Pass the quinoa, comrade! Hypocrisy of the middle-class revolutionaries
PATRICK Harvie almost knocked me over a few weeks ago. I was strolling up the pedestrianised bit of Sauchiehall Street, distracted by a gigantic betartaned hairy busker who was angrily attacking a guitar and shouting Scottish folk songs, when I suddenly became aware of a bicycle approaching at great speed.
As I leapt to safety I looked up to see the co-convener (male) of the Scottish Green Party whiz by. He looked strained, as if late for a train or needed urgently to find a toilet – though this may simply have been the effect of the g-force. He was in such a rush he had forgotten to wear a helmet. I didn’t have time to check for bicycle clips.
As he zoomed down the hill, and I watched terrified Glaswegians scatter from under the wheels of his deadly green machine, I mused that although a world without cars might be better for the environment, it wouldn’t necessarily be safer.
It also struck me that Harvie, in his taupe suit and waistcoat and his multi-coloured protest badges, resembled nothing more than a character from a 1950s campus novel, the eccentric academic too full of great thoughts and empty of self-awareness to notice the chaos around him.
Intellectual
And how fitting. The Green movement has long been the preserve of the middleclass intellectual, the superior ideologue who, like a speeding cyclist, puts far more store on reaching his destination than on the welfare of those who may be in his path. Environmentalism is a purified politics of the upper air, an inhospitable climate for ordinary human beings.
In this, it is of a piece with the wider hard-Left family to which it has attached itself. Radical politics is a pursuit for the moneyed conscience, an indulgence for those who can afford to fight the good fight, who are feather-bedded enough to give their lives over to peripheral causes, doomed campaigns and utopian schemes.
When you’re skint, funding the next meal or paying the leccy bill or covering the rent tends to be more of a priority than shouting slogans at students through a megaphone in Freedom Square.
The middle-class radical can see no good in the society that has raised them, fed them, kept them healthy, educated them and now allows them to make a living shouting it down. It has long been thus. Writing in 1941, George Orwell lamented the mentality of the Left-wing intelligentsia and their ‘generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have never been and never expect to be in a position of power.’ ‘England’ – by which he meant Britain – ‘is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.’
Orwell perfectly parodies this psychology in his novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying. The main character, Gordon Comstock, turns his back on a promising career in advertising in order to live the impoverished life of a poet, from where, voluntarily penniless, he rages against the rule of the ‘Money God’ over society. He chooses and romanticises an existence that anyone born into will try to escape – and yet treats every authentically working-class person he encounters with contempt.
Comstock’s friend is an aristocratic publisher called Ravelston who has taken up the newly fashionable ideology of socialism and frets guiltily about his personal wealth. He is hopelessly conflicted between the two: ‘In every moment of his life he was apologising, tacitly, for the largeness of his income... when he wasn’t thinking of coal-miners, Chinese junk-coolies and the unemployed in Middlesbrough, he felt that life was pretty good fun.’
The hypocritical Left is never not easy to pastiche. Consider the Corbynistas, a middle-class movement if ever there was one. Data published in the Guardian showed that the largest group of Labour members to have joined since the 2015 gen- eral election are urban, long-term homeowners with high levels of income. In a single street of multi-million-pound properties in Jeremy Corbyn’s Islington North constituency, 40 people joined over 12 weeks.
In Scotland, the mainstreaming of the SNP – which must now trim, triangulate and compromise with the population like every other elected government – has seen many radicals from the Yes campaign splinter off into more comfortable territ tory, where they can maintain their pure h hearts and outsider rhetoric.
At the forthcoming Holyrood election, a ‘L ‘Left Alliance’ called RISE (Respect, Independence, Socialism and Environmentalisms – I kid you not) will put forward candidates via the party list system. RISE, supported by the charmingly named R Republican Communist Network, is fr fronted by a 30-year-old woman, Cat Boyd, who, like the SNP’s bright young hope Mhairi Black, is impeccably middle-class.
Agitators
Boyd’s mother Isabelle was awarded a CBE for Services to Education in the 2008 New Year Honours and is currently head of Education Standards and Inclusion at North Lanarkshire Council.
Like a fair number of Scotland’s prominent Lefty agitators, Boyd writes a weekly column in the pro-independence newspaper The National. There’s good money in the independence industry; there’s a good living to be had from the poor.
The truth is that Scotland’s radical Left fits every cliché you could name. It is a home for those yet to outgrow the student politics mindset and those who never will; for otherwise unemployable hackademics and bloggers, and for ageing journalists desperate to keep their show on the road for a few more years; for young posers on the make and lifer scenesters; for the terminally parochial and the reality-averse.
The co-convener (female) of the Scottish Greens, Maggie Chapman, lists her hobbies as ‘the violin, fiddle and accordion… walking and cycling throughout Scotland… star-gazing, watching the sun set, strolling along the beach and browsing second-hand bookshops.’
Unlike Chapman’s politics, this is all admirable and harmless. What it isn’t is in any way representative of the lives of Scotland’s poorest. The truth is that, like the rest of their deathless, self-regarding class, Chapman and Harvie are here to do things to you, not for you, and they intend to have pretty good fun while they’re at it. Speaking from personal experience, whatever you do, keep out of their way.