What should really worry them, however, is the class war — because, like or not, the Tories still have a problem with poshness. 

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In defence of working-class conservatism

By Peter Franklin

It might not seem that way. With the party winning seats like Workington and Blyth Valley one could argue that the whole “Tory toff” thing doesn’t matter anymore. At the last election, the Conservatives not only got more support than Labour did from low income voters, they also got more support from low income voters than they did from high income voters.

However, that’s precisely why the party should be worried. When a crucial part of your electoral coalition isn’t accustomed to voting for you, that’s cause to be extra careful about the things that always put them off you in the past. The Conservatives remain vulnerable to the lingering suspicion that they’re a party of the upper class, for the upper class.

If you want an example of that, cast your mind back to May and the two weeks’ hate directed at Dominic Cummings. The level of fury went well beyond the usual Twitter pile-on — and well beyond the population of diehard Remainers desperate for revenge. Nor was this a simple case of someone in power hypocritically breaking the rules — indeed, no rule-breaking was ever proven.

As was laboriously explained, the Cummings family had driven from London to County Durham so they could self-isolate on a country estate in an empty cottage away from the main house — thus the lockdown restrictions were fully observed. But it wasn’t the technicalities the public paid attention to, what registered were words like “country estate”, “empty cottage” and “main house”. It may have been more of a farm than an estate and the cottage far from luxurious, but the damage was done. Once again, the Tories were seen as living in a different world.

Then last month another example came along. The “rule of six” was hard enough to swallow, but the news that grouse shooting had been exempted left a bitter aftertaste. It was, of course, part of a much wider exemption for organised outdoor activities, but the nexus between wealth, land ownership and blood sports is pure poison for the Tories.

Just look what happened in the 2017 general election when a seemingly unassailable lead in the polls was all but wiped out. That collapse didn’t start with the botched manifesto launch, but earlier in the campaign when Theresa May declared her support for a vote on repealing the law on fox hunting. This went down like a lead balloon — or a pheasant full of shot.

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What the AI doomsters get wrong

By Jack Hutchison

You’d think by now that the Conservative Party would understand that the whole killing-animals-for-sport thing does not play well for them. When he was Prime Minister, Tony Blair understood it very well — which is why he spared so much Parliamentary time to the ban on hunting with hounds. It was hardly the highest animal welfare priority, but it got the Tories just where Blair wanted them. In his era-defining speech to the 1999 Labour Party conference, he described his opponents as “the party of fox hunting, Pinochet and hereditary peers” — and that was them stitched-up for the next two elections.

Like I’ve said before, nothing says “same old Tories” like posh people riding off to kill something. But why is this image so potent? What vein of public disquiet was Blair tapping into? The politics of envy? Reverse snobbery? Ill-informed urban sentiment about country life? Maybe. But the man on a horse evokes something much darker — an atavistic fear instilled by millennia of violence and oppression.

To understand just how deep all of this stuff goes, we need to go back to the very dawn of history — and a crucial development that shaped the world we live in today.

I’m referring to a phenomenon that concerns the languages we speak and how they relate to one another. The English language, for instance, is part of larger group of Germanic tongues (e.g. German, Dutch, Swedish etc). In turn, this Teutonic branch is part of a yet bigger family — the Indo-European languages. As the name suggests, it includes just about all the European languages, and many from the Indian sub-continent too (plus various places in between). It’s an incredible thought, but Welsh, English, Spanish, Russian, Lithuanian, Albanian, Greek, Armenian, Farsi, Urdu and Bengali are all descended from a common root.

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What the AI doomsters get wrong

By Francis Young

We don’t know for sure who spoke this ancestral tongue (which linguists call Proto-Indo-European or PIE), but somehow they and their descendants spread it across a vast area — as a result of which most of the indigenous languages went extinct. The Basque language is one of the few surviving fragments of the linguistic diversity that must have once existed in Europe. So what happened? How did those PIE-speakers sweep all before them? 

The most widely-held theory is that their original homeland was somewhere in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia. These were people of the steppe and the secret of their success was that they domesticated the horse. As a result they acquired superpowers: the ability to travel across distances and strike with a force that other peoples couldn’t hope to match. In all likelihood , they became conquerors — and when one ruling class replaces another, the language often changes too. 

The terrifying power of the mounted warrior may also be the origin of the centaur myth. To people who have never seen horses, or at least never learned to ride them, the sight of man and beast moving together as one suggests a monstrous hybrid of the two. In ancient Greek culture, the centaur was the personification of chaos — of the barbarian charging out of the wilderness.

Horsemanship doesn’t just confer speed and strength, but also height. It literally separates those on top from those below. Away from the battlefield, the man on a horse is a symbol of the class system. In this respect, the connection to hunting for sport is especially potent. 

