Keir Starmer – who has professed that a woman can have a penis – has become the latest figure to gaslight conservatives by making the ridiculous claim that the Culture War is an invention of Tories, rather than something being aggressively prosecuted by the Left against Britain, common sense and freedom. Allison Pearson in the Telegraph is having none of it.
In a speech on Monday at the Civil Society Summit, a gathering of charities and not-for-profit groups, Sir Keir accused the Tories of “sabotaging civil society to save their own skins. They got themselves so tangled up in culture wars of their own making,” he said, that “instead of working with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution to find real solutions to stop the small boats their rhetoric has helped demonise them.”
The Tory party, he went on, was undertaking “a weird kind of McCarthyism… Trying to find woke agendas in the very civic institutions they once regarded with respect. Instead of working with the National Trust so more people can learn about – and celebrate – our culture and our history, they’ve managed to demean their work… It comes to something when the Tories are at war with the National Trust.”
Starmer’s speech was disingenuousness on stilts. The ones waging war on our culture are not Conservatives. As if. The people responsible for “sabotaging” charities are their own radicalised members of staff who put ideology before the public good. And the ‘wokewashing’ of our institutions is hardly a figment of the imagination of some Right-wing think-tank. It’s distressingly, oppressively real as gifted, decent people are ‘cancelled’ for refusing to parrot fashionable idiocies.
If the RNLI has sunk in public estimation it’s because it is perceived to be more interested in equality, diversity and inclusion than saving lives. In 2021, it was reported that the RNLI is “looking to promote empathy and understanding among the British public with respect to migrants crossing the Channel”. Donors don’t generally appreciate virtue-signalling lectures. Nor do they want the RNLI to pay for burkinis as part of an “anti-drowning project for Muslim women in Tanzania”. Honestly, I wish I was making this stuff up.
As for the National Trust, it no longer sees its primary role as helping British people to “celebrate our culture and history”, as the Labour leader claims. It’s more likely to be found berating its poor members, who go for tea and a tour of the gardens, because its beautiful properties have indirect links to slavery and a house’s sweeping staircase was made from teak forested by forced labour. Frankly, it’s a surprise they don’t have a notice at the gate of every stately home: “Don’t Think You’re Here For a Nice Day Out. Educate Yourselves!” Give it time, give it time.
Nor have the Conservatives got tangled up in “culture wars of their own making”. It’s Starmer’s side that started those bitterly divisive wars with a view to undermining the very British values he claims to cherish. Far from leading a McCarthyite purge of woke (in our dreams, folks!), with a few brave exceptions (Kemi, Priti, Suella, Miriam) Tory MPs and ministers have timidly stood by as the Left colonised every British institution like virulent woodworm. They have been allowed to trash our history, force innocent Brits to apologise for ‘slavery and colonialism’ that happened centuries before they were born and generally proselytise for a warped, imported creed that claims all white people are ‘privileged’. Which will certainly come as news to the citizens of Port Talbot.
Far from fighting the culture wars, an embarrassed Government has been far too eager not to offend ‘progressives’. Scared of looking like ‘the Nasty Party’, it has seldom taken steps to defend our birthright against forces which loathe the United Kingdom.
Worth reading in full.
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Does Will Jones know what gaslighting means?
Evidently not! I don’t think Starmer has managed to lead anyone to question their sanity by his accusation of their guilt in this regard.
I’m quite sure he does
The gaslighting might not have succeeded with most of us but it is an attempt at it for sure
If he hasn’t succeeded in gaslighting anyone then he hasn’t gaslit anyone.
He might want to walk to the moon (and of course I would encourage him to try). But he hasn’t actually walked to the moon.
Well doesn’t your definition mean that if you spot gaslighting it is not gaslighting?
Anyway, I think the word was used with some poetic license for the purpose of a pithier headline.
If the intended victim spots the attempt at gaslighting, they are not a victim and have not therefore been gaslit, so no gaslighting has happened.
If somebody spots that another person is unaware of being gaslit, that other person is being gaslit, so gaslighting has happened.
For gaslighting to happen, the victim must not realise it is happening.
It’s not difficult!
Re poetic licence, possibly.
You or I can spot that somebody else has been Gaslit. The person in question may not be aware.
This should have been Does Will Jones know what you believe gaslighting means and unless you’ve told him, the answer is obviously No. Whatever the point of the question was …
Can we please have ‘deception’ back…
“When I hear the word ‘culture’, I slip the safety catch on my Browning.” Hanns Johst’s ‘Schlageter.’
