Labour’s snobbery towards the working class has reached a new low

The workers’ party don’t trust the proletariat to make their own decisions about what to eat, drink or smoke – or how to vote

Source - Daily Telegraph 22/03/24

The Labour Party just can’t help itself, can it?

In 1990 the socialist film maker Ken Loach made an ad for McDonalds. Now Sheffield's Labour council has banned fast food ads from its hoardings

Sheffield City Council has decided that certain products will no longer be able to be advertised on hoardings which it owns or controls. Some of the targeted products will raise no eyebrows, except where the question “Why was this allowed to be advertised in the first place?” is raised: lethal weapons and illegal drugs are apparently on the verboten list.

But there are other items that are simply playing to the tiny minority of activists who care deeply but represent no one: fossil fuels-related brands, airlines and airports, petrol, diesel and even hybrid and electric plug-in vehicles, food and drink that are high in fat, salt and/or sugar, food ordering services, certain infant formula milks, and alcoholic drinks and low/zero alcohol drinks from brands synonymous with alcohol.

My, what fun the local press is going to have in the next few weeks as it records which councillors among those who supported this nonsense have since been found guilty of driving a car, having a drink, going on holiday or ordering in a Deliveroo.

This is not the first local authority to decide what advertising we poor, ignorant, gullible plebs should not be subjected to. London Mayor Sadiq Khan has imposed similar restrictions on Underground advertising, his ire falling, bizarrely, on a West End theatre whose posters included that most vile of modern sins – a wedding cake.

It’s easy – and on this occasion, appropriate – to shout “nanny state” at our politicians’ tendency to believe they know what’s best for us. In fact, Labour is far from alone on this. The Conservatives, as well as the Liberal Democrats and the SNP, have often appeared to be competing for who can best lecture the population on what lifestyles we should adopt, what we should and shouldn’t buy, and what we should and shouldn’t drive.

But it is Labour whose basic instinct is either to ban stuff, make it free or make it compulsory. Local branch meetings are filled with activists – mostly teachers and social workers – fretting volubly about the insistence of the lower classes to make their own life decisions, almost as if they had the same rights as wealthier and more educated people to do so. For shame!

Labour’s control freak tendencies go very far back and are deeply ingrained. And examined up close, they reveal a disturbing inclination to snobbery towards the very people the party was set up to represent and promote: the working classes.

For who else is the Sheffield advertising ban targeted at if it’s not people with low or few educational qualifications, living in social housing and existing on low wages or benefits? It’s certainly not aimed at the kind of middle class, highly paid, university-educated public servants who make up quorums at Labour Party branch meetings. They, after all, would never need to be told what to eat, what to drive or where to go on holiday. 

But those oiks living down on the estates, while they can be relied upon to vote Labour (after their brief flirtation with Boris Johnson’s Conservatives four years ago, for which they have not yet been forgiven) certainly need a firm hand when it comes to making their own life choices. Some of them still smoke, for goodness sake!

The same contempt can be shown in another area of Labour Party culture. For as long as I was a member (34 years, if you’re counting), it was a common complaint that the only reason the party kept losing elections was not because it consistently elected the wrong leader and produced barmy manifestos, but because of the UK’s biased press. But if The Sun and The Telegraph were really that influential on people’s voting intentions, why did those doing the complaining not vote Tory themselves? Ah, because they’re too smart to fall for the propaganda, of course!

In other words, only the little people, the university degree-challenged and manual workers need to be protected from reading Right-wing views lest their little brains succumb to the attractions of the free market and lower taxation. After all, huge numbers of working class council house tenants could only have voted for Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives in the 1980s because they were fooled, not because they were making a rational choice.

How lucky we are that Labour stand ready to take the reins of office again and to use their vast intelligences to decide what’s good for us all. They themselves don’t need to be told how to live, but that’s only because they’re cleverer than us. Which makes their generosity and thoughtfulness all the more gratefully received.