Right-on Labour is absolutely trucked for turning its back on the working classes
“I LIKE trucking – and I like to truck,” smirked Rowan Atkinson, a licensed lorry driver, as gorgeous Pamela Stephenson caressed his gear stick.
His Not The Nine O’Clock News comedy sketch captured the 1980s image of the trucker as King Of The Road.
Driving a 40-ton articulated lorry was every young man’s dream, along with steam locos and the Harley-Davidson V-Rod.
Truckers had their own trade union, the giant Transport and General Workers, founded by Labour’s legendary Ernest Bevin, himself a lorry driver.
Its two million members dictated government policy, putting its tanks on the lawn of Labour Prime Ministers such as Harold Wilson.
So with truckers now at the heart of a national panic over food and fuel deliveries, where is the voice of the mighty T&G, now vaguely known as Unite?
Its brand new leader, Socialist-backed Sharon Graham, is nowhere to be seen.
She has snubbed Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour conference in Brighton to focus instead on “visiting picket lines”.
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Her contempt for the Labour leader — and for the real-life worries of her own members — reflects the gulf between Starmer and millions of grassroots Labour voters abandoned by their own party.
Her focus on truck drivers’ woes seems more about racial and gender diversity than working conditions. Starmer is trapped in a nightmare of his own creation.
He wants to kick out the looney Left, led by Jeremy Corbyn, the man he campaigned for two years ago as Britain’s first hardline socialist PM.
He also wants to expunge the Militant parasites invited in by bacon butty mauler Ed Miliband.
But his party won’t have it, especially Corbynite Sharon Graham, whose Unite union has a veto, and Sir Keir’s gobby deputy, Angela Rayner.
This is a mutual suicide pact in which voters are the biggest losers. Labour has made itself unelectable and the country has no effective Opposition at the very moment it needs it most.
Nor is this all Starmer’s fault. The rot set in for Labour voters 20 years ago, when Tony Blair opened the floodgates to mass immigration. Chancellor Gordon Brown’s economic policy was built on cheap foreign labour — and anyone who objected was branded “racist”.
It was the beginning of the end for traditional Red Wall seats in the North and the Midlands, whose voters saw their jobs disappear and earnings shrink. This, not racism, is why they voted Brexit.
HGV drivers symbolise this gulf between Labour’s metropolitan elite and the hardworking families they claim to represent.
Truckers get up at dawn, drive to depots, load up, then sit in “traffic-calming” gridlock before arriving to unload.
They are often away from home all week, sleeping in their cabs on lonely lay-bys, eating rubbish food, hunting for loos and showers. All for £35,000 a year if they are lucky.
Now, in the face of stark reality, employers are ready to double their money to £70,000. “We are treated like vaga-bonds,” says one. “It’s a young man’s game, but no young people want to do it and the older ones have had enough.”
Labour is paying dearly for turning its back on the working classes — including many Sun readers who, like White Van Man, drive for a living.
It is the reason why Starmer & Co trail behind Boris Johnson’s Tories in almost every poll since the election.
But it is not the only reason.
No party will win a general election as long as it condemns an MP like Rosie Duffield for declaring that: “Only women have a cervix.”
No party will win if it tolerates anti-Semitism or sides with Russia and Islamist terror groups against national security.
Ex-Labour MP Lord (Ian) Austin sums it up. “Decent, working-class people who used to vote Labour in places like Dudley, where I grew up and served as MP, look on in bewilderment,” he says.
“Sir Keir must scrap the obsession with trans issues, the prevaricating on national security and the waffling about ‘public ownership’.
“As things stand, Labour is too weak to win an election, yet strong enough to prevent an alternative party developing.
“That is a tragedy for the millions who want a decent electable alternative to the Government but are currently politically homeless.”
Perfect storm
LABOUR has its work cut out criticising the Government over the fuel crisis.
It was Labour who drove the Net Zero policy now hitting household energy bills.
They also opposed fracking and a new UK coal mine which could deliver back-up power generation.
Labour ministers also created the contract under which GPs now pick and choose their working hours. Despite this Perfect Storm, ministers believe the worst may already be over.
“The lights will not go off. We will not need candles for Christmas. There will not be food shortages,” predicts one.
“Indeed, a greater risk came – and went – at Easter when everyone shut their borders because of Covid.”