Dave touched on something today that (surprisingly) he hasn’t used before. Brown’s borrowing of an old NF/BNP slogan to blow a dog-whistle to Dagenham voters

“Take the slogan the Prime Minister wheels out every week – ‘British jobs for British workers.’ If he could only see how embarrassed Labour MPs are, how they shudder whenever he says those words. Well, I’ve done of a bit of work on this slogan of the Prime Minister’s. First, let’s be clear what they want us to think. The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has told us that there should be no doubt. It is – and I quote – ‘explicitly a British jobs for British people campaign…’… I did a bit more research to find out where he got his slogans from. Here’s one he borrowed off the National Front. Here’s another one he borrowed off the British National Party. Where was his moral compass when he was doing that?“

Knuckle-dragging barrel scraping politics aimed at winning back Dagenham council estate votes for Labour from the BNP. Labour activists are embarrassed by the slogan, Nick Griffin is flattered by it.  In reality it is meaningless, favouring Britons for British jobs is illegal. It is just a Deborah Mattinson focus-group tested dog-whistle slogan.

UPDATE : Ben Brogan has just updated his blog with something Guido hadn’t noticed, Dave “waved a copy of the BNP’s May 2006 newsletter at Gordon Brown during their Commons exchanges earlier” the document was headlined “Keep British jobs for British workers”.