Party politics in Britain now is conferring retrospective significance upon a generation of – and this is putting it very mildly – bad mannered behaviour by lefties.
Here is an example:
This picture was used by London Mayor Boris Johnson to illustrate an article about what is now happening to the Labour Party. It is a cleaned-up snap of what some lefty moral projectionist did to a war memorial in May of this year, during an anti-austerity demo.
The Boris Johnson article was posted last weekend at the Daily Telegraph website, to which links from here are not encouraged. Its title is: “Labour directs its impotent fury at all but those responsible – itself”. It is about how, because they dare not now discuss their own self-inflicted failures and perplexities accurately and clearly, Labourites instead now prefer to blame others for these things.
At the time it happened, the above-illustrated piece of moral decrepitude was not hugely significant. Some people now behave like this. Why? Insert preferred causal theory. Mine might have involved the expansion of the universities and of the welfare system, and perhaps also a reflection on what spraycans have done to our world. Religious people might have murmured something about the decline of religion as a moral force in our society. Those who think that history is now taught badly in Britain’s schools might have talked about that. Most feminists, torn between denouncing what is on several levels a horrible anti-woman insult or, on the other hand, denouncing a fellow lefty moral projectionist for perpetrating it, presumably remained mute.
But that picture now interests me more than it did in May, or would have had I seen it then, just as it recently interested Boris Johnson. Maybe I did see it back in May, but now, I am doing something else. I am noticing it. I even did some googling and found an uncensored version of what had been done. You pretty much knew already what the Boris version of this piece of rudeness was concealing, but I want now to spell it out:
I found this here. This did not take me long.
The reason I show you this insult in all its lack of glory is, first, to draw attention to what a truly nasty public statement this was and is, combining as it does thoughtlessness, ignorance, and an utter indifference to the opinions and feelings of everyone else in the world, and in particular for the opinions and feelings of the sort of English people whose votes decide the outcomes of English political elections.
But why does this sort of rudeness matter now, more than it did when it was perpetrated? Because I now assume, and as Boris Johnson also assumes, that the person who did this is probably now a member of the Labour Party, and has just voted for the Labour Party’s new leader. That may not be a true fact. But if false, it is still accurate.
More thoughtless Labour nastiness is reported in this recent Guido posting. Guido is now noticing this sort of stuff every day. I remember noticing it a long time ago, as have many others of course. The difference is that now this is not just nastiness, it is Labour nastiness.
The internet now has getting on for two decades of this sort of stuff to dig up. And because of what middle-of-the-road voters are going to make of all this when next they get the chance to vote about it, I honestly think that the Labour Party as we have known it for the last century or so may be about to vanish. Like the Liberal Party it will stagger onwards, zombie-like. It won’t completely disappear. Nice but deluded individual Labour MPs will cling on to anomalous majorities for several decades, just as deluded Liberal MPs did. There may even be a “Labour revival”, in about 2045. But the Labour Party as we have known it will, I now surmise, cease to exist.
The fear, of course, is that the Nasty Left, having been handed the Labour Party on a plate by Ed Miliband, will use it to ride to power, following something like a financial melt-down. If only because this might now happen, and that the mere possibility of this happening would itself do serious damage to my country, I would have preferred the Nasty Left to have remained in the party political wilderness to which, I now hope, it will soon return. But the Nasty Left now stands centre stage. And the most probable party political result of this will be, not the triumph of the Nasty Left, but the electoral demise of the political party that they have captured.
Wishful thinking? Certainly. I very much want the Labour Party as we have known it to end. But, I truly think that this might now be about to happen.
I dunno Brian about causes but I do know these people are utter fucking scum. I have done questionable things in my life but the desecration of a war memorial. No. Just no.
Why am I considering a urethral application of my soldering iron?
Because people might not click on Brian’s “this sort of stuff” link, and because it is so good:
Signed Tony Banks, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, 2004.
This looks like quite a treasure trove: http://www.parliament.uk/edm/2003-04/2717/jeremy-corbyn
Rob
Corbyn joked in his recent Labour Party Conference speech about how some newspaper had accused him of saying this. Which he did. It was so crazy he was depending on people just not believing it. He forgot about the internet.
Rob,
Worse than I even thought.
My preferred theory? These people are so convinced of their own righteousness that they regard anyone who does not share their opinions as evil and/or stupid. I suppose this phenomenon can be found among True Believers of many stripes, but listening to global warming enthusiasts and Social Justice Warriors discussing their own particular Others is an especially disturbing experience.
It’s important to remember that the only thing holding them back from putting us into death camps is that they lack the power to get away with it. They have no moral compunction at all. “Fuck Tory Scum” applies to everyone who disagrees with them, even their own grandmothers.
The only thing keeping you from the death camps is that they lack the power TODAY. They are actively seeking that power, with the aid of academics, the media, and the stoking of envy and entitlement. The excuses and justifications will vary from country to country, but the end game is the same across all of Western culture.
