Peddling Poverty

An enduring truth of the horrors of war, is that those who survive them rarely speak thereof. It’s always those who managed to avoid combat that love to regale strangers with tall tales. The same, I believe, goes for the experience of genuine hardship. Those who escape abject poverty have scant reason to relive the trauma. For politicians however, the confected victimhood afforded by humble origins is almost irresistible. Vote-winner or not, there is no end to the members of parliament impelled to parade their penury credentials. Double-decker dolts, Sadiq Khan and Sajid Javid, will tell anyone who’ll listen that their fathers were bus drivers, and it’s clear from the general election campaign that music-lover Keir Starmer’s favourite Dusty Springfield hit must be ‘Son of a toolmaker’.

The idea that the ‘working-class man of the people’ is the only viable candidate for Prime Minister is laughable. Jeremy Corbyn’s tramp from an ‘old farm’ routine (Yew Tree Manor, 5 bed house with an acre of land and worth the best part of a million quid) was a big hit with the far left; John Major was surprisingly not universally loved by the proles, despite his humble origins; and anyone ever heard of Sir Winston Churchill? Not only the 20^th Century’s greatest PM, but arguably the greatest Briton of all time. In case you hadn’t noticed, Winnie wasn’t exactly blue collar.

The fact is, when it comes to high office no one in Britain really gives a shit – provided you’re competent and principled. Even blue-blooded David Cameron had the wit to admit that he was both ‘posh’ and ‘privileged’ (apologies, ghastly word), flipping the script rather poignantly on his critics by adding: “There is no ‘privilege’ in holding your child as they die”. Alas, the United Kingdom’s current candidates for PM are neither competent nor principled. Rishi Sunak couldn’t operate an umbrella if his life depended on it, and the closest Keir Starmer ever gets to a principle is deciding which side of the fence to straddle.

The result is a desperate cosplay of poverty porn. In sir Keir starmer’s case, ‘man of the people’ is pushing it. The Labour leader and soon to be PM grew up in Surrey (I know, land of the poor), and whether his dad was merely a toolmaker or actually owned the factory, no one is laughing about his employ. They’re laughing at your ‘self own’ Keir, admitting to being a ‘tool’, or a prick – something you’d recognise, if you had any connection to the factory floor.

Here’s Starmer recently trying to ‘get down with the plebs’:

I actually do know what it is like to sit around the kitchen table not being able to pay your bills. I remember our utilities, our phone being cut off because we couldn’t pay the bill, so I know what is going through people’s minds.

While I strongly suspect Keir is being less than straight about his childhood, I tend to think the ever-thorough Lord Ashcroft was pretty close to the money in his biography of Starmer:

“Perhaps it would be most accurate to say that Starmer’s background was neither working class nor ‘posh’, as some commentators have attempted to prove, but was instead closer to what sociologists would once have called petit bourgeois. This French term is akin to lower-middle class.”

Meanwhile in Rishi Sunak’s case (the wealthiest prime minister in British history), the attempt at pauperism beggars belief:

“There’ll be all sorts of things that I would’ve wanted as a kid that I couldn’t have. Famously, Sky TV, so that was something that we never had growing up actually.”

Even if you haven’t seen the resurfaced clip of a 21-year-old Sunak revealing he didn’t have any working-class friends, nothing shows how out of touch you are not to know that Sky TV was a hallmark of the poor – and was even dubbed ‘Council house TV’. On the council estate I grew up in, every single house (except for ours – we were actually skint) had satellite television. I seem to recall however, attendance at Winchester College was pretty low.

There’s something utterly distasteful, far worse than naked dishonesty, when politicians pander to the ever-expanding victim statuses our multicultural doomsday has thrown up. From Tony Blair’s ‘man of the people’ glottal stop, which mysteriously disappeared once in power, to Theresa May’s shameful hijab comments: ‘what a woman wears is a woman’s choice’. But Keir Starmer is in another league. Whether it’s his Armistice Day poppy, which develops stage fright in the vicinity of a mosque, or his insistence that he likes Stormzy:

“Do me one favour, go and listen to it [Stormzy’s latest album]. He’s trying a different thing in this album. I think it’s really good, genuinely.”

What is that drug-addled former criminal and murderer of the English language trying now? Heroin, genocide, music?

Multi-millionaires playing the poverty card are an insult to the millions genuinely struggling, particularly when the former are often responsible for the latter. In lieu of the general election, might I suggest the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch – much more honesty and hilarity is to be found therein:

If that’s not to your taste, get yourself down to Clacton and buy Nigel Farage a few sherbs (not a word you’d catch Rish and Keir using). Yes I know he went to Dulwich College (so did I, incidentally), but as any genuine man of the people will tell you, social status and bank balance are no indication of how much you’d enjoy a session with someone.

Frank Haviland is the Editor of The New Conservative, and the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West.

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