Politics Today

[tavyred]

Yes. I saw that opinion poll. That's what exasperated me.

You shouldn’t be too surprised that your somewhat nihilistic worldview isn’t shared universally Indo.
People instinctively want to be positive about their lives, a mindset the liberal left sometimes struggles to recognise.

 

[IndoMike]

You shouldn’t be too surprised that your somewhat nihilistic worldview isn’t shared universally Indo.
People instinctively want to be positive about their lives, a mindset the liberal left sometimes struggles to recognise.

Still avoiding the question of "hindsight", I see. Never mind. As I say, you find it difficult to say you are wrong
Nihilist is another word the meaning of which you need to check out. Criticising a useless Govt is no more nihilistic than supporting it is. But I forgot, we are not allowed to criticise the Govt anymore.
Anyway, about that "hindsighr" matter. Any new ideas about it?

 

[Grecian2K]

I "sighted" quite a few hinds while passing Powderham on the train earlier the week...and, possibly a couple of stags as well.

 

[tavyred]

Still avoiding the question of "hindsight", I see. Never mind. As I say, you find it difficult to say you are wrong
Nihilist is another word the meaning of which you need to check out. Criticising a useless Govt is no more nihilistic than supporting it is. But I forgot, we are not allowed to criticise the Govt anymore.
Anyway, about that "hindsighr" matter. Any new ideas about it?

It’s the job of cross party select committees to scrutinise the work of Government and criticise where appropriate, no problem with any of that, but when it comes to criticism of the UK’s initial response to an unprecedented medical crisis where every country was in effect ‘winging it’ I think the great British public are more prepared than you think to judge the Government and it’s experts pragmatically and certainly without your rabid anti-Boris mindset.
I do think the hindsight accusation is a pertinent one as I really don’t think a different set of U.K. politicians in charge would’ve made a great deal of difference and I don’t recall too much in the way of alternative ideas being put forward by opposition politicians at the start of the crisis 4 months ago.
I stand by my description of you as being somewhat of a nihilist as they are partly defined by their extreme pessimism.

 

[IndoMike]

It’s the job of cross party select committees to scrutinise the work of Government and criticise where appropriate, no problem with any of that, but when it comes to criticism of the UK’s initial response to an unprecedented medical crisis where every country was in effect ‘winging it’ I think the great British public are more prepared than you think to judge the Government and it’s experts pragmatically and certainly without your rabid anti-Boris mindset.
I do think the hindsight accusation is a pertinent one as I really don’t think a different set of U.K. politicians in charge would’ve made a great deal of difference and I don’t recall too much in the way of alternative ideas being put forward by opposition politicians at the start of the crisis 4 months ago.
I stand by my description of you as being somewhat of a nihilist as they are partly defined by their extreme pessimism.

Regarding the bold type comment, the Tories had been in power for 10 years so everything should have been at their disposal. And I repeat - you keep ignoring the fact- that the Tories either didn't read or ignored the findings of the report issued in 2019 regarding the poor state of our readiness for an epidemic reaching our shores. Why would they be so flippant about the report and why are you so hesitant to comment on it? Your "hindsight" comment is exposed frankly as bs - you cannot even support your argument.

You also said that you don't think a different set of politicians would have made a great difference. Can I see the scientific evidence behind that comment? It's the kind of baseless
comment that Johnson and friends make when they have no answer to the criticisms heaped on them from all directions.

By the way, the silly, weak adjectives you like to throw around (i.e "self-loathing lefties", "rabid," and "nihilism") would be much more impressive if you used them appropriately.
Your reply above is nothing more than a blank space with meaningless tropes and diversions. Please put more meat on the bone and try to avoid your usual diversionary tactics.
So, the question was :

"Why would the Tories be so flippant about the report and why are you so hesitant to comment on that? "

Have a lovely day in Glorious Devon. Wish I was there. I'm stuck in Gotham City.

 

[tavyred]

Indo,
I think our respective positions on the Government’s response can be distilled down to you seizing on every negative and politically partial story and treating it as gospel and me having a more pragmatic mindset, where in time if the Government has seriously erred, there will be no hiding place.
BTW, I’m taking no lectures from you on the use flowery adjectives Indo!
Anyway, it’s market day in Tavvy and I’m getting me hair cut.

 

[arthur]

From the Spectator:

‘Let’s face it, had we thought we were going to win some of these seats, we would have had different candidates.’

A senior Conservative on the red wall Tory MPs.

I cancelled my temporary subscription as I found my stomach was not strong enough to read the below the line comments under each article. I'm not sure which made me queasier - the bile under the more liberal columnists (M. Parris, N. Cohen) or the whoop whoop enthusiasm for the likes of Brendan "the metropolitan elite have no right to deny the working class the right to chant racial abuse at football matches" O'Neill. So unfortunately I am unable to read the article in question. But it looks fun....

