Scum on feel the noise: Of course, the media are pretending Rayner's words are worse than Johnson's actions...
In the professional wrestling game of British politics and political journalism, trash talk trumps trash behaviour.
One of the ironclad rules of British public discourse is that calling someone a racist provokes more outrage than someone actually being racist. That made it inevitable that Angela Rayner’s “scum”1 comments at the Labour Party Conference would lead to a storm of bad faith readings from the British political press; their ‘be kind’ campaigns always being about tone over substance.
Rayner, speaking to Labour members at a late-night event, said:
We cannot get any worse than a bunch of scum, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, absolute pile of banana republic… vile, nasty, Etonian…
piece of scum.
In 2019, after Tory MP, Christopher Clarkson — imagine Penfold from Danger Mouse if he’d been raised by Norman Tebbit — accused Labour of exploiting the pandemic for political gain, Rayner was heard calling him “scum”, upbraided by the Deputy Speaker and apologised. This time she’s got no intention of saying sorry, despite Keir Starmer — putting on his best head prefect voice — saying he intends to “speak with her”. It’s Scum Comments 2: It’s Still True Boogaloo.
For The Spectator, Old Etonian and Magdalen College, Oxford alumni Sam Leith asks, “Is anti-Etonian prejudice really OK?”, provoking an immediate run on the UK’s already stretched supply of microscopic violins. The only reasonable answer is that there’s not nearly enough anti-Etonian prejudice, but since I’ve got a newsletter to write, let’s look a little more at Leith’s argument. He writes:
To be an Etonian, on the other hand, is a condition you acquire ineradicably, in the innocence of childhood. It is an accident of birth (or a bit before, usually, which is when you’re put down on the General List). You no more choose to be Etonian than you choose to be black, or gay, or a cervix-haver. So snarling at Etonians like that… it’s, like, racist, yeah?
Snarling at Etonians like that… it’s, like, racist, yeah?
And saying – as is, of course, a fair point – that Boris Johnson and David Cameron have not proved very good ambassadors for the old place doesn’t make it any less so. Here you are in the territory of those who take Osama bin Laden as a representative example of Islam, or who make ‘anti-Zionism’ the cover for a not-so-subtle hatred of the Jewish people.
While Leith, I suspect, would argue his tongue is firmly in his cheek, it takes a superhuman amount of gall — several cauldrons of Getafix’s magic potion would normally be required to get the same effect — to beg victimhood for Etonians in The Spectator, the house journal of skull size-measurers, smart-casual racists, and Rod Liddle fans.
To compare snarling at Eton — the source of 20 Prime Ministers (5 of whom have held office since 1945) — to anti-black racism, antisemitism and homophobia is the kind of grim rhetorical trick that The Spectator specialises in. It’s also the sort of thing that it would howl for years about if, for instance, a left-wing writer drew a direct line from Tory jibes about “lefties” to the Holocaust.
As is so common for people who write for The Spectator but wish to maintain the pretence that they are ‘nice’, Leith makes a point of saying:
I write, incidentally, as someone whose politics is probably closer to Ms Rayner’s than the Prime Minister’s. I have spent 25-odd years working alongside writers and thinkers of the right – many of whose views I have thought wrong and some I have thought positively demented. But I don’t regard them individually as monsters (well, maybe the odd one) and I certainly don’t regard them collectively as scum. It would be bizarre to do so.
The notion that The Spectator plays host to “thinkers” is absurdly generous, but what’s worse is the endlessly repeated notion in the British media that you are required to pretend that vast ideological differences can be smoothed away by a veneer of politeness. So it is that we get Jess Phillips appearing beside Jacob Rees-Mogg to chuckle about their friendship, while simply ignoring his view that abortion should be illegal including in cases of rape, and The Guardian offers us the political parlour game of Dining across the Divide.
It’s professionally useful in the modern British media to have ‘principles’ that can dissolve quicker than the rain-soaked cake of McArthur Park. That’s presented as a strength — “Look! I’ve worked with bigots for decades and some of them bring in very good biscuits.” — rather than a moral black hole of such vast size that it could gobble down whole planets.
