Entries Tagged 'General Election' ↓

On the twitter feeds:

Alasdair Ross thinks that Mrs Duffy should be grateful (even as a joke that’s poor taste)

Soo Thomas thinks that she should lap it up like a good soldier

Julian Swainson thinks its their fault for being working class

Ipswich Labour say nothing

Not one “That was awful” or “She was not a bigot”. Was there a condemnation of the Prime Minister’s behaviour and a clear statement that talking about immigration is perfectly legitimate? Was there hell.

This is the real face of Labour, when they are safely in their car and the microphone is turned off. To Labour activists Gordon Brown’s crime was not the hateful thing he said, but being caught.

Whatever you say about the Tories, they don’t hate 80% of the people who vote for them.

My majority was this big before you became leader

Thanks to Ipswich Spy for pointing out that Caroline Spelman was visiting Monmouth Court with Ben Gummer. Being in an in-play ward in a marginal seat is definitely fun, but it’s exhausting. As she’s the Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government you wait ages for a shadow front bench spokesman to turn up and suddenly they’re all bunched together. The East Anglian Daily Times have a piece on this as does the Evening Star.

From Mrs Duffy:

What did I say to be bigoted? What was bigoted in that what I said? I just asked about the national debt?

And you’ve been a Labour supporter all your life?

Yeah. My family before me. Everybody.

I agree with Gordon

12.30 Friday 30th April.

Come along and berate him. In Bridge we’re much more likely to berate our politicians. I was told that it’s something about Old Stoke, but I’ve seen it in the Hayes, on Wherstead Road and the Maidenhall Estate. Wherever you go Bolshie Bridge still lives.

I’ve also had two Labour councillors being quite nice (one by his standards, admittedly) about my blog. I dislike it when Ben Gummer is nice about it, but I’m doing something wrong when Labour councillors are being nice about this.

So here’s something to stop them:

~I would love to be judged by your record, Gordon

Do you prefer this?

Or this?

And for some political balance, this?

Labour’s broadcast is urging people to be violent to canvassers. That’s rather dangerous, for them.

After all Gordon Brown has told everyone in the country what he thinks of them and their “bigoted” concerns on the national debt and immigration. There’s a couple of Labour canvassers on the cusp of thumping someone themselves but do they really want to encourage voters to hit canvassers from the party they hate the most.

This is not 1997. Not for us.

When I heard that Nick Clegg was attacked by the Daily Mail recently it really seemed like a dog bites man story. God bless the Daily Mail, but it’s not the sort of paper that will look kindly on a Liberal Democrat. They may like the Democrat bit, but as far as Liberal bit, oh dear.

But when I heard that Nazis were involved I thought how did they manage that?

The story is actually a lot more damning about Nick Clegg, and the whole British political class, than it looks like from the outside. Essentially Nick Clegg took a case where a couple of German people claimed that they had been hounded out of a work place. However Clegg used it in an insane tirade against the British in general.

We have a “misplaced sense of superiority” due to our role in the Second World War and “delusions of grandeur”. He then said that the as a nation we “we need to be put back in our place”.

This was all said while he was a member of the European Parliament.

Forget about the Nazi stuff, it’s irrelevant. It’s the disgust with the people that he claims to want to represent. A disgust that is certainly not limited to the Liberal Democrats, and something I’ve heard from both Labour and Conservatives.

I think it was Nicholas Soames (not a classic outsider) who said that it shows that Nicholas Clegg had “the European view of Britain rather than the British view”.

Although Clegg was more extreme than many others, he is symptomatic of the contempt that the political class feel towards their employers, the British public. This is where Gordon Brown’s bigot comment comment comes from and that is where Mark Dyson’s comment about Ipswich being a provincial town came from.

They are a different class. They lie to us, they don’t like us and they think we should be grateful that we deem to represent us.

That’s why I think Ben Gummer is genuinely different. God knows I disagree with him on a lot, but he knows that his job is to represent us, not to act like minor nobility.

Labour activists have a strange attitude to the white working class. This was shown when Gordon Brown called an innocent Labour voting pensioner a “bigot” for daring to ask him questions about the effects of Eastern European immigration.

This will be placed as a question of the Prime Minister’s two-faced nature and his temper. Perhaps it will stretch to questions about Brown’s, ahem, mental stability or the judgement of Labour MPs like Chris Mole who know Brown one hundred times better than we do and who still wanted him as leader of their party. Those are all questions that should be asked, but frankly they are not the most worrying question.

The fact is that middle class Labour activists treat the white English working class with horror. They may think that they speak for them, they may depend on them for their votes and they may even pretend to be like them.

However they can not stand the views of the working class, and they genuinely do regard them as bigoted. This is especially so with immigration. What is in effect a narrow sectional interest – a desire for cheaper restaurants, gardeners and nannies – is transformed into a moral crusade and everyone else has to knuckle down.

When this hurts the loyal white working class, then there is no real sympathy. Obviously if you have been on the doorstep you know that the feeling is intense compared to ten years ago, and curiously non-racial. There is just a feeling that unchecked immigration has lowered wages, raised rents and put a strain on services.

When the white working class complain about immigration they are not calling for an all white Britain but some control over their circumstances. The problem is that from Corder Road or Severn Road this looks like bigotry. In most cases when the class interests of the representatives differ from the clearly expressed interest of those that they wish to represent, the representatives knuckle down and, well, represent.

This has been turned on its head. The people have to be “led”. God help them.

Damian Thompson’s excellent blog has a thought provoking juxtapostion. I think some of the best politicians (such as Dennis Healey) simply had the bad luck to be at their peak in the 1970s and so their reputations will always be sullied.

Gordon Brown is a one man seventies throw back. Chris Mole on the other hand with the beard, the carefully hidden public school education (Dulwich College in case you’re asking), the middle class trade union background, the attempts to be prolier than thou….

So it was wrong to call the Liberal Democrat Mark “Bristol” Dyson. Sorry Mark, I’ll call you Mark “Battersea” Dyson.

He is the only one of the ten candidates nominated, and nine candidates allowed, who does not live in Suffolk. According to his nomination (in PDF) he is listed as living at an “Address in the Battersea Constituency”. Everyone else either has an IP postcode or is listed at “Address in the Ipswich Constituency”.

It seems that Mark Dyson was parachuted in by the Liberal Democrat office over two local Liberal Democrat activists as they “weren’t experienced enough”, at least that’s according to a rather downcast Lib Dem activist I bumped into yesterday. So much for localism.

On his performance at the hustings, you wonder what they weren’t experienced enough for? Mentioning Vince Cable 27 times in an evening? Making the third candidate speech on election night? Operating a twitter account less than I operate a blog? Claiming that the port noise may not have been real? Saying stupid things about replacing global capitalism?

By the way his votedyson.com website is up.