Britannia Radio

This is what’s wrong with politics today.  It’s fallen into the hands 
of professional ploliticians and away from anybody whose beliefs are 
so strong they determine their action.  You can see it in the almost 
interchangeable young men and women who run the party machines,

Firstly that reinforces the cult of youth.  Oh to be an American when 
a possible future president could be a man with some experience and 
not one dominated by theories and soundbites.

Why is the BNP gaining ground ?  Because nobody speaks for England 
any more.  (A good part of the reason for the SNP’s growth in 
Scoltland is not its policy of independence which is looked on with 
grave doubts) but because Alex Salmond speaks for and with the people 
of Scotland)

This will, I fear, not end happily.  Cameron  has the opportunity to 
respond but he doesn’t ‘talk-the-talk’ and - I fear - would not 
comprehend this article.

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ECONOMIST  11.9.08
Bagehot
Redwhiteandbluenecks

Who speaks for the Palin constituency in Britain?

“A BACKWOODS, polar-bear-strangling Britney Spears manqué”; “Vice-
President Barbie”: British newspaper columnists have sneered at Sarah 
Palin at least as energetically as some East-Coast Americans. 
Typically, however, there has also been an equal and opposite 
reaction to her appearance on John McCain’s ticket: we want one! This 
enthusiasm has generally been motivated by the sexy-librarian look 
and the Alaskan-gothic back story. But there are also sensible 
reasons for Britain’s political classes to pay heed to Mrs Palin. She 
seems able to speak in the demotic lexicon of cross rednecks and 
others disenchanted with mainstream American politics. British 
politicians are unable to do the same.

On the face of it, the redneck is not a species likely to flourish in 
an urbanised, godless little country such as Britain. Large fauna are 
not routinely slaughtered for fun; people cling to pubs and satellite-
television dishes rather than Bibles and hunting rifles; few race 
tractors or follow NASCAR. But there is a constituency that roughly 
corresponds, in its values and anxieties, to the rural and small-town 
voters whom Mrs Palin appeals to. It can be divided into two sub-
groups. The first comprises what is left of Britain’s white working 
class, plus bits of the workless class.

These people don’t plant national flags on their porches like their 
American counterparts, because they have no porches: they live on 
council estates or in terraces in ex-industrial towns. But they may 
fly flags on their cars when the English football team is playing. 
They are poorly educated; their children are outperformed by 
immigrants at school, and prone to early pregnancy. They eat too much 
heart-attack food (though no squirrel gumbo). They drink in working 
men’s clubs and pubs that don’t have chalkboard daily menus. They 
keep terrifying dogs. They are savagely parodied by comedians: they 
are known as “pikeys” or “chavs”— terms which, unlike “redneck”, have 
not been defiantly reclaimed by those they apply to—or as “white-van 
man”. Where the American redneck is immortalised in “The Dukes of 
Hazzard”, these lives are chronicled in “Auf Wiedersehen, Pet” and 
“Boys from the Blackstuff”, two iconic 1980s television series.

The second group has moved up and out, to newly built housing estates 
and semi-detached homes in regions such as the Midlands and Essex, a 
county roughly equivalent, in Britain’s psychogeography, to New 
Jersey in America’s. (Members of this group are mostly lower-middle 
class, but are liable to define themselves, if asked to, as working 
class: tellingly, lots of middle-class Britons downgrade themselves a 
notch, whereas in America the reverse is the case.) Instead of 
hunting trophies, these people may have royal memorabilia on the 
walls, paintings by Jack Vettriano and flat-screen TVs. They drive 
family saloon cars rather than pickup trucks. Their outlook is 
grumpily elegiac.

Millions of Britons in those two categories share a set of core 
beliefs. These are not simplistically right-wing: they may think 
taxes are too high but they also revere the National Health Service. 
But they are largely reactionary. The British redneck may not be 
quite as parochial as the passportless American types—geography and 
cheap flights mean that he can holiday in the Mediterranean—but he is 
similarly insular in his way. He is suspicious of metropolitan, 
multicultural London. He lives close to where he was born. He is 
patriotic, nervous (or worse) about immigration and feels stranded by 
globalisation. He has draconian views on crime; he may favour the 
reinstatement of capital punishment. He is devoutly Eurosceptic. And 
he loathes politicians—hardly surprising, since very few speak like 
him, for him or even to him.

Tally-ho!
Gordon Brown tries to sound sympathetic, in his obeisance to “hard-
working families” and his questionable advocacy of “British jobs for 
British workers”. But he is too cerebral, too puritanical, too 
Scottish. David Cameron, the posh leader of the Conservatives, has 
been hunting, but not for moose. He does not connect with Essex in 
the way that Margaret Thatcher did. There are, in fact, precious few 
politicians on either front bench whom Britain’s rednecks can think 
of as “one of us”. Alan Johnson, the health secretary, and Hazel 
Blears, the communities secretary, are the only plausible candidates 
in the cabinet.

That lack is in part a reflection of the boringly professionalised 
career that politics has become. There is still a small gang of old-
school industrial Labour MPs, who huddle in solidarity in the House 
of Commons; but there used to be many more who had personal 
experience of the social problems they opined on. Politics is now a 
game played by slick graduates, who work in think-tanks or back rooms 
before climbing the pole to their own seats, and are unlikely to drop 
their aitches. The party machines weed out authentic mavericks much 
more mercilessly than America’s presidential system. This is as true 
of the Tories as it is of Labour, which is why neither side makes a 
fuss about it.

But the absence of redneck representation is also partly a function 
of Britain’s recent political convergence. The main parties have 
crowded into the ideological centre, in pursuit of the magical swing 
voters in key constituencies. More extreme views inevitably get 
marginalised: they may be widely held, but in places and geographical 
patterns that make them electorally safe to ignore. So the loudest 
voices articulating the redneck attitude belong to blood-spitting 
tabloid newspapers. Liberal Britons who skip the Sun and the Daily 
Mail rarely encounter it, or indeed rednecks themselves, unless they 
meet at motorway service stations or on budget air flights. They are 
as distant from each other, intellectually, as are the denizens of 
New York and the Ozarks.

It isn’t only the rednecks who ought to worry about the consequences 
of this. These include the stark decline in turnout at general 
elections—concentrated at the bottom of the social scale—and the 
creeping rise, in some places, of the far-right British National 
Party. Importing a Palin or two might be sensible.