Winners and losers

Condescension is the language of fools

We live in an increasingly global world. What happens overseas affects us in the UK, and vice versa, to a greater or lesser extent. Which is why, even though it could be said to be none of my actual business, I spend a lot of time studying the politics of other nations. It’s not just because I’m a politics geek. In the last few months, of course, my attention has been on the US Presidential Election.

It will come as a  surprise to precisely no-one that I was rooting for Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party candidate, and that my heart sank to my boots when the result was announced.

I purposefully stayed away from the news until the last minute because, as long as I didn’t know the result, there was always the chance that it would work out fine. Alas, when I opened the news bulletin box, it became apparent that Schrodinger had well and truly done for this particular Democratic cat.

Last time Donald Trump was President, I didn’t hide how little I thought of him, whether as a human being, a politician, or as the Leader Of The Free World. At the BMF Members Day Conference in September, Justin Webb, the former BBC North America Editor, answered my question when I asked how it was that so many American voters appeared be favouring Trump in the run-up to last week. His response was that it had a lot to do with the economy, and that Harris had made a lot of decisions and policies in the past that seemed, to much of the electorate, to mark her out as a far-left candidate. Yet, I still spent much of last Wednesday trying to work out why so many people, so many women, voted for Trump rather than Harris.

The dust having settled slightly, I’m not sure that Trump won the election so much as the Democrats lost it.

Webb was right, in that the rampant inflation that has beset the US economy was a huge factor. But so was the way that the Democrats seemed to come across as the party of the Liberal elite, the party that rich Hollywood stars could get behind, stars who have nothing in common with people who are struggling with soaring bills, or who worry about what they see as increasing levels of illegal immigration. Both things that the Trump campaign majored on.

There is a whole slew of reasons why the result went the way it did: the economy is one, the seeming inability of the Biden administration to curb inflation is another, but one that has struck me quite powerfully this week is that part of the Harris campaign assumed women would vote for her because she was a woman. That gender politics, abortion rights, identity issues would trump, as it were, concerns about economics.

What did it for me was the advert, narrated by the actress Julia Roberts, showing two women in the polling booth sharing secret smiles because they dared to go against their Trump-supporting husbands and vote for Harris. “You can vote any way you want,” the voiceover goes, “and no one will ever know.  Remember what happens in the booth stays in the booth”.

Wow. You mean that in 2024, a woman could actually use her own mind and choose her own candidate, instead of just falling in-line with the views of her husband? Who knew? It’s so patronising, it made my jaw drop, and my skin crawl. It’s here, and it’s awful

We spend a lot of time in this industry – day-job shoehorn alert – worrying about increasing its diversity, about making it more attractive for a wider range of people so that they will want to find building materials sector careers. The Construction Inclusion Coalition is doing sterling work in this area. But we have to do it without patronising those we are trying to attract.

As my Gen Z teenagers would say, that advert gives me the ick, and I might have voted for the other guy too, if that had been targeted at me.