UKIP poster boy is a racist immigrant, film at 11

[Sheilbh]

Ed needs to book his Yorkie bar scoffing photo-op asap ........

Ed Miliband visits a caff to make friends with white van man:

C'mon, there can't be any doubt what message she intended to convey even though it's obviously trivial it absolutely plays up to the narrative of Lab pols hating on the white working class. They had to do something once the Sun put it on their front page and probably resignation/sacking was the only way to lance it. But then you say -  she cocked up, she's resigned, that's the end of it. You don't make transparently false attempts to identify yourself with white van man.

I'm not so sure any more. I've seen that she apparently does tweet lots of photos of buildings with little messages like 'image from Yorkshire' and she posted one about a 'lovely house' absolutely plastered in St. George flags last year. So I'm not so sure about the 'never seen anything like it' line in the Sun.

But it's what Tamas says, what it revealed is that we all think politicians sneer at the white working class. I think they could have dealt with it with a proper apology, but then she fucked that up by blaming anti-Islington bias in the mainstream media.

I think it would have been a story for a day or two that could've been contained. But the resignation and then Ed Miliband's attempt to pose as Del Boy have made everything so much worse.

Anyway good Ian Leslie piece:

Ed Miliband is too good at politics – he can't stop playing the game
Too often, it feels as though the Labour leader has so assiduously studied the rules of political communication that he can't forget them.
BY IAN LESLIE PUBLISHED 21 NOVEMBER, 2014 - 16:40

Emily Thornberry's resignation was the moment when extreme political correctness morphed from a left-wing obsession into one shared by right-wingers. It was also the moment we went full Orwell. Apparently it's no longer enough to jump on every word a politician utters; now we jump all over their thoughts too.

This is a strange time. In July the Labour leader made a speech bemoaning the superficiality of politics; its focus on image over substance. Then on Thursday, he fired his shadow attorney-general for something that people on Twitter said that she thought about an image. The day after he found himself telling an interviewer that whenever he sees a white van he feels "respect".

For all the talk, ever since his leadership campaign, of wanting to do politics differently, Ed Miliband plays the game like the political pro he is. The stock criticism of him is that he isn't very good at politics, but there's a sense in which he's too good at it. It's as if he has so assiduously studied the rules of political communication that he can't forget them.

The rules are there to be broken, however, because at the moment they're breaking us. There is no chance this country will get the politicians it wants until it cuts the politicians it has a bit of slack. Right now, our treatment of the people that govern us is so brutal and unforgiving that we're forcing them to be dishonest. When you feel that you're under attack no matter what you say, you resort to obfuscation and dishonesty. It's the only way to survive. "The weak cannot be sincere", said Francois de La Rochefoucauld.


Victoria Talwar is a psychologist at McGill University in Canada. A few years ago she came across a unique opportunity to test the way that lying behaviour responds to different rules. She was introduced to two schools in West Africa a few miles apart, with similar intakes but very different disciplinary regimes. One of them  - we'll call it School A - was strict but run more or less according to Western norms - if you broke the rules you got a detention or extra homework.

The other - School B - had a draconian regime of corporal punishment, inherited from the French Catholic nuns that founded it. If the kids were deemed to have done anything wrong - including and especially lying - they were beaten. Talwar refers to it as "a punitive environment". She got permission from both schools to carry out an experiment with their pupils to test their propensity for lying.

The experiment she ran is known as The Peeking Game. Here's how it works. The child is asked to sit facing the wall. Behind him, the experimenter brings out a series of toys that make a noise and the child has to guess from the noise which kind of toy it is. If they get it right they win the toy. The first couple are pretty easy - a fire engine making a fire engine noise, for instance. The third is made impossible to get. Talwar brings out a toy football, and opens up a greeting card that plays a tinny tune. The child can't possibly guess what the toy is from the noise.

Before the child can say anything at all, the experimenter says, "I need to take a quick call outside, I'll be back in a minute. Have a think. Whatever you do, don't peek.'"Of course, just about every child peeks. And when the experimenter comes back, the child invariably "guesses" the right answer. The question is, do they lie when the experimenter says, "Did you peek?"

This experiment has been run many times, and about 60 per cent of three and four-year-olds lie in answer to this question. This number goes up with age. It's not just whether the children lie that's interesting, but how well they lie. When very young kids are challenged on their lie by the experimenter - "If you didn't peek, how did you guess?" - many of them fold immediately and say, "I looked". Others maintain the lie, come up with an explanation and deliver it with a straight face.

When Talwar reviewed the tapes of her experiments at the two schools, what she found surprised her. The kids from School A lied at about the same rate and in the same way to kids from Western schools. The kids from School B, however - the punitive environment - were in a different league. They all lied, without exception, and they did so brilliantly, displaying real creativity in the stories they came up with, and mastery of their delivery. It turned out that by attempting to eradicate lying, School B had become a factory for producing highly proficient little liars.

