The McSpencer Group discusses the results of the UK general election, Boris Johnson's triumphant victory, and what does it all mean? And what's going on with those funny hats? Joining me on the panel today are Ed Dutton and Laura Towler.
00:02:34.520I remember just watching it and going, yes, 86!
00:02:37.880And then my colleague becoming ecstatic as well, and Adam Perkins owed him 50 quid because they had a bet.
00:02:44.460Adam Perkins is an academic in the UK.
00:02:46.280And, I mean, for those who are Americans who are listening to this, I don't think it's hard to overstate what happened.
00:02:53.120I mean, we're talking about areas of Yorkshire where Laura's from, northern England that used to have mining
00:02:58.580and with these working class areas where there's visceral hatred for the Conservative Party.
00:03:04.300And that got even worse after the closure of Mrs Thatcher closed the mines in 1984 and so on.
00:03:09.920Absolute loathing for the Conservative Party.
00:03:12.080I'm told that it was possible, if you listened very carefully on Thursday night, to hear rumblings from graveyards as Laura's great-grandfather and people like that turned into graves.
00:03:21.420And now the English working class people have expressed the fact that they're not going to be talked down to and sneered at by these people in London that hate them and take them for granted anymore.
00:03:39.080I know, I know it's not the change, it's not the end of Kali Yuga, it's not whatever, but it's a lot better than having a powerful Labour Party, which is what we've had until recently, a relatively powerful opposition.
00:03:55.140So what were your thoughts as a northern lass, or your thoughts as an American?
00:03:59.360You go first, Laura, and then I'll jump in.
00:04:03.100Because you give my totally uninformed outsider perspective on events.
00:04:07.700So I'm one of these northern working class people that we're talking about, so I'm right in the heartland in these communities.
00:04:14.020And the way that people are up here are their parents voted Labour, and then their parents voted Labour, and then their parents voted Labour, and then their parents voted Labour.
00:04:21.260So they kind of feel like they're doing something maybe a bit traitorous by going for the Conservatives.
00:04:26.900And that's a problem that we've had for all these years, because Labour are obviously so bad, but they have a lot of loyalty to them.
00:04:34.740And it's not, you know, there's no reason why they do have this loyalty, because they've not done anything for them.
00:04:40.680And as Ed said, us northerners hate the Conservatives because of Thatcher shipping all our industries abroad, such as, you know, the shipping industries in the northeast and stuff.
00:04:48.680So I'm so happy that white working class people have just finally, like, grown the balls to abandon Labour.
00:04:56.120And it's not that we're celebrating that the Conservatives have been voted for.
00:05:00.120It's just that that grip has been released for the first time ever.
00:05:04.360And I don't think the people up here have any loyalty towards the Conservatives.
00:05:08.540It's not that they, you know, like that party.
00:05:10.640I imagine that a lot of them held their nose and voted for them.
00:05:13.540But just the fact that the grip from Labour has finally been released after all these decades,
00:05:23.120Well, I think the whole thing is very complicated.
00:05:26.100And so, again, I'm going to give my American uninformed perspective on matters.
00:05:31.820But I think I will get at some kind of ambiguities or contradictions here.
00:05:37.680I totally recognize the fact that working class Brits in northern England, et cetera, just on a visceral level loathe people who say wear ascots or, you know, on live streams about politics or, you know, speak with Ed Dutton's accent.
00:05:57.840I mean, I completely understand this visceral hatred that they have.
00:06:02.880But so I think there is that residual aspect to it.
00:06:07.720But I think what's happening in a way, again, this is an American's perspective, but what happened in the United States with the Democrats and the Republicans has been nationalized and in a way internationalized with Britain.
00:06:23.900So even if you go back to as recently as Bill Clinton in the 1990s, the Democratic Party was 58 percent working class white people.
00:06:35.640That is, white people who are mostly rural, who don't have a college degree or have half of one or something like that.
00:06:42.700Those that that that was a kind of labor party backing that has now literally flipped.
00:06:49.240And those people now make up 58 to 60 percent of the Republican Party.
00:06:54.660The Republican Party wasn't quite as, say, posh as the Tories, but it it was the party of big business, wealth, the eastern establishment, interestingly.
