Saved by the working class

For almost all my life I have felt most at home in what is commonly called the “middle class”. Yes, those were my people — the section of the population which was, on the whole, reliably decent, law-abiding, educated and aspirational. They were people with laudable family values, who read books to their children and shopped at Waitrose.

But that old image of the middle class with which I identified is gone, swept away by the last general election. Quite frankly, it’s now the British provincial working class — the ordinary, salt-of-the-earth people with whom, as an urban professional I have had least in common, living in places I have rarely if ever visited — with whom I now feel most closely aligned. And I will be forever grateful to them for saving our country from a Labour catastrophe too grisly to bear thinking about.

Who could have predicted that in 21st-century Britain the good old-fashioned common sense of butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers could so comprehensively trump the high status of a university degree? Although perhaps there is a certain inevitability to it. For the past two generations, the British educational establishment — at both school and university level — has been such a bastion of entrenched left-wing, anti-Western orthodoxy that it seems the more highly educated someone is, the more likely they are to have been brainwashed into blinkered political correctness.

I am a Londoner of well nigh 50 years’ standing who should really be a representative citizen of this super-cosmopolitan city. Born in Budapest, brought up in New York, with close family connections in Germany, Spain, France and Hong Kong, I’m as cosmopolitan as they come. Hell, some might even accuse me of belonging to the global elite. But I nevertheless feel rooted in this country, I’m a British patriot loyal to its democratic ideals.

So it sickens me that the city which has been my cherished home for a half-century has been effectively hijacked by hordes of anti-democratic malcontents. As soon as the results of Boris Johnson’s landslide came in, these agitators were out in force on the streets of London with their asinine placards and hysterical shouting. Once again they demonstrated that democracy is palatable to them only when their side wins.

These are the chumps in thrall to the myth of a kindly, compassionate Corbynism as a bulwark against the sinister capitalist Tories. It’s a myth that today’s working classes in the English north and the Midlands, and now in more parts of Wales too, have been too sensible to swallow.

There is simply no limit to the wrong-headedness of today’s liberals — a misnomer if ever there was one. The best illustration of this was the intervention during the election campaigning of the father of Jack Merritt, the young man murdered in the latest act of Islamist terrorism in London. Dave Merritt lashed out at Boris Johnson for stating the obvious truth that our system of prison sentencing and early release, even for the most dangerous convicts, needs to be overhauled and tightened up.

As Dave Merritt saw it, his son’s death was being used to “further an agenda of hate”. Yet it is unmistakably true that the agenda of hate emanates not from our Tory PM but from the ideology of the terrorist who stabbed his son to death? What’s more, by advising voters to shun Johnson in favour of Corbyn, he is telling them to support the candidate who has spent decades fraternising with the very same extremist Muslims who would have approved — tacitly or otherwise — of Jack’s murder. 

So, to finish, I humbly offer my heartfelt appreciation to the voters of Dudley North and Bassetlaw, Great Grimsby and Rother Valley, Bolsover, Redcar, Workington, et al, not to mention all those lovely people in Wales. As the PM himself put it, “your hands may have quivered” before putting, for the first time in your lives, that X in the Conservative box. But you did. And I thank you.