I have no real issue in Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner saying what she thinks of Boris Johnson’s Conservative government: “We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile… banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian… piece of scum.” Granted that plenty of people who Labour will need to vote for them at the next election voted for that “bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute vile… banana republic, vile, nasty, Etonian… piece of scum” at the last general election because they thought, rightly or wrongly, that Jeremy Corbyn would be even worse is neither here nor there. I’d use far stronger language than Rayner but I suppose I have a lot less to lose than her. But I do have an issue with a comment by the hard left commentator and writer Paul Mason’s comments about what Rayner said:
“Rayner’s ‘scum’ comment reflects exactly how working class people talk – … yet Keir couldn’t bring himself to endorse it…”
I have never hidden the working class chip on my shoulder. I am neither proud nor ashamed of my working class background because I didn’t create it, I just lived it. And yes, I do know of plenty of people who use the term ‘scum’ and its many derivations. My own favourite is scumbag, a word I would apply to any members of Johnson’s top team, especially the scumbag prime minister himself, but here’s a thing: not every single working class person talks like that.
Mason assumes that working class people are all the same. Maybe, like the late and not particularly great Tony Benn, he has a curiously romantic view of the so-called “struggle of the working class”. Benn was absolutely fascinated by this “struggle” which involved the kind of people he never understood. Mason lumps all all into one basket, as if the working class is some kind of generic grouping which has the same view on everything. Yet for all his experience in the labour movement, I am not sure he realises that the class struggle, which always seem to be fought by the chattering middle classes on our behalf, is very different from the one where children were sent up chimneys and everyone else went to workhouses. Whilst I believe the class system still exists, it’s not the same one he imagines it to be.
Many of the working class people I know do not conform to the stereotypical people the likes of Benn and now Mason imagined them to be. They have good, well-paid jobs, they own nice houses, they go on nice holidays. But fundamentally, they are the same people their parents were. They don’t all keep whippets, play bingo and eat bread and dripping sandwiches and they don’t all call Tories “scum”, especially if they voted for them.
The hard left is good at this stuff. It wasn’t just the so called working class that turned up to Jeremy Corbyn rallies to cheer his every word, to sing “Oh Jeremy Corbyn”. My experience of the Corbynista cult is that they were almost all card-carrying middle class people. They were convinced they knew best what the proletariat needed because they knew them best and, like Mason, knew “how working class people talk”. In other words, sneeringly superior, patronising – well, scum, who wouldn’t know a working class person if they pissed down his leg.
Rayner is what she is. Maybe she calls it like it is, or she’s a loose cannon, maybe it’s all or some of these things. But she isn’t speaking on behalf of so-called working class people. She’s saying what she thinks. Why the hell shouldn’t she? Johnson is a racist, homophobic, misogynistic etc etc and he’s proud of it.
Above all, Boris Johnson has steered Britain on a handcart to hell, playing a major role in the country losing its soft power around the world, separating us from neighbours, damaging the economy, running down the NHS to near breaking point and he’s the biggest liar Britain has ever known, politician or non politician. However, Mr Mason and all your friends in the chattering classes, don’t tell me “how working class people talk”, do something useful to help bring about a better government, a Labour government, that can make this country better for everyone.
