Our wonderful caring government unveiled its new immigration policy this week and, as we’ve come to expect from them, it’s petty, restrictive and nasty. EU citizens will, in the future, have to earn over £30,000 a year in order to apply for residency in the UK. What the government didn’t say was that UK citizens who wish to reside in the EU will doubtless be subject to similar restrictions in future. Reciprocity rules OK. What it means for all those UK citizens who currently reside in EU countries, I've no idea.
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| Steve Bell in The Guardian, 20th December 2018 |
Mrs May is obsessed with immigration and she panders to the xenophobes who infest the comments sections of the press. Here's an example of what I mean. I've just read a story in an on-line edition of a newspaper about a businessman in Scotland who is originally from Bangladesh. He has been refused permanent right to remain in the UK despite having lived here legally for 15 years and owning a successful business employing five people, people who now seem set to lose their jobs. The story is one thing but the comments below the article are another. Here the usual British nationalist trolls are at their small minded worse. Empathy is a foreign quality to them. Compassion is a curse to them. These are the nasty little people that Theresa May has in mind when she frames her immigration policy. This is British nationalism in action. It’s not pretty. It’s not dignified. And I think it stinks.
Hopefully it won't be too long before the real opposition, which isn’t the Labour Party unfortunately, will bring forward a No Confidence motion in the government. Labour will probably abstain. Of course, they will. To support it would be to do something positive. This will be the first time in decades that a government has been subject to a No Confidence motion, yet it’s lost in the shouting, the infantile behaviour and the insult to the intelligence of the public which passes for parliamentary debate.
But none of this gets properly aired in parliament or the press. Instead of holding the government to account, we get a pantomime. And that’s quite literally what we witnessed a couple of days ago during Prime Minister’s Questions. It was a childish and stupid display of crowing and question avoiding of the sort we’ve come to expect from a government which has absolutely no intention of explaining itself, never mind being held to account by the Opposition. Mrs May played the pantomime dame, urged on by her hysterical supporters. This playground behaviour was later dismissed by the Leader of the House, Andrea Leadsom, as "parliamentary banter". What have we come to?
Jeremy Corbyn reacted to this infantile display by muttering something. Then the news was dominated by the allegation that Jezza called Mother Theresa a stupid woman. Because apparently a perceived personal slur against Theresa May is the most important thing that’s happening just now. To the allegations that Jeremy Corbyn is anti-semitic, we can now add the allegation that he’s sexist. And I will say that the phrase “stupid woman” is sexist in a way that “stupid man” is not. However Jezza insists that he didn’t mutter “stupid woman” after Theresa May’s display of childish stupidity which was accompanied by the jeering support of her braying backbench donkeys. He claims that what he said was “stupid people”. A well respected lip reader is quoted as saying: "It’s true that those two words can be difficult to distinguish when all you have to go on is lip reading. The words woman and people both consist of a series of labial consonants followed by a vowel and ending with a alveolar consonant. To pronounce both words you make two movements causing closure or partial closure of the lips followed by a tongue gesture towards the gum ridge, also known as the alveolar ridge. When a person is muttering, as Corbyn was, lip movements are not always fully and clearly articulated. Without any audio it’s impossible to tell which word he actually said during the exchange."
I’ve played the sequence over several times. It does look to me as though he did, in fact, say “stupid woman”, but I’m not a lipreader. He could just as easily have said “stupid people”, “stupid arseholes” or “stupid tossers”, all of which also consist of the labial-labial-alveolar sequence. Naturally the Tories are going to select the option that allows them to feel most outraged and which conveniently distracts from their actual stupidity. Because that's what it was - synthetic outrage designed to disguise their questionable policies. And the tactic worked - amongst those easily fooled by this bunch of clowns.
What looks bad is that right after the event Jeremy scuttled out of the chamber and didn’t make a formal statement to clarify his remark. If he’d got up immediately and stated that he’d actually said “stupid people” he could have killed off the matter. Instead the Tories are going to town on it, Corbyn looks evasive, and the government has got off the hook for its woeful performance on Brexit and its nasty immigration plans. It’s yet another own goal from the Labour leader. The greatest asset this woeful and pathetically inadequate government possesses is that it’s confronted by an equally woeful and pathetically inadequate official opposition. The point is that the Tories are by no means innocent wallflowers when it comes to insulting behaviour. They’re certainly not innocent when it comes to pandering to racists and bigots in how they frame government policy. You can judge for yourself which is worse.
