to thank Emily Thornberry profusely

[longfingernails]

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 don't think there will be a coalition.Things are looking like a UKIP majority

FFS, the bloke who's house it is 'loves his country' so much he couldn't even be bothered to turn out and vote.
No where in her tweet does it indicate she was mocking anyone, that is the way the 'media' have interpreted it because that's the current 'story' about Labour, i.e. a North London out-of-touch elite.
What Bollocks. For better or worse, Labour are the only mainstream party that represent ordinary working people. It has always been thus.

I was amazed too. I saw the resignation headline and thought uh-oh, what have they done now.

Oh - tweeted a pic of the town where a by-election was being held, that showed the atmosphere in the town/a striking image of a local house. With no comment at all. No one knows if she meant it in a snobby way but it seems unlikely since Owen Jones retweeted a pic of house she'd similarly tweeted in 2012 and no furore happened. Maybe because that pic had a black person in it so that was OK? I don't know.

During the recent Scottish referendum, there were flags (union and scottish), banners, posters and signs everywhere and loads of people took photos of them and tweeted them, they appeared in the national press etc. It didn't mean anything except "look, people are getting excited". It's not snobby to tweet a pic of a house with NO COMMENT. The snobbiness is in the eye of the beholder and in the massively oversensitive Labour leadership who dumped her and in the press who hounded her.

Although I am a lefty I have no particularly strong feelings about Emily Thornberry I don't know much about her. I don't even know if she is a snob but that's not the point. What bothers me is the thought policing here. You can not say ANYTHING and yet be hounded out because someone decides someone might be offended by you - erm, not saying anything.

No wonder Ed M is so silent on so many important matters and the whole Labour movement seems to have forgotten that they are there to OPPOSE and argue. Instead they are just obsessed with not frightening the horses.

To be honest, anyone who is stupid enough not to engage their brain before posting something like that shouldn't be representing anyone in parliament .

I don't really get what she thought she would get out of posting it? Also isn't it a bit rude to post someone's house on twitter without asking?

I think it is less about the political point than than the fact that she took a picture of someone's house and posted in order to laugh at it. I would be furious to see the front of my house re-tweeted in that way whatever the point was.

She wasn't mocking them? How in earth do you come to that conclusion? Do you think she was admiring their white van and England flags? Jesus.

Of course she was mocking them. She was being a bloody nasty, quite frankly, and I am astounded she didn't have the sense to realise how foolish it was.

It all makes me wonder, yet again, why anyone voted no in the Scottish referendum. We could have rid ourselves of all these fuckers.

storm in a teacup.
have a to dunk!

She used to be my local MP, before we moved. She is stupid - I wrote to her asking for clarification on something, why it had to be that way, and asking her to justify/explain/change it.
She wrote back, explaining in painstaking detail what the policy was, not explaining. So I replied and said 'yes, I know the policy, I'm asking why?'
She sent the same response. With the same spelling mistakes. Useless woman.

I don't think she was mocking the aspirational working classes, I think she was mocking Little Englanders. The white van was unfortunate and a bit stupid.

To be honest, UKIP voters have to be pretty clueless, given what they are voting for.

'FFS, the bloke who's house it is 'loves his country' so much he couldn't even be bothered to turn out and vote. '

I think he said that to close down discussions on who he was going to vote for.

no she wasn't mocking them, as this tweet shows.
It is the media, that wants to create this story, that is doing the mocking, and mocking us the voting public
We actually had an effective politician working for us until this morning.

As painful as it is to watch the slow suicide of the Labour Party, I do take some satisfaction in seeing the likes of Thornberry hoist by her own petard. She's a prime proponent of using social media mob-rule campaigns to demand bans and resignations for whatever minor infraction 'offends' her on that particular day.

Live by the sword, die by the sword; identity politics swings both ways.

Can someone explain to me the significance of the white van?

This seems to be one of those "bring your own meaning" things, because I can't see anything mockable in the picture - yet clearly a lot of people here can.

why would he say that to close down discussion? surely you'd say "i haven't voted yet" or "i'm not going to tell you who i'm voting for"?

