Tory “scum”: Rayner fires up the base
“Labour’s annual conference was supposed to be all about
Keir Starmer winning over a lukewarm supporter base,” said
Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph. “Instead, all anyone is talking about is a single word: ‘scum’.” At a late-night fringe event, Angela Rayner, Starmer’s “strident deputy”, described the Conservatives as “a bunch of scum: homophobic, racist, misogynistic... banana republic... vile, nasty, Etonian... scum.” Challenged about the outburst later on TV, she refused to apologise, saying she was merely firing up the crowd and expressing her “anger and frustration” with the Government’s policies – adding that the word scum was “street language” that “you hear very often in northern working-class towns”.
It was “outrageous”, but that’s the point, said Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail. Rayner “doesn’t sound like a politician. She speaks like a normal human being, the kind of person you might meet at work or down the pub.” She is clever and fiery and quick on her feet – an impressive parliamentary performer, but authentic in a way that very few politicians are today. Rayner had a deeply disadvantaged upbringing in Stockport: her mother had bipolar disorder and was illiterate; her father was violent. She had a baby, and left both school and home, at 16, but “never let either stand in her way”. Working first as a carer and then as a union representative, she worked her way up like the Labour MPs of old, not the Blairs and Milibands. So, said Cathy Newman in The Independent: she’s “a politician who’s authentic, has the gift of the gab, a mop of hair and an interesting personal life, but is occasionally gaffe-prone”. If I were Starmer, I’d watch out. As his “cautious, cerebral leadership” starts to rankle with MPs and party members, his critics are beginning to “wonder if Rayner may yet be Labour’s answer to Boris Johnson”.
Still, said Tom Harris in The Daily Telegraph: scum? “I spent 34 years campaigning for the Labour Party”, and I still find myself “dazed and confused when I see people who are old enough to know better using such ugly, childish terms to describe parties and politicians with whom they happen to disagree”. This goes beyond the question of courtesy. What Rayner and her apologists have revealed “is that they have no idea why ordinary people vote Conservative”. Labour supporters have long believed themselves morally superior to Tories. This is not just wrong, it’s unhelpful. If they actually want to win elections, Rayner and her party “need to understand why ordinary decent people would rather vote for ‘scum’ than for Labour”.