Andrew Neil on the victims of Labour speeches

 Andrew Neil wrote yesterday on Twitter:

My monologue today on The Times at One with Andrew Neil 

@TimesRadio

 

"British workers have suffered a lot these past two decades. 

Stagnant real wages. 

Barely rising living standards.

An absence of well-paid, prestigious jobs.

A surfeit of soul-destroying Amazon warehouse type jobs.

Soaring grocery and fuel bills. 

So what have they done to deserve visits by the PM and the Chancellor to their factory floors, dragooned to stand behind them when they drone about stuff in which they have no interest?

Keir Starmer did it last week when he went to a glass factory in Lancashire for the sole purpose of attacking Nigel Farage. Etched across the anguished faces of the workers marshalled behind him was a simple question — why are we having to endure this?

But they were the lucky ones. The short straw went to workers at a bus factory in Rochdale, where Rachel Reeves turned up yesterday to lecture them on the importance of her fiscal rules. 

Now that IS cruel and inhuman punishment. Where is the European Court of Human Rights when you need it? The more she smiled that rictus grin the more the workers worried if they’d ever see freedom again. 

They had already been patronised by another politician telling them how proud they should be building the very buses on which they travel to work. I’m sure they think of nothing else when the alarm goes off at 6am. 

Now they were having to endure a Rachel Reeves water boarding. 

But as always in our island story, in grim times a hero emerges. Yesterday it was a young worker stationed right behind the Chancellor. 

As she droned on in her robotic Estuary English he shuffled from foot to foot, grimaced, looked vacant, puzzled, bored, rubbed his head, scratched his crotch — gave out every signal he could that this was worse than a Pol Pot re-education camp. 

It was a silent protest which spoke not just for his fellow workers but for the whole nation. 

This is the beginning of the resistance. Workers of Britain unite, it said. No longer will we be mere backdrop fodder for whatever self-serving drivel politicians wish to spew out to the nation, in a language we don’t even understand.

I wouldn’t be surprised if before the next ministerial factory visit, the workers dress up in clown suits before assembling behind whatever drone they’re being forced to listen to. 

The solipsistic arrogance of politicians never ceases to amaze. The Tories were pretty bad at this too but the current crop of Labour ministers are especially guilty. 

The party of labour has now reduced labour to mere props for their meanderings. And even then this government can’t get it right. 

Reeves had donned her Madame Bountiful persona to tell these workers and a grateful nation about the billions more she was investing in transport links, as if it came from her own bank account when, of course, the money will be coming from theirs. 

But elsewhere in the Labour universe it was being dribbled out that the U-turn on the winter fuel allowance was now in full reverse gear. Which, of course, is what’s making the headlines today rather than Reeves’s dosh sploshing. 

Think how they must have felt in Rochdale. All that agony and for what? Nothing.

It can only emboldened the resistance. Workers of Britain unite! You have nothing to lose but the mind-numbing soundbites of Starmer and Reeves."