to thank Emily Thornberry profusely

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She has just shown how much Labour detest the aspirational working class, the swingiest of swing voters. Labour will be hit with this again and again and again; ever denial and denunciation will just bring Labour's true views to a wider audience. Fundamentally, it will only reinforce the undeniable fact that Miliband's centre of gravity is firmly ensconced in Islington.

She has made a Tory/UKIP coalition, perhaps the best possible electoral outcome, much more likely. Thank you Emily!

I'm not on Twitter. Is there a hashtag #whogivesafuck? That Perkins woman in the Grauniad is a prize idiot, doing the Fail's work for them.

Madrigals I lived in Dalston and I know I had both an English and an Irish flag in my window in 2002 and wasn't the only person in the area either, didn't feel out of place certainly.

She was definitely stretching the truth about it being something amazing or remarkable - she was just judging and stereotyping. I know on my road a lot of people have them out during tournaments and they are not all white or English. And, hey, isn't it racist supporting a team that's got to be at least 50% black or mixed race? I don't think people who leave them up are little Englanders, just lazy and they know that the qualifiers for the next lot are just around the corner.

And any fool knows that someone who drapes their house in England flags when it's not even the World Cup is a racist dick.

Okay Springheeled, seeing as you obviously don't know that much about it. The world cup was this summer. You might not have noticed on account of us being spectacularly shit.

England have played several friendlies since then and had a high profile friendly against Scotland last week. We are also due to start our qualifying campaign for the Euros in March 2015.

So perhaps rather than being racist dicks they're just either really into supporting an England team which is made up, as I said, in a large part of black and mixed raced young men, and they're just a bit lazy?

Are there any other stereotypes you'd like to chuck around? Perhaps referring to all women who wear the hijab as being a bit bomby? Or all black men who wear certain types of clothing as gangsters and muggers? Yet you feel entirely comfortable applying the same kind of flawed logic to white working class people? 'You have displayed a certain type of outward garment/symbol and you are a particular colour therefore I feel totally comfortable ascribing a set of beliefs to you despite the fact I really have no idea if you hold them'. Isn't that a bit, er, fucking racist?

God, UKIP are a nauseating bunch of bastards.

Nowhere near as bad as that ghastly hypocrite emily Thornberry.

I know Madrigals. When I lived in Dalston in 2002 there were so many flags around: Turkey, Ireland, England, Spain, Senegal, Brazil. I found it a huge unifying thing. Everybody had their flags up and they were saying who they supported, it used to start conversations in the street with neighbours you'd lived beside for years but not really known anything about and suddenly you had something to talk to them about and a reason to have a conversation.

I've never not had an England flag in my window during a tournament. But that England flag has never been alone, there's always been another flag because I've never lived in a solely English household. And sometimes my flag hasn't come down straight away. Because I'm lazy. Maybe if I hadn't had the Senegalese/Irish/Brazilian/Italian flags up there too I would have been labelled a racist?

The poor dears get into such trouble with their tweets that their phones should be impounded during an election.

It was obviously going to be a UKIP win and this gave the press an excuse to castigate Labour instead of being forced to lead with Tory defeat headlines.

I will vote labour. I always have and always will but I deplore the blandness Miliband epitomises.
The fresh blood to the parliamentary party used to come up through union sponsorship and that no longer happens so we get career Labour politicians just like the Tory party does. This helps to fuel the accusation that 'they're all the same' even though the policies and underlying philosophies differ.
I'll back Alan Johnson if he makes a run for the leadership but, whatever happens, I'll vote Labour next May. Labour still represents my core beliefs.

Unitarian, apart from the fact that you sound completely patronising I would like to ask you exactly what a union means to you today. Do you know that 2/3 of private sector workers do not have a pension? Do you feel a commitment to expanding unionisation and the benefits it brings to people outside the public sector? Or do you just view the unions as a conduit to serve your own vested interests? How can you say that you think 'fresh blood' coming up through the unions is a good thing when the unions ignore the injustices committed against working class non-members, who are generally low paid private sector workers.

Why do Labour represent your core beliefs? Can you explain that to me?

How do those 'core beliefs' differ from what benefits you personally?

White van man confounds sneering stereotypes... oh wait

Well quite. He is a racist moron. However he does not represent the 'working classes'. I am no fan of 'New' Labour but I am pretty sure Emily Thornberry was not trying to imply the working classes are all like Mr Rochester. (So unlike his literary namesake.)

AskBasil Great swathes of not very rich people (ie surely should be Labour voters?) hold exactly these views. But they get sneered at by the party that's supposed to represent them.

The point isn't that White Van Dan confounds these stereotypes by in fact being a vegetarian Buddhist diversity trainer and part-time volunteer psychotherapist, but that White Van Dan in fact perfectly encapsulates the stereotypes and is sneered at by a Labour politician for it. This neatly illustrates the disconnect between Labour and many of the 'hard-working families' they purport to represent.

The truth is that Labour only like 'hard-working families' when they're either working for the public sector (ie unionised and state-dependent) or else in low-paid insecure jobs where they will continue to be state-dependent thanks to in-work benefits. It's in the economic interest of both these groups to carry on voting for a big-state Labour.

