The Brexit Thread

Status
Not open for further replies.
https://twitter.com/x/status/1203790699738673155

Shame, this must be a shock to some on here. A party with Boris and Jacob Rees-Mogg appealing to the working class?! Surely not!

The BoJo/Cummings strategy of appealing to traditional Labour voters in the Midlands and the North is working like a treat. This reckoning was always coming given Labour's capture by the London metropolitan elite.
 
rietrot said:
And you guys failed to read even the wiki page about you own anarchy symbol. So you are just useing it because you think it's "cool" without understanding the context.
Click to expand...

I’m not sure how difficult it is for you to understand, but to me personally and countless others of my generation, this sign means one thing and one thing only. Punk rock.

It’s like a swastika meaning to a Hindu is a very different from that of a white supremacist.
 
Chris_the_Brit said:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1203790699738673155

Shame, this must be a shock to some on here. A party with Boris and Jacob Rees-Mogg appealing to the working class?! Surely not!

The BoJo/Cummings strategy of appealing to traditional Labour voters in the Midlands and the North is working like a treat. This reckoning was always coming given Labour's capture by the London metropolitan elite.
Click to expand...

Lol.
 
Long-ish article, but I really enjoyed it. Anyone who isn't reflectively anti-Boris should give it a read :cool:. Some great anecdotes that show his hilarious character!

Boris’s Blundering Brilliance

And yet somehow Boris leveraged this indolence and incompetence to gain popularity. Gimson’s biography notes that he couldn’t be bothered to remember his lines in a school play, so he posted them around the stage and rushed from prompt to prompt, garbling most of them, evoking howls of laughter from the crowd and intense frustration from his fellow actors. He acted in a Molière play in French but with an atrocious English accent that also stole the show. He made his laziness into a joke — and discovered that this made people laugh and warm to him.
Click to expand...

At Oxford, it was the same performance. I overlapped with him for a year (1983–84) and, like him, was president of the Oxford Union. Compared with most of the toffs, he seemed to me endearing. So many other Etonians downplayed their upper-class origins, became lefties, smoked pot, softened their accents, and wore clothes indistinguishable from anyone else.
But Boris wore his class as a clown costume — never hiding it but subtly mocking it with a performance that was as eccentric as it was self-aware. He made others feel as if they were in on a joke he had created, which somewhat defused the class resentment he might otherwise have been subject to and which, like many from the lower ranks of British society, I mostly shared.
Click to expand...

It is this aspect of Boris’s politics that some of his close allies insist has been misunderstood. He has done what no other conservative leader in the West has done: He has co-opted and thereby neutered the far right. The reactionary Brexit Party has all but collapsed since Boris took over. Anti-immigration fervor has calmed. The Tories have also moved back to the economic and social center under Johnson’s leadership. And there is a strategy to this. What Cummings and Johnson believe is that the E.U., far from being an engine for liberal progress, has, through its overreach and hubris, actually become a major cause of the rise of the far right across the Continent. By forcing many very different countries into one increasingly powerful Eurocratic rubric, the E.U. has spawned a nationalist reaction. From Germany and France to Hungary and Poland, the hardest right is gaining. Getting out of the E.U. is, Johnson and Cummings argue, a way to counter and disarm this nationalism and to transform it into a more benign patriotism. Only the Johnson Tories have grasped this, and the Johnson strategy is one every other major democracy should examine.

Consider, by contrast, Germany, where the center right is reeling and the extreme-right AfD has 91 seats in the Bundestag. Or, for that matter, France, where the mainstream right has collapsed and Marine Le Pen won 34 percent in the last presidential election. Compare it with the U.S., where the GOP has been overthrown by a far-right insurgency and turned into a disturbingly fascistic personality cult. Or Hungary and Poland, where reactionaries control the entire system. The Tories under Boris, helped in part by the winner-takes-all electoral system, have kept the far right at bay, now favor tax cuts for the poor, have a strong program for climate change, and have proposed an Australian-style immigration policy to defuse native panic.
Click to expand...

What Boris is offering as an alternative is a Tory social democracy rooted in national pride and delivered with a spoonful of humor and entertainment. In some ways, his personality is part of the formula. His plummy voice and silly hair and constant jokes are deeply, even reassuringly, British even as demographic change has made Britishness seem fragile. And if you still believe in the nation-state, in liberal democracy, and have qualms about the unintended consequences of neoliberal economics, it’s about as decent a conservative political blend as is on offer in the West. It makes the GOP look deranged by contrast.
Click to expand...
 
