The
Tories have enjoyed success at General Elections in the past, but mere mention
of their name still provokes vitriol among some voters. SIR BERNARD INGHAM, Yorks
Post. Nearly 40 years ago I sat in on one of Margaret Thatcher’s few meetings
with the Trades Union Congress. A far from militant union leader, who I had
known as a labour correspondent, plonked himself down next to me and
aggressively said: “Hello, traitor”. No acknowledgment that as a civil servant
of 12 years standing I was obliged to work for whatever Government the voters
chose. No recognition that over those 12 years I had worked for three Labour
Ministers (Barbara Castle, Eric Varley and Tony Benn) as well as three
Conservatives – Robert Carr, Maurice Macmillan and Lord Carrington. Just venom
that I had chosen to work for the Tories again. I often think about this little
episode when I read of the sheer viciousness of attacks during the election
against Tory candidates and, to be fair, the bullying of Labour moderates,
especially women. It seems that the new currency of political discourse is
foul-mouthed abuse and threats – even racism – apparently orchestrated on the
internet by some on the hard Left, who Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn fails to rein
in. It is all very well to deplore this – as we must, or it will become the norm
– but it is entirely another thing to fathom the utter contempt for Tories held
by, for example, SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon. Such attitudes are so rife that I
am told it is unwise to reveal you voted Tory in that so-called distinguished
seat of learning, Cambridge. What on earth lies behind this contorted-faced
contempt for all things Tory? As one with impeccable working class credentials,
I must confess that in my younger days I abhorred the privilege that the Tories
represented. But Alec Douglas-Home was the last of the Tory toffs in No 10 – if
you can ignore David Cameron’s new money. Ted Heath, Thatcher, John Major and
now Theresa May were not born with silver spoons in their mouths. I suspect that
certainly Thatcher, Major and May, having lived among the working class, had or
have more in common with them than Islington’s middle class revolutionaries who
stand behind Corbyn. It is – or was in 1945 – easy to understand why Winston
Churchill fell after leading us through the Second World War. The public had had
enough of the two-nation Twenties and the unemployment of the 1930s. And people
are still in love with the welfare state that Clement Attlee provided, even
though it was soon fraying at the edges. Even Aneurin Bevan worried about “the
cascade of pills down the nation’s throat” before prescription charges. Yet
before all this the Tories had a long history of industrial and social reform.
Have the scoffers never heard of the admittedly controversial Sir Robert Peel;
the Earl of Shaftesbury; Richard Oastler or “One-Nation” Benjamin Disraeli? And
it was a Liberal – David Lloyd George – who laid the foundations of the welfare
state in 1911. What has the Left to offer after Attlee? Harold Wilson? He wore
himself out holding his fractious party together, with the Open University
perhaps his proudest innovation. Jim Callaghan? Like Wilson, was hammered by the
nominally staunch Labour unions into defeat after the 1979-80 winter of
discontent. As for Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, nobody who is compos mentis can
possibly hold them out as shining examples of Labour in government. There is not
much to admire in Blair’s “Third Way” socialism or Brown’s “prudence”. Brown
should hang his head in shame over leaving a £153bn budget deficit from which we
still suffer. So why on earth is it that the Corbynists so wholeheartedly hate
the Tories? I can think of four reasons: 1. Give a dog a bad name and it sticks.
The word “Tory” stinks in their nostrils regardless of the balance of history;
like the Bourbons they have learned nothing from it. 2. All the best
revolutionaries are middle class – as one minister once told me instancing Marx
and Lenin. They hadn’t – and now Corbyn hasn’t – a clue how the other half
lives. 3. The parlous state of British education, and especially university
education, rotten as it is to the core with political prejudice instead of
academic rigour and impartiality. Given their record, I would not pay the
average economics professor in washers. 4. The relative Tory success over time
in managing the economy and adapting social and economic life to the needs of
the people. Without a moderate Labour Party, the only bulwark in our democracy
against a hard Left dictatorship is a responsible, reforming Tory Government.
Hence their sheer bile.
Read more at: http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/bernard-ingham-bile-threats-and-hate-are-currency-of-a-bankrupt-left-1-8656941
Read more at: http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/bernard-ingham-bile-threats-and-hate-are-currency-of-a-bankrupt-left-1-8656941