Labour’s contempt for the white working class

I suppose it is the perfect expression of how and why the Labour Party has lost the white working class vote in the last fifteen years; it has only contempt for them. Opposition to immigration – as we know from Neathergate, well before Bigotgate – is seen by Labour has being rooted in a stupid xenophobia; no matter how mildly expressed, anyone who fears we may have let a few too many people into the country is at heart a racist, a bigot. This cat has been out of the bag for a while now, but it is still something the party denies in public. This is why Lord Mandelson was so swift and insistent that Brown had not MEANT that Gillian Duffy was a bigot, he did not really think that at all. But he does think that. They all do.

All that being said, it wouldn’t surprise me if Brown emerges from this farrago with a little bit of sympathy from the electorate; the sheer glee and hounding – both of Brown and Duffy – was more distasteful than the muttered aside. Didn’t you want to smack that smug Scottish BBC political reporter around the chops as he manhandled Mrs Duffy and shoved words into her mouth, smirking like a thirteen year old who has just masturbated inside his mother’s handbag?