An interesting By Election

[Suff]

Kaz, I never thought you did vote Labour. Nothing about you comes over as Labour to me.

The whole point about this tweet is the furore. Not the tweet itself. As WM has said in the other thread, people are ready to be offended. Honestly, I don't care if it is a sarcastic tweet or not. If you don't like it, don't vote Labour or don't listen.

But the way people behave today is ridiculous. Dressed down? Forced to resign? People infuriated?

Sorry but if we can't take a bit of Sarcasm and just let it roll off us then there is something totally wrong with us.

Just as a point Kaz, I don't see that LD goals or activities have changed much, or at all, since before they joined government. Honestly as the Junior partner in a Coalition, the only thing they could do is bolster and support Tory policy and act as a watering down factor on strong Tory cuts. This is exactly what they have done and should be exactly what people should have expected of them.

Of course if it's the Smith thing and the abuse and the hiding of it, that's another thing. The Liberals are no stranger to sexual issues and will ride it out in the long run.

Personally I believe that if people are deserting the Lib Dems because of their record over the last 4.5 years they had the wrong expectations. The only Liberal I ever voted for was Ming Campbell and that was only once. I don't regret it, but I would not vote for them again. It was tactical at the time and I probably won't be in that situation again.

A huge amount less offense and rhetoric and a large amount more pragmatism would do our country a major good. Sadly I don't see it any time soon.

[Kaz]

I just couldn't vote while Clegg is in charge, I really liked him, then felt betrayed when he climbed in with Cameron (bad enough in my book) and then sold the students down the river over the fees......

Just the way it is with me

[cromwell]

I actually now feel a bit sorry for Ed Miliband (sound of collapsing bodies offstage...this weakness shall pass, this weakness shall pass...).

Thornberry's tweet was condescending, I don't think there is any doubt about that. So Miliband sacked her.

What happens? He's accused of 'panicking'. He is told by Thornberry's friends that he shouldn't have sacked her. He is accused of unnecessarily drawing attention to Labour's increasing number of never-worked, opinionated, wealthy middle class southerners.

But - what would have happened if he had not sacked her? He would then have been accused of "tolerating a culture of middle class snobbery towards the workers" or something very much like that.

He was in a position that whatever he did, or didn't do, he just couldn't win.

[Suff]

I have not the slightest sympathy with Miliband. It was New Labour who championed all this PC BS. If they don't know how to swim in it then it's their lookout. The rest of us have to because of them.

You may feel the tweet is condescending, but, in fact, from the written word, it's impossible to determine that. If you were to blank the picture, what would be condescending? This is the key thing. As someone who speaks parts of 5 other languages with varying skill (bad to "Two Beers Please and where are the toilets"), I have come to learn some of the flexibility of our own language. I have also, working much with French, come to learn the major differences between the written word and the spoken word. Sarcasm is often in the inflection of the spoken word. I know because my family excels at it.

So, in this case, with so few words written, people decide to read into it that which they believe. They know what she is and what she is like so they assume that she was doing it out of sarcasm. Miliband, also because it is so few words, could have spun this in almost any way he wanted. From joke to a semi serious attempt at spin control. In the end what did he do? He acted like a petulant child destroying a toy and displayed absolutely no political finesse or style at all.

Imagine what Hague would have done with this! Then consider Miliband. He has reaped from it what he has sown and I have no pity for him. Any more than I would have pity for someone else who had forced themselves into a job they are basically unsuited to, over the heads of others more skilled.

[TheOstrich]

Emily Thornberry is the sort of politician I have absolutely no time for, but I reckon the whole furore was totally over-blown, by factions aided and abetted by the media. Quite how it got transcribed into a hanging and quartering offence is rather unbelievable.

Has to be symptomatic of a now really serious and ongoing ideological division in the Labour Party between the champagne socialist elite at the top and the traditional grass-roots.

There is a certain entertainment in watching both Tory and Labour ripping themselves apart at the moment, I must admit ....

[Kaz]

Has to be symptomatic of a now really serious and ongoing ideological division in the Labour Party between the champagne socialist elite at the top and the traditional grass-roots.

Absolutely!

[Suff]

The Labour party cannot come to terms with the fact that it is turning its traditional voters into something else.

As the party moves more and more towards the middle classes, they leave behind those who were their traditional voters. The more they give to the working classes, the more they give them things and property and money and holidays, the more they move them from working class.

Then they have a choice. Do they rely on the diminishing working classes for their vote? Or do they try and take disaffected Tories, wavering Lib Dems and elevated middle class Labour voters.

The end result can only be that they eventually alienate their original power base. That leaves a vacuum in the voting world.

This is something that I've been banging on about for a long, long time. Labour has more than achieved the most ambitious mission statement that it could ever have envisioned when it was originally set up. Now it is a solution looking for a problem but it can't find the problem because it's already achieved everything it ever set out to do. Now it's just fixing what is not broken....

So is it any surprise that they can't associate with their voters any more? This can only get worse as they try to come to terms with who they are.