Jaguar’s disastrous makeover has left many people wondering if it isn’t April Fool’s Day. It’s not, of course. After 89 years of success with pale, stale males, Jaguar – which is relaunching as an electric-only brand – has decided a new clientele is in order.
Its logo, written as JaGUar, ‘seamlessly blend(s) upper and lower case characters in visual harmony’, the company claims. Jaguar’s managing director, Rawdon Glover – who gives his pronouns on LinkedIn as ‘he/him’ – declared that ‘the time for us to take small, conservative steps has gone’. Jaguar wants new customers, who will ‘be younger than before, affluent, urban, looking for exclusivity’. One car journalist present at the rebrand launch this week likened the experience to being ‘trapped in a cult’s conference’.
Jaguar’s rebrand is similar in tone to a report by an influential French left-wing think-tank called Terra Nova in 2011. Like Jaguar, Terra Nova believed that the Socialist Party must break with its past in order to achieve success.
‘The France of tomorrow is above all united by cultural and progressive values,’ their report stated. ‘It wants change. It is tolerant, open, optimistic and inclusive…it is opposed to an electorate that defends the present and the past against change.’
The Socialist Party fell for this drivel hook, line and sinker. As a result, the party has gone from 280 MPs in the 2012 legislative elections to 66 in 2024. The Socialists only exist as part of Jean-Luc Melenchon’s left-wing coalition, which is dominated by his la France Insoumise.
It turned out that the France of tomorrow wasn’t quite so united by ‘cultural and progressive values’ as the Socialists imagined.
What are these Progressive ‘values’? Tolerance, openness, optimism and inclusivity, if Terra Nova’s report is anything to go by. But in reality, all too many progressives are intolerant, narrow-minded and judgemental. ‘Inclusivity’ is strictly according to their terms and conditions; so, for example, a woman such as Kemi Badenoch, who should be accorded respect for being appointed the first black female leader of the Tories, is attacked by some of those on the left for being ‘the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class’.
Progressives are tolerant only to those who toe their ideological line. Step out of that line, and the insults fly. ‘Deplorables’, ‘Garbage’, ‘Gammons’, ‘Karens’, ‘Little Englanders’ and, of course, the progressives’ favourite twin set: ‘fascist’ and ‘far-right’.
Perhaps the most revealing word in the reporting of Jaguar’s rebranding is ‘urban’. Across the West, from the USA to Britain to France and Germany, Progressives overwhelmingly reside in the cities; it’s the yokels/rednecks/ploucs (French for yokel) who live in the backward provinces.
Donald Trump triumphed in all but the east and west coast States, while Marine Le Pen and her party dominate the French countryside but have scant support in the big cities. Here people vote for the left, like the Socialist Raphael Glucksmann, who in 2018 said: ‘When I go to New York or Berlin, I feel more at home, culturally speaking, than when I go to Picardy.’
Picardy is in the same corner of north-east France as Hénin, once a staunch left-wing mining community but which is now the fiefdom of Marine Le Pen. Instead of trying to win back the voters who turned to Le Pen because they felt abandoned by the left, Melenchon allegedly insults them. François Ruffin, a deputy in the French National Assembly, claims in his book that Mélenchon described voters in the region as ‘sweating alcohol from the morning…they smelled bad…Almost all of them obese…’. Mélenchon does not appear to have commented on the claims.
But whether he said it or not, such sentiment isn’t confined to French politics.
Jaguar will unveil its new electric GT model at the start of December and the carmaker is gambling on attracting this younger, urban Progressive customer. It may well appeal to some of this demographic. But at what cost?
As the French Socialists have discovered, you alienate your traditional electoral base at your peril. The same goes for the American democrats. In August this year, Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic presidential nomination at the party’s convention. ‘I see a nation that is ready to move forward, ready for the next step in the incredible journey that is America,’ thundered Harris.
Her eyes must have been playing tricks on her. Are Jaguar’s?
