I think this week I may have to finally give up on hoping for any coherence or consistency when it comes to politics. Now obviously I gave up on that years ago with the press and politicians but I liked to give my friends a little more credit. Now a lot of my friends are rather left leaning but they’re still good people and in the normal course of events individually tend to be well-informed and able to hold a reasoned argument – but as with so many of us let them on the internet and social media and you can forget all that*.
This has been a week of people pivoting on news stories fast enough to get whiplash.
A soon as it was announced that we may be paying a sum of money to the EU as part of the exit negotiations, the narrative swapped from:
“It’s not a divorce bill, it’s just honouring our commitments”
to
“What a disaster Brexit is we’re continuing to pay for less than we currently have with no influence”
It was announced that India might want to be looked upon more favourably as part of a trade deal and this wasn’t welcomed as a fantastic chance to open our borders to the wider world beyond white Europeans. Nope this was “See we’re leaving the EU and still can’t control immigration”.
British farmers complained that they couldn’t get cheap immigrant labour and that British people wouldn’t do the work for the wages and there was no protests about the farmers not paying a living wage, or their previous exploitation of immigrants. Not a bit of it this was again purely a Brexit problem, as leaving the EU will stop us having cheap food. Cheap food being far more important than paying decent wages, and of course ignoring that there used to be seasonal work visas which allowed workers from all over the world to benefit from underpaid back-breaking labour on British farms.
Then to wrap it up President Trump retweeted 3 videos allegedly showing the actions of some Muslims. Horrifyingly the person he re-tweeted is ( apparently, I didn’t know ) a senior person with Britain First. Now I’ve always though that Britain First were a largely insignificant group within UK politics, but apparently I’m wrong. Apparently they are so important that the President of the USA should know who their senior members are. So important in fact that who they are far outweighs the content and legitimacy of the videos, though I’ve only seen claims that one of the three is misrepresented. So in this day and age the messenger is more important than the message and sharing an article is the same as endorsing. So because of who he retweeted, not what, there is a diplomatic spat between the UK and the USA that may damage future relationships.
At this point I may as well accept that up is down and I can see how ever many fingers they want me to see.
* In aggregate not individually, obviously if any of my friends are actually reading this I didn’t mean you. No you are fine I was talking about my other friends.