"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
I think his targets were much broader than that, if you read a lot of his writing. He seemed to have a great idealisation of working-class culture that he never grew up with. This is actually quite common among the liberal upper-middle classes in England themselves, whence he came.
More that he wanted a Democratic Socialist society that actually included the working class. Rather than a system of preaching at them from the top of a cliff. And dropping boulders on them when they didn't acquiesce.
From his writings, he really liked the 1945 Labour government.
He was a great fan of that government, and also at one time very committed to the Spanish cause, but I don't think the problem with him was really wanting inclusion. He seemed to gradually develop a specific idea that only parts of working-class English culture were the 'real' culture of the entire nation. This is classic Marxist thinking, but it also played into a much older John Bull narrative, so the parts against the cultural intelligentsia have often been quoted approvingly by cultural conservatives, even if in reality they don't like parts of that same English working-class culture.
Inclusion (aka Democracy) was exactly what he was committed to.
"one time very committed to the Spanish cause" an interesting turn of phrase.
He fought with the Anarchists precisely because they believed in an inclusive system. He hated, and was marked for murder by the Stalinists in Spain who believed that "the leaders" should impose the revolution on the Head Count....
He was very much right to do that, and I have quite a lot of sympathy for peaceful anarchism, in general. On developing the new postwar more inclusive system, Clement Attlee was the most important British leader in 150 years, with Churchill.
But the idea that only one part of culture is real culture is much closer to Orthodox Marxism than Anarchism, and goes well beyond political inclusion or representation.
There was talk at conference time time that three Labour MPs would defect to the Conservatives. One of those mentioned, as I recall, was Neil Coyle. As he has now been drummed out of the PLP for alleged racist comments to a journalist, do we think a journey across the floor to the Government benches is now more likely?
Well he clearly will fit in the Tory party better than in Labour...
Nonsense! The Tory’s have been cuddling up to the Chinese and bestowing their agents with awards for the past past decade.
Boris Conservative party, Bojists, have even modelled themselves on Mao and Jinping - with their own cultural revolution in 2019 expelling moderates from anywhere near power or influence.
Beijing would likely black ball Coyle from being allowed in the Tory party.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Corbyn is not an intellectual.
That'll get you beaten with rolled up copies of Living Marxism for being a counter-revolutionary wrecker.
Corbyn is the perfect intellectual - to some people. His inability to learn is one of his key assets, to them.
Actually I guess you can be closed-minded and an intellectual. Eg some of those French ones. Indeed philosophers and thinkers generally. They work it all out - which takes enormous brainpower - but then once they've done that they have to force everything to fit and so their 'ology' becomes rigid. Which makes sense on the human level because it takes a massive effort to work it all out - few of us can get even close - and therefore you don't, having managed it, want to be deconstructing and starting again, just because it turns out you *haven't* quite worked it all out. Best to keep arguing that you have.
Certainly seems to work that way in science, too. Einstein famously hated quantum physics, and Hilbert famously thought there were just 23 unsolved problems in mathematics.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
I think his targets were much broader than that, if you read a lot of his writing. He seemed to have a great idealisation of working-class culture that he never grew up with. This is actually quite common among the liberal upper-middle classes in England themselves, whence he came.
More that he wanted a Democratic Socialist society that actually included the working class. Rather than a system of preaching at them from the top of a cliff. And dropping boulders on them when they didn't acquiesce.
From his writings, he really liked the 1945 Labour government.
He was a great fan of that government, and also at one time very committed to the Spanish cause, but I don't think the problem with him was really wanting inclusion. He seemed to gradually develop a specific idea that only parts of working-class English culture were the 'real' culture of the entire nation. This is classic Marxist thinking, but it also played into a much older John Bull narrative, so the parts against the cultural intelligentsia have often been quoted approvingly by cultural conservatives, even if in reality they don't like parts of that same English working-class culture.
Inclusion (aka Democracy) was exactly what he was committed to.
"one time very committed to the Spanish cause" an interesting turn of phrase.
He fought with the Anarchists precisely because they believed in an inclusive system. He hated, and was marked for murder by the Stalinists in Spain who believed that "the leaders" should impose the revolution on the Head Count....
He was very much right to do that, and I have quite a lot of sympathy for peaceful anarchism, in general. Clement Attlee was the important British leader in 150 years, with Churchill.
But the idea that only one part of culture is real culture is much closer to Orthodox Marxism.
Tim Spector was quoted in the Times yesterday criticising UK government decision to remove all restrictions. However in his latest video he reports most Scandi countries have / are doing exactly the same and says all other European countries will most likely follow suit shortly, and doesn't seem overly critical of this.
His criticism seems to be more centred about any statement that indicates that COVID is finished, and that the UK government should be continuing to push a public health message that people should be good citizens. Rather than any sort of iSAGE, FREEEDDDOMM LOCCCCCKDDDOOOWNNN.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Orwell wrote about Corbyn? Well I never - how prescient.
There was one quote which fitted him to an absolute T - but I can't find it now, annoyingly.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
Aren't they just two cheeks of the same arse? People who think their country is always in the wrong are no more or less likely to be correct than those who think their country is always in the right. STW may be full of twats but they were correct about the Iraq War, for instance, while centrist and right wing opinion was wrong.
Arch centrists the Lib Dems were consistently right about the Iraq war from the start. All wings of the party with very few exceptions.
Were they? The LDs backed the war in Afghanistan but opposed the war in Iraq.
Iraq is now a democracy free of Saddam's brutal dictatorship. Afghanistan has returned to the control of the Taliban.
Even Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan not Afghanistan
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
Aren't they just two cheeks of the same arse? People who think their country is always in the wrong are no more or less likely to be correct than those who think their country is always in the right. STW may be full of twats but they were correct about the Iraq War, for instance, while centrist and right wing opinion was wrong.
