Not getting it
Nothing said more last week about a certain detachment from reality than the pre local elections Newsnight interview of my parliamentary colleague and our local government spokesman, Eric Pickles. He is very calm, professional, experienced and indeed very funny. Newsnight’s penetrating insight into voters’ attitudes was a photograph of young Oxford undergraduates in tailcoats. The inference was that this would surely turn off voters. Well now we know otherwise. Eric pointed out that this simply represented an obsession of some journalists, and that quite rightly nobody ever raised any of this on the doorstep.
There is something sad yet absolutely hilarious about the mindset of such journalists and programme directors, in the BBC and elsewhere. Nobody sane thinks that David Cameron is Leader of the Opposition because some great-uncle pulled some strings, or that George Osborne is Shadow Chancellor because of the recommendations of some mythical relation, or indeed that Boris became editor of the Spectator because his godfather had a quiet word with the proprietor. Yet presumably this is what some left wingers who inhabit our media somehow seriously think and believe that the electorate does, or should do so too.
There is a rich irony in all of this. When Labour was last in office, with 98% taxation and a massive brain drain, social mobility was hugely impaired because of low economic growth and confiscatory taxes. It was Margaret Thatcher who actually unleashed a social revolution in this country, because people of talent were offered the opportunity to make something of their lives and for their families.
Today under Labour social mobility has actually declined in absolute terms, and relative to other advanced countries.
So the next time a posse of left wing media types sip their lattes in some uber-chic minimalist central London watering hole, they might just reflect that the British electorate is grown up enough to elect their leaders on merit. And despite the massive increase in state spending, higher taxation and attempts at redistribution, real social mobility is actually in decline under Labour.
This is yet another legacy of a failed and failing Government some of whose supporters view contemporary Britain through the prism of social attitudes now totally irrelevant to the British people when they cast their votes, as we saw last week.