Ask an insider from any one of the major political parties what kind of person his or her ideal candidate in 2024 would be, and you will probably get some version of the following:
He or she should be a stout local hero with experience outside of Westminster – preferably in regional government or in regional enterprise. He or she should have an everyman’s ambivalence on social issues, with views on economics that are a pleasing muddle – though he or she should be fiercely devoted to things like the NHS. His or her entry into Westminster should be done gingerly; he or she should, in some way, stand above the din of party, and should not come across as a natural politico. Above all, these people should be ciphers for a community, and should take up office less to legislate than to bring local grievances to the seat of Government – petitioner style.
It’s difficult to exaggerate how seriously Britain’s governing class takes this archetype, this local everyman done good. Through the 2010s, the ready solution to populism and, before that, ‘Trust in Politics’ was to load Parliament up with these community heroes. The age of svelte parachute candidates like David Cameron would end, and would give way to a new politics of local populism; indeed, this project has had no greater sponsor than Cameron himself. Even dissident figures like Dominic Cummings can’t resist the siren call of the brassy Midlands matron. He has called for one to head up the Labour Party, or even his new Startup Party.
The arrival of these figures en masse was designed, not so much to overturn the Westminster consensus, but to spread it out across a wider area. It was always a meagre concession. It did not offer any real change of course, only representation in the abstract. It pulled up new seats at the same table.
And nor have these community worthies done much, after all, to shore up the status quo. People are deeply unhappy with the existing order of things, and they do not care whether its local enforcer went to school with them or not. Still, the need to broaden the base of Britain’s governing class in this way is something that’s now taken for granted in Westminster.
George Galloway, the new MP for Rochdale, and Lee Anderson, the member for Ashfield, both fit this bill in all the ways that matter. Galloway and his Worker’s Party of Great Britain really does embody the ‘fiscally Left, socially Right’ formula that – as we are so often told by pollsters, think tanks and party operatives – would sweep the country if given the chance. Galloway is a royalist (he opted for the full-fat Parliamentary oath), and he revels in multiculturalism: his Britain will forever be the Britain of steel drums, anti-Apartheid sit-ins and the Greater London Council. His only seriously heterodox opinions in 2024 are about Israel-Palestine; in other words foreign policy – that most rarefied and abstract domain of politics. Gallowayism, further, is the bona fide politics of community engagement that Westminster keeps telling us it likes so much. Although Galloway’s career in public life has been an itinerant one, it has always been couched in particular communities and their interests; he has indeed courted controversy for being a little too willing to play to the local crowd.
Lee Anderson, too, trades in a bumptious localism. Anderson sees himself not so much as a politician who happens to believe in the death penalty and action on small boats, but as the avatar of a place: the Red Wall, or simply, Not London. The title of his Friday night GB News show – The Real World – speaks to this idea; for Anderson, politics is less about taking over Westminster than administering a brute lesson in the people and places that it’s forgotten about.
Galloway and Anderson are, in other words, exactly what Westminster has been claiming to want and need for the past decade and a half. And yet both have now been made political outlaws for patently obscure reasons. George Galloway has been marked as an enemy of democracy for having strong views on a far off war to which Britain is not a co-belligerent. Lee Anderson warns of Islamism and extremism, sure. But this is simply the boilerplate of David Cameron and Angela Merkel circa 2011 – only this time directed at the Mayor of London, rather than at schoolchildren.
These are strange grounds for proscription. As Barack Obama once said of Ukraine, neither of these things are “core interests”. But getting more people like Galloway and Anderson into politics apparently was. That the two find themselves picked off for trifles, then, is surely telling. We can only take it as a contortion, or a spasm.
What it reveals is a British governing class that can no longer think clearly about which parts of the status quo it values, what it wishes to defend and what it’s willing to compromise on. There is, increasingly, no vision, no appeals, no attempt, even, to win the public for the current social order through things like devolution, the Big Society or Levelling Up – only a frantic spackling to keep the exact conditions of, say, 2010 in place, forever.
And so, expect the contortions to become stranger still. Here is one: in 2024, your typical Labour moderate or Conservative of One Nation believes that immigration is beyond criticism, but that the political rights of those migrants can be revoked on a whim. Here is another: 14 years after he announced the death of the professional politician, David Cameron is in the parliamentary Conservative Party, and Lee Anderson is not.
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it seems just lately politicians are losing their minds, the state wishing to ban any comedy it does not like for example, yes Jimmy carrs joke was crass, but, the reaction has been nothing short of preposterous. along with the disastrous online harms bill which gets bigger everyday and looks to be a threat to privacy, speech and civil liberties, the intent to revise the human rights act, wanting to restrict protests among many things, its like, what’s in the water? Politicians have normally swung towards censorship but the last yr or two they lost their minds. Its like joe rogan in the US, again completely ridiculous reaction going into parody.
and then there are reports of Scotland wanting to cut 6 inches of school doors????
It’s not just lately. There’s been a long drift/march to where we are now. Covid has accelerated it and been enabled by it. It’s a symptom, not a cause.
