Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2846731/Why-Red-Ed-s-bid-parade-patriotism-unconvincing.html

Why Red Ed's bid to parade his patriotism is SO unconvincing

There is one quality in a leader that Ed Miliband certainly does not lack: ruthlessness. The manner in which he destroyed the political career of his elder brother in order to gain control of the Labour Party told us that.

Now, he has sacked one of his earliest champions - and apparently a friend - Emily Thornberry.

The shadow attorney general had tweeted - without comment - a picture of a house in Rochester festooned with St George’s flags that had caught her attention while campaigning in the local by-election.

That was enough: in the brutal style of Alan Sugar, Miliband told her ‘you’re fired’. Yet this was not so much cruelty on Miliband’s part, as sheer panic.

For Thornberry’s terminal offence was to draw attention to the single biggest weakness of the modern Labour Party - the sense that it speaks for a rarified class of public sector officials and administrators, rather than the working people it was originally created to represent.

More particularly, the Labour leader felt obliged to ditch his friend because her de-haut-en-bas tweet encapsulated exactly what many see as his own identity: a man who regards the patriotic working man driving a white van as at best an anthropological oddity, and as at worst a savage.

That the Labour leader still doesn’t quite get it was made clear when he insisted that when he sees a St George’s Flag, he feels ‘respect’ for the person displaying it.

Respect is what politicians say they accord to those whose views they can’t stand (‘with the greatest of respect’). Fellow-feeling is more what the public might want him to say that he experienced on seeing the national flag — but then that would be a lie and Miliband is too hopeless an actor to get away with a fib even if he wanted to.


We are all deeply influenced by our upbringing, for better or for worse. The Labour leader was brought up in a highly intellectual Marxist home, in which it would have been axiomatic that nationalism was only a bad thing.

That was entirely understandable: his father Ralph, born Adolphe, had escaped from a Holocaust created by the most toxic German nationalism. Many others in that Jewish family had not been so fortunate, being murdered in the Nazi death camps.

But the Marxist default position, that the only war worth fighting is the class war and that all expressions of national and cultural identity are delusional except in so far as they can be described as ‘anti-colonial’, has bedevilled the Left as a whole: the Miliband home was a salon for many influential figures who shared this world view and sought to propagate it through the educational system (at which they were quite successful.)

But, as applied to the wider Britain outside the academy, it has created nothing more than a blank space on the map. Robert Colls, the author of Identity of England, remarked of the Blair years: ‘To fill the historical vacuum, “diversity” became New Labour’s watchword. But diversity . . . left nothing to build on.’

In fact, Blair did understand the strong appeal of national symbols and patriotism, which explained why in the 1997 General Election he chose the British bulldog as one of his emblems and even had an article appear under his name in the Sun entitled ‘Why I love the pound’. Of course, no one ‘loves’ a currency: Blair did this to deflect attention from the fact that he really wanted Britain to adopt the euro.

The then Labour leader’s embrace of national symbols may have been deeply cynical, but he at least understood something about the nature of the electorate he was attempting to seduce.

His first political campaign had been the Beaconsfield by-election of 1982. Between his adoption as the Labour candidate and the campaign’s start, the Falklands War broke out.

The young Blair campaigned on the basis that ‘the islanders cannot be allowed to determine the future of the Falklands’ — and was completely marmalised, losing his deposit

Apparently, Blair later told Robin Cook: ‘The thing I learned from Beaconsfield is that wars make Prime Ministers popular’.

But Blair misunderstood his nemesis on the streets of Beaconsfield — with dreadful consequences in Iraq 20 years later. It was not that we were fighting a war that was popular — it was the fact that the government was defending the interests of British subjects against a foreign invader.

Blair’s later military mission of so-called ‘humanitarian intervention’ — as in Kosovo — never captured the British public’s hearts.

As the socialist novelist and journalist George Orwell wrote in My Country Right Or Left, during the 1940s: ‘Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred and always stronger than internationalism.’ Seventy years later, it still is.

Orwell was, in terms of the British Left, very isolated in holding such opinions. Yet unlike so many of them at the time — and certainly unlike the current generation of career politicians — he had deep first-hand knowledge of what he was writing and talking about.

