Angela Rayner scum outburst will only alienate the working class

“Scum” is very much the mot du jour, with deputy Labour leader Angela Rayner’s employment of it in reference to senior Conservatives during a fringe event at Brighton, provoking a controversy that further disrupted the already fragmented Labour Party conference. She compounded the offence by refusing to apologise unless Boris Johnson also expressed contrition for being “racist, homophobic and sexist”.

On this, Rayner has previous. In October, 2020 she called Conservative MP Chris Clarkson “scum” during a Commons debate. On that occasion she apologised, if somewhat perfunctorily. The most recent outburst is being represented by Labour managers as a momentary aberration, untypical of the party’s mind-set; Emily Thornberry, shadow international development secretary, even went so far as to suggest, in supposed extenuation, that “there may have been drink partaken”.

This episode, however, is strikingly reminiscent of Aneurin Bevan’s tirade in 1948, when he launched the National Health Service with a speech in which he holistically denounced the Tories as “lower than vermin”. That classic example of what Labour today would term “hate speech” (though only if directed from the right), demonising more than eight million Conservative voters, was credited by commentators with having contributed significantly to the narrowness of Labour’s election victory in 1950, which paved the way for defeat the following year.

It still rankled in 1951: when Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor, displaying a degree of imprudence alarming in a senior military commander, took Bevan to White’s for a drink, one of the members, John Fox-Strangways, a son of Lord Ilchester, kicked Bevan down the steps on his departure. While this inhospitable gesture had a smack of Regency élan, the consensus among White’s membership was that such treatment of a guest, however obnoxious, was reprehensible and Fox-Strangways’ more legitimate course of action would have been to kick Slessor, who should have known better than to introduce so unwelcome a visitor.

Clearly, then, vituperative abuse of Conservatives, so far from being an occasional aberration, is in the DNA of the Labour left and always has been. Socialism is fuelled by hate, as its more extreme Marxist incarnation revealingly demonstrates. That explains why Angela Rayner’s apparent outburst, so far from being alcohol-driven, may well have been a carefully calculated political move to position herself as a latter-day Nye Bevan and a contender for the Labour leadership, as an alternative to the Attlee tribute act that is Keir Starmer.

Nor should conservatives, except of course as a political manoeuvre, behave as if exchanging abuse in the Commons chamber amounts to an unprecedented collapse of civility – even of civilisation. On the contrary, it is a tradition. When Disraeli described Gladstone as “a sophistical rhetorician intoxicated by the exuberance of his own verbosity”, the language was urbane, but the insult real. More aggressively, Lloyd George said of Sir John Simon: “The right honourable and learned gentleman has twice crossed the floor of the house, each time leaving behind a trail of slime.” Harold Wilson said of Tony Benn: “He immatures with age.”

The current trend for more earthy discourse supposedly reflects the progress down the social scale of the parliamentary intake; but that is misleading. The unlettered (as she is fond of reminding us) Angela Rayner may imagine she is demonstrating her “authenticity” by employing gutter language, but she is deluded. Nowhere will her scurrilous demonisation of Conservatives be more bitterly resented than among former Red Wall voters who turned Tory at the last election. It will not only offend them politically, it will repulse them culturally.

Nothing more tellingly betrays the middle-class ownership of leftist politics today than the progressive establishment’s confusion of the working class with the underclass. Those two sections of society are further apart culturally (as distinct from geographically) than BBC executives and people on benefits. When progressives sneeringly list so-called “bourgeois values”, the moral strengths and aspirations that made Britain a great country, most of the items could equally be ticked as working-class values.

Cleanliness, decent behaviour, respect for the law and fellow citizens, hard work, patriotism, family solidarity, service to country and community, aspiration towards self-improvement: those are among the essential values embraced for generations by working-class Britons and still cherished by many today in former Red Wall constituencies. In those areas, Angela Rayner operates as a vote repellent. No matter how poor her background may be, she has absorbed the leftist bourgeois elite’s caricature of it. This is a universal progressive delusion. It is similar to Scots’ conflation, in recent decades, of proletarianisation with national identity.

Consider the paranoid stream of consciousness in which Rayner gave vent to her prejudices: “We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute pile… of banana republic… Etonian… piece of scum.” That attack of ideological Tourette Syndrome amounts to a compendium of leftist grudges; it is also wholly divorced from genuine working-class preoccupations. The leading terms are synthetic neologisms derived more from the campus than the community.

“Homophobic” is an ugly neologism, intrinsically meaningless when reduced to its etymological Greek origins, a propagandist term used to intimidate all who oppose, for example, same-sex marriage, as they have a right to do in a free society. It is not a term that has an unmistakable resonance of northern working-class cultural preoccupations. Similarly, “racist” has lost any implication of tolerance and has become a catch-all, weaponised piece of invective against anyone who takes the slightest pride in British history and culture – as the working class notably does.

As for “misogynistic” – again an alien term among Rayner’s supposed target audience – it comes shamelessly from those who are relentlessly erasing women from society, unsexing them, denying their natural characteristics, wrecking their sports and finding the very word “women” so rebarbative it has to be replaced with the cretinous term “womxn”. It comes particularly shamelessly from a party whose leader has just told us it is wrong to say “only women have a cervix”. So, who else does, then, Sir Keir?

Is Britain supposed to vote for a man who professes ignorance of such basic biology to serve as prime minister? The more reprehensible aspect is that Starmer is perfectly aware that only women have a cervix, but feels obliged to deny a fundamental scientific truth in deference to the demands of a Marxist ideology. On how many other issues would he roll over as demanded? Does he imagine that sycophancy towards the increasingly insane “trans” lobby will win back Workington and Sedgefield?

In such areas, Angela Rayner, who imagines herself to be their champion, is, for the Tories, a gift that just keeps giving. Political rancour, badly expressed, is self-defeating. On the other hand, fierce confrontation is healthier for the body politic than the kind of cross-party consensus we have seen too often in the past, beginning with the abolition of capital punishment, against the will of the public, in 1965. Politicians are better divided than united, from the point of view of the interests of the public, badly bruised by the elitist consensus to block Brexit that seriously challenged this country’s democratic constitution as recently as 2019.

At least the extreme left believes in something, however unpleasant and destructive: Conservatives need to reacquire convictions, such as they had in the Thatcher era when they successfully evangelised the country. In the 1940s, following Bevan’s insult, thousands of Conservatives wore “Vermin” badges with pride; they returned to power within three years. It is time for today’s Tories to harden the sinews, philosophically as well as politically, and see off Starmer, Rayner and the entire Labour canaille.