Monday 27 June 2016

Fiction, paranoia and all

My late mother looked out at me from the bathroom mirror this morning. When I was young I thought the old girl was stupid, but fast forward a decade or three and now it seems I AM her. I can hear myself saying things she used to say (and sounding quite like her as I do so.)

The constant whinge we’re hearing, which is that the old who voted to leave the EU have ruined the lives of the young who voted to stay, is unpleasant and inaccurate; but even if it weren’t, let’s not forget how cringeworthy most of our own youthful attitudes look, in retrospect. The old may not all be wise, but neither may the young. Especially the ones who are complaining now but didn’t even vote.

Since 24th June, when the country delivered that surprise slap in the BBC’s face, the BBC’s political fraternity have been consistently talking the country down. The financial and business gurus have hugely exaggerated the effect on the pound and the ftse. Britain’s glass is half empty, across the board. Sally Bundock and Ben Thompson were at it earlier today, and Thompson even described what would happen “If we leave the EU” - in fact if I remember correctly he even said “If we vote to Leave the EU”. Eh, what?
funny business

The BBC has a choice. An editorial choice. It can report what it chooses to report and ignore what it chooses to ignore. The most glaring evidence of that is, of course, the MSM’s exclusively negative reporting on Israel. The BBC chooses to ignore multitudes of positive stories about Israel yet ignores mountains of easily accessible examples of the Palestinians’ malevolence. 

You know how small children inadvertently reveal what they’re thinking in fantasy and play?
It’s a peculiar characteristic of the Arab world, which followers of the BBC won’t know much about because the BBC doesn’t report it. 

The conspiracy theories and infantile accusations the Israel haters of the Arab world invent could be used as typical psychological case studies of projection.  Like children, they egg each other on, their tales getting wilder and wilder and ever more revealing of their own thought processes and “unconscious impulses”.  This would be almost comical if only the rest of the world saw it for what it is instead of resolutely taking it at face value. The rest of the world lacks a sense of humor. 

Just one recent example of the EU’s gullibility on this score is the speech Mahmoud Abbas gave to a packed auditorium on 24th of this month.
After he had delivered it, fiction, paranoia and all, he received a standing ovation. Thank goodness we voted “Leave’. Any fleeting twinge of buyer’s remorse - dissipated in one fell swoop.

Thanks to Daphne Anson (comment below) I enjoyed reading this piece by Charles Moore,  (Telegraph) particularly:
“.....it is the Labour moderates, with their gloopy admiration for the EU and their uncritical endorsement throughout the Blair/Brown era of the excesses of global capitalism, who are the most out of touch with their natural supporters. “
and the final few paragraphs:
It's as if the BBC wishes the world was falling apart
Funny how Project Fear has been even more strongly pushed by the BBC (and Channel 4 News) after Remain has lost. The poor public are encouraged to believe fantasies, such as that all Poles must now go home or that we shall need visas to visit France. Such tales cannot be authoritatively refuted because poor Messrs Cameron and Osborne dare not admit that most of what they told us the week before is rubbish, and the Leave campaign is not the government of the country. 
Into this vacuum rush the doom-sayers. Yesterday the BBC put at the top of some bulletins the exclusive ("the BBC has learnt") that HSBC will move 1,000 workers to Paris if Britain leaves the single market. The following things were not properly explained – that HSBC was contemplating this, not actually doing it; that we might not leave the single market anyway and certainly won’t for more than two years; that 1,000 workers is only just over two per cent of HSBC’s British workforce; and that most of those sent to Paris would probably be French people currently in London. 
Is there any country in the world – apart from Britain – where the British Broadcasting Corporation would greet the return of parliamentary democracy with terror and dismay? 
  Despite the above, there is one person who should be deported at once. During the campaign, Ken Livingstone said that if Britain were to vote to leave the EU, he would leave Britain. When I last looked, he was still around. He should be put on a plane with a one-way ticket to Venezuela or Iran. 

