
Tens of thousands of people pouring out onto that there Twitter showing support for Ed Miliband? What has the world come to? Stranger things have happened, just not that often.
And so it came to pass that for the best part of 24 hours, #webackEd trended on Twitter. It still is at the time of writing. Starting before last night’s round of hyped-up difficulties by @CharlieWoof81 and @jon_swindon, as hashtags go it can be described as an unqualified success. It even managed to resist blandishments and hijackings by trolls and the like.
Of course, trending topics are here today, gone in 30 seconds time. They often mean very little. They (mostly) denote an activity, like, ugh, watching Question Time or Strictly; are questions tweeted in to a celebrity Q&A; or just pick up phrases lots of people are throwing into their tweets. Like ‘Happy Christmas’. But not all trends are equal. Tweeters frequently use them to make a point, as per the case here. Tweets of this type are qualitatively different: they reflect a movement of opinion among a large group of people with a computer or mobile device to hand. Can anything then be gleaned from the many tens of thousands of tweets backing Ed Miliband?
februarycallendar said,
November 12, 2014 at 1:26 pm
I can understand why certain people in the party want Alan Johnson, simply because he was one of the very few working-class trade unionists actually to hold high office in the Blair and Brown governments; the argument that Miliband is too much of a Hampstead liberal to unite the working-class vote and hold back UKIP does have some legs to it. Because Johnson isn’t really a “celebrity politician” in the Blair sense, wanting him isn’t quite the same thing as purely and simply wanting someone who can be more convincing on Strictly Come Dancing than the Today programme, for all that he does have the rock music connections that Miliband doesn’t.
But you can only work with what you have. We all know that the age-old working-class trade unionist / Hampstead liberal divisions in the Labour Party have been skewed massively in the latter’s favour as a result of terror vandalism enacted by a Right which had become petrified that the very state itself would crumble in the face of working-class power. But Miliband cannot be blamed for that; he was given this world, he didn’t make it (why do I always quote Tupac in these circumstances? I’m glad I do, anyway). And his ideas are the best we can practically get at the moment. And even if he has been cringing to his enemies, Thatcher put out a lot of reconciliatory gestures to the agents of the post-war state between 1975 and 1979. We have to stick together, and hope. And even if you live in a seat where your vote doesn’t really matter in strictly electoral terms – either because Labour can’t lose (though perhaps in Rotherham a critical Labour vote matters more now in pure electoral terms than at any time anyone can remember) or because Labour can’t win – a good proportional vote will still make a Labour government appear more legitimate and able to change more, even if it doesn’t effect the actual make-up of parliament.
And yes, this is a great piece – shared it on Facebook myself.
(It also brings on another element of the “Miliband as Thatcher in reverse” argument; he’s having to overcome a lot of abuse from certain tribalistic elements in his party much as she did, only he is being attacked for being too privileged, and she was attacked for not being privileged enough.)
februarycallendar said,
November 12, 2014 at 1:27 pm
(incidentally, when I saw the title of this piece on HP I assumed the worst – that it would be saying that Miliband has no chance and that Labour have no chance unless they get a Blair clone, etc. Never been happier to be proved wrong.)