This is me giving notice: the UK is a fucked state. Our political class is beyond repair, and the lazy slide into populist right-wing bigotry signalled by Ukip’s victory in the the Rochester and Strood by-election is probably irreversible. Not because Ukip are in any sense great, because Ukip are just the evil ventriloquist’s dummy from Richard Attenborough film Magic with a posse, but because everyone else in politics is terrible. Labour are terrible. The Conservatives are terrible. The Lib Dems would be terrible, but they’ve shrivelled to a vestigial appendage of the Tories and will soon wither and drop off. And most terrible of all is our political media, which has spent most of the last 24 hours hounding a Labour MP for tweeting a picture of St-George’s-cross festooned house with a white van in the driveway in the constituency of Rochester & Strood.
That’s all Emily Thornberry did. Just shared a picture, with the fairly redundant comment “Image from #Rochester”, presumably to aid those who thought an actual miniature terraced house had appeared on their screens rather than an image of one. Now, who knows what Emily Thornberry was thinking as her thumb swiped the tweet button. Maybe, deep in her secret soul, every pixel really was imbued with the subtext “Oh my word how common” – although since Thornberry was raised on a council estate, she seems an unlikely vector for snobbery. Maybe it’s a coded missive of anti-patriotism, and if you say all the words in the tweet backwards, you’ll discover the subliminal message “I hate the Queen, shit on the flag”.
Content from our partners
