Who else sees the parallels between "nasty right wing GC" slurs and "nasty right wing Brexiter" slurs?

[ConsiderTheLobster]

If you're GC, you know that a vocal majority within certain liberal left circles will denounce you as a right wing bigot. You know that you're actually GC because you've looked into this deeply and are trying to protect vulnerable people (women, non-conforming children, and trans people).

If you voted Brexit, you know that a vocal majority within certain liberal left circles will denounce you as a right wing bigot. You know that you're sceptical of the EU because it constitutes a corporate-favouring trading block, poses barriers to nationalisation of services such as railways, has deeply racist immigration policies (permitting free movement of predominantly white Europeans whilst restricting the movement of others), keeps people in many non-EU (e.g., African) countries locked into unfavourable trade deals, and reduces the influence of genuine democracy.

If you're GC and you work at a university, in the NHS or in left-leaning media, you're scared to say so. If you voted Brexit and you work at a university, in the NHS or in left-leaning media, you're scared to say so.

There are of course some genuine bigots who oppose self ID because they're transphobic. And there are genuine bigots who voted Brexit because they are racist. In each case, these are the narratives peddled by certain media about, respectively, all GCs, and all Brexit-supporters.

So - how many of us GCs still berate the nasty fascist Brexiters?

Does anyone remember when the entire European Commission resigned en masse in 1999, owing to corruption and incompetence? Does anyone think anything has changed since then?

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/297461.stm

I agree with you OP.

Elites, often unrepresentative of the general population, dominate the public sphere and so get to shout loudest. This has always been the case but had been increased and magnified by social media and especially Twitter in recent years. These elites are surprised every time an election happens that they are in the minority, and that not everyone agrees with them. They react, not by examining their beliefs and wondering if they were wrong, but by berating and demonising those who disagreed with them.

It's the Hillary Clinton 'deplorables', it's the Labour Party leadership during the EU referendum campaign taking it for granted that working class constituencies would vote as they were told. (At one point the Labour leadership literally said don't worry about Hull insert working class region, we'll go and tell them how to vote.)

It's arrogance and moral superiority, as well as snobbery in thinking (wrongly) that they know better and are more intelligent than working class people or those who haven't been to the right universities.

This is mainly a prevailing attitude and mindset I'm talking about, but it can be applied to many things - Brexit, transgenderism etc.

Phew, thank God we've got Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg in charge now so we're free of those wretched "elites".

@Livinginthecity

Does anyone remember when the entire European Commission resigned en masse in 1999, owing to corruption and incompetence? Does anyone think anything has changed since then?

Yes 👍, but times were different then journalists actually reported the news instead of editorialising with their opinions reported as fact. This is the same institution that knew that Greece "massaged" it's figures to adopt the Euro, watched as French & German banks lent billions knowing that Greece would be incapable of repaying and then transferred those debts to the Greek people and other EU Citizens. amp.theguardian.com/business/2012/dec/05/eu-knew-greece-figures-fiddled www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16834815 Classic clip from Andrew Neil in 2019: m.youtube.com/watch?v=Hid7KlYyc1c

Perhaps the difference is they don't pretend otherwise. Unlike the unbearable faux social conscience and moral hypocrisy of lefty elites and armchair socialists.

That was to Fifteentoes re elites.

@Wildswim -

Of course they pretend otherwise. The difference is they do it better (or maybe just have more power and money behind selling it). What do you think the lifelong PR exercise behind "me ol' mate BORIS" is about? (Not "Johnson" like any other politician of course. We call him Boris because he's one of the lads. He's a big cuddly teddy bear with crumpled hair that gets things wrong and can't answer questions properly. Dontcha just love him!!!). Or millionaire banker Farage with good old British pint in hand...

Being suspicious of elites is perfectly natural (although I think they're a pretty much unavoidable by-product of modern industrial societies). What's extraordinary is the way the TRUE uber-elite that runs Britain keeps managing to convince the people at the bottom that their enemy is the people in the middle, not them.

To quote Stewart Lee, “it wasn’t only racists who voted for Brexit...”
But seriously what is a GC? And why didn’t the OP want to use the full term. I’ve searched online, still none the wiser.
I read everyone’s comments, still don’t know. And I’m a news hound, which makes it all the more frustrating.

So the British electorate is fooled every time?

I don't think so. I think they know exactly what they are voting for.

To make out voters are stupid and naive and gullible is incredibly elitist.

anditmakesmesmile - GC = Gender critical. Basically a GC person is sceptical of the idea that gender is an innate quality of people that makes men and women "naturally" different, and tends to believe that it's more just a result of social conditioning.

The year that that broke and they published and scrutinised all the expenses that MPs had claimed, guess who had the lowest in the entire house? Jeremy Corbyn. One year's expenses: A toner cartridge.

Fifteentoes I’m not sure that’s true. I think I’m right in saying that Philip Dunne and Richard Benyon were two mps who claimed no expenses whatsoever.

@Wildswim

So the British electorate is fooled every time?

I don't think so. I think they know exactly what they are voting for.

To make out voters are stupid and naive and gullible is incredibly elitist.

