Only those with a comprehensive knowledge of acceptable jargon can these days participate in debate free from an overwhelming fear of getting cancelled
There are just too many thick, jobsworth numpties being paid by a massively oversized State to promote and enforce these ridiculous impositions. But the State has only the money it extorts from the tax-paying minority, so this parasitic and immoral arrangement will persist until they revolt, and force the State to shrink both its role and its expenditure. Then the jobsworths would also be forced to get genuinely productive work.
Salmon Rushdie once quiped that the right to be offended was the new human right. The proportion of the population keen to exercise this new right appears to be growing and the state protection they enjoy is quite chilling.
Frm Henderson's "luxury beliefs' replacing property and wealth as the means to distinguish yourself from the hoi polloi, to Goodhart's Anywheres and Somewheres, via a demonology of 'hate' to be controlled or suppressed by legislation with plod actively pursuing non-crime 'hate' incidents, one could say that what is going on is -erm -intersectional. (of various repressive tendencies). Except it isn't really for I agree that at root it is the exclusion of the working class from political life, with politics left o the self-appointed Brahim class. It adds up to a caste system or, as some describe it, neo-feudatlism.
I read articles about this sort of thing and nod sagely at whatever the latest description is. But it is deeply worrying. Konstatin Kisin pointed out a difference between Russia and the UK over the number of knocks at the door by the police. In the UK there have been thousands - I forget the exact figure he quoted - but only a few hundred in Russia. Perhaps the Russian population is more intimidated and cowed, but it would appear, as Esssex police demonstrate, there is a marked enthusiam here in the UK for punishing wrong think.
The establishment has always feared the mob and that reached a zenith after the Feench revolution. That fear has never gone way, merely temporarily suspended when the 'salt of the earth' were needed for the trenches before being recast as the scum of the earth again. There is self congratulatery snobbery in the establishment that runs through a lot of this. Major and Blair may have announced the end of class war but the reality is that it never went away.
It has been exacerbated by 'critical theory' in which power structures, of oppressor and oppressed, are said to define everything in modern capitalism. The morally simplistic sieze on this as their defining mission in life. We see this more or less weekly in London with marches in support of Hamas (sorry, Gaza). That so many need to feel a moral purpose is worrying.
In the US, the DNA is freedom/get goverment off our backs and the Demcrats attempt to reengineer Amercain DNA has run out of road. In the UK and EU it is have goverment solve every problem even personal ones.
All that said, I think the author is right. Working class people are not wanted in politics. The Labour party which began as champions for including working class people has morphed into their greatest oppressor. In politics, we only have middle class snobs now. It's not looking hopeful.
I look after a Current Affairs group and a History group for my local southern town's U3A - all people in their 70s and 80s - and also attend a History group in a local university town with some members there being a little younger. I would describe everyone in all the groups as middle class. Despite the local town groups including some with left-wing views, including a lifelong Communist, we disagree robustly and I never get the impression that anyone who lost an argument would take revenge by trying to cancel anyone. I am more circumspect with the university town group but even there I observe a traditional respect for other people's opinions. I think what you are describing is a phenomenon which is something to do with age, not being in employment, and level of exposure to social media. I wonder if you are also sensing that the working class believes every other class (including the middle class) has it in for them.
I'm not sure it's specific to politics, it's a general thing that if you want to get on in any field now you have to speak "the language". Whether it's being a judge or a volunteer for scouts, this type of stuff is vigorously enforced. I long ago gave up applying for jobs or positions where this kind of commitment to the ideology is required. I'm not alone.
Yes, I think that's right. It produces a suffocating feeling among those not schooled in the jargon though. It's as if the commissars are waiting to catch them out and cancel them, having withdrawn in advance any entitlement to a presumption of good faith.
Are the left & liberal elite worried about the decline of the MSM and so their ability to control the output & content what the people see. I’d say they’ve seen what has happened on Twitter becoming a bastion of free speech and want to contain & limit what people can say.
