Whenever a left-wing politician wants to besmirch working-class populists or middle-class types who hold conservative opinions, they inevitably choose one of two tactics. Either they smear them as ‘far-right’ or they accuse them of being hopeless nostalgics who long for a mythical past.

On Monday, Jenny Riddell-Carpenter, the Labour MP for Suffolk Coastal, went one better by combining the two ploys in a single sentence. Speaking at a fringe event at the Labour conference in Liverpool, she voiced her concern at what kind of vision the parties of the right would peddle in the next general election.

This kind of hysterical, 24-hour obsessiveness is something we have come to expect from emotive, millennial leftists

This kind of hysterical, 24-hour obsessiveness is something we have come to expect from emotive, millennial leftists

‘It’ll be a vision, a nostalgic vision of Britain, that never really existed,’ she said. ‘It’ll be that warm ale, a black Labrador by your feet in a pub that doesn’t exist, and with symbolism of fox hunting all around them, it’ll be a very far-right nostalgic vision of Britain that we don’t want to have, [and] never really existed.’ The prospect of such a very far-right narrative paying dividends is so terrifying, she added, that it........

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