How would that be when we have a mass media that is almost entirely in the pocket of the Conservative party? Are you saying that everything that goes into that media's program, from the PR behind "Boris" to the relentless attacks on Jeremy Corbyn to the blaming of social ills on benefit claimants, muslims, the EU or whoever the bogeyman of the day is, is a complete waste of effort and money because it has no effect on the electorate's perceptions?

And how can people "know exactly what they are voting for" when you've just described voting for the most elitist party available, the one that has always done more than any other to maintain the economic advantage of elites at the expense of ordinary people, as the way to express anger at elites when you vote?

ConsiderTheLobster 'When I tried to talk about the possible positives to the world at large of not being in it (focusing on TTIP-related ideas at the time), he literally screamed at me "where the hell are my kids going to go for their Gap Years?" and "have you seen how long we'd have to queue at the airport if we leave?".'

This put me in mind of an ex-friend's reaction to the outcome of the referendum. Paraphrased but it did stick in my mind: 'If any of you fucking voted for this just fucking unfriend me you cunts. You've stolen my future," he said. What he meant was he'd been thinking about doing an ERASMUS year but hadn't got round to it yet. This is someone from a wealthy, privileged background who clearly didn't understand the concept of having one's choices taken away, and had very little familiarity with being told 'no'.

Of course, beyond the extremes there's this huge middle ground of sane remainers and reasonable brexiteers. As long as we can talk to each other, we'll be okay. It's the hyperbole and the unpersoning and all the rest of it that needs to stay buried in the 2010s.

@Andante57

The year that that broke and they published and scrutinised all the expenses that MPs had claimed, guess who had the lowest in the entire house? Jeremy Corbyn. One year's expenses: A toner cartridge.

Fifteentoes I’m not sure that’s true. I think I’m right in saying that Philip Dunne and Richard Benyon were two mps who claimed no expenses whatsoever.

Ah, I stand corrected. Actually I just looked up JC here and couldn't see anything about a toner cartridge! (Although his expenses are generally no more than a few hundred per year, and certainly nowhere near the levels of of scandal).

mpsallowances.parliament.uk/mpslordsandoffices/hocallowances/allowances-by-mp/#C

Thanks.

Personally I think voting leave for noble reasons is a waste of time with the government we currently have. It's not as though they are going to address any of the injustices of the EU. I thought their plan was to deregulate banking to prevent scrutiny of money laundering.
I voted remain and I still would. I'm also GC and a feminist.
I worked in the benefit sector for a long time and I can tell from that point of view that financially the working class were MUCH better off under Labour.
Since the coalition it got worse and worse. More and more desperate people, less help we could give them. I was glad to leave.
I loved it when I started, most of the time I was helping single mothers access higher education and going back to work.
I have no political home right now.

What the Tories worked out is that a good deal of the people who traditionally voted Labour for economic reasons are actually social conservatives, particularly on the issue of immigration which was weaponised for Brexit.

I think this really misunderstands what happened.

Concerns about immigration - which is to say movement of labour -whether from elsewhere in Europe or somewhere else - has always been a central concern of the left. Old style conservatives have also had concerns about it for related reasons, but that ideological position has been suppressed for some time - several generations - I don't think it's really in play politically at this point (though it's quite possibly going to be an emergent ideology.)

It's right wing capitalism, and these days middle class centrism, that want that kind of movement of labour to be easy. Not because it's leftist, but because it isn't.

It's true that Tories have picked up on that concern, but only after Labour dropped it and called anyone who saw it as important to leftism a racist. But that is a feature of Labour becoming middle class and looking out for middle class interests.

As for social conservatism, it's true that working class communities are typically socially conservative. And for good reason - those kinds of community level structures like having close family ties and stable neighbourhoods are among the most reliable of social safety nets. This is something modern leftists don't understand - they want social programs to help people but can't fathom that those are generally going to be less stable and helpful than close-knit communities, and that those programs can actually undermine those communities and their stabilising elements if they aren't very careful. And given that their support of globalism is clearly destabilising and detrimental to the working class - no wonder those communities see the LP as out of touch.

"When you are a member of the EU, you make small compromises (like not being able to deport a foreign criminal occasionally, so you keep him in prison in the UK - rather safer that way, really)"

You normally can't keep them in prison unless they are under sentence of a court for a crime committed in the UK. They may have committed no crime in the UK. Or they may have come to the end of their sentence.

So this isn't foreign terrorists being locked up in UK prisons. This is foreign terrorists walking UK streets, and there is nothing we can do about it, other than pay a lot of money to have them under surveillance.

"I'd actually rather people in the UK had... good environmental, human rights and employment protections"

But that stuff can be done at the national level. You just don't need the EU for it. OK with environmental issues partly you need international cooperation, but that doesn't have to mean a superstate.

And "human rights protections" are a potentially dangerous system, without a check on it.

Let's imagine that the European Court of Human Rights comes down on the side of "trans rights". So biological males to be given access to women's spaces or it's a human rights violation.

If you're in the EU, what do you do in that situation? (Again, I'm aware that they are technically distinct and it's not actually a court of the EU.)

Just accept it as a small price to pay for all the wonderful benefits of the EU?

