summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
The love of money corrupts absolutely.
Current Affairs The Conservative Party
- Thread starter Ashtonian
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summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
I wonder if he has the same fruiterer ? We're all in this together now makes perfect sense.
zzr45
#MURDERINGSCUM
Sorry, but that’s just reverse snobbery. Yes he’s terrible at his job, but so what if he’s got 4 ovens?
zzr45
#MURDERINGSCUM
We used to have a fruiterer in our town (was written on the sign) and Joey seems to have more than a passing knowledge of my hometown. Very possibly he was moonlighting as Chief fruiterer.
Cash in hand I suspect to help him build up his illicit fish farming business. #BritishFishForBritishPonds
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
Ouch. lol
www.thetimes.co.uk
The Victorians by Jacob Rees-Mogg review — ‘what a staggeringly silly book this is’
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s self-consciously “old-fashioned” manners and appeals to patriotism are familiar to all TV viewers. He would like us to believe that his monetarism and his Euroscepticism have their roots in the good old days of Victoria and the British Empire — hence this book, which claims to be a work of history, but is in fact yet another bit of self-promotion by a highly motivated modern politician.
The Victorians consists of a dozen clumsily written pompous schoolboy compositions about 19th-century characters. Prince Albert is praised as “truly virtuous”. The cricketer WG Grace and the crackpot General Gordon are seen as great patriots. Rees-Mogg’s first hero is Sir Robert Peel, because he was prepared to split the Conservative Party for patriotic reasons. In the Rees-Mogg version, Peel’s decision to abolish the corn laws and support free trade rather than tariffs on imported corn becomes a parable about the European Research Group’s patriotic decision to face down the Tory wets.
Lord Palmerston, the subject of chapter two, in spite of his “complicated and notorious private life” (over which Mogg draws a boringly chaste veil), is equally patriotic. “The interest of England is the polar star, the guiding principle of the conduct of the government,” Palmerston said in 1839. We are meant to believe this would have led him to a firm Eurosceptic position in 2019.
And so the catalogue of blimps and fogeys goes on, reaching its high-water mark with . . . none other than Albert Dicey. “Thank Heavens for Albert Dicey!” Mogg’s damp squib of an essay on this forgotten constitutional lawyer is included because Dicey moved from being a radical to being a Unionist diehard over the question of the Irish backstop, sorry, I mean, over Irish home rule. Dicey thought he could stop home rule by an appeal to the “people” by means of a referendum, says Mogg. “It is his structure of parliamentary sovereignty and his understanding of referendums that provide the constitutional authority for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.”
Quite why Dicey has such “authority” in English law is not explained. What a staggeringly silly book this is! Although it is called The Victorians, it contains no humorists and no humour — where is Dickens? It has no musicians, no engineers, no John Stuart Mill, no Thomas Carlyle, no scientists, no painters, no poets and interestingly for so devout a Catholic writer, no cardinals. There’s no Manning fighting for the rights of the dockers and no Newman writing the most plausible defence of theism in the English language. “Britain’s most famous Catholic”, on planet Mogg, was the architect Augustus Welby Pugin, who was, of course, mad because he had syphilis — a fact Mogg censors.
Mogg wonders why Pugin, who had quarrelled with almost everyone involved with building the new Palace of Westminster, was not invited to the inauguration of the House of Lords. Anti-Catholic feeling? “The renewal of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales had, after all, occasioned the last strong outburst of anti-Catholic prejudice in the country.” An interesting theory, apart from the fact that the House of Lords was inaugurated in 1847 and the new RC hierarchy of bishops was established three years later in 1850.
The book is all chaps. Of the dozen characters assembled, only one is female; the figure whom Mogg calls “Her Imperial Majesty Queen Victoria”. Where is George Eliot? Where is Josephine Butler, or Frances Buss, pioneer of women’s education, or Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first female doctor?
The oddity of the book’s style cannot be excused entirely by the obvious fact that it was written in a hurry. “Pugin’s vision for the building [the Palace of Westminster] proved to be a lasting masterpiece of Gothic design.” (How can a vision be a masterpiece?) “Let us not imagine Sleeman,” Mogg intones, “ as anything else but a classic Victorian.” What does this mean, and who was imagining William Sleeman (the administrator who campaigned against the Thugs in India) as anything other than a Victorian, classic or otherwise? “His life was a vindication of the Empire he served.”
