Blame the creators of Brexit, not Paddington, for destroying the UK

[ad_1]

Well, I don’t have that, to begin with. Over the past few weeks it has been hard to avoid Professor Matthew Goodwin and his new book Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics. According to Goodwin, the traditionalist beliefs, patriotism and honorable values ​​of the British majority were marginalized by a sinister new elite of private Russell Group graduates who colonized the country’s major institutions; who share a liberal and cosmopolitan worldview; and who have an unwavering sense of their own moral uprightness.

To give you a taste: Britain in the 2020s is in the grip of a new ruling class, the new elite of middle-class graduates; a tightly knit, insular and selfish ruling class bound by a new ideology that divides awakened radical progressivism; and (from the music of Darth Vader) the new elite became the new overclass.

And who are these polenta-eating Sith lords, draining all that is good, fine and traditional from British life? Well, Emily Maitlis, apparently. Then there’s Jon Sopel, Carol Vorderman, Gary Lineker and James OBrien. Emma Watson and Hugh Grant also star, although it’s not entirely clear how Paddington 2 vandalized the social fabric.

No such list is complete without Alastair Campbell’s own TNE, of course. And even I get a peek, for daring to suggest that the Brexit revolt could, in theory, have something to do with xenophobia.

Now I am the first to admit that I had a very privileged and lucky life, educated in a private school and at Oxford. It is also evident that Britain remains a depressingly elitist country, where social mobility is unequal at best and socio-economic inequalities are increasingly entrenched. But whose fault is it?

It has become a political reflex, when things go wrong, to blame the educated, the professional classes, the media, the civil servants and the intelligentsia by borrowing the notion of the traitorous intellectual from the title of Julien Bendas’ 1927 book La Trahison Clerics. In the United States, the trope can be traced to the influential Christopher Laschs The Revolt of the Elites and Thomas Sowells The Vision of the Anointed (both 1995).

According to Sowell, those in public and educational life who consider themselves anointed do not simply have a contempt for the public. Such disdain is an integral part of their vision, because the central characteristic of this vision is the preemption of the decisions of others.

When William Hague’s Conservative Party leadership was on life support, he declared himself the implacable enemy of the Liberal elite and vowed to prevent Britain from becoming a foreign land. In her first and last conference speech as Prime Minister last year, Liz Truss launched an embarrassing attack on the talking heads, the Brexit deniers. [who] taxi from north London townhouses to the BBC studio to fire anyone who challenges the status quo.

But let’s separate the rhetoric from the reality. If we were looking for an elite to hold Britain’s woes accountable, we should look no further than the privileged gang who brought Brexit to you and are now doing their best to turn border control politics into a hotbed sinister and dangerous culture war.

Goodwin is good enough to acknowledge that Boris Johnson went to Eton and Oxford, but excuses it by calling him a renegade member of the elite (my italics). It’s slippery, to say the least.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the Brexit plan is that it was almost entirely the work of opportunistic, privately educated Oxford boys.

Watch the cast of characters: Michael Gove (Robert Gordons College; Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford); Dominic Cummings (Durham School; Exeter College, Oxford); Daniel Hannan (Marlborough College, Oriel College, Oxford); David Frost (Nottingham High School; St Johns College, Oxford); and, of course, Rishi Sunak (Winchester College; Lincoln College, Oxford).

There were a few outliers: David Davis was a high school student raised on a housing estate by a single mother and didn’t go to college. Priti Patel went to full and Keele University. But, as Simon Kuper shows in his brilliant book, Chums, the Tory Brexiteers sub-group was the real vanguard of an elite-led anti-elitist revolt: a coup by a group of schoolchildren Oxford public against another.

And where did that big wheeze get us? At a low point in national history, there it is. Britons and the working-class pensioners whom Goodwin claims to speak on behalf of have been hardest hit by the cost of living crisis and for that, as research from the London School of Economics has shown, we especially of the post-Brexit bureaucracy, to thank.

As the EU migrant workforce dries up, there are desperate shortages in the NHS and social care. Upgrading remains a slogan in search of a policy.

And, to deflect from this pitiful record, we have the shameful political theater of war on small boats. We have Home Secretary Suella Braverman (Heathfield School, Pinner; Queens College, Cambridge) who says it is her dream to see planes full of refugees take off for Rwanda. And we have a Prime Minister who brags that if you come to the UK illegally you cannot benefit from our protections against modern slavery.

Goodwin thinks that those who find it all repugnant are driven by a waking madness, a belief in luxury. But what is happening to immigration policy is also an affront to a much older and deeply rooted sense of decency and compassion that is an integral part of the British soul.

It is easy, of course, to stoke resentment among immigrants and risk igniting the tinder of bigotry. But in the truest sense, it’s also deeply unpatriotic. Expect plenty more of this ahead of the election: Sunak last year vowed to stand up to wake up the nonsense and likes to attack Keir Starmer for being part of North London’s supposed liberal oligarchy.

Are Hugh Grant and Emma Watson really crushing Britain? Maybe that helps the populist right and its cheerleaders believe in such nonsense. But the truth is that they themselves are the new elite that is leading the country to perdition.

[ad_2]