The picture says it all ?? ?@BorisJohnson? #g7 pic.twitter.com/3sPrK3Zl1m
— Arne Delfs (@ArneDelfs) June 12, 2021
… or, BULLY BUNTER’S SEASIDE SUMMIT OF SHAME:
International gatherings have been off the menu for quite some time now, due mostly to the ‘current unpleasantness’, but also thanks to a certain country’s well-funded trollfarms and obviously blackmailed client-politicians making sure that no one’s really trusted each other enough for visiting to be worthwhile. So, it’s actually a nice change of pace to be able to slot the Tonytush into its well-worn couch groove, crack open a can of 8% chocolate stout, and settle down to enjoy a collection of cocksure national emblems assembling under the bright summer sun to dazzle us with their range of inspirational skills, visionary ingenuity under pressure, and intuitive understanding of the additive value of teamwork, all of the things which people operating at this rarefied level of excellence are supposed to excel at, and for which they are all oh so very, very expensively renumerated. Their job – their only job, really – is to make the world a better place, if only for a short time, and remind us that the stiff, crabbed, endlessly negative world the Right have clumped together for us since they grabbed the wheel isn’t the only puddle in which we can splash. There really is a better today out there we could be living in, one where otherwise rational people don’t need to feel the urge to palm a sharp knife because you just never can tell when Stranger Danger might happen to YOU! Life can be good. It can be hopeful. We can share the best of ourselves and look damned good doing it.
But that’s enough about the delayed 2020 European Football Championships, they’ve got their own thread where inevitable French or German victory can be celebrated. We’re here to talk about the recently concluded G7 meeting where, in utterly predictable fashion, Flobalob Johnson’s delusional buffoonery took a serious event devoted to serious issues and sprayed bum-paste all over the august proceedings like someone stuffed a veal-fed pug full of laxatives and glued it to a writhing garden hose.
This G7 took place at an upscale hotel estate in the lovely little seaside resort of Carbis Bay, Cornwall, which just so happens to be as distant from Scotland as their team’s chances of qualifying from Group D [Ed – Oh, you’ve jinxed it now] and a county that sums up Brexit voters in a nutshell, in that it voted Leave, immediately demanded that other parts of Britain stump up the £200 million a year it then lost in EU infrastructure grants, and has spent the last year watching its fishing, farming and tourism industries turn to dust while blaming everyone but themselves. It was promoted by Tory State Media (with typical jingoistic myopia) as a made-to-measure showcase for ‘Global Britain’, that lean and hungry future-state created when Johnson’s Brexit victory freed the UK from the EU’s jealous bondage and liberated its phalanxes of swashbuckling entrepreneurs to go boldly forth and harvest the world’s pent-up appetite for Stilton, period drama and things that go Fucking Boom! Hosted by the (checks notes) charmingly chummy (burns notes) Alexander ‘Boris’ de Pfeffel Johnson and his long-term mistress Carrie ‘Antoinette’ Symonds (hastily transformed into wifey number 3 in an ostentatiously Catholic ceremony at the end of May that had nothing at all to do with Joe Biden being a practicing Catholic and Doctor Jill Biden being a step or twenty above visiting local schools and animal sanctuaries alongside a sharp elbowed concubine), this gathering of the Great and Good (Western Division and Affiliates) would immortalise the moment when Britain strutted confidently back onto the international stage of Big Boy globo-politics as a respected peer rather than a shackled rule-taker, winning over all the silly doubters with a display of backslapping camaraderie and musky bonhomie redolent of a leather-clad Elvis circa 1968. Still got it, uh hu hu.
