Ed Notes Extended

Monday, June 27, 2016

The Tories Made Their Neo-Liberal Bed....

So the austerity Tory (Brit Republicans) neo-liberals from Thatcher to Cameron have driven a stake into the economy and now must live with it while Labor (Brit Democrats) Tony Blair and even the current so-called left leader sailed along and are now undergoing divisions. The strongest party in Britain seems to be the Scotish nationalists who will soon hold their own ScEXIT and stay with Europe with Ireland to follow. Great Britain is getting slimmer. Oh Boris, have fun while you are prime minister for your very few minutes in the sun.

After this vote the UK is diminished, our politics poisoned


Meanwhile a section of London-based commentariat anthropologised the British working class as though they were a lesser evolved breed from distant parts, all too often portraying them as bigots who did not know what was good for them. Having assumed themselves cosmopolitan, the more self-aware pundits began to realise just how parochial they were: having experienced much of the world, they discovered they didn’t know their own country as well as they might.

But if the remain campaign was incompetent and patronising, leave was both inflammatory and irresponsible.

It is a banal axiom to insist that “it’s not racist to talk about immigration”. It’s not racist to talk about black people, Jews or Muslims either. The issue is not whether you talk about them but how you talk about them and whether they ever get a chance to talk for themselves. When you dehumanise migrants, using vile imagery and language, scapegoating them for a nation’s ills and targeting them as job-stealing interlopers, you stoke prejudice and foment hatred.
The chutzpah with which the Tory right – the very people who had pioneered austerity, damaging jobs, services and communities – blamed migrants for the lack of resources was breathtaking. The mendacity with which a section of the press fanned those flames was nauseating. The pusillanimity of the remain campaign’s failure to counter these claims was indefensible.

Not everyone, or even most, of the people who voted leave were driven by racism. But the leave campaign imbued racists with a confidence they have not enjoyed for many decades and poured arsenic into the water supply of our national conversation.

More
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/24/eu-vote-uk-diminished-politics-poisoned-racism


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