In general I deplore violence. But I do know that if a braying Etonian bully wandered round this country telling people how to dress, it would be very bad for their health. As someone who lived almost half of my life in England, I cannot understand the right wing intolerance, xenophobia and contempt for liberty that now characterises that nation.
And I cannot understand the degree of cringing servility that causes English people to want to be ruled – and told how to dress – by this.
“Corby does need to smarten himself up, though. It matters if one wishes to be taken seriously. People look at Corbyn and wonder how he can look after a country if he can’t even look after himself.”
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I have considerable sympathy for that point of view. Rightly or wrongly (seen from the point of view of morals/ethics) appearance is important for those looking for a job – the job in this case being that of British Prime Minister. Is it not, to take another example, suggested to youngsters going for a job interview to dress as smartly as they can?
Having said that, I’ll give Mr Corbyn the benefit of the doubt and assume that his (relatively) untidy appearance is part of the left-winger’s natural appearance and is not some sort of silly, silly “gesture”, like most of the Greek SYRIZA ministers making a point of never wearing a tie.
Is there a common core of resentment amongst the public? Most seem willing to sacrifice their personal liberty for the illusional state of safety they’ve been promised. With the number of ruminants and cattle in UK pastures one would think people would observe the cautionary tale leading to shearing and slaughter.
“It is a typical Tory ad hominem attack (the type trolls use on here)”
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Perhaps so, but less mendacious and unpleasant than some posters on here calling people whose opinions they don’t agree with “racists”, “fascists”, “supporters of torture” and so on.
Wouldn’t you agree, Mr Goss?
Glenn_UK
Don’t play the fool, it doesn’t suit you. You know perfectly well what Anon1 meant by “can’t look after himself”.
Kempe. The Guardian is recognised in Scotland as a Unionist disseminator of mendacity. It’s circulation is sinking rapidly , only kept somehow bouyant by those who use it to carpet the bottom of their birdcages.
MJ-
If the populace were sufficiently informed – that 35%+ of the value of every transaction taking place went straight to a financial institution, say – there might just be an incentive to muddle along in a different direction.
Another nexus needing to be solidly hit is the increasing determination of the financiers to have a cashless-all-electronic currency, which would make scooping up peoples’ earnings even easier.
Komodo Solutions plc is also planning a campaign of publicly humiliating rich people on principle. And on primetime media. Anyone over £100K/year for starters. They can afford a little obloquy.
Yes, Ben. And the US with its free movement of manufacturers to the lowest-income states, and union legislation the envy of North Korea, showed us how.
Kailyard Rules, below is a list of the latest sales figures for the press in Scotland.
Thankfully almost all of them are pointing to a downward trend. I imagine the Scottish public can only stomach so much unionist lies.
The Scottish Sun: 214,800 (down 7.8%)
Daily Record: 176,100 (down 10.2%)
Scottish Daily Mail: 86,958 (down 3.4%)
The Press & Journal: 56,400 (down 6.4%)
The Courier: 43,000 (down 8.4%)
Scottish Daily Express: 40,800 (down 11.5%)
Daily Star Of Scotland: 38,200 (down 4.7%)
The Herald: 32,100 (down 13.2%)
The Scotsman: 22,700 (down 13.5%)
The Times: 19,900 (up 8.9%)
The i: 16,800 (down 7.2%)
Daily Telegraph: 16,300 (down 5.1%)
Daily Mirror: 13,500 (down 18.8%)
The National: 12,100 (first figures)
The Guardian: 8,700 (down 7.3%)
Financial Times: 2,400 (up 4.5%)
The Independent: 2,400 (down 10.2%)
SUNDAYS
Sunday Mail: 195,000 (down 9.2%)
The Scottish Sun On Sunday: 161,500 (down 5.6%)
The Sunday Post: 127,600 (down 14.8%)
The Scottish Mail On Sunday: 74,400 (down 5.3%)
The Sunday Times: 42,700 (down 1.5%)
Sunday Herald: 25,000 (down 22.4%)
Scottish Sunday Express: 23,400 (down 11.4%)
Scotland On Sunday: 22,000 (down 19.9%)
Daily Star Of Scotland Sunday: 21,000 (down 3.9%)
The Sunday Telegraph: 13,800 (down 8.7%)
The Observer: 12,400 (down 4%)
Sunday Mirror: 12,000 (down 27.2%)
The People: 7,300 (down 19%)
Independent On Sunday: 4,900 (down 10.1%)
Lloyd George was rather unkempt. I don’t think that detracted from his abilities as a leader. (Ivan Maisky, whose diaries I just read, had a very high opinion of his intelligence and ability to prognosticate the future.)
