That white van man in Rochester or Strood was a Conservative supporter in 2010. He will have voted either for that party or for UKIP at that by-election, and again at the 2015 General Election.
He openly admitted to having hung out his flags purely in order to annoy ethnic minorities. They will not have been offended by those flags. But he hoped and expected that they would be.
Emily Thornberry should have stood her ground. She grew up on a council estate, where the houses will not have had porticoes.
In her childhood, or even in mine, next to no one would have known what that flag was.
Flag-waving in general is not very English, and that one was in any case confined to ecclesiastical use, making it identifiable by a tiny percentage of the population.
Until about 20 years ago, if you had asked the English what their flag was, then they would have told you something quite different from that. Check the footage of the 1966 World Cup final, and you will see.
Nothing invented by, of all things, the advertising industry can be said to be part of working-class culture. Nor can anything promoted by the tabloid newspapers, which are an elaborate public school joke on their readers, as any encounter with their staff will confirm.
And least of all can that be said of something that was invented as an integral part of pricing the working classes out of attendance at live football matches by rebranding them as a posh boys' interest, in order to make possible a drastic increase in the price of the beer thus associated with them.
Thornberry is a weird woman.
ReplyDeleteAn active Islington sexual revolutionary who backed the disgraceful sacking of Liliane Ladelle by Islington Council for refusing to carry out civil partnerships in contravention of her Christian beliefs, Thornberry appears to think Soviet-style state childcare is actually better than fatherhood.
Peter Hitchens wrote of this bizarre woman:
""Her mother Sallie, alas no longer with us, was a most courageous and distinguished person, and also much-loved by political allies and opponents alike. She was a teacher by profession, and an active and popular Labour councillor who became, despite the privations and difficulties of her life, Mayor of Guildford in Surrey, by no means a Labour town.
But the family was not fatherless in the sense that it had never had a father. Nor was Sallie Thornberry unmarried. On the contrary, she was married to a distinguished and talented academic lawyer, Cedric Thornberry, who lectured at the London School of Economics, and rose to become Assistant General Secretary of the United Nations. He is still active in the international human rights industry.
I do not know or seek to know exactly how he came to leave the family home, though he did so when his daughter was seven and his sons even younger. It is perhaps significant that Emily Thornberry omits all reference to him from her entry in ‘Who’s Who’ (those in Who’s Who’ write their own entries), though she does mention her mother. Whatever happened, Emily Thornberry has unpleasant, rather shocking Dickensian memories of bailiffs, and of going off to live in a council house in pretty sharply reduced circumstances.
To give you some idea of our differing responses to this episode, she believes it is an argument for better state childcare to allow women such as her mother to go out to work. I believe it is an argument for strengthening marriage, and placing a higher value upon fidelity and constancy, and upon promises.""
Indeed. Thorberry thinks her childhood is an argument for better childcare.
Conservatives know, however, that reducing the role of fathers in families increases the role of the state.
Always.
Look at what happened in America where the rise of single mothers has led to almost permanent Democratic Party Government, and ever greater state welfare and childcare spending replacing independent families.
It was the economic changes of the Reagan years that made one in four American voters a single woman.
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