None so blind

A spitty little twitter spat the other night, between me and an out-and-proud lefty shouting about her credentials of ‘having spent 25 years of higher education in politics’ got me thinking. As usual, the clash was brought about by the failure, once again, of a self-proclaimed political expert to grasp what is bleeding obvious to anybody with a proper job and both feet on the ground.

Irony blinkers firmly fixed and utterly incapable of seeing those all around them making ‘the sign of the wanker’ in their direction, your lefty political theorist merrily ploughs straight ahead and tells you what’s good for you. How you should behave, what you should earn, who you should positively discriminate in favour of and what kind of weather is in your best interests; all blind to the realities of what drives humans to make it from one day to the next.

It’s as if Karl-never-had-a-job-in-his-life-Marx himself invented politics; virtually all concerted political movements are leftist in nature and on go the theorists, dreaming up ways of convincing themselves there will genuinely be a utopian future where we all put nurture before nature; if only they could stop the little people from indulging in original thought and individual action. Meanwhile, those on what is disparagingly referred to as ‘the far right’ are too busy making a living and fending for themselves to have the luxury of envy of what others possess; and as a result they tend to have far clearer understanding of the hopes and fears of ordinary workers.

John Humphrys said on the Today programme that the problem of immigration is a right wing issue, when in fact it is the very large, low-paid, unskilled sector of the work force who are most exercised and most disadvantaged by it. Those who welcome mass immigration are those who gain from it – a small and privileged minority of British society – or those who are blind to its downsides. Behind the heavy blinds of the lofty ivory towers, Ed Miliband’s policy unit no more understands the masses it believes it fights for than a sheep understands the workings of the ticks living off its blood.

Time after time the left-wing ‘thinkers’ do their thinking on behalf of the hoi polloi without ever actually consulting those same beleaguered legions, whose most likely reaction, post incomprehension, would be to tell them to do one. Today, Clacton’s forgotten denizens will, for good or ill, reject the traditional parties, just t see if there might be a better way. Will they also roar in Heywood and Middleton. Interesting times, folks…