The past few weeks have been incredibly draining at Puddlecote Inc and there is more to come, so Mrs P and I ran off to Rome for a long weekend to chill for a bit. We ate loads of good food, sweltered under a cloudless sky at times, consumed more than our fair share of wine and - a real bonus - came across a seriously interesting business opportunity while there. It might require a few more trips back to get it sorted but ... oh well.
Thanks to glorious WiFi, though, there was an early evening window where I could keep track of what was going on in the UK, the Emily Thornberry snobbery being the most striking.
The left seem to be trying to play it down, but it's quite clear she showed modern Labour's hand when it comes to working class people. The original tweet was appallingly ill-judged but her attempt at wriggling out of trouble was truly laughable!
Ms Thornberry initially tried to defend her tweet. Speaking to MailOnline, she denied snobbery but said she was astonished to see people hanging so many flags outside their house.
She said: 'It was a house covered in British flags. I've never seen anything like it before.
'It had three huge flags covering the whole house. I thought it was remarkable. I've never seen a house completely covered in flags.'
When pressed that flying flags was common, she said: 'I was brought up in a council house and I've never seen anything like it.'Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? Where I live it's difficult to find any road without flags during football tournaments and within a quarter mile of me there are three houses with flagpoles in their front garden specifically for the purpose of flying it 24/7/365. If she's never seen this she is woefully out of touch.
But then, her party's leader is a bit of a comedian too.
He said: ‘It's not the view we have of that family. Labour's never had that view of disrespect and I'm afraid her tweet conveyed a sense of disrespect - that's not my view, that's not Labour's view, it's wrong, it never will be our view and that's why I think it was right she resigned.’
Asked what went through his mind when he saw a white van outside a house with England flags, Mr Miliband replied: ‘What goes through my mind is respect - respect is a basic rule of politics and I'm afraid her tweet conveyed a sense of disrespect.’Respect? White van men up and down the country - whether displaying the cross of St George outside their houses or not - tend to like burgers, beer and baccy. Ed's party, though, are fiercely opposed to absolutely everything working people like to consume.
A Labour government would impose tough restrictions on the sale and advertising of alcohol, unhealthy food and tobacco, according to a leaked policy document.
The plan would end sports sponsorship by drinks firms and impose minimum alcohol pricing in an effort to cut the impact of drinking on Britons' health.
There would also be new laws to curb the amount of sugar, fat and salt in food aimed at children, and a ban on advertising unhealthy products on TV before the 9pm watershed.They don't respect the choices of working people, they despise working people because of their choices.
Luciana Berger is stomping all over Westminster trying to bring in laws advocated by stratospherically-paid fake charities which target calm enjoyment of products enjoyed by working class people. Just in the last few days she has been talking of the need to make it more difficult for white van man and his wife to choose what they can drink, and been badgering the Department of Health about pointless plain packaging. Andy Burnham wants to make Frosties history and Alan Johnson wants to ban Coca-Cola. Diane Abbott - part of the shadow health team, would you believe - vilely sneers about the concept of working people being allowed "a penny off a pint, a penny off beer, and you can have your fags as well"
They might claim that it's because working people are not making the 'correct' choices - a crass display of elitist arrogance in itself - but it doesn't even stop there. Any vaper will tell you that, while the EU Tobacco Products Directive was being drawn up, the only MEPs who contemptuously refused to listen to the thousands of pleas sent to them about e-cigs were Labour ones.
I'm little more than a glorified white van man who made good and come from sarf London stock - some might call it social mobility. Grandad Puddlecote was a lifelong proud Labour voter who lived in council houses on the same street for his entire 85 years and enjoyed tobacco and alcohol throughout all of it. He would spin faster than the lathe he used to operate if he could see the bastardisation of his party now.
Puddlecote Inc employees - the same type of people I socialise with daily - are woven from working stock and our biggest task while preparing for the annual staff party is making sure they have somewhere the approximately 40% of them who smoke can enjoy their tobacco at the same time as the alcohol we are paying for. It is becoming increasingly difficult thanks to attitudes promoted by Labour. I don't reckon the professional barbecue we put on this year would be received any better by the left either considering the usurping of the working man's party by rich Hampstead and Islington Labour snobs.