In contrast, self-employed tradespeople are traitors to class solidarity. Rather than being obediently immiserated by a combination of shit wages and benefits they insist on making their own money, under their own steam, and both resent high taxation and - shockingly - don't believe people should be given something for nothing. And worst of all, their wages have been hammered by mass EU immigration, and so they object to it and want it to stop.

For this they are castigated as racist bigots, when in fact they are simply responding to a supply and demand problem that has disproportionately disadvantaged them. And yet because they don't align with the high-tax, high-dependency, vibrant internationalist diversity script beloved of metropolitan Labour, their values are inimical to those of the Labour Party. So people like Emily Thornberry treat them with contempt and try to make those values out to be disgusting, bigoted, shameful and socially beyond the pale.

In their heyday both Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher got White Van Man onside and so won by a landslide. Since their day, both main parties have adopted a condescending, patrician line that either skews things for the top 10% (Conservative) or skews things for the top 10% with a side order of high tax, self-righteousness and non-contributory benefits (Labour). Not only is no-one is doing anything for the self-employed, socially conservative, independent, aspirational lower middle class, but both Conservative and Labour treat their value system as retrograde, bigoted and frightfully non-U. And people wonder why Ukip is gaining so much traction.

It's not 'patronising' to suggest that Labour MPs were less bland and more diverse when the route upwards through union sponsorship was open.

BringMeTea, can you explain exactly why having an England flag on your house and being in favour of tighter immigration controls makes you a 'racist moron'? You seem to have made a big leap from that to assuming the man is a card carrying racist who hates everybody who is a different nationality or race from him.

You are yourself completely racist BringMeTea. As I said above, if you make assumptions about other people's politics or views based on outward appearances or a vague idea of their beliefs, for example that a brown woman in a niqab who is a Muslim and assuming she is a bomber or a black man wearing baggy trousers who's a bit angry about Mark Duggan being shot and thinking he is a looter and a mugger makes you racist. Looking at White Van Dan and seeing he is a white man, has an England flag on his house and would like tighter immigration controls then denouncing him as a 'racist moron' is using exactly the same logic. If anybody is a racist here BringMeTea, it's you. You are imposing racial stereotypes on White Van Dan with very little to back it up.

If you could point me to the evidence that he is a member of the BNP, throws pigs heads at mosques or beats up black lads I would be most interested in seeing it. He didn't even vote for UKIP. You're just making your own set of racist assumptions that would have you clutching your pearls if someone where to make them about someone with a different colour face.

And just repeating 'he is a racist moron', doesn't make it any more true. Really, attitudes like yours are exactly the reason the left is haemorraging support and also exactly the reason why Emily Thornberry offended so many people. If someone is concerned about the effect immigration is having on them or their community, rather than listening to them, or asking why, you simply dismiss them as 'racist morons'.

Given that immigration is coming very high in lists of voters concerns, do you really think that's going to be an effective way of winning support?

Labour and lib dems need to tear up their manifestos and start again. I'm sick of protacticsl voting I want a party with radical changes, sorting out gp practices, partial remunicipaling/nationalizing some but not all things, if it needs subsidising lets just have it back thank you very much. Corporations and individuals are continuing to shaft the country over tax. I don't buy the whole they will move away, laws just need to be passed and ceo's going to jail.

Unitarian it was a patronising post. And you've ignored the rest of it. Unions these days essentially the representives of an extremely limited group of people, who have their own vested interests, are largely state employees and are not interested in the welfare of society as a whole, but purely their own members. How would union sponsorship make Labour 'less bland' when it would simply ensure that it would produced MPs who tended to support the vested interests of the limited groups the unions represent?

That's bland. And complaining about Ed Miliband then lauding union sponsorship in the next breath is astoundingly misinformed. Because Ed Miliband managed to capture the Labour leadership because of, er, union sponsorship.

BringMeTea, you are astoundingly racist about poor white people who don't share your political views. Overwhelmingly so. I really find attitudes like yours repugnant. Anybody poor and white who won't sign up to a left wing agenda is worthless. Attitudes like yours make me so angry, they're the stuff of oppression and elitism.

Um Aermingers I think it may be you who has made a leap. I believe that people who hang flags from their homes in the UK are racist morons. Nothing will dissuade me from this view.

There is a real hatred of the working class amongst the liberal labour elite. Emily Thornbury is absolutely everything that is wrong with LAbour

YAB immensely U. I agree totally with what Boulevard said.

Labour hates self-employed tradespeople because they are the wrong sort of working class. They want low taxes and contributory welfare and a cap on immigration, because all these things are in their interests as a demographic. But because this doesn't fit Labour's class solidarity narrative and fixation with internationalism and high-tax, high-spend government they are demonised as nasty bigots and treated with exactly the kind of class snobbery Labour accuses the Tories of.

Incidentally BringMeTea, once I had an England flag and a Senegal flag in my window. Because I was such a nasty racist I was shacked up with a Senegalese Muslim.

I agree with Chipstick10 I have really gone off the Labour party in the last couple of years. I don't like Miliband. But Emily Thornberry has managed to with no words and a picture to say exactly what is wrong with the Labour party. And Labour wants people dependant on welfare. They want everyone taxed to the limit and ever more state support rather than people being enterprising. They bring this country down. I hate what Emily Thornberry stands for.