Both groups can of course be correct, just as a person who believes that the answer to any arithmetical sum is always 46 has a literal infinity of ways of being right. That does not make them thoughtful or of any use whatever.
The only opinions worth considering are those where people apply facts and arguments to clear and declared principle, and consider the weakest aspects of their case as well as the blindingly obvious.
This is why, say, Polly Toynbee, while very bright, is completely without value as a commentator, while Matthew Parris, and a few others, are worth reading.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Orwell wrote about Corbyn? Well I never - how prescient.
There was one quote which fitted him to an absolute T - but I can't find it now, annoyingly.
Negative Nationalism as defined by Orwell fits him perfectly.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
I think his targets were much broader than that, if you read a lot of his writing. He seemed to have a great idealisation of working-class culture that he never grew up with. This is actually quite common among the liberal upper-middle classes in England themselves, whence he came.
More that he wanted a Democratic Socialist society that actually included the working class. Rather than a system of preaching at them from the top of a cliff. And dropping boulders on them when they didn't acquiesce.
From his writings, he really liked the 1945 Labour government.
He was a great fan of that government, and also at one time very committed to the Spanish cause, but I don't think the problem with him was really wanting inclusion. He seemed to gradually develop a specific idea that only parts of working-class English culture were the 'real' culture of the entire nation. This is classic Marxist thinking, but it also played into a much older John Bull narrative, so the parts against the cultural intelligentsia have often been quoted approvingly by cultural conservatives, even if in reality they don't like parts of that same English working-class culture.
Inclusion (aka Democracy) was exactly what he was committed to.
"one time very committed to the Spanish cause" an interesting turn of phrase.
He fought with the Anarchists precisely because they believed in an inclusive system. He hated, and was marked for murder by the Stalinists in Spain who believed that "the leaders" should impose the revolution on the Head Count....
He was very much right to do that, and I have quite a lot of sympathy for peaceful anarchism, in general. Clement Attlee was the important British leader in 150 years, with Churchill.
But the idea that only one part of culture is real culture is much closer to Orthodox Marxism.
This is an anarchist
This is not an anarchist
The 1970's alternative living movement was also much inspired by more peaceful kinds of anarchism. All squatting now seems to have been criminalised across the board, even for more responsible and conscientious kinds of squatters, ofcourse.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
Churchill sent the troops to Tonypandy because he was concerned that the local police chief was a bit of a nutter and would arm his constables and things would get out of control. The troops on the other hand, could be given specific orders *not* to shoot.
Funny how these things come round, isn't it....
I could facetiously say - you are Starmer and Diane Abbott collects her ten pounds. 😃
But truth is, posting so quickly and informative on Churchill and Tonypandy, you really know this subject.
Posting as a Lib Dem, who should say it’s a matter of which Labour or Tory spin to believe on this, it’s clearly one that amazingly reverberates down the years - Attlee unsure Labour could in 1940 support Churchill, Callaghan making chaos in commons in 70s with dig at Churchill family.
But as right wing Libdem who don’t like strikes, have to applaud Churchill who wittingly or unwittingly actually broke a strike that looked like miners could quickly win, with presence of his troops.
Wikipedia “ A major factor in the dislike of Churchill's use of the military was not in any action undertaken by the troops, but the fact that their presence prevented any strike action which might have ended the strike early in the miners' favour.[6]: [p112] The troops also ensured that trials of rioters, strikers and miners' leaders would take place and be successfully prosecuted in Pontypridd in 1911. The defeat of the miners in 1911 was, in the eyes of much of the local community, a direct consequence of state intervention without any negotiation; that the strikers were breaking the law was not a factor with many locals. This result was seen as a direct result of Churchill's actions.[6]: [p112]
Political fallout for Churchill also continued. In 1940, when Chamberlain's war-time government was faltering, Clement Attlee secretly warned that the Labour Party might not follow Churchill, because of his association with Tonypandy.[6]: [p112] There was uproar in the House of Commons in 1978 when Churchill's grandson, also named Winston Churchill, was replying to a routine question on miners' pay; he was warned by Labour leader James Callaghan not to pursue "the vendetta of your family against the miners of Tonypandy".[12] In 2010, ninety-nine years after the riots, a Welsh local council made objections to an old military base being named after Churchill in the Vale of Glamorgan, because of his sending troops into the Rhondda Valley.”
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Corbyn is not an intellectual.
That'll get you beaten with rolled up copies of Living Marxism for being a counter-revolutionary wrecker.
Corbyn is the perfect intellectual - to some people. His inability to learn is one of his key assets, to them.
Actually I guess you can be closed-minded and an intellectual. Eg some of those French ones. Indeed philosophers and thinkers generally. They work it all out - which takes enormous brainpower - but then once they've done that they have to force everything to fit and so their 'ology' becomes rigid. Which makes sense on the human level because it takes a massive effort to work it all out - few of us can get even close - and therefore you don't, having managed it, want to be deconstructing and starting again, just because it turns out you *haven't* quite worked it all out. Best to keep arguing that you have.
Indeed. Though France and us have reverse problems ; generally too much faith in intellectuals, and generally too little.
This is partly why the Anglo-French Union, as proposed by Churchill as an emergency in 1940, could have ended up quite a spectacular place.
I find this subject quite interesting. You need a framework for seeing the world - otherwise it's all trees to you and no wood - but since no framework is both complete and accurate you also need to flex it from time to time in response to specifics. If you refuse to do this you'll end up adopting some bizarre positions. I've noticed that people who pride themselves on having a strong belief system and always staying true to it often tend to go this way. In striving to be 100% consistent with their principles they will arrive at insupportable conclusions about things. OTOH if you find yourself having to flex your framework very regularly it probably means it's a poor one and ought to be ditched. Getting a good balance is difficult.
