Reduced support for migrants in any way possible, even if cruelty and absolute hardship result. Andrea Jenkins, the new mayor of Lincolnshire, says she wants migrants held in tents, not hotels.
Support for children with autism, ADHD and special educational needs. Farage made it clear recently that he thinks that all of these are overdiagnosed, and he clearly does not really believe that they exist. I expect plans for sweeping cuts.
Likewise, there will be plans for sweeping reductions in adult social care: the claim will be made that all those of working age should work and that depression, autusm, ADHD and other conditions which are, at present, massive barriers to entry into the workplace for many will be ignored as reasons for supplying care.
Public health services will be cut. Farage hated everything to do with Covid. They will claim such services are not needed.
Libraries, parks and sports centres will close. The argument will be that the market should supply such things.
Support for the arts will disappear. Reform hates anything that they think intellectual. This will include the arts.
Diversity services will disappear.
Anything to do with sustainability will go.
Has Spud got it then?
Everything of value is, in other words, at risk.
Ah, no, he hasn’t, has he?
If Reform actually does close down ‘migrant’ hotels in the areas it now ‘controls’, and successfully turns away any more, OK, I’ll believe.
Does anyone want to take a £100 bet that they will not do so?
The issue here is that – as I (and many others) have been saying for a long time now – politics is distraction. A charade. A Potemkin magic show, inviting you to ‘look here children’ while the action happens elsewhere.
We need to find a way round the blob/Deep State/them/the Establishment. I don’t know if Reform can do it.
If Grosslincolnstadt is indeed planning to be mean to migrants, presumably councils which are not mean will welcome them, just to show us. Andrea can do all that other stuff too, if she likes. She got my vote.
PS I’m not taking Interested’s bet.
I’m already a supporter, you don’t have to sell me!
“Support for children with autism, ADHD and special educational needs. Farage made it clear recently that he thinks that all of these are overdiagnosed”
Hell, I suspect they are over diagnosed and I am the most civilised of coves. Why are they over diagnosed? Incentives of course: why was Covid over diagnosed?
“Likewise, there will be plans for sweeping reductions in adult social care: the claim will be made that all those of working age should work and that depression, autusm, ADHD and other conditions which are, at present, massive barriers to entry into the workplace for many will be ignored as reasons for supplying care.”
They are massively overdiagnosed, plus there are fairly cheap medical treatment for these.
“Public health services will be cut. Farage hated everything to do with Covid. They will claim such services are not needed.”
Three months into Covid we should have reopened. We knew it wasn’t the bubonic plague and was killing old people who could stay indoors.
“Libraries, parks and sports centres will close. The argument will be that the market should supply such things.”
Libraries mostly make no sense today. For most books, it’s cheaper for people to buy them than to pay people to manage the sharing of them. There is such a glut of books that we no longer have secondhand bookshops that pay for them. You give them to Oxfam. Go into many pubs, old phone boxes and there are piles of books.
Parks? Well, maybe if the state made sure that the swings weren’t broken or surrounded with broken glass, parents would take their kids to them rather than going to a well-maintained, safe, privately run indoor play zone.
Sports centres? The problem there is that they get run for the benefit of the people running them and their friends. Multiple nights of a huge swimming pool being given over to the local swimming teams, so if you’re an average guy, you can’t use them.
“Support for the arts will disappear. Reform hates anything that they think intellectual. This will include the arts.”
Are Reform talking about closing down Vue putting on Christopher Nolan films? Or cutting subsidy to shit modern opera about slavery that no-one cares about and will be instantly forgotten?
Just to add on this: ending state arts funding is not an existential threat to the arts like classical music, opera or ballet. It’s an existential threat to arts as state propaganda that no-one wants to see. The PC stuff costs a fortune to put on but no-one wants to see it.
The Met runs without subsidy. Covent Garden is packed for La Traviata at prices similar to West End Musicals and the costs of putting both on are not too different. Glyndebourne, Garsington, Waterperry, Iford, Longborough, Holland Park and all the other festival opera are Little Platoons operations. Run on a mix of patronage, volunteers, sponsorship. Join and you get your name in the programme. Pay a bit more, you get entrance to the nicer bar, Pay a lot more, you get to mingle with the cast for drinks. Plenty of rich old widows who love that stuff.
