Why would the English working class consider voting Labour again?

It’s lovely to see the former geographical entity Lindsey back in the headlines, a fleeting visit from a ghost from the past. Lindsey was one of the three subdivisions of the great county of Lincolnshire, if you remember, along with landlocked Kesteven and dank, flat, blustery Holland. It was abolished in 1974, simply swept away — the bit in the news became part of something called Humberside, but with a Doncaster postcode, neither one thing nor the other.

Ghosts from the past: I swear, on my evening news this week, I saw at Lindsey a picket standing on a picket line beside a brazier in the swirling snow, shouting things at scabs — all things which one imagined had been made illegal by the end of the 1970s, except for the scabs of course. Then there was the language of the picket interviewed: he referred to the gastarbeiten, the foreigners taken on by the oil company Total and to whom the pickets strenuously objected, as ‘Eyeties and Portuguese’.