Reasonable GDP figures today. I had December pencilled in at -0.5% but the non consumer services economy saw almost no drop off at all from Omicron. If we'd had a "normal" December wrt consumer facing services December would have come in at +0.4%.
On the above/below the pre-covid GDP we're just about above but due to a quirk of statistics the reports today will say we're just below.
Our next quarter is currently forecast at ~ +1.4%, the year at ~3.5% which is much lower than the consensus view of ~4.5%, hopefully we're wrong!
I think you are probably about right: the world economy has still not got its supply chains sorted out, and that's going to affect all kinds of businesses. There are also some hidden capacity constraints, particularly around labour, that I think take some time to play out. Finally, UK GDP is going to be hit by increased energy prices: through both greater imports and squeezed consumer spending.
My guess is that world GDP is going to come in slightly below expectations this year.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
Aren't they just two cheeks of the same arse? People who think their country is always in the wrong are no more or less likely to be correct than those who think their country is always in the right. STW may be full of twats but they were correct about the Iraq War, for instance, while centrist and right wing opinion was wrong.
Arch centrists the Lib Dems were consistently right about the Iraq war from the start. All wings of the party with very few exceptions.
Were they? The LDs backed the war in Afghanistan but opposed the war in Iraq.
Iraq is now a democracy free of Saddam's brutal dictatorship. Afghanistan has returned to the control of the Taliban.
Even Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan not Afghanistan
The Afghan invasion helped stymie the outflow of Islamofascist terror to the West, which was its intention. The Iraq invasion unleashed more of it on us, and its intentions were malign.
By those tokens, yes, the Lib Dems were spot on in their support/lack of support for each. Of course, they can't take much credit or blame for the implementation, being out of power for all but 5 years of the last 19, and only as a junior coalition party then. But yes, they made the right calls.
There was talk at conference time time that three Labour MPs would defect to the Conservatives. One of those mentioned, as I recall, was Neil Coyle. As he has now been drummed out of the PLP for alleged racist comments to a journalist, do we think a journey across the floor to the Government benches is now more likely?
Well he clearly will fit in the Tory party better than in Labour...
Nonsense! The Tory’s have been cuddling up to the Chinese and bestowing their agents with awards for the past past decade.
Boris Conservative party, Bojists, have even modelled themselves on Mao and Jinping - with their own cultural revolution in 2019 expelling moderates from anywhere near power or influence.
Beijing would likely black ball Coyle from being allowed in the Tory party.
Who liked this post? It was only tongue in cheek nonsense 😆
Reasonable GDP figures today. I had December pencilled in at -0.5% but the non consumer services economy saw almost no drop off at all from Omicron. If we'd had a "normal" December wrt consumer facing services December would have come in at +0.4%.
On the above/below the pre-covid GDP we're just about above but due to a quirk of statistics the reports today will say we're just below.
Our next quarter is currently forecast at ~ +1.4%, the year at ~3.5% which is much lower than the consensus view of ~4.5%, hopefully we're wrong!
I think you are probably about right: the world economy has still not got its supply chains sorted out, and that's going to affect all kinds of businesses. There are also some hidden capacity constraints, particularly around labour, that I think take some time to play out. Finally, UK GDP is going to be hit by increased energy prices: through both greater imports and squeezed consumer spending.
My guess is that world GDP is going to come in slightly below expectations this year.
Did you see the news from a few days ago that silicon wafer manufacturers are currently booked out for capacity all the way until 2026? That feels like such a huge opportunity to create more capacity and an industry out of nothing. No need for expensive ASML lithography machines, just make the wafers and sell them to Intel.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
Aren't they just two cheeks of the same arse? People who think their country is always in the wrong are no more or less likely to be correct than those who think their country is always in the right. STW may be full of twats but they were correct about the Iraq War, for instance, while centrist and right wing opinion was wrong.
Arch centrists the Lib Dems were consistently right about the Iraq war from the start. All wings of the party with very few exceptions.
Were they? The LDs backed the war in Afghanistan but opposed the war in Iraq.
Iraq is now a democracy free of Saddam's brutal dictatorship. Afghanistan has returned to the control of the Taliban.
Even Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan not Afghanistan
The Afghan invasion helped stymie the outflow of Islamofascist terror to the West, which was its intention. The Iraq invasion unleashed more of it on us, and its intentions were malign.
By those tokens, yes, the Lib Dems were spot on in their support/lack of support for each. Of course, they can't take much credit or blame for the implementation, being out of power for all but 5 years of the last 19, and only as a junior coalition party then. But yes, they made the right calls.
Did it? Time will tell if it becomes a base for radical Jihadis again now the Taliban are back in charge.
Saddam was anti West as well as being one of the most brutal dictators on earth. Many of his former supporters aligned with ISIS, which let us not forget emerged from the Syrian civil war not Iraq.
Now Iraq is free of ISIS as well as Saddam.
If the LDs had been in power not Blair then the UK would not have backed President Bush in his liberation of Iraq from Saddam. They made the wrong call on that
Sky suggesting that the MET will decide who gets a criminal conviction on the responses to their e mails
I understand a FPN is not a criminal conviction anymore than a parking ticket
FPNs are used for traffic offences and some other criminal offences. Parking tickets are PCNs (penalty charge notices) I think. As I understand it accepting and paying an FPN is admitting that you are guilty of a criminal offence. If you choose to go to court instead then I guess you would be "actively" convicted if found guilty of the offence.
Perhaps not quite accurate terminology but not sure it's relevant here: FPNs are issued where the police believe a criminal offence has been committed, and I don't think Johnson will do too well with the distinction "well yes, I committed an offence, but it wasn't a criminal conviction".
