Posh lefties are back from Tuscany - and talking bollocks!

You wait ages for an eminent member of the left-liberal chatterati to say something particularly stupid, then three of them turn up at once! I expect it’s because they’re all just back from Tuscany, where they’ve no doubt all been worrying themselves sick about all the decent, law-abiding Britons adversely affected by the stupid, feckless, criminal rioters who so recently decided to prove what most of us already knew – that liberal social and economic policies invariably lead to disaster.

Anyway, it’s great to have the likes of Vanessa Redgrave, Polly Toynbee and Will Hutton back so I can vent some spleen against brainy privileged socialists who hate ordinary people.

First off, Ms Redgrave, who’s been keenly championing the cause of the Dale Farm Irish “travellers”. The lanky thespian’s comments offer rich pickings for those seeking examples of the Left’s willingness to misrepresent reality in pursuit of an unjust cause: "It's a day on which I have great hope that this strong, wise, warm and gentle community will have their rights protected and will not have their rights disintegrated."

I take it she’s referring to the following passage in Magna Carta: “Ye rights of ye fcurvy lawless anti-focial knaves hailing from foreign fhores to break ye law and make intolerable ye lyves of ye honest taxpaying fubjects of this countrye who voteth for ye Torye Baftards anyway and descend not from an famous acting dynafty and readeth not Ye Guardian fhall in no manner be difintegrated, no matter how much mifery they cause.”

I’ll admit that when, a few years back, the parents of some traveller children (whose UN charter rights Mss R is also keen to protect) took to beating up teachers at our local state primary school, the adjectives that sprang to mind did not include “gentle”, “warm” or “wise”.

Polly Toynbee next (inevitably). According to the Total Politics Blog, she told an audience at the Edinburgh Festival yesterday that “left-wing people are more intelligent, and just generally better people” than right-wingers. To be fair, the journalist reporting the event described her as saying this “with a slightly mischievous look on her face”. But our Pol doesn’t really do irony: I think she was simply giving voice to what most middle and (in her case) upper-middle class lefties actually believe - in order for those of us on the Right to hold the opinions we do, we must be either mad or stupid or both. 

On the question of intelligence – who knows? The majority of those involved in the  “book larnin’” professions - lecturers, teachers and the like – are undoubtedly left-wing. So are the majority of those involved in broadcasting, publishing and the press, and those “experts” in Quangoland who continue to bleed the public purse dry despite Dave Cameron promising he was going to set fire to them all. 

I suspect, the leftiness of intellectuals (I use the term very loosely) is partly due to frustration at the refusal of most ordinary people – who are overwhelmingly small “c” conservatives – to accept their pronouncements as Holy Writ. Intellectuals create endless victim-groups to champion so that someone will take them seriously and show some gratitude for a change. As in the case of Ms Redgrave’s travellers, brainy left-liberals prefer undeserving victim groups whom ordinary people despise: this is the academically-inclined lefty’s way of punishing the rest of us for not respecting them.

When you equate intelligence with competence or common-sense or the ability to make things work or to predict the future, the left doesn’t fare so well: there is no country so happy, nor an economy so successful that the left couldn’t destroy it within a couple of years. They don’t understand people (actually, they don’t really like people), so they don’t understand how markets work, so they can’t run economies. Because they have such regard for their own intelligence, they’re convinced that the best way of running anything is for highly educated “experts” to devise plans – which always fail, because the experts don’t understand people or markets. 

I’ll leave Ms Toynbee’s point about the moral superiority of the Left for another day and turn to her platform partner at Edinburgh, Will Hutton, who was banging on about fairness. Now, Hutton is a former BBC economics correspondent, so he is utterly ignorant about how successful economies work, but, like many lefties, is quite obsessed with money. His basic point appears to have been that we must all share in each other’s “brute good luck” and “brute bad luck”. One example he gives of this in practice is inheritance tax – we should all share in the “brute good luck” of someone born to wealthy parents.

My wife and I won’t have much to leave, but I don’t see why we shouldn’t be allowed to leave every single penny we possess to our son, and I don’t see why any of our rich friends should be expected to supplement his inheritance: we worked for that money and they worked for theirs. The thought that a single penny of it might end up in the hands of the offspring of, say, parasitic, tax-dodging travellers is disgusting. And if the left were to argue that not paying Danegeld to the children of law-breaking foreigners will result in perpetuating the cycle of anti-social criminality, I would argue that the cycle could more effectively be broken by locking them up when they commit crimes, or by forcefully inviting them to return to their country of origin. Besides, given that the little bastards have grown up in a “strong, wise, warm and gentle community” I reckon they’ve had all the brute good luck they need to see them on their way.

The desire to do the best we can for our children is the most natural and healthy of human urges, and the greatest motivating factor in the development of decent societies – just look at what happens whenever that desire is thwarted.

But, then, you’d have to be a brighter and better person than me not to be able to grasp that.