Loved this piece. Excellent description of what’s happening to the Tory party & its journey to self destruction. They deserve complete annihilation in the general election for the suffering they’ve caused to this country.
While it's no more than they deserve, I sadly fear that's not the end of their toxicity at all.
First, Sun, Daily Heil etc. can keep pouring lies into population, because they are millionaire-owned.
None of the leaders will be put in court for betraying the good of the country; and as Farage the weasel has shown, complaining is much easier if you're not in power and thus have no responsibility at all to make anything work, like showing the sunlit uplands and the flying unicorns. The whole Brexit movement itself is a perpetual revolution, not an actual government, hence why none of their plans have details rooted in reality.
Second, how much of Labour is from the same 1% Oxbridge type who thinks this is just a game, because even if the country goes belly-up, they can retire to their allotment?
Third, even if Labour has the guts and the competence to start reforming, that would be a total reform - educating the population to get away from hate back towards fact and reality, improving the infrastructure the Tories let rot for 10+ years, pumping millions/ billions into social services so that people can eat without food banks, pumping another billions into building up industries damaged by Brexit and before, Tories; reforming the BBC to stop pandering to Tories, stop with the "balance" bullshit and start reporting on facts again; build affordable housing in London alone; start vocational training - not paid by the trainees of course (nursed having to pay their own training, WTF?); election reform and a written constitution - that will take not just 4/5 years, but decades, and need a broad, across-divides support by population.
But all polls show the country split in the middle, so to get support to rehabilitate people who depend on daily hatred, you need people who have stopped that habit.
And yes, studies long before Trump in the US showed that the Fox news change of 24 hr hate and lies produced measureable changes in brain paths, and that people who get upset have changes in their brain chemistry. People get addicted to hate and uproar as they do on drugs, and it takes a lot of individual effort and long time to wean them off it.
Meanwhile they will oppose any change.
Finland and Netherlands did some great long-term projects (Delta, building big dykes, and changing education to make skilled people their number one ressource), but because the majority of population agreed that this was a good thing and should be done.
I don't see that support for anything in todays Britain (or most western countries) which is a huge problem. Divided we fall to the populists.
Personally I'm looking forward to a Tory wipe out that leaves the Five Families with so few MPs they'd struggle to fill a shed, let alone their vaulted "Star Chamber".
Tremendous article, the more powerful as it is both obvious and overdue. My father was one of these conservatives, even though he had a reputation for right wing demagoguery. He was foremost a traditonalist and a democrat. He and many others such are no longer with us and nor is the Tory party.
Why is the population of the U.K. unable to hit the streets to protest against the far right coup, like the Germans have all weekend? When will they say ‚enough is enough‘? The GE might not be held until end of this year. So much damage can and will be done in the meantime.
The group SODEM is at Westminster every Wednesday when Parliament is sitting. We are about 10-15 people, in a city of 8 millions!
Sadly, I regard the demonstrations as Alibi, not actual anti-fascists.
In the early 90s, after re-unification, terrorists started burning houses, and 500+ of "ordinary citizens" stood by and clapped, while hindering fire rescue.
So decent people went on protest marches of Lichterketten (chains of lights) to show #notall were racists.
Despite that, the political parties, conservatives (Kohl in charge) passed a law giving the right-wingers what they wanted, validating their lies of "Das Boot ist voll" (The boat is full) and changing the constitution to restrict the right to asylum so much that de-facto it was abolished.
Today, while the SPD and Greens are part of the government, they have passed laws validating the right-wing and populists lies:
sanctions against people on welfare, despite hard factual proof that they are useless at best and people on welfare are not "lazy"
easier deportation of people who's claim to asylum has been denied
What does it matter that one soccer stadium full of people (10 000) march one Sunday, when even the nominally not-right-wing parties pass the laws the right-wingers want, and validate their lies by repeating them?
What about the million refugees Merkel took in? I agree that European countries are not coping well with the influx of refugees (from countries where they often are the ones who caused the wars) and that the fear of people who are ‘others’ lets governments bring in vile laws.
I disagree with you on the protests not being anti fascist. I have friends who have been there. Of course, street protests alone are not enough. Citizens have to unite to fight the toxic right wing populism on all levels. Form citizens assemblies, lobby their local, regional and government and bombard the media. The right wing groups have big money behind them and are using the real issues people have playing on their fears. 1930’s revival? We must try and learn from past mistakes or else……
The million refugees in 2015 is another point - the volunteers worked hard to integrate them, but the loud margin of right wingers spread lies about the refugees, and mainline politicans went with the lies instead of facts.
