National Conservatism et al.
The Tory party shows signs of fragmenting, following the latest English local election results. Last week we had the meeting of the Bring Back Boris Brigade last week addressed by Priti Patel, there is now a meeting of another group which is itself a branch of a US Conservative movement, addressed by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Suella Braverman. Suella seems to be advocating a form of autarky, while the Memnber for 1832's solution to the immigration issue, AIUI, is to make conditions in this country so awful (by scrapping all regulatory controls originating from the EU) that no-one will want to come here. Can these people have any traction outside the eye-swivelling Right?
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Here's a foretaste of what National Conservatism looks like:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/may/15/suella-braverman-rails-against-experts-and-elites-in-partisan-speech
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
"Braverman warned against the UK descending into a US-style culture war that pitted various elements of the right against each other."
She doesn't realize that her own speech catapults her into the immediate company of the US's most virulent political culture warriors? My-my. She makes all of the same declarations as Marjorie Taylor Greene & Lauren Boebert. At least your National Conservatives aren't armed to the teeth with assault weapons with few if any meaningful laws or efforts to regulate them.
The National Conservative movement was founded and is funded by US Republicans.
Well, well. MEGA...Make England Great Again?
Rees-Mogg criticising voter ID is pretty funny though. Especially because I'm sure that was an idea put forward by Boris Johnson not Sunak, probably to try to save Johnson's seat (area with lots of students).
Link?
Indeed, but with any luck (yes, I know), the NCs under Braverman won't win the election either...
The National Conservatism website states that N.C. is a "project of the Edmund Burke Foundation" which was itself founded "by a series of public conferences on national conservatism in London, Washington, and Rome between May 2019 and February 2020."
Sorry for not linking to the EBF website, but the URL won't copy/paste correctly.
here
And here.
Scary.
The NatC party, as somebody put it on the Grauniad website.
Something that's also sinister is the presence of two clergymen in that gallery and a slot on Wednesday afternoon called "God and Country". Doe any shipmates know anything about either of them or any of the speakers at that session?
The head-bangers teaming up to appear at or attend this sinister nutfest don't seem to have noticed that there's something fundamentally illogical about having anything to do with something that proclaims nationalism but which is driven from abroad by somebody else's nationalism and apparently significantly funded by foreign money.
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Reading the links provided they appear to be Theocrats of a sort.
Irony has never been a strong suit for Conservatives, it seems, particularly in terms of self awareness.
On the plus side at least they haven't got pretendy vicar (and real bigot) Calvin Robinson on the slate.
I guess deregulation internally, while protectionist against foreign businesses. Sorta like I support the right of citizens to move around their own nation with zerio hinderance, but foreigners should have to jump through at least a few hoops to even so much as visit.
That said, I'm pretty sure alot of libertarians do apply the laissiez-faire principles to international trade as well. And allowing domestic industries to pay as little as they want and pollute as much as they want is, if nothing else, prob'ly a good way to get them to stop building their factories overseas.
God knows I'd disagree with Birblesinghe about just about everything but I didn't think she'd gone far enough to end up with this lot.
I wasn't entirely surprised, Quilette/Unherd/Spectator exist to launder far-right opinions into the mainstream, and so once someone starts to write for them it generally signals a certain ease with the further right.
She was - after all - the headmistress who was humiliating and not feeding children properly when their parents didn't/couldn't afford to pay for school lunches. Her reputation has been built by fairly ruthless selection in every school she's led.
Every part of education that isn't purely a matter of fact is indoctrination, and that goes double for history. One man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist, and all that - and which identity is taught in school is decided by which political and/or ideological worldview those who set the curriculum want to instill in their pupils.
They call it "Faith, Flag, Family". Which isn't a mile off.
Also true.
Well, alternately, we might be back in the 1870s, with Disraeli's One Nation Conservatism. Which is, in fact, what I initially thought the thread-title was referencing.
(Not that I'm a fan of social-welfare ideologies based upon sentimentalized notions of aristocratic values.)
Are they really? The 3 Fs.
Also not a mile off Starmer's flag-shagging, though even Starmer hasn't quite got to the faith bit yet.
