Westminster: Brexit is the hard right's weapon of mass distraction

[BigChocFrenzy]

The fervour and divisions over Brexit have suspended normal party politics.

The staggering incompetence & unsuitability of Corbyn as a leader, together with the resulting impotence of Labour has removed the normal checks & balances in UK politics.
There is a vaccum where the Official Opposition should be, so Theresa May is under pressure only from her right.

I fear Thereas May and the Tory rightwing are taking advantage of Brexit to complete the destruction of the post-WW2 social contract and the welfare state.

Meanwhile, the constraints of civilised discourse have been loosened and those with racist or social Darwinist views now feel free to spout their poison openly.

Putin is pouring petrol on all the fires and Arron Banks is lurking < sinister emoticons required >

Zoe Williams:
"Behind a smokescreen of bogus patriotism, ideologically driven cuts to the NHS and all our public services are unpicking the bonds of nationhood"

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/05/brexit-theresa-may-falklands-war-nhs-cuts

"We should be marching against the crisis in adult social care, the closure of care homes, the systematic exploitation of carers, the £4.6bn cut from social care budgets this decade.
We should be .... asking:

“What exactly is the plan, if we’ve decided we can no longer afford to care for the elderly and the disabled?
What do we do with them instead?”

"We should be marching against cuts in education funding"

"Every morning we wake up to someone on the radio explaining, despairingly, that you can’t fix the hospital bed crisis until social care is fixed, and you can’t fix that until council tax brings in more, and it can’t bring in more because wages are too low."

"But when everything breaks at the same time, that is not a coincidence: it is a plan.

As surely as Margaret Thatcher had an economic plan on employment, rights, industry and wages,
this century’s Conservatives have a plan on public services, which is to smash them beyond all recognition."

Who can forget all the arguments that the increased hate crime figures were just reported crimes, that there hasn't been an increase in actual convictions therefore it was just some wusses crying foul because they lost

"I'm not racist and anyway you're not even British!!"

I have occasionally written on threads here that I am (a) an immigrant exercising my FoM and (b) was disenfranchised in the referendum, to which the response is generally - "why should we give foreigners like you a vote? Go home if you don't like it here" . (Note: I'm British). There were also disparaging comments yesterday about how most of us on here are foreigners. You really don't have to scratch very deep at all.

Gosh I'd never thought of that!

Sorry - Danniel Hannan specialises in saying demonstrably and spectacularly wrong things, but always in elegantly constructed sentences and long words.

Depressing that this seems to be enough to fool his followers into believing he must be an intelligent man and worth listening to.

A stupid man's idea of a smart man

I'll look back.

I've followed all of these threads! Were those the exact words misti, because that is shocking!

equally applies to Farage and Johnson.....

True ghost

Daniel Hannan - yes, the one who said that it should be possible not to have Freedom of Movement - Liechtenstein didn't! Conveniently overlooking the size of the said country and the terrain. Such a profound input into the debate.

Agree BCF, think DC started this school of conservatism, 'fake it till you make it' He never expected to win the leadership, regarded himself as a good manager, but was a lazy posh git. I think current crew have brought the same entitled idiocy to public service jobs, which need brains, humanity and charm. Her cabinet is a nest of vipers, who barely trust each other.

But crucially they don't seem to acknowledge what they don't know or what is not possible.
Politics used to be called the art of the possible, before fascism came back in fashion.

"Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market" who said that?

"I'm not racist and anyway you're not even British!!"

That was said. There was someone with an Australian husband who had a British passport, and it might have been on that thread. The thread got so nasty this morning that it got pulled.

"I'm not racist and anyway you're not even British!!"
And the creepy thing is that they expose their children to that racism, and it's repeated by them too. That is horrible that that thread was pulled.

Wasn't aware thread was pulled. Should have been kept up as evidence of what post referendum Britain looks like.

Who can forget all the arguments that the increased hate crime figures were just reported crimes, that there hasn't been an increase in actual convictions therefore it was just some wusses crying foul because they lost angry

TBF if you do look at it as a non partisan issue you will see that there has been documented false flags and media trying to push a certain narrative, the guardian pulled an article that they based on a Hope not Hate press release as it was based on very dodgy data

I saw the thread.

I think it was pulled because some people were being very nasty to a victim of rape.

It was on the last thread too. Not that exact sentence but a series of posts which started with I'm not racist and eventually culminated in most of you aren't even British.

woman exactly, its been creeping in IRL round my way too. I've been well prepared for it though thanks to not being fully British and that upsetting my British family.

ok lets stick to what Britain's most senior police officer said;

Hogan-Howe expressed alarm about the figures. “We saw this horrible spike after Brexit,” he said. He revealed there was a connection between the referendum and many of the incidents and pointed out that many of the victims were eastern Europeans.

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/28/hate-crime-horrible-spike-brexit-vote-metropolitan-police

There was another thread misti where some of your posts were removed by Mnhq. .. was it that one?

It doesnt even shock me anymore Tbh
Saddens me
Makes me angry
But shock me? Nope.

I'm just waiting for the issue of ROI citizens to come up...have the govt ANY idea how many voters (and I include leave voters!) Have Irish parents/grandparents?

Very prominent ukip supporter lives near my mum...his mum and dad are Irish. I wonder if he thought they would be safe because they are white?

😒

Don't be silly ghost. He's an expert

Lots going on today.

The House of Lords is an interesting one. The process by which people get appointed to the Lords is somewhat lacking in transparency, shall we say, but it's very difficult to come up with something better. There is no point in having a second chamber that is constituted in the same way as the first, since then the advantages of the Lords being able to take the broader, longer term view than the Commons are lost. I guess the issues to contend with are (i) on what basis are the members appointed? and (ii) who does the appointing? Maybe one could have a bunch of fixed-term positions that people could apply to?

Grammar schools, on the face of it, have nothing to do with Brexit, but somehow I think they are emblematic of what post-Brexit Britain is going to look like. Like Brexit itself, this is a policy with popular appeal. And like Brexit, it's a policy that risks being most detrimental to the people who support it. The amazing thing about a policy like grammar schools is that, by definition, it will at best have no impact on the 80-90% of people who don't get into them! I've never seen any proponent of grammars claim that (let alone provide evidence for) the non-grammars will deliver a better education for their pupils than comprehensives do at the moment. Apparently they have a marginal benefit the kids who do get in, so you could argue that it improves the chances for a small group, and leaves things unchanged for everyone else. But equally, you can argue that is has in fact a detrimental effect on the larger group, so overall you're worse off than when you started.

The actual effect of a policy like this is that it creates the illusion of opportunity where none exists.

badders my experience is that they often feel the Irish are the 'right type of immigrants'. And they will be until there's no more EU immigrants to blame everything on.

The brexit arms seem to think the story about the Australian was a lie/exaggeration.

Well. They would, wouldn't they?

gruffalo I was just citing someone else (who I assumed was paraphrasing tbh as it's quite an effort to flip between threads on Mumsnet's oldfashioned forum layout - let alone cite from other threads. I didn't see the thread that got pulled. I try to avoid immigration ones tbh, because I find the attitudes so depressing and utterly lacking in empathy).

But that sort of stuff gets said regularly. Leavers routinely assume that I didn't get a vote because I'm foreign (I must be foreign, I describe myself as an immigrant not an expat ), not because I was deliberately disenfranchised by Cameron pandering to his loony wing. And only yesterday that knickers person was throwing around stuff like this (actual quote this time): go ahead filling these threads with you anti british sentiment/propoganda ... Many of you have personal issues with the UK are not british