Mick Hartley

Janice Turner in the Times:

On a hike in Ecuador, I chatted with a couple of New York Democrats. Humane, politically engaged professionals, they’d been blindsided by Trump’s re-election and I asked how they explained it. “The problem,” said one of them earnestly, “is half of America is just incredibly stupid.”

He encapsulated the progressive view of “populism”. Those who vote for it must be deluded bigots, radicalised by Elon’s X, seduced by racist demagogues, too thick to know what’s good for them. After Reform’s triumph in last week’s council elections, many will be aghast that stupidity is running at 29 per cent in the polls and extends beyond known stupid areas such as Hull or Doncaster (my home town) into nice places like Worcestershire, hitherto seen as quite bright.

Asked by the pollsters More in Common to tick a reason why voters had turned to Reform, 38 per cent said they couldn’t understand it at all. Almost half of Labour voters and 62 per cent of Lib Dems were mystified.

The only explanation they can come up with is: these people are thick as shit.

Reform is surging because the lanyard class refuses to listen to voters when the reality they describe conflicts with its liberal shibboleths. Voters are told crime is down, but they know shoplifting or vandalism goes unreported because police never act. They see the effects of unprecedented mass migration in rapid change to their high streets and NHS surgeries. With up to 1,000 small boat arrivals a week being dispersed, many more communities have a local hotel turned over to bored, undocumented, non-English-speaking young men.

When voters learn that hotel accommodation will cost three times what was predicted, while pensioners’ winter fuel allowance is cut, or that Labour plans to scoop up swathes of rented housing for migrants on five-year contracts when their kids can’t find a home, of course they’re angry. The idea the government will deport those without good English is laughable when convicted foreign criminals are allowed to stay. They did not vote for this, they can’t even speak of it. (They risk being accused of “dog whistling” by Lucy Powell.)

Like a national HR department, the government cares only about “compliance”. So people are turning to a party, as makeshift as a flat-pack bookshelf, simply because it doesn’t shut them down. It is not Reform voters who are stupid.

There's a social media trend – I see it on Facebook – for showing posts from Trump supporters: from before the election, with "Hey, I'm for Trump and sticking it to those liberals", followed by the more recent "Hey, what's going on? My business has been ruined." The lesson? These are really really stupid people who deserve what they're getting. Ha, ha, ha! So, no lessons need to be learnt by us: we're the smart ones who were right all along.

Yes, sure, Trump was never the answer. But sticking it to the liberals? Well….these were the liberals who were saying people could just change sex on demand, who were in thrall to trans ideology, who were overseeing the trashing of American higher education and just about every facet of American life with DEI and Black Lives Matter and diversity hiring and all the rest. But just as Labour aren't listening, so the Democrats and liberal America aren't listening. "Hey, we were right all along". But the people know better.