(I'd like to think the Met don't decide who gets a criminal conviction, rather than making a charging recommendation to the CPS so that guilt can be established via the appropriate court process, but perhaps I'm out of date.)
I was not attempting to excuse Boris but a FPN is paid to the local authority and as I understand it is not a criminal conviction but of course if you do not accept the FPN then the criminal process will no doubt commence
Come on BigG. whether a FPN is a criminal offence or not really is angels dancing on the head of a pin, and makes no odds to anyone except Johnson. The reality is, if he broke the rules in spirit (which seems 99.999% to be the case) he should be finished.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Corbyn is not an intellectual.
That'll get you beaten with rolled up copies of Living Marxism for being a counter-revolutionary wrecker.
Corbyn is the perfect intellectual - to some people. His inability to learn is one of his key assets, to them.
Actually I guess you can be closed-minded and an intellectual. Eg some of those French ones. Indeed philosophers and thinkers generally. They work it all out - which takes enormous brainpower - but then once they've done that they have to force everything to fit and so their 'ology' becomes rigid. Which makes sense on the human level because it takes a massive effort to work it all out - few of us can get even close - and therefore you don't, having managed it, want to be deconstructing and starting again, just because it turns out you *haven't* quite worked it all out. Best to keep arguing that you have.
Indeed. Though France and us have reverse problems ; generally too much faith in intellectuals, and generally too little.
This is partly why the Anglo-French Union, as proposed by Churchill as an emergency in 1940, could have ended up quite a spectacular place.
I find this subject quite interesting. You need a framework for seeing the world - otherwise it's all trees to you and no wood - but since no framework is both complete and accurate you also need to flex it from time to time in response to specifics. If you refuse to do this you'll end up adopting some bizarre positions. I've noticed that people who pride themselves on having a strong belief system and always staying true to it often tend to go this way. In striving to be 100% consistent with their principles they will arrive at insupportable conclusions about things. OTOH if you find yourself having to flex your framework very regularly it probably means it's a poor one and ought to be ditched. Getting a good balance is difficult.
Yes, I would see this in terms of an equilibrium of extremely different problems between Jacques Derrida and Boris Johnson. Both countries and cultures still have a lot to learn from the other.
There was talk at conference time time that three Labour MPs would defect to the Conservatives. One of those mentioned, as I recall, was Neil Coyle. As he has now been drummed out of the PLP for alleged racist comments to a journalist, do we think a journey across the floor to the Government benches is now more likely?
Well he clearly will fit in the Tory party better than in Labour...
Nonsense! The Tory’s have been cuddling up to the Chinese and bestowing their agents with awards for the past past decade.
Boris Conservative party, Bojists, have even modelled themselves on Mao and Jinping - with their own cultural revolution in 2019 expelling moderates from anywhere near power or influence.
Beijing would likely black ball Coyle from being allowed in the Tory party.
Who liked this post? It was only tongue in cheek nonsense 😆
I found it rather pertinent and profound in the event of Coyle's alleged misdeed.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
Churchill sent the troops to Tonypandy because he was concerned that the local police chief was a bit of a nutter and would arm his constables and things would get out of control. The troops on the other hand, could be given specific orders *not* to shoot.
Funny how these things come round, isn't it....
I could facetiously say - you are Starmer and Diane Abbott collects her ten pounds. 😃
But truth is, posting so quickly and informative on Churchill and Tonypandy, you really know this subject.
Posting as a Lib Dem, who should say it’s a matter of which Labour or Tory spin to believe on this, it’s clearly one that amazingly reverberates down the years - Attlee unsure Labour could in 1940 support Churchill, Callaghan making chaos in commons in 70s with dig at Churchill family.
But as right wing Libdem who don’t like strikes, have to applaud Churchill who wittingly or unwittingly actually broke a strike that looked like miners could quickly win, with presence of his troops.
Wikipedia “ A major factor in the dislike of Churchill's use of the military was not in any action undertaken by the troops, but the fact that their presence prevented any strike action which might have ended the strike early in the miners' favour.[6]: [p112] The troops also ensured that trials of rioters, strikers and miners' leaders would take place and be successfully prosecuted in Pontypridd in 1911. The defeat of the miners in 1911 was, in the eyes of much of the local community, a direct consequence of state intervention without any negotiation; that the strikers were breaking the law was not a factor with many locals. This result was seen as a direct result of Churchill's actions.[6]: [p112]
Political fallout for Churchill also continued. In 1940, when Chamberlain's war-time government was faltering, Clement Attlee secretly warned that the Labour Party might not follow Churchill, because of his association with Tonypandy.[6]: [p112] There was uproar in the House of Commons in 1978 when Churchill's grandson, also named Winston Churchill, was replying to a routine question on miners' pay; he was warned by Labour leader James Callaghan not to pursue "the vendetta of your family against the miners of Tonypandy".[12] In 2010, ninety-nine years after the riots, a Welsh local council made objections to an old military base being named after Churchill in the Vale of Glamorgan, because of his sending troops into the Rhondda Valley.”
And round and round the argument goes. Churchill *thought* the troops would restore order, not break the strike. The strikers thought the presence of the troops had a chilling effect on the strikes. They certainly stoped the riots.
Intent vs perception in all directions..
EDIT: And the shade of Admiral Cradock touches his hat in the darkness..
Thanks, Cyclefree, for a very thoughtful and thought-provoking header, as usual.
I agree with most of that but I do not think culture change is as hard as you make it out to be and I think you have a couple of things about it dead wrong.
External pressure will not create a culture, at least not one you want. Culture has to be generated internally.
