Respect!
Rod Liddle does the most effective and funniest put-down of Ed Miliband's claim to think of the word 'respect' whenever the Labour leader is confronted by an image of a White Van Man complete with England flags flying in the background.
Now that answer sounds so completely contrived and ridiculous that it made me laugh out loud while reading Liddle's column in The Sunday Times.
Because the problem is that the leadership of the Labour Party lead lives that are far removed from those of the ordinary, everyday people they claim to represent, and this 'respect' business sounds about as convincing to me as an Ali G routine.
And while there's nothing shameful or wrong about being a property millionaire in London it does suggest there is a real sense of disconnect between working class voters and the metropolitan Labour hierarchy, epitomised by Ed Miliband and Emily Thornberry.
Red flag at half mast, Labour: your love of the workers just died
By Rod Liddle - The Sunday Times
Things have come to a pretty pass in this country when a politician can’t express an abiding contempt for the unspeakably awful English working classes without losing her job.
This is the fate that has befallen Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney-general, who had been sent to the Rochester and Strood constituency by her party in the hope that the presence of this magnificent political colossus might swing a few votes behind Labour’s perfectly good candidate, Naushabah Khan. Instead, Emily turned up and somehow contrived to lose Labour the next general election, quite possibly. Way to go, Thornbird.
Emily tweeted a photograph of a house in the constituency with the mordant comment: “Image from Rochester.” The snap depicted a thin new-build terraced house bedecked in England flags — the cross of St George — and with a white van parked in the drive. The subtext was, of course: “Look, these are the lowborn fascist scum who are about to deliver a by-election victory to Ukip. Now someone get me back to Islington, pronto. I need a fair-trade mung-bean-and-falafel wrap urgently. Where’s my driver?”
Good for Emily. It is vital that senior members of the Labour party should be allowed — indeed encouraged — to express their visceral loathing for that section of society the party was set up to support. Otherwise working-class people, under some sort of delusion, might be tempted to vote for it next May. This is a freedom-of-speech issue. Reinstate the Islington One!
But Ed Miliband sacked her. The Labour leader remarked sadly that Emily had shown “disrespect” in her tweet. He was then asked what he would think if he came across the same image himself: St George’s flag, white van, poor person. “Respect,” is what he replied. Oh dear. Rather Emily’s contempt than Ed’s blank-faced fibs.
Ed, Ed, come on — nobody you know socially would dangle a cross of St George outside their house. The Palestinian flag, maybe, but never England’s. It would be as alien and exotic in your milieu, Ed, as a cannibal with a bone through his nose chowing down on a fricassee of missionary. And obviously less diverse and commendable. Nobody you know has driven a white van, or lived in a house such as that, or a place such as that. You don’t like those people. And they don’t like you.
This inveterate dislike of the working class is present in almost every pronouncement from the Labour front bench, one or two of them excepted. In general they cannot abide them.
And the epic distaste was there, too, in the online comments accompanying the story as reported in The Guardian and the New Statesman. According to one post, the flag of St George is “the hallmark of the dregs of the working classes. There’s no doubt that Labour is dominated by the metropolitan middle classes. But their failure to connect with the working class isn’t a matter of them not sticking their snouts far enough into the scum at the bottom of the barrel.”
And there, pretty much, you have it. The scum at the bottom of the barrel. And this impeccably bien-pensant point of view is echoed by plenty of pro-Labour commentators in your daily newspapers. For The Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, for example, the white working class are “the scum who drop shit and fireworks through the letterboxes of asylum seekers”. Spare me your pity for them, she urged.
Emily: the flags of St George were draped around that house to show support for England’s football games. And it is a tradition among these awful crepuscular deadbeats to get behind one’s country with such a display. The white van was there because the man who lives in the house works for a living and pays taxes.
And the house was not in Rochester, but Strood. Yes, she didn’t even know where she was.
This is the fate that has befallen Emily Thornberry, the shadow attorney-general, who had been sent to the Rochester and Strood constituency by her party in the hope that the presence of this magnificent political colossus might swing a few votes behind Labour’s perfectly good candidate, Naushabah Khan. Instead, Emily turned up and somehow contrived to lose Labour the next general election, quite possibly. Way to go, Thornbird.
Emily tweeted a photograph of a house in the constituency with the mordant comment: “Image from Rochester.” The snap depicted a thin new-build terraced house bedecked in England flags — the cross of St George — and with a white van parked in the drive. The subtext was, of course: “Look, these are the lowborn fascist scum who are about to deliver a by-election victory to Ukip. Now someone get me back to Islington, pronto. I need a fair-trade mung-bean-and-falafel wrap urgently. Where’s my driver?”
Good for Emily. It is vital that senior members of the Labour party should be allowed — indeed encouraged — to express their visceral loathing for that section of society the party was set up to support. Otherwise working-class people, under some sort of delusion, might be tempted to vote for it next May. This is a freedom-of-speech issue. Reinstate the Islington One!
But Ed Miliband sacked her. The Labour leader remarked sadly that Emily had shown “disrespect” in her tweet. He was then asked what he would think if he came across the same image himself: St George’s flag, white van, poor person. “Respect,” is what he replied. Oh dear. Rather Emily’s contempt than Ed’s blank-faced fibs.
Ed, Ed, come on — nobody you know socially would dangle a cross of St George outside their house. The Palestinian flag, maybe, but never England’s. It would be as alien and exotic in your milieu, Ed, as a cannibal with a bone through his nose chowing down on a fricassee of missionary. And obviously less diverse and commendable. Nobody you know has driven a white van, or lived in a house such as that, or a place such as that. You don’t like those people. And they don’t like you.
This inveterate dislike of the working class is present in almost every pronouncement from the Labour front bench, one or two of them excepted. In general they cannot abide them.
And the epic distaste was there, too, in the online comments accompanying the story as reported in The Guardian and the New Statesman. According to one post, the flag of St George is “the hallmark of the dregs of the working classes. There’s no doubt that Labour is dominated by the metropolitan middle classes. But their failure to connect with the working class isn’t a matter of them not sticking their snouts far enough into the scum at the bottom of the barrel.”
And there, pretty much, you have it. The scum at the bottom of the barrel. And this impeccably bien-pensant point of view is echoed by plenty of pro-Labour commentators in your daily newspapers. For The Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, for example, the white working class are “the scum who drop shit and fireworks through the letterboxes of asylum seekers”. Spare me your pity for them, she urged.
Emily: the flags of St George were draped around that house to show support for England’s football games. And it is a tradition among these awful crepuscular deadbeats to get behind one’s country with such a display. The white van was there because the man who lives in the house works for a living and pays taxes.
And the house was not in Rochester, but Strood. Yes, she didn’t even know where she was.
