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Tory MPs beware: if you whip up an angry mob, they may end up angry with you
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There is so much of this to Cummings’ “people vs parliament” brand of politics, but the patsies – the Tory MPs – are yet to catch on. While most women could read that New York Times column and work out what it basically meant for them, a lot of Conservative MPs are dutifully spouting Cummings’ lines, but don’t yet seem to have worked out where they leave them.
But listen, Tory mooks – I’m here to help. While you’re getting a tiki torch and standing a post, let me tell you what a “people vs parliament” election ultimately means for you. First, if you whip up an angry mob, why do you assume they won’t end up angry with you? Do you think the mob is going to come upon an MP and go, “Wait, wait – this is so-and-so. He voted for Meaningful Votes 2 and 3, so we should, you know, definitely not put our pitchforks up his arse”? Eventually, you’re going to get a pitchfork up your arse either way.
To adapt that phrase of the alt-right to whom you tack closer every day: mobs don’t care about your feelings. If I had to come up with an adjective to help you understand mobs, it would probably be mob-like. Very mobby. Mobtastic. If you go to the country in a people v parliament election, you may indeed get elected and be part of a triumphant Tory majority. But when you have been elected, and when you’ve “got Brexit done” – which is to say, when you’ve either taken the UK off the no-deal cliff, or opened up the next however many painful years of trade negotiations fuckery-pokery, which is never going to solve the problems it is magically supposed to – you, then, are “parliament”.
The even angrier people are then versus YOU. That’s when they come for you, because you asked them to. You invited them in. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this line “the revolution devours its children”? That’s you, babe. Second, I know you’ve already only read about one war, but bad news: it’s the wrong war. You need the first world war, not the second. By way of a crash course of what Dom’s got planned for you, take the line in Blackadder, where the general brays to the guys he’s sending over the top: “We’ll be right behind you!” and Blackadder mutters: “About 35 miles behind you.” You’re the cannon fodder, you’re the Twenty Minuters. But, hey – enjoy it out there.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/27/tories-dominic-cummings-people-v-parliament-election
There is so much of this to Cummings’ “people vs parliament” brand of politics, but the patsies – the Tory MPs – are yet to catch on. While most women could read that New York Times column and work out what it basically meant for them, a lot of Conservative MPs are dutifully spouting Cummings’ lines, but don’t yet seem to have worked out where they leave them.
But listen, Tory mooks – I’m here to help. While you’re getting a tiki torch and standing a post, let me tell you what a “people vs parliament” election ultimately means for you. First, if you whip up an angry mob, why do you assume they won’t end up angry with you? Do you think the mob is going to come upon an MP and go, “Wait, wait – this is so-and-so. He voted for Meaningful Votes 2 and 3, so we should, you know, definitely not put our pitchforks up his arse”? Eventually, you’re going to get a pitchfork up your arse either way.
To adapt that phrase of the alt-right to whom you tack closer every day: mobs don’t care about your feelings. If I had to come up with an adjective to help you understand mobs, it would probably be mob-like. Very mobby. Mobtastic. If you go to the country in a people v parliament election, you may indeed get elected and be part of a triumphant Tory majority. But when you have been elected, and when you’ve “got Brexit done” – which is to say, when you’ve either taken the UK off the no-deal cliff, or opened up the next however many painful years of trade negotiations fuckery-pokery, which is never going to solve the problems it is magically supposed to – you, then, are “parliament”.
The even angrier people are then versus YOU. That’s when they come for you, because you asked them to. You invited them in. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this line “the revolution devours its children”? That’s you, babe. Second, I know you’ve already only read about one war, but bad news: it’s the wrong war. You need the first world war, not the second. By way of a crash course of what Dom’s got planned for you, take the line in Blackadder, where the general brays to the guys he’s sending over the top: “We’ll be right behind you!” and Blackadder mutters: “About 35 miles behind you.” You’re the cannon fodder, you’re the Twenty Minuters. But, hey – enjoy it out there.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/27/tories-dominic-cummings-people-v-parliament-election
I had to really gut Marina Hyde's article to comply with the forum's paragraph limit, but what I've posted of it chimes with something I've long thought about Trump, Farage, Johnson and other petty but powerful demagogues who keep popping up. Hyde no doubt expresses it more pithily and elegantly than I can.
Perhaps it's just my cheery, optimistic nature. But maybe some day, when all the cheap rhetoric's spent and they run out of excuses and scapegoats and adversaries to whine about to explain why they never actually deliver on any of their grandiose but vague promises - if they even bother to formulate a positive message at all - but mysteriously and consistently end up making themselves and their shady cronies filthily richer at the expense of the rubes and plebs they secretly hold in utter contempt while using their snobby caricature of the thuggish, amorphous blob of ballot box fodder "outside the M25" or "oop North" or wherever, always on the verge of erupting into convenient violence, to try to scare people into doing what they want, maybe some day, when they're finally rumbled by those they've conned, maybe then there'll be a row of lamp posts with their names on.