The road to Hartlepool pier

The bourgeoisification of Labour isn’t new. It was catalogued in Orwell’s scabrously entertaining dissection of socialism, The Road to Wigan Pier

AS SO OFTEN, THE BEST (AND OF COURSE THE FUNNIEST) analysis of the runaway Tory victory in the Hartlepool by-election came from Rod Liddle.

Its theme was that the Labour party has become a vile antithesis, as the party set up to represent working people has abandoned any connection with the working class. The Labour party’s membership is middle class (“the well-orf, the comfortable, the impeccably right-on”); its policies are middle class, with “their obsession with race and interminable gender complexities”; while its leaders old (Corbyn) and new (Starmer) are, in a characteristic Rod-ism, merely the “two cheeks of the same liberal ass”—with liberalism being of course the quintessential middle-class creed.

But worst of all is that