Men arrested for racism for posting stickers demanding border closures

[Kokeshi123]

www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-52314222

Forgive the click-baity posting of a news article from February 2020. But I just can't resist posting this bit of old news here, as a rather fascinating insight into how things have changed and how drastic the political shift has been. As someone on Twitter put it, "Nobody talks about the Great Covid Realignment."

I guess I'm also posting this as a reminder to those getting cross about the fact that the government did not slam the borders shut in February 2020.

Back at the time, not only were border closures being described as unnecessary and counter-productive by organizations like the WHO, but they were particularly unpopular among those on the political left (who tend to be the ones most strongly in favor of border closures right now).

Back in Feb 2020, it was basically only Nigel Farage and a bunch of right wingers calling for the borders to be slammed shut to keep those damn furrin' germs out. Somehow, I don't think Boris' political opponents would have been very impressed at the time if he had actually closed the airports down. ;)

I wonder what happened to them…..were they found guilty of anything?

On their own the stickers (certainly now) don’t seem racist but the article talks about how the men are linked to a far right, racist group.

Fascinating, isn’t it? In a grim sort of way.

Oh, the guys themselves were definitely part of a horrible group. Not defending them (the opposite, actually)! Just fascinated at how big the realignment has been (and at the way everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten about this).

Can you imagine if Boris had actually closed the borders in Feb 2020?

Whether this would have been possible is a tricky question.

But had he done it, he would have been accused by his political opponents of everything from "disrespecting the Irish" to "being insensitive towards the feelings of immigrant communities and their need to see families overseas" to "being a typical racist Tory who blames everything on dirty foreigners" to "trying to outdo Nigel Farage" to "attempting to lay the ground for a hard Brexit"..... etc.

The political amnesia from the Zero Covid people is kind of... astonishing.