Hector Drummond
@hector_drummond • 12,582 subscribers
Writer-researcher-composer. Author of The Face Mask Cult, and the campus satire Days of Wine and Cheese. Former academic. Host of the (resting) Guff Stream.
Videos
Steve Coogan, betraying his own people for 36 years. This is from 1990.
Hector Drummond98,981 просмотров • 8 дней назад
![Andrew Lloyd Webber just single-handedly yanked the Overton Window right: "Many, many, many people are hovering around at the moment, rubbing their hands in glee about [the tax]... I can assure you they're not British."](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1858867506720453113/ext_tw_video_thumb/1858866460895887360/pu/img/v1_EvXRw81DAX2Dc.jpg)
This is the British dream now, to live in a shoddy, cramped Deanobox with thin walls and too many neighbours on top of you, in a place you don't want to live but were forced to move to to avoid the diversity, in a terrible job you can never leave, paying tax for foreigners.
Hector Drummond27,441 просмотров • 1 год назад
Farage and the suckers I used to regularly socialise with a group, one of whose number was a financial lawyer. He used to tell us about something that was surprisingly common in his line of work. He would be called in to give advice because someone wanted to spend their life savings on a scheme that was an obvious scam. He said that 99% of the time they could not be talked out of it. Nothing and nobody could persuade them not to do it, because they were convinced that a fortune was there to be made, and they were desperate to pour as much money as they could into the scheme. They would get really angry with anyone (like a spouse, or other family, or friends) who tried to stop them. Why are you stopping me from making a fortune, they would say. “You're ruining my chance of living the life of my dreams,” was their view. This was meant to happen. This was the life they deserved, which had been so cruelly denied to them for so long. Finally reality was going to turn around and favour them for a change. It was the “Shut up and take my money” meme in real life. It wasn’t that they didn't understand about scams. Yes, scams happen, they knew that, but they don’t happen to me. (That, at least, was my friend’s summation of their thinking based on talking to them.) They could barely take seriously the idea that they were a gullible fool who was being tricked. When obvious problems and flaws with the scheme were pointed out, they would come up with far-fetched and implausible explanations to wave the problems away. Any explanation would do, as long as it meant they didn’t have to wake up from the dream. In almost every case the person concerned decided to put their money into the scheme. Hardly anyone decided not to. In every single case they lost all the money. In every one of these cases the mark was completely shocked and stunned when it happened. They never saw it coming, despite so many people around them telling them it was a con. I bring this up because the situation with Nigel Farage is similar. People are desperate to believe that he is going to save the country. I don't blame them for being desperate. The situation *is* desperate. But that means that many people will cling onto anything which is presented to them as the solution. Farage, they are told by the media, is the big, bad anti-immigration, anti-green, anti-PC man. Great, they think. If the media doesn't like him, then he’s the man for me. I'm also against those things. So they buy into him, big time, without a proper examination. Look, they say, he was Mr Anti-EU for decades. He’s Mr Brexit. He released that poster during the Brexit campaign depicting a long line of foreigners trying to get into Britain. The hated MSM attacks him for being anti-immigration, etc. So how can you lose if you trust him? Life will become good again if we all just support Nigel. Sink your emotional life-savings into him, and watch the results pour in once he gets power. So when you tell them to read Farage’s fine-print, like the Reform manifesto (digging into what slogans like “Net Zero immigration” actually mean), or particular things he has publicly said over the years, and what many people who have worked with him say about him, they act exactly like those people who are advised not to invest their life savings into a get-rich-quick scheme. They get angry and offended. Why are you trying to take away my dream of a better life for me, and a better Britain for all of us? Why are you undermining the only man who stands any chance of transforming the country for us, and preventing my life from getting worse and worse? You’re just trying to ruin everything. You’re just a negative Nelly, who is too afraid to take a risk. Maybe you even support Labour, really. And so on. When asked to explain why it is that Farage’s actual positions, and his track record, indicate that he is not remotely the hard-liner they think he is, they act like the wannabe investors who will come up with any excuse, no matter how implausible, to preserve the dream. I know, I've seen many of them in my comments doing this. “He has to pretend to be more mainstream and mild than he really is in order that he doesn’t get bad MSM headlines” is the gist of it. “The BBC would tear him apart and his support would vanish overnight if he said anything stronger at this stage,” they say. In other words, “he has to get his party into a stronger position before he can say anything that might seem radical.” Apparently being neck-and-neck with Labour and the Conservatives in the polls, having MPs in Parliament, facing rival parties that are collapsing in unprecedented fashion for their adherence to the established ways, having the media hang on your every word, and facing a country crying out for a change in your supposed direction, isn’t a strong enough position for you to lay out your real agenda. You’ve still got to be timid and pretend to differ only slightly from the Conservative Party, lest the British people say, “Reducing mass immigration back to the levels they were in 2000 frightens me, who will cook our kebabs? I’m going to go back to the Tories/Labour/LibDems.” So it’s quite reasonable, apparently, for Farage to delay saying what he really thinks until 2034. Or 2039. Until then, we’ll just twiddle our thumbs and trust him with our support. It