Jocks are shorter than the UK average, to be fair. Full-size doors are a waste of wood up there.
Finally, the truth is coming out!
Masky Mark McClown: I will be an eternal god!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkSPlmaSC1A
New Zealand Covid protest convoy jams streets near parliament | AFP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YAn8DM9838
A convoy of trucks and campervans blocked streets near New Zealand’s parliament in Wellington Tuesday to protest against Covid restrictions and vaccinations, inspired by a similar demonstration in Canada. AFP News Agency
Let’s keep getting the message out
Thursday 10th February 5pm
Silent lighted walk behind one simple sign
“No More Lockdown & Covid Rules Are Barking”
Bring torches, candles and other lights
meet outside Town Hall, between Rose Inn & Costa
Wokingham RG40 1AP
Stand in the Park Sundays 10am make friends, ignore the madness & keep sane
Wokingham Howard Palmer Gardens Cockpit Path car park Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Henley Mills Meadows (at the bandstand) Henley-on-Thames RG9 1DS
Telegram Group
http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
The comments in that Leicester mercury article are encouraging. Seems the balance in her favour.
At first I smelt a rat and thought it must be to do with her refusal to test as opposed to vax status. I was wrong. Seems it was more about having to self isolate because unvaxxed.
Long past time all these covid laws were abolished.
Hey critically ill child is in hospital, catches covid because of course and so they ban the mum because she has come into contact with said son. How can an unvaccinated person go to a hospital without coming into contact with an infected ffs?!
Aside from that is it actually law to wear masks in hospitals, even when exempt?
I was harassed by a nurse in a local hospital last year for not wearing a face nappy, despite being exempt. I filed an official complaint with the NHS, which was fobbed off. They kindly reassured me that my future NHS treatment would not be affected by my complaint (not sinister whatsoever). I replied to their email by sending a picture of the Pig Dictator not wearing a mask at Hexham Hospital.
There may have been a requirement then, I expect the “law” is different now?
Telling someone you can visit your covid positive infant in the ICU but that will render you a ‘contact of someone with covid’ and as such you will then have to stay in your home for whatever days is evil in the extreme.
Hopefully…
Soon it will be like the end of Lord of the Rings: when Our Heroes come back to the Shire and find Lobelia in prison as an unlikely hero for liberty. They raise the Shire, the hobbits have a mini-revolution, rescue Lobelia, and get Saruman out, and then sink back into their old normal, with very little notion that anything happened in the wider world that was bigger than they were.
They put CO2 monitors into the small studio rooms at school a couple of weeks ago. I asked why, and was told it was so we knew when to ‘waft the doors’ around to let some air in because ‘the plague is still around’. When I asked what number was safe, I was told they didn’t know, but the little machines would beep if it was a problem.
I put my CO2 monitor in the corner out of the way. By the end of the day it registered 3600 PPM. And I STILL don’t know (or especially care) if that was bad. The odd thing really was how no one seemed to feel it was important to know WHAT THE ACTUAL F it was for.
I live in hope that one day, when its all over, I will be like Frodo, sitting quietly with a drink and some food and no longer needing to let this stuff get to me. Where’s Lobelia Sackville-Baggins when you need her?
It’s fearless hobbits with bright swords that you need. With a very few exceptions, the hobbits caved in to tyranny exactly as the Brits have done, with enough willing and active collaborators to keep Saruman’s ball rolling. But once resolute action was taken, the people rose and the tyrants were pushed over with comparatively little trouble. Their power was entirely based on bullying and intimidation. When their bluff was called, that was the end of them.
Britain needs a thorough scouring, but where our bright swords are coming from is not yet clear.
Right Annie. My world is almost entirely peopled by silly little hobbitses. And one or two worm tongues.
At least you’re not troubled with Tightass Groan, which Peaked some time ago.
Annie! Do you think this might be ‘bright swords’? https://policeonguard.ca/news-release-urgent-message-to-canadians/
How does that work? Starmer called for harder, faster, lockdowns, and is more green globalist net zero fanboi than the greenest Tory.
Just like every high profile “charity” then, it’s usually jobs for the boys/wives of the establishment connected parasite class
Obviously STAGED.
Because it’s not about online safety, it’s about CONTROL
came here to say the same. Voting for either party is just going to give you different flavours of the same s***
Yes all horses come from the same stable and the same owners always win the races. The public has to come to terms with the fact that they repeatedly vote for genuine evil, then buck that trend. Serial Traitor Dominic Raab hawking this latest Human Rights Act abomination for example. People like him need to be flushed down the toilet where they belong. Folk always pick the lowlife parasite class with no morals. We need to start really analysing the character of those running for office. Anyone from a corporate background should be placed in negative points, as corporate culture and entities are by default evil and have an enormously negative effect on our world. Corporate is the filthy seed of evil and deceit
UK “reforming” human rights law…compulsory vaccines on the horizon?
https://off-guardian.org/2022/02/08/uk-reforming-human-rights-law-compulsory-vaccines-on-the-horizon/