We know where you live: chattering classes outed by AV

Friday June 3, 2011

The AV referendum results exposed the chattering classes and their intolerant values once and for all, says Simon Hills

The most revealing by-product of the alternative vote referendum this month was the locations of the councils where electors gave the proposed new system a resounding ‘yes’.

Predictably, the good people of Hackney, Haringey, Islington, Lambeth, Camden and Southwark in London; Oxford and Cambridge, Glasgow Kelvin and Edinburgh Central – all inner-city areas with lots of progressive posh people living in chichi Victorian houses – gave their support for a more complicated route to democracy.

Why predictably? Well, it confirmed our suspicions of the existence of that vocal and influential minority group, the Chattering Classes. Lambeth, Camden, Oxford. Ha! Gotcha!

They are caught red-handed because these are Labour areas, yet the voting was so at odds with Labour strongholds with a traditional working class vote. The working classes were patently against something that appeared so convoluted and complicated; something that smacked so of Machiavellian self-interest. So, indeed, were the majority of middle classes. Ergo, a special group of electors must reside in these boroughs.

So we just knew the people who were at work here. A political class for whom we could invent a colour: a new election map could now read red for Labour, blue for Conservative, yellow for Liberal Democrat and ooh, let’s say pink for politically correct or, in rather more outdated argot, pinko.

We just know that this class would be pro AV. In the same way that we know that it is pro-Palestine, pro-abortion rights, pro-alternative energy, pro-positive discrimination, pro-gay rights, pro-immigration. By the same token we know that the chattering classes are anti-fast food, anti-big business (with the exception of the Apple corporation), anti-car, anti-smoking, anti-television, anti-selective education. Anti working class, in other words.

Have you noticed how things the working classes like – smoking, lager, watching television, fast food – are terribly bad for you? The things the chattering classes like – red wine, olive oil, polenta, theatre – on the other hand have manifold benefits. Similarly driving the kids to school and not insulating your house will lead us to environmental ruin, while flying out three times a year to the second home in Tuscany will have no effect on the planet at all.

The paradox is that for all their posh education, the chattering classes are too blinkered to see that despite their massive political influence, the people they purport to represent, the poor and the dispossessed, couldn’t give a toss about organic food and namby-pamby alternative theatre projects.

As Tony Parsons observed, the working classes don’t want to be middle class, they want to be rich.

The chattering classes ponce around less well-off districts (or they were before they arrived), well, chattering, about how they’ve improved with their multi-cultural environments, smoke-free pubs serving up cod on a bed of pui-lentils and forests of street furniture and pedestrianised areas.

What they simply can’t understand is that the poor shouldn’t want to take part in this social nirvana.

When the poor do come into the money, it sends the chattering classes into paroxysms of disgust. There is nothing more offensive than Jordan lookalikes tripping out of ice-white 4X4s for a relaxing morning at a nail bar before noisily taking their friends to a chintzy riverside restaurant. They shudder at gated mansions and footballers blathering down mobile phones to their agents as they order a bit of schmutter from an overpriced boutique.

No. The chattering classes want the working classes to be authentic. Friendly locals running organic butchers or a little industry making, say, wood-burning-stoves. They’re very fond of working classes bringing their earthy grit to alternative theatres, too, and positively swoon over having a black or Asian person join them for drinks in the garden of the gastro pub.

They like otherness, in other words, so long as the others have bought in to their vision of how the world should be. And how do you know whether you belong to it? Have a read of this Guardian puff of yore: ‘The River Café Guide to the Top 10 Olive Oils’. If that doesn’t make you want to rush out and buy the paper, you’re probably not one of them.

Simon Hills is associate editor of The Times Magazine and author of Strictly No! How We’re Being Overrun by the Nanny State