Once upon a time, we were all hunter-gatherers. But then came farming, which allowed our numbers to grow. Or maybe it was our growing numbers that required us to start farming. Either way, game became scarce and was monopolised by the ruling class. They ate meat; we ate grass. They remained hunters; we became poachers. 

And this, I think, is our real problem with “country sports” and all the class associations that go with it. Contemporary concerns over animal welfare are a thin veneer over something much, much older — a cultural memory of subjugation. When the Countryside Alliance and other groups campaigned to save hunting, they implored the public to consider just how much hunting means to some rural communities. The reason why this failed is not because these practices have no meaning to the rest of the population, but because they still do.

The so-called “High Tories” really ought to understand this stuff. They’re the ones always going on about custom and tradition: the inherited intuitions that link the present to the past. And, they’re right — these things are real and they matter. But they matter to everyone — the descendants of downtrodden peasants, not just the men on horses.

Hunting is not the only signifier of poshness; schooling is a big part of it too. The exclusivity of an expensive private education obviously leaves the state educated majority on the outside, but that’s not all — there’s also the bit about people sending their children away. Hogwarts not withstanding, the idea of boarding school is one that horrifies most of us muggles. In our increasingly diverse society, we’ve become attuned to cultural differences — but is there a bigger cultural difference than this one? I mean, if personal circumstances don’t force you to, then why on earth would you send your kids to live somewhere else? And not even to a family home!

But perhaps family is the point — the creation of a superfamily. From time-to-time, human societies have aimed to create in-group solidarity through the collective rearing of children. The Shakers in America, for instance, or the Kibbutzim in Israel. The ultimate example, however, was ancient Sparta, where boys were taken away from their mothers at the age of seven and raised in military barracks. In its own brutal fashion, it worked. Spartan society was so effectively militarised and unified that they held off the Persians, defeated the Athenians and controlled a local slave population — the helots — that was many times bigger than their own. I’m not making a direct comparison between Sparta’s nightmare society and our own dear toffs, but there are… echoes. 

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History began with a counterfactual

By Tom Holland

As a rite of passage, young Spartan men were encouraged to steal from, attack and even murder the helots. This wasn’t just a test of military prowess, it was a means of dominating the subject population through state-sanctioned terror. It’s a tactic that ruling classes have used at many points in the past — to intimidate other people and to initiate their own.

Again, this isn’t something we’ve entirely forgotten. When we hear tales of anti-social behaviour on the part of exclusive drinking clubs at elite universities we don’t just write it off as the normal student rowdiness. The spectacle of privileged young men throwing their weight around — and their money — provokes a visceral loathing that goes much deeper than the mere politics of envy. 

Collectively, we remember. 

When he became Conservative leader, David Cameron tried to detoxify the Tory brand. It was out with the “nasty party” and in with “hug-a-husky”. “Banging on about Europe” was replaced with the “Big Society”. But in conflating the nastiness of the nasty party with cultural conservatism, he’d forgotten all about class. That photograph of him in his student days posing with fellow members of the Bullingdon Club did lasting damage. Though comparable to Blair at the height of his popularity, at no point did the electorate ever take Cameron to heart — he was never the people’s Prime Minister, nor could he be. 

Looking back, through such instruments as the Sasha Swire diaries, we can see him continually surrounded by a coterie of his own class. His closest advisors, his social circle, were of a type — not the tweedy, LARPing Rees-Mogg variety — but nevertheless out-of-touch, no matter how modernised they considered themselves to be. He, and they, would discover the real modern Britain on the 23 June 2016, but by then it was too late.

When Theresa May took over, she was described by Westminster insiders as “unclubbable”, but to the voters that was a blessed relief. Unfortunately, and as mentioned above, she too failed to understand the Tory problem with class; but at least she wasn’t part of it. Never forget that she pushed the Conservative vote share way above what Cameron ever achieved.

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Stop making poverty the butt of jokes

By Gavanndra Hodge

May pioneered the strategy that Boris Johnson perfected, but that brings me to the apparent Achilles’ Heel of my entire argument. How can I say that poshness is problem for the Tories given the result of 2019? Is Boris not poshness personified? Does he not appear in that very same photograph as David Cameron? Has he made the slightest attempt to downplay his class identity?

Well, the answers are obvious, but Boris is to poshness what a pantomime dame is to femininity — an absurd performance put on for the public’s enjoyment. Of course, while Widow Twankey is not actually a woman, Boris Johnson is actually posh. Crucially, though, he very publicly abandoned his own tribe by breaking with Cameron over Brexit and siding with the 52%. 

