The disgraced corrupt racist liar thread:British PM edition

[ursus arctos]

Was he knocking up employees?

[Sean of the Shed]

Who knows? They'd have to breach the NDA to confirm that.

[Lang Spoon]

Raab was bullying his, that's the subject of his NDA it seems. Think Petronella Wyatt having an abortion would have been at the time he was Spectator Ed and she was a columnist.

[Tactical Genius]

Raab was bullying his, that's the subject of his NDA it seems. Think Petronella Wyatt having an abortion would have been at the time he was Spectator Ed and she was a columnist.

Women have abortions all the time and we shouldn't sneer at them for doing so, this isn't the US deep south.

[Lang Spoon]

And I'm not sneering. I was answering the question from Ursus above that post. I don't see Johnson and his sex life being at all relevant to the issue of Tory leadership in general. Though trying to get out of paying child maintenance in the case of the NDA is another matter I do feel v strongly about and something that does reflect personal character, having had personal experience of "gadfly" biological fathers.

[Tactical Genius]

And I'm not sneering. I was answering the question from Ursus above that post. I don't see Johnson and his sex life being at all relevant to the issue of Tory leadership in general. Though trying to get out of paying child maintenance in the case of the NDA is another matter I do feel v strongly about and something that does reflect personal character, having had personal experience of "gadfly" biological fathers.

Fair enough, I wasn't necessarily having a go, I am happy to withdraw. On a brighter note, it makes me want him to be Prime Minister, It will give me a nice comeback when the chin stroking liberals start musing on all these deadbeat black fathers etc, etc.

[E10 Rifle]

But this was long before the "you're with us or you're against us" politics of today.

Really? The book Hugo Young himself wrote about Thatcherism was called "One of Us", an allusion to how Thatch' saw everyone and an explicit acknowledgment of a deep tribalism. And 1984 was arguably the most politically violent year in Britain since the Second World War. "You're with us or against us" politics was everywhere. Politics is probably more promiscuous now. I dread to think what social media would have been like during the Miners' Strike (though the state might have been rumbled for Orgreave rather earlier)

[Duncan Gardner]

1972 was much more violent

[E10 Rifle]

True enough.

[Lucy Waterman]

Really? The book Hugo Young himself wrote about Thatcherism was called "One of Us", an allusion to how Thatch' saw everyone and an explicit acknowledgment of a deep tribalism. And 1984 was arguably the most politically violent year in Britain since the Second World War. "You're with us or against us" politics was everywhere. Politics is probably more promiscuous now. I dread to think what social media would have been like during the Miners' Strike (though the state might have been rumbled for Orgreave rather earlier)

What they didn't have was the Trumpist thing of anyone on your side being forgiven anything, no matter how grave, and anyone on the other side being a legitimate target for any form of attack, no matter how irrelevant or spurious. Difference of degree.

[Satchmo Distel]

Illustrative of this is that Blackford will get more stick from the press for calling Johnson a racist than Johnson gets for being a racist. Inverted norms.

[Lucy Waterman]

Yes, good example.

[Satchmo Distel]

It also stems from national, gender and racial stereotypes. You can say things in Johnson's accent you can't say in a Scottish one without being labelled hysterical and rude.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

It also stems from national, gender and racial stereotypes. You can say things in Johnson's accent you can't say in a Scottish one without being labelled hysterical and rude.

Only if you're english.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

1972 was much more violent

Gotta say this is a very common mistake that you hear among people in the UK, particularly on the Left. They think that on some level Thatcher was worse than say ted Heath, forgetting of course that Heath locked up thousands of his own countrymen without trial, and used the army to murder unarmed protesters in the street....

[Lucy Waterman]

Thatcher’s rhetoric was more violent than Heath, which might go some way towards explaining it.

[Snake Plissken]

Illustrative of this is that Blackford will get more stick from the press for calling Johnson a racist than Johnson gets for being a racist. Inverted norms.