“The ones waging war on our culture are not Conservatives”
Well in 2019 Boris could’ve had a bonfire of Woke, instead he turned out to be spineless. If you remember his time as Mayor that would not be a surprise. This is the result of the long march through the institutions (according to Wiki a right wing conspiracy) with organisations like Common Purpose fronting it. Give credit to UK Column who first exposed it. I remember them talking about CP beck around 2011 when they were still on Sky TV.
Well I just think we need more of this in Europe. 100% Trumptastic. It’s just complete common sense. I’m looking at you, Geert. No pressure! lol;
President Trump delivers warning to immigrants that Hate America and support Hamas.
“To all immigrants: If you hate America, if you want to abolish Israel, then we don’t want you here.”
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1750165444558778483
You can only have a war if someone disagrees with a course of action by someone else. If everybody is happy with the course of action there is no war. The left is totally in thrall to woke, so of course they cannot cause any disagreement. There is only a culture war because some of us on the right disagree with this nonsense.
The Tories have however by their passivity and oft ambiguity done a great deal to enable wokism, and at times openly supported it.
“…“instead of working with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution to find real solutions to stop the small boats… “
Sir Kier is confusing RNLI whose job isn’t to protect our shores, with the RN whose job it is.
Once upon a time in the past, England ruled a large part of the globe after it had conquered it over the course of centuries. That’s not some evil special case of something which hasn’t ever happened before which deserves a term of its very own (“colonialism”) but just one of very many large (for the standards of the day) multi-ethnic states held together by military force which have existed since historical records began. And they’re still existing. The three largest are Russia, China and India. For some strange reason, nobody demands that they must decolonize themselves out of existence and nobody accuses them of having conquered a lot of territory occupied by all kinds of different peoples.
The first step to deal with the w-hucksters is to reject their ahistorical nonsense terminology.
It is obviously disingenuous for a number of reasons.When I was a student in the early 1990s this struggle was already well underway which was itself an inheritance from the late 1960s and the Gallic madness which seemed a good idea at the time. I remember a stall at the university where a gay man and a butch lezzer were giving out such devices as dental dams. I had never encountered a dental dam and I haven’t encountered one since. The tendency of a smug liberal elite is very much an attack on working class values of kith and kin and a sense of belonging. This parochialism, as they see it has been at odds with the intentions of the predator parasite class for at least 150 years.
The thing is…does it really matter? No, it doesn’t. Both parties are hell-bent on destroying our society – something we have to acknowledge as neither party seems to be interested in real people’s problems. They both advocate vaccination/jabbing people with something that has been proved beyond any reasonable doubt to cause harm. They both support the WHO’s pandemic treaty and the IHR regulations. They both support state-sponsored genocide and continuous war using OUR money to do so. They both believe all the climate lies and are committed to the ruinous policy of achieving Net Zero which once again has been shown to be to the detriment of us all. They pay the merest lip service to doing anything at all about the unrestricted immigration and so on. They’re not listening to any of us. Why? Because the direction of travel has already been decided by forces outside our government and which they – our weak and cowardly government – are unable to oppose. So, in my view, this is nothing more than another useless distraction and I couldn’t care less because it’s just designed to make me feel a certain way…which I already feel about ALL of THEM!
Thinkers have said throughout the millenia that despite the apparent imbecility or perfidy of our rulers, that it ultimately comes down to the will of the people. Obviously our political class represent nobody these days. Is there a real energy for the new? I would say not because for one thing in times of renewal there is an explosion of artforms, protest songs, poetry, murals, the sense of a better world a’comin as Woody Guthrie put it. There is a deep sense of finality amongst even the best of us and thus we will continue to endure our overlords. This mood that afflicts us isn’t our fault there are transmissions that afflict us that we don’t understand at all.
A few years ago I went to clean the vandalised statues in Parliament Sq. I met a painter/decorator who had the same idea. He taught me that 10% turpentine is gentle on the stone.
If the Left hadn’t started that culture war neither of us would have been there.
It’s a good memory.
Identity Politics has destroyed the left. The Conservatives must have thought they were missing out on something so decided to start to destroy themselves as well, and ended up morphing into Labour Lite.
Th parasite political class that today all seem to have merged into one big leftist blob have no right to talk about the culture that they are wiping out.