Definitely going to start using the phrase "things up with which I simply will not fucking put" in my daily life.
And the 'can non-white people be English?' thing is a great example of something that could make life difficult for Farage & Co; similar perhaps to the massive twattery of 'what is a woman?' being in just about every interview to a progressive politician a few short years ago. Time to make the far right fuckers squirm.
The phrase “up with which I will not put” has been attributed to W Churchill. I read it and then got utterly distracted because ID omitted the “up”. But I’m an editor by trade, and these things interrupt my train of thought! However…it is a neat way of identifying the line we will not cross..
Absurd pedancy, but you've inserted an "up" where one is missing in the email version (it might have been changed here), which says something about your generosity, or maybe cognitive overlap 🤷🏻♂️
Brilliant piece Ian. And whilst I agree: pretty much nothing gets done without compromise; my fear is: the "other side" are no longer in the compromise business. We have reached the "Punch & Judy" stage in society. I also believe there's a fine line between compromise and surrender. And to misquote Prof Timothy Snyder's rule 1: "Never surrender in advance."
Re: Jeremy Corbyn: Love his principles, but confounded by his complete lack of strategy. Although the weaponisation of antisemitism against him did much to undermine any chance he might have had to make a difference.
Some of that Corbyn bought on himself. In an interview he was asked about something written by a Labour councillor. It certainly looked to be antisemitic and Labour were investigating but Corbyn just waffled, and waffled. For some reason he seemed incapable of agreeing it could be antisemitic. He was a crap leader.
Its difficult to formulate strategy, when from day one, the right wing of your party is determined you won't. He was abused by 'Blue Labour' (Tories by any other name) in Parliament, at Labour HQ, and harassed by them in the corridors of Whitehall, often when cameras were, quite by chance, filming everything. When he moved into his office as leader, all the equipment, anything not nailed down had been stripped out. Petty? Absolutely, but it also had the effect of delaying the leaderships ability to get anything done. We now know of course, that the Labour right was actively campaigning against the leadership on the streets, in the councils, and briefing against it behind their backs. Dirty tricks were rife, and the media were being fed constantly, to the point where even those great haters of the Left, Private Eye, stated that he was the most undermined and 'monstered' Labour leader in modern history. Yes, being human he didn't get everything right, but others made sure he stood no chance of ever being PM, and those others were, disgracefully, in his own party. Now of course, those same people are currently destroying any chance of Labour ever being elected again.
I think this is a reflection of how I’ve been feeling. The Overton Window has shifted so far to the right, I’ve ended up questioning my own liberalism. Not in a way that says that I should give those up, but in a way which makes me question whether liberal values are on the fringes of acceptability?
It probably doesn’t help that I have plenty of family, friends and colleagues who reinforce whatever shite Reform spew out, but on issues like immigration, I feel like I’m from another species, because I care about finding solutions that are both pragmatic but compassionate first and foremost.
Btw- been catching up on some Origin Story episodes I’ve missed. The British Chinese one was really refreshing.
The Overton window occurred to me, too, while reading this. I always thought that the whole point of political parties was to mediate opinion into deliverable policy, all based on core values. The Overton window used to be further left and if a Labour govt is reluctant to inch it back there, what hope do we all have?
Our leaders and our institutions have forsaken us, and left us to fight the battles alone. And one becomes afraid. Starmer has essentially abadoned his principles; Trump, Boris Johnson, never had them, nor Putin nor Orban. Everything has become transactional or negotiable. And, what to do with Tony Blair? How do we think of him? From Fionna O’Leary and Carole Cadwalladr: 'Blair is godfather to the oldest of Murdoch & Deng’s daughters. His TB Institute is swimming in Larry Ellison / Oracle to the tune of £half a BILLION. Ellison is best mates with Netanyahu, Oracle & its partner company Rafael Systems are deep in Israeli defence and intelligence industry.'
How can we fight battles when our leaders lack all conviction?
It’s as though we are being pushed back to the Dark Ages , where all wealth and control lay within the barons and slave owners , the rest of us becoming mere serfs . I suspect it could get worse before it gets better .
We have yet to learn that you have to defend the gains made with the same vigour as they were wrested.
There are plenty of people willing to look away, complaisance cannot be discounted. There are lines, unlike Overton windows, they should not shift or drift. To do so renders the rights they have won meaningless if they are somehow lost in regression.
No good will come of chasing the assumed prejudices of an electorate, you end up with a coalition so fractious (see Johnson, B.) that chaos is the most likely outcome.
