2024 General Election Preview

I've been putting off a review of election leaflets because... we simply haven't had any to review. Labour are the only party to get in touch. We have had three leaflets from them. So my traditional review of pre-election literature feels like a waste of time this time.

All we got...

Technically we are in a newish constituency because the boundaries have been redrawn. The net result of this is that the number of parliamentary seats in Wales has reduced from 40 to 32. That means we get 20% fewer politicians.

The irony is that Labour's central message is "Change", except, as Cathy pointed out, all we've ever had here in Grangetown is Labour. Real change here would mean voting in an MP from any other party!

Unfortunately we don't get the option of voting for an official Plaid Cymru candidate this time. Plaid announced they were withdrawing support for their candidate because of anti-semitic tweets just after the cut off date to get a replacement in (more details in this report, which includes details of the tweets). This isn't the first time Plaid have had a candidate with a dodgy track record on social media in our constituency. It's a real shame this has happened again because I wanted to vote for them.

Other people I've talked to have had lots of leaflets. I have noticed a major difference between a Labour leaflet posted through my mum's door and the ones we have received. The leaflet delivered in Shrewsbury was this:

Yes, actually a Labour leaflet!

In contrast, the Labour leaflets we have received have not featured this 'Stop the Boats' messaging. I strongly suspect that is because Shrewsbury's population is 97% white and skews towards older people, and the profiling experts would assume that means they will respond positively to anti-immigrant rhetoric. (My mum didn't!)

Meanwhile where we live is the most multicultural community in Wales. This is reflected in the (possibly photoshopped) picture of Labour supporters with our incumbent MP on his leaflet. 

I find that the most cynical aspect of this - the blatant racist 'Stop the Boats' rhetoric is bad enough, but Labour don't even have the guts to stand by their racism in communities that are more likely to be offended by it.

I am completely repelled by the leaflet that was delivered to my mum's. I've written before how my grandmother moved to Britain when she was 19 and how both she, and my mum, experienced racism. One day I will blog about my experience as a five year-old refugee - and how my family were given a 30 minute warning to pack everything and head to the nearest border. It happened while we lived in Africa and it has taken me years to properly grasp what was going on and come to terms with how much danger we were in. 

I wouldn't wish the experience of racist abuse or being a refugee on anyone. But you shouldn't have had to have experienced those things to have empathy and compassion for people in that situation. The way the people crossing the channel in small boats are monsterised and treated as less than human by the media and the right wing parties is sickening. And now Labour are doing it too. 

This is a deal-breaker for me. Labour are pandering to racists - and doing it dishonestly at that, by saying racist things to get racists to vote for them and then being careful not to mention it in other communities. The duplicity in that makes them completely unpalatable. 

Whataboutery and moral equivalency - weapons in the war on truth part 3

This is my third post in a row about whataboutery. I've previously written about 'moral equivalency' and how whatabouterists try to deflect criticism by criticising the critics. But sometimes whatabouterists stray into bold new territory. Today's quality whataboutery came on yet another post on Facebook about Dominic Cummings.

A friend shared a story from someone who had been in a very similar position to Dominic Cummings but had followed the quarantine rules. It was difficult for that person to follow the rules, but it was the right thing to do. They were justifiably annoyed that Dominic Cummings had ignored the quarantine rules and potentially exposed a lot of other people to Coronavirus.

The very first comment on the shared post included the phrase "What about..." It's a textbook start for some whataboutery, and then it kicked into an unexpected direction. Here's the post.

In case you can't read the reply, here it is a bit bigger.

It reads as follows:

"Think it's time to move on. Starter is a hypocrite and CANNOT be trusted. What about the French escorting migrants to British eaters and dumping there? Where it the new coverage over this - nowhere and the media wiggle to be the best at destroying someone it goes over their pathetic agenda." [sic]

I told you it was quality whataboutery. It was clearly typed in a hurry by someone in a rush to tick lots of boxes. "Time to move on." they say. I have a lot to say about that phrase. It's the catchphrase of an authoritarian person who does not want to be held to account for their actions. (That's a future blog post right there.)

By "Starter", they actually mean Starmer, as in Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour party. Apparently he "CANNOT be trusted". The use of CAPS is beloved of whatabouterists. But who said anything about Starmer? This, again, is an attempt to bring the "other side" in and pretend this is only a political argument. It was heartening to see that subsequent commenters just ignored this libellous comment and avoided the trap of defending Starmer. That's not the subject in hand and the distraction was ignored.

