Brexit the economy and house prices part 6

Moby

cogito wrote: »

You really do hate people who voted leave, don't you. Your hate filled rant sums up exactly what people like you feel about those who vote in the incorrect way.

This DT opinion piece could have been written just for you.

SOURCE - Daily Telegraph - Janet Daley - 27 Aug 2018

https://www.telegraph.co.uk...

You can scarcely have missed the outcry over the powerful media elite. Donald Trump, in his Goebbels-like rants against the press, condemns it for lying about him. In Britain, television news presenters admit that their membership of an enclosed metropolitan circle puts them out of touch with the wider population.

You might think that this phenomenon – a privileged social caste which dominates established opinion and has little understanding of how most people live – was new and historically unprecedented. It is thought to be the common factor in the various electoral surprises that the populations of the West have sprung on their governments over the past year. But of course, it isn’t new at all. It has been pretty much the accepted order since time began.

The question is not: how has this great rift come about? It is more: why has it suddenly become such an urgent and politically incendiary issue? The answer, I think, is that what is happening now is genuinely different and far more disturbing than the old-fashioned snobbery and condescension in which previous elites engaged without qualms. The attitude of the privileged educated classes, who have always dominated the mass media, was once a kind of benign arrogance which may have been profoundly ignorant about the conditions and concerns of most ordinary people, but was aware (at least officially) of its duty to show consideration for those they saw as being below them in social prestige.

In Britain, particularly, this took the form of an almost feudal paternalism that demanded courtesy and respect: one did not mock or traduce the disadvantaged. Those whose upbringing and education had not provided the sophisticated tastes or the higher literacy into which you had been initiated were not to be ridiculed and despised: your good fortune came with an automatic obligation to show kindness and understanding to those who had been born into less enlightened circumstances.

Well, that’s all over. Forget kindness and any attempt at benign understanding. What is being blared out shamelessly from a good many media outlets now is beyond arrogant disdain: it is full-on loathing. I have never known a time when public intellectuals – commentators and academics – have stated, without equivocation, that they were waiting eagerly for those swathes of the population that hold unacceptable views (on Brexit, say, or immigration) to go away and die.

One speaker at a recent conference stated that progressive ideas would have to be installed in society “one funeral at a time”. This is not argument. It does not attempt to convert or persuade or to enlighten the supposedly benighted. It is a vendetta: a bald, unambiguous assertion that people with whom you disagree barely have a right to live, let alone to be heard.

On the receiving end of this palpable disgust are people who still disconcertingly have a voice and a vote – both of which they are using in what should have been seen as predictably defiant ways. They may have grown used to being ignored but they were not accustomed to being deliberately insulted. What made it more provoking was that they were under attack for what they consider to be virtues: patriotism, community loyalty and local tradition. In a US newspaper article last week, an apologist for the new metropolitan consensus described the acceptable world view as “internationalist, secular, cosmopolitan, multicultural liberalism”. This seems to make it explicitly opposed to national pride, religious faith, cultural identity, communal cohesion and any form of social conservatism.

And that presumably means that it excludes much of the world – especially those “unspoilt” bits that metropolitan elitists love to visit: the provincial backwaters of Europe where the same families have lived for generations and the cuisine is native to the region. Yes indeed, what a delight it is to see a local culture with its own integrity and inherited rituals intact.

In truth, aggressive cosmopolitans would not be able to endure (or even survive) a world which consisted entirely of people like themselves. Their freewheeling, globe-trotting lifestyle is parasitical on the stable infrastructure provided by all those stolid, circumscribed communities that they deride.

So how have we got here? There is one element to this ugly impasse which leaps out: today’s privileged elite clearly believes itself and its core beliefs to be unquestionably morally righteous. (This is a direct consequence of its being explicitly Left-wing.) Unlike previous establishments, most of the exponents of the Metropolitan Ethic see themselves as independent thinkers who have reached their own conclusions, even if their views are remarkably conformist. They are not operating on inherited assumptions of class superiority but on personal conscience. By definition, then, these are moral precepts which anyone – from any background – could freely adopt. Metropolitan liberalism is a kind of moral meritocracy so there is no need for a concept of noblesse oblige. From this it follows that those who do not adopt the correct views are choosing to be wilfully immoral and thus deserve no forgiveness or understanding.

What happens when ordinary people are openly hated by the powerful? They are licensed to hate right back – and to act on their hurt and frustration. So they vote for a Donald Trump who cleverly plays on the loathing that the “elites” shower on his supporters. (At a rally last week, he told his ecstatic followers: “They don’t like me – and they don’t like you.”) Redneck America was pretty used to that treatment but now they are being led by a demagogue who makes deliberate use of it. And not long ago in Britain, anybody who expressed concern about the country’s loss of national character was subjected to what a US writer called “point and laugh liberalism” – or worse. There was always going to be a price to be paid for this. The reckoning has arrived.

So the privileged Daily Telegraph hack complains about the new liberal elite. What nonsense. Janet Daley has no idea about ordinary people, she supports the upper class elite who are oppressing them! That's why she writes for the Telegraph.

lisyloo

ukcarper wrote: »

Isn't point 1 what happens when people feel ignored and side lined by major parties

100% agree.
It’s still stupid IMO to make what you think is a “protest” vote on the basis that “it will never happen” becuase you just might get it.

