The Labour elite's secret problem... they can't stand the working class

Labour, like the Tories, no longer speaks for any major part of the British people

Hating the working class? Then Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown talks with resident Gillian Duffy ahead of the 2010 General Election

By PETER HITCHENS

How long does it take for the penny to drop? It is amazing how slow voters  have been to see  that the two major parties have been stolen from them, and are now their enemies.

I spend a lot of time here pointing out that the Tory Party is a now a nest of anti-British, anti-family liberals. But Labour is just as bad.

The Labour Party of 1945 was pretty Left-wing. But it was patriotic, Christian and genuinely working-class. It hated cheats and it loathed crime. Several members of the Labour Cabinet of 1948 voted to keep the death penalty.

It did not support immigration. It set up the NHS to care for hard-working people whose illnesses were in many cases caused by that hard work. It was (rightly) deeply suspicious of the first steps towards creating what is now the EU.

It supported grammar schools, seeing that they gave the children of the poor a ladder out of that poverty. It favoured strong national defences.

I suspect that millions of Labour voters still feel roughly the same way. But the party does not. Like the Tory top deck, Labour’s London elite loathe and despise their members.

We have absolute proof of this thanks to the meeting between Gordon Brown and Mrs Gillian Duffy during the last Election, when Mr Brown responded to Mrs Duffy’s completely reasonable fears about mass immigration by calling her a bigot behind her back. He apologised – for being caught – but who can doubt it was his real view?

This week we saw two more examples of the problem. 

One was the absurd shadow Minister Chris Bryant, trying to be strong on immigration.

Mr Bryant has been told by Labour voters that their jobs are threatened by migrants, and so he wants to keep their votes by sounding tough.

 But in fact Labour –  as I have pointed out here more than once – deliberately created that immigration. Its leaders, 1960s revolutionaries who have never grown up, knew exactly what they were doing.

But now they fear they have been found out, and that millions of Gillian Duffys – who would die rather than vote  Tory – are now thinking of defecting to UKIP.

Luckily for us all, Mr Bryant’s speech blew up in his face like an exploding cigar. This is what ought to happen more often to politicians who dishonestly seek the votes of people whose opinions they despise.

The other interesting moment was a Channel 4 programme  in which three modern welfare claimants were subjected to the rules of the original welfare state set up by Labour.

That welfare state was a proper, decent thing – people who worked hard insuring themselves against age and illness, and genuine efforts to find work for all, even the seriously disabled.

It was completely unlike the Sponger’s Charter that modern Labour has set up, under which the genuinely poor tend to suffer, and cheats prosper.

Labour, like the Tories, no longer speaks for any major part of the British people. It only pretends  to. When the penny does eventually drop, what a reckoning we shall see.

But I wish it would be sooner.