I’ve finally worked out what watching Lee Anderson speak is like. It was today (5 September) at this year’s Reform conference after he was introduced as a “famous international comedian”. Lee Anderson is a Peter Kay set gone wrong. Like Peter Kay, that is, he relies on sequences, routines, anecdotes and political catchphrases, all ungirded by his working-class upbringing and demotic. He is substantially a nostalgia act, a reminder of the world of working men’s clubs, half pints of bitter, and packets of ten Bensons. Unlike Peter Kay, however, he is awful.
First the catchphrases, which start from his entrance, where Lee leads a chant of “Here we go”, conducting the audience with swinging arms. Then he really warms up. We had “Mastermind” David Lammy. We had “I want my country back” (indeed we had the panto follow-up: “Do you want your country back?” “Yes!”). We had, “Do not fear, Reform are ‘ere.” And we had “Reward the workers, not the shirkers.”
Then the routines. First, there was a gag about Angela Rayner’s financial adviser – it was actually Diane Abbott! Then there was another about Jeremy Kyle, who at this year’s Reform conference has bizarrely been given the job of roaming around interviewing attendees, and generally pretending that he is nice. “Where’s that lie detector?” Lee asked him. “Keir Starmer would run a mile if he saw that.” Then Lee told us about his schooldays. He called his teachers “Miss” and “Sir” – not “Mx”! And there weren’t any drag queens reading stories either – they would have been exiled to the “funny farm”.
This is mostly pretty harmless stuff, if it were confined to some upstairs pub room in Ashfield as part of an overexcited bid at stand-up. But the problem is that Lee’s politics are like this too, formulated in cliches and visceral generalisations. Britain has “lost that work ethic”, he told us, the one he learned down the pit with the “lads”, “doing a shift”. And learned from his parents, who worked long hours and tended their vegetable patch in the garden at the weekend – “that was our food bank”.
But since the days of 1970s Nottinghamshire, a rot has set in. We have a generation of young people who have “never heard an alarm clock go off”. We’ve become a nation of whingers, begging for a “sicknote for six months off with mental illnesses”. Some hard work – some “decent graft” and “tough love” – would put us straight. “Benefits should be a safety net, not a career option.” Oh, and that £20bn black hole? Lee could fix that in an instant: stop paying for David Lammy’s flights and food.
It goes without saying that is a wildly inaccurate assessment of Britain’s civic culture and social issues. For one, in Lee’s analysis of where this world – graft, respectability, early mornings – vanished to, he doesn’t utter the word “Thatcher” once. The same petit-bourgeois virtues that she personified are elided with a lost world of working-class respectability, exactly the one that her policies helped to dissolve. And while Lee Anderson’s work at the Citizens Advice Bureau and supporting homeless care leavers after his mining career ended should be commended, it seems to have a produced a hard, mean, unsympathetic politics. “That was our food bank.”
But even if it’s wild, it’s obvious what use this act, and this politics, has to Reform UK. Nostalgia is like the rain in Britain: bitter, chilling and ubiquitous. The belief that the good is gone and the worst is on its way is a reliable human lapse. In the context of relative British decline, it can become a vicious one. Increasingly, the direction of our political future is being driven by visions of some imagined past.
[See also: Farage dances on Angela Rayner’s political grave]
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