Yeah, but no. Grey reality falls with musty inevitability across our story. This is the Disunited Fiefdom of Lesser Brexitannia we’re talking about here, a country run by and for a grifting minority of highly slapable nonentities made lazy and overconfident by their sweethearts and lollipops deal with domestic media. These people think that they’re the creamy white shizzle to whom lesser folks raise statues of purest marble, while in reality they’re so universally incompetent they could fuck up a facial at a Porn Awards afterparty. All that PR bullshit (and this Government is nothing but PR bullshit) does wonders when you’re pitching woo to a radicalised population of tabloid-poisoned geriatrics, less so when your audience consists mainly of grown-up people with their own political and media culture to worry about, no illusions whatsoever about the lowness of your quality and barely any reason bar general politeness to hide their awareness of it. If Johnson imagined he could cosplay Churchill during cocktails and photo-ops while ducking any of the substantial issues of state he’s so badly suited to solving [Ed – He did] he was very quickly disabused of his naivety. Brexit was the pale horse Flobalob rode into Absolute Power, but his problem remains that sealing that deal meant signing off on legally binding international agreements with rules and timetables and everything. These were sold to the electorate as “oven ready” and “the deal you voted for”, but all that guff was just one more big, fat fucker of a lie amidst an Election campaign notable mainly for its shameless embrace of barefaced dishonesty. Leaving aside the fact that Britain’s economic future has been hammered into driftwood and splinters by the predictable aftereffects of leaving the EU (we might as well, since the British Media certainly aren’t inclined to talk about it), the major pressing issue that spoiled Bunter’s weekend jolly was The Matter of Ulster.
Basically, the UK and the Republic of Ireland share a land border on the island of Ireland. On one side of it the Republic, on the other the Province of Ulster, also known as Northern Ireland. When both were EU members that wasn’t a problem, because civilised, but since the UK became
adrift isolatedindependent, it most certainly is. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that (mostly) ended decades of sectarian strife in Ulster specified no hard border (border posts, customs inspections, identity checks, etc) between the Republic and Northern Ireland, but how does that jibe with the need for the EU to protect its internal market and regulatory environment from a UK where Tory ideology demands low to no regulation and is seeking import/export deals with countries with lower standards than a Nickleback groupie? Answer – It does not, and the thorny question of how to square this circle has bedevilled the Brexit process for years. It’s why Theresa May’s numerous flawed attempts to compromise with the EU in a way that maintained Tory Party unity failed to get Parliamentary approval. The parties opposing Brexit plus the Ultra-Brextremist wing of the Tory Party (which Johnson acted as semi-official spokesman for before winning the Tory Party leadership and which cynically equated any kind of genuine compromise with outright capitulation) could outvote the Government loyalists and stop things dead.This is the problem Johnson faced after winning the 2019 Election on the unexamined (by the Media) promise that he had a plan to “Get Brexit Done”. In order to secure a Brexit deal in late 2020 that simultaneously met the EU’s demands for clarity on customs checks and regulatory standards, got rid of the ‘Irish Backstop’ provision that had assumed mythical hate status on the Brexiteer Right, and also respected the Good Friday Agreement that kept the peace in Ireland, Johnson chucked aside everything he’d previously said on the topic (no surprise there) and agreed that Northern Ireland would remain subject to EU customs union rules even after the UK as a whole exited the EU, establishing a de-facto customs border down the middle of the Irish sea in order to protect the EU’s internal market in goods from any changes (for which read substantial downgrading) in British regulatory standards. The idea being that there would be a grace period lasting for the first part of 2021 to allow the UK to get its shit together (either by signing up to EU-level regulations in perpetuity or by funding the establishment of a proper network of customs posts along the UK side of this notional border) but the important point was there would be no ‘hard border’ between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, preserving one of the major tentpoles upon which the Good Friday Agreement rests.
Of course, and as any of his ex-wives and unwanted children can attest, Flobalob is constitutionally incapable of keeping his word, and virtually as soon as the ink was dry on the Northern Ireland Protocol his Government-of-Rogues was making it clear that it planned to treat it more as a first-draft pending renegotiation than the legally binding international agreement it actually was. They’ve been thumbing their noses at the EU for months and acting as though the front pages of the British tabloids are the ultimate arbiter of international law [Ed – They’re not? Do they know that?] which is entirely on trend. These are the people who passed an Internal Market Bill in 2020 that gave the Government ‘authority’ to unilaterally ignore any bits it disliked in the Withdrawal Agreement Johnson had just signed with the EU, dismissing Parliamentary and EU concerns that this amounted to brazenly breaking international law with, and I only barely paraphrase, “No we’re not, and even if we are, it’s only in a specific and limited way, so mind your own business, oiks.” Your rules don’t apply to them. Don’t you know who they are?