 

[IndoMike]

Indo,
I think our respective positions on the Government’s response can be distilled down to you seizing on every negative and politically partial story and treating it as gospel and me having a more pragmatic mindset, where in time if the Government has seriously erred, there will be no hiding place.
BTW, I’m taking no lectures from you on the use flowery adjectives Indo!
Anyway, it’s market day in Tavvy and I’m getting me hair cut.

You're taking the high ground? Eh?!

I will make a mental note that you yourself raised the topic of hindsight but when challenged on it you couldn't justify it - you avoided it.

I recommend you get some double Devon cream and strawberry jam at the market and make yourself a nice cream tea. I shave my head every 2 days - makes me look a bit evil bit keeps the muggers away

 

[elginCity]

Always liked this interesting insight into the formative Tory 'leadership' - some 4 years after it was first written....personal observations that have proved so accurate and prescient over time, and an article we should be ever mindful of......

"To understand the situation the UK has got itself into, it helps to know that Brexit isn’t simply an anti-elitist revolt. Rather, it is an anti-elitist revolt led by an elite — a coup by one set of public schoolboys against another. I went to university with both sets, and with hindsight I watched Brexit in the making. When I arrived at Oxford in 1988, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove had just left the place. George Osborne and the future Brexiters Jacob Rees-Mogg and Daniel Hannan were all contemporaries of mine.

I wasn’t close to them, because politically minded public schoolboys inhabited their own Oxford bubble. They had clubs like the Bullingdon that we middle-class twerps had never even heard of. Their favourite hang-out was the Oxford Union, a kind of children’s parliament that organises witty debates. A sample topic: “That sex is good . . . but success is better”, in 1978, with Theresa May speaking against the motion. May is now running for Tory leader without the usual intermediate step of having been Union president, though her husband Philip, Gove and Johnson did all hold that post. (Beautifully, Gove campaigned for Johnson’s election in 1986.)

You could recognise Oxford Union “hacks” by the suits they wore, though none took it as far as Rees-Mogg, a rail-thin teenager who promenaded along Broad Street dressed like a Victorian vicar with an umbrella. Three times a year, when the Union elected new officers, the hacks would go around town tapping up ordinary students with the phrase, “May I count on your vote?” The traditional climax of a Union election was one Etonian backstabbing another for the presidency. It’s no coincidence that the Houses of Parliament look like a massive great Gothic public school. That building is a magnet for this set.

Whereas ordinary Britons learn almost no history at school except a UK-centric take on the second world war (as evidenced in the Brexit debate), the Union hacks spent their school years imbibing British parliamentary history. Their heroes were great parliamentarians such as Palmerston, Gladstone and Churchill. I don’t think most Union hacks dreamed of making policy. Rather, Westminster was simply the sort of public-school club where they felt at home — or in the case of middle-class wannabes like Gove, aspired to feel at home. Their chief interest was oratory. From age six they had been educated above all to speak and write well. After Oxford, Union hacks usually found jobs in communications: Cameron went into PR, while Gove, Johnson and Hannan became journalists churning out the kind of provocative essays that are valued at Oxford. Osborne applied to do likewise at the Economist but was turned down at interview by my FT colleague Gideon Rachman. Only Rees-Mogg went into finance, possibly because his dad had already been editor of the Times.

The autumn I started university, Margaret Thatcher gave her legendary anti-European “Bruges speech”, and this set began obsessing about Brussels. Ruling Britain was their prerogative; they didn’t want outsiders muscling in. Tory “Euroscepticism” is in part a jobs protection scheme akin to Parisian taxi drivers opposing Uber. The public schoolboys spent decades trying to get British voters angry about the EU. But as Gove admitted to me in 2005, ordinary voters never took much interest. Perhaps they didn’t care whether they were ruled by a faraway elite in Brussels or ditto in Westminster. And so the public schoolboys focused the Brexit campaign on an issue many ordinary Britons do care about: immigration. To people like Johnson, the campaign was an Oxford Union debate writ large. Once again, their chief weapons were rhetoric and humour. In Britain, humour is used to cut off conversations when they threaten either to achieve emotional depth or to get boring or technical. Hence Johnson’s famous, “My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it”, a line that doesn’t seem quite so funny now.

The moment Brexit was achieved, Johnson and Hannan airily informed Britons that immigration would continue after all. No wonder, because the public schoolboys don’t care about immigration. Whether Poles and Bangladeshis live in unfashionable English provincial towns is a matter of supreme indifference to them. The public schoolboys turned out to have no plan for executing Brexit. I’m guessing they considered this a boring governance issue best left to swotty civil servants. Johnson actually spent the Sunday after Brexit playing cricket. In the great public-school tradition, he was a dilettante “winging it”. Now Britain seems headed for recession. When I mentioned this in an email to a privately educated Oxford friend, he chastised me: “You seem unduly concerned about short-term financial impacts. This is a victory for democracy.” I see what he means. If you make £200,000 a year, a recession is just an irritation. But if you make £20,000, it’s a personal crisis, and if you now make £15,000, then soon you may be struggling to feed your children. Anyway, the public schoolboys have already moved on, first backstabbing each other and now extracting favours from their preferred candidates in the Tory leadership election. “May I count on your vote?” What fun!"

https://www.ft.com/content/f4dedd92-43c7-11e6-b22f-79eb4891c97d

 

[IndoMike]

Always liked this interesting insight into the formative Tory 'leadership' - some 4 years after it was first written....personal observations that have proved so accurate and prescient over time, and an article we should be ever mindful of......