So instead of "overwhelmed bureaucrats with outdated IT can't process the refugess fast enough" it became "volunteers are burned out and can't do it anymore" despite the volunteers saying that the only problem was the bureaucrats undoing months of good work with one bone-headed decision.
Instead of "look at how fast these Syrians and others learned German in 2 years and finished an apprenticeship" it became Palmer (of the Greens!) talking about criminals in his town.
Since 2015, all measures about refugees by official politicans have been on rowing back.
When Merkel sensibly suggested the 3+4 law which would help both refugees and the economy - anybody who's done 3 years of apprenticeship succesfully = is an educated professional worker, very valuable, can stay legally for 4 years - the right-wing CSU in Bavaria just ignored that and police took young people straight out of vocational school for deportation, even celebrating how many people they had deported as birthday present: Merkel let the sister party get away with breaking federal law, because appeasing right-wingers is more important than following the law, despite it never ending well.
We have now such a lack of professionally trained nurses and doctors that hospitals are recruiting directly in Marocco, poaching already qualified people from developing countries, while also allowing people (from Marocco) to drown in the Middle sea, and deporting those who get to our shores because Marocco is not a valid country to flee from. Appeasing right-wingers even by the traffic light coalition is more important than the economy being crippled from growth by lack of qualified employees which by demographics can only come (and come quicker) from "refugees" and "economic migrants" than kids being born today.
I really do wonder when these golden times of decent, level-headed, conservative politicans are supposed to have taken place.
Because in the 1980s - which is more than a generation ago - the face of conservatism was Thatcher in GB, Reagan in USA (and Kohl in Germany), and none of them, or their prominent party members, were decent, level-headed, fact-oriented at all.
Thatcher openly said that she deliberatly killed off steel and coal industry in the North with the explicit purpose of killing of the strong unions (back then, I didn't know the background of Winter of Discontent turning a large part of British population against unions as unreasonable in general, I though it was general hate from rich conservatives against unions and normal workers).
Yes, in the 1980s steel and coal was dying in western countries because of employee cost, but the right way to deal with this was government helping to transition into new industries, as North-Rhine Westfalia did for the Ruhr valley region, not simply destroy the industry and let the whole region fall into poverty.
Plus the whole Falkland war stupidity, of whipping up patriotic fervor, let some people get killed just to improve her own rating.
Reagan started the lie of welfare queens with cadillacs, while cutting worker protections. And Kohl sat out any active improvement program, letting everything rot and fall into disuse during 16 years, instead of actually adapting the infrastructure and society to changing times.
While I don't have enough details on earlier decades, conservatives by their very nature seem to be power-hungry 1% people who see politics and life as a game because they never risk anything even when their plans fail, and whose policies are oriented first at keeping their power, not the good of the state, across different countries with different systems.
That view of life is against experts and their advice, because that would be counter to keeping their power - experts told Kohl of what actions were necessary now in small steps to avoid big problems later, things like repairing and rebuilding bridges, but cutting taxes was more important to their client base, so repairs were delayed to next year, and next year...
And they see as real threat not the ideological enemies from the other party - that's rhethoric for gullible voters and sun-readers - but the people in their own party competent at political machinations, because those can kick them out of lucrative career and delegate them from minister to back-bencher, so that's what their actions are about.
That it's not good for the party or the country to disable all internal opposition by side-lining them, only leaving yes-men in the upper places, doesn't matter, because that's a problem for the successor, not for them.
But I think that's why a party can "suddenly" implode - no real competent people left if you start with only 1%, then get rid of anybody with their own opinion and charisma for a good decade or more.
All good points, and I remember those times very well. I wasn’t suggesting in my piece that there were ‘golden times’, merely that there were times when conservatives (not just conservative politicians but voters) were associated with certain principles that you could identify - even if you criticised and opposed them. When certain forms of political dishonesty and anti-democratic fanaticism that are now normalised were not acceptable; when, at least in this country, conservatives at least paid lip service to the concept of the national interest and parliamentary accountability.
“Unable to use the instruments available to it through EU membership and the Dublin Convention, the UK became, for the first time in its history, a destination for ‘boat people.’”
