Labour’s disdain for the public has landed it in huge trouble

There must an election on because social media is teeming with Labour supporters wondering aloud why the voters are so stupid. I mean really, why would they be so idiotic as to vote for the Tory Party against their own interests? I blame the education system for churning out ignoramuses who are so easily manipulated by the billionaire-owned Tory press.

Voters across England, Scotland and Wales are going to the polls today in the biggest set of local and devolved parliament elections since 1973. Sources within the Labour Party believe it is in “huge trouble” in Hartlepool and risk losing control of Sunderland and Durham councils for the first time in half a century. If this is true, it means Labour has yet to hit rock bottom.

Little over a year since Keir Starmer pledged to rebuild the “red wall”, Yougov is predicting a nine-point northern swing to the Tories. There will be plenty of opinions flying about trying to explain Labour’s decline. It’s the Brexit effect, it’s Corbyn’s legacy, it’s media manipulation, cognitive dissonance or perhaps just that Keir Starmer isn’t very good.

In fact, the explanation is simple. Many people simply do not like what the Labour Party has become. There are two sides to this, on the one hand you have a Party perceived to have been taken over by snobby, ideological, metropolitan fanatics who look down on ordinary voters while believing they know what’s best for them. On the other, is a party stuck in the past still banging on about the miners, still wailing about Thatcher and using attack lines against the Tories from the 1990s.

His critics say Jeremy Corbyn toxified the Labour Party – in fact his leadership was simply the toxic sludge rising to the surface for all to see. Tony Blair and New Labour was an aberration, a brief takeover that managed to marginalise the nutty element of dogmatists. It says it all that he is the only leader to have led the party to victory since 1974 and yet he is reviled, and New Labour’s victories are not celebrated.

The true Labour Party doesn’t want election winners at the helm. It is too busy celebrating its latest abject failure and hailing Corbyn for his ideological purity. Don’t you see? Now is not the time for self-reflection, it’s not Labour supporters who are out of touch, it’s the voters.

However much he might try, Starmer is unable to escape the Labour of nostalgia for a mythical past, burning resentment, trade union communists, nutty activists, woke warriors and naïve kids born decades after Thatcher who think they’re fighting the political wars of the 1980s.

There was a belief, or hope, that the Corbyn movement could be buried, and the Party could move on and rebuild, but how can it? The Left cannot process loss because they cannot admit they were wrong.  There is no room for self-reflection. There are simply good guys (them), bad guys (the right) and stupid people who are manipulated by the bad guys. They cannot process the fact that perfectly decent people have their own reasons to reject Labour.

Search Twitter to see the attitude yourself, here are some unattributed samples:

‘If you’re thinking of voting Tory tomorrow… Think.’

‘Is it possible for an entire town to suffer Stockholm Syndrome? Anyone in Hartlepool care to comment?’

‘From an NHS doctor friend: “I am genuinely baffled. How do the Tories manage to persuade/manipulate LOTS of people to vote against their own interests??”‘

First prize must go to Grace Blakeley for this snobby contempt dressed up in pseudo-intellectual left wing babble:

‘I think the contempt for Labour as the ‘party of students’ might reflect ressentiment (sic) towards the educated based on the dominance of a kind of entrepreneurship of the self in which education is seen as an investment in human capital that raises the value of the underlying asset.’

In other words, no working class people have degrees and they vote Tory because they are ill-educated and resentful. There in one tweet, we have a good summary of why voters are turning their back on Labour despite the scandals surrounding Boris and Brexit being done. Things will not improve without radical change and a serious reassessment. Instead we have Paul Mason on BBC News criticising the leader and forgetting the damage his Far Left movement have done to his party:

‘The left feels “unloved, dissed… no enthusiasm for what he does” says author Paul Mason on Keir Starmer. He says coming second in Scotland & holding some councils would be a “cheerful night” for Labour, “not the making of a government”’

The left feels unloved. Aw, diddums. Perhaps it’s time to realise they feel like that because they are unloved. Unloved by a leadership trying to reverse Labour’s decline into perennial failure and unloved by the electorate.

There is no need for detailed analysis. The Labour Party believes voters are too stupid to make up their own minds. They think they are easily manipulated by the media and Tory propaganda into voting the wrong way. The ballot paper is a test, and Labour supporters are over our shoulders furrowing their brow and tutting when we get it wrong.

Maybe, just maybe, it isn’t in the voters best interest to vote for people who don’t understand them and hold them in contempt? Just a thought.