Wednesday’s Child: A Victory for Labor

No, it isn’t a mistake, my title.  It’s not like I don’t read the papers, you know.  But in the stuffy atmosphere of Tory triumphalism, I think, the gentle reader may well be wishing for a window on the world to be opened.  So what really happened in Britain last week?  Well, basically, the two main political parties have exchanged roles, which is not, moreover, entirely a bad thing.  It’s both good news and bad.  Let me start with the good news.

A number of pollsters analyzing the general election have spoken of a new divide in British society, as evidenced by the distribution of the vote.  It wasn’t really Brexit, as many had supposed; nor was it the traditional rift between richer and poorer constituencies, or the one between town and country; it was not gender, it was not defense, and it wasn’t even healthcare.  It was not the North against the South.  What was it, then?  It was “education.”  Constituencies with more than 25 percent of “educated” people gravitated to Labour, while those with less cleaved to the Tories.

No pollster has dared say it, but anyway the meaning is clear.  “Labour isn’t working,” in the words of a prophetic election slogan, back in 1979, for Margaret Thatcher’s election campaign.  Labour has become the party of “education,” which, in modern terms of reference, is one of the synonyms of freeloading.  Other hypostases of parasitic existence include all aspects of the arts and of the cultural sphere generally, financed as these are almost entirely by the taxpayer – in other words, by the working man – against his will.  Britain’s “yoof” – as in the “youthquake” that was supposed to throw up the deciding vote for Labour – is naturally high up on that list as well, along with the drug addict, the dyslexic and the bulimic, the wilfully obese, the unemployed and unemployable, and the lazy and shiftless of every description.

  Labour has tried desperately to bribe the freebie class with $1 trillion in handouts, including 50 billion promised in support of something called “Women Against State Pension Inequality,” so women would have more time on their hands for hounding their husbands, and twenty billion for “free broadband for all,” so men could watch more porn when not hounded by their wives.  But in stepped the working class, and there the hopeful bubble burst.

The bad news is that, as the Tories traded souls and personalities with Labour, thereby winning the working class vote, the mantle of socialist double-speak and left-wing hypocrisy was passed on to them in the process.  Boris Johnson was endlessly posed in front of a hoarding that read “The People’s Government,” a pose that struck Peter Hitchens, among other observers, as highly significant.  Tony Blair, as the gentle reader may remember, refashioned his party as “New Labour.”  There are abundant signs that the party that won last week’s general election should be known as “New Tories.”

The variable to watch for now, of course, is how their Brexit – or should it be “New Brexit”? – measures on the Nigel Farage Hardness Scale.  During the entire campaign I’ve not heard a single promise that “The People’s Government” would remove a single molehill of an obstacle, to say nothing of the impassible ridge of mountains created since Britain joined Europe, from the path of the working man.  The talk was of tariffs and customs, but not of the customs that matter.  After nearly half a century of forced socialist evolution, would the Tories put unarmed bobbies back on patrol in London’s streets and have British schools once again teach Latin instead of gender equality?

Not b****y likely, as they used to say in British family newspapers.