I’m aware, of course, of the claim it is so but it doesn’t seem to stack up. The UK was still bound by/ able to use Dublin III (including the returns policy) until the end of the transition period at the end of December 2020 (for confirmation, see HOC Research Briefing: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9031/#:~:text=The%20Dublin%20III%20Regulation%3A%20a,the%20UK%20from%20January%202021.). And yet small boat crossings began in 2018 and started to rise steeply in 2019 and, continued to rise even more steeply in 2020 - during the whole of which time the returns policy was still in place. And, yes, they rise even more after that - but it seems clear that the end of returns isn't the only factor, and isn't even the prime factor in the sense that other things started the rise in numbers first (maybe ending returns then intensified it, maybe that became the prime factor, though maybe the increase would have continued anyway).
Thanks Chris. You're right to make that point. I may have overstated the conflation between the 'EU membership and the Dublin Convention' as an explanation in itself for the phenomenon of boat crossings, given that the UK didn't always make use of the Dublin Regulation returns even when it was an EU member. There are, as you suggest, many other factors involved in the transition from clandestine undocumented entry into the UK via lorries and transport, to boat crossings (tighter port security, the decline in road traffic during the pandemic, closing safe routes, etc). Some of these things were already in place before the UK left the EU, yet boat crossings didn't begin till 2018. It's also possible, as the Migration Observatory suggests, ( https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/people-crossing-the-english-channel-in-small-boats/ ) that the perception amongst prospective asylum seekers and facilitators that the UK would find soon find it more difficult to return undocumented migrants explains the rise in numbers, but that doesn't explain the method.
Thanks, Matt. All valid points. Like many issues, Brexit is in the mix here even disentangling it from other factors is sometimes difficult, but I think it's important to acknowledge when this is so, if only to forestall the usual Brexiter objections (I'm actually writing about exactly this for my Brexit blog this week, although not in relation to small boats).
Loved this piece. Excellent description of what’s happening to the Tory party & its journey to self destruction. They deserve complete annihilation in the general election for the suffering they’ve caused to this country.
While it's no more than they deserve, I sadly fear that's not the end of their toxicity at all.
First, Sun, Daily Heil etc. can keep pouring lies into population, because they are millionaire-owned.
None of the leaders will be put in court for betraying the good of the country; and as Farage the weasel has shown, complaining is much easier if you're not in power and thus have no responsibility at all to make anything work, like showing the sunlit uplands and the flying unicorns. The whole Brexit movement itself is a perpetual revolution, not an actual government, hence why none of their plans have details rooted in reality.
Second, how much of Labour is from the same 1% Oxbridge type who thinks this is just a game, because even if the country goes belly-up, they can retire to their allotment?
Third, even if Labour has the guts and the competence to start reforming, that would be a total reform - educating the population to get away from hate back towards fact and reality, improving the infrastructure the Tories let rot for 10+ years, pumping millions/ billions into social services so that people can eat without food banks, pumping another billions into building up industries damaged by Brexit and before, Tories; reforming the BBC to stop pandering to Tories, stop with the "balance" bullshit and start reporting on facts again; build affordable housing in London alone; start vocational training - not paid by the trainees of course (nursed having to pay their own training, WTF?); election reform and a written constitution - that will take not just 4/5 years, but decades, and need a broad, across-divides support by population.
But all polls show the country split in the middle, so to get support to rehabilitate people who depend on daily hatred, you need people who have stopped that habit.
And yes, studies long before Trump in the US showed that the Fox news change of 24 hr hate and lies produced measureable changes in brain paths, and that people who get upset have changes in their brain chemistry. People get addicted to hate and uproar as they do on drugs, and it takes a lot of individual effort and long time to wean them off it.
Meanwhile they will oppose any change.
Finland and Netherlands did some great long-term projects (Delta, building big dykes, and changing education to make skilled people their number one ressource), but because the majority of population agreed that this was a good thing and should be done.
I don't see that support for anything in todays Britain (or most western countries) which is a huge problem. Divided we fall to the populists.
Personally I'm looking forward to a Tory wipe out that leaves the Five Families with so few MPs they'd struggle to fill a shed, let alone their vaulted "Star Chamber".
Tremendous article, the more powerful as it is both obvious and overdue. My father was one of these conservatives, even though he had a reputation for right wing demagoguery. He was foremost a traditonalist and a democrat. He and many others such are no longer with us and nor is the Tory party.
Why is the population of the U.K. unable to hit the streets to protest against the far right coup, like the Germans have all weekend? When will they say ‚enough is enough‘? The GE might not be held until end of this year. So much damage can and will be done in the meantime.
The group SODEM is at Westminster every Wednesday when Parliament is sitting. We are about 10-15 people, in a city of 8 millions!
