The greatest, most enduring lie of the left is that it stands for the poor and oppressed. In fact, the left have long-hated actual poor and working-class people. In the early decades of the 20th century, upper-class English ‘intellectuals’ espoused a fashionable socialism, yet sneered at working people. Incorrigible snobs all, like Virginia Woolf, they “detested” the working class, whom she likened to “irritating… kitchen flies”. “The only people I really hate”, wrote Woolf’s American counterpart Edna St Vincent Millay, “are servants. They are not really human beings at all.”
Woolf and Millay were far from unique in their detestation of the workers. Orwell excoriated “that dreary tribe of ‘high-minded’ women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come nocking towards the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat”.
Nothing has changed, a century hence. The left’s essential loathing of the working class was laid bare by Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” sneer. They’ve only gotten more vocal in their disdain as blue-collar voters rally behind Donald Trump in the US and Reform in the UK. The Climate Cult, an elite movement par excellence, hates the poor so much it wants to eradicate them.
Lest anyone doubt how much the left loathe the poor, simply look at how much misery leftist policies have heaped on them.
Everything the centre left offers programmatically is bad for poor people especially, but for the societies more generally that the centre left claims to serve.
The Biden administration was a disaster for working Americans. Besides flooding the control with illegal immigrants, who, besides unleashing a crime wave, drove down blue-collar wages dramatically. Bidenomic inflation, coupled with lunatic climate policies that sent energy prices skyrocketing, only compounded working-class misery.
But Joe Biden was a rank amateur compared to Keir Starmer’s Labour government in Britain.
Like the Albanese government, it received a low primary vote but in the translation of votes to seats, like the Albanese government, won a huge parliamentary majority. Yet now the Starmer government is shockingly unpopular and is consistently polling behind Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.
It’s a long way to an election, but if one were held now, Farage could very well be PM. Starmer has failed in budget repair, welfare reform and immigration control.
The great hero of the Australian left, Gough Whitlam, was also a disaster for Australian workers. Aside from installing a Marxist into the Treasurer’s job, Whitlam illegally tried to borrow money from a Pakistani loan shark – which, if it had succeeded, would have saddled Australians with debt we’d still be paying off today.
His government was a rollicking shambles from the start but he won a narrow re-election in 1974, mainly because the opposition leader, Billy Snedden, was so hopeless. In 1975 Whitlam suffered the greatest electoral landslide drubbing in Australian political history. He stayed on as opposition leader and got almost as bad a result in 1977.
Even Whitlam’s signature policy, which Australian lefties still bang on about, so-called ‘free university’, rewarded the middle classes at the expense of the workers. Despite leftist mythology, the demographics of university students barely shifted under Whitlam: university remained almost exclusively the remit of the middle class. But working-class taxes paid for it.
A generation later, the children of Whitlam’s bourgeois beneficiaries were overwhelmingly more likely to go to university than working kids.
All Whitlam achieved was to cement generational middle-class privilege at the expense of the working-classes.
The underlying truth is that every big idea the left has had in the past 40 years runs in some way against human nature. Because the left, since it parted ways with Western tradition, has been trying to refashion humanity to fit the various ideological constructs which it itself very often doesn’t fully understand.
Because these ideas typically are so radically against the real nature of human life, they hit people with fewer resources harder than they hit people with lots of resources, even when their purpose is ostensibly redistribution.
Consider education, a field run almost exclusively by left-wing females. Fashionable left-wing educational theories have engineered a collapse in basic literacy and numeracy.
The chief victims were poor kids. Rich kids had private educational resources that overcame this ideological deformity in learning.
But the rampaging elephant in the room of elite leftist disasters inflicted on the poor is mass immigration.
In [Australia, the UK, and the USA] the left thinks there is something illegitimate about the nation state, especially Western nation states. Therefore they believe the state has no right to control its borders. Thus in all three societies you got vast and uncontrolled illegal immigration. Some of the people who came in had great difficulty settling, but more generally the sheer numbers overwhelmed the society.
The people who suffered most were not the new-class, affluent, centre-left political leaders, staffers, academics and bureaucrats. They live in insulated affluent suburbs. People in working-class suburbs suffer the greatest ill effect of these policies in competition for entry level jobs and sometimes in crime rates.
Then there’s the massive government debt from uncontrolled government spending: this leads directly to spiking inflation, which hurts the poor far more than the wealthy left-voters.
‘Net Zero’ is another left-elite obsession that is belting the poor, through spiralling energy costs.
There is really a left-wing war against the poor, evident in a thousand policy areas and big ideas that are bad ideas. Winning one election well does not remotely guarantee policy success. And left-wing policy failure always hurts the poor.
So spare me the leftist palaver about being ‘the party of the worker’. I’ve had about as much of that bullshit as any working man should have to bear.
