Toward Brexit: The Duffy Decade - New English Review

by Matthew Wardour (January 2020)

Portrait of a Yellow Man, Paul Klee, 1921

So when Gilian Duffy (see Left), a 65-year-old life-long Labour supporter, began to question Brown on the streets of Rochdale about mass immigration, live on television, one can imagine his discomfort. Duffy first complained that she is now “absolutely ashamed of saying I’m Labour.” (Sound familiar?) She was sceptical about Brown’s claim that “if you commit a crime you’re going to be punished.” “I’m afraid I don’t think it’s happening in Rochdale,” Duffy replied. She then complained about immigration, particularly the effect it has on benefits. She bemoaned that “you can’t say anything about the immigrants because you’re saying that you’re . . . but all these eastern Europeans coming in, where are they flocking from?”

Openly criticising immigration is of course one of the cardinal sins of modern politics. Following this exchange Brown pretended, in a way that for him must have felt terribly humiliating, to be friendly to this poor paleolithic creature before him, enquiring about her family and her grandchildren. But once he was safely in his car, he let out the vitriol that, unbeknownst to Duffy, was seething throughout the entire conversation. Fortunately for us his comments were recorded as he had forgotten to remove his microphone:

Gordon Brown: That was a disaster. Should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?

Unknown male: I don’t know, I didn’t see.

Gordon Brown: Sue’s, I think. Just ridiculous.

Unknown male: They’re . . . pictures. Not sure if they’ll go with that one.

Gordon Brown: They will go with it.

Unknown male: What did she say?

Gordon Brown: Everything. She’s just this sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be a Labour voter . . . Ridiculous.

Duffy heard it all and was incredulous. “What was bigoted about what I said?” she asked, obviously upset. It is a question many of us have been increasingly asking ourselves over the course of this decade, on issues from immigration to transgenderism to racial and gender quotas.

We have therefore seen a rather peculiar revolution in British politics. The two main parties, which at the beginning of the decade both looked in very ill health, have survived by way of a sort of role reversal. Labour increasingly dominates London, and the Tories now increasingly command majorities in the North. These are unprecedented majorities in constituencies the Conservatives have not held for several decades—and in some cases never held before. It is not unlike in American politics, where Republicans took over the South and Democrats (albeit sometime later) took over the Northeast and many of the coastal states. I would not be surprised if in the 2020s we see some of the home counties begin to turn Labour or Liberal, and the North steadily turn more Conservative.

The political battlegrounds in British politics, ideological as well as geographical, are obviously changing. This decade has seen culture overtake economics as the issue of primary importance. Immigration, crime, sexual politics, climate change are much more prominent in public political discussion than debt or taxes or even welfare spending. What really seems to agitate people now is either a sense of cultural loss or an enthusiasm for cultural change. Corybn’s economic policies were indeed broadly popular, but they were not as important as Brexit and the cultural issues which surrounded that vote. It is also true that Corbyn, being whatever the opposite of a patriot is without quite being a traitor, hardly appealed to traditional voters who may sympathise with much of his left-wing economic politics, but cannot stomach a man who sides with those who wish the United Kingdom ill.

Yet Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, a liberal capitalist former mayor of multicultural London, is hardly an effective or believable spokesman for the Duffy worldview. On immigration, Johnson is advocating a points-based immigration system which could quite possibly increase the number of migrants to the UK (the number of migrants per head in Australia, which is usually touted as the model points-based system, is far higher than in the UK). Can our relatively gentle politics survive even more mass immigration? How much is too much? Our leaders are not even ready to countenance the idea of “too much” immigration.

Just as voters became disenchanted with Tony Blair, they will become disenchanted with Johnson. As far as I can tell, Johnson is a further continuation of the Blair years. His self-declared “People’s Government” is a pathetic impersonation of Blairism. Like Alistair Campbell under Blair, Johnson has his own poisonous special advisor in the gnarled form of Dominic Cummings. And so I very much doubt a Johnsonite government will discontinue the Blairite policy of mass immigration.

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Matthew Wardour is an English musician and occasional writer. He blogs on culture, politics and other things which catch his fancy at smelfungus.blogspot.com

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