British politics is now something like a punitive environment. We punish politicians for dishonesty. But we also punish them for telling the truth. No party leader is being remotely honest about the scale of cuts that will take place after the next election. They're in a competition to see who can lie to us most persuasively, because they know that the first one to tell the truth will get pulverised by a cynical press and by voters who act like children angry at being told they can't have dessert.

Since our rulers know that whatever they say they'll be accused of dishonesty then, like the pupils from School B, they try and say whatever it is they think we want to hear. Except that most of them aren't as skilled at lying as the kids in School B. That's why they often end up sounding so painfully inauthentic. It's why they claim to feel surges of emotion at the sight of white vans, or tell us unbelievable stories about some bloke they supposedly met in a park. If we really want more honest politicians, we'll have to start treating them like grown-ups, and acting like grown-ups ourselves.

The larger point here, though, is that perhaps the reason we have politicians in the first place is to allow us a margin of dishonesty in our dealings with each other. The term "politician" or "politique" was first used widely in its modern sense in sixteenth and seventeenth century France, where it was applied to those who were trying to mediate between warring Catholic and Protestant tribes, who were tearing each other apart in the name of Truth.

The politiques were the only ones saying, you know what, chaps, maybe "truth" isn't the most important thing here. Isn't it more important that we find a way to get along without killing each other? If that means a few fudges, evasions and deceptions - allowing different people to believe different things - then isn't a price worth paying?

They were despised for it, of course. Truth has all the best tunes. But they were right.

[Ed Anger]

I love Ed Millipede's facial expression. 

[Warspite]

Ed Miliband: but is he as good as Michael Foot?

[Sheilbh]

Ed Miliband: but is he as good as Michael Foot?

At least he hasn't worn a donkey jacket to the Cenotaph. Not yet anyway.

I saw this last night which is pretty awful:

[Sheilbh]

Back on the EU: I was discussing this with a Spanish (anglophile) scholar yesterday. He is terrified the UK will leave because in his mind, it actually unravels the entire European project, as Britain is a counterweight to Franco-German competition.

I don't know what Europe would look like without the UK. I imagine a few other countries like the Swedes and the Danes might begin to feel a little less comfortable.

On the other hand I don't know if we've ever been an effective counterweight. My impression is most British governments aren't very good at European politics (ironically, Thatcher's was). It's a shame we've ended up as a truculent, miserable semi-detached member rather than, as David Owen suggested we should be a sort-of chair of countries in the European slow-lane.

Like Gups and Shelf I know there are big problems with the EU, particularly over the implications of Eurozone integration for the rest, and the continuing alienation of average Europeans from the EU itself. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that the way the problems of immigration and European integration have manifested themselves will actually be solved by skipping out of the EU. Particularly as we are then in a situation where we have even less influence on continental legislation.

I think the FTT and Euro trading rulings will matter in my vote. But it's beyond alienation, the 'more Europe' option's produced a 4 year recession in Italy (whose economy is now smaller than it was before the launch of the Euro) and unbelievable levels of unemployment. If the situation in 2017 is the same as it is in 2014 and was in 2010 then I think it's very difficult to see a positive case for it. I remember when Cameron first promised a referendum and I was speaking about it to a lefty Italian friend who said she'd love the chance to vote to leave Europe.

I don't desperately want to leave but if there's no change I don't see how I could support something that's in my view causing that much damage.

[Warspite]

Back on the EU: I was discussing this with a Spanish (anglophile) scholar yesterday. He is terrified the UK will leave because in his mind, it actually unravels the entire European project, as Britain is a counterweight to Franco-German competition.

I don't know what Europe would look like without the UK. I imagine a few other countries like the Swedes and the Danes might begin to feel a little less comfortable.

On the other hand I don't know if we've ever been an effective counterweight. My impression is most British governments aren't very good at European politics (ironically, Thatcher's was). It's a shame we've ended up as a truculent, miserable semi-detached member rather than, as David Owen suggested we should be a sort-of chair of countries in the European slow-lane.

That's because the British narrative domestically severely underplays the influence the UK has had in the EU when it has decided to engage. It's a frustration I have had privately shared to me by several FCO diplomats, as well as EU Commission staff and German and Dutch diplomats.

Like Gups and Shelf I know there are big problems with the EU, particularly over the implications of Eurozone integration for the rest, and the continuing alienation of average Europeans from the EU itself. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that the way the problems of immigration and European integration have manifested themselves will actually be solved by skipping out of the EU. Particularly as we are then in a situation where we have even less influence on continental legislation.

