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."

Not sure it's about right or left Kaija, it's mainly just about personal enrichment. The tories being a party of elites, they are reluctant to let vulgar nouveau-riche people like Banks and Farage stick their dirty mitts in the till.

But both groups want a small state, minimal welfare, tax haven. Banks is more overtly xenophobic, but other than that I'm struggling to see where the difference will be, in terms of goals at least - I suppose the rhetoric will be more colourful and unashamedly Trumpian. Particularly effective as prices rise and the Brexit deal unravels.

So much to look forward to.

The Tories have the power, they don't want the likes of Banks to have it. Banks wants to power. Goals may be similar but Banks is challenging the current Alpha.

Yes

So glad we've taken back control.

It is actually completely logical to assert that people who went ahead and voted Leave after the Farage anti-immigrant poster and the murder of Jo Cox were indifferent to both

What a disgusting thing to say.

Yes that is disgusting.

if they've sobered up this morning

Six hour time difference ;)

Do you not think Banks may have mistimed this? It's hard to swim against a retreating tide. UKIP's peak has been and gone.

What would a new patty have to offer the oligarchs and political creepy-crawlies ?

The Tory party has been taken prisoner by the hard right, but still contains many "One Nation" and more liberal Tories - who may eventually stop cowering in the corner and take back their party.

The glorious new party of the hard right would not be held back by any consideration towards the vulnerable in society and it would include all the open fascists that would be persona non grata even in May's Tory party.

Laura Kuenssberg
Most amazing fact of the Hezza sacking is that he revealed he has never met Theresa May
Wow

gruffalo it makes it a lot easier to understand what you are saying if you put quotes in italics or bold, or even use quotation marks. I have literally no idea from that post what you are trying to say.

Condemning everyone makes it more difficult to condemn those who are really wicked.

Yes bigchoc

So the current signs are inability to format quotes.
Who's on the nightshift tonight? I haven't yet made it up long enough to see the inevitable mask slippings and doubt I will tonight either!

Most amazing fact of the Hezza sacking is that he revealed he has never met Theresa May

That's astounding. They've both been senior members of the Tory party for yonks, and May has been at Westminster for 20 years now - she was elected four years before Heseltine stood down as an MP, so for them not to have met is remarkable.

UKIP has died away because Banks, Mercer & Breitbart have stopped propping them up.
They have served their purpose.

We saw that about 13% of the population regularly voted even for the shambolic UKIP
So, there is a market for hate-filled nostalgia or just for a party who can gain that section of the pissed-off who don't care what they vote for, so long as they feel they are rebelling.

A properly organised far right party might easily win 20% if Brexit is a disaster and the blame game takes off.

BUT there would be the same roadblock to their route to power as for UKIP: FPTP
This angry / far right vote is spread evenly across England and I posted on a previous thread what that meant in seats for UKIP.
Under FPTP, e.g. they only get 17 seats at 17%, 81 seats at 31%.

Gruffalow: It's not difficult to put quotes in italics or bold to make it easier for people to see your point.

You just need to put a ^ at the beginning and end of each paragraph you are quoting for italics, or a * for bold.

Or as Misti says, you could even simply use quotation marks.

Do the nightshift namechange each time? Anyway, a few hours peace, maybe. We can digest Hammond's budget. Wonder what he will do for the JAMS?

Oops, typo ! UKIP would get 17 seats at 25%

s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/bc/06/cd/bc06cded94e06cc21a708c49104e6e50.jpg
A Punch cartoon featuring a Mr. G. O'Rilla.
Punch's cartoons weren't the start of anti-Irish sentiment however. That was well under way by then. It had been going strong for hundreds of years.

Thegruffalowswife Tue 07-Mar-17 22:15:59
We'll just have to hope that people see past the "couldn't negotiate with the British" script. I thin people in NI will see stright through it
The people of NI are far more likely to see the irrelevance of Unionism. People like the border farmer who have built livestock farms with the help of EU agriculture funds, people whose banks have recently told them to settle their bills or see their farms and homes sold off to American vulture capitalists.

Wrt the Irish Famine:
"God sent the blight but the English made the Famine" is a saying with a slightly different nuance from your flippant remark...
As far as the famine goes it was a natural disaster, which could have been handled better by the english. It was not inflicted on Irish people, but very badly managed.
I take it you haven't actually read anything about the Irish Famine.

I listened to the Hezza interview this morning and thought he meant he hadn't met May since she became PM - not to have met her at all is quite . I know she's very proud of the fact that she's not "clubbable" but that's taking it to extremes.

Ok. I was simply being lazy and thought It would be obvious what I was talking about

For the sake of identification of quotes I shall use these

Like this:

Or as Misti says, you could even simply use quotation marks.

A properly organised far right party might easily win 20% if Brexit is a disaster and the blame game takes off.

Who's going to properly organise it, though? Hard for small parties to win anything in a FPTP system unless they have competent local organisers, and these people really don't. The top layer is crafty, but the grassroots is stupid and disorganised. They can get councillors elected, but they turn out to be useless or crooked and lose their seats.

So who among the Leavers was unaware of anything Nigel 'On TV 24/7' Farage thought about immigrants, the EU, experts, Muslims, Donald Trump, pints, the relative merits of Leave vs. Remain, and how traffic congestion was due to immigrants clogging the roads, etc?

I think Nigel is a bell end so I don't care much what he thinks or says.

A properly organised far right party will win the next general election and possibly the next two, partly because it will be the default option as the opposition couldn't organise a dog fight.

It is called the Conservative and Unionist Party.

I listened to the Hezza interview this morning and thought he meant he hadn't met May since she became PM
I assumed that's what was meant actually. Even so that's pretty wow.