With 28 member states, it was a lot more unlikely that a handful of corrupt millionaires would take control and pillage the UK, as is happening as we speak. And we had the single market and the customs union. And the bargaining power of the whole of Europe. On our own, we are going downhill extremely fast. For the sake of ideology, taken advantage of by the likes of Johnson and Cummings.

We were constantly told by the likes of The Guardian and other Remainer press that the Apocalypse and Armageddon would rain down upon this doomed Isle as a result of leaving the EU. There would be food shortages and riots, There appear to have been some issues with regard to paperwork by exporters to the EU. Somebody I know who exports says it's always been much easier to export on WTO terms than anything to do with the EU.

Interesting ChestnutStuffing

It is of course true that opposition to immigration was originally focused among the left, and that that has been largely pushed out by the middle class dominance within Labour. I don't think that's entirely for capitalist interests though; I think it's largely more of a social than an economic issue. It's important to the middle class "woke" tendency in Labour to oppose racism, and the immigration debate gets tied up with that.

In purely economic terms however, I'm not so sure. It comes down to the different things Labour can "be", as I described earlier. If you're going to have a social democratic Labour party that basically retains the capitalist market system but attempts to institute some redistribution and protection for the most vulnerable within it, then surely it makes sense to at least make that system function WELL, and increase prosperity. Blair didn't allow increases to immigration because he wanted to piss off the working class. He did it because it's extensively studied and agreed within economic circles that such increases are beneficial to the economy. He wanted money to spend on the NHS, on schools and working tax credits, so something like intra-EU immigration that brings more money into the economy than it demands, was a no brainer.

I worry that the people so angered by that are only seeing one side of the story. They see a Bulgarian plumber competing for their job. They see a Polish family in the queue in front of them at A&E. What they don't see, because it isn't reported by the press and doesn't express itself in a striking soundbite, is the effect on the government's ledger of all the tax that plumber and that family are paying, and how that affects outcomes for everything the government does.

We can argue about the theory of this all day, but several posters in this thread have pointed out how much worse off the working class have been under the last decade of Tory austerity than they were under Labour. That's all you need to know really. Yes, in a very localised sense immigration can drive down unskilled wages. But it also drives UP a number of other things and there's no reason why the net effect on the working class has to be negative, especially if you have a government committed to protecting wages and working conditions. (It's probably true that Blair didn't do enough to counteract the negative effects, partly because the scale of immigration from the Eastern bloc EU entrants took him by surprise and was far greater than he bargained for).

By contrast, Brexit under the Tories is not going to drive up the conditions of the working class simply because the Tories don't have, and have never had, any intention or desire to do that. Even in a miraculous outcome where Brexit results in an increase to GDP (which pretty much everyone thinks is the opposite of what will happen), that extra money won't appear in the form of contracts for agency workers or better state school provision; it will simply find its way into Jacob Rees-Mogg's offshore bank account.

Does anyone seriously believe it's going to mean £350 million a week extra for the NHS, like they put on the side of the bus?

"We can argue about the theory of this all day, but several posters in this thread have pointed out how much worse off the working class have been under the last decade of Tory austerity than they were under Labour. That's all you need to know really."

But if Labour had stayed in power, they would have needed to go the path of austerity also. You can argue over the exact timing and level of it. They might have done it in a better way resulting in less harm. Or they may have done a worse job of it, we don't know.

Labour had a good economy, probably somewhat by luck, and they also borrowed to invest in services.

When a recession comes, times are going to be harder. That can't all be blamed on evil Tories vs Labour saints.

"Yes, in a very localised sense immigration can drive down unskilled wages. But it also drives UP a number of other things and there's no reason why the net effect on the working class has to be negative"

But it may still be negative for the working class yes? The benefits to the economy may not help everyone, on balance. And people have to make their own judgements about this, with obviously incomplete information.

But it's not unreasonable to suspect that it's harming sections of the population, when you start considering the impact on wages, the impact on services, the impact on housing. Maybe build more housing before allowing mass immigration? Growth in GDP isn't the only thing that matters. If a policy helps business and total tax revenues, but quite possibly harms the people at the bottom... not everyone is just going to trust the political elites and business lobby and economists who say it's a good thing.

The idea that an increase in GDP helps everyone in a society is just trickle down economics again, though. It doesn't. As the lot of the workers becomes more precarious, the wealthy have continued to grow wealthier.

This isn't something that is just true in the UK, either. It's happened in many different nations, whether liberal progressive governments have been in charge, or right wing ones.

I have to disagree with the op. Brexit/vote leave was based on LIES and allowed this country to be pillaged by the shitshow government brexit has given us. The fact that so many have died because vote leave and those who voted for it set the groundwork for us to be governed by such incompetent buffoons deserves some scorn. Vote leave was an ideology.

Being GC is based on science. Humans cannot change sex in the same way they cannot change race. That is a fact. It is logical. Women are oppressed because if their sex. This is fact.

Not everyone who voted for brexit is racist but everyone who is racist voted for brexit

Much of Europe is significantly more racist than the UK. Are we really saying that Europeans with British citizenship are all voting for Brexit?