Hysterical lefties really need to grow upAs the culturati weep into their lattes while demonising the poor, old and insecure, the carry-on has been beyond parody. 
It has been a particularly grim couple of days for a soft-left newsaholic like me with a tenderness for the arts world. To quote one performing artist’s tweet — “Ashamed. Terrified. Shocked. Horrified”. Indeed: but it was not the actual vote that shocked, life having taught me that democracy has rough patches. It was the online squawk of reaction by my timeline, my tribe: cultural icons, colleagues, friends. If they feel “let down, betrayed, distressed” by the result, so did I by the mass response of the liberal media and arts sector to this vote against a 43-year-old administrative arrangement. 
 (That’s the accessible bit) Behind the paywall:
These are directors, actors, critics, cultural titans, intelligent lefties. Yet the carry-on was beyond parody: anguished bunker-mentality tinged with patronising. generalising hauteur about those who voted Leave. There had been nonsense from that general direction in the days before, alarm calls like panicked parakeets about how Brexit meant turning your back on Beethoven, Picasso and foreign cooking.”
Do read it all if you’re a subscriber to the Times online, or buy a copy. I disagree with some of the things she says, but after all, she was a Remain voter, and the obligatory comments about Nigel Farage and ‘that poster’ are par for the course.

My dear departed mother and her generation, (both parents staunch Labour supporters and readers of the pre-historic Manchester Guardian) would be turning in their graves if they could see us now


Tom Corbyn. "Palestine campaigner"

5 comments:

  1. The young did indeed benefit from the advantages of remaining in the EU in ways that most of their parents could never have enjoyed. A gap year generation would have found the ease at which they could, for example, work abroad very attractive - an opportunity particularly available to the better educated young. But in a Europe that has become almost Napoleonic in its vision all of this came at the expense of democracy. Something that perhaps an older voter would be more aware of. There is also the naive utopian fantasy espoused by certain sections of the young of a world without borders. Most of us who are somewhat more mature in years also indulged in unrealistic idealism when we were young, but then we grew up and saw that the real world is a much more complicated and dangerous place. We saw the terrifying reality of utopian politics in places like the Soviet Union. I think the divide between the young and the old is just the same old divide that has always been always there.

    This is slightly unrelated and I’m not sure if it was on the BBC, but I caught a glimpse of an almost hysterical Will Self and the crime writer Dreda Say Mitchell in a referendum aftermath interview. Dreda Say Mitchell was a Leave supporter. One felt concerned for Self’s mental health as rolled his eyes, waved his arms in the air, and moaned incoherently, haranguing Dreda for not “feeling his pain”. Contrarily, he was quite put out by the fact she was conciliatory rather than triumphant. All of those ordinary people, Will, who you probably imagined you were championing in your newspaper columns, you never really knew anything about them. And it’s probably slowly dawning on you that they don’t like you. Poor Will, you thought you were a working-class hero, but you were just a middle-class metropolitan leftie, who has spent his entire career chattering to other middle-class metropolitan lefties. Don’t worry Will, we feel your pain.

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  2. I'm currently sitting at the airport waiting for a flight, and the doom and gloom on CNN is a sight to behold. Same script as the BBC: uneducated working class wanting to kick the rich, want to destroy their country just to do it. They have "cut off their nose to spite their face," was the rejoinder from one of the enlightened.

    Some British woman correspondent (can't see the screen from where I am) is shouting that the markets hate uncertainty, banks hate uncertainty, "the British people hate uncertainty." If I could see the screen, I'd confirm that she is carrying a "The End Is Nigh" placard.

    Who knew that wanting to open up the country's market to the whole wide world instead of being strapped to a single sclerotic market in decline was "turning their backs on 40 years of globalization"?

    Not the BBC, I know, but it's the same bubble-dwelling nomenklatura. I'm embarrassed that these people are telling lies about you to my fellow countrymen. At least they're not the official national broadcaster with a legacy of trust spanning generations, and I don't have to pay for it on penalty of law.

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  3. My prediction this won't pass the commons, they'll dissolve and call a GE which is why labour want a new leader.

    The new party will campaign on the basis of returning to the EU and get a majority due to SNP and all the other 48ers voteing their way.

    Whilst the leave vote will be split between conservative and UKIP losing those who bottle it due to the economy.

    This will then be used as a mandate for staying in EU rather than a further referendum.

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  4. The one problem Corbyn won't go because of his principals.....

    Ah well it's a good conspiracy theory anyhow.

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  5. A Jewish student got compensation for anti Semitic attacks from the University of York's students union but the BBC did not mention that one of the students who attacked him was none other than Jeremy Corbin's son Tom. Tom is events manager for the Palestinian Solidarity society and he organised the anti- Semitic play on campus " Seven Jewish Children".

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