A very poor smear article on Lee Anderson. Latching on to a few selective phrases without context is the stuff of the poor click-bait journalism that is all-pervasive these days.
I suspect the author has avoided the hard yards of actually listening to Anderson during interviews.
It is certainly naive to suggest that stifling the views held by much of the population will enhance an attempted ‘big-tent” approach.

“Yet even if the Tories are wiped out,”
If they are, it won’t be Anderson’s fault.

Lee Anderson seems like the sort of normal, common sense bloke who means what he says and we need more of (and not less) in Parliament.
Last week we read here about the “Civic Future fellowship”. Frankly, I’d far rather see more Lee Anderson’s than more “fast-tracked” “high flyers”.
Of course, the media pack all despise people like Lee Anderson. Just as they were blind to the Red Wall. Once you’ve deemed a set of views “unacceptable in modern society”, you stop listening. As Gordon Brown proved with Gillian Duffy.
He’s also a better communicator than 95% of the media hacks. As is Nigel Farage. Never discount the professional jealousy of the mediocre – and dare I say it privileged.
I have never supported the death penalty and am unlikely to ever do so. But a lot of people do and deserve representation.

Trying to create equivalence between Anderson and the hard left in the Labour Party is profoundly wrong. Unlike Momentum and the rest of the Tankie left, Anderson has no faction around him trying to infiltrate and dominate his Party. He is simply expressing a point of view shared by many of his constituents (interestingly, the same constituents who almost certainly supported him when he was a Labour councillor). And herein lies the rub; both mainstream parties use figures like Lee as a pressure valve (which Mr. Oxley acknolwedges) while they cling on to their grey, centrist, steady-as-she-goes politics. The sort of politics that won’t get them labelled nasty at dinner parties, or threaten their post-political corporate careers. I can’t wait for Sir Keir’s Labour to come into power – apart from some Kulturkampf posturing it will be more or less exactly the same as the shower of merde we have now.

I’m afraid, John, that this mean-spirited article reveals a lot more about you than it does about Lee Anderson.

Really poor article. Well below par.

I come from a neighbouring constituency to Lee Anderson’s. There is nothing ‘imaginary’ about the working class people who support him, or why they do so. These are people who are despised by his former party because they are mourning the deaths of their pits and coal-fired power stations and the end of their status as a proud, high-earning, industrially powerful working class. Labour is only interested in ‘the poor and the vulnerable’ and those with an ‘identity’; white former miners in depressed coalfield towns are not it! There is also a distrust of Nottinghamshire on the Left because it created the UDM and continued working in 1984. It is still known as Scab County in some circles.
Supporting the death penalty is not unusual in working class areas; my stepfather, a retired train driver, used to ask every candidate who came to the door whether they supported it, though he still voted Labour because that’s what you did. That world has gone. The traditional working class is opposed to illegal migration, thinks ‘Transgenderism’ is ridiculous and elected Lee Anderson because of his actions against the travellers that regularly plague the East Midlands and his assertion that benefit claimants should be sent to live in tents and made to pick vegetables. And it is Labour that called him 30p Lee.

I don’t know this Anderson guy very well – I’m from Canada – but I’m not seeing a lot of substance to the critique here. He supports the death penalty. Meh. I don’t support the death penalty, but lots of people do and that’s their right. It’s certainly not some far right position. If the guy is a loud mouth who doesn’t get anything done, that’s a valid criticism.

A typical petit bourgeois view from someone who would not last 5 minutes in an industrial working mens pub…. If he did, he would realise that an overwhelming majority of British working class voters loath the ” racism/ Lbgt/ global warming” national socialist fifth column ” trident, and were the LM C ToileTories to work this out, they could create a landslide victory.

Those of us who have had the enjoyment and honour to work with soldiers, and stable lads, and in our youth on building sites and in factories have a respect for our manual working bretheren that the modern lower middles, themselves often only one generation away, do not, due to the Pooteresque snobbery that this part of our society literally wallows in.

That was a rubbish read. Apart from anything else, the comments on Teddy Taylor are nonsense; he was a highly intelligent nuanced thinker, with a great understanding of the various strands of liberal (old fashioned meaning) Tory philosophy and the practicalities of being a Conservative in a democratic society. Yes, he supported the death penalty in limited circumstances, but that was just one part of his philosophy and not a very important part.

Well that was a few minutes wasted, not a good start to the week.

The views of Mr Anderson are not mainstream but they are probably closer to the electorate than most MPs. There’s a huge gulf in values between the political classes of all parties and the people they purport to represent. Many people despair at the failure of the police and justice system to protect law abiding citizens and punish wrongdoing. The restoration of capital punishment may be a blind alley but desire to bring in robust deterrents would find a lot of support.

I laughed at a “street house” for £70k. Does this plonker mean a terraced house?

