‘I don’t know if he is aware that he is calling for an end to parliamentary democracy, and it will not be as sunny as he thinks. If he is, he does it weeping.’
It looks to me like he is calling for an English parliament, which is not ‘an end to parliamentary democracy’ but more of it. It seemed to be fine when the Scots did it. And he is right – England is the only European nation without its own parliament, and its working people are treated like dirt when they are even noticed.
I enjoyed some of this, but there’s a curious wrenching tone to it. On the one hand, it seeks to hand out a lesson about how ‘we’ should listen to and not sneer at English working people. On the other hand, there is still a lot of sneering.

Thankfully Tanya, you’ve all learned from that period of history. So, moving forward, you’re all going to demonstrate the lesson by screaming “raaaaaaacist” that much louder, because, obviously, if they’d just heard you last time, they’d all have gone, “blimey, didn’t realise I was such a despicable immoral thicko, defs going to vote for Jezza this time round…!”

The banking crisis caused by corrupt bankers. Politicians and their expenses scandal. The media bugging peoples phones. A police force that is no longer capable of preventing crime and in most cases not interested investigating crime. A criminal justice system that is failing ordinary people. Petty minded Councils run by a clique of “can’t quite make it as an MP’ bureaucrats powerless to affect change in the even smaller minded technocrats that manage the councils like their own little fiefdoms.  The systematic destruction of affordable social housing and well-paying jobs. All of these institutions are controlled and run by the middle and upper class elites. Yet you reserve your greatest scorn, your greatest condescension, your vailed hatred for the working classes whose only crime is to be vocal in their desire to preserve their identity and way of life. I suppose we should be grateful there was a small amount of contrition in this article.

Tanya Gold never considers why there has to be a bye-election. She states that David Amess was murdered, but doesn’t consider the murderer, his faith, or any implications that that might have.
I finished this piece thinking that Steve Laws, on the beach, counting the migrant boats, might be seeing more clearly than Ms Gold.

Tanya – perhaps if you thought for a moment about the reason there was a by-election at all, then you might have a better understanding of why Steve Laws is so focused on channel crossings. The murderer’s parents found shelter here from Somalia. David Amess was a Friend of Israel and a supporter of Iranian dissidents. His selection for slaughter may not have been a random act.
There are amusing eccentricities in any English town or city, but there’s plenty for the outsider with an open mind and ears to understand as well.
Steve Laws is also a source of information on the number of crossings daily, statistics we rarely get off the regular news. That same media will at the same time highlight any data it can on Covid to alarm a public whose tendency overall is still to believe the news. See Sky’s laughably hysterical and misleading headline on the increase in Covid deaths the other day. This was rightly called out by others for the scare-mongering it was, but by then the lie had already got it’s boots on and was on it’s journey.
People are worrying themselves sick over uncontexted, misleadingly presented data – maybe not “sneers” a Plandemic – but in my view an Extremely Bad Thing. As a journalist yourself, you might even have some sympathy to that view.

You’ve learned nothing. You’re still laughing and – what’s that expression?- you’re still punching down.

What if “these people” are right, Tanya?

“Why else build a mile long pier into the mud of the Thames estuary, where no one wants to go? ” Shocking misunderstanding of history. When the pier was built in 1829 there were no railways and the fastest way to get from London to Essex or Kent was by steamer. Services were well used and popular untill the railways came along.

This feels a bit mean-spirited, although the author seems to be saying ‘we the M25-bubble misjudged’, I came away feeling as if somehow she was still sneering in a slightly condescending way.

Lurid travel writing about your town must always be intriguing – it doesn’t happen much to Southend – and presumably people often say: this is as reflective of reality as Rick Stein’s Cornwall is of the economic circumstances and political opinions of St Austell. Which is to say, not very much, and nor is it intended to be. Although even Rick got to a china clay pit and talked to a couple of Methodists about urban regeneration.
But in UnHerd there must be some correspondence with reality otherwise why would the writer go there at all?
In this case, it looks like she didn’t: she went to the tacky bit of Rochford and Southend East, and therefore she can’t tell whether and how what she saw answers her own implied question about Southend West. To be fair, she did talk to a fishmonger and the only ones I can think of in the area are in Leigh and therefore in Southend West. But did she really get back on the train at Southend to go three stops and walk up the hill to the Broadway to talk to the fishmonger? When she had dinner at the Delaunay to get back for? No, I bet that like any Martian she actually talked to the fish and chip man in Southend High Street under the impression he’s a fishmonger in the right constituency.
It’s not as if it would have been difficult to talk to people actually in Southend West about politics and try to answer the question in the article’s title. She could have talked to a real-life fishmonger and then walked along Leigh Broadway and talked to any passing OAP or mum or truant child or painter and decorator. She could have walked along the queue for tickets on Thursday morning at the station – fewer season tickets now in the age of hybrid working – and talked to the commuters going to work in the world’s second largest financial centre. She could have gone to the golf range or stood outside Waitrose. She could have walked into any number of hairdressers or charity shops or pubs.  She could have sat in one of the cafes under the arches on the seafront. She could even have talked to a fish and chip man. This is Essex: they would mostly have been friendly, amusing, open, quotable, and well right of centre.
She could have talked about the Conservative party’s choice of candidate, the decision by the other main parties not to contest and whether David Amess would have disapproved or been secretly chuffed and why, Partygate and Boris (she did get in a couple of questions about that but they didn’t say quite the right thing did they), the future of hybrid working, Ukraine, electric and gas prices and net zero, Rishi Sunak and tax, knife crime, house prices, the state of the NHS, Islam, the future of tertiary education, social care, the new timetables on the C2C, anything. Fresh fish supply post-Brexit. Michael Gove.
But she didn’t. She talked about national identity and immigration with a clump of hopeless and disgruntled extremists who later netted the square root of minus stuff-all in a poor turnout and got them to sound like the people Benedict Cumberbatch goes to see in a mobile home when he’s trying to look clever and populist. She moved the debate on from Goodhart by a whole zero inches. 
I don’t know to what extent snooty and lazy journalism contributed to the strengthening of the right in Anglosphere politics over the last decade and a half. My bet is it’s much less than they think and it was much more about the failure of multiple progressive policy areas since the end of the Cold War. If not the First.  But it’s not for the want of trying is it.

The second Unherd article in as many days, and I’ve never got past the first sneering paragraph on either occasion

Thank you Tanya. Suspect you have also had experiences that permit observations of this kind – nobody starts life on the far right. They have had a journey to get there. Great insights (and well told) about both the joyful and often burdensome roads we travel. Delightful reading!