During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump promised rustbelt America that he would restore and rebuild the great industries such as coal mining and steel making. Many people voted on the basis of Trump’s promises, which were based more on a throwback to the past than modern day reality. There was a sepia-tinged, almost romantic image of the working man. The cold reality of back-breaking work in often awful conditions is usually lost on those who actually carry it out. Nonetheless, politicians, not just of the right, hold exactly this view of life among the working classes.
It was certainly part of the psyche of my very first MP, Tony Benn. He was born into privilege, one Anthony Neil Wedgwood Benn, and became the 2nd Viscount Stansgate. Despite his elite education at Westminster School and New College Oxford, Benn’s politics were very much of the left. The older he got, the more left wing he became.
The aristocratic Benn developed a fond fascination for the working classes, indeed learning about the jobs they did, the conditions in which they lived and how they got by. Theirs was the struggle he never had to endure. Benn too had a romantic view of the working classes which many found touching and others, like me, found slightly cringeworthy.
In truth, there was little that was romantic about the lives of working people. It was, for most people, a constant struggle. Rewards were few, hours were long, conditions were often grim, especially in the coal mines where those men who were not killed below ground often suffered later in life with ghastly debilitating diseases. To the affluent chattering classes in the labour movement, the sight of a coal miner, blinking in the sunshine as he emerged from the pit, caked from head to toe in soot and dirt, this was the symbol of the working classes. It was wonderful to behold. Except it wasn’t.
The former miners I have come across in my life, along the sons and daughters of miners from the Somerset coalfields, taught me that the last thing the men wanted was for their children to follow them down the pit. They often scrimped and saved to ensure their offspring could earn a living in a safer, healthier environment.
Today, little has changed in the eyes of those who don’t have to get their hands dirty for a living. The far right represented by Trump promise the return of the coal mines, the far left, in Britain for sure, get all dewy eyed when they talk about it.
Today’s Labour Party is in the hands of the sons of Tony Benn. Not the actual son of Tony Benn, Hilary Benn who holds a very different, less romantic and more realistic view on just about everything, but those who believe they carry forward his torch. Millionaires on Jeremy Corbyn’s top table like ‘former’ hardline communists Seumas Milne and the aristocratic Andrew Drummond Murray and their fellow millionaire Jon Lansman who owns the Corbyn fan club organisation Momentum view the world through the same looking glass as Tony Benn. From their upmarket restaurants and wine bars, they observe the working classes as if they were in a painting by LS Lowry. They also know what’s best for the working classes. Or at least they think they do.
Whilst the chattering classes romanticise the lumpen proletariat, they also patronise them. The worker wants to live a better life, to ensure his children have better life chances than he did. The colour of a government matters, though not in the same way as it does to the Champagne socialists. For example, under Tony Blair’s New Labour government, working people did very well, whether that was through the introduction of the minimum wage, Sure Start, improvements to the NHS and so on. Working people needed a Labour government to achieve these things and by and large that’s what happened. The affluent, privately educated, Oxbridge generation that now owns Labour cares only about purity and if they cannot secure socialism in one country, as in say Venezuela or Cuba, then anything else is somehow red Tory, neoliberalism and all the nonsense you hear from the left wing bourgeoisie. And if pure Labour loses, it barely affects then at all.
It almost feels like the wealthy comrades treat the working classes they purport to venerate as poorly as the hated ruling class. The Trumpian romanticism of the working man is little different from the leftist version.
The working class existence in which I grew up was outside toilets, a tin bath in front of the coal fire and ice on the inside of windows.
When we were freezing to death in our house in his Bristol South East constituency, Tony Benn’s overnight stays when visiting the city were at the Unicorn Hotel, an aptly named establishment for a man whose simplistic slogans and empty rhetoric would only have been relevant in a world inhabited by unicorns, which of course is nowhere.
Reality for many working class people is one of survival, not of some quaint romanticism. And the chattering classes who pretend otherwise are either deluded or simply ignorant.
