In fairness Gillian Duffy was being bigoted, if you don’t want to be called bigoted don’t hold bigoted views.
No she wasn’t. She raised a legitimate question on an issue that Labour itself admitted it ‘spectacularly failed on’. Labour refused to introduce transitional controls on workers coming into Britain to work from Poland and Hungary when they joined the EU in 2004. The other EU states including the big economies like France and Germany, did restrict them from working there until 2011. Labour refused and said that only 13,000 would come. Over a million people came. With no forward planning on houses and services or how to cope with such a huge and sudden population increase. Jack straw who made the decision admitted in 2013 that he had ‘spectacularly failed’ over the issue.
If a working class person can’t bring up a ‘‘spectacularly failed” government policy which has negatively affected their lives hugely without being called a “bigot” then they are being silenced, oppressed and denied a voice.
Brown patronised and insulted her even before that. Her first question, although garbled, was a good one. Labour had continued a practice which had been going on since the Thatcher years, moving people with spurious sickness claims from unemployment benefits onto sickness benefits to lower the unemployment figures. The press had caught onto this and as a result Labour applied huge pressure on GPS not to give out more sicknotes for new benefits claims. This ended up with a situation where a lot of genuinely sick people with new claims were being refused the benefits while people who weren’t really sick but had already claimed continued to get them.
It was another genuine and serious issue but Brown just stereotypes her and assumed she was just moaning about benefits.
The ‘bigot’ label is just, working class people should just shut the fuck up and stop asking difficult questions we can’t answer.