Have a plan, and a backup plan, and be ready to act. We truly live in “interesting times.”
I see this as a very welcome development. The sooner the Left is put beyond the pale socially the better, and clearly some members of the Frothing Left agree with me 😉
These are the people who pushed Sp!ked (formerly ‘Living Marxism’) into our camp. More and faster please.
When loony lefty types tell us they want Thatcher to die or daub war memorials with obscenities we are invited to wonder just what injustices could possibly push altruistic, caring and clever ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ into displaying such uncharacteristic hatred.
But the ruse fails because everyone knows their altruism is a sham, a cover they use to hide their inner anger and bitterness at not getting as much of other peoples money as they’d like in their middle class public sector paypackets or to pay for their time as a student.
When the bourgeois Marxists welcomed Pot into Phnom Penh they weren’t prepared for the consequences. The Left’s biggest enemy is the Left. Gordon Brown came close to wiping them out with debt.
This is a minor matter in this context, but why are links from here to the Torygraph not encouraged?
Their view of humanity is a clear case of psychological projection.
Also, the Left and other power seekers always destroy themselves in the end, as a direct and inevitable result of the actual process of seeking power. Prolem is, they often take with them too many of the rest of us dowm that particular way to hell.
Really? Awesome 😀
It was stuck behind a paywall with only partial access to it for free.
I love Anna Racoon’s comment “Hmmn. Asteroids good. Nuclear weapons bad.”
I don’t think it’s as deep as many think. I think most of these folks are simply saying/spraying this sort of thing because saying naughty words gives them the illusion of being transgressive and down wit’ de yoot. It’s the mindset that was parodied so well by Flanders and Swann more than 50 years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSrXqOI9988
Like toddlers who say naughty words because they know it will create shock and alarum among their elders.
I’ll bet you’d find, if you actually chased these SJWs down to their lairs, you would find them to be, to a man or woman, middle-class, privileged and well-provided-for, just playing at ‘social justice’ on the weekends.
llater,
llamas
Smited? SMITED? ME?
llater,
llamas
‘Twas on a Monday morning that the smitebot struck again,
The post key, it was working, but my comments were in vain .
I checked my posts for naughtiness, and tried to post once more.
But still it wouldn’t have it, for why not, can’t be sure.
Oh, it all makes work for the posting man to do.
‘Twas on a Tuesday morning, that I tried another post.
But once again the smitebot, up and dashed my hopes
I thought I had good things to say, I thought that I’d be fine
But while it let all others post, no post was there of mine.
Oh, it all makes work for the posting man to do.
‘Twas on a Wednesday morning I tried to post once more
My post it had no naughtiness, of that I was quite sure
As clean and sweet, as mild and meek, as I have ever been
But once I again I found I’d got that awful smitebot screen
Oh, it all makes work for the posting man to do.
‘Twas on a Thursday morning, it almost broke my heart
I’d written it so carefully, ‘twas good in every part
So full of thought, so carefully wrought, all writ in might and main
But all I got when I hit ‘post’ was the same old screen again.
Oh, it all makes work for the posting man to do.
‘Twas on a Friday morning that I had another go
And once again, the same blue screen, the same old bitter blow
I can’t think what it could be, that I’ve done so very wrong
And I all know to make it stop, is write another song.
Oh, it all makes work for the posting man to do.
On Saturday and Sunday, the posts were just inane . . . . .
So ’twas on a Monday morning that the smitebot struck again . . . .
llater,
llamas
The 1970s left has undergone a series of fractures since Thatcher’s privatization and Kinnock’s denouncements wiped out militant, and the end of the cold war. But the proto-communist unions have been slumbering and every now and then start to awake, what is happening is nothing more than a tired old dinosaur trying to relive the glorious of general strike days of yore.
The most disturbing thing is that the whole anti-Zionist (read: anti-semitic) movement was a union ploy that has infected the rest of the left like a bad dose of clap. The tragedy was, that where intellectual and pro-Marxist left was once a proud, anti-religious, if not rabid and wholly atheist movement, this strategy has put them as uncomfortable bedfellows with the most authoritarian and barbaric religious nut cases on the planet, witness the NUS as the latest bunch of radical “progressives” to put aside theological and ideological differences and cosy up with a band of 7th century misogynists.
The left once stood at the pinnacle of opposing fascism, but at the next Battle of Cable Street it is clear the modern left will be one the other side this time, together with their “friends” the religious thugs.
The viciousness of the action is understandable – after all the left are evil.
The objective of the left is a boot coming down on the face of humanity – for ever.
It is the stupidity that I do not understand.
Evil people are not supposed to go around openly shouting “I am evil, I am evil…..”.
And that is what spraying something like “Tory Scum” on a war memorial (in this case to women) does.
Have these people not read “Rules for Radicals” (first edition dedicated to Satan – later editions remove this tell-tale sign).
Collectivists are supposed to pretend to be good. Not openly boast of their vileness.
What is next?
Renaming the Labour Party the “League of Evil Chaos Mutants”?