When he denounced the British Empire, it was with the experience of having been a member of the Imperial Police in Burma. When he spoke of what really motivated British workers, it was from having lived among the miners in the North of England.

This helps explain what he wrote about the peculiar out-of-touchness of the Left-wing intelligentsia, which bears repetition today: ‘England is perhaps the only country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

In Left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings.

MaxK - 23 Nov 2014 23:30 - 51093 of 51109
Good gear eh Haystack?


Let me know your dealer.
goldfinger [Send an email to goldfinger] [View goldfinger's profile] - 23 Nov 2014 23:39 - 51094 of 51109
Big black man on London Bridge.

That was very racist , not all drug dealers are black. Labour supporter brands black men as drug dealers

I thought the BBC use to be full of left wingers ?

Labour supporters only deal in stereotypes. They don't have the intellect for shades of grey.

The BBC gets accused of being left wing, right wing and all sorts. Israel accuses the BBC of being pro Palestinian and Palestine says it is pro Israel.

"Haystack - 24 Nov 2014 09:54 - 51113 of 51116

Labour supporters only deal in stereotypes. They don't have the intellect for shades of grey."

Pot and kettle alert... You couldn't make it up.

Stan.


Haze could and does.

Copy & Paste red top Labour/Loony left politics for the masses

Indeed Fred.. and with desperate repetition.

And then we have one of the "Tory Trolls" not far behind.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rochester-aftermath-labour-backbenchers-call-to-arms-against-partys-north-london-set-9878724.html

Ed Miliband's 'north London set' must be demolished to save Labour, say critics

Former minister Frank Field said the flag incident was 'the most serious thing that has happened' to the party

Labour is dominated by a “north London set” who must be “demolished” if the party is to reconnect with its core support, a senior backbencher warned today.

The recriminations follow the furore over the sacking of Emily Thornberry as a shadow minister after she tweeted a picture of a house draped in three England flags. It was widely interpreted as evidence of a patronising view of working-class voters.

The former minister Frank Field said the flag incident was “the most serious thing that has happened” to the party.

He added: “It’s the north London set we’ve got to control. They are a Berlin Wall trying to prevent us reaching out to our voters, and like the Berlin Wall they’ve got to be demolished. Ed’s trying to move us on immigration and welfare and with one blast of a tweet she wrecks that and puts us back to square one.”

Another former minister, David Lammy, said the party was “culturally adrift” from its traditional supporters. He said politicians from “liberal, professional backgrounds” found it hard to identify with ordinary working people.

Who would want to indentify with smelly oiks anyway?

Haze,

If Thornberry was patronising and snobbish about a section of the working class, which cloud do you think you and the tory hierarchy are on.

As far a party splits, the con party has never been so split at any time as they are now since the Maggie Thatcher period.

The only reason they haven't split into two separate parties, is that they haven't the guts to stand up and advocate what the believe in.

After their defeat in May the may do so.

They believe in :

"Rugby may be more clever,
Harrow may make more row,
But we'll row for ever,
Steady from stroke to bow,
And nothing in life shall sever
The chain that is round us now,
And nothing in life shall sever
The chain that is round us now."


Also, some of the other aspiring "arse lickers" like yourself are hoping the present lot will protect their own lots at the expense of the UK society as a whole.

My feeling is that at the next election you will "all sink together"!

=======

But looking at the UKIP and some of the tory right wingers could identify themselves with comfortably with "union jackers".

Mob appeal = mob politics and its consequence.

=======

Listening to "Politics Show" , both DOMINIC GRIEVE and GISELA STUART talked sense on the above.

I didn't know that Fred was such a working class snob, he as a pie and pint in public wearing his cloth cap , and in private he has vintage wines and fine expensive food has he has posted on here to cynic and others many times

Go an gossip somewhere else, theres a good boy aldgit.

How boring listening to the orgasmic rhetoric of you raving lefty lunatics on here.

God's truth! Get a life!

Did you not know there are real problems which need solving out here in the big wide world?

eg. The catch has just broken on the door way leading to the lounge from the hallway. This thing may well not actually be 'metric'. The hunt is on for a suitable replacement. I do not want to have to change all of the door handles downstairs just so that they all end up matching each other. Now solving this one for me will truly be orgasmic. :-)