Hidden Prejudices

John Harris in ‘CiF’ has an article on #bigotgate that reveals the way the progressives think.

First up, the subheading to his article:

Labour's political elite has failed to explain social change to ordinary people.

Ouch! Only someone steeped in GuardianWorld culture could not fail to notice the glaring insult in that sentence...

…the metropolitan media is part of the same problem. It tends to portray them as latter-day Alf Garnetts, nostalgic for a world long gone, and fired up by the kind of prejudices that have no place in London W1 or W11.

In fact, as Gillian Duffy proves, their concerns are a mixture of right and left-ish stuff, much of it traceable to the fact that as Britain has gone through convulsive change after convulsive change, nobody in power has ever bothered giving them much of an explanation.

Or asking them if it was what they wanted, and would have voted for...

… somewhere within Labour's collective psyche, there will a creeping awareness of how they arguably ended up here: by mortgaging their future on a mixture of contorted electoral arithmetic, and secondhand free-marketry, and so forgetting their own people that their own prime minister met an pretty average Labour voter, heard her concerns, and came away seething. (It's worth bearing in mind a phrase beloved of market traders in the West Midlands: "Never make a mug of your punter.")

Indeed!

…I'm rather reminded of a passage from a Tony Blair conference speech that both set out New Labour's credo, and captured its essential pathology. "The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition," he said. "Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change." That doesn't describe Gillian Duffy, nor millions and millions of other people. And in this awful episode, here are the wages of that ever-festering disconnection.

No-one asked the likes of Gillian Duffy if she wanted the chance to adapt to this changing world, though...