“Vote for Us, You Miserable Scum”: Mammon, Marx and Miliband
“We want your votes, you miserable scum.” That has long been the private attitude of the Labour party to the White working class. Now a senior Labour MP has made it public. No wonder Ed Miliband is said to have been “incandescent.” You’ve heard of point-and-splutter. Here’s some point-and-sneer, a photograph tweeted by a Labour MP called Emily Thornberry during the Rochester by-election, which has just given UKIP its second MP. She was sneering at White working-class patriotism, as expressed by the red cross of St George, England’s patron saint. But there’s more to the photo than that. She was expressing contempt for White working-class men in particular. “White van man” is a shorthand in England for self-employed tradesmen who carry their tools around in a white van. They’re rough, they’re crude and they’re not politically correct.
That’s why the modern Labour party hates them, as a Labour peer called Lord Glasman admitted in 2011:
In many ways [Labour] viewed working-class voters as an obstacle to progress. [Labour’s] commitment to various civil rights, anti-racism, meant that often working-class voters … were seen as racist, resistant to change, homophobic and generally reactionary. So in many ways you had a terrible situation where a Labour government was hostile to the English working class. (Miliband ally attacks Labour migration ‘lies’ over 2.2m they let in Britain, The Daily Mail, 16th April 2011)