This ‘flexbility’ is practical, of course, because it allows for journalists to slip easily from The Daily Mail to The New Statesman without missing a beat. You just have to believe whatever the current editorial line is and if that changes tomorrow, don’t worry, institutional amnesia and tactical ignorance are there to cushion the whiplash of going from centre-right to right.
On any given day, you can find terms far more wounding and cruel wielded by the right through papers like The Sun (which is especially touching about the “scum” word for some reason), The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail and magazines like The Spectator than “scum”. God forbid that Rayner honestly describe her feelings about a party whose Prime Minister has sealed his long history of racism, sexism and homophobia in the amber of newspaper columns, non-fiction books and novels.
The pearl-clutching, skirt-gathering performative outrage over Rayner’s comments are part of a wider effort to mash politics down to a bland centrist mush. The argument is that Labour cannot get back into government unless it rolls over and fully submits to the argument that the Tories are better and that Labour should be a second Tory party, but simply one that smiles apologetically as it breaks your legs and waves a flag.
That kind of thinking is present in Ian Dunt’s column the i Paper, Stephen Bush’s analysis for The News Statesman, and this maddening tweet from the Financial Times’ Sebastian Payne:
The problem with Angela Rayner’s “scum” comment is not the rudeness (driven by passion, she’d argue) but what does it say about those who vote for scum? Or those who feel their values are now represented by scum? 48% of working class voters backed the Tories in 2019.
The answer is, of course, that only someone arguing in bad faith thinks that Rayner was talking about voters and similarly it’s bad faith to think that her comments would reach voters in that form if the media didn’t present them that way. The use of the word “rudeness” also speaks volumes.
The rage of today’s newspapers at Rayner — with front pages illustrated with pictures of her smoking a cigarette doing lots of nudging and winking — has a historical parallel: Nye Bevan’s speech on July 4th, 1948 (the eve of the NHS’ birth) in which he railed against the Conservative Party:
… no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through.
… After a while the newspapers in the hands of our enemies will give the impression that everything is going wrong. Don’t be deceived, it is then that they will start going right. We are the people to whom the people can complain. I shall be unmoved by the newspapers, but moved by the distress.
In 1945 and 1946, we were attacked on our housing policy by every spiv in the country – for what is Toryism, except organized spivery? They wanted to let the spivs loose.
Just as the media of today picks at the scab of a single word — “scum” — the newspapers of the late-40s fell upon another — “vermin” — to launch a counter-attack on behalf of the Conservative Party.
In 1948, The Daily Express headline read Bevan: My burning hatred of the Tories. In 2021, it says: Angela Rayner launches into explosive two-minute rant against 'Tory scum' and runs a poll asking Should Angela Rayner be kicked out of the party after 'Tory scum' remarks?
Inside the paper, Leo McKinstry — imagine Humpty Dumpty after an ill-advised hair transplant — rages beneath the headline Sir Keir’s failing leadership will breed extremism in the party that:
[Rayner’s] sort of rhetoric might delight the zealots of the Left who live in a cocoon of neurotic political derangement, but it will dismay the British public which values civility.
I am unconvinced that a country in which The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Daily Telegraph et al. are popular papers actually places much value on “civility”. It is merely an environment in which the media defines who is fair game for insults and who must be protected at all costs. God forbid someone should say something de trop about a ‘top’ Tory.
The Times of 1948 wrote: Mr Bevan’s ‘Burning Hatred Attack on Tory “vermin”. Today’s Times goes with ‘Scum’ insult and tax rises split Labour leadership, with the piece quoting an unnamed shadow cabinet member calling Rayner “an imbecile” and claiming “until she realises that the party will never be credible”.
In its leader column, after correctly noting that “a half-competent opposition ought to be having a field day”, the paper writes of “Angela Rayner [refusing] to apologise for an offensive rant in which she denounced Tories as racist, misogynistic ‘scum’.” Once again the issue is not the racism and misogyny that runs through the Conservative Party like the message through a cursed stick of Brighton rock but the fact that an opposition MP called it by its name.