There is a lot of vindication of the empire in Mogg’s book. In the chapter on General Charles Napier’s conquest of Sindh, Mogg thinks he is being very fair-minded to quote Napier saying: “Our object in conquering India, the object of all our cruelties, was money.” He does not add that Napier, after the conquest of Sindh and the massacre of thousands and thousands of Indians, was corrupted and claimed a reward of £70,000 — a colossal sum. Mogg tells his readers that the Koh-i-Noor diamond, looted from the Maharaja Duleep Singh by the East India Company, was “given” to Queen Victoria “in recognition of a great victory”.
At this point in the book you start to think that the author is worse than a twit. By all means let us celebrate what was great about the Victorians, but there is something morally repellent about a book that can gloss over massacres and pillage on the scale perpetrated by Napier and that does not spell out the nauseating facts behind Mogg’s weaselly phrase: “More than half of British revenue in India in this period was accounted for by duties levied on the trade in opium.” The enforcement of the opium “trade” on China, the genocidal killings, the vandalism, the destruction, is passed over in total silence.
Mogg begins by saying that he intends his book to be a corrective to Lytton Strachey’s hilarious Eminent Victorians, a work he admits to having “leafed through”, and whose cynicism shocks him. He writes as if Strachey’s book, over 100 years old, has elicited no response until his own and as if the “civilising effect” of the British Empire, and of the Unionists in Ireland have somehow passed us by. Dicey reminded the Victorians that “Englishmen are ruled by the law”. This was “a blessed state enjoyed almost nowhere else in the world outside the Empire”. Can he be serious? Has he ever heard of a country, for example, called the United States of America?
Mogg proudly says at the outset that his book will be “anathema to the present-day politically correct elite”. But also anathema, surely, to anyone with an ounce of historical, or simply common, sense.
The Victorians by Jacob Rees-Mogg review — ‘a staggeringly silly piece of history’
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s self-consciously “old-fashioned” manners and appeals to patriotism are familiar to all TV viewers. He would like us to believe that his monetarism and his Euroscepticism have their roots in the good old days of Victoria and the British Empire — hence this book, which claims to be a
www.thetimes.co.uk
The Victorians by Jacob Rees-Mogg review — ‘what a staggeringly silly book this is’
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s self-consciously “old-fashioned” manners and appeals to patriotism are familiar to all TV viewers. He would like us to believe that his monetarism and his Euroscepticism have their roots in the good old days of Victoria and the British Empire — hence this book, which claims to be a work of history, but is in fact yet another bit of self-promotion by a highly motivated modern politician.
The Victorians consists of a dozen clumsily written pompous schoolboy compositions about 19th-century characters. Prince Albert is praised as “truly virtuous”. The cricketer WG Grace and the crackpot General Gordon are seen as great patriots. Rees-Mogg’s first hero is Sir Robert Peel, because he was prepared to split the Conservative Party for patriotic reasons. In the Rees-Mogg version, Peel’s decision to abolish the corn laws and support free trade rather than tariffs on imported corn becomes a parable about the European Research Group’s patriotic decision to face down the Tory wets.
Lord Palmerston, the subject of chapter two, in spite of his “complicated and notorious private life” (over which Mogg draws a boringly chaste veil), is equally patriotic. “The interest of England is the polar star, the guiding principle of the conduct of the government,” Palmerston said in 1839. We are meant to believe this would have led him to a firm Eurosceptic position in 2019.
And so the catalogue of blimps and fogeys goes on, reaching its high-water mark with . . . none other than Albert Dicey. “Thank Heavens for Albert Dicey!” Mogg’s damp squib of an essay on this forgotten constitutional lawyer is included because Dicey moved from being a radical to being a Unionist diehard over the question of the Irish backstop, sorry, I mean, over Irish home rule. Dicey thought he could stop home rule by an appeal to the “people” by means of a referendum, says Mogg. “It is his structure of parliamentary sovereignty and his understanding of referendums that provide the constitutional authority for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.”
