WHAT would Malcolm Tucker have made of it? Front page on the Daily Telegraph – the red hair, the recalcitrant but impervious face and slender fingers holding an extra long fag, poised for a long, thoughtful drag.
Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner did what her party has been a bit short of recently – bagging the front page headlines for calling senior Tories “a bunch of scum”. Tucker would be loving it. Rayner’s fellow shadow cabinet members, maybe not so much.
After a bonkers week which started with a gas crisis, progressed to a cost of living crisis and then peaked spectacularly with a petrol shortage and wild talk of a winter of discontent – you could argue this sort of language was the perfect rallying call for those feeling angry and frustrated with the UK government.
At the Labour party conference activists’ meeting, Angela Rayner was amongst friends, but the social media savvy MP must have known her comments would be all over Twitter by the time she popped outside for that post-fringe meeting ciggie.
She had form – just last year the very school-marmish Speaker Dame Eleanor Laing had made her apologise for the use of the same word in a Commons debate. But this time, despite Sir Keir Starmer – a bit like a firm but fair head of year – saying he would speak to her about it, she was sticking to her guns insisting that Boris Johnson apologise for “racist, homophobic and sexist” comments he had made in the past. But, as Rayner metaphorically flicked her ash, waiting for a louder rebuke from the heidie, there was nothing.
The reality is that Keir Starmer knows that there is a place in the Labour party for politicians like Rayner. Someone who has lived ‘a life’ far away from the metropolitan bubble, who speaks, as she says herself, the way ordinary people do and who has had to wrestle with a plethora of real-life issues in her job as a care worker and who became a granny at 37.
Just as he sees the value in having the cool, calm, carefully-considered Anas Sarwar leading the Scottish Labour party, Starmer recognises that there are votes in diversity.
It’s an approach that seems to be popular at the moment with even the Conservative party – until quite recently a bastion of white, generally male senior leaders – using it to produce one of the most diverse-looking, if not thinking, cabinets we have seen.
Despite all this, I find Rayner’s defence of her use of the word “scum’ to be on shakier ground.
She says that: “It’s a phrase that you would hear very often in northern working class towns that we’d even say it jovially to other people.”
Really? Whenever I’ve seen the word ‘scum’ – whether in Glasgow or Barnsley – it’s usually been daubed on a wall or said in anger sometimes with an ethnic or religious slur just in front of it.
I’ve grown up hating the word and finding it hugely offensive regardless of the ‘variety’ of scum we are talking about. Both my kids are passionate about politics and have been from a young age, and I’d be disappointed if they used it in political discourse.
Whilst I admire Angela Rayner’s passion, the language is not what I’d be hoping they would model. ‘Scum’ is not a word I would imagine you’d hear the outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel using or indeed Barack Obama. It’s associations with impurity and dirt should fill us all with concern. It’s a blunt tool, used by those with little political imagination and has been used successfully to besmirch groups across the decades.
Call me a complete sap but I’m still waiting for the Be Kind version of politics where debate, discussion and a bit of mutual respect wins the day. Remember when Michelle Obama said: “When they go low, we go high”?
She said: “Going low is easy and it’s also the short term thing.”
It is ironic that Jeremy Corbyn has rallied to her defence – saying that she “said what needed to be said” – when in his keynote speech to conference in 2015 he appealed for a kinder politics, where we should “treat people with respect, treat people as you’d like to be treated yourself”.
In six short years he’s changed his tune a bit. Maybe that’s what happens when you’ve been out of government for 11 years. But it does smack of desperation.
Is this really the way to woo back red wall voters who voted Conservative at the last election? By speaking “their language”?
That stands on two presuppositions – that it is their language – which clearly it isn’t for everyone, and that they might be a bit irked that they are being tarred with the same brush as the government they voted for in their droves, at least in England.
I quite like Angela Rayner – the intelligent insolence, the knapsack instead of designer handbag, the raw authenticity. But, whereas diversity might get Labour votes in the next election, alienating a large section of potential voters by using divisive language is never going to be a winning tactic.
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