And in a piece headlined Angela Rayner calling Tory ministers scum reflects a problem for the left, The Times’ Red Box blog, the opinion pollster Chris Curtis (of Opinium) claims ludicrously:
Second, hating your opponents stops you from thinking rationally about how to criticise them. It is rare in politics for the most effective attack line to be one that is about personality, rather than their policies or capabilities, and yet many within Labour are often blinded to this fact.
It’s rare for the most effective attack line to be one that’s about personality? Tell that to Hilary Clinton, Theresa May or Jeremy Corbyn. Again the notion that the Conservative Party plays the ball and not the player is gaslighting of the most clumsy and obvious type.
The Sunday Despatch — which was co-owned by the current Lord Rothermere’s great grand-father — opted for the screaming headline: THE MAN WHO HATES 8,093, 858 PEOPLE (presaging The Daily Mail’s 2013 attack on Ed Miliband’s father Ralph as “the man who hated Britain” by 65 years). Today’s Daily Mail has Storm over 'Tory scum' jibe as Labour is branded the 'true nasty party'.
Inside, Stephen Pollard — editor of a paper that has been found to have breached the ISPO code of practice 28 times in the past three years and has lost or settled four libel cases in the same period — contributes a column accusing Rayner of “[delivering] a bile-flecked rant” and belonging to “the real party of hate”. That “true nasty party” jibe is clearly the editorial line at Northcliffe House today.
Over at The Telegraph, Tim Stanley — still far from over that time some builders laughed at his bow tie — begins his column with a now-familiar Telegraph whine that the Tories are not remotely Tory enough (“Vote Conservative and you get Ed Miliband’s policies, plus chaos”) before turning to Rayner. He writes:
… Angela Rayner struck a blow for a kinder, gentler politics at a fringe meeting by declaring that the Cabinet is staffed by “scum”. She didn’t apologise but later reassured an interviewer that it isn’t as bad as it sounds because Northerners call each other scum all the time.
Many senior Tories will be relieved she went so far because hitherto the ungracious Ms Rayner has been beyond criticism thanks to her impressive biography: pregnant at 16, left school, trained as a carer, worked her way up through the unions. She’s the sort of person we are always saying should go into politics. The objection among Tory MPs isn’t to her class but, on the contrary, her lack of it – and now she’s crossed the line of incivility, I’m sure senior Tories won’t feel awkward about pointing out her own shortcomings.
But they are wary of her. She is Trumpian; a Left-wing populist who doesn’t care what you think about her – and she stands out from the crowd. Ms Rayner is a fighter (with her flame-red hair, a touch of the femme-fatale), and when the economic pain gets so bad that people forget about the culture war, I can see her waiving a constituent’s “final demand” at Boris across the despatch box, and winning quite a few votes.
The sneers stack up like a royal rumble between Cyril and his cartoon family but the key line there is “… she’s crossed the line of incivility…” The pretence is that the Conservative Party never does this, presumably because the many ‘uncivil’ slurs that have slipped from between Jacob Rees Mogg’s lying lips were done in that cosplay Lord Snooty voice he uses.
The endnote on Stanley’s column states, “Tim Stanley’s new book ‘Whatever Happened to Tradition?’ is published on October 14 by Bloomsbury”. You’d think, being so obsessed with tradition, he’d be aware that the history of British politics is one of robust rudeness and this tactical leaning on “civility” is a recent (and ridiculous) affectation.
In The Sun, Lord Ian Austin — well-known dog lover and knighted for services to shafting the Labour Party — writes a column headlined Decent working class people will be appalled by motormouth Angela Rayner branding the Tories ‘scum’, screeching:
Decent working people in places like Dudley don’t wander around calling each other “scum” as a term of endearment.
They will be appalled - by her saying it in the first place and then claiming they speak like that.
They want the people they send to speak up for them in Parliament to be taken seriously.
