British Right-Wing Pundits

We'll see how hard a time he has getting rid of it, it'll be less hard than you think once he persuades the middle classes it's in their interest (xxpost)

Well, I think if it were politically possible to get rid of the NHS, it would have already been done. Anyway, doesn't Cameron have a disabled kid or something. He probably uses the NHS more than the average Tory.

They are getting rid of it already, piece by piece

um guys the nhs is already on the way out...

xpost!

BUT immigration is the no 1 concern of uk voters! apprently. maybe my first hypothesis was v v wrong.

Not according to the most recent polls.

Being tough on immigration didn't do Michael Howard much good last time round did it?

... and wasn't Cameron one of those responsible for that policy?

parties don't campaign on 'number one concern of voters' in general but the voters who will swing the election, ie middle england blah blah blah.

Middle england (according to the polls) cares about health and house prices.

healthy and house prices

fixed

what on earth could their problem be with house prices!? they are winning that war. it would be interesting to know the nature of middle england's concern w. health -- taking my parents as barometer of same, their problem isn't exactly lack of service but quality of it: hospital bugs etc. a move by the tories towards increased private provision probably wouldn't phase them too much.

their kids getting on the property ladder?

Having to live near poor people?

are the right wing pundits repping for "middle england" thou? as dom points out Littlejohn is, or at least was, the voice of white van man. all the big scares of recent years have focused on working class fears as much as middle england haven't they?

the fact that homeowners who actually rent their houses from the bank think theyre rich overnight and are spending the paper money they dont have?

Ha ha, who cares about "working class fears"?

Difference between white working class fears of immigration and middle England fears of immigration? Straightforward difference of economics vs culture?

also theres a sense that rightwing british pundits dont really believe that much in what they right, so it all comes off a bit geezer down the pub, who says one thing one minute and another the next

a decent education system in this country might mean people writing right instead of righting write

If nothing else, the French election campaign makes me feel nostalgic for the days when one party stood for something and another party stood for something else, clearcut with no ambiguity and no chasing after the same limited and overrated floating electorate.

perhaps with a decent university system that keeps the poor out, some of them may even write correctly

"the fact that homeowners who actually rent their houses from the bank think theyre rich overnight and are spending the paper money they dont have?

-- 600, Tuesday, April 24, 2007 6:05 PM (4 minutes ago)"

lol 8080

There are a lot of rent-a-rightie types on the op ed pages of the Times who you know cynically knock out 500 words of half-hearted spleen on the turn of a dime and really don't give a toss one way or the other - stand up Stephen Pollard, Ross Clark, Mick Hume and Rosemary Righter, which latter name could have come straight out of Kingsley Amis.

oh i think mick hume cares a lot. he's sinister fucker with a scary team.

Since when was Mick Hume on Sinister?

Still, never trust an ex-Marxist.

i think saying they don't actually believe what they're saying is a bit dangerous. cf that thread about melanie phillips and the missing WMDs.

I've said this before elsewhere on ILE, but Peter Cook used to write a fervently right-wing column for the Daily Mail in '76-8. He said he didn't agree with a word of it but he thought that was the kind of writing the editor of the Daily Mail wanted, and it paid good money. Most notoriously, he gave a scathing denouncement of punk rock which he'd written with Malcolm McLaren the night before.

what thread was that?

i know what you mean acrobat. but melanie p means every word of what she says. she is less of a menace than the others, partly because that imo. which sounds odd but basically i don't think many guardian writers are really very committed to any kind of politics, they, like their right-wing counterparts, churn out perversely 'reassuring' copy each day, confirming their readers' half-thought out prejudices. polly toynbee and jackie ashley exist solely as government mouthpieces, for example.

crosspost

the cook columns are really funny though!

He also mocked the idea that Martin Luther King was a good person because he used to sleep around, some of the columns are in that "I Was Born An Only Twin" collection.

xp

Does this guy count as a rightwing pundit? Or is he a bit too button-down for the raving loon aspect?

