The Left and the politics of anger

To a Tory crank like me, left-wing politics is a confusing business. Most of my friends and acquaintances, thoroughly decent people indeed, hold left-wing views, but much as I’ve tried, asking questions and carefully listening to the replies, I just don’t get it.
You see, left-wing politics is the politics of anger. It is the politics of ideology over pragmatism, and that, to me, means angrily bundling up every apparent injustice in to some grand metanarrative, or to put it in less ponsy terminology, in to one big story of victimhood and grievance.

The consequence is ineffectually raging madly about everything. This was in evidence during the 2010 student fees protests. Whilst I had some sympathy with the cause in that particular case, it was frankly astonishing how Marx-inspired groups turned a protest about student tuition fees in to a solidarity march with all the oppressed, including the people of Egypt as the revolution was well under way.

What nut thought it was a good idea to equate a nation’s struggle for democracy and freedom, with their desire for free stuff? Did it not allow people like me, who might otherwise have listened to their view on fees, instead to just laugh dismissively at this hideous carnival of scrambled, incoherent, jumbled nonsense?

We saw it again last weekend, as the great and the good of Showbiz mingled with the lefty lunatics in an extravagant, festival-type protest that was so at odds with the apparently dire misery to come after Tory cuts bite.

Multi-millionaires Charlotte Church and Russell Brand showed up, the latest celebrity darlings of a cause that will never touch their own lives.

“Austerity,” Charlotte grandly told us, “is unethical.”

Charlotte, my dear, some might say condemning generations of the future by frivolously spending that which we don’t have ain’t all that ethical either. Don’t believe me? Ask the Greeks; behind the Grexit question is a story of dreadful poverty, rocketing unemployment and third world care needing to be provided for desperate citizens of this once proud nation.

But even if Miss Church did indeed turn up with the noblest of intentions, it must have escaped her that there was no clear message behind this protest at all. In fact, a thousand different messages were there.

IT was, quite simply, a mad march of the angry mob. Banners were waved demanding an end to fracking. Others read “Save our NHS!” Perhaps the most truthful of all of them simply read “We’re mad as hell!”

This, I’m afraid, is the great failure of left-wing politics. IT seeks a simple explanation for all of society’s problems, and the latest is austerity. If anyone can tell me when spending only that which you’ve actually got became ‘austerity,’ I’d be really grateful. The need for financial restraint, and its advocates in government, become the bad guys on to which we can pin every indignity, every outrage, and every injustice.

The reason these people keep marching is because they are utterly incapable of working out a decent solution to each problem, in acknowledgement of the fact that there is a complex set of causes for each. That is probably because their arguments are also intellectually stunted by an inability to see that, if you change a system, you might also change the way people behave.

We are told that cutting benefits condemns people to ‘poverty,’ another term that is hideously abused in Britain today. All manner of statistics will be wheeled out by the Guardian-reading folk to justify this view. Could it not be, though, that there are some people who are more likely to seek work if benefits don’t either afford them a sufficiently comfortable lifestyle, or actively create a disincentive to get a job? Dare one say it, but might people actually have fewer children if they don’t get rewarded with a tax credit for it? Listen, we don’t need to encourage people to have kids: quite the reverse. Certainly not to have them if one parent working and the other staying at home or working and paying childcare isn’t enough without a generous government handout.

You may disagree, but my point is simply that so blinded are these people by the belief that all affairs are shaped and determined by the actions of the state, that they can’t see individuals’ capacity to change, or the role of unhealthy dependency cultures in keeping our welfare bill stubbornly high. And what any of this has got to do with fracking and the NHS, I have absolutely no idea.

I can only say that, notwithstanding a brief flirtation with the hard left as a teenager, I’ve always been a conservative and will be to my dying day. It is immensely liberating.

I am not so embittered by the politics of anger, that every injustice is a manifestation of a polemical struggle between the politics of good and evil.

The human condition isn’t determined by the state, but there is such a thing as society and the power of individuals to shape their own circumstances.

I can get angry about one thing, without getting angry at everything else. I can think things through, problem by problem, without being bogged down by whether it’s public (good) or private (bad), or whether it’s big state (good) or little state (bad). Such nonsensical black and white divisions destroy the left’s ability to offer a coherent analysis, and indeed an analysis which they can acknowledge might be imperfect.

It is this final flaw – the failure to see the merits of any other argument, that makes the political left quite so objectionable. They are always right, we are wrong.

Its most ugly manifestation is the monopolisation of compassion. How dare the selfish, compassionless, heartless souls of Middle England vote Tory! How dare you try to make cuts to keep us on budget: you obviously don’t give a stuff about the disabled, impoverished, young, unemployed, or just about anyone else who is vulnerable in our society.

Last week I annoyed some lefties when I had a Twitter exchange with Owen Jones in which I complained about how his article on the inevitability of the rich doing well and the working classes being squeezed out, was unhelpful. I argued that a successful working class kid like Jones, who had a good career and the trappings of an Oxbridge education, should use his success to inspire others, not tell them, from his lofty perch, that the door is slammed in their face.

Yet every reply portrayed me as uncaring and indifferent.

Jones patronisingly replied to me: “Eh? I just don’t like people not being able to realise their potential because of their background. Do you?”

No Owen, of course not. I’ve dared to disagree, so clearly I want them to fail and amount to nothing.

It is this arrogantly dismissive attitude that makes open-minded people like me so fed up of the left that, when they march through London banging a drum and shouting every manner of chant, I not only choose not to give the political content of their ideas any thought, but I actually can’t stand them.

Left-wingers, obviously not among my decent friends, have called me all manner of things. Among the highlights are homophobic, sexist, bigoted, unable to “see beyond your own hideous privilege” and even some-one not deserving of human rights. I now just need to be called a racist and I’ve got the full set.

I just wish the decent left-wingers, rather than supporting these ridiculous marches and dismissing their worst excesses as ‘civil disobedience,’ would speak out against this form of campaigning and the aggressive bullying that people like me have experienced at the hands of sanctimonious socialists, so that these people can be as marginal a part of the political left as the English Defence League is of the political right.

Then, lefties will have a real voice. Their perspective, in defence of the vulnerable, will be a powerful voice, and one we will have to listen to in the tricky business of compromising as we go about the difficult task of balancing fairness with fiscal responsibility.