The Left reveals its stupidity when it patronises the poor
IT was perhaps inevitable her broadside should have been aired on Newsnight, notorious for its adulation of Left-wing celebrities. So Scots comedian Rhona Cameron chose the BBC’s current affairs programme as the forum for her diatribe against the Tories.
The middle classes, she opined, had no understanding of the suffering of the poor in Britain, or of how this Government and its predecessor had forced them into Dickensian squalor.
The situation was now so bad, she insisted, that ‘some families are eating dog meat in some parts of the country’. Truly, she concluded, we are living in ‘catastrophic times’.
It was a virtuoso performance, but there was one slight problem: her claim about poor people consuming dog food was entirely baseless.
According to the Trussell Trust, a food bank charity, a girl in South Ayrshire is said to have eaten dog biscuits, but that was back in 2013.
With some understatement, a trust spokesman said: ‘Rhona is being a bit over-confident saying something like that.’
It is an ‘over-confidence’ shared by fellow Left-wingers such as comedian Russell Brand, another Newsnight favourite and former ally of Ed Miliband, who rails against ‘corporate hegemony’ and the plight of the poor despite being a millionaire.
Of course, some inconvenient truths get in the way of this picture of ‘catastrophic’ poverty. Under the Tories, Britain is on track to deliver the biggest turnaround in public finances by any advanced economy since the Second World War.
Indeed, we have overtaken France to become the second biggest economy in Europe behind Germany.
We are expected to believe that Brand and Miss Cameron are driven by nothing other than heart-felt compassion for poorer families (and that self-publicity plays no part in their motivation).
Clueless
In fact, their concern, however sincerely meant, is a product of a deeply patronising attitude common among the Left: one that groups poorer families together as a homogenous mass of helpless, clueless humanity – a sub-class reduced to eating dog food.
How much easier to cast poorer Scots in this role than to accept that they may also have self-respect, as well as real aspirations for themselves and their families. They are instead merely a substratum of society which can only be kept alive by endless handouts from the state.
This has long been the default position of a political philosophy founded on false compassion. Its cornerstone is the belief that creating a giant client state dependent on taxpayers’ money for its survival can solve all society’s problems. Self- reliance and the instinctive human desire to create a better life become secondary concerns.
The SNP, of course, has helped to propagate this unquestioning portrayal of Right-wing politics as somehow morally debased – and of the UK Government as sadistic tormentors of the poor.
On Friday, there was the extraordinary spectacle of an angry mob jeering at Scotland’s only Conservative MP as he opened a food bank in his own constituency.
It is operated by the Trussell Trust – the body that demolished Miss Cameron’s dog food nonsense – in Dumfries.
David Mundell was forced to flee through a back door and escape in a waiting car after ‘ anti- austerity’ protesters, including Scottish Nationalists, chanted: ‘Shame on you.’
Dressed in Yes T- shirts and carrying Saltires, they thumped on the windows and at first refused to l et the vehicle move.
One banner read: ‘They cut, we bleed.’ Another referred to Mr Mundell’s nickname, asking: ‘Have you no sense of irony, Fluffy?’ Among the protesters was Steve James, an SNP activist and media studies lecturer who is pictured with First Minister Nicola Sturgeon on his Twitter profile.
It was another bleak example of an increasingly ugly dimension to SNP politics. But it also neatly illustrated the intellectual vacuum at the heart of a movement that has become adept at prioritising style over substance.
Just as ‘the poor’ are a subgroup of society dependent on the largesse of the state, UK Government ministers are villains relentlessly pursuing a vendetta against them.
The SNP has perfected the art of such pantomime politics, as shallow as it is.
It might have been thought Mr Miliband’s demise spelt the end for the delusional, semi-Marxist, ‘big state’ vision the electorate so decisively rejected in May (another small fact the Left prefers to ignore).
But the SNP’s anti-austerity agenda appeared to win support, just as Mr Miliband, its chief standard bearer south of the Border, suffered a humiliating defeat.
In Scotland, the Nationalists go from strength to strength, despite the mob politics demonstrated by Mr Mundell’s ordeal and tacitly condoned by the SNP leadership.
As Alex Salmond said at the weekend: ‘Instead of devo to the max, we’re getting austerity to the max.’
Undoubtedly, there are many in Scotland who support the Nationalists’ opposition to Tory welfare reforms, partly because for generations their own families have been dependent on benefits.
There is a ready-made support base for a party that seeks to sustain that dependency culture – and the SNP is well aware of its existence. But what it has miscalculated is the extent to which the wider Scottish public will stomach its platitudes about ‘austerity’ and ‘progressive politics’ – an increasingly meaningless term.
Downtrodden
Yes, Miss Sturgeon’s performance during the election rightly won admirers around the UK; and in Scotland the SNP has prospered, largely due to the lack of any credible opposition. But that does not mean Scots are prepared to swallow the SNP’s narrative about evil Conservatives and the downtrodden poor.
A recent Scottish Daily Mail survey found that only 9 per cent of voters want Miss Sturgeon to raise income tax when MSPs take over its control from Westminster.
Indeed, a staggering 31 per cent of SNP supporters said the new powers should be used to lower income tax – an even higher proportion than the 21 per cent of Tories who said the same.
Polls have also shown support among Scots for the Conservatives’ tougher stance on welfare.
The truth is that Scots are fed up with decades of a runaway benefits culture that saps the country’s productivity and undermines individual self-empowerment.
There was no better illustration of the SNP’s failure to understand this than Miss Sturgeon’s decision, as Deputy First Minister, to axe the right of council tenants to buy their own homes – despite the fact her own parents had taken advantage of that totemic Tory policy. ‘ The poor’ can’t be trusted to own their own homes, after all.
Ultimately, the SNP and its supporters are content to use poverty for the most cynical of reasons – to achieve the final, overriding objective of Scottish independence.
During last year’s referendum, emotive posters featuring a young girl with dirty shoes and tattered clothes were devised by the Yes campaign. They were accompanied by the plea: ‘Let’s become independent before 100,000 more children are living in poverty.’
Yet the previous November, the Scottish Government’s own White Paper on independence had claimed only half that number, 50,000 more children, would fall into poverty by 2020 because of UK benefit changes.
These claims were exposed at the time as ramshackle – built on the same shaky foundations as Miss Cameron’s dog food nonsense. Yet even now, such distortions continue to be peddled by the SNP, which also expects us to believe – despite all available evidence – that separatism remains an economic panacea.
In its own way, of course, this is also deeply patronising. But it should come as no surprise from a party which, it appears, cares about the predicament of poorer Scots only insofar as it can further its own narrow political ambitions.