Then we get the "What about...?" Just to clarify, they mean migrants being escorted to British waters, not to British eaters. E and W are easy keys to mix up when you're keen to get your comment in. I thought I'd best explain, just in case you were worried about cannibalism.

I have no idea what relevance the French navy's actions have to the discussion at hand. It's a classic example of an attempt at derailment and deflection - let's talk about another issue! Why isn't that news?

And they're still not finished. This is a real kitchen sink job - everything is going in! As we saw in my previous post, the actions of the media are criticised. They are trying to destroy Dominic Cummings in pursuit of "their pathetic agenda". Again, no acknowledgment that none of this would have happened if Dominic Cummings had not broken quarantine law, or had resigned when the story broke. No, this is all the media's fault. Blame-shifting is an important aspect of whataboutery.

In my previous posts I've blacked out the names of the people making the posts. I almost didn't bother with this one because they sound like a racist and I think people should own their shit when it comes to that sort of thing. But I'm nice. However, I did reply to him, as follows.

"[To Name] I agree it's disgusting that migrants aren't helped safely ashore and cared for. More should be done for them. They shouldn't just be dumped."

They haven't responded to that. That's probably because whatabouterists aren't actually looking for a sensible debate on the points they ask 'what about' about. They just throw stuff into the mixer to confuse the conversation and obscure the point of it. I wasn't expecting a response and did it mainly for my own amusement, and also because I like pushing the buttons of people who blame all the ills of society on immigration.

I'm concluding this mini-series of blog posts about whataboutery here. I suspect we will continue to see a lot of it on social media in the coming months though.

What would a UKIP Britain look like?

UKIP are making the news. Putting aside all the more outlandish elements – like the major donor who thinks it should be illegal for women to wear trousers, or the councillor who thinks there’s a causal link between gay marriages and flooding, or the guy who thinks we should euthanize babies with Down’s Syndrome (these are all real things – Google them) – there is a chance of electoral success in 2015.

Certainly, what UKIP has done is drive an increasingly hostile political narrative around immigration. The way immigration is reported and the way immigrants are written about in the press is almost entirely negative. It’s as if wanting to live somewhere else is criminally immoral and anyone wanting to move overseas is a black-hearted monster. Which I guess is bad news for the one and half million British-born people sunning it up in Spain.

I have a stake in the immigration debate because my Grandmother was an immigrant. She met and married my Granddad while he was on active service during the war – getting married in 1945 before the war ended. She gave birth to my Mum just after coming to this country, in January 1946.

It was a difficult time to be an immigrant. Being Scandinavian, Grandma had an accent that sounded a bit German to many people. Many men had been killed in the war, so there was an imbalance in society meaning many women were unlikely to meet and marry someone. So there was resentment of a foreigner marrying a man, when men generally were in short supply. (My Grandma was told this.)

My Mum has told me that when she was little the other mums in her village wouldn’t let their children play with her. For no other reason than her mum (my Gran) was foreign.

These days we would call that racist. And rightly so, because it was.

But that racism is what I think of when I hear Nigel Farage braying on about immigrants. The narratives we listen to shape our thought patterns. If we really believe the wicked foreigners are after our jobs and our women and our comfortable lifestyles; if we think they are criminals and thieves, then that will shape how we respond to them.

Racism is subtle. We can easily find ourselves agreeing with comments like the one Nigel Farage made about not wanting to live next door to a family of Romanians. And the next thing is you’re not allowing your kids to play with their kids for no other reason than because you are racist.

And that’s what I think a UKIP Britain would look like. It’s sad so many people seem to think that would be a better place to live. I hoped people were better than that.

National identity

Last night's life group discussion was on immigration. Debate got a bit heated at times too.

One of the questions we had in our sub-group was "What makes a national identity?" And I was thinking about that and I said: 'Well, it's the people, surely.' Yes, there's the cultural heritage, the historical legacy of what's gone before, but really we are responsible for the national identity.

The big questions about being British revolve for me around not so much whether we are British, but what do we want being British to be. Is our national identity what we are, or what we choose? Are we bound by what we've inherited or are we free to shape our own destiny?

So, those things we like to think characterise Britishness - the ideal of fair play, of justice, of standing up for the underdog, of doing what's right even if it's hard, of rejecting tyranny, of showing compassion for your neighbour and even your enemy - as evidenced by the many, many stories of German airmen who landed having been shot down and were immediately offered a cup of tea. All those things are actually related to who we are as people and how we behave towards others.

And if it's about choosing to live like that, then really it's not a question of colour, or where you were born.