Very sinister, if we don’t remove Labour at the next GE then I think Starmer will implement his agenda, ie Orwell’s 1984.
Cultural capital goes a long way, in that, if you are in bulk possession, you no doubt will have the language skills to navigate the current socio-political milieu. And if you fall foul and have considerable social capital, you stand a better chance of crushing any investigations for speech crimes, as Alison Pearson deftly did, unfortunately without these types of capital you are at a disadvantage.
There is already a means to resist and revolt to a certain extent. That way is to withhold your taxes. All of them. Income tax, VAT, car tax, etc. All one has to do is to go onto, Probityco.org everything you need to knoiw is there. It's a vast site with lots of information.
It’s not about left and right. It’s a game played by both sides. Take immigration for instance. The left enable mass immigration in order to keep low pay low, both feed them as cheap labour to employers and use them for division and the right kick them out when it suits both parties. Keep playing the game.
The author has a very stereotypical idea of what w/c is anyway. He clearly was raised upper working class.
Of course there’s been a war against the w/c for decades, but it’s fought by the credentialed who think some shitty certificate from an exam body renders them an educated authority, when in fact they just become useful idiots who’ll do anything to advance this thing called “a career”. The state of the country is all the evidence you need.
P. S. Boys from the Black Stuff, Educating Rita, soaps and most tv depictions are stereotypes, nothing else, and all part of the ongoing war.
I don’t believe in a sinister, carefully thought-through, master plan to get control of language and thus exclude all those not able to keep up with the ever changing rules. But I do believe that the modern left just automatically, unconsciously even, advances anything that restricts the freedom, physical, verbal, or even mental, of people over whom they have some control. We saw it during the Covid madness, absurd rules that had no possible utility brought in, most zealously by figures like Drakeford and Sturgeon. These aren’t evil geniuses, and I doubt they have even read 1984, they are just low grade, banal, ideologues, steeped in a philosophy that is inherently suspicious of anything that doesn’t emanate from the state. The family, the church, the pub, independent media, humour and drama; anything that isn’t state controlled to which people owe allegiance, or through which they can express an independent opinion, has to be shut down or regulated into impotence and irrelevance. Remember Arden’s ‘if you don’t hear it from the government, it isn’t the truth’ during Covid? And witness the different treatment by Ofcom of GB news compared to Sky and the BBC. The latter two are basically instruments of the state, the former independent and thus a threat. The current government is mounting an assault on private schools, private enterprise, and private property, anything private basically, and free expression on the internet, of course. One can only hope, no pray, they are overreaching and will be, like the Democrats in the US, summarily expelled while we still have a semblance of a free society.
Not obvious to me that there is a concerted move to make politics unenterable for working class people (although there aren’t that many now…). More that the do-gooders are busy doing good, and if some people can’t voice their thoughts that is a price worth paying to protect others from psychological harm as it were.
The effect may well be that people can’t enter politics in exactly the same way of course.
The best rebuttal to this is for this cause to be taken up by Reform and the Tories (some of them anyway) as then there will be political pressure to change this.
You say you’ve got experience in doing exactly this…
The Tories opened the door, but I suspect Two Tier Starmer’s rabid enthusiasm to condemn, convict and punish the Far Right has emboldened the Left to feverishly seek out and condemn any thought and/or utterance which emanates from someone of the Right, or indeed of any political persuasion but authors of the Right will be under more scrutiny and will never be given the benefit if the doubt.
So whereas under the Tories we were able to criticise ‘wokeness’ and indeed gender clinics and gender treatments have been closed, I believe there’s a danger that the tide is changing and whereas those on the Right were previously ‘cancelled’ by the Left, it’s now possible to actually have the police investigate ‘non crime incidents’ which invariably are accusations against the Right, never the Left.