Perhaps it feels a little too late, but something is better than nothing.
I think you're giving way too much credit to the Labour party and Ezra Klein. Politics of values vs. politics of strategy? Politics of stupidity would be a better description for what both are doing.
Yes, when large swaths of the electorate move to the right it definitely requires a change of strategy for progressives, but it doesn't require us to assert our values any less forcefully, quite the opposite.
When far right views are in a tiny minority, then you can just ostracise that tiny minority, which no longer works when far right views enter the mainstream.
However, and I can't emphasise this enough, it is not a smart strategy to try and compromise with the far right, because the far right doesn't compromise. Hitler was able to seize power because conservative politicians in Germany thought they could compromise with him. The Reform party is going to win the next UK elections precisely because the Labour party are legitimising far right positions through words and actions - occasional speeches by Starmer notwithstanding. The idea that pandering to far right positions will help Labour stay in power and therefore prevent the worst is completely laughable and defies all historic precedent.
You absolutely need much better communications in the current situation. Just calling Farage a racist won't work. But you have lost the fight, when you start believing the far right propaganda that they are speaking for "the people".
Those who sympathise with far right views are not a homogeneous group. Some are genuine racists who are excited by the opportunity to be cruel to minorities. It is completely pointless to worry about these people and whether or not they feel insulted for being called racists.
But many are drawn to far right views, precisely because they do not see any clear opposition to far right positions. And these people can be won back if you make a compelling case for why far right demands are abhorrent. Normalising the far right just helps the far right.
Very good. There is one other point worth considering. Why have ideas once seen as unacceptable to most become acceptable to the extent that they can be discussed openly on national platforms and not just dismissed out of hand? This at the same time as so called cancel culture has supposedly been silencing those with such ideas.
I think that mainstream politics has to take much of the blame because they have allowed, to use a cumbersome phrase, the immiseration of the masses. In other words, whereas in the good times people could look forward to improving living standards and social conditions, now many cannot. Rather the reverse. So ideas that require a sense of frustration, resentment, injustice, envy or anger, to grow and flourish, receded in the good times, but have regained their appeal.
The reason Labour and others are struggling with this is that they have no answer to how to make ordinary lives better, and are just as wedded to the need to keep the corporations, financiers, oligarchs and tech bros on board as their opponents. If you are seen to have no answers, then people will eventually turn to those that claim they have.
I agree. Fear and insecurity brings out the worst in people or to use a fancy quote from Karl Marx: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, it is their social being that determines their consciousness."
A big driver of right wing sentiment is the collapsing economy. If you want an example of a "politics of strategy" worthy of the name, you can look to somebody like Gary Stevenson who avoids talking about topics such as immigration completely and just relentlessly stays on message about inequality and its consequences. This is a strategy that could actually work (meaning win an election), but the reason why the Labour party cannot follow such a strategy is that they have no intention of doing anything that would actually have a chance of reversing inequality in the UK.
Personally, I don't fully agree that you can fight the far right by just ignoring them. However I do admit that I could be wrong.
Mike, you are correct. If the Far Right are not resisted, well, history has shown only to clearly what happens. In the UK, we have always been, um, 'lucky', in that the Far Right vote has never held up. Mainly because, despite their views being widely shared by Conservative voters, loyalty to the Tory party is so ingrained, come election time, the far right vote went to the Conservatives, thus drawing their teeth. If you ever feel the need, members of the BUF were interviewed, and their comments reflected exactly that. They were frustrated that huge crowds (proven by ticket sales) often attended their meetings, but when the people that attended were asked if they would vote BUF, the answer was, and I quote, 'always the same. We support your views, but, I'm a lifelong Tory so I'll be sticking with them'.
Now though, disillusion with the Conservatives, coupled with Brexit, the surge of bigotry fired by the Conservatives themselves, plus the media ramping up even their usual bigoted rhetoric, and, as you rightly say, economic woes, we are seeing the loyalty to the Conservatives finally break, and voters switching to populists offering them easy answers to complex questions.
Of course though, as Ian says, and his adherents repeat on countless posts, its really all the left, Corbyn, woke, and politically correct social commentators fault.
But that's what comes of backing the wrong horse and continually, as with this article, refusing to accept you have.
Ezra Klein is wrong because we all have to draw the line on what is and isn't acceptable. Has he never seen Ibsen's 'An Enemy of the People'? I live in a constituency that for many years has voted Tory and also voted for Brexit. I didn't draw my line somewhere else because of this. No, both decisions were stupid and many suffered in consequence (and are still suffering).
