Re: Racist tories (?)
Daniel Davies wrote:
On the other hand, the Tories got so comprehensively carried out at the last election, based on a truly dreadful dog-whistle-racism campaign designed by Lynton Crosbie (John Howard’s political consultant) and based on various slogans about “bogus asylum seekers”, that they are for once trying to play the opposite tune; to try to tell the electorate that they are a normal people’s party and the racist nutters are no longer welcome. My barometer of whether this is a) sincere and b) working is the support level for the BNP, which is rising and rising. I take this as a good sign in UK politics as I think it means that “working class Tories” (an electoral grouping who are given the most bizarrely excessive respect in British politics as a bunch of salt-of-the-earth types who are far more in touch with the real world than trendy leftie middle class socialists, but who nevertheless love their country and their heritage; actually most of them are just nasty little racist fuckers who would have turned coat the minute the first jackboot landed in Dover) have got the message that the game is up. Having the fascists out in the open in an explicitly fascist party with no hope of power is much better than having them hiding in corners of a party that might run asylum policy.
Someone once told me that the reason that Britain never had a serious LePen-style politician in the 1980s was that Thatcher made one unncessary. Is there any truth to that?
Doug