Thornberry did the country a favour by showing that Labour don't have the first clue about people in general. For Miliband to claim that his party respects the working class - while his party members furiously work to denormalise and outlaw their freedom of choice - is a just a sick joke.
14 comments:
In my opinion the rot set in with the election of Maggie. Labour have never forgivemn the white working classes for enthusiastically voting for Maggie.
And their rverenge was simple; if we cant take the workign class votes for granted, we'll i9mport a vcoter base that we can; combined with doleys and public sectgor workers, they hope to hit their 35%.
And given the uineptitude and shiteness of the Tories they might just pull it off.
Miliberger
If you look at the traditional voting patterns, I reckon that you would see that, like my grandparents... The "working classes" were not necessarily in thrall to the Labour Party.
They were married for more than 50 years and throughout, she voted Tory and he voted Labour. They lived in a tiny house rented from the CO-OP, she worked as a clerk and he as a lathe worker at the Arsenal. Both were poor as church mice. My grandmother left £750 when she died.
Neither party was particularly representative of their class, but neither party went out of its way to "train" these people in how to become the perfect socialist or conservative citizen....
My grandparents were not particularly political, although they were a bit upset when my Dad became a communist.
As you say sir, neither of these parties were particularly interested in people like them, and they weren't particularly interested in the parties either.
And these sorts of people who are now flocking to UKIP, because both of those parties have lost interest in the less than titanic concerns of this class, and as you point out, they now seem interested only in winding them up...
The tweet was just another expression of that interest.
"She said: 'It was a house covered in British flags"
Except they are not British flags, they are England ones. After all the devolution stuff I am more concerned about her appalling lack of understanding of nationalism than her snobbery.
Forming a government with 35% of imported voters, PS troughers, and Doleys, that could spark off civil disobedience.
Would she have been less astonished if the flags had been Asian, Polish or of some other country? I only ask as all of the main 3 parties seem totally in love and besotted with this 'wonderful' multi-cultural and diverse society they have created, without ever asking any of their electorate! I don't know anyone who wants this, most people I talk to just want their own country back!
Oddly, and despite it taking somewhere north of twelve months for the bastard to so much as acknowledge any of my letters, my Labour MP (Simon Danczuk) was (and remains) not only quite supportive of E-Cigs, but also one of few from any flavour of our current Westminster soup to appear to offer similar support for drinkers, smokers and larders(?).
Having said that, he's still given me more than sufficient reason to both doubt his integrity and despise his politics; but he wasn't as bad as his NW MEP counterparts, who were to a man/woman as dismissive of him as they were of me.
Which reminds me that while the Nationalists would be pleased as Punch to see a house draped in Scottish flags, they have just as much contempt for the everyday lives of ordinary people as Labour. If not more. (Forcing shopkeepers to charge 5p for carrier bags, anyone?) Yet they're riding a wave of popular support.
This leads me to the terrifying thought that people may be more concerned about flag-waving and the freedom of politicians to tax them and order them around than their own personal liberty. What other conculsion can there be?
XX She said: 'It was a house covered in British flags. I've never seen anything like it before. XX
When I saw the photo, the flags were ENGLISH. Dumb bitch!
She also said that 'It had three huge flags covering the whole house. I thought it was remarkable. I've never seen a house completely covered in flags.' which, looking at the picture is simply not true and, i would posit that it's still the case that she's never seen a house completely covered in flags.
Regardless of her motivations for tweeting a photo of it she's demonstrated beyond doubt that she's either quite severely mentally impaired or simply downright dishonest.
Danczuk was one of those who condemned Thornberry so you might have a Labour MP who isn't entirely ignorant. He can perhaps see the threat his southern elitist counterparts pose to working people and his party. They'll have to start listening to ordinary people instead of haranguing them soon or else they'll become a footnote in history.
An English MP not able to distinguish what a German citizen can. Now there's a condemnation if ever I saw one.;)
I think you just described much of Labour's fan base, sadly. :(
There must be a reason why Labour show such contempt for what used to be their core vote, it truly escapes me though.
As far as what we talk about here, do they not remember that Harold Wilson used to really enjoy tobacco?
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