I compromised at the last election by voting Labour because it seemed the best way to remove the Tories. But there are some things on which one cannot and should not compromise and if the Trump administration and its execrable policies on mass deportation and suppression of opposition voices isn't amongst them then what is for people like Klein?
"said that he would have thought Farage’s policy was racist years ago, but now the public mood has changed, so it isn’t." What horrific utter fucking horseshit. This strategy-driven "flexible morality" is repugnant; this was the MacSweenyist Labour approach prior to Kier's speech. I do wonder whether (somebody) had a word in his shell-like?
Goodwin and Oakshott have both broken the law; their scrawlings are clearly discrimination in contravention of 2010 Equalities Act. Arrest them.
Ocenaudio is perfect for you. It is one track voice recording software from Brazil, it's libre, run by donations, and it's super easy to navigate. When all you are recordsing is voice, you don't need all the bells and whistles of music software.
Loved this article. Against my better judgement and experience I was momentarily drawn into a political "discussion" at work yesterday. Somebody made the point about how popular and approved of Farage was, as if that basically destroyed all counter arguments. I reacted almost instinctively to point out that Hitler was popular too. No come back was forthcoming. For probably the first time in my 66 years on the planet I reflected how a knee jerk reaction on my part seemed to have won the day. I think there are plenty of bruises to be pushed - perhaps we need to seek them out and do it as much as possible.
Great piece, but I have to take issue with your caricature of deontology, as illustrated by the classic 'Nazis hunting Anne Frank' scenario. The problem is with the framing of the moral issue simply as 'one should not lie, therefore one should betray' when really there is a clash of at least two deontological values here: 'one should not lie'; 'one should not betray one whose life depends on your trust'. The nuanced challenge of deontology is how to make the choice between clashing moral values without the consequentialist's bland appeal to consequences. Here, a deontologist would have no difficulty in stating that non-betrayal takes precedence, but different schools of deontology may differ as to why.
Although to be fair, Kant himself may not have allowed for exceptions, regarding saving Anne Frank as a voluntary (imperfect) rather than absolute (perfect) duty. Ethicists in the Kantian tradition would rarely take such a view today.
Another great column Ian, well done. And a big part of the challenge facing those seeking to resist the UK becoming a far right oligarchy is the unwillingness of the whole political class (and Labour in particular) to work in collaboration with any other party to resist the tide. For example, I don’t recall any reference to scrapping FPTP at the Labour conference (happy to be corrected), when this would be a positive first step to a political world that required co-operation and compromise, not the never ending mud slinging that typifies political and media discourse in this country.
Not that I dont appreciate your dulcet tones but hearing this rather jolly posh male AI voice in a very uplifting way saying "Right fuck off you cunts" is quite enjoyable. I felt a bit 'seen' as the kids say reading this as I used to be so guilty of the ideology bit of an argument and remorselessly dismissive of the pragmatic side of the debate, however this has mellowed into a more balanced view with age thank fuck. I pretty much said this exact same sentence on Bluesky this week about Labour and all rpgessive parties attacking reform hard on who they are, who the members are and where the money comes from "Make it the chief issue, focus remorselessly on it. Force everyone on the right to either disassociate themselves from it or be branded a racist for holding it." I think as much as its the media's responsibility to do this its also all of ours who care about having a diverse vibrant nation and are genuinely terrified of the prospect of an autocratic regime in power like we are seeing played out over in the US. Case in point this weekend the Reform minister for Caerphilly posted a photo of the weekends rally of reform voters only on closer inspection not all is what it seems namely the weather because south wales has been fucking biblical with lashing rain and gale force winds yet the image shows a blue calm sky, closer inspection of the photo (I did this so you dont have to) reveals what appears to be a photo shopped image of a blurred out male - my money is its the recently disgraced but always disgraceful Nathan Gill and I have been using my modest social media offering to post this everywhere I can. Call the fuckers out for what they are because the truth hurts them and its the greatest weapon democracy has.
Definitely going to start using the phrase "things up with which I simply will not fucking put" in my daily life.
And the 'can non-white people be English?' thing is a great example of something that could make life difficult for Farage & Co; similar perhaps to the massive twattery of 'what is a woman?' being in just about every interview to a progressive politician a few short years ago. Time to make the far right fuckers squirm.
The phrase “up with which I will not put” has been attributed to W Churchill. I read it and then got utterly distracted because ID omitted the “up”. But I’m an editor by trade, and these things interrupt my train of thought! However…it is a neat way of identifying the line we will not cross..