Crapping all over the same Northern Ireland Protocol that they had rammed through Parliament and signed into law was dumb, but very popular with the Tory Party’s rabid Brextremist base. Unilaterally extending the termination point of the ‘grace period’ that allowed shipment of some trade goods from the UK into Northern Ireland without checks from June to October without even consulting the EU was even dumber, but was even more popular with the rabid Brextremist base. Whining that the EU’s refusal to just let the UK get on with violating the clear wording of the Northern Ireland Protocol was an “excessively purist interpretation” of the rules was beyond dumb, but had the rabid Brextremist base flushed and wet lipped. Slashing the UK’s international aid budget by £4 billion in direct violation of their election manifesto was so dumb even Nicolas Cage wouldn’t star in a film with it, but it had the rabid Brextremist base frantically digging out the ball-gag and harness set they got in the divorce. Johnson’s own repeated insistence that he might be minded to invoke Article 16 of the Protocol (which justifies unilateral measures if applying the Protocol’s rules “leads to serious economic, societal or environmental difficulties that are liable to persist”) in order to facilitate the movement of crappy English sausages into the already sausage-sufficient Northern Irish market was so dumb it could win an election in a safe Tory constituency, but it had the rabid Brextremist base slamming their rigid members in car doors while howling “BORIS’ BRITISH BANGERS!!!” at the uncaring moon.
All of these hugely embarrassing actions by the British Government were politically as dumb as fuck while being red meat to the base, to which I’m sure you’d say so far, so lime-flavoured Trump-lite, but ramping it all up on the eve of a major G7 summit? One which you are hosting and at which you’ll be negotiating vitally important international co-operative efforts with the people you’re most pissing off? That’s beyond dumb. That’s deaf, dumb and blind. That’s Helen Keller floating in a sensory deprivation tank. That’s… well, that’s our Government. If fate had conspired to elect a box of wind-up dildoes to office in 2019 they’d be a substantial step-up on this shower of self-satisfied teat-suckers. One might almost think they were deliberately sabotaging the nation’s interests in service to other bodies that might benefit from a divided and isolated UK, but that’s for people with better legal representation to argue. I’m just clear that they’re a bunch of nasty fucking idiots led by a lazy, incoherent fraud and every single one of them would benefit from a punch to the throat.
So, we get what we had last week. Which was an extended, excruciatingly embarrassing evisceration of the comedy character known to his fans as ‘Boris’ Johnson at the hands of people who arrived at the G7 already well-aware how lightweight he is and refreshingly unwilling to give him the benefit of the doubt he’s so very reliant on. In meeting after meeting, the EU leaders Johnson met with took time from discussing more important topics to explain calmly and almost pityingly that the UK had no option but to abide by the agreements it had negotiated and signed, otherwise every other nation would have to conclude that the UK and its Prime Minister simply could not be trusted to keep their word, and he wouldn’t want that, would he? In response Flobalob fell back on his trademark melange of huffy blather and casual lies, but that flew like an Acme anvil. To their credit (and much to my surprise, maybe it was the Pirate-themed air of the Cornish coast inspiring them to stick it to the Establishment) various reporters, including Channel 4 News’ delightfully to-the-point Gary Gibbon, went straight for the corpulent creep’s wattle, saying bluntly that he’d been told over and over again what the terms of the agreements he’d signed were and asking if he was just flat-out lying when he claimed to be surprised by the EU’s stance. The look on his face when that interview concluded (cold-eyed, haggard, impotently furious at being humiliated) was such a chef’s kiss moment that you could almost hear the Chief Executive of Channel 4 sighing as she prepared to field a barrage of threatening phone calls from the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
So comprehensive was the mass-beating Johnson was being forced to endure that peanut-headed brain-donor Dominic Raab was brought out of the steroid-induced coma he’s been kept in since the last time Johnson needed someone at his back with the intellectual firepower of a salted anchovy to pretend that he was mortally offended by French President Macron’s banal observation that Northern Ireland wasn’t part of Great Britain (geographically or as far as customs were concerned). Raab, a man so blisteringly stupid and moronically belligerent that Johnson couldn’t resist appointing him head of the Foreign Office, and the same cork-skulled knob who was surprised to learn that Dover was a coastal port of some importance to British overseas trade despite his being Brexit Secretary at the time, bellowed into the first available microphone that of course Northern Ireland is part of the UK and foreign johnnies needed to acknowledge that or else, proving once again that distraction via tabloidesque meltdown is the only thing this lot are any good at. Needless to say, Macron (whose main concern all week appeared to be ensuring that his pants were tighter than Justin Trudeau’s) didn’t give a fuck about yet another rosbif tantrum, but the fauxrage had done its job of luring the British Media away from boring old questions about policy and onto the much more familiar ground of access journalism and insider gossip, where the optics of who ‘won’ and who ‘lost’ will always benefit whoever has the right journalist’s private number.