There are just too many thick, jobsworth numpties being paid by a massively oversized State to promote and enforce these ridiculous impositions. But the State has only the money it extorts from the tax-paying minority, so this parasitic and immoral arrangement will persist until they revolt, and force the State to shrink both its role and its expenditure. Then the jobsworths would also be forced to get genuinely productive work.
Nail on the head.
Salmon Rushdie once quiped that the right to be offended was the new human right. The proportion of the population keen to exercise this new right appears to be growing and the state protection they enjoy is quite chilling.
Frm Henderson's "luxury beliefs' replacing property and wealth as the means to distinguish yourself from the hoi polloi, to Goodhart's Anywheres and Somewheres, via a demonology of 'hate' to be controlled or suppressed by legislation with plod actively pursuing non-crime 'hate' incidents, one could say that what is going on is -erm -intersectional. (of various repressive tendencies). Except it isn't really for I agree that at root it is the exclusion of the working class from political life, with politics left o the self-appointed Brahim class. It adds up to a caste system or, as some describe it, neo-feudatlism.
I read articles about this sort of thing and nod sagely at whatever the latest description is. But it is deeply worrying. Konstatin Kisin pointed out a difference between Russia and the UK over the number of knocks at the door by the police. In the UK there have been thousands - I forget the exact figure he quoted - but only a few hundred in Russia. Perhaps the Russian population is more intimidated and cowed, but it would appear, as Esssex police demonstrate, there is a marked enthusiam here in the UK for punishing wrong think.
The establishment has always feared the mob and that reached a zenith after the Feench revolution. That fear has never gone way, merely temporarily suspended when the 'salt of the earth' were needed for the trenches before being recast as the scum of the earth again. There is self congratulatery snobbery in the establishment that runs through a lot of this. Major and Blair may have announced the end of class war but the reality is that it never went away.
It has been exacerbated by 'critical theory' in which power structures, of oppressor and oppressed, are said to define everything in modern capitalism. The morally simplistic sieze on this as their defining mission in life. We see this more or less weekly in London with marches in support of Hamas (sorry, Gaza). That so many need to feel a moral purpose is worrying.
In the US, the DNA is freedom/get goverment off our backs and the Demcrats attempt to reengineer Amercain DNA has run out of road. In the UK and EU it is have goverment solve every problem even personal ones.
All that said, I think the author is right. Working class people are not wanted in politics. The Labour party which began as champions for including working class people has morphed into their greatest oppressor. In politics, we only have middle class snobs now. It's not looking hopeful.
I look after a Current Affairs group and a History group for my local southern town's U3A - all people in their 70s and 80s - and also attend a History group in a local university town with some members there being a little younger. I would describe everyone in all the groups as middle class. Despite the local town groups including some with left-wing views, including a lifelong Communist, we disagree robustly and I never get the impression that anyone who lost an argument would take revenge by trying to cancel anyone. I am more circumspect with the university town group but even there I observe a traditional respect for other people's opinions. I think what you are describing is a phenomenon which is something to do with age, not being in employment, and level of exposure to social media. I wonder if you are also sensing that the working class believes every other class (including the middle class) has it in for them.
I'm not sure it's specific to politics, it's a general thing that if you want to get on in any field now you have to speak "the language". Whether it's being a judge or a volunteer for scouts, this type of stuff is vigorously enforced. I long ago gave up applying for jobs or positions where this kind of commitment to the ideology is required. I'm not alone.
Yes, I think that's right. It produces a suffocating feeling among those not schooled in the jargon though. It's as if the commissars are waiting to catch them out and cancel them, having withdrawn in advance any entitlement to a presumption of good faith.
Are the left & liberal elite worried about the decline of the MSM and so their ability to control the output & content what the people see. I’d say they’ve seen what has happened on Twitter becoming a bastion of free speech and want to contain & limit what people can say.
Very sinister, if we don’t remove Labour at the next GE then I think Starmer will implement his agenda, ie Orwell’s 1984.