Imagine being Lord Austin and pretending you’re an expert on decency. If satire wasn’t already dead, we’d have to put it down more bloodily than Keir Starmer dreamed of ending that poor old alpaca.
The Sun also lunges for Rayner in its leader column (“…as usual, she is talking — in whatever dialect — a load of nonsense.”) and has published snide SEO bait headlined Who is Angela Rayner’s husband Mark and do they have children? The Sun is well aware — and if it isn’t it could read this weekend’s Angela Rayner profile in its wordier sister paper The Times — that Rayner and her husband are separated and have been for some time.
Ending where we began in the swamps of The Spectator, Stephen Daisley argues Calling Tories ‘scum’ is part of Angela Rayner’s leadership pitch and, as I have done, draws a parallel to Bevan’s speech in 1948:
Bevan’s inflammatory, sinisterly dehumanising language drew a reprimand from Clement Attlee, who wrote to tell his health minister his speech was ‘unfortunate’, 'singularly ill-timed’ and had provoked 'a great deal of criticism… including a good deal from your own party’. Where a Labour member comes down on this disagreement, 73 years later, is a reliable barometer of whether she believes it the party’s role to do right or be right. That the phrase ‘lower than vermin’ remains in currency today suggests the latter could give a decent accounting for themselves against the former.
Bevan’s speech was ill-timed because it was delivered on July 4, 1948, the eve of the NHS's launch. Attlee thought the speech had undermined the government’s rollout of its signal achievement and could jeopardise Bevan’s own efforts to get doctors on-board. Bevan also succeeded in bringing together tens of thousands of right-wingers to form anti-Labour campaign group the Vermin Club, which Margaret Thatcher is reputed to have encountered and joined later that year. Attlee chided Bevan for a polemic which he felt had distracted attention from the minister's skill in getting the Health Bill through Parliament – ‘without doing any good’. When you are so thoroughly convinced that you are good, there is less motivation to do good.
Bevan was a gobby hater who did not just good but great things. So far Rayner appears to have the first bit down pat but has yet to shown signs the second part is on its way. In this she is emblematic of Labour's soft-left, who divide their time between talking among themselves and talking down to everyone else. Their self-righteousness is a schoolmarmish form of self-harm in which tutting at the world becomes a substitute for changing it and purity in defeat cherished over compromise in power. Winning would sully them.
Over 73 years since Bevan’s “vermin” speech, we are still living in a society when a harsh word from the left is seen as far worse than a host of harsh words and deeds from the right. The newspapers of 1948’s high dudgeon is echoed exactly by their descendants in 2021.
You can argue that Rayner’s anger will put off voters (Daisley, to his slight credit, goes against the consensus to argue that it won’t2) but the truth is her words were ripped from their late-night rabble-rousing context by a Mirror journalist and are being spun in bad faith by columnists who say worse things on a weekly basis, with no true conviction to back them up.
The newspapers who are railing against Rayner for her “incivility” spend their every waking moment pushing all kinds of half-truths, insinuations, cruelties and lies. The difference is their rudeness is priced into the system and they prefer to call it “honesty” and “holding the powerful to account”. Look closely at who is “held accountable” though and whose jibes are rebranded as jokes.
Curiously another revelation from this weekend — Mail on Sunday reporting that Tory MP James Gray joked that a bomb should be planted in the office of Labour chair Annelise Dodds (for which he has apologised) — is not being raised as an example of “everything that’s wrong with politics”. Funny that.
Side note: But notice how Tory outriders are contesting the word “scum” but usually not the other parts of Rayner’s statement.
Well, kind of:
“Expect some to retail the nonsense that Rayner's verbal bludgeoning of her opponents will appal and disgust the voters. The voters don't care about politicians calling each other names. They call them much worse. The only thing that will appal them is the discovery that there are people who voluntarily spend their Saturday nights in half-empty function rooms talking about politics. Self-righteous and weird.”
Centre of Excellence (Conquest of the Useless is), uh x