Take the New Atlantic Charter Johnson signed with Biden as case in point. On the one hand, the dawn of a post-Trump era of co-operation between the great democracies to secure political and economic freedoms in a world of spreading illiberalism and climatological peril, on the other a purely theatrical photo-op for an eternally needy brat who loves to play dress up. “I’ll be Churchill and you can be Roosevelt”. Pointless and ultimately meaningless when no one who isn’t paid to pretend that they believe a single word you utter actually trusts you as far as they can throw you. On the other, other hand, it doesn’t matter one Little Jimmy Osmond if Johnson meant a word of it, does it? He just signed an official agreement with the President of the United States on behalf of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland promising to promote and defend things like transparency, the rule of law, independent media, the dignity of work, all of which are under attack in one way or another by his Government and its allies, while working to combat disinformation designed to manipulate elections, which his own Government and its allies have benefitted from enormously. Who exactly do you think is going to be holding the casting vote when the question is asked “Are our Brits working?” Hint, it’s not anyone who knows which words require a ‘U’ in order to be spelled correctly, it’s not even anyone with an American passport and an Australian accent, and it’s definitely not the ‘Great British Public’. The British Media were happy to cover the signing of the NAC as a coup for Johnson, a ‘win’ to offset the ‘loss’ of him having his knuckles rapped by Biden over the threat to the Good Friday Agreement, and a serious moment of adult behaviour after the cringing embarrassment of The Exchange of Unequal Gifts, but looked at more cynically Uncle Joe used Johnson’s vanity to manipulate him into signing the UK up to a specific set of behavioural standards that today’s Tory Party are not naturally capable of living up to.
That’s, uh, that’s how mature democracies treat troublesome rogue states, isn’t it? Wrap them up in silken chains and squeeze if they wriggle? That what we are now?
Makes you proud to be British, said no one who wasn’t on the take. It’s just so infuriatingly embarrassing that this is the future of Britain because 43% of voters were stupid/evil enough to look at the scruffy buffoon and think, “Oh yes, he’s the one we want leading us”, and if the opinion polls are anything to go by he’d get back in with an even larger majority because the Opposition is… well… I don’t know, apparently convinced that offending every one of its core constituencies in turn will somehow purify their essence and attract a better class of (Tory) voter.
The G7 was supposed to be about the world’s most important democracies coming together to negotiate big answers to the big problems plaguing the world, and although, yeah, that only barely started to happen in a few areas and in others not even that, what’s even more galling is that Britain’s sole contribution to any of it was a thin-skinned clown who thinks the world owes him a life of luxury and some nice scenery for group shots.
If only anyone could understand how depressing that is. /s
Fuck these people, I’m all about the Football.
John Revolta
*speaks into intercom* Ms. Tompkins……….clear my schedule!
