Left Behind?

I am not entirely sure why, in this age of fixed-term Parliaments, we continue to have weekly opinion polls. But we do.

They include the unsuitable Americanism that is a question about impressions of the Leader, whereas only the question about voting intention matters tuppence in a parliamentary system.

This week, that only question which matters gives Labour a six-point lead over the Conservatives.

In the last couple of days, a senior Conservative languidly assured me that Labour could expect, "only a small majority of about 70."

A Labour majority of 70 is now considered "small", and something of a Conservative triumph, by the Conservatives.

As for UKIP, a consensus seems to be emerging that it represents "the left behind", or, as even the Mail on Sunday put it a few months ago, "life's losers".

That is an awfully long way from the ethos of Thatcherism.

Those who once powered that, now define themselves as objects of pity, and have organised a self-understood Pitiables' Party on that basis. How the world turns.

Anyway, like the BNP before it, UKIP or anything else is only a party of the white working class if it makes any headway in the Pakistan of the white working class, namely County Durham.

More than any other, this is the area that is inhabited by hardly anyone else. The other old coal and steel areas come close. But nowhere else quite matches the situation here.

So far, unless I am very much mistaken, neither the BNP nor UKIP has ever won so much as a Parish or Town Council seat here. Certainly, neither has ever come close to capturing anything above that level.

How much better, if at all, does UKIP do in South Yorkshire, or in the South Wales Valleys, or in the old coal belts of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, or in Fife, or in the vicinity of Ravenscraig?

Does it hold even so much as one elected public office in any of those places, either?

Whoever the left behind are, they are not the white working class. They are the people who, well under a generation ago, thought that they had permanently defeated that class.

Yet the party for which that class votes has a six-point lead over its nearest rival, which consoles itself with the prediction of "only a small Labour majority of about 70".