Well said , and well over time to hold them deeply accountable . 👍🏻
Absurd pedancy, but you've inserted an "up" where one is missing in the email version (it might have been changed here), which says something about your generosity, or maybe cognitive overlap 🤷🏻♂️
Haha - you noticed! I felt that I'd add the 'up' myself and let Ian decide whether to change the non-email version at his convenience... or not :)
Brilliant piece Ian. And whilst I agree: pretty much nothing gets done without compromise; my fear is: the "other side" are no longer in the compromise business. We have reached the "Punch & Judy" stage in society. I also believe there's a fine line between compromise and surrender. And to misquote Prof Timothy Snyder's rule 1: "Never surrender in advance."
Re: Jeremy Corbyn: Love his principles, but confounded by his complete lack of strategy. Although the weaponisation of antisemitism against him did much to undermine any chance he might have had to make a difference.
Some of that Corbyn bought on himself. In an interview he was asked about something written by a Labour councillor. It certainly looked to be antisemitic and Labour were investigating but Corbyn just waffled, and waffled. For some reason he seemed incapable of agreeing it could be antisemitic. He was a crap leader.
Its difficult to formulate strategy, when from day one, the right wing of your party is determined you won't. He was abused by 'Blue Labour' (Tories by any other name) in Parliament, at Labour HQ, and harassed by them in the corridors of Whitehall, often when cameras were, quite by chance, filming everything. When he moved into his office as leader, all the equipment, anything not nailed down had been stripped out. Petty? Absolutely, but it also had the effect of delaying the leaderships ability to get anything done. We now know of course, that the Labour right was actively campaigning against the leadership on the streets, in the councils, and briefing against it behind their backs. Dirty tricks were rife, and the media were being fed constantly, to the point where even those great haters of the Left, Private Eye, stated that he was the most undermined and 'monstered' Labour leader in modern history. Yes, being human he didn't get everything right, but others made sure he stood no chance of ever being PM, and those others were, disgracefully, in his own party. Now of course, those same people are currently destroying any chance of Labour ever being elected again.
I think this is a reflection of how I’ve been feeling. The Overton Window has shifted so far to the right, I’ve ended up questioning my own liberalism. Not in a way that says that I should give those up, but in a way which makes me question whether liberal values are on the fringes of acceptability?
It probably doesn’t help that I have plenty of family, friends and colleagues who reinforce whatever shite Reform spew out, but on issues like immigration, I feel like I’m from another species, because I care about finding solutions that are both pragmatic but compassionate first and foremost.
Btw- been catching up on some Origin Story episodes I’ve missed. The British Chinese one was really refreshing.
The Overton window occurred to me, too, while reading this. I always thought that the whole point of political parties was to mediate opinion into deliverable policy, all based on core values. The Overton window used to be further left and if a Labour govt is reluctant to inch it back there, what hope do we all have?
Has the Overton window moved or has it just stretched right and now there's a gaping hole where the centre used to be?
I feel exactly the same.
Our leaders and our institutions have forsaken us, and left us to fight the battles alone. And one becomes afraid. Starmer has essentially abadoned his principles; Trump, Boris Johnson, never had them, nor Putin nor Orban. Everything has become transactional or negotiable. And, what to do with Tony Blair? How do we think of him? From Fionna O’Leary and Carole Cadwalladr: 'Blair is godfather to the oldest of Murdoch & Deng’s daughters. His TB Institute is swimming in Larry Ellison / Oracle to the tune of £half a BILLION. Ellison is best mates with Netanyahu, Oracle & its partner company Rafael Systems are deep in Israeli defence and intelligence industry.'
How can we fight battles when our leaders lack all conviction?
Ian, such an excellent essay.
It’s as though we are being pushed back to the Dark Ages , where all wealth and control lay within the barons and slave owners , the rest of us becoming mere serfs . I suspect it could get worse before it gets better .
We have yet to learn that you have to defend the gains made with the same vigour as they were wrested.
There are plenty of people willing to look away, complaisance cannot be discounted. There are lines, unlike Overton windows, they should not shift or drift. To do so renders the rights they have won meaningless if they are somehow lost in regression.
No good will come of chasing the assumed prejudices of an electorate, you end up with a coalition so fractious (see Johnson, B.) that chaos is the most likely outcome.
Perhaps it feels a little too late, but something is better than nothing.
I think you're giving way too much credit to the Labour party and Ezra Klein. Politics of values vs. politics of strategy? Politics of stupidity would be a better description for what both are doing.
