WHEN the world of politics tilts a little on its axis and its trajectory is slightly altered we like to reach for neatly-packaged theories to explain these wrinkles in time. We rehearse them avidly under the low gantry lights of our favourite boozer and the sodden scrutiny of chums – adding a little polish here and there – before presenting them fully-formed at Benjamin and Samantha’s in Hyndland the folllowing Saturday.

I first encountered the phenomenon as a teenager in the early 1980s when neighbours and older relatives returned to ours for drinks after Saturday night parish fund-raising dances. The talk then was of Margaret Thatcher as third generation Labour voters sought to convince each other why they had chosen to loosen their family’s ties to the party that had redeemed them. Many were the first in their families ever to own their own home and, newly-inducted into the property classes, felt they owed a debt of gratitude to Mrs Thatcher. Others felt that the “power of the unions” had to be “broken” and that the Iron Lady had done just that by facing down the miners.

You wanted to point out that none of them would be sitting there sipping Blue Nun and talking about avocado bathroom suites and their new Granada Ghias if Labour and the unions hadn’t emancipated their families from low incomes and bad outcomes in health and education. But your own theories were still forming and anyway you would be chided affectionately for spending too much time among university beer hall Communists and not enough of it at lectures.

You wanted to tell them too that Mrs Thatcher had waged a doctrinal and cultural war on the miners. She had done this as a means of destroying the trade union movement, the biggest obstacle separating her from her dream of society driven purely by market forces and where the worth of a person was measured only by their ability to turn a profit. In vain, you sought to appeal to their robust Christianity and the story of the money-changers in the temple and the Good Samaritan, only to be told that Mick McGahey and Arthur Scargill were God-hating Communists.

Looking back, you wished you had possessed the information gained many years later. Thus you would have been able to tell them that MI5 had infiltrated the National Union of Mineworkers to disseminate the lie, aided by Robert Maxwell and the Daily Mirror, that Mr Scargill was on the take. You could have shown how coal-mining was still a profitable industry when the last remaining pits began to shut and that Mrs Thatcher had spent £7 billion paying off working miners and making wastelands of their communities. Thus billions more were lost in productivity, unemployment benefits and the increased pressure on local health services and that you lot would be next up against the wall when Mrs Thatcher’s bell tolls again.

You could have told them about the McCrone Report and how Mrs Thatcher and her successors all conspired to conceal the true extent of Scotland’s oil wealth and how she had used tax revenues from it to fund her dismantling of Britain’s old and still productive industries.

Ah, but what about the right to take ownership of our own council houses? And then you could have asked them who they thought benefited most from that. What a boon that was to the financial services industry: millions of new customers clamouring for easy mortgages at crippling rates and the certain knowledge that unemployment, an unforeseen economic corrugation, sudden health issues and divorce would inevitably result in sweet multitudes of repossessions and the creation of the money-laundering state. In 2008 we learned how that turned out.

Another lie is being prepared which feeds on the curious outcomes of the last presidential election and the EU referendum. It’s currently marinading nicely in Britain’s chardonnay estates and where flaneurs gather to display their knowledge of the political tides which are changing the direction of our lives. As with all best-laid lies there is a degree of truth attached. This one states that the far-right’s new band of Armani demagogues and tribunes are now truly representative of the working classes. It floats on the multitudes of voters in North America’s rust belt who turned out for Donald Trump in 2016 and on the blue-collar vote in Britain that is sweeping the country out of the EU.

In the US it’s permitted President Trump and his chief propagandist Steve Bannon to proclaim that they are standing up for “the little man” and all those who have felt locked out or otherwise disenfranchised from Washington’s decision-making. Nigel Farage and his lickspittles in the UK Conservative Party have propagated a similar fiction.

On the day after the EU referendum I visited Hartlepool, a solidly-working class town on England’s North Sea coast which had just voted 70-30 to leave the EU. This is traditional Labour territory but fuelled by a sense of despair and resentment that its old car manufacturing and fishing industries had been allowed to run down and that nothing meaningful had replaced them. Each of the dozen or so local people who talked to me cited immigration as the principal factor in their decision to vote Leave. There didn’t seem to be that many immigrants in Hartlepool but decades of anti-immigrant stories in the English red-tops and the richly-funded lies of the Leave campaign had found their mark here.

The affluent extremists who have annexed Conservative policies across Europe and the US despise the blue-collar communities whose vote they kidnapped. They despise their Hicksville concerns; their beer and reality television addictions; their Three Lions and their barbecue complexions. They are valuable only as fodder to help Trump, Bannon, Boris Johnson and Farage attain power and thence to deploy it to bring about an 18th century society where the weak and the poor know their place; where women are chattels and where minorities are marginalised.

The trick is to avert their gaze by making enemies out of other nations; other cultures and colours and blaming them for their ills. The odd war helps too and carries the bonus of business opportunities for all their main political donors. It is the traditional means by which all Conservative governments maintain control and sew division. In the hands of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Boris Johnson it has become something more bestial.