Vince Cable and the case of the toxic electorate

Vince Cable is rarely out of the news. Perhaps that is a little unfair to him. He ensures that he is never out of the news. This week he has been holding forth about the electorate. The people he ostensibly represents. This is a democracy after all. But Vince doesn’t like the British people very much. And it is not just Tory voters who fall foul of his generous views on immigration. He thinks that even LibDem supporters have let him down.

Of course politicians often feel let down by the electorate. They don’t always show the proper deference which those in high office have come to expect. It was not so long ago that Gordon Brown described a life-long Labour supporter as a ‘bigot’ because she expressed concern about the effects of immigration on the working class, mostly Labour voting neighbourhood in which she lived. Gordon Brown was forced into a humiliating apology in that case. But many other politicians share the same views. We are not the electorate they think they deserve.

Vince Cable is almost unique among politicians in that he has such an almost impossibly high view of his abilities and achievements that he is quite willing to insult the population to their faces, believing that no reasonable person could disagree with any of his opinions. And when the population does, it is clearly the population itself, the demos, the plebs, who are being unreasonable and need to step into line.

Speaking to LibDem activists, he went far beyond a veiled criticism of particular views and opinions held by the British population, and plainly told us all that our views consitute ‘an absolutely toxic public opinion’. What does that mean? To be toxic is to be poisonous, to be lethal and harmful, damaging an destructive. They are views which must be eradicated for our own good. Indeed Vince Cable hears our pain, as so many politicians do, but knows what we really want. He comforts himself that the electorate uses language around the issue of immigration that “they don’t really mean”.

This is not so very far removed from the issue of sexual violence, a subject that th LibDems seem unable to deal with. When the population says ‘No!’, Vince Cable knows that we mean ‘Yes!’

But this time, Vince, we just mean ‘No!’. No to more uncontrolled immgration. No to schools being swamped with children who don’t speak English so that the education of British children suffers. No to the NHS struggling under a massive increase in the immigrant birth rate. No to the introduction of Female Genital Mutilation, to child marriage, to honour killings, to sex-trafficking and sex gangs preying on our young girls, to TB and other diseases we had once thought eradicated. No to the cheapest housing being taken up by 5 or 6 foreign workers so that our own young families are priced out of the market. No to the first steps on the employment ladder being taken by immigrant workers.

This time we mean ‘No!’. If you think our views are toxic Vince, then it is you, and those like you, whose politics is incompatible with democracy. You don’t get to change the electorate, though the political class has tried very hard over the last decade to do just that. But we do get to change our politicians, and you will hear us say ‘No!’ soon enough.