Barry Sheerman's Gillian Duffy moment - Telegraph.co.uk (blog)

Barry Sheerman, Labour MP for Huddersfield

Who do you think is the most sympathetic character?

A) A Polish worker on low wages doing long hours serving the public food
B) An unemployed northerner
C) A Member of Parliament

I would imagine that in most people's minds the order is A-B-C, with a minority opting for B-A-C. Unsurprising then that Labour MP Barry Sheerman annoyed a lot of people when he made a "little St George's day rant" about his bacon sandwich. As this paper reports.

The veteran backbencher was accused of xenophobia after he used Twitter to vent his frustration at poor service at London's Victoria Station on St George's Day.

He wrote: "Just had worst coffee & bacon bap in London at Victoria Station. Why can't Camden Food Co employ English staff?"

The MP then responded: "I am not a xenophobe. I am an MP and I represent the good folk of Huddersfield not Gdansk!"

Mr Sheerman has defended his comments, and said British people should be first in line for jobs over foreign workers.

Taking aside the economic arguments – that massive, unpopular welfare reform would have to be introduced to remove our reliance on cheap immigrant labour and a lot of Sheerman's constituents might have to move south – to understand your reaction to this statement you should read Jonathan Haidt's Righteous Mind, which my colleague Tom Chivers and I have already reviewed.

In fact so much of our view on the subject of immigration is formed by the care/harm foundation, our ingrained need to protect the weak and vulnerable from the powerful and strong. We all have this instinct, although in liberals it is less balanced by other concerns, and most people, either because of personal experience or because of how the media portrays them, see immigrants as victims, even when this is not always the case.

Clearly a minimum wage Polish immigrant doing her best to keep the wolf from the door is more sympathetic than an MP, even a Labour one (and if he'd been a Tory he'd have been out of the party before you could say przepraszam).

Yet Sheerness is of course still right – he represents Huddersfield, not Poland. His first duty is to his constituents. In fact, and even discounting his job, as a human being he owes more loyalty to the people around him.

In his review of Haidt's book David Goodhart pointed out how horrified his friends were by the thought that one might wish to help one's countrymen more than foreigners. It followed Gordon Brown's much criticised "British jobs for British workers" speech. He wrote:

In most other places in the world today, and indeed probably in Britain itself until about 25 years ago, such a statement about a job preference for national citizens would have seemed so banal as to be hardly worth uttering. Now the language of liberal universalism has ruled it beyond the pale.

My fellow partygoers were all too representative of a part of liberal, educated Britain. Shami Chakrabarti, of the human rights group Liberty, has argued: "In the modern world of transnational and multinational power we must decide if we are all 'people' or all 'foreigners' now."

Oliver Kamm, the centrist commentator, said to me recently that it was morally wrong to discriminate on grounds of nationality, ruling out the "fellow citizen favouritism" that most people think that the modern nation state is based on.

And according to George Monbiot, a leading figure of the liberal left, "Internationalism… tells us that someone living in Kinshasa is of no less worth than someone living in Kensington… Patriotism, if it means anything, tells us we should favour the interests of British people [before the Congolese]. How do you reconcile this choice with liberalism? How… do you distinguish it from racism?"

Yet the universalism that New Labour embraced, which made people at dinner parties feel all fluffy, warm and morally superior, is actually a monumentally selfish, antisocial philosophy. As Harriet Sergeant once wrote: "They seem unaware that in a society without gatekeepers, it is the weak, the inarticulate and the elderly – surely many of Labour's own natural constituents – who are the first to suffer."