Spizz said:
I’m not sure how difficult it is for you to understand, but to me personally and countless others of my generation, this sign means one thing and one thing only. Punk rock.

It’s like a swastika meaning to a Hindu is a very different from that of a white supremacist.
Click to expand...
WTF do you think punk rock even is?
 
rietrot said:
WTF do you think punk rock even is?
Click to expand...

I know exactly what it was because I was a punk since I started high school in 1978, and it’s still about the only music I listen to.

Working class kids rebelling against the mainstream music industry and the stadium rock bands who charged a fortune for their gigs. Pub rock turned to punk rock and the anarchy was a revolution in how music was made, produced and marketed.
 
Spizz said:
I know exactly what it was because I was a punk since I started high school in 1978, and it’s still about the only music I listen to.

Working class kids rebelling against the mainstream music industry and the stadium rock bands who charged a fortune for their gigs. Pub rock turned to punk rock and the anarchy was a revolution in how music was made, produced and marketed.
Click to expand...
Revolution and anarchy is politicised terms. Listen to the actual words of any of the songs. There's way more depth to it than just music.
 
Can we take the punk rock discussion to a different thread please?

I am anti Brexit, I think Boris Johnson is a liar, BUT I am looking forward to a government having some kind of majority so that stuff can move forward. Right now we have an ineffectual government that actually does kinda nothing, because it can't. It will be nice to have a a government with a majority.

I would like some of the Labour and Lib Dem policies to be implemented, but not all of them.
 
rietrot said:
Revolution and anarchy is politicised terms. Listen to the actual words of any of the songs. There's way more depth to it than just music.
Click to expand...

Sorry, yes OT but I have to respond, this is something I do know lots about :p

There were a handful of pure anarchist bands led by Crass (who were famously debated in parliament), but they were late to punk. Punk was a street movement which evolved to include them but 99% of bands were into sticking two fingers up at the establishment.

There were of course songs about anarchy from pretty much all punk bands, such as I believe in Anarchy by the Exploited, Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols, Chaos by the 4-Skins etc, but as much as they were political, they were more about disaffected youth than overthrowing the state.
 
@Spizz, it's likely a cultural issue (like Chris not understanding the real concept of being British), I presume rietrot is from some little dorpie in the platteland (or somewhere far behind the Boerewors Curtain) and cant comprehend of things they don't really understand.
 
Spizz said:
Sorry, yes OT but I have to respond, this is something I do know lots about

There were a handful of pure anarchist bands led by Crass (who were famously debated in parliament), but they were late to punk. Punk was a street movement which evolved to include them but 99% of bands were into sticking two fingers up at the establishment.

There were of course songs about anarchy from pretty much all punk bands, such as I believe in Anarchy by the Exploited, Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols, Chaos by the 4-Skins etc, but as much as they were political, they were more about disaffected youth than overthrowing the state.
Click to expand...
This is mostly what I've been saying.

Now hopefully anyone can read this and understand the irony of rebelling against the system and being a globalist/communist labour supporter.
 
Last edited:
rietrot said:
This is mostly what I've been saying.

Now hopefully anyone can read this and understand the irony of rebelling against the system and being a globalist/communist labour supporter.
Click to expand...
Assuming there were a communist party in the UK to vote for being a communist and voting for them would be rebelling against the system. Most wouldn't vote them because they'd know that there was no real intention to ever implement communism. Why would management implement a system that would make them redundant? But its moot since there are no communist parties running in the elections.
 
noxibox said:
Assuming there were a communist party in the UK to vote for being a communist and voting for them would be rebelling against the system. Most wouldn't vote them because they'd know that there was no real intention to ever implement communism. Why would management implement a system that would make them redundant? But its moot since there are no communist parties running in the elections.
Click to expand...
I strongly disagree. As communism at this point in time would just mean more/bigger government in every way.

Check out labour's manifesto.
Communism doesn't make government redundant. All their talk about the people just means the government/dictator gets to manage anything and everything on behalf of the people.
 
Weather in the UK has gone to **** (obviously). One of the reasons people didn't vote in the referendum, when asked, was because it was raining (also, "I had other things to do", "Didn't know there was a referendum"). Wonder if there will at least be a decent turnout this time? This could end up being the 2nd most important vote of our generation, after all.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X