Horrendous to think hat could be the factor that “swung the will of the people”.

lisyloo

Thrugelmir wrote: »

Alternative view is that EU has morphed into something totally different.

I totally agree it’s different in many ways.
The most obvious one for older people ironically is that there aren’t enough natives who want to take care of them.

chucknorris

ukcarper wrote: »

This is an old argument I also voted remain but virtually everybody I know voted leave non of them are racists. If previous governments had done something to address the concerns of leave supporters instead of ignoring them and call anybody who voiced concerns over immigration a racist we might not be in this position. If, as the obviously do, want to avoid leaving at all cost they should not have called referendum but then they were and still are completely out of touch with the felling in the country.

With respect, I know that already, I think that you have completely missed my point, I even said:

chucknorris wrote: »

(I'm not saying vote leave = racism). I don't know why the bowling club members voted leave, they appear unwilling to talk about it.

The post that I was replying to was making a point that:

Arklight wrote: »

Thankfully practically no one under 40 wants this

I was adding that most people that I know between 40's and 50's didn't want it either, my post, wasn't about racism, it was about the main leave voters that I know were even older people (at my bowling club), and the only two people who I knew below that age were voting for racist reasons. But I know they are mostly the exception, not the rule, and I even said so, so please stop inferring that I think leaver voters are racists, because that is not true. A minority of leave voters would have been, but no where near enough to generalise leave voters as being racists, they are not, which is why I wouldn't do so in such a clumsy way.

For the avoidance of doubt:

I do not think leave voters are racists! Calling someone a racist is a serious acquisition, because racists are disgusting pigs, and that should not be done without hard evidence.

I have edited my previous post to make it clear that I was not saying leave vote = racism, although I did use that exact phrase in my original post, so I was very surprised that my post was misunderstood.

Tromking

Moby wrote: »

So the privileged Daily Telegraph hack complains about the new liberal elite. What nonsense. Janet Daley has no idea about ordinary people, she supports the upper class elite who are opressing them! That's why she writes for the Telegraph.

On the contrary she seems to have a good handle on the anti establishment phenomenon currently gripping western democracies.
Do you deny the educated liberal middle class loathing for the ‘uneducated’ socially conservative white working class?

chucknorris

lisyloo wrote: »

100% agree.
It’s still stupid IMO to make what you think is a “protest” vote on the basis that “it will never happen” becuase you just might get it.

Horrendous to think hat could be the factor that “swung the will of the people”.

One of the most one sided boxing matches that I have watched with a surprising result was this one in the 1988 Olympics:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-biggest-fix-in-olympics-history

The Korean (host nation) boxer beat the American in the final of the light middleweight contest 3:2, despite being totally dominated in the fight. One of the judges who voted for the Korean admitted afterwards (I seen him being interviewed) that he had done so because the Koreans had been great hosts, and that he thought that there was no way that the Korean would win anyway, and he just wanted the score against him not to look so bad. So the American was denied 'his' gold medal because of voting (scoring) for the wrong reason.

ukcarper

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Read the article.... The data is robust.

That doesn't mean that Labour wouldn't have big problems the biggest swing is 13.4% so assuming figures are accurate and all swing voters are Labour voters unlikely, that still leaves over 20% of Labour voters in those constituencies leave supporting and in many it will be more.

ukcarper

chucknorris wrote: »

With respect, I know that already, I think that you have completely missed my point, I even said:



The post that I was replying to was making a point that:



I was adding that most people that I know between 40's and 50's didn't want it either, my post, wasn't about racism, it was about the main leave voters that I know were even older people (at my bowling club), and the only two people who I knew below that age were voting for racist reasons. But I know they are mostly the exception, not the rule, and I even said so, so please stop inferring that I think leaver voters are racists, because that is not true. A minority of leave voters would have been, but no where near enough to generalise leave voters as being racists, they are not, which is why I wouldn't do so in such a clumsy way.

For the avoidance of doubt:

I do not think leave voters are racists! Calling someone a racist is a serious acquisition, because racists are disgusting pigs, and that should not be done without hard evidence.

I have edited my previous post to make it clear that I was not saying leave vote = racism, although I did use that exact phrase in my original post, so I was very surprised that my post was misunderstood.

Ascroft poll shows that under 35 to 45 year olds voted remain and you can just as easily argue that people in their late teens early 2Os do not have enough experience as older people voted out of nostalgia.

The point I was making is many people especially those in stonge remain voting area are trying to make excuses as to why leave won as they can't or don't want to believe how strongly a very large number of people in country disagree with them. I wasn't surprised leave won I fully expected it from the start and couldn't understand why there was so much support in Parliament for referendum.

gfplux

I agree that some voted Brexit as a protest vote. That protest was because they were being ignored.
One of the biggest decisions taken by Britain swung by those who were being ignored.
Yet they continue to be ignored.

ukcarper

lisyloo wrote: »

100% agree.
It’s still stupid IMO to make what you think is a “protest” vote on the basis that “it will never happen” becuase you just might get it.

Horrendous to think hat could be the factor that “swung the will of the people”.

I expect people vote both ways for stupid reasons and suspect not many remain supporters voted leave.