WB, you’re spot on about state arts funding. A couple of days ago I had to visit the Tate Modern gift shop to get some stuff to photograph for a Japanese client. 95% of the stock is the output of ignorant lefty fools presuming to instruct me how to think. Little of it could be called ‘art’.
A month ago I was working at a site on an RAF base in Lincolnshire. It was deserted, chap there said nobody is based there any more. So: loads of empty accommodation sitting there, well away from the view of the voters.
The RAF base might have asbestos in it, so we can’t house illegal migrants there (despite it being okay for forces personnel).
Interested @ 10:50, you’re not wrong about the Punch & Judy distraction. That said, the blob/Deep State/them/the Establishment are parasitic on the productive population. Their Achilles heel is the same as anyone else’s: if you cut off their money supply they will wither.
Only elected politicians can do this, by changing the laws and structures which supply the blob/Deep State/them/the Establishment with money. Look at Trump and USAID. It’s either that or heads on spikes.
Anyone who doesn’t think Autism (and ADHD for that that matter) is over diagnosed is probably the proud owner of a couple of bridges.
As someone said: Show me the incentives and I’ll show you the outcome. In this case more time in exams, extra help with schooling, more cash in some cases and high status amongst middle class women for some reason. Over diagnosis amongst the pointy elbowed middle classes is prevalent because of those very incentives.
It also helps that there is no clear definition of autism and what definition there has been has been changed over the years so much that we now talk about a spectrum.
https://www.thestudiesshowpod.com/p/episode-71-the-autism-epidemic
jgh, was it Scampton? When it got out that it was to be used for migrants a protest camp was started at the gates. Right where Gibson’s dog is buried. They don’t use hotels and sites which act as a locus for protest any more, that is why the move is to bribe private landlords to take them. Then they are spread out and the locals ‘don’t notice’. We do though.
An interesting vid about DOGE and what they are finding in DC. If anything like this even at a far smaller scale happens in the UK will we ever find out?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uhiwIFUoKQ
I am fortunate to live on a leafy road in a pleasant part of Norf London. Mostly good ’60s apartment blocks along one side; desirable Georgian villas along the other. A couple of these villas have been HMOs for years now, both in good repair. Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed young black men emerging from one of them to smoke and chat with their mates on the green opposite. They’re clearly not the usual young black men we see about. This is how the dispersal is being done now.
What surprises me is that this is middle-class public sector/artsy state-supported Ground Zero. It’s Progressive Blob Central. They’re shitting on their own doorstep.
@Norman
That said, the blob/Deep State/them/the Establishment are parasitic on the productive population. Their Achilles heel is the same as anyone else’s: if you cut off their money supply they will wither.
There’s something to this, but, tying in to your second comment, I’ve always said that it will only really end – and I obviously pray this doesn’t happen – when the families of judges, chief constables, MPs and ministers, senior quangocrats and bureaucrats, and leading journalists and ‘influencers’ suffer the consequences of what they are bringing down on the 80% of the population that doesn’t count.
As regular readers will know, I tend to the view that there IS a conspiracy, by which I do not mean Donald Pleasance in an undersea volcano but people and organisations which meet in non-public fora and discuss and agree to do stuff that they know most of us don’t want, and then steal the money to do it and lie and obfuscate about it.
Yes, it’s all greased by dosh and self-interest, too, but the speed and pace and direction and lunacy of the change wrought synchronously across the west make it impossible, to my eyes anyway, that there’s no coordination.
That doesn’t mean they all fully understand how things are going to turn out: middle class girls (and judges, quangocrats, and chief constables, but I repeat myself) can be awfully naive.
You could ask (as only one for-instance of thousands) Louisa Jespersen and Maren Ueland for their thoughts, but they were beheaded by Islamists while on what they assumed was a perfectly sane hiking holiday in the Atlas mountains.
I genuinely thought a while ago about launching a crowdfunder to buy, at any price, the house next door to James O’Brien.
What would it cost? £3 million? If everyone who fucking hate’s the cunts guts gave 10p we could wrap it up in 24 hrs.
The government is making it even more attractive now that we can get paid for the terrorists we move in. I may revisit this.
