UK parliamentary by-elections 2014

[Filuwaúrdjan]

'White Van Man' is a ridiculous media stereotype that has remarkably little relation to any known social reality and which very few legitimate tradesmen identify with and which quite a few - my father for instance - find pretty offensive (of course the idea that all tradesmen drive vans and that all people who drive vans are tradesmen... er... antiquated to say the least). The media, of course, believe it is an objective sociological category.

Broadly speaking the tweet was a very classic Not Ready For Prime Time Sorry About That moment (to say the least),* but the media reaction to it has been bizarre beyond the point of absurdity, and (I would argue) quite hypocritical: the assumption - and I write here as confirmed white trash - that it is normal to have a house festooned with absurd faux neoclassical columns and bedecked with enough flags for the average battleship is itself rather snobbish.

*I.e. public rubbernecking isn't a very bright idea if you are a public figure, even if one as absolutely obscure as Thornberry.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The Labour Party is suffering a slight backlash in non-metropolitan areas of the country

It is highly questionable whether this is actually happening outside the fevered imagination of out of touch political junkies (of all hues) in central London, but whatever.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

"#RochesterAndStrood was our 271st most-winnable seat. If UKIP win here, we can win across the country" - Mark Reckless

Its unusual for the winner of by-election to also come out with the most egregious bit of post-electoral bullsh!t, so congratulations of a sort to Reckless. That figure comes from an extremely dubious demography (bad demography) as destiny nonsense put forward by a pair of cringeworthy academic hacks. In reality the Medway towns were one of the strongest areas in the country for UKIP in the mickey mouse Euro elections earlier this year (and let's not even talk about the unusual circumstances of the by-election).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

With a certain crashing inevitability it emerges that the owner of the house - feted as emblematic of all working class people by middle class wankers who work for newspapers - is not, in fact, a tradesman of any description, but is actually a car dealer.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Whatever can be said about that particular by-election, two things can be noted. First, that Labour's poll share held steady; second, that the issue that allowed UKIP to build up a head of steam was (as you know very well) a local one.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Though I'd point out that there is no such thing as 'the C2 demographic'. One of the principle reasons why polling breakdowns in that category are notably volatile (even when allowing for the replacement of theoretically more reliable survey data with commercial polling aggregates) is because the range of occupations in it is extremely diverse. There are subsections that tend to vote heavily for this party or that party, and subsections that are extremely swing-y. And of course subsections that vote quite differently in different parts of the country. Back when there were still huge industrial employers employing huge numbers of skilled workers, sheer weight of numbers from that source meant that the category was (just about) uniform enough to (just about) make some sort of sense; not so now.