Why was the encounter between Gordon Brown and Gillian Duffy in Rochdale so achingly uncomfortable?

Not because he groaned ‘bigoted woman’ – he wasn’t wrong; not because the top man hadn’t answered a customer’s complaints – he had; not because he couldn’t spin an explanation of party policy – he had; not because he had failed to manage a conversation with Labour Party kin – he had; That was his problem – he ‘managed’ his dialogue. He answered her, but he didn’t engage with her. He made no concessions. What he, and everyone around him – and many commentators, too, didn’t appreciate was that the white woman in Rochdale also managed: she wasn’t an ingénue, she wasn’t ignorant, had a clear, coherent and unyielding critique of her party that should have engineered equality but decided not to. Her final poignant protest about student fees should have alerted Brown and his comrades to what was exercising Gillian Duffy: this women knew exactly what was different for the working class between now, and then – when her own generation could enjoy ‘great expectations’ but her grandchildren’s generation seems doomed to hard times. Immigration reared up, as it always does, as both bigotry and as a proxy for pitiless disappointment.

The tragedy of the encounter was that he expected her to be grateful, and she was angry about everything.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 8:11 am and is filed under Bea's Buzz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.