00:07:07.160And now it is flipped to the party of working class and middle class white people in middle America.
00:07:15.360And I see the the same thing happening.
00:07:19.220The only thing I would say about this, and this does strike me as genuinely ambiguous, is that Jeremy Corbyn, much like Bernie Sanders, is not Tony Blair.
00:07:30.540And even if he kind of bows to the woke crowd and the London crowd, that's not where his heart is.
00:07:37.360And I don't think I'm wrong to read both Bernie Sanders, whom I'm I'm not I don't have a visceral hatred of, to be honest, in the way that I dislike Elizabeth Warren and some other of these people, that their heart is in a kind of little England working class nationalism.
00:07:56.640And to be honest, it was the Tories who supported things like going into the European Union and and et cetera.
00:08:05.740And it was actually the the the real Labour Party that that which that should support things like Brexit.
00:08:13.640I noted these two tweets, which these are obviously anecdotal, but I think they say a lot that were put out by each party.
00:08:22.700The Labour Party put out a black and white photo of white children and they and they said, vote for your future.
00:08:30.040And there was something you could say kind of nostalgic about it, something mid-century about that kind of sentiment.
00:08:38.900And what did the conservatives tweet out on the election day?
00:08:43.240They treated out a grotesque image of this black man and a white woman lying in bed, you know, just excited about voting conservative.
00:08:53.980And I you know, you shouldn't read too much into tweets, but I think these are actually telling of of of of let's say impulses within the party.
00:09:03.920The conservatives are a globalist party. The people who support Brexit or the least the leaders of Brexit, not the people who voted for it, are globalists.
00:09:13.920They want they understand the Britain as, you know, being a global sea power.
00:09:21.060I think the people who voted for Brexit did it for immigration, like no question.
00:09:24.940So I think they had very good instincts. But the people, the ideologues behind it, Farage and all these other terrible people are absolute free market, Thatcherite globalists.
00:09:35.940And there seemed to be an impulse within Corbyn to go back to that old labor, which I actually find I find a lot of virtues in it.
00:09:44.700Even though I don't come from a working class background, I really get where they're coming from.
00:09:50.420And I think there's some positive aspects to that. Corbyn was, at least to the degree that I understand it, he was relatively silent, maybe a little bit ambiguous about Brexit.
00:10:00.580He said, I respect the vote. He was not a, you know, vitriolic vocal remainer.
00:10:08.580And I actually, I have heard the rumor that he is a closet Brexit supporter, as he should be as a kind of retro leftist.
00:10:21.940Yeah, no, I mean, I agree with with a fair amount of that.
00:10:26.620I mean, one of the one of the issues that struck me is that both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party are coalitions of different views and they and they shift over time and so on.
00:10:37.040And so the Conservative Party does have this element of nationalism within it and whatever.
00:10:43.380And indeed, when I was a member, an active member of the Conservative Party, when I was a teenager, a lot of people in the Conservative Party openly voted UKIP.
00:10:50.320But I'm talking senior officers within the local Conservative Association.
00:10:53.360So there's this nationalist kind of English nationalism, remnant English nationalism that's there.
00:10:58.540On the other hand, yeah, you do have these kind of big business people that just want to make money.
00:11:01.700And their attitude is that a Conservative government will not tax them very much and will free them up to do that.
00:11:07.240And similarly, with the Labour Party, you have this coalition.
00:11:09.840I think the big if I was to simplify it immensely, even if you go back to the 60s or whatever, you've got the people who were in the upper class who were the kind of virtue signalers of their day.
00:11:20.460The Clement Attlee's, the Hugh Gates guilds, people like that, who went to public school and Oxford and Cambridge University and who never did a day's work in their life and those those kinds of people.
00:11:30.340And that was very much the Blairite ascendancy, those kinds of people.
00:11:34.220And then you've got increasingly, of course, the just the immigrants and particularly the Muslim viewpoint.
00:11:39.300The Hindus seem to be more inclined towards the Conservative Party because they do better.
00:11:42.740They have about the same IQ as English people and they just do quite well.
00:11:46.480The Muslims seem to be more inclined towards Labour.
