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When Brown called that Rochdale lady bigoted there was the same outcry. He may have been wrong but it seemed to flip the argument so that a few years before you weren't allowed to mention immigration without being branded a racist to the point where Britain was suddenly a post-racist society and anti-immigration couldn't possibly have anything to do with racism and you had to be nice to the BNP when they came on the Today programme in case you came off as metropolitan.
It's one of the scary things in our post Brexit world. It's now taboo to call a racist, racist.
Can't believe how far right this county has lurched in such a relatively short time.
Ste_S
I don't disagree with that at all. I agree the message should be simple and seductive.
I just don't think that message should begin with 'how much of this can we absorb'. The first way to win back a Labour voter who voted Brexit is to change his or her mind, not to think 'How much of how this person thinks NOW can I pander to?'
I think it was Obama's first campaign where he talked about gun control and how in certain deprived white areas people had nothing to hold on to but their guns. It was considered a giant mis-step, one of the few of that campaign. It's become taboo within politics to say people who are poor and white might also be wrong about something. This weird conflation of deference and disenfranchisement. I think that's very dangerous (see Trump if you feel like it).
When Brown called that Rochdale lady bigoted there was the same outcry. He may have been wrong but it seemed to flip the argument so that a few years before you weren't allowed to mention immigration without being branded a racist to the point where Britain was suddenly a post-racist society and anti-immigration couldn't possibly have anything to do with racism and you had to be nice to the BNP when they came on the Today programme in case you came off as metropolitan.