Perversity is a much undervalued British trait, much more redolent of our real psyche than queuing, drinking tea or being tolerant of foreigners and homosexuals — all things for which we are better renowned. Seeing Dunkirk as a victory was magnificently perverse. So, too, was electing a Labour government in 2005 shortly after we had invaded a sovereign country and created a civil war. For ‘perversity’ I suppose you could read ‘complexity’, although the two often amount to the same thing. Our reactions to stuff are never as straightforward as they should be — they are complex and therefore can seem perverse.
And so it is right now. For three years I have been banging on, boringly, that Labour faces the same sort of annihilation in its north of England (and indeed Midlands) blue-collar redoubts as it suffered in Scotland at the hands of the Scottish National Party. A liberal metropolitan party, out of touch with working-class voters and led by a clown-shoed moron, would be wiped out north of the Trent, I insisted. And so indeed it may well be.
But wiped out by whom? The obvious answer was Ukip, under Nigel Farage. Ukip at least championed the socially conservative values and anti-immigration, patriotic impulses which the northerners, including me, rather liked. Even if the redistributive and communitarian impulse wasn’t there, at least a good few boxes were ticked. So Ukip to gain and maybe the Tories too, an analysis seemingly reinforced by the glory of Brexit — yet another reason for northerners to vote Ukip or Tory: our antipathy to Brussels and what it stood for. And now we have the Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent Central by-elections in which to test such a thesis. The upshot may well be truly, Britishly perverse.
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