I despair!
Sadly, I regard the demonstrations as Alibi, not actual anti-fascists.
In the early 90s, after re-unification, terrorists started burning houses, and 500+ of "ordinary citizens" stood by and clapped, while hindering fire rescue.
So decent people went on protest marches of Lichterketten (chains of lights) to show #notall were racists.
Despite that, the political parties, conservatives (Kohl in charge) passed a law giving the right-wingers what they wanted, validating their lies of "Das Boot ist voll" (The boat is full) and changing the constitution to restrict the right to asylum so much that de-facto it was abolished.
Today, while the SPD and Greens are part of the government, they have passed laws validating the right-wing and populists lies:
sanctions against people on welfare, despite hard factual proof that they are useless at best and people on welfare are not "lazy"
easier deportation of people who's claim to asylum has been denied
What does it matter that one soccer stadium full of people (10 000) march one Sunday, when even the nominally not-right-wing parties pass the laws the right-wingers want, and validate their lies by repeating them?
What about the million refugees Merkel took in? I agree that European countries are not coping well with the influx of refugees (from countries where they often are the ones who caused the wars) and that the fear of people who are ‘others’ lets governments bring in vile laws.
I disagree with you on the protests not being anti fascist. I have friends who have been there. Of course, street protests alone are not enough. Citizens have to unite to fight the toxic right wing populism on all levels. Form citizens assemblies, lobby their local, regional and government and bombard the media. The right wing groups have big money behind them and are using the real issues people have playing on their fears. 1930’s revival? We must try and learn from past mistakes or else……
The million refugees in 2015 is another point - the volunteers worked hard to integrate them, but the loud margin of right wingers spread lies about the refugees, and mainline politicans went with the lies instead of facts.
So instead of "overwhelmed bureaucrats with outdated IT can't process the refugess fast enough" it became "volunteers are burned out and can't do it anymore" despite the volunteers saying that the only problem was the bureaucrats undoing months of good work with one bone-headed decision.
Instead of "look at how fast these Syrians and others learned German in 2 years and finished an apprenticeship" it became Palmer (of the Greens!) talking about criminals in his town.
Since 2015, all measures about refugees by official politicans have been on rowing back.
When Merkel sensibly suggested the 3+4 law which would help both refugees and the economy - anybody who's done 3 years of apprenticeship succesfully = is an educated professional worker, very valuable, can stay legally for 4 years - the right-wing CSU in Bavaria just ignored that and police took young people straight out of vocational school for deportation, even celebrating how many people they had deported as birthday present: Merkel let the sister party get away with breaking federal law, because appeasing right-wingers is more important than following the law, despite it never ending well.
We have now such a lack of professionally trained nurses and doctors that hospitals are recruiting directly in Marocco, poaching already qualified people from developing countries, while also allowing people (from Marocco) to drown in the Middle sea, and deporting those who get to our shores because Marocco is not a valid country to flee from. Appeasing right-wingers even by the traffic light coalition is more important than the economy being crippled from growth by lack of qualified employees which by demographics can only come (and come quicker) from "refugees" and "economic migrants" than kids being born today.
Another well aimed and eloquent piece Matt.
One small pedantic point: I would have said "...when those fantasies deflated ..." rather than burst.
I really do wonder when these golden times of decent, level-headed, conservative politicans are supposed to have taken place.
Because in the 1980s - which is more than a generation ago - the face of conservatism was Thatcher in GB, Reagan in USA (and Kohl in Germany), and none of them, or their prominent party members, were decent, level-headed, fact-oriented at all.
Thatcher openly said that she deliberatly killed off steel and coal industry in the North with the explicit purpose of killing of the strong unions (back then, I didn't know the background of Winter of Discontent turning a large part of British population against unions as unreasonable in general, I though it was general hate from rich conservatives against unions and normal workers).
Yes, in the 1980s steel and coal was dying in western countries because of employee cost, but the right way to deal with this was government helping to transition into new industries, as North-Rhine Westfalia did for the Ruhr valley region, not simply destroy the industry and let the whole region fall into poverty.
Plus the whole Falkland war stupidity, of whipping up patriotic fervor, let some people get killed just to improve her own rating.
Reagan started the lie of welfare queens with cadillacs, while cutting worker protections. And Kohl sat out any active improvement program, letting everything rot and fall into disuse during 16 years, instead of actually adapting the infrastructure and society to changing times.