Cultural capital goes a long way, in that, if you are in bulk possession, you no doubt will have the language skills to navigate the current socio-political milieu. And if you fall foul and have considerable social capital, you stand a better chance of crushing any investigations for speech crimes, as Alison Pearson deftly did, unfortunately without these types of capital you are at a disadvantage.
There is already a means to resist and revolt to a certain extent. That way is to withhold your taxes. All of them. Income tax, VAT, car tax, etc. All one has to do is to go onto, Probityco.org everything you need to knoiw is there. It's a vast site with lots of information.
It’s not about left and right. It’s a game played by both sides. Take immigration for instance. The left enable mass immigration in order to keep low pay low, both feed them as cheap labour to employers and use them for division and the right kick them out when it suits both parties. Keep playing the game.
The author has a very stereotypical idea of what w/c is anyway. He clearly was raised upper working class.
Of course there’s been a war against the w/c for decades, but it’s fought by the credentialed who think some shitty certificate from an exam body renders them an educated authority, when in fact they just become useful idiots who’ll do anything to advance this thing called “a career”. The state of the country is all the evidence you need.
P. S. Boys from the Black Stuff, Educating Rita, soaps and most tv depictions are stereotypes, nothing else, and all part of the ongoing war.
I don’t believe in a sinister, carefully thought-through, master plan to get control of language and thus exclude all those not able to keep up with the ever changing rules. But I do believe that the modern left just automatically, unconsciously even, advances anything that restricts the freedom, physical, verbal, or even mental, of people over whom they have some control. We saw it during the Covid madness, absurd rules that had no possible utility brought in, most zealously by figures like Drakeford and Sturgeon. These aren’t evil geniuses, and I doubt they have even read 1984, they are just low grade, banal, ideologues, steeped in a philosophy that is inherently suspicious of anything that doesn’t emanate from the state. The family, the church, the pub, independent media, humour and drama; anything that isn’t state controlled to which people owe allegiance, or through which they can express an independent opinion, has to be shut down or regulated into impotence and irrelevance. Remember Arden’s ‘if you don’t hear it from the government, it isn’t the truth’ during Covid? And witness the different treatment by Ofcom of GB news compared to Sky and the BBC. The latter two are basically instruments of the state, the former independent and thus a threat. The current government is mounting an assault on private schools, private enterprise, and private property, anything private basically, and free expression on the internet, of course. One can only hope, no pray, they are overreaching and will be, like the Democrats in the US, summarily expelled while we still have a semblance of a free society.
Not obvious to me that there is a concerted move to make politics unenterable for working class people (although there aren’t that many now…). More that the do-gooders are busy doing good, and if some people can’t voice their thoughts that is a price worth paying to protect others from psychological harm as it were.
The effect may well be that people can’t enter politics in exactly the same way of course.
The best rebuttal to this is for this cause to be taken up by Reform and the Tories (some of them anyway) as then there will be political pressure to change this.
You say you’ve got experience in doing exactly this…
You ought to put something out in writing for those who are not sure how to put a point of view in writing.
Thus phrases not to use put it this way.
If you are trying to say this, write it like this.
Give explanation of what Non crime hate incident is.
Ask people who are concerned about an issue to send their thoughts to you and You may have time to write it for them.
Just some suggestions....
The Tories opened the door, but I suspect Two Tier Starmer’s rabid enthusiasm to condemn, convict and punish the Far Right has emboldened the Left to feverishly seek out and condemn any thought and/or utterance which emanates from someone of the Right, or indeed of any political persuasion but authors of the Right will be under more scrutiny and will never be given the benefit if the doubt.
So whereas under the Tories we were able to criticise ‘wokeness’ and indeed gender clinics and gender treatments have been closed, I believe there’s a danger that the tide is changing and whereas those on the Right were previously ‘cancelled’ by the Left, it’s now possible to actually have the police investigate ‘non crime incidents’ which invariably are accusations against the Right, never the Left.