00:11:48.460And then you've got what has been massively expunged from the party, really.
00:11:52.840But when I was a child, a lot of these people that were in the Labour Party and were MPs were just trade unionists.
00:11:57.980They were just they were just working class people, but they were born in Yorkshire or Wales or whatever in working class families.
00:12:05.160What the Labour Party was doing was promoting their interests, literally their genetic interests, their family's interests, the interests of the areas in which they lived.
00:12:13.860So there was a strong kind of practicality to that.
00:12:16.480And it's that that practicality that kind of that kind of went that these these people who were who were working class, who were reasonably intelligent, I suppose, because of what was brought in under Attlee or whatever, a more a more kind of egalitarian society, whether you've got grammar schools and things like this, kind of moved up and to being middle class, really.
00:12:37.940And consequently, there was very few working class people left in the in the Labour movement.
00:12:42.400And so and then Labour started to just look with contempt, really, upon upon working class people.
00:12:48.880It started to see them as the whole culture of them.
00:12:51.200I mean, in the 1980s, you have wrestling.
00:12:53.440I talk about British wrestling here on television.
00:12:56.000And you had the kind of the kind of men that did comedy in working men's clubs up north.
00:13:00.540They would be on television doing comedy.
00:15:40.680Well, I was just going to say, I mean, if we if we look at just the economic policies, as a working class person myself, I can say that that Corbyn is better for me.
00:15:48.960You know, the conservatives don't represent me and my family and the people who live around me.
00:15:52.740But it's the the cultural policies, which are just so strong that they're just they just take up all the space, you know, all the dialogue on TV and stuff.
00:16:01.780And they just take your attention away from the good stuff that he is saying.
00:16:05.860I mean, he wants to, you know, the post office, he wants to deprivatize and things like that.
00:16:10.940You know, there are lots of good stuff that would that would help us.
00:16:13.560But then you have policies like making illegals, giving them, giving them all amnesty and giving them the same rights as us.
00:16:20.860And then he wants to create safe routes from the Mediterranean to Britain.
00:16:24.740And then people can obviously seek asylum.
00:16:27.320But if they don't get asylum, then they have the same rights as us anyway and they can vote.
00:16:31.560He also wants to teach British children about colonialism and slavery.
00:16:50.180But the other thing about, as I agree with the one, the other thing is that it has to be.
00:16:53.280OK, so that cultural stuff, that cultural indoctrination that is a worry, that that kind of making working class English people feel that they're just, you know, their culture is bad and they should feel ashamed and all this kind of thing.
00:17:05.840That culture war, you can guarantee that they'll do that.
00:17:09.280But Labour are so financially incompetent and they always are.
00:17:12.620Always the Conservatives get voted to clear up the financial mess that Labour have made.
00:17:16.100That's how British politics seems to work.
00:17:17.860The country gets rich and then it gets decadent and then it votes Labour, apart from after the war.
00:17:22.320But otherwise, otherwise, that seems to be the process.
00:17:25.340And and and he you've got no guarantee that he'd be able to do these things that sound wonderful, like having free Internet for everybody and the health service being wonderful.
00:17:35.140He probably wouldn't be able to do those things because because he would flee the country.
00:17:45.940And so you probably wouldn't be able to do those things.
00:17:47.760And so what you can guarantee if he gets elected is that he'll do things that are bad for the British working class and that are bad for their culture and their genetic interests and the things that are good.
00:17:57.620OK, yeah, his heart's in the right place.
00:17:59.280Perhaps you could argue if you're being charitable and he wants to do those things, but he probably won't be able to do them.
00:18:04.280And I think I think that a lot of people kind of kind of realise that.
00:18:07.120And also there was just this fundamental kind of fair play dimension that Brexit has been voted for and the English people voted for Brexit and should have Brexit.
00:18:14.820And it was obvious that he that he wouldn't deliver it.
00:18:17.420No matter if he is Eurosceptic, he may be.
00:18:19.980I mean, the Labour until the early 80s were more Eurosceptic than the Conservatives.
00:18:24.700And you had Tony Benn and Peter Shaw and people like this that were campaigning to get out of the European Union.