I don't think you know what history is. History is fundamentally about investigation - it's literally what the word means. I also don't know what weird school you went to, because I did History through GCSE right up to A Level, and even pre-GCSE students have access to things like primary sources.
Like for example, for part of my GCSE History we studied Irish history and especially that of the 20th Century and the Troubles. I grew up in an area with a large Irish community with the GFA being signed very very recently, so it was very much a personal issue for many students. We weren't taught to feel a particular way about it, people were able to study the sources and decide for themselves.
Of course, shagging doesn’t mean the same thing where I live as it does in many parts of the Anglosphere. It’s a kind of dancing here, and I have to remind myself what it means elsewhere.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Flagshagger
This is a snapshot of America.
You are quite right. But you are a lot younger than I am, @Pomona, and the teaching of history has changed a great deal. At least, I was on the cusp of the change, and teaching to O-level/GCSE was always more methodical than the basic primary and early secondary course. I didn't sit O-level history but I did do the first year of the syllabus which covered the unification of Germany under Bismarck, the American Revolution and Civil War, the buildup to the Great War and the war itself, and finally the rise of Hitler. There was access to a limited amount of primary source material including, to my continuing delight, original music-hall recordings.
Prior to that, it was largely the old procession of Kings and Queens and Battles although one enlightened teacher (she went to the Methodist church and knew my parents there) covered on her own initiative Mohammad and the rise of Islam (something that should be on all modern syllabuses today, such is the poor understanding of and bigotry towards Islam that is abroad these days) and Luther and the Reformation. But that I think was an aberration. Most of it was Reasons to be Jingoistic. I think it was called building character, or at least loyal subjects
The National Conservatives, and their supporters on right-wing websites, go purple and blustery about the loss of the old jingoistic history. Pointing out that not everything was covered in national glory is treasonous. Agincourt 1415 – Jolly good show! Good old English pluck and superior longbows giving the dastardly Frogs what for! Raise the flag high and proud! What? Castillon 1453? Never heard of it! What do you mean, the perfidious, cowardly French routed a much larger English force with superior tactics and artillery? Fake history, woman! Rewriting of history! Stop teaching such Britain-hating woke propaganda to our children!
(Repeat or replace with Spanish Armada 1588 for Agincourt and English Armada 1589 for Castillon: in both cases I learned about the second of the pair long after the first. Or use other examples of your choice involving Ireland, Empire or religious persecutions).
Bloody hell! I'd idly wondered from time to time why nothing much seemed to come of repelling the Spanish Armada and now I know why. What an utter clusterfuck. And how very British that the investors made up for their losses by screwing the crews and their families out of their pay. Thank you for an enlightening 10 minutes on Wikipedia.
NatCs for short.
I don't think you know what history is. History is fundamentally about investigation - it's literally what the word means. I also don't know what weird school you went to, because I did History through GCSE right up to A Level, and even pre-GCSE students have access to things like primary sources.
I did History all the way up to PhD.
The good thing about primary sources in school is that pupils are taught how to assess them, to interrogate the text with questions such as - who wrote this? to whom? why? did they have any reason to dissemble?
BUT someone chooses which primary sources to present to school pupils, and that person will have their own biases, conscious or unconscious. It is a remarkable school pupil who heads off to find their own primary sources.
So pupils don't, can't, get a balance. My area is Women's History, and I sometimes joke that I chose it because I'm lazy. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions, of primary sources unresearched, because for the last couple of hundred years an unconscious bias has identified primary sources by or about men as the important sources. That makes it easy to find new sources. But on the flip side, archive material which I would find useful is often listed as "miscellaneous correspondence" with no indication of what might be there because someone has decided that that particular bundle of letters isn't of interest.
I'm aware of the bias towards men, but undoubtedly I have my own biases at play in choosing primary sources to support my own arguments.
He won't. He'll find another way ..."British values" mabe?
I keep asking but I've never found anybody who could tell me what "british values" are other than in the vaguest terms that are shared at least by our European friends and neighbours and probably much further afield.
Same with the "British Culture" that is being constantly "eroded" by incomers. Whisper it not but I suspect it means "pale skin".