Good to know our leaders decide our fate at ‘dinner parties’.The author should look at Lee’s old Facebook page. Many comments there wishing he was their MP. He has a strong following in his constituency, I dare say if he were to jump to Reform they’d go with him. As it is he’s a bit too forceful for their dinner partyites. He’d tear them to pieces for only having 7-8% at this time of dissatisfaction with government.

What a snobby article or do I miss the point?

Wasn’t it always so, the tribune of the plebs given the power to speak for them alone, yet always in the pocket of the ruling class? To speak of the worst imagined voices and thus the stain the workers as the worst sort of savages. Along with that other witless class the journalists; who do their job of spreading division amongst the ruled even if not intentionally. They are always rewarded for their efforts, like dogs being given a treat for barking at the unknown. Even when they know what they do, the lure of the, very, greasy pole is too great.

I am neither old nor poor …

*Populism (which is what we’re really talking about here) is not synonymous with authoritarianism, as the Left and the squish Right love to characterize it. It is harsh on criminality and cultural decay and refuses to cater to good manners hiding bad actions, but is the opposite of the Progressive all-knowing, all-controlling authoritarian state (of the sort we saw all too clearly during Covid).

There’s an article worth writing to say that someone like Anderson is a figleaf for the bland mediocrities who run the party, a Tory John Prescott. Suggesting that their views have no resonance among a large portion of the electorate doesn’t make sense. I listened to Anderon being interviewed by Peter Whittle and he came across as down to earth, sensible and in tune with real issues for real voters. The question then for the article worth writing is whether someone like Anderson is genuine, and if so, does he have a place in the modern Tory Party?

Lee Anderson is one of those rare politicians who says what everyone else is thinking.

Another intellectually bankrupt London denizen masquerading as an expert on the northern working classes. I wonder what qualifications or, more importantly, what authority the author has to opine on the authenticity of a working class MP? Still, knowing nothing never deterred the cognoscenti, did it?

Geoffrey Dickens also tried to expose political paedophiles. Unfortunately he gave the evidence he had collected to Leon Brittan.

Not actually stated, but we can be confident that he has no actual influence in Cabinet or the Conservative Party as a whole; just a noisy facade.

“He’s … even boycotting England for “taking the knee”.”
Good man!

John Oxley speaks of “murderous paedophiles”. On average, one child is killed around every 10 days in England and Wales alone at the hands of their parent (NSPCC), often in cases of partner infidelity that attract little publicity. By contrast, the murder of a child in a sexual contact, is always huge news but is extremely rare, which is why individual cases stick in the mind and generate outrage. This outrage is well justified but unintentionally selective and prejudicial against minor attracted persons, who generally behave as well as others.
Media commentators should avoid collective libels, which in Oxley’s case looks casual and careless. The YouGov poll he links to in order to support his point actually makes no mention of paedophiles. The relevant question asked in the poll says, “Should the death penalty be reintroduced for the murder of a child?”

“As Labour learnt with Corbyn, giving too much prominence to the outliers alienates far more voters than it brings in — and, after their inevitable electoral failure, they tend to leave chaos in their wake”
Whatever else, Corbyn was, he wasn’t an example of “giving too much prominence to the outliers.” Corbyn won the leadership of his party fair and square. He won among the existing membership and he won among the incoming membership as well as the £3 supporters. The party trebled in size. It’s still a small sliver of the population but it’s a mandate.
Instead of buiding on that (ahem) momentum, the Parliamentary Labour Party resisted him as fiercely as they dared. They ran a leadership election in which Corbyn wiped the floor with them, they briefed against him on all sorts of issues about which the public didn’t give a toss (too republican to accept a post to the Privy Council was especially stupid I thought) and, as is now well known, they actually tried to lose the 2017 election in order to be rid of him. Instead, Corbyn’s manifesto achieved a huge and unforeseen swing towards Labour which rubbed out the Tories’ majority and hamstrung Theresa May. It wasn’t a win, but it wasn’t bad for someone whose own Parliamentary party actively loathed him and his politics.
My point being that, at least, in 2017, Corbyn was far more appealing to voters than he was to his own MPs
It’s true that 2019 was a wipeout but, that was, primarily because a) he was persuaded to come out firmly against Brexit, which was economically correct but politically an elephant trap and b) because the PLP finally found a charge that stuck – anti-Semitism. No matter that the charge has now been largely debunked by the Forde Report, Labour Leaks, Al Jazeera’s reporting etc. The narrative is that “the public won’t accept some beardy old Lefty because they hate leftiness.”
You’re entitled to hold that opinion if it makes you happy. But it isn’t a very good explanation for what actually happened.
Which makes the analogy with the Tories inexact. Whatever, disdain old school parliamentary Tories might have had for fringey ideas like No Deal Brexit, they either nodded along or got purged. That’s how Liz Truss’ fringey brand of dead-eyed lunacy made it into Number 10 and drove the UK headlong into avoidable disaster in a matter of weeks.
The Tories enable and coddle their “loonies” in the hope that they may one day prove to be electoral assets. Labour repudiates theirs in pursuit of “respectability”. And thus, our politics drift ever rightwards.