“Extremists are trying to hijack this election. They want you to vote Lib Dem to punish Phil for being strong on immigration. The Lib Dems plan to give hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants the right to stay. It is up to you? Do you want the extremists to win?”
Which Phil is that then? Some UKIP or Lib Dem blowing the dog whistle to his racist base?
Nope. It’s Phil Woolas and Ed Miliband, the lefty brother, gave him the job of shadow Home Office minister which means that he got to air his views on all sorts of things including immigration.
The good news is that a court has ruled Woolas knowingly made false statements about his election rival and ordered a fresh contest in in his constituency.
The former immigration minister’s General Election 103 vote victory has been declared void.
Quite right too. Woolas knew exactly the game he was playing.
Of course it is entirely possible to read too much into a single phrase but see if anything leaps out at you from this passage on his website:
“Whether it is new schools and clinics, neighbourhood policing, housing or social services, his weekly return trip to London is to “bring back the bacon” for Oldham East and Saddleworth.”
Maybe people drop it into conversation in Oldham all the time but you can’t help thinking that it’s one of those linguistic choices made to appeal to a certain type of bacon sandwich lover. I say this as someone whose ideal Saturday breakfast is a soda farl with a lump of the stuff inside it.
Woolas has been up in court under Section 106 of the Representation of the People Act (1983). That’s the one that stops us making "any false statement of fact in relation to the candidate’s personal character or conduct" to prevent them being elected "unless he can show that he had reasonable grounds for believing, and did believe, that statement to be true". In a world where people have rotten politics and few principles such things seem to be a regrettable necessity.
Miliband took a little bit of flak from some who are ever so slightly to his left by plumping for Alan Johnson to be his shadow chancellor. This represented some unwelcome continuity with the Darling / Blair cuts programme. Choosing someone that even the notoriously dodgy Lib Dems feel they can legitimately accuse of trying “to foment racial and religious divisions” rather suggests that Ed Left Miliband was blowing a dog whistle of his own to the racists and Islamophobes.
Today’s verdict means that he’s going to have to find another MP cut from the same cloth. People affect not to believe you if you say that there is a lot of racism in the British working class.
Woolas and Miliband know there is and even think there can be a few votes in it. We’re likely to be seeing a lot more of this sort of stuff when the competition for jobs, social services and homes steps up as Labour proves itself to be much better at implementing cuts than fighting them.
Liam redux 
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