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Are we getting pissed off with the BBC

Arkless Electronics said:
If by right wing people think I'm referring to the likes of Ken Clarke then they must have been at the xmas egg nog a bit early!

Right wing views in general are morally indefensible and inherently wrong because they seek to empower and enrich those who are already doing very nicely thank you and usually at the expense in both money and blood, sweat and tears of those with far less. They enshrine the lowest emotions such as "dog eat dog", "survival of the fittest" and "the law of the jungle".
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I think you need to make a clearer distinction between ‘right of centre’ (Ken Clarke), ‘right wing’ (Thatcher, Alan Clark), and ‘far right’ (Farage, Cummings, Rees-Mogg). When you say things like ‘right wing views are unacceptable’ and ‘but Ken Clarke is OK’, it’s a tad confusing.

It’s also not helped by the fact that the ‘centre’ has probably shifted rightward of late so you probably can’t get a fag paper between erstwhile right of centre Clarke, and erstwhile left of centre Blair, and Clarke’s views would probably now pass for centre or even slightly left of centre.

For me, I’d say the right wing proper probably starts at Thatcher, and most of the current Parliamentary Tory Party is to her right, often significantly so.
 
I think Alan Clark was well to the right of Farage, Cummings and Rees-Mogg. Charming bloke though. One of the few relatively famous people I've met.
 
Joe Hutch said:
I think Alan Clark was well to the right of Farage, Cummings and Rees-Mogg. Charming bloke though. One of the few relatively famous people I've met.
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Like that Herr Hitler who loved his dogs so much and would while away a few days playing with kids at the Wolfs Liar before knocking out a lovely painting after lunch kinda thing eh...
 
This was back in my Civil Service days. He was always polite to staff, even to a mere minion like myself. Norman Tebbit, by contrast, can only be described with a word that's not allowed on the forum.
 
Arkless Electronics said:
See. twat tunes.

That no one should have more than one of anything so basic and yet so necessary as a roof over their head whilst others have none is at page one of human decency.
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I can’t disagree with this, but rather than forbid ownership, I’d tax second homes at the cost of providing the equivalent social housing. So a 2 bed holiday home gets taxed, annually, at the same as it costs the council to provide a 2 bed home for a family.
 
Joe Hutch said:
This was back in my Civil Service days. He was always polite to staff, even to a mere minion like myself. Norman Tebbit, by contrast, can only be described with a word that's not allowed on the forum.
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"tory" and the word I believe you are hinting at are of course interchangeable.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
I can’t disagree with this, but rather than forbid ownership, I’d tax second homes at the cost of providing the equivalent social housing. So a 2 bed holiday home gets taxed, annually, at the same as it costs the council to provide a 2 bed home for a family.
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An adequate compromise yes:)
 
droodzilla said:
You called?

EoJ33lSXEAAOMES
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Ha! Look at her little face. So pleased with herself. It's still the case that to object to the basic strategy here - turning the racism dial up to just the right level - is to put yourself outside the bounds of legitimate political debate. Everything to the left of this is just sixth form debating clubs and mad Trotskyist sects.
 
Sue Pertwee-Tyr said:
I can’t disagree with this, but rather than forbid ownership, I’d tax second homes at the cost of providing the equivalent social housing. So a 2 bed holiday home gets taxed, annually, at the same as it costs the council to provide a 2 bed home for a family.
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Sue, have you ever considered a career as a diplomat? Thanks to your intervention, owning two houses has gone from beyond human decency to acceptable in the space of minutes.
 
Marchbanks said:
Do you mean.... I’ll circumlocute here... he didn’t like Kraftwerk?
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I'll illustrate the sort of 'person' he was with a couple of anecdotes.

One on occasion, he arrived at our HQ mid-morning. One of the IT blokes was leaving at the same moment. Tebbit asked him 'Why are you leaving so early?' The IT bloke replied 'I've been working all night sorting a problem in the computer room. Why are you arriving so late?' Tebbit demanded to know his name, and said he'd get him sacked. (Nothing came of the threat AFAIK. Back then, IT blokes were far more valuable, and useful, than Government ministers).

Another time, one of the unemployment centres the department was funding (basically a drop-in club for jobseekers) featured in a local newspaper. This was when unemployment was topping 3 million. Tebbit, on seeing the article, asked for a magnifying glass. He spotted what he suspected to be a poster for some socialist meeting. When his suspicions were confirmed, he wanted the funding for the centre to be withdrawn. Eventually he was persuaded that maybe telling them to take the poster down would suffice.
 
Joe Hutch said:
The connection is that, if you want a 'left' person to counter the likes of Mad Mel, whom do you choose? Back in the dim and distant past, you would see people like Tariq Ali and Germaine Greer, who were (at the time) to the left of mainstream Labour. Now the left seems fractured and disparate, and whoever is chosen will be anathema to one or other of the left groupings. The only person who seems to be a regular from the left is Owen Jones, though to be fair I very rarely watch political TV shows.
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Have to say I don't really recognise the picture. I'm not sure there was ever a huge stable of left wing media commentators, and the one we have now runs to more than Owen Jones (Paul Mason, Grace Blakely the Novara crew spring to mind). The reason we see so little of them, relative to the right wing gobshites, isn't because the left is fragmented, it's because they're not regarded as representing legitimate political positions.

The left isn't fractured and disparate, by recent historical standards: Corbynism brought a lot of different left wing strands together, and while there were tensions the various traditions managed to suppress a lot of longstanding beefs to get behind the party. Again, we never really learned about any of this because it wasn't regarded as legitimate politics: it was entryism, it was antisemitism, a weird youth fad, wokeism, whatever. The one significant fracture was between this large, diverse but still basically unified bloc and a large part of the Parliamentary Labour Party, but since the latter are exceptionally noisy, malicious and well-connected they made damned sure the end of their world was made to look like the collapse of the left in general.
 
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