Currently, Bernie Sanders is notorious for his unkempt appearance.
In the year after the Nazi takeover in Germany, the circulation of German newspapers dropped by about 50%.
RoS; you’re missing the point. It’s all going electronic. And independent credible news sources on t’net are as rare as they are on paper. Time to fix that.
Habbabkuk: Would you rather a candidate that looks good or can do the job well? (not that the two need be exclusive). Whilst image can be an indicator of ability it is a notoriously unreliable one. Perhaps the potential employer of Mr Corbyn should look to his CV instead?
As for Mr Cameron’s recent statement it seems to me to be an obvious attempt to distract from the issue. Schoolyard stuff. Would you disagree?
Can’t quite see it as reflecting on the English polity. Britain’s ruling class has always aped US political fads in an extraordinarily slavish way. This is clearly Cameron imitating Trump’s insulting style. If Sanders were permitted to assume the presidency, Cameron would instantly muss his hair and happily follow his new president around like an organ-grinder’s monkey.
It’s an amazing con, you have to admit: telling a nation of scruffy prats with the mass dress sense of a bag lady on her uppers that a nice suit makes you credible. Speaking as a scruff myself, of course. Hague’s baseball cap and Cameron hugging hoodies can be safely forgotten…oh, and pigs’ heads…
MSMD:
Good thinking.
“Those men (I use the term loosely of course) need to pass a initiation test. The wannabe Bullingdon boys need to burn a £50 note in front of a down and out person.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/09/21/bullingdon-club-five-things-we-know_n_8169064.html”
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I invite readers to read the article RepublicofSpuriousOutrage has linked to very carefully and then ask themselves how credible it is.
Inter alia, they might ask themselves whether the quotation ascribed to Mr Dimbleby sounds like Mr Dimbleby.
Having said that, I can see how the articles might resonate with ignorant Americans – it certainly makes for good copy.
The truth is that little is known by most people about the Bullingdon Club.
Why, even our Transatlantic Friend (he of the Pugna*ious nature) has told us that despite spending four years at Oxford he had never heard of the club when he was there… 🙂
Oh I’m not excluding the colonies Komo. But it does seem the Master is catching up with the Student.
Thanks for making me sick with that picture, what a bunch of unreal remote characters. poseurs, the lot of them.
Boris autobiographer, in front of the BBC camera’s intoned in false indignation that ‘Boris, two years his elder(David Cameron) expected to be PM before him, but it did not turn out that way’.
The English are mugs, regardless of what the Government inflicts on them,they take anything and more of it. yes please sir, hit me again, genetically predisposed masochism, programmed to vote Tory/Labour/Lib Dems and play the establishment game together with the Media.
Fair proportional votes? from our principled and empowering devolutioner’s? NEVER, they rather become fascist and a little more degenerate, we have to invoke change ourselves.
Nobody will change anything here by voting or by waiting for administrations to bring a new more sustainable agenda. It has to be taken off them, the roles reversed.
they keep their subjects dumb and, preferably, in squalor.
To think that anyone can be so up their own arse to ‘expect to become PM’ as if its their god given right, should not be anywhere near Government.
Davrod
“Habbabkuk: Would you rather a candidate that looks good or can do the job well? (not that the two need be exclusive).”
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~The matter, but I think you answer your own question (in the brackets). I’d say. One could also imagine that someone who is likely to do the job well might also be the sort of person who would take some care with his personal appearance.
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“Perhaps the potential employer of Mr Corbyn should look to his CV instead?”
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Certainly and of course primarily. But I fear that the electorate might find his CV (I stress CV, not proclaimed policies)to be as unimpressive as his sense of appropriate dressing.
BTW – I imagine you have gone for job interviews in your time. Did you dress neatly?~Tie straight?
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“As for Mr Cameron’s recent statement it seems to me to be an obvious attempt to distract from the issue. Schoolyard stuff. Would you disagree?”
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I wouldn’t disagree. But that’s PM’s Questions, isn’t it. Nothing very new there.
“The latter..”
“(Ivan Maisky, whose diaries I just read,”
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Is that the third or fourth time we’ve been honoured with that fascinating piece of information? 🙂
Nebelmind
“The English are mugs, regardless of what the Government inflicts on them,they take anything and more of it. yes please sir, hit me again, genetically predisposed masochism, programmed to vote Tory/Labour/Lib Dems and play the establishment game together with the Media.”
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So why do you stay – are you a masochist or do you just like feeling superior?
