The tories lost the closest race as well. The West Midlands Mayorship went right down to the wire:
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Again with the lack of oneboxing
Itâs been two years since the UKâs poop-engulfed beaches became a national scandal. Now itâs even worse
https://edition.cnn.com/england-uk-sewage-poop-beach/index.html
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I feel you on that one. My honest vote would have been Green but I ended up voting Labour as damage limitation more than anything else.
My borough voted for Hall anyway, so my vote didnât count for much but now I canât help but feel deeply uncomfortable around my neighbours.
Are they that stupid, or are they just racists?
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At the time of writing, the Conservative Party are down three hundred and ninety-six council seats* (* councillors, not council seats), which is such a monumentally huge disaster that itâs kind of hard to really get across.
Itâs like, imagine Chernobyl happened because the Hindenburg crashed into it because the pilot shot himself because he found out that his mother had just died in the Titanic.
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Conservatives not getting elected is never a disaster.
The analogy should be something like âyour team wins the World Cup, European cup, and the Eurovisionâ or something like that.
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Ah yes the town of Bushmills⊠lovely place, like a painting on a biscuit tin. Well tended and wealthy. Neat as a pin. Iâm told the town Jack Danielâs comes from is similar.
I wouldnât stop the car there.
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A world in which you donât interact with anyone who doesnât look or act like you, and in which all the media you consume tells you that everywhere else is a hellhole and they are coming to take your stuff and/or kill you, is one that leads inexorably to the level of Hallâs campaign.
So no, I donât think Iâm quite willing to call them all stupid or racist. Just very badly informed. And Iâm not sure that the modern media world is able (or willing) to deal with that problem, since it is their entire raison dâĂȘtre.
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Why do they want her?
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Keir Starmer wants as many Labour seats as possible as long as they are in right wing hands, Natalie Elphicke wants to stay being an MP.
Itâs a match made in hell.
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I understood she was not standing in the General Election to spend more time with her rapist ex-husband.
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Maybe.
I stopped paying attention to election news when Keir Starmer started attempting a Bigger Arsehole competition with the Tories. All I have found out is that you can be utterly repellent even if you are in a distant second place.
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Looks like that was the price extracted for getting her not to run in a leadership election. The sooner sheâs out of there the better.
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Iâm not sure about that. Hall (like Goldsmith, the previous Tory mayoral candidate) used both overtly racist statements and aggressively astro-turfed campaigns that were based on racism, in order to attract aggrieved, white, working-class suburban voters.
Fortunately, there werenât enough of those voters in either election to win, but at what point does willful ignorance/stupidity cross the line into willful racism and vice versa? Is there really any need to split the difference?
I grew up in the neighbouring borough and remember people breaking into my (40% non-white, selective) school in order to spray swastikas on the playground, school buildings, and school coach. I also remember several of my school friends being racially assaulted on the way home, to the point that we, as white students, were encouraged to act as chaperones to them to make sure that they werenât targeted by racists on the way home.
That was 25 years ago. People now have access to pretty much the entirety of human knowledge on the internet with a few clicks, and yet there is a sizeable minority of people (in South London at least) who still willfully think âmy life is shit, and thatâs because of immigrants.â We have a Muslim Mayor, a Prime Minister who is of Indian descent, and a more diverse city than ever before.
And yet, some people still choose to be racist/ignorant, because the idea of changing how they see the world is anathema to them. Itâs not the 70s/80s/90s any more. If you choose to be racist and/or ignorant in 2024, thatâs a personal choice that you have made because you donât want to upset your world view.
That is definitely intertwined with the opinions that you hear from your peer group, but I still feel that it takes a certain amount of effort to still agree, in 2024, with the National Frontâs policies from the 1980s when other norms that were okay at the time, such as drink-driving, are met with near-universal disapproval.
For me, a large part of the recent surge in racist beliefs in the UK since around 2001 have occurred as a direct result of our overtly racist media and politicians who cater to it.
Yes, if the only media that you consume is the Daily Mail, you will almost certainly hold racist views as a result. That said, why do we hold those peopleâs racist views as somehow intractable and worthy of consideration, when no one says the same things about our attitudes towards, for example, drink-driving, smoking, or gay marriage? Does it have anything to do with the attitudes espoused by our (extremely) right-wing media and our politicians, who are terrified of contradicting anything they say?
ETA: I guess what I mean is that if, at this point in time, you still choose to get your information from the Daily Mail, thatâs because youâre a racist who likes being told how to think. I feel like âill-informedâ is too generous a term.
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Oh, those are all fair points, and I agree with almost all of them.
The old trope about people getting more conservative as they get older is simply that they are unable to change and the world carries on doing so. Most of us would like the world to be as it was when were ten, because it was just about comprehensible then (before senior school squashed all hope out of most of us, except the top public schoolboys of course.) Not everyone, mind, but itâs the easiest route to follow.
Fundamentally though, I think thereâs a difference between 'phobic positions and general social conformity positions. Drink-driving or smoking indoors or fox hunting or seatbelts or whatever feel like category differences to me, but I am willing to admit that itâs a very interesting distinction and worthy of discussion!
But I certainly wasnât contending that we should hold the views of racists and other 'phobes as being intractable; quite the opposite in fact. Indeed, I specifically noted that the problem was almost certainly that the media model depended upon them being perceived as intractable, and therefore there was little incentive to change. (Consider, for instance, the âsmall boatsâ issue. Which could be solved at a cost far less than the current system, because itâs not a real problem, but then it wouldnât be a populist political or media issue any more.) In other words, I entirely agree that the (depressing) regressive surge of this century can largely be put down to populist media and the bandwagoning politicians. Because when I have had conversations with people, a lot of these media-driven positions fall apart quickly.
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commentary from the Guardian, FWIWâŠ
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