Sunak resumes Tory Culture Wars attack on North London. Dog whistling
At Prime Minister’s Questions on 26th October Rishi Sunak made clear that Tory Culture Wars attacks on North London will continue.
The origins of the Tory obsession with North London remain, perhaps, unclear. The last two Labour leaders and the current one live in North London. So what? Boris Johnson lived for years in Islington.
The attacks can perhaps be traced back to Priti Patel in 2019 when she used the term North London Metropolitan Elite. The dog whistle of this statement was so loud that the Jewish Board of Deputies asked her to stop using it.
Cultural Marxism, apparently to be found in North London, became the Culture Wars term of choice
More recently Liz Truss focused on people who live in North London Townhouses and take taxis to the BBC. The current Home Secretary Suella Braverman is also no doubt a North London hater, her recent comments about Guardian reading, tofu eating, wokerati leaving not much doubt about where they were aimed.
Right-wing commentators argue that there is nothing more to this Culture War than poking fun at the dress and eating habits (etc) of North Londoners. Yet aside from the wealthy, Boroughs like Haringey and Islington have some of the poorest areas in the UK.
Culture Wars may seem like fun but they have a political purpose and the dog whistle of Anti-Semitism is heard clearly enough by those who want to listen
Prime Minister’s Questions 26th October
Keir Starmer
I know the right hon. Gentleman has been away for a few weeks, but he should have listened to what has been going on for the last two months. Anyway, I have to say I am surprised that he is still defending non-dom status. He pretends he is on the side of working people, but in private he says something very different. Over the summer, he was secretly recorded at a garden party in Tunbridge Wells, boasting to a group of Tory members that he personally moved money away from deprived areas to wealthy places instead. Rather than apologise or pretend that he meant something else, why does he not now do the right thing, and undo the changes that he made to those funding formulas?
The Prime Minister
I know the right hon. and learned Gentleman rarely leaves north London, but if he does, he will know that there are deprived areas in our rural communities, in our coastal communities and across the south, and this Government will relentlessly support them because we are a Government who will deliver for people across the United Kingdom. He mentioned the last few weeks, and I am the first to admit that mistakes were made, and that is the reason I am standing here, but that is the difference between him and me. This summer I was talking and was being honest about the difficulties that we were facing, but when he ran for leader he promised his party he would borrow billions and billions of pounds. I told the truth for the good of the country; he told his party what it wanted to hear. Leadership is not selling fairy tales. It is confronting challenges, and that is the leadership the British people will get from this Government.
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