My Comment

Been fulminating on Bob Piper`s wonderfully combatitive blog....
He said (on the rise of the BNP)
But Labour cannot be blamed for the paucity of the Tory opposition for 12 years, which has been truly, truly pathetic.
I said
Yes it was unpopular to say that New Labour were hiding fiscal profligacy under an inflationary boom and that we ought to rein in .Such absurd doom mongering ended the career of Michael Howard and Oliver Letwin for example. Silly people .
On immigration it has something to do with housing but not ‘policy ‘, and no matter how many times you repeat that comforting myth it will get no truer . It is chiefly to do with the imagined community of England and the feeling that a home is being turned into a car park for any travelling folk who come by.
It was pathetic to see Jack Straw recently spotted sending dog whistles by banning the Burqa from his surgery hit easy targets and ignore the real problem .That is not the BNP but the wide constituency with sympathy for some of what they say . Immigration has been the number one concern for some years prior to the economic melt down your lovely masters have inflicted upon us , why no action ? Is it only bourgeois Liberals who get a voice ? I notice at the Crewe by election running a racist attack on blameless local Poles was an smoothly managed segue for the Party who have quintupled immigration and lost control of the borders .
Why Bob Knows Nothing About Working Class Voting - An essay
Since the Second World War about one third of the Tory vote has come from the working classes by the widest definition . In fact the working class Tory vote is the largest exception to class based voting in the UK . Middle class votes for Labour are less important but still a significant proportion its used to be about 25%. For example in 1983 4,000,000 wc voters supported the Conservative Party. In
1992 Labour trailed the Conservative Party in working class owner occupiers (even after having made up ground ).
These figures are out of date but illustrative of the true picture . The problem Labour has now is that its incursions in middle Englandare a memory but the working class vote it retained when it became New Labour has belatedly realised they were sold a pup
Conservatives never lost England and the working class you imagine in black and white are shopping at Blue Water and voting Conservative in much the same numbers as always . In the phrase working class you forgot the first word and when you claim we owe each other endless duties of care it might been wiser not to destroy the “we” in question.