Crystalisation

So, the Psycho Cyclops has actually let a microphone capture what he really thinks of a core Labour voter. Big deal, you may say - it's been obvious for decades that the leaders of the Labour Party fear and despise the proles as only the lower middle class can.

Obvious to whom, though? Clearly not to the life-long Labour voter who asked him what he was going to do about the vast deficit he has run up, and the intolerable strain his policy of unlimited immigration has put on the sacred Welfare State.

Brown's foot-in-mouth moment may be one of those unpredictable events, akin to minerals in solution crystalising, which provide the seed around which previously free-floating doubts begin to take solid form. 

Think of the expenses scandal: most people were dimly aware that politicians, in general, are distinguished from criminals only by their lack of the minimum courage required to rob the helpless openly. Yet it took the revelation not so much of their systematic dishonesty but of the pettiness of their cheating to crystalise that general awareness into the open contempt that they had long deserved.

It is a strange phenomenon. In this case, I pray that it will break the Labour pukes' apparently unshakable hold over the quarter of the electorate that they have most systematically betrayed.