The Pale Scot
We’re all living in Bizarro World
Ian Paisley accuses BBC of mocking Edwin Poots’ faith
Accurately describing a bigoted young earth creationist as a bigoted young earth creationist is slander
Go figure
cain
haha!!! I love it.
lowtechcyclist
“could fuck up a facial at a Porn Awards afterparty.”
I can’t wait to get an opportunity to use this one
Also “lower standards than a Nickleback groupie.” Dayum!
Tony Jay
@The Pale Scot:
Paisley’s ‘argument’ is basically “Yeah, what we believe is crazy and highly mockable, so mentioning it at all is evidence of bias against us. Just say we’ve got ‘faith’ and leave your viewers none the wiser about the nutty bolts of our Kooky Kristian Kult“.
I wonder if the BBC’s Director General will write another open letter to staff suggesting that the corporation has a secular bias and needs more godbothering voices, because ‘balance’.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
When I read a Ton Jay article I like picture I am one of the two suits sitting next to Jimmy in The Who video 5:15 while reading Jay’s article in the paper while ignoring that stoned kid. “Harmph,” mutter as the kid gawks at the passing lights “Germany won again“
The Pale Scot
Writes down carefully
The Pale Scot
@Tony Jay:
The willingness of society to cut these swivel eyed loons slack, of any mythical persuasion, is going to be the death of us all.
Anonymous at Work
Always a treat. Like Chuck Pierce but somehow MORE sarcastic and pointed.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Awsome. lol
Tony Jay
@The Pale Scot:
“That Jesus, such a pity. The kid was so smart, he was kind too, give you the robe off his back if you needed it and he’d never ask for a thing in return. He didn’t judge, always made time for anyone, and boy could he listen. Such a way about him, he could have gone far. But then he ‘got religion’ and, well, it was all downhill from there.”
Another Scott
Excellent. Thanks.
What are your plans for your £1.22 windfall??
(via HappyToast)
Cheers,
Scott.
Lacuna Synecdoche
Tony Jay @ Top:
Cockney Rhyming Slang? Please to be translating? Or am I reading it wrong (likely, I suppose)?
Cameron
@The Pale Scot: Ian Paisley is still alive? I’ll be damned.
Mai Naem mobile
@Cameron: i think that is Paisley Jr.
Cermet
From this I can conclude – never get into a verbal argument with a Brit! Also, never go to war without the Brit’s on your side.
Tony Jay
@Another Scott:
I’m going to withdraw it from the Bank of Brexitania as 122 shiny new pennies and place them tenderly on the empty eyes of the next 61 people I hear arguing that “Boris will make it work”.
I may wear double-denim while doing it, as an homage to Michael Landon in ‘Highway to Heaven’.
Tony Jay
@Lacuna Synecdoche:
No, I just wanted an alternative to “one iota” and the lovely Mr Osmond sprang to mind.
Now I’m thinking what ‘Little Jimmy Osmond’ would be rhyming slang for. Well, that’s my night planned out. 8-)
WereBear
So eloquent. You are a Prince of Ranters, Tony Jay.
VeniceRiley
The UK media is remarkable in it’s overall sameness and ability to make the masses into opinion parrots faster than one can say Meghan Markle.
Ken
@Another Scott: Don’t think of the Australian trade agreement as something that will destroy UK agriculture. Think of it as freeing UK farmers to drop all that nonsense with growing crops and raising livestock, and concentrate on making their farms bucolic showpieces for agrotourism.
Ken
Bonus points for getting it to work out as “wind-up dildo”.
Mike in NC
We toured Belfast as part of our delightful “British Isles Explorer” cruise in the summer of 2019. The city appeared to be doing very well in terms of peace and prosperity, but there were still posters and murals everywhere that indicated things could go ‘to hell in a handbasket’ at any time, as the old saying goes.
Brachiator
@Tony Jay:
It is strange to watch Boris continue to play a pointless game just to keep the rabble wound up. No, it’s not strange. It’s exactly what Trump used to do.
Back when Theresa May was still fucking things up, the British media mostly ignored anything having to do with BREXIT and Ireland, insisting that it was no big deal.
