Friday 12 October 2018

Tears of Rage - starting with Quentin Letts's splendid evisceration of Theresa May in the Daily Mail

The Mail's political sketch-writer started Wednesday's article this way:
Prime Minister’s Questions left me hoping the Conservatives lose the next election – lose it so badly their buttocks sting – and that Jeremy Corbyn, with whom I disagree on almost everything, becomes Prime Minister.
Having summed up Mrs May's wretched performance as "No fun. No verve. No imagination..." Letts ended his piece with this stirring call to arms:
Our politics has become irreparably stale. To correct that we may need a further revolution, the first magnificent, yeoman revolution of Brexit having been all but neutralised by the Establishment blob.
We have a paralysed, anti-popular, inert Government, Conservative only in name. It is fronted by an indecisive, gulping, dreary thing, prime minister only by title.
She spreads misery like a bell-ringer in plague days.
Bring out your dead.
The only real difference between the current state of the Tory party and and the ghastly, enervating, dying days of John Major's exhausted government in 1997 is that the opposition leader then was a plausible, quick-brained, fork-tongued, political shape-shifter who instinctively knew how to quell the fears of middle class voters - whereas the current Labour leader is a braindead Marxist dickhead who, if he weren't so spectacularly thick and so blinded by his obsessive hatred of Britain, America and Israel, would be at least 20 points ahead in the polls. What, for instance, are we to make of a political leader so ignorant of his country's history, so blinkered when it comes to its achievements, that he insists schools should emphasise the role of Britain in propagating the slave trade rather than its vigorous efforts to end it, while entirely ignoring the fact that many Africans willingly sold their enemies - and their own people - into slavery? Meanwhile, the writer Howard Jacobson has written an excellent piece for The Atlantic on Corbyn's blatant anti-Semitism:
...if Corbyn is unwilling to understand the centrality of Zionism to the Jewish imagination, the yearning and the displacements that shaped it centuries ago, its poetry and idealism; if he cannot enter sympathetically into the life-or-death desperation that turned it into a necessity—if he will not, in short, answer the question: What else would you have had us do?—then Jews will not be shaken in their conviction that he has not only tolerated anti-Semitism in his party, he has encouraged it.
What Mrs May and Jeremy Corbyn share - apart from an uncanny ability to miss the net every time they're presented with an open goal - is their evident determination to enrage their parties' traditional supporters. Jews used to vote Labour overwhelmingly - no longer: they've noted the cold, bristling anger and the utter absence of empathy or understanding that characterises Corbyn's response to any question regarding his attitude to Jews in general and Israel in particular.  The working classes outside London used to vote Labour, but Corbyn's chronic lack of patriotism and his utter lack of understanding of what motivates the actual working working classes - their aspirations, their allegiances, their disdain for identity politics (a middle class obsession) - is now driving them away. As a good example of how deracinated the Labour Party has become, this is how Momentum founder and NEC member Jon Lansman reacted to an attack on Corbyn as a "lunatic" by the distinctly working class popster Noel Gallagher...
...which prompted this response from Iain Martin:
As for Mrs May, what in the name of all that's holy are we to make of a Conservative prime minister who's quite happy to betray the majority of Conservative voters who backed Brexit, while coming up this sort of grievance-mongering, cultural Marxist, identitarian pish?:


Theresa, if you seriously think pandering to the Guardian/BBC/Student/Blairite tendency in this nauseatingly abject manner is going to convince them to vote Tory, you couldn't be more wrong. What about pandering to your natural supporters for once in your miserably misconceived reign? Ditch the gender pay gap, ethnic pay gap, workers on boards, transgender sodding bogs bollocks - along with your determined efforts to bugger Brexit and water down stop 'n' search and hounding British soldiers for what they may or may not have done 20 or 30 years ago - get a grip on immigration, sack crappy virtue-signalling police chiefs, stop powerhosing money we don't have at the NHS without figuring out where it's coming from or what it's going to be spent on, and start sounding patriotic, pro-capitalism, pro-military, pro-catching and locking up burglars and muggers for a very long fucking time, pro-cutting taxes, anti-nanny state interference in every bloody thing we say, think or do... and, for God's sake, stop your batty ministers tweeting out crud like this:

You take £14Bn in tax from us to pay for "international development" - without our permission - so stuff your patronising promise to "match" what the public gives and spend some of the £14Bn you already misappropriate from us annually for this very purpose! Better yet, give us back the money and let us decide which causes to donate to. It's all our bloody money, you impertinent fools! It really is time members of this truly dire government took note of the following truth:

While I'm feeling decidedly grumpy, isn't there anyone at the BBC who can stop the license fee being squandered on this sort of idiotic dreck?:


If we all go plant-based, surely the resulting increase in global flatulence will increase the non-existent pseudo-problem known as climate change - or is it only cow-farts that are a problem? Even if the BBC is happy to go on propagating this sort of pseudo-scientific rubbish, aren't they in the slightest bit concerned about wasting licence-payers' money on this sort of tawdry, sniggering vileness?  


I'll end with two tweets containing sentiments with which I fully concur:
I don't often agree with Hugh Grant, but it just so happens that Friday is the day a near-neighbour with a large garden pays a man with a leaf-blower to drive us all mad. Thanks - right neighbourly of you! 
I'm not sure why I'm feeling quite so feisty - perhaps the steroids I've been prescribed are actually working.


3 comments:

  1. Don't be so cynical Scott - they are going to reduce the size of our Pizzas - at least they are tackling the important things.
    JonT

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  2. Reminds me of a piece you wrote on Mellor View. Great stuff although it pains me to see what's happening to a once great nation.

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