Quaro
7090
I don’t follow UK politics at all but every time I see Boris Johnson pop up on Twitter I’m struck by just how similar and terrible he is to Trump. WTF UK.
draxen
7091
The Tories have released some chill Boris beats.
Gotta love it :)
They should make a movie. Is Leni Riefenstahl available?
“Johnsons Top 10 Skrewdriver songs”
First the Corbynistas came for the Chief Rabbi, when he said this.
then the Corbynistas came for the Archbishop of Canterbury, when he came out in solidarity
Then the Corbynistas, a bit confused i think, came for the Muslim Council of Britain when they supported the Chief Rabbi and added their own warning about minorities being ignored when claiming racism.
that one of course generated a response on the right “there is no Islamophobia in the Tory Party, its all lies and smears” which was somewhat ironic seeing they’ve been linking the Rabbi all morning…
and now the Corbynistas, somewhat out of breath and tired from running torch wielding mobs all over town, are queuing outside the /checks… Hindu Council of UK.
Me, an atheist, hey, actual solidarity, you guys are ok gissa hug
and the Tories sneaked this bit of ethnic cleansing into their manifesto
Irish Travellers are a fucking nightmare, i’ve lived around them all my life but i do know enough about Romany and Traveller culture and lifestyle to recognise that paragraph and the wording around “unauthorised” and “intentional trespass” is pretty much the intentional destruction of their entire culture and this isnt a solution to some of the issues presented by the traveller communities.
For US readers, they are never authorised to set up encampments, a handful of plots across the UK in barely habitable locations are the only official ones. They are never given permission, they are hounded out and voted against everywhere they go. This is carte blanche to seize their homes/property and force them into fixed accommodation and cultural genocide of the Romany and Traveller lifestyle.
Oghier
7097
10 years ago, I was doing some work just outside Bratislava. Every morning, one of my colleagues, a Slovakian, picked me up at the hotel and drove to the job site. One day, we passed a beautiful teenage girl in a blue dress, just walking down the street. He scowled, leaned out the window, screamed something at her and spit. Then he turned to me and said “fucking gypsies.”
I know almost nothing about the Romany, except that some people really hate them.
Tim_N
7098
The most recent polls:
make it seem clear that if most of the Lib Dem voters switch to Labour then Boris Johnson would not be PM. I know first past the post voting sucks, and that Corbyn in many ways sucks too, but I still don’t really understand how people that are intelligent enough to understand the long-term threat to democracy from hard-right nationalism could not vote for Corbyn?
rho21
7099
Sadly we’ve already had our one chance at that for this generation in the UK and voted it down 68-32. Maybe we can try again in 2035 if we’ve managed to fix Brexit by then.
I’m really hoping the backlash from Trump will let the US fix its electoral college at least.
Aceris
7100
Boris, for all his flaws, is not a hard right nationalist. He has many flaws, but other than his support for brexit his worst flaws ( mendaciousness, being a bit racist ) are shared with Corbyn.
Johnsons own MP’s call him a hard right nationalist. I think people like Nick Boles knows Johnson and the Tories better than us.
From the outside, it seems clear that his support for Brexit is transactional: he supports it solely because that’s the way to power. To want power so much that you’ll do the most destructive political thing you can do is quite terrifying in a leader, and that alone ought to disqualify him. Never mind that I have no idea what it means to be ‘a bit’ racist…
The Roma are a different culture again from the British Romany and Irish Pavee.
Roma discrimination in Europe is unbelievably bad but integration issues are manifold. There’s an integral part of culture that separates them, their laws and values from ours. They are Roma, we are gadjo. It’s very difficult to cross the line at even a basic social level. Even a Roma will be declared gadjo and excluded if they integrate too much. The EU continues to try and help though.
The US has been more successful in integration of traveller cultures. Its a big part of US culture that just works on anyone.
Gadjo and Romanipen explained
Aceris
7104
Well I wouldn’t vote for the guy that’s for sure.
I quite agree about the transactionality of Boris’s support for Brexit. I actually think in a democracy being power hungry and without ideology is not so toxic. Indeed, democracy as a system channels ambition into, if not the service of the people then at least some level of responsiveness to their desires.
Of course this depends on the maintenance of strict norms about the conduct of politics, as once that lack of principle is given too much control over the nature of campaigning you get a demagogue. These norms are breaking down in the social media age.
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…
As @playingwithknives points out; Conservatives themselves recognize this. Even dyed-in-wool Thatcherite Ken Clarke isn’t afraid to mince words in referring to the modern-day Conservatives as right-wing nationalists - a development he has predicted for well over a decade.
Honestly, though, it’s easier just to look at how the party has changed during the last 12 months. At the start of 2019, the Tory party’s membership numbers languished at around 120K and had been suffering a steady declining for decades. By the time of the leadership election, the membership numbers had risen to somewhere around 180K (latest official numbers I’ve seen are 191K). The vast majority of new members appear to have come from the Brexit party and they delivered Johnson a crushing victory. This is not a secret - far-right nationalist (with Russian business ties, because - of course he has) Arron Banks - openly vowed to recruit 50K members into the Tories in 2018 - and is known to have spent substantial amounts of money in advertising to do so. In June, a YouGov poll found that ~60% of Tory party members had voted for the Brexit party in the MEP elections.
A party that has been effectively taken over by right-wing nationalists is a right-wing nationalist party.
The seemingly anti-Conservative pledges of expanded social services are right out have a of the right-wing populist playbook used by all the other hard-right nationalist parties in Europe to appeal to voters.
draxen
7106
MRP released. Looking good!
EDIT:
Aceris
7107
Terribly disappointing. Brexiteers voting tory, anti-Boris voters voting Labour. The dynamic of FPTP where it doesn’t matter how bad you are if you can make the other lot more toxic are truly awful, and not something I’d really understood before now.
Criticisms of Labour are met with fact-free denials and hyperbolic attacks on the torys (who deserve them, but I’d prefer accurate attacks).
A party that has been effectively taken over by right-wing nationalists is a right-wing nationalist party.
I’m not British, and I have no particular right to give opinions about British politics. With that said, nationalism emerges when people feel threatened, it would have little to no appeal otherwise. So if people feel this way, if the Conservatives have become nationalist, it’s because they’ve been provoked.
draxen
7109
I really don’t understand this idea that the Tories have become some kind of far right party. They are only extreme on a single issue - Brexit. A policy that won a majority in a referendum. Their manifesto is very much middle of the road Conservative policy. If the Tories are a far-right party does that also make the Lib Dems a far left party? (far centrist party? :D) They have an equally extreme Brexit policy.
My answer is no to both. It’s just that Brexit is a “new” issue that has been the catalyst for political realignment and people are coalescing around one or the other.
I’m much more hopeful and optimistic. I think this is just yet another part of the political realignment we are witnessing. Although politics is very bitter right now I’m hopeful this will dissipate over time back to pre-Brexit bitterness levels. With luck we should also see some new blood coming into politics from people who have been motivated by the recent political upheaval. Brexit has been compounded by a seeming lack of talent in politics.
People will put up with a lot but they won’t put up with being condescended to. When they are told they made the wrong choice because they are too old/too stupid and/or demonized as far right/fascist there will be push back. I think this forms part of the swing from the northern historically Labour strongholds to Conservative (and also The Brexit Party support in the European elections).
