By Hand Or By Two-Brains

David Willetts, the ridiculous person, has suggested quotas for working-class white boys in the matter of admission to universities. He could far more usefully propose that his party field a male parliamentary candidate from a C2DE socioeconomic background (not his parents, himself) in every seat where the sitting Conservative MP was retiring, and in every new Conservative seat created by boundary changes.

That will not happen, as we all know. But what if UKIP were to promise such a candidate wherever none of the major parties' candidates was a working-class man? Of course, recruiting such would raise questions about, for example, UKIP's commitment to a pre-Obama American-style insurance system in place of the NHS. But that would be all to the good.

Even more likely might be such a commitment from the party whose founder and Leader, back when he was President of the NUM and still a Labour Party member, challenged all-women shortlists in the courts. If UKIP really were a lower-middle-class provincial insurrection, then it would receive exactly as much attention as the SLP, which this time last year Radio Four had to apologise live on air for having declared "defunct" despite its having beaten the BNP in the Scottish and Welsh elections and in every council ward that both parties had contested.

Respect's alliance of student Trots and urban ethnic minorities is also within the media's frame of reference, just like the public school and Home Counties world of UKIP: blazers, golf clubs, Jaguars, company directorships, gin. Lee Jasper's recent Newham speech effectively offering reserved council seats and parliamentary candidacies to the black pastors if they wanted them is a very interesting development in all sorts of ways. But the old pit villages and the old steel towns of South Yorkshire or South Wales may as well be on the dark side of the moon. (The SLP has never taken off in the old pit villages and the old steel towns of County Durham, because this was never a Scargill-loving area, not to say Area.) However, a promise to put up a local working-class man wherever Labour had an all-women shortlist might attract some attention.

Then again, that is the sort of thing that Labour itself has now quietly and informally resumed doing. It would be very Ed Miliband, and very Jon Cruddas and Maurice Glasman indeed, to promise a shortlists comprised only of working-class men, in an equally safe or winnable seat, to match every all-women shortlist imposed. That, and offering reserved council seats and parliamentary candidacies to the black pastors if they wanted them, as is likewise already happening under the radar; it looks like quite a battle in the black areas to sign up the men who work the machine.

And unlike either UKIPites or SLPers, as well as almost certainly unlike members of Respect, those candidates might in fact end up in the House of Commons.

Ed Miliband, over to you.