British correspondent Tony Jay, continuing from yesterday’s post…
… Back in 2019 the corporate media and the Right of the Labour Party had been justifiably confident they’d left no stone unturned in forging an Establishment-wide coalition of exactly the kind of creepy, crawly things you’d expect to find living underneath stones, all dedicated – for one reason or another – to sparing the UK a nightmare of progressive social policy and reduced inequality by painting a vote for the Party led by the lifelong anti-racism campaigner and pro-diplomacy peacenik as nothing short of a green light for concentration camps in Golders Green and the compulsory renaming of all male children as Yasser Adolf Mao Ho Chi Amin Dzhugashvili, meanwhile the spoilt, mendacious, casually racist asset of Russian oligarchs and American billionaires with the long history of corruption and shameless lying was passed off as that funny posh bloke from the telly who, say what you like about his eye for the dolly birds, at least you could always rely on to put the interests of Great Britain first.
I wouldn’t say the Tories were actually popular in 2019, but by and large the coalition’s PR policy had been to make Labour even less popular and they’d given ‘centrist’ voters licence to sadly shake their heads and tell each other that they simply couldn’t possibly be expected to sully their precious consciences by casting a vote for a man who’d personally betrayed Anne Frank to the Nazis (well, maybe the actual facts didn’t show that, but if even Nigel Havers and that nice girl off Countdown said he would have, well, no smoke without fire) and if anyone was
honestrude enough to equate that decision with letting Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson have his destructive No-Deal Brexit, well, that was just another thing to blame that ghastly Corbyn for, wasn’t it?In comparison, it’s not so easy to overstate just how irredeemably unpopular the Tories had become by July 2024. Cholera. Priests in your bed. Elon Musk’s aesthetic choices. These are just a few of the things a majority of the British electorate found less offensive to their spirit animals than the thought of another five years of Tory Government. 14 years of national decline and the continued widespread enshitification of the culture for everyone who wasn’t already dirty rich.
This national decision-by-osmosis had reached an apotheosis in the clogging of Britain’s rivers and beaches with unprocessed sewage by private water companies while their executives just shrugged, funnelled the billions they’d saved on infrastructure maintenance into shareholder dividends, and paid themselves multi-million pound bonuses as a reward before hiring lobbyists (many of them former Tory or Labour politicians) to
bribeoffer inducements to fund the off-the-books jet-setting lives of have in-depth private consultations with Government Ministers about signing off on funding the clean-up efforts with public money… or if they couldn’t swing that, then certainly about slow-walking any serious investigation of criminal liability until said executives had moved on to another stratospherically rewarded post and the companies could play the “Oh, that was under previous management, it’s all good now” card. Corruption, deceit, incompetence, these were all the bywords for Tory Government and people were tired of it.
