The latest salvo in the "common sense" bullshit-get-out-clause, which the Tories always mobilise to avoid taking responsibility or being held accountable.
The last time Boris Johnson spouted this shit & it was splashed on the front pages was in may 2020, & that went REALLY well.
People who say "just use your common sense":
Julia Hartley-Brewer
Iain Duncan Smith
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Isabel Oakeshott
Allison Pearson
Boris Johnson
Michael Gove
Laurence Fox
Nigel Farage
Toby Young
Claire Fox
People who think that's dumb:
Albert Einstein
Antonio Gramsci
"Common sense" is a myth. The Tories' "common sense" call for #austerity has been revealed as a perverse & damaging ideological ploy.
We now know that cuts to public spending resulted in Britain being one of the most ill-prepared countries in the world to deal with #coronavirus.
The Tories' "Common Sense group" criticised the @nationaltrust for publishing a report into slavery links at some of its country houses, using the antisemitic far-right terrorism-inspiring conspiracy of 'cultural Marxism' to accuse the Trust of an "anti-British" "woke” agenda!
There is no consensus about what "common sense" is, or means.
Seemingly innocent appeals to common sense often mask controversial ideas or viewpoints.
Asking the public to use their common sense is a very irresponsible thing for any politician to do.
My own summary is above, but journalist @gilduran76 - of the brilliant #FrameLab - has now written his own summary, review and interpretation of it, which I reproduce with a few links and commentary, below.
To fully understand Silicon Valley’s project to destroy democracy, read 'The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State.'
In 1999, it was rebranded as 'The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age.'
Life was demonstrably worse in the 1979 than it is today.
Zymunt Bauman calls this yearning for an imagined past, ‘retrotopia’, in which the ‘Volk’ (the ‘simple folk’, who Reform UK claim to represent) are constructed as homogenous, Christian, white, & ‘indigenous’.
Life was demonstrably inferior in the 1970s compared to today for almost everyone in England.
Life expectancy in the UK in 1980 was 71 for men and 77 for women. By 2019, life expectancy at birth in England had increased to 79 years for men & 83.5 for women.
1. Economic Hardship
In 1979, the UK economy was struggling with high inflation, unemployment, and a budget deficit. This eroded purchasing power, making essentials like food, clothing, and housing more expensive relative to wages. "Stagflation" was a significant problem.
'Anti-elite man of the people' Nigel Farage, educated at one of the most expensive private schools on earth, is now the highest paid MP in the UK. His basic annual MP salary is £91,346 plus expenses.
The UK National Living Wage for people aged 21+ is just £12.21/hour.
Let's take a look at some of Nigel Farage's additional earnings that he's legally obliged to declare in the MPs Register of interests - and which contains a few surprises - starting with GB "News".
Between 16th July 2024 and 15th January 2025, Farage decalred earnings of £264,790 for his work as a presenter on Reform UK Ltd's 24/7 propaganda channel, GB "News", co-owned by Islamophobic billionaire hedge-funder, Paul Marshall.
The front-page article, published in the Daily Telegraph, claiming “London is home to as many as 585,000 illegal migrants, equivalent to one in 12 of the city’s population” was covered across the media and widely discussed by politicians and others.
The claim that “One in 12 in London is illegal immigrant” is based on this report, commissioned by Thames Water, conducted by the research company Edge Analytics in February 2023, which the Telegraph says it obtained “under freedom of information-style laws for the environment”.
The EDL is an Islamophobic protest movement aimed at preserving UK identity and culture in the face of a perceived Islamization of the UK and Europe.
So is Reform UK.
The EDL reinforce the notion of the “nationalist subject” - a fallacious conception of citizenship - that wrongly assumes members of the majoritarian culture are possessed of certain core values, beliefs, and traits that embody the true essence of the nation.
🧵 Quite a few politically & historically illiterate brainwashed Trump-supporters replied or quote-tweeted the tweet below to tell me lifelong democratic socialist George Orwell was not in fact a democratic socialist. Truly Orwellian. So I asked Oligarch Musk's Grok about it...