Dave and the editorial writer consider the problem and conclude that things will surely improve once the pandemic ends and the Conservative Party’s terrible malfeasance becomes clear, and, well maybe, but you expect the same old shite then as well, don’t you.
Just you wait, once the pandemic is over we’ll stopping getting this drivel at roaring volume all day every day and start focusing on real problems. Any day now.
The Scrappy Doo routine now
These excuses about the falling down house aren’t very encouraging at this point, and they’d be easier to take if they weren’t coming from people who spent years ostentatiously smashing walls with sledgehammers.
So it turns out that if you wage a scorched earth wrecking campaign against your own party, the earth is difficult to unscorch. Who could possibly have foreseen this might happen.
It’s great how the likes of Watson can tell the hacks how sad he is that his heavily choreographed campaign of leaks and damaging revelations achieved its intended aim and nobody ever asks him why he would be saddened by his own tremendous success.
The thing to remember amid all this Woe Is Us, We Were Defeated And In Disarray stuff is that quite a few of these people worked very hard to ensure that happened; they’re not at all sorry they did it and they’d gladly do it again tomorrow.
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Sure, but it’s also a whole system thing, and the abject shitshow that has been the period 2001-2024 really does feel quite a lot worse and more enduring than, say, some bins going unemptied and the three day week. Which we have all been told justified an elite-led revolution.
Again, I suspect the core of the problem is that none of these people can ever admit they were wrong about anything except maybe being too nice and left wing, because admitting you were wrong about something opens up the idea that you might have been wrong about almost everything
The core of the liberal compromise was: give up your bargaining rights and expectations of equality in exchange for cheaper goods, social mobility and maybe a house. Now ten guys have more money than god, nothing works and if you lose your job or get ill, you get eaten alive.
I’m not going to post excerpts here but I will say a couple of things, starting with: Our learned historian friend here would be well advised to decline any interview requests from Mr Chotiner of the New Yorker he receives.
I’ll also say that you couldn’t vat-grow a person less capable of accurately describing what’s happening, than Simon is. The idea that what you can see is exactly what it looks like is not only offensive but utterly unthinkable to him, blasphemous even.
I’ve thought of people like this throughout at Chris Hitchens figures: convinced ideologies, people who travel the world discovering that they are somehow even more emphatically correct about everything than even they had expected. But this is something quite different.
These absolutely ludicrous shitehawks. Try harder, I am begging you to at least try a bit harder than this. Make it look at least somewhat credible.
Marr says that Sir Keir taking tens of thousands in free suits looks bad, and proposes that MPs should have to declare all the donations they take. Nobody says But Andrew, that is the existing system, that’s exactly how we know about this. We move swiftly on.
George says it looks quite bad to take away pensioners’ winter fuel allowance while accepting £76,000 in free suits and football tickets. He then asks what the public want, do we want public funding of political parties? It seems that ironically, there is no Third Way.
Look, Tory members don’t think they need to change or apologise because their experience 2010-2024 was being constantly sucked off and praised as sensible, rational and statesmanlike by a national press that inexplicably turned on them in 2021. They don’t think they were wrong.
It might be better now if there had been some candour about what happened: the entire political/media class decreed austerity was essential and then, when the scale of this unnecessary disaster became clear, united as one to fend off The Crazies (people who said we should fix it)
Nobody has ever explained to them that almost all of the political/media class aligned behind “Johnson must win” as their preferred available option, even though they all well understood that Johnson was a catastrophically bent and clueless buffoon. So they don’t understand.
Remember that book with Labour backroom staffers bragging about how they manufactured a vexatious, years-long mass media panic about some racist Facebook posts, and how their bullshit handed victory to Boris Johnson? Wait til you see who reviews it here amp.theguardian.com/books/2024/sep…
Absolutely incredible stuff there, proper Patrick Bateman losing it at the end of the book, confessing to murders, severed limbs in his fridge and so on. Just a total inability to hide it any more.
As far as I can tell, that’s also the only review online.
Let me translate here: having moved heaven and earth to reinstall these appalling people, entirely heedless of obviously disastrous consequences, the lads are now perturbed to see Labour have no ideas and they suck like a Dyson. But they would do the same tomorrow, if required.
There was great “intellectual vigour” in the nineties because parties of the left embracing neoliberalism then cajoling, shitehousing and excluding their one-time supporters was a major task requiring industrial quantities of professional bullshit. The results are all around us.
“How come Thatcherism/Reaganomics appear to be fucked with nothing to offer in a post-2008 crisis world” is no great mystery, I’d say. How come I can’t have the cake I just ate? The problem is, admitting it raises major questions about why people like you are in politics at all.