"To understand the situation the UK has got itself into, it helps to know that Brexit isn’t simply an anti-elitist revolt. Rather, it is an anti-elitist revolt led by an elite — a coup by one set of public schoolboys against another. I went to university with both sets, and with hindsight I watched Brexit in the making. When I arrived at Oxford in 1988, David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove had just left the place. George Osborne and the future Brexiters Jacob Rees-Mogg and Daniel Hannan were all contemporaries of mine.

I wasn’t close to them, because politically minded public schoolboys inhabited their own Oxford bubble. They had clubs like the Bullingdon that we middle-class twerps had never even heard of. Their favourite hang-out was the Oxford Union, a kind of children’s parliament that organises witty debates. A sample topic: “That sex is good . . . but success is better”, in 1978, with Theresa May speaking against the motion. May is now running for Tory leader without the usual intermediate step of having been Union president, though her husband Philip, Gove and Johnson did all hold that post. (Beautifully, Gove campaigned for Johnson’s election in 1986.)

You could recognise Oxford Union “hacks” by the suits they wore, though none took it as far as Rees-Mogg, a rail-thin teenager who promenaded along Broad Street dressed like a Victorian vicar with an umbrella. Three times a year, when the Union elected new officers, the hacks would go around town tapping up ordinary students with the phrase, “May I count on your vote?” The traditional climax of a Union election was one Etonian backstabbing another for the presidency. It’s no coincidence that the Houses of Parliament look like a massive great Gothic public school. That building is a magnet for this set.

Whereas ordinary Britons learn almost no history at school except a UK-centric take on the second world war (as evidenced in the Brexit debate), the Union hacks spent their school years imbibing British parliamentary history. Their heroes were great parliamentarians such as Palmerston, Gladstone and Churchill. I don’t think most Union hacks dreamed of making policy. Rather, Westminster was simply the sort of public-school club where they felt at home — or in the case of middle-class wannabes like Gove, aspired to feel at home. Their chief interest was oratory. From age six they had been educated above all to speak and write well. After Oxford, Union hacks usually found jobs in communications: Cameron went into PR, while Gove, Johnson and Hannan became journalists churning out the kind of provocative essays that are valued at Oxford. Osborne applied to do likewise at the Economist but was turned down at interview by my FT colleague Gideon Rachman. Only Rees-Mogg went into finance, possibly because his dad had already been editor of the Times.

The autumn I started university, Margaret Thatcher gave her legendary anti-European “Bruges speech”, and this set began obsessing about Brussels. Ruling Britain was their prerogative; they didn’t want outsiders muscling in. Tory “Euroscepticism” is in part a jobs protection scheme akin to Parisian taxi drivers opposing Uber. The public schoolboys spent decades trying to get British voters angry about the EU. But as Gove admitted to me in 2005, ordinary voters never took much interest. Perhaps they didn’t care whether they were ruled by a faraway elite in Brussels or ditto in Westminster. And so the public schoolboys focused the Brexit campaign on an issue many ordinary Britons do care about: immigration. To people like Johnson, the campaign was an Oxford Union debate writ large. Once again, their chief weapons were rhetoric and humour. In Britain, humour is used to cut off conversations when they threaten either to achieve emotional depth or to get boring or technical. Hence Johnson’s famous, “My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it”, a line that doesn’t seem quite so funny now.

The moment Brexit was achieved, Johnson and Hannan airily informed Britons that immigration would continue after all. No wonder, because the public schoolboys don’t care about immigration. Whether Poles and Bangladeshis live in unfashionable English provincial towns is a matter of supreme indifference to them. The public schoolboys turned out to have no plan for executing Brexit. I’m guessing they considered this a boring governance issue best left to swotty civil servants. Johnson actually spent the Sunday after Brexit playing cricket. In the great public-school tradition, he was a dilettante “winging it”. Now Britain seems headed for recession. When I mentioned this in an email to a privately educated Oxford friend, he chastised me: “You seem unduly concerned about short-term financial impacts. This is a victory for democracy.” I see what he means. If you make £200,000 a year, a recession is just an irritation. But if you make £20,000, it’s a personal crisis, and if you now make £15,000, then soon you may be struggling to feed your children. Anyway, the public schoolboys have already moved on, first backstabbing each other and now extracting favours from their preferred candidates in the Tory leadership election. “May I count on your vote?” What fun!"

https://www.ft.com/content/f4dedd92-43c7-11e6-b22f-79eb4891c97d

Excellent read.