There is a particular species of Englishman and Englishwoman, spotted in the market towns of the Home Counties, the stucco-fronted terraces of Notting Hill and the smarter quarters of provincial cities. He drives an Audi estate; she wears yoga leggings and clutches a reusable water bottle emblazoned with self-improvement slogans. Their children attend schools where the greatest concern is why Inigo lost the lead in Oliver! to Bertie. Weekends revolve around sourdough, Pilates, and the odd ski trip to Val d’Isère. They are comfortable. And comfort, the middle classes have discovered, is more potent a narcotic than any opium once imported from the East.
Call me a snob, but I belong to this class – one that has attained just enough comfort to fear losing it and therefore refuses to think beyond the next bonus or Ofsted report. The very rich can afford ideology; their portfolios are diversified; their walls are gated. The aristocracy still plants oaks in their Capability Brown parks that will take centuries to mature. The working class, for whom comfort is a rumour, has nothing to lose and therefore everything to gain from taking the long view. Only the bourgeois mass is trapped in the present tense. They’re not ideological; they’re terrified.
Ten years ago, the Brexit referendum laid it bare for us. The “AB” social grades – professionals, managers and the university-educated – voted Remain by a clear margin. The “C2Des” (skilled and unskilled workers) voted Leave. The upper echelons were more evenly split, many quietly Eurosceptic. It was the middle that clung to the status quo, terrified that upheaval might cause house prices to wobble or spoil the essential supply of Prosecco. Comfort made cowards of them then, and is doing so again now.
A decade on, we see this pattern repeating itself. Polling ahead of the May local elections shows the middle drifting towards the Liberal Democrats and Greens – parties offering the politics of comfortable virtue-signalling: net zero, diversity workshops and wind turbines that will ruin someone else’s view. Restore Britain draws the working class and pockets of the old orders who still remember what a nation state is for. The middle, once again, chooses the safe, the soft and the approved.
They refuse to notice that the country is changing faster than their children’s GCSE syllabus. They hide away from the reality of the grooming-gang [rape gang] scandals in Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford, where authorities, too, averted their eyes for fear of “racism.” They pretend not to see the parallel societies in Birmingham, Bradford and Tower Hamlets, where the call to prayer drowns out the ancient toll of the church bells, and certain streets become no-go zones for women in Western dress. They call mass immigration “enriching” whilst quietly relocating when their local primary school shifts from 80% white British to 20% in a single decade.
This is not ignorance; it is wilful blindness born of fear. To speak plainly about demographic changes – native birth rates below replacement, higher Muslim fertility rates, polls showing significant minorities of British Muslims favouring sharia, apostasy laws and views on homosexuality that would have horrified their grandparents – risks the one thing they dread the most: social disapproval. Better another holiday, another enrichment class and the hope that the problem solves itself. It will not.
