This week's events involving Prime Minister Gordon Brown's encounter with
Rochdale pensioner and life long Labour voter
Gilian Duffy, when he at first spoke to her ion a friendly, and, for him, affable manner, but was
recorded calling her a “bigoted woman” as he drove away, were revealing in a number of ways.
Firstly they revealed a lot about the man himself. Insincerity is nothing new in politicians, but seldom has it been revealed quite so blatantly, and even the most passionate of Labour supporters must have cringed at the contrast between the flattering and friendly lies he told to the woman's face and what he said about her, and her views, behind her back when he thought he was no longer being recorded. However, there was more than just hypocrisy revealed immediately the car door closed
The fake, "stuck in a wind tunnel", grin dropped from his face and the real Gordon Brown raised his ugly head.
His first act was to blame someone else (his adviser, Sue Nye, a woman who will surly double lock her doors and windows and jump at the slightest creaking floorboard for many years to come) for 'letting' him meet 'someone like that'
he then accused the elderly voter of being a bigot merely because she dared, ever so mildly, to express some concern about migration. This was despite the fact that the poor old duck had even obeyed the BBC approved immigration debate requirement by specifically referring to “Eastern European” immigrants rather than the large numbers of Asians who have moved into
Rochdale in recent decades.
In response Brown had disingenuously attempted to dismiss her concerns by claiming that the “million” foreigners were 'just replacing' a million Brits who were deserting the place. This was in fact a lie, as there are actually considerably more Europeans in Britain than there are Britons in Europe (let alone the millions upon millions of non-Europeans in Britain).
Furthermore, most of the Britons in Europe are spending their British earned, and British paid, pensions in places like France, Spain and Greece, not competing with Europeans for jobs and forcing down European wages.
When
confronted with a tape of what he had said he put his head in his hands (forgetting there was TV in the studio). When the head came up the tried to say HE was misunderstood. Of course he was not 'misunderstood', he was just 'caught'. He wined that he had not been able to respond to the question about immigration because of the media – he had obviously forgotten the fib about all those Brits in Europe
He then blamed some other minders for forgetting to take his microphone off. It was all somebody else (perhaps several somebody
else's) fault, to Brown the fault lay with the recording, not with what was recorded. None of the blame was his.
As the panic began to set in he dropping everything else and rushed back to
Rochdale in search of the deeply hurt but still feisty pensioner's home and disappeared indoors for 45 minute, emerging to say that in fact HE had misunderstood her, he had apologised (now) and she had accepted his apology, and that he was a repentant sinner, all delivered with a nervous smirk/grin throughout. See my reference to sincerity and politicians above.
Throughout we never saw the woman, she stayed indoors. I didn't count how many bodyguards went in with him or how may came out, but when he stressed she had accepted his apology (the same woman who was giving him a Northern tongue-lashing a few hours earlier when the TV people relayed his remarks about her) I was left with the feeling the reason she wasn't by his side (it was on her doorstep after all) was because two of them had her in the kitchen holding her down until Gordon was out of range of domestic missiles.
By Friday in his interview with over employed Jeremy
Paxman he had come up with a new excuse for calling a voter a bigot, apparently they were having one conversation and he was hearing a completely different one
http://www.express.co.
uk/posts/view/172480/Brown-defends-bigoted-woman-jibe
However, it revealed a lot more than just the psychological and moral flaws of our sociopath of a Prime minister.
Had the so called “gaffe” related to any other subject the Cameron and
Clegg double act would have been screaming it from the roof tops and probably used it as their mobile phone ring tones. However, in this instance their silence was almost eerie. Certainly they commented, and were suitably critical of Brown's slur on Mrs. Duffy however, in both cases their comments were made with the frowning and serious faced reserve of one listening to the words “there but fir the grace of God” echoing at the backs of their heads.
Let us be in no doubt that, although both Cameron and
Clegg are both sufficiently media savvy to remember to take off their microphones before making private comments, both of them would have taken exactly the same view as Brown did of Mrs. Duffy and her views.
To our political leaders and other residents of the Westminster bubble, common people who say things like “You can't say anything about the immigrants, other wise you're a r.........” or “And what about all these Eastern Europeans, where are they all flocking from?” as Mrs. Duffy did, are bigots. In fact, at any time other than during an election, when they are required to pretend to empathise with the plebs, many of our politicians would view such statements as proof that the speaker was a hate fuelled, jack booted, Nazis.
Young journalists and junior political party apparatchiks must have been rather confused, after years of being taught to accuse people who expressed the views Mrs. Duffy did of racism and assorted hate crimes, they were suddenly being required to treat her as an “ordinary person” who was merely expressing “concerns shared by many ordinary people”, an approach which would never be permitted at any other time.
However, there is an election on, and the establishment has been forced to accept that the previously unmentionable topic of immigration is an issue of serious concern to many of those common white proles who, for the time being, still have votes. Therefore, they have to spend a month pretending that understand ordinary people and care about ordinary people's concerns, otherwise ordinary people might go off and vote for the
BNP.
Once the election is over, everything will go back to normal, the politicians will forget any promises they made about resolving immigration, and it will once again be okay to call Mrs. Duffy a bigot.
That is, of course, unless enough people vote
BNP to ensure our rulers stay as scared as they are right now