Llamas “toddlers who say naughty words because they know it will create shock and alarum among their elders”
My house is a living example of that right now. Oh boy.
Meh. The passage cited against Corbyn is (in context) a piece of deliberately exaggerated hyperbole, expressing the sponsors’ profound disgust with a particular practice.
I sort of respect him for letting rip with some black humor.
I’d be more repelled by his extreme solicitude for Mordechai Vanunu, compared to apparent indifference to, for instance, Maria Afiuni.
Re the Telegraph paywall.
If you set your browser to block Telegraph cookies, and delete any that have already been set, you can browse the site to your heart’s content and never get asked to pay.
Rich Rostrom is sort of right. Corbyn anyways seems to manage to say odious things but have an escape route. Osama bin Laden’s death a tragedy… But “in context” he meant something else. Does he ever say anything straightforward and meaningful?
Anyways = always … Typing on my phone.
llamas,
My congratulations to Samizdata’s reigning Poet Laureate. Very well done! It both rhymes and scans. One had thought the art lost for good. And one sympathizes with your feeling of being beaten about the chops by a deranged Smitebot with a stick, so well and aptly stated.
I fear your transgression lies in your link to the dread You of the Toob, the very mention of which drives the Smitebot into berserkerland. Which is why YrsTrly has adopted the practice of referring to it as “UT,” and giving links to it with the domain omitted. True, this means readers must copy and paste, rather than simply clicking, but to my mind it beats hanging around waiting for human investigators of malfeasance to Do Something; these folks do, after all, have lives outside of chasing after Smitebots.
(Why “UT” and not “YT,” you ask. Well, because it’s pronounced U-Toob, and therefore “UT” amuses me.”)
Julie – Google ‘Flanders and Swann The Gasman Cometh’ to view the original on the dreaded Tube of You. I merely stand on the shoulders of giants.
llater,
llamas
Rich Rostrom, nothing against black humour or hyperbole – even the exaggerated kind – but unless the whole thing’s a too-subtle satire then the weird moral relativism of condemning what was only ever a proposal to use birds at a time when entire bomber crews were dying is actually pretty noxious.
And much as the demise of the Labour Party would be welcomed, I can’t help but feel it’s only a particularly nasty symptom, and until the BBC and academia are treated the disease will only worsen.
These people are so convinced of their own righteousness that they regard anyone who does not share their opinions as evil and/or stupid.
Because if you can dismiss your opponents as evil you dont have to engage with their arguments leaving your preferred doctrine as the “one true way”. It lets you skip defending your position from attacks on its credibility by effectively asking “who will you believe, me or that goat buggerring, pedo, satan worshipping, transvestite, opus dei member over there”? (any similarities to Mel Gibson unintended)
Similar to other groups of fanatics like university feminists, and Islamic beardie weirdies.
If you can find a reason to dismiss opponents out of hand then your doctrine remains pure and unsullied by reality.
Why was this allowed to happen? IMHO, that’s easy to answer. It’s the disappearance of the traditional working class. If the desecration of a war memorial would’ve been attempted in front of a group of working class men the wannabe desecrators would have had their asses handed to them. I say only working class as middle class types don’t know how to use judicious violence in defense of their beliefs and the poor have too much to lose by using it. Those kind of working class men have pretty much disappeared from most cities (they live in suburbs now).
As to the individual sprayer, I wonder which other graffitist became the subject of so much fame?
Assuming he even noticed what he was spraying on, he personally did it to get the warm feeling of being noticed. Like a cat or dog marking territory. It worked.
And it works in the cat or dog sense, too.
“Everything. The streets, public property, private property, manners, your dead women, and the sacrifices of the living women who fought the war and pay the taxes to build and wash this thing. We piss on them because you are weak, and you won’t stop us. You are even afraid to show yourselves what I did. It’s all ours now.”
Re: the recent spitting/egging of delegates and others at the Conservative conference.
I don’t recall ever reading news stories about people at the Labour conference being hassled by Tory thugs. Has it ever happened?
Thank goodness the graffiti was just four letters for each word. It is very hard for the ignorant lefties to think of longer words.
How do you have a “labour” party, without any labourers?
Vulgar Madman
Simple actually, Indoctrinate the young, fan the hatred of the ideologues and fanatics and bribe the lazy with other people’s money. Oh yeah, import people but he tens and hundreds of thousands who does not share your country’s ideals, culture and history to the UK, call them refugees and fast track them to citizenship . There you have it, a “Labour Party” without any laborers.
Paul Marks:
“It is the stupidity that I do not understand.”
Why not? How can you be a genuine lefty without being also stupid?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama
That’s one way; there are others.
“How can you be a genuine lefty without being also stupid?”
Only being thoroughly dishonest.
It’s rather rare for me to disagree with Cristina, but being thoroughly dishonest seems like one of several ways one can be a genuine lefty without being stupid. Being thoroughly selfish, for example, can be another way as well I think.