It also helped that so many prominent Remainers became the new snobs, condescending to Leave voters and insulting them with accusations of ignorance and bigotry. Worse still, they went all out to overturn the referendum result. At each stage of the ensuing battle, it was Boris Johnson who stood in their way, while also taking his share of the flak. In defying the Remain establishment, he stuck by Brexit Britain and so Brexit Britain stuck by him.

But what next? Though hardly irrelevant, Brexit is now just one element in the multiple challenges we face as a nation. As for the Boris persona, that joke’s wearing a little thin — and so, perhaps, is he.

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Has 'Long Covid' left us leaderless?

By Mary Harrington

The extraordinary confluence of circumstance and personality that allowed the Tories to prevail is unravelling. So where does that leave them?

With a Cabinet, most of whom were privately educated. With an economic policy that still favours the rentier class. With a looming jobs crisis that will hit the poorest workers hardest. With a skills deficit That is still unsolved; a housing crisis that is still unaddressed; and a culture war that is still unfought. And though the “levelling-up” agenda is promising, it is still as under-resourced as George Osborne’s Northern Powerhouse.

And, so, as the utility of Boris and Brexit fade-away, the Tories still have everything to prove.

Chickens are not particularly intelligent or expressive creatures. But Sunny and Flowery, as our three-year-old daughter named them, were surprisingly characterful nonetheless. Sunny: bold and friendly. Flowery: daft and a worrier, with one crooked toe, making loud distress calls the moment Sunny was out of eyeshot. Our daughter loved them, quickly learning to handle them gently and help look after them. For an only child, deprived of playmates by lockdown, they were desperately-needed friends.

They soon outgrew their brooder box, and we built them a large wire coop outside, taking care to secure it against foxes. We got used to the sound of cheeping on the back patio. Our daughter would play in the coop for an hour at a time, chatting to the chicks and laughing merrily as they gave themselves dust baths.

Then disaster struck. We went out for ‘chick check’ after tea to find a section of the wire pulled away from the frame, and no chicks. It turns out a hungry fox is stronger than you might think, and despite what we thought were thorough fox-proofing measures, we had failed to protect them. All that was left of Sunny and Flowery was a few grey feathers.

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How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

By Mary Harrington

It felt like the heart was gone from our garden. The household mourned, and no one more than our daughter. She’d poured heart and soul into being ‘chicken mummy’, and losing them both so abruptly was devastating.

It also prompted an agonised debate between her parents. When she saw the hole in the fence our daughter said: “Maybe Sunny and Flowery escaped and went to visit their cousins?” We wondered: should we let her carry on believing this comforting, anthropomorphised lie? Or tell her the truth, that a predator broke into the chicken run and ate her pets?

Mulling this over, it struck me that our prevailing culture is methodical about hiding the real-world relation between predators and prey from small children. From birth onwards, products and media aimed at babies and children are covered in cute, anthropomorphised animals – all wholly divorced from any reference to their nature.

By this I don’t mean nursery books should contain scientific lectures about animal behaviour. But when I think of older folk tales with animal protagonists, their actions are generally rooted in some sense of what each type of animal might plausibly do.

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By Ed West

In Aesop’s famous fable of the lion and the mouse, we know animals don’t really talk but both creatures are at least a bit lion-y and mouse-y in their behaviour. In The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Chaucer puts chivalric and literary allusions in the mouths (OK, beaks) of farmyard chickens, a comic absurdity. But anyone who’s ever met a rooster will recognise Chauntecleer’s mix of amour propre and foolishness, just as I (sadly) now recognise the wily determination of the hungry fox. Even the 1972 classic Watership Down is grounded in observation of rabbit behaviour. But this basic reference to animals’ nature is almost entirely missing from modern depictions of animals.

Contemporary retellings of the folk tale Henny Penny don’t end with the fox eating the birds. I’ve lost count of the preschool picture books I’ve read that depict species which in reality have a predator/prey relationship as friends. Whenever I see this part of me wants to stop reading and tell my daughter: “Of course, in real life this fox would chase this bunny and try to eat it.” Modern sensibilities retort: what kind of sociopath would say that to her pre-schooler at bedtime?

Similar examples on TV are legion, but the CBeebies animation ‘Hey Duggee’ serves to illustrate. The characters are all depicted as animals, but a crocodile is the same size as a mouse or a rhinoceros, and none of the characters’ personalities corresponds in any recognisable way to the animal they’re meant to be.

This matters, because children absorb stories as vital sources of knowledge about the world. And TV programmes in which a crocodile is waved off by his elephant mummy to attend playgroup with a mouse and an octopus do nothing to convey the truth that different animals have different natures. Or the fact that some animals, including humans, eat other animals. Instead, to spare our own squeamishness, we end up teaching our children a kind of wilful ignorance about animals’ relationship to one another, and about our own relationship to the natural world.

