(sublinhados meus)
We’re being ruled by a 1980s left-wing student elite
We are now governed by people who were left-wing students in the 1980s and early 90s. This is one of those facts that you try to forget, like getting older in general, but which – occasionally, suddenly – hits you in the mush. It’s fine in the normal run of things but every so often I remember that these left-wing students are in power and I get a rush of panic and horror, and emit an (internal) scream.
I was a student then as well you see. Gold Label at 50p a bottle in the Union bar. Pamphlets, pamphlets, photocopied pamphlets, everywhere. And what a soundtrack. That Petrol Emotion and their 1987 semi-smash ‘Big Decision’ – ‘Economies gets weaker, Reactionaries stronger, You gotta agitate, educate, organise!’
Or the toe-tapper ‘Breadline Britain’ by the Communards; ‘Where the sick don’t stand a chance, Where fascism leads a new dance, Where they’d privatise your mother if given half a chance’ – all this in an incredibly wealthy country with a high (and rising) standard of living.
‘Old England’ by the Waterboys complained that ‘Old England is dying’, which was fair enough – it was – but ‘where criminals are televised, politicians fraternised, journalists are dignified and everyone is civilised and children stare with heroin eyes!’ Which even then struck me as a somewhat skewed picture. No wonder this generation of students feel, ludicrously, that they have been ‘betrayed ’by their number one musical hero, Morrissey.
This milieu was unavoidable, in and out of the lecture hall. My confreres performed ‘die-ins’ on the city streets, lying down and drawing chalk lines around each other, to protest the first Gulf War in 1990, before rushing back home to watch Neighbours.
Their rooms in the halls of residence were plastered with the correct literature and iconography. And then there were the demos. Endless demos. On a ‘stop section 28’ march I heard, ‘Can you hear the people cry “Gay rights, gay rights?” to the tune of Camptown Races. Bubbling in the background was an arcane factional dispute between the Socialist Workers party and Militant, which at least kept both sides busy.
Our current establishment was stewed in this stuff, and I think it makes some sense of their behaviour. As others have noted, there has been a lack of outrage – comparatively speaking – about some of the new government’s doings from the news media and online. The wheeze to send prisoners to Estonia, the winter fuel cut – hardly a peep. Because it isn’t the Tories doing it. And the Tories, as every eighties student knows, are the quintessence of wickedness. Anyone else doing pretty much exactly the same kinds of things as the Tories? Well they must have their reasons. Give them a chance. They’re on our team.
This strange quietude makes sense if you factor in the infantile student background of those in Labour. I don’t think the ideology is the same as it was back when I had hair and shoulder pads were quite the thing, but the general tribalism remains baked in. We can hear this in the strange, often repeated claim from Labour people that ‘this party is my family and I love it’ (something Tories have very unwisely started to say too). This is intended to sound homey and grounded, but which in actual fact, to use a recently popularised phrase, is very weird indeed. Don’t you have an actual family? What happened to them? Why would Harriet Harman replace them?
Eighties student Tory haters have matured into Labour politicians and Labour’s useful idiots. ‘I just feel safe when Labour are in power’ I recently heard someone in their late 50s say. The tribalism is pathetic and funny, yes, but it’s also dangerous. These people have, after all, turned a blind eye to all manner of real evils – from the grooming gangs to puberty blockers – because they wanted to style themselves as open-minded and ‘nice’.
We have a new elite – and this stretches across both mainstream parties – formed in the crucible of the 80s polytechnic campus. I wouldn’t mind if it was an elite that functioned. Paternalism? Fine by me, if paternalists actually did the job of running the country. But how can they? For them it is forever October 1986, when they were young, they were good, and everybody else was nasty.
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