Disdainful metropolitan liberals are doing a disservice to democracy

The working classes want the same things as anyone else – patronising them for it is a grave mistake

supported Remain – whereas the Caliban vote went so overwhelmingly to the Conservatives that the whole accustomed edifice of party loyalty was rocked to its foundations. If you are the BBC or The Guardian, or some other species of desperate apologist for the losing side, there is only one possible conclusion: those who voted against the Tory-Leave option, in whatever way was available to them, represent Enlightenment and are a force for the General Good, while those who voted for Tory-Leave, even when it went against their historic loyalties, are stupid bigots who don’t understand what is at stake.

Can I suggest an alternative explanation? That the sense in which many of those anti-Tory Remain voters were truly enlightened was in the spirit of the 18th-century notion of “enlightened self-interest”.

It is the graduate professionals who have had – and wanted passionately to continue having – most of the advantages of EU membership. Or at least, they believed themselves to have had such advantages. As this column has noted before, for many, if not most, of those would-be citizens of the world, the freedom they idealised was impractical or unattainable.

But even those who did not have the specialised skills or qualifications that would have facilitated their dream of unlimited European professional opportunity had good personal reasons for wanting to prevent Brexit.

All that cheap, conscientious eastern European labour – the plumbers and the builders and the domestic cleaners – drawn into the UK from poorer EU member states, has helped to transform the households of those middle-class graduates who supported Remain with such a self-regarding belief in their own virtue. To put it bluntly, it was not necessarily a utopian vision of cosmopolitan tolerance that propelled the London bourgeoisie into the arms of anybody-but-the-Tories.

It was a combination of shameless snobbery and – dare I say it – genuine selfishness. Because while they were happily indulging in their good fortune amid a glut of obliging tradesmen and servants, and possible foreign property ownership, much of the population outside the M25 was paying the price in lower wages, fewer jobs and hugely overstretched public services.

There was a particularly comic instance of this utter failure of understanding on (what else?) the Today programme after the election.

A BBC reporter found herself in an alien universe, having to interview a Northern Working Class Person about his decision to vote Conservative after a lifetime of Labour loyalty. The Northern Working Class Person was articulate, obliging and clear in his explanation of his decision, which was to do with the economic realities facing his community.

He mentioned that he had recently had to take his daughter to A&E with a broken ankle – and found they were the only patients there speaking English. At which point, the BBC interviewer gratuitously expostulated: “But if they can do the jobs, does it matter what colour they are?”

What? Where did that come from? To his enormous credit, the Northern Working Class Person, clearly taken aback but still good-natured, actually laughed as he patiently replied, “It doesn’t have anything to do with colour. It’s nothing to do with race…”

The point he had been making was to do with the pressure on his local NHS hospital from an influx of EU

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion migrants (most of whom were not likely to be, BBC please note, black).

This was a perfectly reasonable, empirically sound observation from a person who has to live with the consequences of the EU principle of free movement and is not in the fortunate position of gaining any advantage from it.

And just to compound the illinformed insult to a mild-mannered voter who was trying very hard to explain what had happened in this historic election, the interviewer’s reference to people who “do the jobs” was misleading. Under existing practice, an EU citizen does not need to have a job to enter the UK. So the automatic assumption that the people whose presence the Northern Working Class Person referred to must be “doing the jobs” was quite wrong. It is true that most EU migrants prefer to find work, but when they are in employment they are eligible for inwork benefits and child benefit (even if their children do not reside in this country). So they may or may not be net contributors to the economy – and thus to the public services – even if they are “doing the jobs”.

There is a nasty insinuation here, which is threatening to engulf our whole national conversation. It is absolutely essential – a matter of democratic life and death – that everybody understands this. Workingclass people generally want the same things as all those smug metropolitan liberals: self-respect, freedom to make choices and the opportunity to improve their lives. They do not want class war or permanent victimhood, and they will not forgive those who dismiss them as unworthy. They have just announced that very clearly. Heaven help those who refuse to listen.

‘While they were happily indulging in their good fortune … the population outside the M25 was paying the price in lower wages, fewer jobs, and overstretched public services’