And then the Conservatives used everyone’s unhappiness with Theresa May’s negotiations to dump her and insert Boy Boris. He knew how to get the job done and the Conservatives and the media were all on the same page: the feeble EU would give Britain everything they wanted.
Cut to today where Boris and Frost now insist that they didn’t understand the deal that they were so hot to get done. And most of the media quietly goes along with this obvious lie.
Fixating on sausages is a great image, easy for people to understand, even though this is all bullshit. The EU is being too purist. But this is nonsense because the UK insisted on controlling its borders, and this border is entirely inside the UK.
Also, the EU has offered all kinds of relaxation of other customs regulations so that there would be fewer that the UK had to worry about. But BoJo and the band keep focusing on sausages, even though they totally agreed with these regulations about chilled meats when they were a part of the EU.
Also, during the supposed transition period, the UK did little to prepare for custom checks in Northern Ireland.
So, this is all some weird game of misdirection. The UK could resolve most of this easily, if they really wanted to.
But the Conservative hard liners hate the Republic of Ireland, and hate the protection the country gets as a member of the EU. The Conservatives don’t care much for the people of Northern Ireland either, but care more about hanging onto that territory even more than they care about Scotland possibly declaring independence. It’s a weird empire thing.
The Conservatives hate Biden and the US as well. They resent that this upstart colony usurped British glory. These are the kind of fools who sit in their clubs and rail against Ike for interfering in the Suez misadventure in 1956. They are very much like the American neo-cons who still blamed anti-war hippies for losing Vietnam, and so who were going to show everyone how it was done by waging glorious war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Anyway, the Conservatives believe, with some justification, that they can keep Labour down by appealing to the ignorant hatreds and fears of the average person.
It is interesting that just as Labour’s Starmer is starting to fight back more effectively, opposition to Starmer from the left is intensifying. We will see how this works.
And most of the media goes along with this, even more than the American press played up to Trump.
And the UK is welcoming a new media outlet, GB News, which is very much like Fox News, to further play up right wing propaganda.
It’s a good thing that at least the UK doesn’t have to worry about lockdowns anymore. Oh, wait…
VeniceRiley
@Ken: I’m more thinking it’s a push to turn farms into subdivisions of suburban housing.
The Pale Scot
@Tony Jay:
Jesus’s Return.
Nice hippy dude shaking his head. “No no you have got everything wrong, that’s not how any of this works”
KILL THE BLASPHEMER!!!!!
Cameron
@Mai Naem mobile: I see. As the saying has it, “the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
Geoduck
@Mai Naem mobile:
Maybe it was Jr, but Paisley Sr is still befouling the earth at 88 years of age.
Classic Dave Allen joke about the bastard.
Chetan Murthy
@Ken:
Humpf. I’m no expert, but it seemed to me like, it was the other way around: that protecting small farmers was the way to promote agrotourism (b/c they could afford to continue using the quaint and picturesque old-timey ways, instead of the modern factory ways that pollute the everlovin’ F out of the landscape, creating hellscapes populated with diseased and dying animals only made “safe to eat” by liberal applications of antibiotics and bleach).
As I look at Western Europe and compare it to the US, that’s certainly been my assessment of the reason why every micro-region of France/Spain/Italy (and to some extent Germany) has their particular foodstuffs that grow there, and nowhere else, whereas in the US, everything is homogenized except for a tiny fraction of the production.
I could be wrong.
VeniceRiley
@Tony Jay: I like the Jimmy Osmond reference as a … sixth finger? An irrelevance that is. Must be of a certain age to appreciate.
The Pale Scot
@Geoduck:
The bastard died in 2014
Amir Khalid
@Geoduck:
The only Paisley I know of and admire is Bob Paisley. Tony Jay will know of whom I speak.
Geoduck
@The Pale Scot: Ah, misread the Wikipedia article. Thanks.
Mary G
Love your rants, Tony Jay, and am in awe of how long you can keep a sentence going without me wanting to see a period somewhere in the paragraph.
