It should cheer me up that there's less substance to David Cameron's spiteful immigration rhetoric than meets the eye. But it worries me that he feels the need to say this stuff. Dave's "Big Society" idea which he hardly ever mentions any more, might have been cynical nonsense, a Potemkin village full of phony communitarian spirit that was really just a front for "shrinking" the state (i.e. monetising it so that profiteers could take their cut, rather than serving citizens directly), but at least there was some pretence at decency.
Now, instead of playing mood music about us all being in this together and helping each other out, he's cranked up the volume and changed the tempo to something you can goose step to. He's cottoned on to the trending idea that all will be well if one or other of a group of people are removed from our presence. He can't and wouldn't condone the idea that stopping everyone at Dover and pushing the foreigners back into the sea to swim home, with a bit of light machine-gunning to encourage the stragglers, would help in any way, but he's more than happy to let people who yearn for the finality of such solutions imagine that he's thinking what they're thinking.
Apparently, politicians* who want power after the next election believe that erecting the facade of a Potemkin concentration camp will make voters like and trust them. The fact that they believe this it is depressing enough - it could only be worse if they turn out to be right.
*The opposition's "me too"-ist tendency as well as the incumbents.
Now, instead of playing mood music about us all being in this together and helping each other out, he's cranked up the volume and changed the tempo to something you can goose step to. He's cottoned on to the trending idea that all will be well if one or other of a group of people are removed from our presence. He can't and wouldn't condone the idea that stopping everyone at Dover and pushing the foreigners back into the sea to swim home, with a bit of light machine-gunning to encourage the stragglers, would help in any way, but he's more than happy to let people who yearn for the finality of such solutions imagine that he's thinking what they're thinking.
Apparently, politicians* who want power after the next election believe that erecting the facade of a Potemkin concentration camp will make voters like and trust them. The fact that they believe this it is depressing enough - it could only be worse if they turn out to be right.
*The opposition's "me too"-ist tendency as well as the incumbents.
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