Truss speech attacks ‘intellectuals, elites & media types from North London’
Liz Truss’s speech to the Tory conference in Birmingham has continued a recent Tory tradition of attacking North London. She claimed that intellectuals, elites and media types from North London are part of an anti-growth coalition. Its dog whistle politics
A speech to the Tory Conference in 2019 by the previous Home Secretary Priti Patel criticised the ‘North London Metropolitan Liberal Elite’.
She did not elaborate as to who such people might be.
However we do have evidence of one such person. They lived in an area that for a period elected a Liberal Democrat MP post the Iraq War and is certainly heavily in favour of remaining in the EU
Crouch End in North London is not the kind of place where you’d expect to find a Tory in 2022. But it was a little different 50 years ago and the area elected Tory MPs until 1992.
While delving into the (unpleasant) undergrowth and background to the previous Premier’s rise to No.10 I noticed a brief sojourn in Crouch End.
In July 1965 Johnson’s father Stanley and mother Charlotte left Oxford for Crouch End. They stayed only to October 1965 deciding to spend the winter with Boris, who was just over a year old at the time and newly born Rachel (September 1965) in an Exmoor cottage.
I haven’t (yet) been able to locate where they lived in Crouch End (a blue plaque surely beckons) but perhaps even then the Johnsons were able to detect that the area was not really the kind of place for Tories, at least on Priti Patel’s analysis.
Johnson went on to live in Islington, North London for some years when he was marred to Marina Wheeler. The current PM Liz Truss despite claiming to hail from various places around the UK is a confirmed West Londoner. It’s not known if it has an elite.
Tory references to a ‘metropolitan elite’ and ‘cultural marxism’ continue. This week has seen the term ‘social marxism’ added, a term apparently used by hard right US politicians to describe those they believe to be ‘woke’.
The current Home Secretary Suella Braverman is an enthusiast for identifying such types, she was asked by the Jewish Board of Deputies in 2019 not to use the term ‘cultural Marxism. Ms Braverman hails from Brent in North-West London. The enemy within perhaps?
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