I think the FTT and Euro trading rulings will matter in my vote. But it's beyond alienation, the 'more Europe' option's produced a 4 year recession in Italy (whose economy is now smaller than it was before the launch of the Euro) and unbelievable levels of unemployment. If the situation in 2017 is the same as it is in 2014 and was in 2010 then I think it's very difficult to see a positive case for it. I remember when Cameron first promised a referendum and I was speaking about it to a lefty Italian friend who said she'd love the chance to vote to leave Europe.

I don't desperately want to leave but if there's no change I don't see how I could support something that's in my view causing that much damage.

The manner in which EU integration was carried out is at fault to a good degree, yes, but there's also the long-run sustainability of an economic model that relied on periodic competitive devaluations to stay afloat.

[Sheilbh]

The manner in which EU integration was carried out is at fault to a good degree, yes, but there's also the long-run sustainability of an economic model that relied on periodic competitive devaluations to stay afloat.

Isn't the current policy basically competitive internal devaluations within a currency union? Which seems even less sustainable in the long-run.

[Syt]

I love Ed Millipede's facial expression. 

He looks like what Hollywood casts when they need a stereotypical snobbish English villain in a comedy.

[Martinus]

I'm sure she was just an avid white van spotter. Come on chaps, there was a clear implication in that tweet.

Is there some cultural importance of white vans I am not aware of? 

[Martinus]

But it's what Tamas says, what it revealed is that we all think politicians sneer at the white working class.

But pretty much every middle class and upper class person everywhere (with the possible exception of the handful of upper class deviants with a blue collar fetish) sneers at the "white working class" (or its local social equivalent).

That is why I could never go into politics - I am not enough of a hypocrite to stake my career on pandering to people I consider my inferiors. I occasionally encounter idiots who are my clients (or work for my clients) and I find it very difficult hiding my contempt and frustration with them. Fortunately, the prevailing majority of people I work for are smart. Having to deal with idiots on a constant basis and pretending I respect them would be hellish.

[Martinus]

It's a shame we've ended up as a truculent, miserable semi-detached member rather than, as David Owen suggested we should be a sort-of chair of countries in the European slow-lane.

I don't think it is possible any longer for the UK. It was possible when the "slow lane" included countries like Denmark and Sweden. But now the "slow lane" is mainly composed of Eastern Europeans. For all the talk of the free market, our interests are completely opposite to yours on the core issues making up the EU.

Polish government's behaviour is a great example of this - there used to be an almost instinctive tendency of Polish governments to side with the Brits, to counterbalance French and Germans in the past, over a number of issues, such as tax harmonisation, labour law etc. But the anti-immigration rhetoric of the tories is seen as so offensive here, it has become politically toxic, internally, for the Polish government to support any British position in the EU in the recent months.

[Sheilbh]

But pretty much every middle class and upper class person everywhere (with the possible exception of the handful of upper class deviants with a blue collar fetish) sneers at the "white working class" (or its local social equivalent).

No.

It's pretty rare in my experience and as I say personally I think there's little uglier than snobbishness. I hate it.

Polish government's behaviour is a great example of this - there used to be an almost instinctive tendency of Polish governments to side with the Brits, to counterbalance French and Germans in the past, over a number of issues, such as tax harmonisation, labour law etc. But the anti-immigration rhetoric of the tories is seen as so offensive here, it has become politically toxic, internally, for the Polish government to support any British position in the EU in the recent months.

You give two reasons for this though one is because your interests are the complete opposite, the other is a reaction to British domestic politics. Which is it, or is it more that anger about British politics sort of drove Poland to her national interests, not her national allies more quickly?

One seems sensible and the other a little hysterical

[mongers]

But pretty much every middle class and upper class person everywhere (with the possible exception of the handful of upper class deviants with a blue collar fetish) sneers at the "white working class" (or its local social equivalent).

No.

It's pretty rare in my experience and as I say personally I think there's little uglier than snobbishness. I hate it.

I don't know, I'd say it's more in the middle of yours and Marty's numbers ;In my experience between a third and a half of English middle classes hold those sorts of views.

[Sheilbh]

Guardian headline:
'Miliband pledge to white van man'

Is there no one in the shadow cabinet who can tell him to stop, or lock him in a cupboard for a while?

[mongers]

Guardian headline:
'Miliband pledge to white van man'

Is there no one in the shadow cabinet who can tell him to stop, or lock him in a cupboard for a while?

Did he give several interviews about that or was it just the one on the bbc, whilst he was at a school the next morning?

I ask because what he was quoted as saying, was a deliberate shortening of the sentence he said, missing out a couple of words that rather changed the emphasis.

I know it's open season on portraying him as an out of touch nerd, but in the interview he gave, what he said sounded reasonable and unforced.