HARRY BELL

the entirely subjective label “progressive” to its politics. Its outlook comprises a flabby body of ideas incorporating soft environmentalism, comprehensive school education, free higher education, the pumping of taxpayers’ money into public services, attachment to the EU, loyalty to the dogma of multiculturalism, hostility towards big business – especially Canterbury’s housing developers – and a belief in the state as the dispenser of “social justice”.

Underlying all this is an urgency to be a moral and compassionate soul who just wants to help others – both as a method of resolving personal frustrations and in order to travel to the location from where one is able to pronounce oneself “good”.

This newspaper’s letters page was handed an example of the kind of moral abrasions someone endures as he makes this journey. Responding to a piece on left-wing politics in this column in February, a correspondent from south Canterbury agonised: “We are aware that we are flawed human beings trying to understand a complex world.”

Indeed. This is the identical conundrum Christians have struggled with for two millennia.

AN Wilson’s magnificent 1999 book God’s Funeral examines the decline of the Christian faith from the late 18th century to the early 20th century among public intellectuals, including writers, philosophers and artists.

What struck me the most as I read it was that in abandoning Christianity these intellectuals had simply transferred their faith to other abstractions, to reason, to science, to humanity in general.

Today, religious faith features even less prominently among the educated middle class. This, of course, does not mean that its members cease being moral creatures. As

Underlying all this is an urgency to be a moral and compassionate soul who wants to help others

Christianity evacuated the scene, it necessitated the rise of a new religion to fill the vacuum: politics. And a new church: leftism.

Like a fundamentalist religion, it rejects a nuanced approach, preferring instead to see the world in terms of light and dark.

This election, like no other I can remember, didn’t feel like a technical or managerial debate about what the best way is to make law and raise and spend public money, but instead hardened into a contest portrayed as a Star Wars-like fight between good and evil.

Social media, moreover, shaped the election in Canterbury and Whitstable in terms of a moral crusade.

Sir Julian Brazier, the defeated Conservative candidate and MP for 30 years, was little more than a distant and polite old school Tory who had sat on a shelf gathering dust for too long.

But on Facebook and Twitter he was depicted as a monster for the righteous to slay. It was vicious and unwarranted.

For many, glued as they are to their devices, it was a message they were happy for their own purposes to recite.

Such activity on social media is vital to the educated middle class mind as a way of arrogating to itself a loud moral dimension.

Despite the odd pimple of deprivation, the face of Canterbury is today distinctly that of the educated wellto-do. Good schools, good universities, lots of people working in education and in the health sector and some “down from Londoners”.

This is a social class with status, wealth, opportunity – perhaps even a house in St Augustine’s Road, one of the city’s most affluent streets, which boasted a Labour Party poster in every other window.

While it would never give any of this away in the name of equality, that peculiar obsession of the educated, the middle seeks to offset its privilege and comfort by noisily subscribing to the politics of care and compassion, grievance and guilt – which are provided in spades by Labour.

Don’t forget, too, that the elders of the new church are products of the 1960s and 1970s. Their idea of the kind of place Britain was – its glorious past, militarily successes, the export of parliamentary democracy around the globe – was not one they wanted to celebrate or sentimentalise.

Instead they set out to question, undermine, repudiate and eventually destroy the foundations upon which this country was built and replace it with something new.

They venerated the likes of Che Guevara, Castro and the Sandanistas. They gawped at the teenagers and students rioting in the streets of Paris in 1968 and longed for a piece of the action. They applauded as the Viet Cong picked off the American youth sent to the jungle to arrest the spread of communism spreading through south-east Asia.

This explains why Jeremy Corbyn, John Mcdonnell and Diane Abbott have been so comfortable applauding every assault on the British state, especially the IRA’S attempts to damage it through murder.

With the British educational establishment avowedly leftist and more and more people passing through universities, we really ought not be surprised if Labour support among the middle class solidifies yet further in Canterbury. It may well be that Mike Prowse is proved right.