Culture also needs to be bottom up as well as top down. This means that, yes, you do need enlightened leadership, but most of the work will come from the work unit level, with those who work together deciding how they want to work and who they want to be (within the overall mission, vision, and values of the organization), making commitments to each other, and giving each other permission to hold themselves to account. Peer-to-peer pressure is far more effective than top-down pressure at achieving behavioural and attitudinal change.
You are right to point out the need for an assertive, speaking up culture - psychological safety in the latest business school jargon. But really it requires leadership placing more trust in the lower levels, not less, becoming an enabler who generates engagement and commitment. And, as noted above, it is peer-to-peer pressure that will cement the culture, not the words of a distant boss.
Yes, you need to get rid of the bad apples, and to do so quickly and cleanly, in a way that those who remain understand and agree with the action. But culture, as with behaviour, responds better to positive reinforcement than negative actions such as penalties and punishments. Reliance on the latter leads to a culture of fear and hence silence and/or lying.
To get the culture you want, you have to know what you want and, once you have that, encourage and reward the behaviours you want, and eliminate the behaviours you don't. But the best way to eliminate bad behaviours is not to say "don't do that!" but rather to show "Do it this way"
For example, if I don't want people to take cell phones into the lab, I don't say "Don't take cell phones into the lab", but I find out why they take them into the lab and then say:
"If you need to make a call from within the lab, use the land line in there" "If your family needs an emergency number to call while you're working in the lab, give them this number" "If you want to want to check your social media regularly to keep in touch with your friends, schedule regular breaks and do that stuff in the rec room" "If you're playing games on your phone, or surfing the web because you're bored, let's address that"
and so on ...
To maintain a culture requires consistency over the long haul. But you can make big strides relatively quickly with the right leadership because, guess what, most people want to do the right thing and, if shown it, will adopt it quickly.
Thanks. The external pressure is needed when you have a sector which refuses to accept the need for change. It's not attack which is needed but a regulator who will ensure that this is something which is always one of the key priorities i.e. who encourages, asks, rewards, who makes it a standing item on the agenda at regular meetings, who encourages best practice, who encourages it to learn from others. That's the kind of external oversight & pressure needed.
I have seen this at close hand in finance. Banks had problem after problem for years before the financial crisis. They did nothing about the underlying problems. Nor did the regulator. It was really only after the Parliamentary report on Banking Standards that they began to get it and the regulator too. And the regulator expecting work on conduct really helped. It helped people like me because when I talked about the repeated behavioural issues I was seeing they started listening. Even the regulators listened. A talk I did was filmed and shared with the SEC, the Swiss and U.K. regulators as evidence of what was needed and how we were addressing it.
Without something like this it is easy for organizations to slip back into old habits.
The discipline is at the start. It's a way of cleansing the stables. It's a way of showing the good guys that they're not being mugs by being good guys. It gives them opportunities and it encourages them to stand up for and reinforce the good behaviour you want.
You need to change peoples' hearts not just give them rules and yes you need to show them and suggest ideas. You also need to make them unafraid of making mistakes and admitting them because people learn best from their mistakes (and those of others). It is counter-intuitive but what I say to my audiences is this: You need to make the sorts of mistakes you can learn from but not the sort that blow the place up.
It was hard in finance because before you could make the change you had to strip away the carapace of denial and arrogance and it's only a few rotten apples. That takes time and effort. And then you start doing the positive stuff and keep on doing it etc.
I think the Met is still at the denial stage. Intellectually some see the problems. But emotionally very many don't or are scared of what it entails. And dealing with that requires a toughness but also an emotional intelligence which is rarer than it should be in leaders.
That is why I say that you need senior leaders and the next layers down to understand & buy into what is needed and exemplify it in their daily professional lives. There will be plenty of them around but they have been either disempowered or disheartened.
I know I have gone about this before. But when I look at the Met I see so many echoes of what my sector went through. I do not pretend to have all the answers. But the Met really would do well to learn something from those organisations which had to go through similar because I really do believe that it would help.
Thanks, Cyclefree, for a very thoughtful and thought-provoking header, as usual.
I agree with most of that but I do not think culture change is as hard as you make it out to be and I think you have a couple of things about it dead wrong.
External pressure will not create a culture, at least not one you want. Culture has to be generated internally.
Culture also needs to be bottom up as well as top down. This means that, yes, you do need enlightened leadership, but most of the work will come from the work unit level, with those who work together deciding how they want to work and who they want to be (within the overall mission, vision, and values of the organization), making commitments to each other, and giving each other permission to hold themselves to account. Peer-to-peer pressure is far more effective than top-down pressure at achieving behavioural and attitudinal change.
You are right to point out the need for an assertive, speaking up culture - psychological safety in the latest business school jargon. But really it requires leadership placing more trust in the lower levels, not less, becoming an enabler who generates engagement and commitment. And, as noted above, it is peer-to-peer pressure that will cement the culture, not the words of a distant boss.
Yes, you need to get rid of the bad apples, and to do so quickly and cleanly, in a way that those who remain understand and agree with the action. But culture, as with behaviour, responds better to positive reinforcement than negative actions such as penalties and punishments. Reliance on the latter leads to a culture of fear and hence silence and/or lying.
To get the culture you want, you have to know what you want and, once you have that, encourage and reward the behaviours you want, and eliminate the behaviours you don't. But the best way to eliminate bad behaviours is not to say "don't do that!" but rather to show "Do it this way"
For example, if I don't want people to take cell phones into the lab, I don't say "Don't take cell phones into the lab", but I find out why they take them into the lab and then say:
"If you need to make a call from within the lab, use the land line in there" "If your family needs an emergency number to call while you're working in the lab, give them this number" "If you want to want to check your social media regularly to keep in touch with your friends, schedule regular breaks and do that stuff in the rec room" "If you're playing games on your phone, or surfing the web because you're bored, let's address that"
and so on ...
