How appropriate that my favorite Thatcherite @RColvile, in his latest essay, his reportage awash in self-infatuated political bathos, if that describes his retrograde politics: so fascinating is his self-presentation in its game of reporter/ideologue.  His careful, and to speak hyperbolically, ‘loving reconstruction‘ of British politics, in situ. Mr. Colvile, while not like @JGaneshEsq in the use of almost breathtaking apercus, to garnish his political commentary. And sometimes rescue his political banalities from it’s poverty of imagination, in deference to following an ideology… 

Read Mr. Colvile’s informative essay, while keeping your critical attention focused,  and then look to Chris Hudson reply that enunciates a reply to a Technocrat’s Intervention. 

There’s a lot of wishful thinking in the commentariat that this was about HS2 or nimbyism. Or Brexit. But it runs much deeper. My mother lives in the area, voted for brexit and has the Daily Mail and Telegraph hard wired into her psyche. She loathes HS2 and the new planning laws, but she’s as disappointed that the conservatives wanted to close the desk at the local police station. And that they have made such a mess of the pandemic (her dear friend died after being released into a care home). And in an area proud of its schools, that the conservatives have ruined the education of so many children with the ongoing exams fiasco, and her granddaughter’s university learning (9k per annum for the last 18 months for the privilege of having zoom lectures). She is also furious that the government is so incompetent and corrupt that they have turned us into a ‘ banana republic’ of cronyism. But most of all, as a regular churchgoer, she is simply appalled that the PM and his ministers lie with such impunity. As she said today at lunch ‘This is not who we are.’

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/this-was-not-a-lib-dem-victory-it-was-the-anti-tories-wot-won-chesham-and-amersham-cj63nnk3n

Old Socialist