Yeah, sure. Blaming the left for not tapping in to Johnson's appeal to "shared cultural values" and for calling people racist, rather than pandering to this hankering after a long-gone past. Oh, but wait, "Meanwhile a never ending succession of Tory fuckwits will rule now and forever".
What contempt is that showing for the people who vote for them?
Think about your use of the word pandering, why is an appeal to shared cultural values pandering, what's wrong with having shared cultural values? Surely that's what defines us as a people, as a nation?
Theresa May stated at the Tory Party conference in 2016....
"If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere"
And for once she had a point.
The Blair/Cameron mush of 1997 to 2016 led us to Brexit, with their brand of globalist, welcoming to the world, multicultural, economically conservative, socially liberal flimflam. Sadly for these yesterday men (and for all of us) this bollocks was at variance to where we were as a people.
Tick, tock, tick, tock....
And now Johnson and Farage have made hay with that variance.
We are not as economically conservative as Blalr/ Cameron believed we were, and we're not as socially liberal either. We might well be multi-ethnic but we're not multicultural, with all cultures given equal status. That's bullshit newspeak the left peddles, because of their post empire hangover, divide and rule, pillage and plunder, cultural imperialism and the white man's burden.
Ask yourself this.....Is what is taught at a Bradford Madrasa antithetical to what it is to be British?
The answer has to be no.
And it's no, not because of what is being taught, but because there is no longer a consensus on what it is to be British.
Previous generations would be aghast, yet who can deny that Britishness now exists in the realm of unfathomable.
Sadly the left has no answers to any of this. How where we live is increasingly delineated along ethnic and religious lines (they've always been delineated by class), how groups with distinctly "different" modes of behaviour and outlook exist in our larger towns and cities, coexisting, but only in the sense that they exist at the same time, but not in the same place and certainly not in harmony. And how does the left reconcile the fact that at best there's a grudging acceptance, particularly by the white working class, that things ain't what they used to be and that's just the way it is, but that the grudging acceptance was rooted in an unspoken angst (inadvertently given voice by Brexit) that it shouldn't have been allowed to be this way.
But you and I both know the left cannot address these issues because that would be racist, at odds with the equal status given to all cultures, under the all encompassing umbrella of multiculturalism. Besides, to address these issues would suggest there's a problem and that would require a recognition that certain ethnic minorities have a problem, which of course can never be recognised (unless buses and children get blown up). Better for the left to blame the racist white lumpen proletariat, which is all very well and good, unless you require them to vote for you, which increasingly they don't.
Look at how Starmer is scrabbling to find a Labour definition of patriotism he can flog to the unthinking masses (that's the white poor, you know, the new black) because focus groups tell him his party is seen as unpatriotic. Good luck with that, because he's doomed to fail, and he'll fail because he's straddling too much, too many incompatibles, so he'll end up with something so vague as to be meaningless.
Ask yourself.....Why is this so difficult for the left?
No doubt you love this country, I certainly do, but unless we can come to a definition of what it is we both love, then chances are we don't love the same thing (remember those shared cultural values) and we leave the field open to the likes of Johnson and Farage to define it for us. And if people vote for that definition I don't hold them in contempt, I hold the left in contempt for leaving the field open.
Take a look at the first half of this from 2012, when we were still basking in the Olympic afterglow of dancing NHS nurses, Churchill and Mo Farah. Will Self plays the typical lefty and Hitchens plays the pantomime villain. Everyone else shuffles their feet in embarrassment and avoids the question....
Of course, barely four years later, all this guff (with the possible exception of Hitchens, which tells you just how screwed we are) got blown away by UKIP and Brexit.