To maintain a culture requires consistency over the long haul. But you can make big strides relatively quickly with the right leadership because, guess what, most people want to do the right thing and, if shown it, will adopt it quickly.
Thanks. The external pressure is needed when you have a sector which refuses to accept the need for change. It's not attack which is needed but a regulator who will ensure that this is something which is always one of the key priorities i.e. who encourages, asks, rewards, who makes it a standing item on the agenda at regular meetings, who encourages best practice, who encourages it to learn from others. That's the kind of external oversight & pressure needed.
I have seen this at close hand in finance. Banks had problem after problem for years before the financial crisis. They did nothing about the underlying problems. Nor did the regulator. It was really only after the Parliamentary report on Banking Standards that they began to get it and the regulator too. And the regulator expecting work on conduct really helped. It helped people like me because when I talked about the repeated behavioural issues I was seeing they started listening. Even the regulators listened. A talk I did was filmed and shared with the SEC, the Swiss and U.K. regulators as evidence of what was needed and how we were addressing it.
Without something like this it is easy for organizations to slip back into old habits.
The discipline is at the start. It's a way of cleansing the stables. It's a way of showing the good guys that they're not being mugs by being good guys. It gives them opportunities and it encourages them to stand up for and reinforce the good behaviour you want.
You need to change peoples' hearts not just give them rules and yes you need to show them and suggest ideas. You also need to make them unafraid of making mistakes and admitting them because people learn best from their mistakes (and those of others). It is counter-intuitive but what I say to my audiences is this: You need to make the sorts of mistakes you can learn from but not the sort that blow the place up.
It was hard in finance because before you could make the change you had to strip away the carapace of denial and arrogance and it's only a few rotten apples. That takes time and effort. And then you start doing the positive stuff and keep on doing it etc.
I think the Met is still at the denial stage. Intellectually some see the problems. But emotionally very many don't or are scared of what it entails. And dealing with that requires a toughness but also an emotional intelligence which is rarer than it should be in leaders.
That is why I say that you need senior leaders and the next layers down to understand & buy into what is needed and exemplify it in their daily professional lives. There will be plenty of them around but they have been either disempowered or disheartened.
I know I have gone about this before. But when I look at the Met I see so many echoes of what my sector went through. I do not pretend to have all the answers. But the Met really would do well to learn something from those organisations which had to go through similar because I really do believe that it would help.
I am wondering if finance is sui generis in culture terms, in that, for much of it, its raison d'être is to make money for its own right, rather than to provide a service to others. Yes, it does provide a service to others (financing homes and businesses and creating more efficient ways of doing this), but this service to others aspect seems much more removed in finance than in, say, healthcare or consumer product development. I stand to be proved wrong on this by those who know the industry better than I. But if that analysis is right - that the mission is simply to make money, well there is the bulk of the culture issues.
For policing, I think the US (and probably the UK) has massive culture problems for a number of reasons, two prime ones being subconscious structural racism (critical race theory has valid points vis-a-vis the US), and the fact that police forces have systematically recruited the wrong types of people and provided them with the wrong training, the wrong tactics, and the wrong equipment. Root and branch may indeed be needed.
Perhaps I should withdraw my comments with regards to the two industries you mention - finance and policing. But I think they hold good in most others, and in particular in the life sciences, public health and healthcare, which is my area.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
Churchill sent the troops to Tonypandy because he was concerned that the local police chief was a bit of a nutter and would arm his constables and things would get out of control. The troops on the other hand, could be given specific orders *not* to shoot.
Funny how these things come round, isn't it....
I could facetiously say - you are Starmer and Diane Abbott collects her ten pounds. 😃
But truth is, posting so quickly and informative on Churchill and Tonypandy, you really know this subject.
Posting as a Lib Dem, who should say it’s a matter of which Labour or Tory spin to believe on this, it’s clearly one that amazingly reverberates down the years - Attlee unsure Labour could in 1940 support Churchill, Callaghan making chaos in commons in 70s with dig at Churchill family.
But as right wing Libdem who don’t like strikes, have to applaud Churchill who wittingly or unwittingly actually broke a strike that looked like miners could quickly win, with presence of his troops.
Wikipedia “ A major factor in the dislike of Churchill's use of the military was not in any action undertaken by the troops, but the fact that their presence prevented any strike action which might have ended the strike early in the miners' favour.[6]: [p112] The troops also ensured that trials of rioters, strikers and miners' leaders would take place and be successfully prosecuted in Pontypridd in 1911. The defeat of the miners in 1911 was, in the eyes of much of the local community, a direct consequence of state intervention without any negotiation; that the strikers were breaking the law was not a factor with many locals. This result was seen as a direct result of Churchill's actions.[6]: [p112]
Political fallout for Churchill also continued. In 1940, when Chamberlain's war-time government was faltering, Clement Attlee secretly warned that the Labour Party might not follow Churchill, because of his association with Tonypandy.[6]: [p112] There was uproar in the House of Commons in 1978 when Churchill's grandson, also named Winston Churchill, was replying to a routine question on miners' pay; he was warned by Labour leader James Callaghan not to pursue "the vendetta of your family against the miners of Tonypandy".[12] In 2010, ninety-nine years after the riots, a Welsh local council made objections to an old military base being named after Churchill in the Vale of Glamorgan, because of his sending troops into the Rhondda Valley.”
And round and round the argument goes. Churchill *thought* the troops would restore order, not break the strike. The strikers thought the presence of the troops had a chilling effect on the strikes. They certainly stoped the riots.
Intent vs perception in all directions..
EDIT: And the shade of Admiral Cradock touches his hat in the darkness..
