As the dust settles on a bitterly-fought general election, British socialism’s corpse is barely even twitching now, its death rattle long since extinguished.
As a journalist who’s covered this campaign from the start on TV, radio and in print, I started out a Labour voter (I’ve previously voted Labour all my life)… and ended it anything but.
And while my defection was first started by Milliband’s business-bashing champagne socialism, it was spurred on by Labour voters themselves.
Sensing my Labour wobble, I was courted by hopeful UKIP voters who, despite their disgraceful portrayal in the left-wing press, I found to be almost universally polite and passionate.
Greens, while often bonkers, were also polite and optimistic for an extra vote. Tory voters were of course largely conspicuous by their absence on Twitter away from their established media commentators.
And Labour? On social media, it’s my conclusion that they have become the party of the modern-day Social Justice Warrior. And that is a truly terrible and toxic place to be.
During the election, I routinely watched Labour voters like wasps in a jam jar. Daily, they’d swarm towards aggressive Left-leaning and brazenly anti-Tory hashtags that brought out the worst in these lefties, who became drunk on hate.
The list was endless, with the omnipresent #CameronMustGo buttressed by #ToriesOutNow #millibandmustwin and the frankly preposterous final-furlong, sandwich-eating parody #JeSuisEd.
Potty mouthed
Believe me, there’s nobody more potty-mouthed than a scorned socialist. They were the polar opposite of ‘shy Tories’ – and probably the main reason so many Tories were shy. After all, who wants an aggressive, expletive-riddled, patronising lecture in privilege from a 22-year-old feminist gender studies student simply for questioning proven Muslim corruption in Tower Hamlets?
In the old days, it was the Right who told us how to think. The British Conservatives (with a big C) were morally conservative (with a small c). Today, it is Labour and their voters who, from their high perch, dish out morally superior life advice to the rest of us.
Labour’s zero-aspiration mindset seemed more interested in gender quotas, championing feminism and trying their best to not offend the LBGT and Muslim communities. But by pandering to the margins they have fatally ignored the mainstream; the quiet majority who work hard and pay their taxes.
In the strange world of the internet – and now in Labour’s mindset – whites, heterosexuals and men are bottom of the privilege pyramid. They don’t matter. Worse, if they dare to step out of line, they’re labelled racist, sexist, misogynistic, Islamophobic… whatever will shut them up.
Bullying
During this election, I was subjected to daily personal attacks on social media and when I went into these people’s timelines, to a man and woman they were Labour. And every time, it made it that little bit easier to abandon the Labour ship.
Not that it bothered me – after 20 years in journalism I’m ugly enough to not care about Twitter spats, and when you’ve had a hate letter posted to your home address from Britain’s hardest inmate Charles Bronson, a militant feminist droning on Twitter is what it is: a low-level irritant with no more force then a dripping tap.
For at least a year – long before it was accepted that Labour were losing entire communities to UKIP – I questioned, then later attacked, Labour’s abandonment of the working classes.
In the months leading up the the election, I was extremely open about my politics on Sky News, LBC Radio, in the Telegraph and here on Breitbart, where I finally I denounced Labour as a party I no longer recognised.
For this I was called “a Tory bottom feeder” a “Murdoch glove puppet”, and, of course, a “class traitor” and “a sell-out”. Finally, one enraged Tweeter told me to “f**k off”.
So, along with millions of others, I did.
Ungracious
If the left-leaning press ever hope to pander beyond the shrinking shores of Guardiansville, much like the Labour party itself, they need either a wholesale rethink of approach or a root and branch personnel clear-out.
Yet, somehow, even worse than Labour’s media commentators were some Labour voters themselves.
The ghoulish pall-bearers for Soviet economics and far-left social ideology – a minted metropolitan media elite and Labour’s most outspoken voters, a rag-tag bunch of furious Social Justice Warriors, feminists, bilious public servants and snide students – are still glumly death-dancing over the grave, making mischief on the streets of London, and wreaking disrespectful havoc on social media.
Never in the history of British politics has defeat been so ungraciously met. Labour’s media commentators have been struck down with the worst case of political delusion since “Comical Ali” was laughed out of Iraq in 2003, when Suddam Hussein’s Iraqi Information Minister refused to accept his “invincible” Iraq Army was being eviscerated by the Allies despite irrefutable televisual and journalistic proof.
Like Comical Ali, the standard bearers of British socialism – highly-paid media commentators such as Owen Jones, Laurie Penny and Charlie Booker – are suffering from a case of selective myopia, one that continues to consume them even after their war has been lost.
When the end was nigh, even Adolf Hitler had the good grace to pull the trigger, but Labour’s supporters live in a parallel dimension.
Delusional
It was magnificent, for example, to see Jones’s attempt at playing electoral Mystic Meg – “Russell Brand has endorsed Labour and the Tories should be worried,” he wrote – retweeted many thousands of times post-election. His end-of-the-pier fortune telling was even joyously printed onto celebratory mugs and T-shirts.
Penny’s bitterness at defeat led her first to take to her fainting couch with “depression” before she ill-advisedly threw her fedora in with the class war rabble who rioted outside Tory HQ the day after the party’s outright election victory had been declared.
When yobs daubed “FUCK TORY SCUM!” on the Women’s War Memorial in Whitehall on the 70th anniversary of VE Day, a Downing Street spokesman condemned the graffiti as “a despicable display of disrespect for those who fought and died for their country”.
Penny, however, insisted she had “no problem” with the desecration, adding: “The women of WW2 – including my nanna – fought for a better world. National healthcare, education. Everything the Tories want to destroy.”
For this high treason, she was quickly added to the Daily Mail’s Most Hated list, an accolade Penny and her fans will no doubt draw comfort from. Being a target of the Right adds to her allure on the Left.
Worse, when the exit poll was announced, Charlie Brooker – The Guardian’s resident Jack Dee – said voting Tory was “like masturbating or listening to Gary Barlow.”
His previous, wholesale dismissal of the Tories had come back to haunt him: “The Conservative party is an eternally irritating force for wrong that appeals exclusively to bigots, toffs, money-minded machine men, faded entertainers and selfish, grasping simpletons who were born with some essential part of their soul missing.”
At a stroke, this minted metropolitan socialist contemptuously dismissed 36.9 per cent of British voters, not to mention Winston Churchill, our greatest ever leader and the man who masterminded Penny’s “nanna” to victory against the Nazis.
These sneering boobies are the UK’s Animal Farm socialists: luvvies who’ve grown fat on lucrative book, journalism and TV deals, buttressed with public speaking appearance fees; corpulent Lefties who inexplicably feel they have the right to lecture the rest of us on privilege.
Their brazen contempt of the British electorate and, in particular, Penny’s disrespect for our war dead will be long remembered.
Liability
When the Social Justice Warrior collides with Labour we get the Socialist Justice Warriors: oiks who are encumbered with a rampant, intellectual fascism that grants them the right, hourly, to hunt down and harass anybody who disagrees with them.
Sweet revenge came when 11,334,520 crosses were placed in Tory boxes on May 7th. That’s not forgetting 3,881,129 UKIP voters, who’d been dismissed by the Left as racist, homophobic Neanderthals mainly for wanting tougher immigration controls on what they see as an open-door policy – a policy that was introduced by Labour.
The Labour party that once represented coal miners like my father is now the party of the Socialist Justice Warrior.
So we find ourselves in a bizarre position where modern Labour voters are now the single biggest reason to not vote Labour. How the hell did that happen? And what on Earth are Labour going to do about it?