Hating the poor, hating refugees—a very Tory mix

Conservative Party deputy chair Lee Anderson  (Picture: Wikimedia Commons)

Lee Anderson, the Conservative deputy chair, is meant to be the rough end of the big business party. He’s the former miner designed to appeal to the no-nonsense part of the working class.

He began last week with an assault on what some sections of Victorian society called the undeserving poor. “ We have got this culture now in some of these deprived areas where people are so dependent on food banks it is like a weekly shop for them,” he said.

Revealing his burger-espionage, he claimed to have spied, “One particular family going to the food bank two or three times a week to get their groceries and then, you know, I see them in McDonald’s two or three times a week.”

Anderson followed it up with a “better in my day” reference. He claimed there was a “different culture” in his youth, and people were more likely to take on extra work.

Unlike the ungrateful and revolting—in all senses—modern-day poor, Anderson recalled that in his childhood, “our garden was our foodbank”.

He said his parents had “made do” in the 1970s. Actually, his father was a miner, and miners did rather more than “make do”. Their 1972 strike shattered a Tory government and their 1974 strike brought down prime mister Ted Heath. But maybe his father was a scab.

Having gone for the poor and young people, Anderson completed the trinity by targeting refugees. Remember that Anderson was once a Labour Party councillor. But the local party suspended him in February 2018 after he received a community protection warning from the council for using boulders to block Travellers from “setting up camp at a site in the area”.

Now he says he sympathises with the racists who are attacking refugees in former hotels. Anderson said protesters were “just normal family people” with concerns about the safety of their community.

Speaking to the BBC’s Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, Anderson said, “When you live in a community, you expect to be safe and you don’t like sudden change. That is how humans behave.”

When asked if he had sympathy with people protesting outside the hotels, Anderson said, “Of course I do. These are not far right extremists.”

It’s an age-old Tory method to hide their contempt for all working class people by claiming to stick up for “real” workers against what they say are scroungers, outsiders and freeloaders.

Anderson knowingly plays with such tactics and his friends in the Cabinet chuckle along, hopeful he can pull in some support.

But be clear where it leads. It means the real prospect of heads broken and refugees’ homes set on fire. It sees desperate people shamed and slurred.

And anyone fooled by Anderson should know they are not just scapegoating others but conniving in their own demise—while the Tories laugh at us and fill their pockets.

It’s a disgusting piece of trickery that needs revenge from our side.