I'm not entirely sure how to put this without screwing up, but the attack on the Imam who posed the Islamophobia question last night is leaving me uneasy - yes, he posted some out of order tweets, but that seems to be being used to obscure the fact that the responses from the candidates - Johnson especially - were totally inadequate and almost patronising.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Thatcher’s rhetoric was more violent than Heath, which might go some way towards explaining it.

maybe, but it's more likely to be that Heath was only imprisoning, torturing and shooting Irish catholics, whereas Thatcher affected white English people.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

The more fundamental issue here is that of all the racist things Boron’s said, 90 per cent of the the people voting in this election agree with him. Blackford has probably galvanised his support.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Yeah but the MP's are going to be uncomfortably aware that the SNP are going to call him a racist liar every day Parliament sits.

[George C.]

Gotta say this is a very common mistake that you hear among people in the UK, particularly on the Left. They think that on some level Thatcher was worse than say ted Heath, forgetting of course that Heath locked up thousands of his own countrymen without trial, and used the army to murder unarmed protesters in the street....

Surely the wider point is they strongly objected to being labelled as his 'countrymen'...

Hence the more violent disproportionate reaction from the Heath regime?

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Surely the wider point is they strongly objected to being labelled as his 'countrymen'...

Hence the more violent disproportionate reaction from the Heath regime?

What they thought about things is immaterial. They were citizens of the UK, and the govt locked them up without trial, tortured many of them and got the army to mow down a lot of unarmed civilians. That's something that the UK govt was prepared to do to their own citizens, and I can't help feeling that it should be a bigger deal.

I suppose It's not really a surprise that the Northern Ireland border didn't get a mention in the Brexit debate. A substantial part of the UK's political self identity is reliant on completely ignoring everything that they got up to in Ireland over the years. Honestly imagine what we would think of a Govt if they shot a dozen unarmed protestors in the street today? What would we think if victor orban's govt did that? Why should we think differently about ted heath?

[George C.]

Good riposte Berba.

[Duncan Gardner]

Berba's broadly right that Ted Heath (like his immediate successors Wilson and Callaghan) deserves a lot more stick as PM.

There is a rather more obvious reason why 1972 was so politically violent in this country: 'Irish Catholics' murdering hundreds of people, not to mention intimidating my granny from her home and me out of primary school...

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Berba's broadly right that Ted Heath (like his immediate successors Wilson and Callaghan) deserves a lot more stick as PM.

There is a rather more obvious reason why 1972 was so politically violent in this country: 'Irish Catholics' murdering hundreds of people, not to mention intimidating my granny from her home and me out of primary school...

Undoubtedly bad things were going on, but It's the response of the UK govt to it over a long period of time that I'm more interested in. I have limited expectations of good behaviour by the assorted violent cunts, once the genie is out of the bottle. They're not supposed to be bound by any rules. That's not true of states. The whole fucking thing could have been avoided in its entirety if the UK govt were concerned about the rights of their citizens, and had essentially pushed through the welfare state for all in NI, and not allowed the thing fester into a quasi Jim crow nonsense, then none of it would happened. This is something that I would hold against all post war govts. If they had treated northern Ireland like the north of england, then this would be a very different place.

Also it's worth remembering that each of those things i mentioned simply made the situation worse. Lashing out randomly and violently may make for great headlines at home, but it doesn't help. They seemed to have learned nothing from the war of independence. They were steps on a par with burning cork city centre after yet another Ambush, or shooting up Croke Park in response to the assassination of the cairo gang. These things didn't actually achieve anything, and simply made things much worse. Governments doing terrible things to their own citizens though over prolonged periods of time is nothing particularly out of the ordinary though, the interesting thing here though is how it is dealt with. It's the amnesia that is the interesting part. You could see it when everyone was googling "Who are the DUP" after the last election. It seemed to come as a shock to a lot of people in the UK that they had a political party that seemed to be made up of Bigoted, homophobic, sectarian trolls, with a sprinkling of young earth creationists. I mean it's not like the DUP were keeping any of that old shite under wraps or anything.

The reason that this sort of thing I suppose is important, is that the methods used by Thatcher against the miners were only really possible in an atmosphere where that sort of thing was relatively commonplace in some other part of the country. Rather than treating Northern Ireland like the North of england, in a very real way they started to treat the North of england, like Northern Ireland. The thing that would concern me if I were from the UK, is that the way that various UK govts acted in Northern Ireland over the years, strikes me as indicative of the way that they would like to act on the mainland if they could get away with it. I find myself looking askance at the various pieces of judicial and security apparatus that were assembled for the fight against islamic extremism and see that they're prepared to make the same mistakes again.