How Tories and an obsequious media are softening us up for long, cold winter

Consider this: there aren’t enough middle-class and upper-class voters in the UK to ensure Conservative electoral dominance. Yet, since the end of the Second World War the Tories have been in power twice as long as Labour. For this to have come about has always required the votes of millions of working-class people.

Certainly, there is a variety of valid reasons why significant numbers of working-class voters choose to back the Conservatives at specific moments in British history. Those on the left who insist on patronising them or insulting their intelligence for making these choices risk being regarded as intellectually arrogant.

This was evident during the Brexit debate when a sort of left-wing and liberal consensus gathered pace that was chiefly characterised by intellectual snobbery. It portrayed Brexit supporters – especially those in the sprawling working-class hinterlands of North West England – as politically illiterate racists who simply didn’t know what was good for them.

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Such a view betrayed an ignorance of what these communities were about and what they’d experienced. It overlooked their sense of feeling alienated and marginalised by successive Labour and Conservative administrations which had signally failed to implement viable strategies to address the changing nature of industry in these regions.

Membership of the EU hadn’t led to sustainable jobs paying wages that offered security. Rather, it fed the exploitation of cheap foreign labour by predatory corporate players. The Tories’ assaults on trade unionism and New Labour’s refusal to reverse them meant that wages lagged behind rises in the cost of living and the scavenging instincts of the banks.

Even so, it still requires something much more to make working-class voters choose the Tories over the Labour Party at most of the post-war General Elections. It’s a social synchronicity reliant on a number of moving parts clicking into gear at the right time.

On Tuesday morning, we were given a glimpse of some of these on the two main television broadcasting platforms. On ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Richard Madeley and Susanna Reid were provided with a live tutorial by one of their top reporters on how to quiz government ministers trying to explain their chronic failures in addressing the energy price hikes.

The reporter, Martin Lewis, painstakingly explained to the hapless duo that the cheapest energy tariffs were now 50% more than at same time last year and that the price cap would rise by 12% next week and likely to increase 20% next April.

Furthermore, he explained to the presenters, the warm home discount which is meant to support vulnerable people and help them pay their energy bills is a mere £140 and has been for the last nine years. Yet in the last year alone the cheapest tariffs have gone up by 50% and the price cap is rising. “That does not add up,” said Lewis.

Yet, when UK Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng appeared a few minutes later he was permitted to squirm off the hook by continually stating that the government would “keep the warm energy payment”.

The rise in National Insurance contributions and the refusal to retain the Universal Credit uplift will force many more people to choose between rating and heating this winter. Of course, Kwarteng’s scant knowledge of recent industrial history probably doesn’t include the fact that many of our poorest citizens have already been forced into making this choice for several years.

At no point did it occur to the presenters or their producers to ask him if taking gas and electricity back under state control might be the best way of keeping the lights on this Christmas.

At one stage, the man tasked with managing the government’s business portfolio admitted he knew little of the 1970s energy crisis. “I don’t remember those days,” he said. He’d only “read about them”.

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On another item about the M25 protesters, Madeley proposed passing “emergency legislation” to deal with citizens trying to pressurise the government to insulate all of the UK’s 29 million leaky homes by 2030 and all social housing by 2025.

These are reasonable requests and stopping the traffic on Britain’s busiest highway seems a reasonable enough protest. But when 90% of your press is owned by a handful of billionaires who tremble when popular protests are effective what seems reasonable is soon rendered revolutionary and a threat to the fabric of society.

On the BBC, it was time once more to wheel out the royal family, an institution that can always be relied upon to come to the aid of the government whenever there’s a crisis or the punters are getting restless. Thus we were treated to an excruciatingly deferential interview with a courtier-journalist who’d just spent a large chunk of our money-making a documentary about the recently deceased Prince Philip.

Wasn’t it wonderful that so many members of the royal family had agreed to be interviewed, they all trilled. All three “journalists” then began to list the attributes that made the prince worthy of such adulation. Philip, it seems, was a literary giant; a philosopher; a theologian; and one of the great sages of the ages. Weren’t we all just lucky to have been blessed by his beatific presence among us?

It seems Prince Philip “quite liked kiddie chaos” and that he was “a hands-on dad” who read to his children at bedtime. These, we were assured, are among the highlights of a programme where 14 obscenely affluent and behaviourally dysfunctional members of the UK’s richest family have been given licence to lavish praise on their close relative, a man who drove carriages for a hobby. “They trust you to make a programme like this,” the programme-maker was gushingly told. And no wonder.

It echoed the tone of last week’s show the morning after tennis player Emma Raducanu’s thrilling win at the US Open the previous night. The main item about her victory wasn’t that she’d made history in becoming the first qualifier to lift a major tennis title but that the queen had sent her a congratulatory telegram.

We are being softened up for a long, cold winter. And, as usual, those with the fewest means of defence will bear the brunt of it. But a sprawling family of toy-town royals playing their part and an eternally obsequious press and media sticking to their lines means a lid will be kept on any signs of unrest or disquiet.

If this had happened on Jeremy Corbyn’s watch they’d be organising a military coup.