PLUMBERS ought to vote Tory or Reform, not Green. Why? Because they are usually independent small businesspeople who exhibit all the enterprising qualities that are attributed to those who put Mrs Thatcher into power a few generations ago. And yet the Green victor in the by-election was a plumber.
Plumbers are socially indispensable and, rightly, often with the pay of professionals. They are probably best categorised as SMEs (Small and Medium size businesses). Plumbing is highly skilled, requiring knowledge of water and heating distribution systems, relative pressures, smart controls, mechanical drawings, renewable energy, tool expertise and relevant mathematics. The best-known plumber in the UK is probably Charlie Mullins, who started by repairing taps himself and in 2021 sold his company, Pimlico Plumbers, for around £140m.
The victor in the Gorton and Denton by-election was a very impressive communicator and plumber, Hannah Spencer. How is it possible that she stood for a party which, if you look at Zak Polanski’s ambitions, will pretty much destroy our economy as well as ending any influence the UK might have in the world for ever more? (Which means being unable to defend the economic livelihoods of plumbers and everyone else.)
She did so by attracting the votes from her polar opposites, communities with the unforgiving mindset of religious conformists whose ideas about the economy, as about society, are medieval.
Hannah’s interests are surely represented by a free enterprise party? So why would plumbers vote Green?
The first point is that cultural leftists are just as terrified of the future as cultural conservatives. They too fear that our economy won’t provide for us if we don’t revitalise and reform it. They don’t, however, blame the state for over regulation and excessive taxation, but ‘the rich’.
They are not entirely wrong. The greed of business managers pocketing huge salaries and payoffs, of private equity asset strippers and of overpaid state bureaucracy, the culture of selfishness so well exemplified by Philip Greene or Peter Mandelson, these are as equally abhorrent to SME people as to teachers and other white collarites.
To get these guys on side, to stop them voting Green, an insurgent party must not only (rightly) blame left-wing ideology for our disastrous state, but also admit the irresponsibility of many of the rich and the failure of governments to support SMEs, freelancers and the development of start-ups in every field.
The second point is that the Greens, under the rabble-rousing fantasist Zak Polanski, have managed to seduce the religious vote not merely because of their Marxist economic ideas or stance on Gaza, but because of perceptions of Reform being hostile to all ethnic minorities.
Whether we like it or not, many British electors now come from another culture and speak another mother tongue. A political party which seeks to represent the whole of the UK, must speak to them just as much as to any other fraction of the British electorate. This doesn’t mean giving up on the fight to stop immigration: why should it when very large numbers of immigrants themselves oppose more immigration and certainly oppose illegal immigration.
Instead of complaining about the Greens’ use of Urdu election literature, Reform should consider carefully how to address the concerns of the ethnic minorities without abandoning its appeal to those who fear the influence of ever growing Muslim electorates. Not easy, but necessary.
For Reform in Scotland, there is a very clear message: it is that Reformers have to work out how to detach nationalists from voting SNP and Labour people from turning to the Greens. We need a patriotic programme that unites on economic issues and offers solutions to the immigration crisis without appearing to want to persecute.
It will be disastrous to be seen as championing the rich or swatting ethnic minorities. Reform is very fortunate in having Malcolm Offord as leader – because he’s not a professional politician and is quite different from the misfits and jobsworths who are clamouring to be let into Reform from the Tory party. He and Danny Kruger are capable people with intellectual and commercial hinterlands that even the most negative hacks can’t easily write off. They should be given their heads to chart a course which stops the Greening of the plumbers.
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