A GROUP of 22 Tory MPs and lords, describing themselves as the Common Sense Group, took to the letters pages of The Telegraph last week to rail against “powerful, privileged liberals rewriting our history in their image.”

How dare the snowflakes at the National Trust “implicitly tarnish one of Britain’s greatest sons,” Winston “gas-the-natives” Churchill, “by linking his family home with slavery and colonialism,” the 22 wrote in the billionaire Barclay brothers’ newspaper.

How could the social justice warriors at the National Maritime Museum cave into the PC brigade by promising to provide “multiple perspectives on history,” the letter cries, before going on to praise the “chairman [sic] of the Charity Commission, Baroness Stowell,” for reminding charities to stay out of politics.

The Common Sense Group, the letter says, was formed “to speak for the silent majority of voters tired of being patronised by elitist bourgeois liberals whenever issues such as immigration or law and order are raised.”

Wait a minute. Who are these self-appointed spokespeople of the majority — comprised of 59 Tory MPs and lords, allegedly, though only 22 of them put their name to the letter — calling bourgeois?

The median weekly earnings for full-time employees in April 2019 was £585, according to the Office for National Statistics.

I am no maths genius, but if you times £585 by 52 weeks then you’re looking at a yearly salary of something like £30,420.

As of April 1 this year, MPs are paid £81,932 a year. Divide that by 52 weeks and you get a weekly income of something around £1,528. 

That’s two-and-a-half times more weekly cash jangling about in your tweeds than your average Joe’s jeans.

Most peers in the House of Lords (none of whom are elected, let’s remember) don’t get a salary — probably because they’re rich enough to work for free. But they can claim £153 or £305 for turning up.

Now, according to HM Revenue and Customs data from 2016-17, a salary of £75,300 a year puts you in the top 5 per cent of UK earners.

Let’s take a look at the leader of the Common Sense Group, the Right Honourable Sir John Hayes, CBE, FRSA, and MP for the Lincolnshire constituency of South Holland and The Deepings. 

On top of his top-5-per-cent-in-the-country salary he receives £30,000 a year for 40-50 hours of work as president of HBSA — a company that, according to the MPs’ register of financial interests, provides technical and vocational education. 

Hayes rakes in another £50,000 a year for 80-90 hours’ work as strategic adviser to BB Energy Trading Ltd, an international energy company.

And for teaching 20-30 hours a month as a part-time professor in political studies at the University of Bolton, Sir John “man-of-the-people” Hayes receives another £38,000 per annum.

It’s worth pointing out that on the latest version of the MPs’ register of financial interests, Hayes says he consulted the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments about each of these appointments.

That’s an extra £118,000 before tax on top of the £81,932 MP salary. I doubt the liberal ideologues at the National Trust and National Maritime Museum are carrying around that much change.

And though I’m sure some of these charity types who triggered the Common Sense Group probably do buy a bit of quinoa at Waitrose, are subscribers to the Guardian and go on skiing holidays, they most likely do not own the means of production.

As if accusing people of belonging to the elite bourgeoisie wasn’t bad enough, the Common Sense Group appears to have a more nefarious purpose, spreading anti-semitic conspiracy theories.

In the letter, the Common Sense Group says: “Part of our mission is to ensure that institutional custodians of history and heritage, tasked with safeguarding and celebrating British values, are not coloured by cultural Marxist dogma colloquially known as the ‘woke agenda’.”

The woke agenda? Wait, what the hell is cultural Marxism?

In my conversations with liberals, socialists, communists, anarchists and lefties of all types over the years, I’ve never once heard anyone talk about cultural Marxism.

And that’s because cultural Marxism exists only in the minds of the far right and the politically ill-informed.

The term has its roots in what the Nazis referred to as “cultural Bolshevism,” which they assigned to basically any art form they felt didn’t promote their hateful ideology or genocidal racial theories.

Cultural Marxism postulates that the Frankfurt School — a group of Marxist German and Jewish academics who fled the Nazis in the 1930s, resettled in the US and were largely responsible for the critical theory school of thought — was responsible for spreading intellectual contagions (ie feminism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, etc) among its students who then went on to infiltrate the upper echelons of government, the legal system, the media and cultural industries.

For whatever reason, the tin-foil hat brigade believe that the Frankfurt School intended to bring down the West with these ideas and path the way for foreigners, women, socialists, LGBTQ people, asylum-seekers, commies, hippies, Jews, Muslims, Black Lives Matter activists, etc to take control.

Of course, the Frankfurt School academics and their school of thought had nothing to do with any of that. 

Critical theory, in a nutshell, is the study of the relationship between ideology and mass culture (TV, radio, news, art etc).

Cultural Marxism appeared as a new conspiracy theory in the ’90s and gained a following in the 2010s thanks to online far-right personalities (Alex Jones, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage), pseudo-intellectuals (Jordan Peterson, Steve Bannon), white supremacist terrorists (Anders Breivik), and now a growing number of Tories (Suella Braverman, Ben Bradley, Toby Young, Tom Hunt, and probably more).

Whether the Common Sense Group actually believes the conspiracy theory or not is not the point.

The point is one, that by spreading it, they’re sowing more confusion and hate into an already charged society for their own nefarious political purposes, and two, the Common Sense Group and the other Tories who spread the hateful conspiracy won’t face any consequences at all for doing so.