Still kind of amazed that we got rid of our fat “blonde” guy in ill-fitting suits and our mother country kept yours.
Australia has a horrifying mouse plague (WaPo, visual story with very unpleasant visuals) and spiders with webs the size of tall ships sails blanketing the country (NY Post), so deals with the UK are low on the priority list.
J R in WV
Well, I’m always enthralled by Tony J’s pieces, and so glad he gets a front page now and again.
My favorite bit of this editorial is “…Johnson needed someone at his back with the intellectual firepower of a salted anchovy…” because we got some really great anchovies when in Spain and France some years ago. Tastes great, but no, as in Zero, intellectual power!
Tony, so sorry your national election results appear to not support membership in the EU common market, so the rules will destroy your national trade with the closest other nations.
Best of luck with importing French champagne, cheese, Italian tomato sauces, German sausages, Spanish anchovies, etc, etc. Oh, and Portugese wine, Porto, etc.
And best of luck with the Republic of Ireland and the Northern Ireland killer monsters!!
Tony Jay
@Brachiator:
I honestly think it’s pretty simple. The Tory Party exists to make sure that the right people get richer and the wrong people pay for it. Everything else is secondary to that. Ideological squabbles, different opinions on what constitutes ‘conservative’, they all get put aside when votes are called. The vast bulk of the British Media is owned by ‘the right people’, so they support the Tory Party and use their enormous power to define consensus reality (even when its as basic as “This = Good” and “That = Bad”) to support the Conservatives and undermine opposition to them. They’ve found the easiest way of doing this is to push racial, gender and cultural resentments harder and harder, dividing people into Us and Them and projecting the Tories as the Party that, for all its faults, is on the side of ‘Us’.
Unfortunately, nothing is static. Actions have consequences. Feeding a massive amount of hard-right bigotry into the national food-bowl over decades changed the definition of “common-sense, down-to-earth, mainstream” opinion amongst large parts of the population into something toxic. Opinions that were considered extreme and way out of line back in the 70s when the National Front pushed them became general pub-talk, and when the Brexit Referendum was called, that ugly tsunami of media-fed resentment and bile found an outlet that the Tories, eventually, decided they had to surf on or die.
So, yeah, I’m not surprised that the British Media is happy covering for the Tories. They were instrumental in creating the societal divisions that have put White English Nationalism in vogue, and while Johnson’s Tories promote and represent that and – more importantly – it sells newspapers/advertising space they’ll keep on pretending it’s just fine. What do the half dozen or so people and or organisations that own the British Media and control its editorial line care if Brexit immiserates millions? Their money is safe, and as long as the dirty lefties are kept out of power it will remain that way. Winner winner.
Lacuna Synecdoche
@Tony Jay:
LOL’d.
My apologies for the inconvenience I’ve caused, and my gratitude for taking over responsibility to find a rhyming slang for ‘Little Jimmy Osmond’ so I don’t have to.
Tony Jay
@Amir Khalid:
The greatest manager in English Football history bar none*. A softly spoken genius who took what Shankly built and made it better. I only hope that when Klopp steps down his successor has a touch of the Sir Bob’s about him.
*Sit down and shut up, Sir Alex, or we’ll dig out Rafa’s spreadsheets and have a nice, wide ranging chat about how your teams had 12 men in every game.
The Pale Scot
@Mary G:
“our mother country”
65 million Americans of the Catholic Irish persuasion, along with Italians etc beg to differ
The Pale Scot
@The Pale Scot:
Meant to post from My Cousin Vinny,
That’s what verdict means. It’s a word that comes down from old England, and all our little old ancestors.
FelonyGovt
As someone who is very nterested in British politics, but whose understanding of it essentially comes from watching “Mock the Week”, I really enjoy your posts, Tony.
Doug R
The picture looks like they started NEIN inches away.
BruceJ
After reading that I feel the need to lie back and light a cigarette and I don’t smoke…
I mean starting with
Flobalob is definitely entering the lexicon…
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@lowtechcyclist: avril lavigne did nothing wrong.