Yes, when large swaths of the electorate move to the right it definitely requires a change of strategy for progressives, but it doesn't require us to assert our values any less forcefully, quite the opposite.
When far right views are in a tiny minority, then you can just ostracise that tiny minority, which no longer works when far right views enter the mainstream.
However, and I can't emphasise this enough, it is not a smart strategy to try and compromise with the far right, because the far right doesn't compromise. Hitler was able to seize power because conservative politicians in Germany thought they could compromise with him. The Reform party is going to win the next UK elections precisely because the Labour party are legitimising far right positions through words and actions - occasional speeches by Starmer notwithstanding. The idea that pandering to far right positions will help Labour stay in power and therefore prevent the worst is completely laughable and defies all historic precedent.
You absolutely need much better communications in the current situation. Just calling Farage a racist won't work. But you have lost the fight, when you start believing the far right propaganda that they are speaking for "the people".
Those who sympathise with far right views are not a homogeneous group. Some are genuine racists who are excited by the opportunity to be cruel to minorities. It is completely pointless to worry about these people and whether or not they feel insulted for being called racists.
But many are drawn to far right views, precisely because they do not see any clear opposition to far right positions. And these people can be won back if you make a compelling case for why far right demands are abhorrent. Normalising the far right just helps the far right.
Very good. There is one other point worth considering. Why have ideas once seen as unacceptable to most become acceptable to the extent that they can be discussed openly on national platforms and not just dismissed out of hand? This at the same time as so called cancel culture has supposedly been silencing those with such ideas.
I think that mainstream politics has to take much of the blame because they have allowed, to use a cumbersome phrase, the immiseration of the masses. In other words, whereas in the good times people could look forward to improving living standards and social conditions, now many cannot. Rather the reverse. So ideas that require a sense of frustration, resentment, injustice, envy or anger, to grow and flourish, receded in the good times, but have regained their appeal.
The reason Labour and others are struggling with this is that they have no answer to how to make ordinary lives better, and are just as wedded to the need to keep the corporations, financiers, oligarchs and tech bros on board as their opponents. If you are seen to have no answers, then people will eventually turn to those that claim they have.
I agree. Fear and insecurity brings out the worst in people or to use a fancy quote from Karl Marx: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but on the contrary, it is their social being that determines their consciousness."
A big driver of right wing sentiment is the collapsing economy. If you want an example of a "politics of strategy" worthy of the name, you can look to somebody like Gary Stevenson who avoids talking about topics such as immigration completely and just relentlessly stays on message about inequality and its consequences. This is a strategy that could actually work (meaning win an election), but the reason why the Labour party cannot follow such a strategy is that they have no intention of doing anything that would actually have a chance of reversing inequality in the UK.
Personally, I don't fully agree that you can fight the far right by just ignoring them. However I do admit that I could be wrong.
Mike, you are correct. If the Far Right are not resisted, well, history has shown only to clearly what happens. In the UK, we have always been, um, 'lucky', in that the Far Right vote has never held up. Mainly because, despite their views being widely shared by Conservative voters, loyalty to the Tory party is so ingrained, come election time, the far right vote went to the Conservatives, thus drawing their teeth. If you ever feel the need, members of the BUF were interviewed, and their comments reflected exactly that. They were frustrated that huge crowds (proven by ticket sales) often attended their meetings, but when the people that attended were asked if they would vote BUF, the answer was, and I quote, 'always the same. We support your views, but, I'm a lifelong Tory so I'll be sticking with them'.
Now though, disillusion with the Conservatives, coupled with Brexit, the surge of bigotry fired by the Conservatives themselves, plus the media ramping up even their usual bigoted rhetoric, and, as you rightly say, economic woes, we are seeing the loyalty to the Conservatives finally break, and voters switching to populists offering them easy answers to complex questions.
Of course though, as Ian says, and his adherents repeat on countless posts, its really all the left, Corbyn, woke, and politically correct social commentators fault.
But that's what comes of backing the wrong horse and continually, as with this article, refusing to accept you have.
Ezra Klein is wrong because we all have to draw the line on what is and isn't acceptable. Has he never seen Ibsen's 'An Enemy of the People'? I live in a constituency that for many years has voted Tory and also voted for Brexit. I didn't draw my line somewhere else because of this. No, both decisions were stupid and many suffered in consequence (and are still suffering).