I agree with you Malmesbury, Intent v Perception in all directions on this one.
I’m glad I used this one to put words in Diane Abbotts mouth - because that is exactly what she was trying to do to Starmer 😂
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
It needed all three.
Stalin was generous in saying that, but if you qualify it as the *final* victory it is crystal clear that Britain had made its greatest contribution by 1942, other than providing the real estate from which to launch d day
If you qualify it as the final victory being only 1944-45, then most likely you are doing so to denigrate the British contribution.
If Britain had capitulated early in the war there wouldn't have been a final victory - at the time the US was staying out of the war and the USSR was still effectively on the wrong side.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
It needed all three.
Stalin was generous in saying that, but if you qualify it as the *final* victory it is crystal clear that Britain had made its greatest contribution by 1942, other than providing the real estate from which to launch d day
If you qualify it as the final victory being only 1944-45, then most likely you are doing so to denigrate the British contribution.
If Britain had capitulated early in the war there wouldn't have been a final victory - at the time the US was staying out of the war and the USSR was still effectively on the wrong side.
The USSR was *actually* on the wrong side and with the blood of the murdered Polish officers of Katyn and Smolensk on their hands.
Comments
But the idea that only one part of culture is real culture is much closer to Orthodox Marxism than Anarchism, and goes well beyond political inclusion or representation.
Boris Conservative party, Bojists, have even modelled themselves on Mao and Jinping - with their own cultural revolution in 2019 expelling moderates from anywhere near power or influence.
Beijing would likely black ball Coyle from being allowed in the Tory party.
This is not an anarchist
His criticism seems to be more centred about any statement that indicates that COVID is finished, and that the UK government should be continuing to push a public health message that people should be good citizens. Rather than any sort of iSAGE,
FREEEDDDOMMLOCCCCCKDDDOOOWNNN.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2Zm9OcULDs
Iraq is now a democracy free of Saddam's brutal dictatorship. Afghanistan has returned to the control of the Taliban.
Even Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan not Afghanistan
The only opinions worth considering are those where people apply facts and arguments to clear and declared principle, and consider the weakest aspects of their case as well as the blindingly obvious.
This is why, say, Polly Toynbee, while very bright, is completely without value as a commentator, while Matthew Parris, and a few others, are worth reading.
But truth is, posting so quickly and informative on Churchill and Tonypandy, you really know this subject.
Posting as a Lib Dem, who should say it’s a matter of which Labour or Tory spin to believe on this, it’s clearly one that amazingly reverberates down the years - Attlee unsure Labour could in 1940 support Churchill, Callaghan making chaos in commons in 70s with dig at Churchill family.
But as right wing Libdem who don’t like strikes, have to applaud Churchill who wittingly or unwittingly actually broke a strike that looked like miners could quickly win, with presence of his troops.
Wikipedia
“ A major factor in the dislike of Churchill's use of the military was not in any action undertaken by the troops, but the fact that their presence prevented any strike action which might have ended the strike early in the miners' favour.[6]: [p112] The troops also ensured that trials of rioters, strikers and miners' leaders would take place and be successfully prosecuted in Pontypridd in 1911. The defeat of the miners in 1911 was, in the eyes of much of the local community, a direct consequence of state intervention without any negotiation; that the strikers were breaking the law was not a factor with many locals. This result was seen as a direct result of Churchill's actions.[6]: [p112]
Political fallout for Churchill also continued. In 1940, when Chamberlain's war-time government was faltering, Clement Attlee secretly warned that the Labour Party might not follow Churchill, because of his association with Tonypandy.[6]: [p112] There was uproar in the House of Commons in 1978 when Churchill's grandson, also named Winston Churchill, was replying to a routine question on miners' pay; he was warned by Labour leader James Callaghan not to pursue "the vendetta of your family against the miners of Tonypandy".[12] In 2010, ninety-nine years after the riots, a Welsh local council made objections to an old military base being named after Churchill in the Vale of Glamorgan, because of his sending troops into the Rhondda Valley.”
My guess is that world GDP is going to come in slightly below expectations this year.
The Iraq invasion unleashed more of it on us, and its intentions were malign.
By those tokens, yes, the Lib Dems were spot on in their support/lack of support for each.
Of course, they can't take much credit or blame for the implementation, being out of power for all but 5 years of the last 19, and only as a junior coalition party then. But yes, they made the right calls.
Saddam was anti West as well as being one of the most brutal dictators on earth. Many of his former supporters aligned with ISIS, which let us not forget emerged from the Syrian civil war not Iraq.
Now Iraq is free of ISIS as well as Saddam.
If the LDs had been in power not Blair then the UK would not have backed President Bush in his liberation of Iraq from Saddam. They made the wrong call on that
P.S. I'll remove the "Like" if you'd prefer.
Funny how these things come round, isn't it....
I could facetiously say - you are Starmer and Diane Abbott collects her ten pounds. 😃
But truth is, posting so quickly and informative on Churchill and Tonypandy, you really know this subject.
Posting as a Lib Dem, who should say it’s a matter of which Labour or Tory spin to believe on this, it’s clearly one that amazingly reverberates down the years - Attlee unsure Labour could in 1940 support Churchill, Callaghan making chaos in commons in 70s with dig at Churchill family.
But as right wing Libdem who don’t like strikes, have to applaud Churchill who wittingly or unwittingly actually broke a strike that looked like miners could quickly win, with presence of his troops.
