The Greens’ Hannah Spencer is no friend of the working class

Finally, the posh left has found a plumber it likes. Having for years wrung their untoiled hands over ‘gammon’ – meaning ruddied-faced blokes who work for a living – leisured leftists have at last happened upon a tradesperson that doesn’t make them come out in hives. Having usually made a mad dash for the chaise longue whenever a rough-speaking fella with wrenches comes to fix their bog, now activist types have discovered a plumber they can bear to be in the same room with. And you won’t believe it – it just so happens to be a plumber who shares every one of their naff, unworldly bollocks beliefs.

Yes, it’s Hannah Spencer, the inescapable, gurning candidate for the Green Party in the Gorton and Denton by-election. She’s a plumber. But, unless you’re lucky enough to live under a rock, you already knew that. Because every lily-handed adherent to what madly passes for ‘the left’ in 21st-century Britain has been yelling it from the rooftops. ‘She’s a plumber!’, they cry and tweet, blissfully unaware of how Bloomsbury Group they sound. ‘A real-life working-class person’, they might well as say, as they fawn like latter-day Lady Chatterleys over the first grafter they’ve ever seen who hasn’t made them want to file a harassment claim.

Ms Spencer is a 34-year-old plumber who has represented the Green Party on Trafford Council in Greater Manchester since 2023. Hypnotits Zack Polanski, the Green leader, announced her as the party’s pick for what promises to be an eventful by-election in Gorton and Denton. It looks like it will be a two-horse clash between Ms Spencer and the army of grads, trans people and Islamic sectarians who’ll be doing her door-knocking, and Reform UK’s Matt Goodwin, the academic turned GB News presenter. ‘The Houses of Parliament… leaky roofs, crumbling walls. I think they need a plumber!’, said Polanski. Guys, she’s a plumber!

My take: good for her. Britain needs plumbers. It’s the great unsung trade, the toil that keeps Britain flowing – literally. But what sticks in the craw is the bourgeois left’s overnight conversion to the cause of Blighty’s plumbers. These are people who agitated day and night for the voiding of the oiks’ vote for Brexit. These are people who collectively shit their pants over the ‘ham-like’ lower orders, those ‘nest[s] of gammon’ who require ‘regular spoon-feeding from the trashy tabloids’ to tell them what to think. We weren’t born yesterday. We know who you mean: working men who’ve never darkened the door of a university and think it’s mad to put illegal immigrants in four-star hotels when there are veterans going without.

They love Ms Spencer because she is the least-plumber-like plumber. She’ll never have a rolled-up copy of the Sun in her arse pocket. She’ll never be caught taking a five-minute break to find out the football scores. She’s the only plumber in the land who’d effortlessly blend in with a soiree of Novara readers on London Fields. She might get her hands dirty for a living but she adheres to every luxury belief of the remote establishment. Modernity is polluting, borders are overrated, that hulking fella in a dress is a woman – she buys it all. The digital left is cock-a-hoop because they’ve found something as rare as hen’s teeth – a working person who believes all the same post-truth crap they do.

I don’t care if she pursues a working-class trade – I just want to know what she will do for working-class people. And the fact is the luxury ideology she propagates is measurably, provably anti-working class. Take Net Zero. The climate-change alarmism that fuels this neo-religion is an objectively anti-working class ideology. Under Polanski, the Greens have raged against the building of new nuclear reactors and further oil exploration in the North Sea. And just like that, tens of thousands of well-paid jobs sacrificed to appease the gods of weather. So it’s cool to be a TikToking plumber but don’t even think about becoming an oil-rig worker. Such devil’s work is ‘pure climate vandalism’, say the hysterics of Spencer’s party.

There is currently a mass revolt against the deathly, job-destroying creed of Net Zero. Dutch, French and German farmers have risen up against their ruling classes’ insane eco-rules. Construction workers in Poland chant ‘Fuck the Green Deal’. Seventy-seven million good Americans voted for the man who says ‘Drill, baby, drill’. Support for Net Zero policies is seriously flagging among ordinary Brits. They can see what a staggeringly expensive folly it will be, laying waste to jobs and hiking up taxes and for what? Britain only emits around one per cent of the world’s greenhouse gasses.

The Greens’ aristocratic disdain for industry is a kind of luxuriant apocalypticism that might flatter the ‘End Times’ delusions of smug influencers but which massively undermines the right of every man to work and live comfortably. It’s the same with their other hobbyish obsessions. Take trans. Polanski thinks a woman can have a penis. Ms Spencer has been hailed as a warrior ‘for trans rights’. Go tell that to Scottish nurse Sandie Peggie, or London nurse Jennifer Melle, or the Darlington nurses – hard-working women who were punished by the boss class for the uppity sin of saying they don’t want fellas in their changing rooms or for ‘misgendering’ a paedo. Everyone in Gorton and Denton who sees Ms Spencer at the front door should ask her this: ‘If you’re a friend of the working class, does that mean you support the right of working-class women to have a bloke-free changing area in the workplace?’ A simple yes or no will suffice, Hannah.

Then there’s her bristling at last year’s outbreak of flag-waving. Working people’s hoisting of the Union flag and the St George’s Cross was designed to ‘intimidate our communities’ and ‘cause division’, she said, like a Guardianista with a plunger. That flag-waving was a cry of the left behind against the borderless mania of the neoliberal elites. It was a plea by working-class communities for a restoration of a sense of national togetherness following the savage trouncing of sovereignty by capital and its apologists. How telling that Ms Spencer, supposed champion of grafting folk, couldn’t see that.

So you can fix a sink. Great, that’s an important job. But if you are repping an ideology that will thwart the creation of good jobs, slow down growth, give men free rein in women-only areas, let the boss class reprimand female employees and demonise decent people simply for feeling patriotic, then you know what? You’re no friend of the working class. And that’s why all those preening gammon-haters love you.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.