Firstly, Emily Thornberry posted a picture on Twitter stating that it was in Rochester. Then everyone (not least Ed Milliband) decided to read all sorts of negative connotations into this and blame them on her and get all upset about the Labour Party sneering at the working class.
Just in case the working class aren't clear on this: everyone is sneering at you, even the Labour Party (but probably not as much as anyone else who claims to speak on your behalf). It's OK, you get used to it, I should know, I'm a member of the liberal intelligentsia, and everyone sneers at us too. At least as the working class, everyone usually sneers at you in private whilst publicly asserting your unassailable right to do, say or act however you like because you are the only social subgroup to be considered genuine; the rest of us are lying to ourselves. This at least is what I can glean from my (admittedly limited) interaction with the popular press.
As saying that you speak on behalf of the working class is a cardinal sin, all parties involved in any 'debate' concerning the working class tend to spend most of their time trying to accuse the other parties of having the audacity to patronise the working class whilst trying to avoid being accused of the same thing themselves. Although in many ways, this makes such debate more complex and nuanced than most modern political debate, if anything it means that even less of the actual issue gets discussed. This is an achievement of sorts, just not one that should be celebrated.
The level of debate surrounding politics at the moment is so low as to be utterly meaningless: no one even bothers introducing proper policies any more, they just make up some headline grabbing crap that'll never actually make it on to statute and then ram all the ugly stuff into the small print. When it actually gets debated in parliament everyone is so busy shouting empty platitudes at each other that genuinely fractious legislation can sail by without anyone batting an eyelid. It's like government exists at two levels: the hilarious press circus and the bit that quietly gets on with selling off our assets to its mates. What's really odd is that I'm sure there are some very clever people in parliament (not all of them obviously, otherwise how do you account for David Cameron), but they all seem so shit scared of being presented as idiots that they never dare say anything intelligent.
I don't have a cure for this because it's fairly deep rooted: we went to war in 2003 based on evidence that everyone knew was made up; we just chose to ignore the blindingly obvious, like we'd collectively stuck our fingers in our ears and gone 'lalalalalalala, not listening...oh look we invaded a country illegally, whoops'. So if we can ignore the massive steaming, humming dung heap that was the 'case for war' in 2003, is it any wonder that no one has pointed out the fact that nothing in the last Tory election manifesto has actually even been hinted at in the last five years. I'm sure the excuse would be coalition government, but you can't blame everything on the Lib Dems, even though the Tories have made a pretty good fist of it. The truth is that for some time now an election manifesto has been a fairly meaningless way of grabbing headlines without actually having to commit to anything.
So where does this leave us? I think we should accept that the content of the the debates around the elections is basically meaningless and that there is nothing we can do to change this. Indeed I think we should embrace this fact by demanding that politicians take all spurious claims to future policy out of their debates and instead simply pick a topic for debate like they did at school or Oxbridge. I think next May our politicians should stick to one topic and only debate which is the best cheese.
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