Whenever a left-wing politician wants to besmirch working-class populists or middle-class types who hold conservative opinions, they inevitably choose one of two tactics. Either they smear them as ‘far-right’ or they accuse them of being hopeless nostalgics who long for a mythical past.
On Monday, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, the Labour MP for Suffolk Coastal, went one better by combining the two ploys in a single sentence. Speaking at a fringe event at the Labour conference in Liverpool, she voiced her concern at what kind of vision the parties of the right would peddle in the next general election.
This kind of hysterical, 24-hour obsessiveness is something we have come to expect from emotive, millennial leftists
‘It’ll be a vision, a nostalgic vision of Britain, that never really existed,’ she said. ‘It’ll be that warm ale, a black Labrador by your feet in a pub that doesn’t exist, and with symbolism of fox hunting all around them, it’ll be a very far-right nostalgic vision of Britain that we don’t want to have, [and] never really existed.’ The prospect of such a very far-right narrative paying dividends is so terrifying, she added, that it now caused her sleepless nights. ‘This is one of the things I do stay awake at night about, and think about, and fear.’
While most people might forgive such an absurd, alarmist and counter-factual statement had it been mouthed by a usual Labour suspect from an inner-city constituency – by a metropolitan ignoramus who pretends not to know that warm ale and dogs can still be found in pubs all over Britain, frequented by normal people – it’s not what one expects from an MP from rural East Anglia. And especially from one who is the Defra minister with responsibility for rural communities.
It would be nice to think that she was ironically paraphrasing or knowingly alluding to the sentiments made by Suffolk’s most famous adopted son, George Orwell, who in his 1941 essay ‘England Your England’, made a sincere paean to his country, the one of ‘old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings.’
But Labour MPs today aren’t the brightest, well-read or most worldly lot. And Riddell-Carpenter is very much of her kind, and of her generation. This kind of hysterical, 24-hour obsessiveness is something we have come to expect from emotive, millennial leftists. Her nocturnal torments bring to mind the recent revelation by Paloma Faith, also born in the 1980s, that she tucked up her children in bed at night with the words ‘Free Palestine’.
While Riddell-Carpenter grew up in rural Suffolk, it’s more significant that she went to Soas in London, where she studied History and Politics, followed by a master’s in Islamic history. Whereas it’s unlikely that she would have read anything by Orwell at Soas, a crucible of anti-Western theorising, it’s certain that she would have been instructed there in the teachings of Edward Said, the figure whose writings have taught generations that their country’s past is immersed in racism, and that most of what they know about their nation’s history is confected.
She undoubtedly would have also encountered the idea that nations consist of ‘imagined communities’ – the title of a hugely influential 1983 book by Benedict Anderson – or that most of this country’s traditions and customs were ‘invented’. A book by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, called The Invention of Tradition, also published that year, was an open assault on the concept of the nation state edited by one avowedly Marxist historian and another with an anti-imperialist agenda. It, too, had a lasting impact, dovetailing neatly with the incipient postmodern spirit of the time, one which likewise sought to deconstruct and dismantle truths.
While many will now be familiar with the influence postmodernism theory had in giving birth to wokery, less well appreciated is how academia’s lurch to the left at the end of the last century left its imprint on mainstream politics today. It was the intention Hobsbawm and his ilk to undermine the west, to tell its citizens that their past ‘never really existed’. That’s why you hear those sentiments repeated by the likes of the MP for Suffolk Coastal today. It’s also why it’s now fashionable to say that the English people, as an ethnic category, has never existed.
Riddell-Carpenter was wrong not just for the manifest untruths contained in her address. The Britain most people yearn for today is not a Tolkienesque one concealed in the mists of time. It’s not even a Victorian Age, or the 1950s. They mostly miss the stable, settled, liberal country they remember from 30 years ago, before mass immigration and left-wing fanaticism created such disruption and damage. She may have nightmares about a certain, wistful vision coming true, but many of us still have dreams about it coming back.
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