A Round Up

So, this year's Tory conference glories include these new gems:

All companies who hire foreign workers to disclose the numbers of foreign workers they employ  (I don't think identities were mentioned, but Mallory's all about the info, so doubtless names would be greatly appreciated) just to see if they are employing foreigners where they could be hiring Brits. Name and shame.

All schools to provide lists of foreign children attending.

All foreign doctors to be 'phased out,' after we have retrained enough 'home-grown' talent to replace them.

The Home Secretary mirroring Chapter 2 of Mein Kampf.

N.I and Scotland to just shut the hell up and obey regarding Brexit, no input.

Fracking decision overturned in Lancashire.  Going ahead of course.

Opting out of European Human Rights laws  re soldiers in war.

The words that will resound through history; "If you believe you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere.'

There's more. Even my more hawkish rightwing friends are very quiet right now. Because whether they believe or whether they don't believe, they know what this is.

Continuing...

May wouldn't dare come out with this hideous rubbish if she believed Corbyn could provide proper opposition. What it has done is highlight:

a) Her total faith that he can do jack

b) A deep strain of oppressive nationalism that is not expelled to the outer fringes, but lives and thrives in the heart of the Tory party. I I experienced it in childhood and have long known of its existence. But to see it validated so publically makes me think she is desperate,not only to keep the party together but to hoover up voters from Ukip. The tory majority isn't huge.  But if Corbyn posits no threat, why does she have to do that?

c) A very real lack of integrity.  Mallory will clearly do pretty much anything for power, and there is a certain weakness at her core to pander to such feelings. Here is an excerpt from the Spectator, quoted in one of my earlier posts this year:

There’s undoubtedly a Ukippy strand in Toryism — and there’s more of them in than out. They are, in good and bad ways, somewhat reactionary. They’re deeply patriotic, fierce about defence and hostile to the EU. They’re morally conservative (no gay weddings for them). Their instinct is to support the bosses rather than the workers, they hate tax and are not overly sensitive to the woes of the poor, but they’re not wholly free-marketeers. An orderly market rather than a free-for-all appeals to them. [For this group I shall use Tim’s name]: the National party.

Well, I think it is safe to say that the first sentence is bang on the money. But as for an orderly market? No, the ones among them who think at all are perfectly happy with a free-for-all until it hurts them or their families. It is this strand of Conservatism at its most mindlessly parochial that May is trying to harness.

In doing so she and her government display either malignity or weakness.If this is what the country wants, this is what the country gets. But what kind of place will it become? And is there a way out?