However we’re now in a place where stupid people behaving stupidly believe it’s a greater insult to be called stupid than it’s insulting to everyone else for them to be dangerously and selfishly stupid. They’re wrecking all our futures, running roughshod over what passes for a British constitution, playing Brexit chicken in an effort to sideline parliament. But that’s nothing compared to a mumbled personal insult, if that’s indeed what it was. If that’s not proof all by itself of just how stupid the Tory party is, and more to the point just how stupid they think the rest of us are, I’m not really sure what is.
Hopefully it won't be too long before the real opposition, which isn’t the Labour Party unfortunately, will bring forward a No Confidence motion in the government. Labour will probably abstain. Of course, they will. To support it would be to do something positive. This will be the first time in decades that a government has been subject to a No Confidence motion, yet it’s lost in the shouting, the infantile behaviour and the insult to the intelligence of the public which passes for parliamentary debate.
But none of this gets properly aired in parliament or the press. Instead of holding the government to account, we get a pantomime. And that’s quite literally what we witnessed a couple of days ago during Prime Minister’s Questions. It was a childish and stupid display of crowing and question avoiding of the sort we’ve come to expect from a government which has absolutely no intention of explaining itself, never mind being held to account by the Opposition. Mrs May played the pantomime dame, urged on by her hysterical supporters. This playground behaviour was later dismissed by the Leader of the House, Andrea Leadsom, as "parliamentary banter". What have we come to?
Jeremy Corbyn reacted to this infantile display by muttering something. Then the news was dominated by the allegation that Jezza called Mother Theresa a stupid woman. Because apparently a perceived personal slur against Theresa May is the most important thing that’s happening just now. To the allegations that Jeremy Corbyn is anti-semitic, we can now add the allegation that he’s sexist. And I will say that the phrase “stupid woman” is sexist in a way that “stupid man” is not. However Jezza insists that he didn’t mutter “stupid woman” after Theresa May’s display of childish stupidity which was accompanied by the jeering support of her braying backbench donkeys. He claims that what he said was “stupid people”. A well respected lip reader is quoted as saying: "It’s true that those two words can be difficult to distinguish when all you have to go on is lip reading. The words woman and people both consist of a series of labial consonants followed by a vowel and ending with a alveolar consonant. To pronounce both words you make two movements causing closure or partial closure of the lips followed by a tongue gesture towards the gum ridge, also known as the alveolar ridge. When a person is muttering, as Corbyn was, lip movements are not always fully and clearly articulated. Without any audio it’s impossible to tell which word he actually said during the exchange."
What looks bad is that right after the event Jeremy scuttled out of the chamber and didn’t make a formal statement to clarify his remark. If he’d got up immediately and stated that he’d actually said “stupid people” he could have killed off the matter. Instead the Tories are going to town on it, Corbyn looks evasive, and the government has got off the hook for its woeful performance on Brexit and its nasty immigration plans. It’s yet another own goal from the Labour leader. The greatest asset this woeful and pathetically inadequate government possesses is that it’s confronted by an equally woeful and pathetically inadequate official opposition. The point is that the Tories are by no means innocent wallflowers when it comes to insulting behaviour. They’re certainly not innocent when it comes to pandering to racists and bigots in how they frame government policy. You can judge for yourself which is worse.
However we’re now in a place where stupid people behaving stupidly believe it’s a greater insult to be called stupid than it’s insulting to everyone else for them to be dangerously and selfishly stupid. They’re wrecking all our futures, running roughshod over what passes for a British constitution, playing Brexit chicken in an effort to sideline parliament. But that’s nothing compared to a mumbled personal insult, if that’s indeed what it was. If that’s not proof all by itself of just how stupid the Tory party is, and more to the point just how stupid they think the rest of us are, I’m not really sure what is.
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| Martin Riddell in The Guardian, 21st December 2018 |
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