While I don't have enough details on earlier decades, conservatives by their very nature seem to be power-hungry 1% people who see politics and life as a game because they never risk anything even when their plans fail, and whose policies are oriented first at keeping their power, not the good of the state, across different countries with different systems.
That view of life is against experts and their advice, because that would be counter to keeping their power - experts told Kohl of what actions were necessary now in small steps to avoid big problems later, things like repairing and rebuilding bridges, but cutting taxes was more important to their client base, so repairs were delayed to next year, and next year...
And they see as real threat not the ideological enemies from the other party - that's rhethoric for gullible voters and sun-readers - but the people in their own party competent at political machinations, because those can kick them out of lucrative career and delegate them from minister to back-bencher, so that's what their actions are about.
That it's not good for the party or the country to disable all internal opposition by side-lining them, only leaving yes-men in the upper places, doesn't matter, because that's a problem for the successor, not for them.
But I think that's why a party can "suddenly" implode - no real competent people left if you start with only 1%, then get rid of anybody with their own opinion and charisma for a good decade or more.
All good points, and I remember those times very well. I wasn’t suggesting in my piece that there were ‘golden times’, merely that there were times when conservatives (not just conservative politicians but voters) were associated with certain principles that you could identify - even if you criticised and opposed them. When certain forms of political dishonesty and anti-democratic fanaticism that are now normalised were not acceptable; when, at least in this country, conservatives at least paid lip service to the concept of the national interest and parliamentary accountability.
By no means a golden age, but it was different…
Great as always, but I am not convinced by this:
“Unable to use the instruments available to it through EU membership and the Dublin Convention, the UK became, for the first time in its history, a destination for ‘boat people.’”
I’m aware, of course, of the claim it is so but it doesn’t seem to stack up. The UK was still bound by/ able to use Dublin III (including the returns policy) until the end of the transition period at the end of December 2020 (for confirmation, see HOC Research Briefing: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9031/#:~:text=The%20Dublin%20III%20Regulation%3A%20a,the%20UK%20from%20January%202021.). And yet small boat crossings began in 2018 and started to rise steeply in 2019 and, continued to rise even more steeply in 2020 - during the whole of which time the returns policy was still in place. And, yes, they rise even more after that - but it seems clear that the end of returns isn't the only factor, and isn't even the prime factor in the sense that other things started the rise in numbers first (maybe ending returns then intensified it, maybe that became the prime factor, though maybe the increase would have continued anyway).
What seems to have begun the ‘small boat’ crossings was closing down/ wiring off other routes/ methods. See letter in Guardian from ex-HO worker: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/01/the-only-way-to-stop-small-boat-crossings
Chris Grey
Thanks Chris. You're right to make that point. I may have overstated the conflation between the 'EU membership and the Dublin Convention' as an explanation in itself for the phenomenon of boat crossings, given that the UK didn't always make use of the Dublin Regulation returns even when it was an EU member. There are, as you suggest, many other factors involved in the transition from clandestine undocumented entry into the UK via lorries and transport, to boat crossings (tighter port security, the decline in road traffic during the pandemic, closing safe routes, etc). Some of these things were already in place before the UK left the EU, yet boat crossings didn't begin till 2018. It's also possible, as the Migration Observatory suggests, ( https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/people-crossing-the-english-channel-in-small-boats/ ) that the perception amongst prospective asylum seekers and facilitators that the UK would find soon find it more difficult to return undocumented migrants explains the rise in numbers, but that doesn't explain the method.
But the UK has clearly lost instruments that it once had through the sovereignty it had gained, which is why Sunak has been trying to find new ones in Europe: https://ukandeu.ac.uk/will-the-eu-help-the-uk-on-small-boats/
Thanks, Matt. All valid points. Like many issues, Brexit is in the mix here even disentangling it from other factors is sometimes difficult, but I think it's important to acknowledge when this is so, if only to forestall the usual Brexiter objections (I'm actually writing about exactly this for my Brexit blog this week, although not in relation to small boats).
I agree. And look forward to reading your blog!
A brilliant analysis of where we are today. These Tory grifters must be consigned to history.
Cracking.
Phil Burton-Cartledge wrote this in ?2020. Seemed optimistic then, but becoming ever more true by the day. https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2630-falling-down
Great article, Matt. Two points: methinks Rwanda was dreamt up by Johnson to deviate attention from Partygate.
Second, Farage didnt conquer the Tories, but influenced them towards the lunatic fringe.
In that sense, he did prevail over them.
He still has eyes on leading this lot of criminals.
You're on fire Matt. Thanks.