He's the kind who's exported to america, at least, since he's over here on a book tour.

http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=40&threadid=53352#unread

this thread. i flicked through the spectator for the first time ever last week. it was really horrible.

xpost

Upper class twit (xp)

he's crazy like a right-leaning fox.

good parody of him in last week's private eye.

xpost

"'reassuring' copy"

hmmm...

i'm thinking of toynbee really -- totally reliable worldview, could have been written any time in the last century.

i remember that labour voters used to say, well yeah blair *is* a dick, but wait till brown comes in, then it'll be sweet. so we live in interesting times.

I find Toynbee a lot more dangerous than pretty much any right-wing British pundit, to be honest.

When Blair gets back from saving the Middle East...

Are the right-wingers in Britian opposed to TWAT?

It's complicated. Provisionally, no. In reality, sort of.

Daily Mail have pretty much opposed any war fought by Blair.

well it's all sort of paradoxiacal innit. the old divisions have become bluured. a government that, if the strawmanning can work properly, has to be characterized as left wing fighting an "imperialist" war. with brown coming in i guess the old battles may be revived SOUR SOCIALIST SCOT WANTS YR TAXES!

british culture is weird atm, reactionary seems to be the new subversive. or at least people (mark lawson) can still be claiming the likes of ricky gervais, little britain etc to be something other than the heirs of love thy neighbour. also see the hideousness have i got news for you has become: "john prescott is a fat cunt lol lol, boris johnson is a top wheeze jeremy clarkson lol global warming doesn't exist ha ha ha..."

No mention of Patrick O'Flynn? from The Worlds Greatest Newspaper?

Monday's was a cracker.

[Removed Illegal Link]

It even came complete with the Expresses favourite photo...
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Which is my opinion of right-wing pundits, and my inability to post links...

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Oh read it for yrselves...

THE Rowntree report into poverty levels among Britain's ethnic minority communities is, predictably, being used by left-wingers to call for even more public spending and even more "anti-racism" initiatives.

The report reveals that poverty rates are far higher among black and Asian communities than among whites.

Bangladeshi and Pakistani families are particularly likely to live in poverty.

But there is another way to read this report.

What it actually does - though this is not what its liberal leftish authors will have intended - is to give the lie to claims that mass immigration has always been in the national economic interest.

It is common ground now among Left and Right that economic participation is the way to eliminate poverty. So a community with lots of poverty will tend to be a community in which relatively few people are making an economic contribution.

Therefore, not only are Muslim communities in the inner-cities the source of cultural and political tension with mainstream Britain, they are also revealed to be a major economic burden too.

Their economic participation rates are extremely low. If you believe, as I do, that this is primarily due to cultural factors rather than any overwhelming anti-Asian racism in Britain, then it becomes even clearer that the mass immigration of these groups with no simultaneous demand being made of them to integrate, has not so far been in the interests of Britain as a whole.

Given the large family sizes which are typical in these communities, they must also be putting a big strain on public services and social housing.

If we are to build a tolerant, successful, multi-racial Britain then people must be persuaded to stop using their ethnic origin as an excuse for underachievement or anti-social conduct. Left-wingers should be challenging members of these communities to fulfill their human potential, not giving them more excuses to view themselves as victims.

No doubt racism does still exist towards the ethnic minorities, but it is clearly not the main reason for some groups prospering and others ending up in poverty. It cannot explain why the Jews and Chinese have been economically successful and yet people from Pakistan and Bangladesh have, in general, not been. Neither can it explain why black boys and the children of Irish travellers are much more likely than average to be expelled from schools, while Indian and Chinese children are much less likely.

Is there an army of black-hating, traveller-baiting state school teachers out there which at the same time has an irrational adoration for Chinese and Indian children? I hardly think so. Different family structures are resulting in different types of behaviour across the ethnic groups.

The answer to problems of poverty and crime have to come from within the communities themselves. It is time for law-abiding Britons to stop beating themselves up about the failure of large proportions of people from some immigrant groups to succeed.

So you don't want to be poor? So learn the language, work hard at school, get a job and only bring into the world only the number of children that you can support out of your own income. So you don't want to end up in prison? Then stop breaking the law. And that applies whether you are black, white or sky-blue pink.

oh man daily mail are going down the BAN ABORTION road. well the front page yesterday was. jesus.

i was pretty shocked by the number of gps who thought it should be illegal.

I'm guessing the Daily Mail didn't mention that the reason for that is probably because of the disproportionate number of British GPs who are devoutly Hindu, huh?