I compromised at the last election by voting Labour because it seemed the best way to remove the Tories. But there are some things on which one cannot and should not compromise and if the Trump administration and its execrable policies on mass deportation and suppression of opposition voices isn't amongst them then what is for people like Klein?
I’m with you
But unfortunately 90% of the British media has not been for at least a decade
Poor journalists and fake journalists, influencers and mendacious actors
have repeated the simplistic slogans and sound bites for so long
Credible journalists have to up their game now
We can’t get our country or the world back on track without thought provoking pieces of real journalism like this
I agree, Debbie.
"said that he would have thought Farage’s policy was racist years ago, but now the public mood has changed, so it isn’t." What horrific utter fucking horseshit. This strategy-driven "flexible morality" is repugnant; this was the MacSweenyist Labour approach prior to Kier's speech. I do wonder whether (somebody) had a word in his shell-like?
Goodwin and Oakshott have both broken the law; their scrawlings are clearly discrimination in contravention of 2010 Equalities Act. Arrest them.
Ocenaudio is perfect for you. It is one track voice recording software from Brazil, it's libre, run by donations, and it's super easy to navigate. When all you are recordsing is voice, you don't need all the bells and whistles of music software.
https://www.ocenaudio.com/
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Amazing thank you
Loved this article. Against my better judgement and experience I was momentarily drawn into a political "discussion" at work yesterday. Somebody made the point about how popular and approved of Farage was, as if that basically destroyed all counter arguments. I reacted almost instinctively to point out that Hitler was popular too. No come back was forthcoming. For probably the first time in my 66 years on the planet I reflected how a knee jerk reaction on my part seemed to have won the day. I think there are plenty of bruises to be pushed - perhaps we need to seek them out and do it as much as possible.
Ian, I’ve always been a fan but this takes it to a new level! Loved the piece.
A deeply thought-provoking piece, Ian. I think it answered a number of questions with which I’ve been contorting myself. Thank-you.
A very good fleshing out of the old saying that for evil to win, it only needs good people to stay silent.
Great piece, but I have to take issue with your caricature of deontology, as illustrated by the classic 'Nazis hunting Anne Frank' scenario. The problem is with the framing of the moral issue simply as 'one should not lie, therefore one should betray' when really there is a clash of at least two deontological values here: 'one should not lie'; 'one should not betray one whose life depends on your trust'. The nuanced challenge of deontology is how to make the choice between clashing moral values without the consequentialist's bland appeal to consequences. Here, a deontologist would have no difficulty in stating that non-betrayal takes precedence, but different schools of deontology may differ as to why.
Although to be fair, Kant himself may not have allowed for exceptions, regarding saving Anne Frank as a voluntary (imperfect) rather than absolute (perfect) duty. Ethicists in the Kantian tradition would rarely take such a view today.
Another great column Ian, well done. And a big part of the challenge facing those seeking to resist the UK becoming a far right oligarchy is the unwillingness of the whole political class (and Labour in particular) to work in collaboration with any other party to resist the tide. For example, I don’t recall any reference to scrapping FPTP at the Labour conference (happy to be corrected), when this would be a positive first step to a political world that required co-operation and compromise, not the never ending mud slinging that typifies political and media discourse in this country.
Not that I dont appreciate your dulcet tones but hearing this rather jolly posh male AI voice in a very uplifting way saying "Right fuck off you cunts" is quite enjoyable. I felt a bit 'seen' as the kids say reading this as I used to be so guilty of the ideology bit of an argument and remorselessly dismissive of the pragmatic side of the debate, however this has mellowed into a more balanced view with age thank fuck. I pretty much said this exact same sentence on Bluesky this week about Labour and all rpgessive parties attacking reform hard on who they are, who the members are and where the money comes from "Make it the chief issue, focus remorselessly on it. Force everyone on the right to either disassociate themselves from it or be branded a racist for holding it." I think as much as its the media's responsibility to do this its also all of ours who care about having a diverse vibrant nation and are genuinely terrified of the prospect of an autocratic regime in power like we are seeing played out over in the US. Case in point this weekend the Reform minister for Caerphilly posted a photo of the weekends rally of reform voters only on closer inspection not all is what it seems namely the weather because south wales has been fucking biblical with lashing rain and gale force winds yet the image shows a blue calm sky, closer inspection of the photo (I did this so you dont have to) reveals what appears to be a photo shopped image of a blurred out male - my money is its the recently disgraced but always disgraceful Nathan Gill and I have been using my modest social media offering to post this everywhere I can. Call the fuckers out for what they are because the truth hurts them and its the greatest weapon democracy has.