Idiocies of the Week

Its Conservative Party Conference week, so we are spoiled for choice.

Liz Truss announced that she wasn’t going to back any of the 4 candidates for Party leader. The sighs of relief from the candidates could be heard from coast to coast.

Kemi Badenoch – and has no one noticed that her name is an anagram of Bad Enoch (its even in the right order) – said that she was shocked that so many recent immigrants to this country “hate Israel”. Given that Israel has spent the last year killing over 41,000 people and bombing Gaza to rubble, accelerated the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, been indicted for genocide at the International Criminal Court and, to return its 60,000 internal refugees to their northern border, has just killed another 1,000 people in Lebanon invaded the country and displaced a million people there, what’s not to love?

Her team in the leadership campaign released an odd pamphlet arguing that 21st century politics is different from 20th century politics because – although everything can best be understood in the form of a triangle – in the old days the triangle was divided horizontally and the bottom of society supported the Left while the Right defended the top, today the triangle is divided vertically; to indicate that both Left and Right have support from top to bottom, but without any acknowledgement that the right still defends the interests of the people at the top, while it is the role of the Left to fight for the bottom.

Confused? You will be. Just to make things even clearer, in their diagram the Left is on the Right and the Right is on the Left. This might indicate that the Tory Right approach the world in an inverted way, but it also might simply be a Freudian slip, implying that somewhere deep in their heart of hearts they know that the Left is, ultimately, right.

Another way of looking at it is that they don’t know which way is up. Bottoms up chaps!

Another gem from Badenoch is that her way of dealing with the problem that highly educated people tend to lean Left is to have fewer highly educated people. All those “pointless university degrees” that make people think have got to go.

Meanwhile, Miriam Cates, speaking on Politics Live, unravelled the full insanity of the Right’s line on immigration. On the one hand the country can’t afford to have all these people coming in, but at the same time it needs people coming in to fill job vacancies because, in Cates’ view “we’re not having enough babies”. So, the country isn’t full up after all. Breed damn you! Breed!

Jo Coburn, the anchor of Politics Live, noted that the Tories were obsessively discussing immigration while most of the electorate are concerned about energy bills and the cost of living, the NHS and the state of public services; without reflecting that Politics Live itself obsessively discusses the issue “we can’t talk about” almost every time it comes on. Anyone would think there was an agenda somewhere to push this under everyone’s noses at every opportunity, carpet bombing us with BS.

Robert Jenrick – a small, cheap embodiment of petty minded mean spiritedness, best known for his order as immigration minister to paint over a mural in a child refugee centre to make it less welcoming – dropped an honest bollock when he said that the problem with the European Court of Human Rights is that it meant that UK Special Services were having to shoot terrorists rather than arrest them because the EHRC would order them released. While this is an absurd claim in itself, its notable that none of the people who criticised Jenrick for this statement denied that UK Special Forces do indeed breach the Geneva Convention in this way. There are a number of cases from Afghanistan that the SAS kept locked away for years to maintain the fiction that they didn’t happen. But its now well known that they did. But to everyone from his rivals for the Tory leadership to “a Labour source”, its just terribly bad taste, and awfully insulting to our brave boys to say that they have done what they have done.

Jenrick also criticised the police for dealing with peaceful demonstrators calling for an end to genocide and a ceasefire in Gaza more gently than rioters who were trying to burn refugees alive in hostels, threw bricks at the police, attacked people in the streets and trashed their neighbour’s houses. Quite inexplicable.

And two from last week.

A delegate at the Reform Conference, interviewed on Politics Joe, opined that the rivers are polluted, not because of the water companies failing to invest – “I think they are being scapegoated” – or too much toxic runoff from farmers overfertilising their fields – its because all those immigrants are coming over here and overwhelming our overloaded sewage system with all their poos. Talk about S*$t.

And David Lammy at the UN last week saying “I know Imperialism when I see it”. A question for David. When you go to work as the British Foreign Secretary at the Foreign Office, and you walk past that statue of Robert Clive, and stride along corridors resplendently decorated with paintings of Britannia and all the rest of it (which you can see here), perhaps through the “Durbar Court”, and you look at all that, what exactly do you see?