00:18:29.980But and but but that's that flipped when they realised that the EU was a way of bringing in lots of sort of socialist type type policies.
00:18:39.080And then it kind of reversed. But I don't think he'd be able to do those things.
00:18:43.200I think people knew he wouldn't be able to do those things.
00:18:45.400And it has to be understood that he had with him these appalling, nasty, spiteful people in his band, such as Diane Abbott, who couldn't even wear two shoes from the same pair on the election.
00:18:55.340And I will admit that I actually did that the other day.
00:19:01.760So I cannot criticise Diane Abbott on her shoe policy.
00:19:10.860Corbyn's economic policies would be good if they came with nationalism, but he wants those policies to be available for the whole world.
00:19:20.620And it's probably worth talking about the reasons why the northern working class have abandoned Labour.
00:19:26.340And I don't know if you've been following this in the States, Richard, but one of the key reasons has been the grooming gangs and the cover up by Labour and how they just they haven't apologised for it.
00:19:35.720You know, all the people who were involved are still in positions of power.
00:19:39.060And I don't know if the stories have reached America, but people up north are just sick of that as well.
00:19:54.160So I was going to say that was an example of the degree to which they their ideology and their multiculturalism and allows them to hold the working class in contempt as far as they were concerned.
00:20:16.140It's almost it's almost it's almost like the the the they are a sacrifice.
00:20:20.600They are swinging for England, as they used to say, those that were wrongly hanged for things.
00:20:24.700It's for the greater good that this shouldn't be.
00:20:27.500This should be suppressed so that multiculturalism can flourish.
00:20:29.720And I think this is a big problem within the left that isn't exactly rearing its head, but but but it will right now.
00:20:40.300And I think it will ultimately divide them in the sense of the woke politics of personal liberation and everyone, you know, I there was this silly movie called Team America World Police where there is a song.
00:21:03.640And there's there's that on the other hand.
00:21:07.400And then there's this kind of retro mid-century social democracy on the other, which are both actually ascendant in the Democratic Party in the United States.
00:21:17.320Four years ago or let's say eight years ago, if you mentioned Medicare for all in a Democratic debate, people would just poo poo you, laugh you, say, get out of here.
00:21:32.580That debate has been won by a kind of ascendant social democratic force in the sense that if you oppose Medicare for all, you are a boring old white man who who is constantly saying, how are we going to pay for it?
00:21:44.880So that kind of mid-century social democracy retro left is ascendant.
00:21:50.460But at the same time, we know what is also ascendant.
00:21:53.720I mean, Barack Obama opposed gay marriage at this point with among Democratic candidates in the United States.
00:22:00.280If you are against, like, literally government-funded sex change operations for six-year-olds, you are a Nazi.
00:22:11.260And these two things really are opposed.
00:22:15.060I think conservatives like to just talk about the left as if it's this monolith.
00:22:19.840But these two things really are opposed.
00:22:21.940And I ultimately think wokeness will win.
00:22:25.760Wokeness will win in the hearts of voters in the sense that it is so toxic or, on the other hand, so kind of irresistible to some people that that is the – that cultural force is the dominant force.
00:22:40.720And I'm afraid, even though I have a great deal of sympathy towards, say, mid-century social democracy, the likes of which was supported by Corbyn and Sanders, I don't think that will win out.
00:22:55.800I think that will ultimately be overwhelmed by the woke crowd, the woke crowd that is embraced by corporate America.
00:23:02.440Indeed, they were embraced by major corporations before they were embraced by the Democratic Party.
00:23:09.880So I think there's – there is a – I don't know.
00:23:12.360There's some real strong big fissures in the left that I think are kind of coming into play.
00:23:20.120I hope – sorry, I hope the woke crowd wins because it's the woke crowd that is the turnoff to decent English or American working class white people.
00:23:35.780If it's the sort of a socialism without the wokeness that wins, then, well, you're going to get just a less free country and people will pay the price.
00:23:44.020People will be happy to pay that price as they were in England in the 40s.
00:23:47.040I mean, one of the reasons why I think that the health – well, Tony Benn argued this, who was a British, very left-wing politician, deputy leader of the Labour Party, I think he was.