never occurs to them as a serious possibility that maybe Farage isn’t “hiding his real power levels,” but just isn’t very radical. In fact, his whole history indicates that not only does he have no interest in supporting robust anti-immigrationism, he is actively opposed to it. He left UKIP because he thought UKIP people were too concerned with Islamic immigration. When he was in charge of UKIP it worked with the intelligence services to weed out anyone who didn’t want Britain being filled up with foreigners. All his public statements going back thirty years indicate that he is a liberal, supply-side Thatcherite, who repudiates nationalism, unless it’s anodyne, flag-waving, Union-Jack-biscuit-tin civic nationalism, where anyone who can vaguely adopt some British cliches (cricket, tea, old Jags, etc.) gets a passport. If he’s playing a game to fool the media, it’s a game that goes back a long, long way. Where is the actual evidence, then, that shows that he is in any way a nativist? What reason is there to believe that he is really is a blood-and-soil nationalist who will suddenly reveal, once in power, his determination to remigrate millions of foreigners, when he’s spent his whole life urging against this? There is no reason to believe this at all, other than people’s desperation to search for a Messiah figure, and the fact that the media (and various hysterical left-wingers) give people the impression that this is Farage’s plan. But they have no evidence for this either, and anyway, why would the media give airtime to someone who genuinely thought this? Wouldn't that devious and tricksy ol’ MSM be more likely to give airtime to someone who was actually rather liberal when it comes down to it, but who can be made to seem like an attractive, anti-establishment rebel, while simultaneously sidelining the real rebels? It's like when the people who want to give away their life savings are shown the long history of bankruptcies that their Svengali has left behind, and they excuse it by saying something like, “Oh, that’s because he never had enough financial support from people. But thanks to me, I can finally give him the money he needs to succeed.” Or whatever excuse they kid themselves with. When asked, “But what evidence is there that he can make you money?”, they reply, “He’s told me his plan, and swears it will work, and it sounds good to me. Look, the rate of return is amazing, I can't pass that chance up, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” and so on. Farage also has a glib, charismatic manner, and is very good at talking in general-enough language that people can read into it what they like. “People on the streets have been talking to me, and they've had enough,” he kept saying during the summer 2024 election campaign, but he was rather vague about what exactly they were fed up with, and even vaguer about what he proposed to do about it, which allowed the sucker, er, supporter to decide that Farage was talking about just the very things the supporter thinks are important, and had in mind the same solutions. The media will admit, though, when it thinks the average Joe isn’t listening, that Farage isn’t anywhere near as bad as they normally make him out to be. This is what’s going on in this video clip of Michael Crick, which was from Times Radio, which the average Joe doesn’t listen to. The point of Crick admitting this is to calm down any naive liberals or leftists who are starting to froth at the mouth at the prospect of Farage getting anywhere. (“Look, we don't like him, but we can live with him, he's tamer than you think, better him than some genuine nationalist party.”) I haven't even talked about the idiocy of thinking that Reform’s support would plummet overnight instead of rising (or at least staying roughly the same) if they started talking tougher. (The Telegraph’s pet hamster Tim Stanley hysterically claimed recently that if Reform decided to do this they would lose 10,000 votes for every “far-Right” voter they courted.) I haven’t said anything about how an anti-establishment party must of necessity drive changes in stateable public opinion, rather than accept the status quo. Nor have I talked about the foolishness of trusting a party that you think is cowardly and constantly lying. Or the problem of how rational it is to believe that a timid party, that said for years that it definitely won't do X, Y and Z, will be capable of doing X, Y and Z when it gets power, especially seeing as it will face the real wrath of the establishment at that point. These are all legitimate topics for discussion, but in this article I have been mainly concerned with the parallels with the self-deluding life-savings investor. The conman doesn’t need that many suckers to be a success. He just needs a few. Similarly, Farage doesn’t need that many people to fall for his shtick. With the other big parties’ support in free fall, he can set Reform up as the rebel outsider party for years on the back of a minority of votes, without ever having to make any hard choices, or commit to any positions which will genuinely set the establishment against him. He also has an advantage over the traditional conman, who operates on the margins and in the shadows, of having the media there to endorse him as the “official” rebel. Their every warning makes him seem more attractive to the dissatisfied: “Don’t vote for that Farage, don’t you know he’s anti-immigration and anti-Net Zero? He’s a maverick who doesn’t do what he’s told.” No wonder Reform’s membership numbers are going through the roof. When one person loses their head to a charismatic phony it’s a private tragedy. When enough voters lose their heads to a political phony, who’s taking away the oxygen that a real opposition needs, it’s a public tragedy. So I say, keep your political life savings in a box under your bed for now. And if you must spend some or all of it on Farage, be demanding. Keep all your receipts, note what he says and doesn’t say, and demand that he clearly articulates the feelings of the people he claims to represent. Don’t let him fob you off with vague and airy platitudes. He’s not Barack Obama. He’s your rebel, so make him speak for you, and if he won’t, find someone else who will.
Hector Drummond34,408 просмотров • 1 год назад
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