Guy Matthews
10 hrs
Seeing as Angela Smith has taken an absolute fucking kicking today, I'm going to stick the boot in some more because, well, fuck her.
When you analyse her resignation speech, what emerges is a thinly veiled disdain for the working class. She talks about aspiration, about poverty being perceived as a state of grace, as if the only way out of grinding poverty and manual labour is to send your kids to university so they can become MP's.
The problem with this, and indeed the problem with her entire mindset, is that she, as an upper-middle class economic elite, indelibly associates working class with poverty. It is, essentially, snobbery. "You're a bricky so you're a povvo, you should have been a lawyer." Or, "My dad was a printer and my mum was a receptionist, look how far I've come because of my aspiration and ambition."
The entire point of left-wing politics is to emancipate the working class from poverty. She doesn't understand that. She thinks the "left-wing intellectuals" she sneers at want working-class people to remain poor.
No.
We want the working class who are happy to be working class, to be fairly recompensed for their labour so that they are not entrapped by poverty. Take me for example. I'm a chef. I fucking love my job. What I don't love, is being exploited and being unfairly paid for my labour so that my passion for my trade leads to me struggling to pay the bills. (Although I should note that my current employers are some of the best I've ever had, and they're as working class as me. I've worked for some absolute cunts though over the years, all of them middle-class or aspiring to be so.)
Why should I have to aspire to become middle-class, when being working class would be perfectly suited to me, if I wasn't being exploited? And what would the middle-classes do if their fucking bins weren't being emptied by the working class? Choke on their fucking prosecco as the stench of rotten hummus filled their kitchen most like. That is why left-wing politics lionises the working class; because we're the cogs in the machine without whom the country would grind to a halt, and we demand to be fairly recompensed for the services we provide.
Do you know who talks about "aspiration" like it's some golden virtue? Margaret bastard Thatcher and all her little acolytes from both sides of the house who have poisoned our society for forty years.
I'm glad you've resigned from the Labour Party Angela Smith.
Because you are exactly what was wrong with it.
