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Obviously, the main reason why British governments haven’t done more to control the movement of labour is because it would cost more than it could ever hope to save, what with EU migrants being net contributors to the economy.
only relatively recently did Schrödinger’s immigrant – the one who simultaneously steals ‘our’ jobs and claims unemployment benefit while leading a life of state-subsidised indolence – assume pole position on the starting grid of public contempt.
It sometimes seems that half the country is furiously convinced that so-called ‘snowflakes’ are too easily offended while they literally splutter with rage at a primary school’s toilet policy, a student union’s decision not to have a Rudyard Kipling poem on their wall or a non-existent flag removal.
The ‘nanny state’ is a phrase now used exclusively to describe mostly good and important attempts to prioritise citizen welfare over corporate greed; and ‘classical liberal’ now has nothing to do with Thomas Hobbes or Adam Smith. It’s just a fancy phrase that kids who grew up without ever learning how to share use to describe themselves.
The remaining protections that workers enjoy in modern Britain are indubitably in the sights of the right-wing politicians who talked of a ‘bonfire of regulations’ being a benefit of Brexit. And the news sources we might expect to be explaining and condemning these assaults upon the fabric of our future are once again silent, because their billionaire owners are set to make another killing from the new direction of traffic.
Donald Trump mocked the disabled New York Times journalist, Serge Kovaleski. It is literally on tape and has been broadcast around the world countless times.
The desperation to believe that Trump is not the man that recorded facts prove him to be frees his followers from reality. The rest of us can sit here tearing our hair out and wringing our hands, but Jack and pretty much every diehard Trump supporter I’ve encountered will just carry on blithely insisting that the emperor is most definitely not naked, even as his bare buttocks quiver on national television.
If you don’t stand up to it, you encourage it.
Brendan Cox is the widower of the murdered British MP, Jo Cox. A week before the Brexit referendum and hours after Nigel Farage unveiled his ‘Breaking Point’ poster, grimly reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels’ Nazi propaganda, Jo was shot by a white supremacist terrorist.
Because those aligned with the neo-fascists are so committed to their ‘side’ of the perceived battle or ‘culture war’, they will overlook every transgression of their leaders and comrades. The other side must, they believe, be similarly committed to their own cause.
And yet, at the risk of doubling down on my own naivety, I still don’t think they are bad people. Imagine, for a moment, what an undiluted diet of news portraying Muslims as terrorists, Mexicans as rapists, black people as criminals and feminists as metaphorical castrators would do to you. Imagine curating your own media to provide constant and unchallenged endorsements of your own warped world view.