Wikipedia
“ A major factor in the dislike of Churchill's use of the military was not in any action undertaken by the troops, but the fact that their presence prevented any strike action which might have ended the strike early in the miners' favour.[6]: [p112] The troops also ensured that trials of rioters, strikers and miners' leaders would take place and be successfully prosecuted in Pontypridd in 1911. The defeat of the miners in 1911 was, in the eyes of much of the local community, a direct consequence of state intervention without any negotiation; that the strikers were breaking the law was not a factor with many locals. This result was seen as a direct result of Churchill's actions.[6]: [p112]
Political fallout for Churchill also continued. In 1940, when Chamberlain's war-time government was faltering, Clement Attlee secretly warned that the Labour Party might not follow Churchill, because of his association with Tonypandy.[6]: [p112] There was uproar in the House of Commons in 1978 when Churchill's grandson, also named Winston Churchill, was replying to a routine question on miners' pay; he was warned by Labour leader James Callaghan not to pursue "the vendetta of your family against the miners of Tonypandy".[12] In 2010, ninety-nine years after the riots, a Welsh local council made objections to an old military base being named after Churchill in the Vale of Glamorgan, because of his sending troops into the Rhondda Valley.”
And round and round the argument goes. Churchill *thought* the troops would restore order, not break the strike. The strikers thought the presence of the troops had a chilling effect on the strikes. They certainly stoped the riots.
Intent vs perception in all directions..
EDIT: And the shade of Admiral Cradock touches his hat in the darkness..
I have seen this at close hand in finance. Banks had problem after problem for years before the financial crisis. They did nothing about the underlying problems. Nor did the regulator. It was really only after the Parliamentary report on Banking Standards that they began to get it and the regulator too. And the regulator expecting work on conduct really helped. It helped people like me because when I talked about the repeated behavioural issues I was seeing they started listening. Even the regulators listened. A talk I did was filmed and shared with the SEC, the Swiss and U.K. regulators as evidence of what was needed and how we were addressing it.
Without something like this it is easy for organizations to slip back into old habits.
The discipline is at the start. It's a way of cleansing the stables. It's a way of showing the good guys that they're not being mugs by being good guys. It gives them opportunities and it encourages them to stand up for and reinforce the good behaviour you want.
You need to change peoples' hearts not just give them rules and yes you need to show them and suggest ideas. You also need to make them unafraid of making mistakes and admitting them because people learn best from their mistakes (and those of others). It is counter-intuitive but what I say to my audiences is this: You need to make the sorts of mistakes you can learn from but not the sort that blow the place up.
It was hard in finance because before you could make the change you had to strip away the carapace of denial and arrogance and it's only a few rotten apples. That takes time and effort. And then you start doing the positive stuff and keep on doing it etc.
I think the Met is still at the denial stage. Intellectually some see the problems. But emotionally very many don't or are scared of what it entails. And dealing with that requires a toughness but also an emotional intelligence which is rarer than it should be in leaders.
That is why I say that you need senior leaders and the next layers down to understand & buy into what is needed and exemplify it in their daily professional lives. There will be plenty of them around but they have been either disempowered or disheartened.
I know I have gone about this before. But when I look at the Met I see so many echoes of what my sector went through. I do not pretend to have all the answers. But the Met really would do well to learn something from those organisations which had to go through similar because I really do believe that it would help.
For policing, I think the US (and probably the UK) has massive culture problems for a number of reasons, two prime ones being subconscious structural racism (critical race theory has valid points vis-a-vis the US), and the fact that police forces have systematically recruited the wrong types of people and provided them with the wrong training, the wrong tactics, and the wrong equipment. Root and branch may indeed be needed.
Perhaps I should withdraw my comments with regards to the two industries you mention - finance and policing. But I think they hold good in most others, and in particular in the life sciences, public health and healthcare, which is my area.
But truth is, posting so quickly and informative on Churchill and Tonypandy, you really know this subject.
Posting as a Lib Dem, who should say it’s a matter of which Labour or Tory spin to believe on this, it’s clearly one that amazingly reverberates down the years - Attlee unsure Labour could in 1940 support Churchill, Callaghan making chaos in commons in 70s with dig at Churchill family.
But as right wing Libdem who don’t like strikes, have to applaud Churchill who wittingly or unwittingly actually broke a strike that looked like miners could quickly win, with presence of his troops.
Wikipedia
“ A major factor in the dislike of Churchill's use of the military was not in any action undertaken by the troops, but the fact that their presence prevented any strike action which might have ended the strike early in the miners' favour.[6]: [p112] The troops also ensured that trials of rioters, strikers and miners' leaders would take place and be successfully prosecuted in Pontypridd in 1911. The defeat of the miners in 1911 was, in the eyes of much of the local community, a direct consequence of state intervention without any negotiation; that the strikers were breaking the law was not a factor with many locals. This result was seen as a direct result of Churchill's actions.[6]: [p112]
Political fallout for Churchill also continued. In 1940, when Chamberlain's war-time government was faltering, Clement Attlee secretly warned that the Labour Party might not follow Churchill, because of his association with Tonypandy.[6]: [p112] There was uproar in the House of Commons in 1978 when Churchill's grandson, also named Winston Churchill, was replying to a routine question on miners' pay; he was warned by Labour leader James Callaghan not to pursue "the vendetta of your family against the miners of Tonypandy".[12] In 2010, ninety-nine years after the riots, a Welsh local council made objections to an old military base being named after Churchill in the Vale of Glamorgan, because of his sending troops into the Rhondda Valley.”
And round and round the argument goes. Churchill *thought* the troops would restore order, not break the strike. The strikers thought the presence of the troops had a chilling effect on the strikes. They certainly stoped the riots.
Intent vs perception in all directions..
EDIT: And the shade of Admiral Cradock touches his hat in the darkness..
I agree with you Malmesbury, Intent v Perception in all directions on this one.
I’m glad I used this one to put words in Diane Abbotts mouth - because that is exactly what she was trying to do to Starmer 😂