Unlike some people, I actually do read books. And cite facts from them, when they seem relevant to a discussion.
Hab: One mans’ care is anothers vanity, Its hard to hold others to ones own standard.
At interviews the advice nowerdays is to dress “appropriately” rather than excessively smartly, as the ever fickle employer may be prejudiced in the other direction. For my job I dressed in a suit and tie, but I also sport four foot long dredlocks, how would you judge that?
Mr Corbyn’s CV would appear to rest largely on his not espousing the same politics as either the Conservatives, or the previous Labour leadership and having shown that not to be a convienient stance, but a lifelong dedication.
Indeed it is PMQ’s as usual, perhaps we should aspire to better?
“Unlike some people, I actually do read books.”
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Which reminds me of a question you obviously overlooked – perhaps you were busy reading Maisky at the time?
The question was: have you read Anne Applebaum’s “Iron Curtain: the crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956”?
People like Cameron are getting increasingly desperate: the empire they handed over to the Americans to rule is coming to an end, in immediate terms because of the complete incompetence of the US which regards diplomacy as girlish and violence as the answer to every problem.
Or rather threats of violence, involving the use of proxies: “I’ll set our wild eyed wahhabi militias on you…” Because actual violence, after the bombing from 50,000 feet and three thousand miles away has failed and the novelty of the drones has worn off, would involve recruiting young people to fight and die in foreign parts and the American People have no stomach for the coffins returning to Delaware. And that is to their credit, God bless them.
Cameron, Johnson and Osborne are made of much sterner stuff- as their colleague IDS daily demonstrates- they don’t give a toss when squaddies get wiped out, whether by war or by hunger and poverty. In fact they find it rather tonic-which is what the Bullingdon Club is all about- sneering at the peasants and tossing lighted banknotes at the sleeping bags underneath the arches.
So they get very angry, and grind their teeth and lose their tempers as they watch their pension plans- backed by US hegemony eternally- being pissed up the wall by incompetents like Kerry, Nuland, Obama and, the typhoid Mary of imperial dreams, Hillary Clinton.
However there is zilch they can do about it: they lack the gravitas of the Macmillans and Churchills, they lack the brains of the Baldwins or Georges, they are the dregs of a ruling class whose brightest members have plunged into the City, gone abroad to write, joined in the Beltway games or become cynics, leaving the scum and their fags to run the Conservative party.
What caps it all is that Cameron is clever enough to see that he has come back from Brussels with a ‘deal’ that would make Neville Chamberlain wince. His only hope is that it is a glorious summer and that the nation is at the beach watching a splendid run in the European Nations Cup when the referendum comes around. And that the British people really are as daft as he has always been assured that they are, Because he knows that his package is empty: it is a reflection of the contempt with which Europe regards him, his government and the whinging forelock tuggers who mistake him for a popular leader with a mandate.
In fact he’s just the guy who wiped the floor with Ed Miliband, Andy Burnham, Balls and all in an election. He hates to admit that Corbyn, who really did crush the Blairites, is a formidable opponent who is likely to drive him into exile in Florida or tidewater Virginia where Washington’s discharged clients are wont to gather.
And really he doesn’t care: he’d be much happier living a life of leisure, playing with some dogs, having fun and maybe even learning how to read books, growing up, thinking about things. He’s dead in the water and it shows.
Davrod
You used the present tense – were you sporting dreadlocks at your job interview? Would you sport dreadlocks if you had to go for an interview for a new job next week?
Agree with you re PM’s Questions.
For the accusations of baseless slurs upon the English, let me say that in England alone, 55.1% of those voting at the General Election voted Tory or UKIP. In no other part of the UK did Tory and UKIP combined get over 50%.
“I actually do read books. And cite facts from them”
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One has to be rather careful when reading the diaries of politicians, high civil servants and so on. They often tend to the self-serving and the “facts” do not always reflect the truth.
“…have you read Anne Applebaum’s “Iron Curtain: the crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956”?”
Certainly not, Applebaum is not a serious person she is a columnist on the Neo-con Editorial Page of the Washington Post, which is a propaganda rag.
She is a careerist kleptocrat married to another: the dreadful Sikorski. She is an enthusiast of neo-Nazi emigre movements employed by the CIA and a proundly dishonest person.
The question is why anyone would waste time reading what is bound to be a thoroughly dishonest piece of propaganda designed to misinform and mislead.
It is touching that Habba from GCHQ actually regards Applebaum’s works as worth our attention. They aren’t.
If you are short of reading matter try this:
http://johnhelmer.net/?p=13866