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A compassionate carnivore's manifesto

By John Lewis-Stempel

The livestock farmer John Lewis-Stempel wrote last week for UnHerd about humanely killing a terminally injured ewe, not realising the rest of the flock was watching. In the flock’s reaction to witnessing this, he experiences “a kaleidoscopic moment” of recognising that the flock was not just sentient but “composed of sub-groups based on friendship and family bonds.” The experience, he says, ended his “objectification of sheep”.

But, Lewis-Stempel says, while animals must not be objectified, it doesn’t follow that we should stop farming them. Rather, we should keep livestock in conditions that suit their nature, and accept humans’ role as both caretakers and respectful predators by slaughtering humanely toward the end of an animal’s natural life and eating ‘nose to tail’.

But this means accepting both that animals have natures, and also that humans are predators — facts we seem desperate to avoid imparting to our children. Instead, we condemn forms of animal cruelty asymmetrically, depending on what the cruelty implies about our relation to the suffering animals.

Compare public opposition to fox-hunting with the relative public indifference to factory farming. Both of these practices cause animals to suffer. But fox-hunting depends on a willingness to accept that humans are predators — and also that being a predator can be fun.

This is something we avert our gaze from in domestic cats, even as a sea of internet memes puts cutesy words in feline mouths. As for confronting the same blood-lust in humans, forget it. Never mind that a fox in a henhouse will carry on killing well beyond what it needs for food, the idea that it might be fun to chase a fox through the countryside on horseback implies something that horrifies modern sensibilities: that in fact, like the fox (or the cat currently purring on my knee), humans can enjoy hunting for pleasure as well as food.

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The hypocrisy of the fashion pack

By Kate Spicer

In contrast, the industrial-scale cruelty of factory livestock farming is utilitarian, and founded in a willingness to treat livestock as things — a wholly different order of entity to us. We have no particular duty to take species-specific needs or behaviour into account, beyond the minimum needed for productivity.

And for the most part we shrug our shoulders at the fear, pain and misery this industry causes. According to Compassion in World Farming, 70% of livestock in the UK are kept indoors, in factory farming conditions — and this is with Britain’s vaunted high standards of farm animal welfare. In the less-regulated United States, it’s worse: if you’ve a strong stomach, this gives a sense of the situation for American livestock.

Paul Krause writes about the way utilitarian exploitation of the natural world has its roots in Francis Bacon’s vision of humanity as separate from and in opposition to nature:

As Bacon made clear, man would have to strip and unclothe the natural world, pin nature down and violate her, in order to learn nature’s innermost secrets, which would then inaugurate the “reign [and] empire of man.”

Krause argues that this antagonistic vision is central to our looming ecological crisis — an extractive relationship that sees humans as not on a continuum with plants and animals but as separate from and entitled to exploit and dominate them. This view seems both widespread and intractable. Campaigners can point out till they’re blue in the face how the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrates that this is not sustainable, but to date this doesn’t seem to be having any impact on economic policy.

And many of the ‘save the earth’ campaigners are no better. They’ve just substituted a ‘saviour’ role for the ‘dominator’ one, while leaving unchallenged the belief in humans’ separateness and superiority, as well as the indifference to animals’ actual nature. Think of those activists who released thousands of mink from a Minnesota fur farm, whereupon they laid waste to local wildlife or simply starved.

On the surface, idealising animals to the point of ignoring their nature looks more empathetic than treating animals merely as ‘flesh robots’, in Lewis-Stempel’s phrase. But it’s still a way of refusing to see them as they are. It’s the cuddly version of the worldview that produces factory farming and ecological destruction on a planetary scale. We may wring our hands about human abuse of the natural world, but by raising our children to objectify animals — even sentimentally — we’re more or less guaranteeing that it continues.

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By Gerald DeGroot

So we decided to tell our daughter the truth: some animals eat other animals, foxes also have babies to feed, and that’s probably what happened to Sunny and Flowery. It’s a tough lesson for a pre-schooler, in a culture that feeds children battery-farmed chicken dippers while censoring any realistic depiction of carnivores in stories.

The experience has changed her. We were incubating a second clutch of eggs when the raid happened, and since they hatched — all six this time — I’ve noticed our daughter doesn’t treat them like she did Sunny and Flowery. While she’s still keen to help care for them, she’s less emotionally invested. Perhaps she’s still mourning her lost chicks. (I am, if I’m honest.) The new crowd seems less individual: six chicks is a little flock, which makes them harder to tell apart. In turn that makes it more difficult to project emotions onto them.

Perhaps that’s not a bad thing. If we’re to get out of this ecological mess, we need our kids to grow up understanding that animals are not just foils for our inner lives, or fuel for our economies. Rather, they have their own natures, and they are different to us. But not that different.