I shouldn't be having to explain how I know someone who DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING wasn't being mocking. You should explain how you know she was, since she DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING.

is this just as bad then?

People tweet pics of houses all the time on twitter - in the scottish referendum as I said; my architect friend tweets pics of houses he admires; houses appear in pretty much any street/city scene. It's ridiculous to suggest it's not an OK thing to do and Thornberry has done it before with no incident.

Again I'm not defending her per se. I'm pissed off with the labour leadership / media for persecuting someone when there's absolutely no evidence she did anything wrong, and in fact was doing what she's done before with no problems. If labour don't like it why didn't they freak out about the previous pic?

Are MPs only allowed to tweet pics of rich people's homes otherwise it's "sneering"

Are they not allowed to tweet a pic of a woman because that would be sexist? Because it adds up to the same thing.

' I am just having a massive WTF? moment over this.'

So glad it's not just me. I think it was an ill-judged thing to tweet but a resignation matter? Seriously????

Anyone who thinks that UKIP is anything other than an utter disaster for the majority of the country needs their head examined.

That's pretty ridiculous voyages I'd like to know what possible reason (other than petty-mindedness) you think there was for posting that tweet.

If she doesn't feel she's done anything wrong, she should not have resigned. I think it was direspectful and certainly ill-judged.

From what I'd seen (she's been on question time), I never liked the woman anyway.

When I first heard about this, I didn't k ow what party she was from and presumed she was a conservative- I was so shocked when I found out she was Labour.

IMO it does show the champagne socialists at their worst. They just don't u dear stand working class people and don't want to either. They want to be as far away form it/them as possible.

Anyone who thinks that UKIP is anything other than an utter disaster for the majority of the country needs their head examined
this. in spades.

"I don't know about the council estate but as her father was assistant General Secretary to the United Nations (according to her profile on the BBC website) it would suggest that she didn't grow up worrying about how school trips were going to be paid for."

Given that her mother and father were divorced when she was 7 and it is EXTREMELY unusual for children of UN GS's to live on council estates but extremely usual for non-resident parents not to pay maintenance or to pay them at poverty levels (3/5 of lone parents do not get any maintenance at all), I wouldn't actually make any assumptions about her financial situation vis a vis school trips.

But also given that the discussion around this is all about "Labour out of touch", I think the more relevant point is that "council" isn't alien to her. I

Here's the New Statesman take on it.

Do I think Emily T admires white van men and their houses with St George flags? Pull the other one.

She's not an architect or cultural commentator along the lines of Grayson Perry. (Could he give Labour a bit of training?)

She chose it as an image of Rochester. That was its significance to her; a by-election summed up in one picture. Maybe she could have asked the homeowner the significance to him of the flags.

About Emily Thornberry's background - this is from the Guardian:

"Born in July 1960, Emily Thornberry was raised on a council estate outside Guildford by her mother, a teacher and Labour councillor, after her parents divorced when she was seven. Her father Cedric Thornberry was an academic and human rights lawyer.

She failed the 11-plus exam, went to a secondary modern and had to do courses to get enough A-levels to go to Kent University, where she read law and met her husband Christopher Nugee, who is now a QC."

I am appalled at the treatment of Thornberry by Miliband. From the media, I expect no better. But all she wrote was "Image from Rochester". Anyone who gets upset at that or imagines it is mocking the "aspirational" working class must truly be a delicate little flower. Or, more likely, another racist troublemaker. As if we didn't have enough of them.

Unfortunately, this is another nail in the coffin of freedom of speech in this country. Now that we know that even the most innocuous remark will offend the racist morons, the time will come soon when no-one on the front bench is allowed to say anything at all, lest they alienate the moron vote.

OP, you should be ashamed of yourself for revelling in the hounding of a politician for something this inoffensive. But I doubt you have the wit.

Is this post a joke?! Somebody SERIOUSLY thinks a Tory/Ukip coalition is a good outcome?

packs bag, leaves UK