Why Does Tristram Hunt Think the Electorate Is Full of Stupid Bigots?

In a forthcoming book edited by Labour's bland wunderkind Tristram Hunt, various figures from the party are trying to explain why and how they lost last year's election, as if everyone didn't already know. The party, they conclude, is out of touch with ordinary people. Everyone knows that Labour Members of Parliament are, by some margin, the worst people in Britain: the stupidest, pettiest, most venal, most cowardly, most useless non-entities, with the most nauseatingly shaped heads, the most pathetic set of priorities, and the most flatulently unearned arrogance.

But what's remarkable is that the Parliamentary Labour Party, unlike most other small clumps of idiocy, will happily admit that they're all idiots; in fact, doing this has somehow become one more terrain for their idiocy. We saw this last week, when Pat Glass MP (head shape: ornamental spoon) was forced to apologise after being recorded calling a voter a "horrible racist" after a BBC interview. The latest in a long line of such events: Emily Thornberry losing her job after tweeting, without comment, a photo of some England flags and a van outside someone's home; Gordon Brown all but grovelling in the muck after calling a woman a "bigot" when she asked precisely where all these eastern Europeans are "flocking from".

For Tristram Hunt (head shape: dented chisel) and his fellow authors, the Labour party's residual ability to correctly identify racism when they see it is proof of its estrangement from the public, and a dangerous electoral liability. "Unnecessary metropolitan squeamishness is simply unacceptable," he says, while "nurturing a civic English patriotism is now absolutely essential".

The line he's pushing is this: the left wing of the party is dominated by preening urban elites, while some of its MPs are actually snobs who secretly hate the people they represent. And this is probably true – MPs are an awful smug bunch generally, and it's hard to believe they think of the rest of us as anything but a vicious and unstable mob. But it's very strange for him to crystallise this contradiction around the question of Englishness and patriotism; if anything, it marks him out as the snobbiest of the lot.

To my mind, the second-snobbiest Labour representative is probably Ian Austin (head shape: weather balloon), the member for Dudley North, and another figure standing firmly on the party's right wing. A few weeks ago, at the height of Labour's contrived anti-Semitism scandal, he tweeted, "This row about Ken Livingstone & Hitler is so unfair. One was a horrible extremist obsessed with Jews. The other was leader of Nazi Germany." Imagine, for a moment, that someone on the left had implied that his political enemies were worse than Hitler: it would quite rightfully have been called a diminishment of the horrors of the Holocaust, and he'd have been suspended from the party within days. Instead, the Jewish Chronicle 's Stephen Pollard (head shape: undercooked soufflé) immediately jumped to his defence.

Austin eventually apologised, but it's what he did next that's incredible. When various members of the great British public took him to task for what he'd said, he started bragging about blocking their accounts. This kind of behaviour might be standard for a certain class of journo or pundit, but for an elected representative it's generally bad form to so openly despise your constituents. He then later told another voter to "stop moaning and go deliver some leaflets." It's clear what Ian Austin MP thinks of us: we are the small and worthless people, and our only job is to propel Ian Austin to the political stardom he deserves. He never apologised for this conduct. But why should he? The rules are clear: only the party's left wing are forbidden from being rude to their constituents; you can say anything you like to them, as long as you don't say they're racist.

Labour lost the last election because they really are dangerously out of touch, because they really do despise the people, and, most of all, because they were more concerned with triangulating their policies to the views of some imaginary idiot than they were with actually presenting an alternative. Remember those "tighter controls on immigration" mugs; remember the stupid rock; remember Ed Miliband at the hustings, listening patiently and respectfully as some cretin in the audience vomited a sickly glug of nonsense directly at the cameras.

But for Tristram Hunt, they lost because they weren't being racist enough. This is ridiculous: the Labour figure with the strongest working class support is in fact none other than Jeremy Corbyn, in part because the British working classes are not populated solely by cartoon bigots but actually happen to include a sizeable number of people from ethnic minorities.

If we're looking for metropolitan condescension towards the public, there's no better example than Tristram Hunt himself. This is, let's not forget, a man who once walked through a picket line to teach a seminar on Marx. In his caricature of the electorate, voters are a gang of vicious petty chauvinist thugs, overgrown babies in tight-fitting polo shirts who need their tummies burped and their flag venerated. The working class base must be "appealed to"; actually advancing its interests is immaterial. All Labour needs to do to win is to start miming nationalist slogans and profess a deep attachment to Englishness – never mind that the Tories will always do this sort of reactionary national-identity fussing better, that Labour's shitty English patriotism will always be an ersatz supermarket version, some grubby imitation of the real thing.

Hunt seems to honestly think that if he drapes himself in an England flag and chugs a few cans of Carlsberg, a man called Tristram will be immediately celebrated as a working class hero. Pat Glass might have thought one voter was an idiot and a racist; if only that were the end of the party's problems. Tristram Hunt thinks all of us are.

@sam_kriss

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