Norman,
“WB, you’re spot on about state arts funding. A couple of days ago I had to visit the Tate Modern gift shop to get some stuff to photograph for a Japanese client. 95% of the stock is the output of ignorant lefty fools presuming to instruct me how to think. Little of it could be called ‘art’.”
Anyone who is really great at art is making movies or doing advertising. The last great, beloved painting is Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks in 1942. Anything after that is either being goofy and meta about the form (like Warhol) or shit.
And 1940-1950 is roughly the time when cinema became more artistic. They weren’t just plays being filmed but became more expressionist, like Citizen Kane, The Third Man, Black Narcissus and Double Indemnity.
The last great, beloved painting is Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks in 1942. Anything after that is either being goofy and meta about the form…
Er…Hockney, Lucian Freud and a legion of watercolourists (eg Jason Partner)
Theo,
How many people have a painting of a naked fat woman on their wall compared to Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party?
On arts funding, it’s interesting to see how they do it in France. Every little commune gets a sum of money to spend on community events, for example celebrating VE Day or Bastille Day. They’ll tart up the village centre, they’ll lay on some outdoor music and a beer or wine tent (depending on whether you’re in the north or south of the country). This type of arts funding could be popular in the UK too; I suspect it would be a vote-winner for whichever party tries it.
Mr Murphy appears to have written the Reform manifesto for the next election.
Missed out some major bits, as usual.
Apparently there’s been an ‘affray’ on Teignmouth beach in which a ‘boy’ has been clobbered by ‘up to four men’ in an incident involving ‘up to 100 people, adults and youths’. The police are coming out with a very firm “nothing to see here” line. Teignmouth is a bit far from Calais but not far from Torquay and its “hotel”.
Or am I barking up the wrong tree?
WB
Your claim that any painting after 1942 “is either being goofy and meta about the form” doesn’t survive even momentary scrutiny…
There are good paintings post-1942 but you’re highly unlikely to see them in Tate Modern.
Having seen the hilarious series about them on the Yesterday Channel, three years ago we took a trip to Margate to visit Hornby. In the bookstore there were a couple of volumes of Roy Cross’s fantastic Airfix box art. It occurred to me then that these images were more skilfully executed, were way more exciting and inspirational, and had almost infinitely greater cultural significance and influence, than anything you’ll ever see in Tate Margate.
FWIW I have a BA in Fine Art.
“Sports centres? … Multiple nights of a huge swimming pool being given over to the local swimming teams, so if you’re an average guy, you can’t use them.”
Absolutely. The Total Fitness gym is a lot more expensive than the local leisure centres but is open from six in the morning until ten at night. There are two pools so the kids’ swimming lessons don’t involve roping off half of the main pool. The changing rooms are segregated so you don’t have to get a shower with your swimming trunks on and then get changed in a tiny cubicle.
Norman, I see your Roy Cross and I raise you Shigeo Koike.
I think point made, rhoda.
Norman,
“There are good paintings post-1942 but you’re highly unlikely to see them in Tate Modern.”
I’m sure there are. But I’m talking about beloved art. Culturally significant art. There is good classical music outside of cinema (like “The American Project” by Teddy Abrams), but it isn’t culturally significant like the soundtrack to The Lord of the Rings. Whether it’s that the money is better or the stage is bigger, I don’t know, but that’s where the best talent generally goes.
“Having seen the hilarious series about them on the Yesterday Channel, three years ago we took a trip to Margate to visit Hornby. In the bookstore there were a couple of volumes of Roy Cross’s fantastic Airfix box art. It occurred to me then that these images were more skilfully executed, were way more exciting and inspirational, and had almost infinitely greater cultural significance and influence, than anything you’ll ever see in Tate Margate.”
Yes. So, advertising. Same with things like movie posters which are probably the most common post-WW2 art that people buy prints of. Once colour printing became cheap, more artists were used in packaging, advertising in magazines, posters, etc.
If there are Mozarts alive today (and there probably are, given the population is 10x what it was in his day), they’ll be found writing music for adverts, games or films, because that’s where the money (and the kudos, for the films, at least) is.
New library in our village of 6000 a few years back. Cost about £100 per resident to build and £6 per resident per year to run.
For that sort of money you can send everyone a book a year off amazon and trouser the capital.
Doesn’t look like it’s used by more than a couple of hundred people.
Also for some reason we also get mobile library visits?
Neither efficient nor effective.