Quite why Dicey has such “authority” in English law is not explained. What a staggeringly silly book this is! Although it is called The Victorians, it contains no humorists and no humour — where is Dickens? It has no musicians, no engineers, no John Stuart Mill, no Thomas Carlyle, no scientists, no painters, no poets and interestingly for so devout a Catholic writer, no cardinals. There’s no Manning fighting for the rights of the dockers and no Newman writing the most plausible defence of theism in the English language. “Britain’s most famous Catholic”, on planet Mogg, was the architect Augustus Welby Pugin, who was, of course, mad because he had syphilis — a fact Mogg censors.
Mogg wonders why Pugin, who had quarrelled with almost everyone involved with building the new Palace of Westminster, was not invited to the inauguration of the House of Lords. Anti-Catholic feeling? “The renewal of the Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales had, after all, occasioned the last strong outburst of anti-Catholic prejudice in the country.” An interesting theory, apart from the fact that the House of Lords was inaugurated in 1847 and the new RC hierarchy of bishops was established three years later in 1850.
The book is all chaps. Of the dozen characters assembled, only one is female; the figure whom Mogg calls “Her Imperial Majesty Queen Victoria”. Where is George Eliot? Where is Josephine Butler, or Frances Buss, pioneer of women’s education, or Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first female doctor?
The oddity of the book’s style cannot be excused entirely by the obvious fact that it was written in a hurry. “Pugin’s vision for the building [the Palace of Westminster] proved to be a lasting masterpiece of Gothic design.” (How can a vision be a masterpiece?) “Let us not imagine Sleeman,” Mogg intones, “ as anything else but a classic Victorian.” What does this mean, and who was imagining William Sleeman (the administrator who campaigned against the Thugs in India) as anything other than a Victorian, classic or otherwise? “His life was a vindication of the Empire he served.”
There is a lot of vindication of the empire in Mogg’s book. In the chapter on General Charles Napier’s conquest of Sindh, Mogg thinks he is being very fair-minded to quote Napier saying: “Our object in conquering India, the object of all our cruelties, was money.” He does not add that Napier, after the conquest of Sindh and the massacre of thousands and thousands of Indians, was corrupted and claimed a reward of £70,000 — a colossal sum. Mogg tells his readers that the Koh-i-Noor diamond, looted from the Maharaja Duleep Singh by the East India Company, was “given” to Queen Victoria “in recognition of a great victory”.
At this point in the book you start to think that the author is worse than a twit. By all means let us celebrate what was great about the Victorians, but there is something morally repellent about a book that can gloss over massacres and pillage on the scale perpetrated by Napier and that does not spell out the nauseating facts behind Mogg’s weaselly phrase: “More than half of British revenue in India in this period was accounted for by duties levied on the trade in opium.” The enforcement of the opium “trade” on China, the genocidal killings, the vandalism, the destruction, is passed over in total silence.
Mogg begins by saying that he intends his book to be a corrective to Lytton Strachey’s hilarious Eminent Victorians, a work he admits to having “leafed through”, and whose cynicism shocks him. He writes as if Strachey’s book, over 100 years old, has elicited no response until his own and as if the “civilising effect” of the British Empire, and of the Unionists in Ireland have somehow passed us by. Dicey reminded the Victorians that “Englishmen are ruled by the law”. This was “a blessed state enjoyed almost nowhere else in the world outside the Empire”. Can he be serious? Has he ever heard of a country, for example, called the United States of America?
Mogg proudly says at the outset that his book will be “anathema to the present-day politically correct elite”. But also anathema, surely, to anyone with an ounce of historical, or simply common, sense.
NilSatisOptimum
Player Valuation: £70m
The Tories only squandered away £500 million of tax payers on its failed privatisation of probation services.
www.bbc.co.uk
Probation service: Offender supervision to be renationalised
Chris Grayling's part-privatisation of the probation system is reversed after a series of failings.
www.bbc.co.uk
summerisle
The rain, it raineth every day
Coming to a Poundland near you.
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
I see the Government has bravely defended one of its generals, after he accidentally told the truth earlier this week:
from here - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/16/uk-raises-threat-level-for-british-forces-in-iraq
from here - https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/may/16/uk-raises-threat-level-for-british-forces-in-iraq
peteblue
Welcome back Wayne
Normally I would agree with our military, but four ships had limpet mines blown up on them.......
tsubaki
Player Valuation: £90m
... several days after the US announced there was a threat from Iran, and none of the ships was significantly damaged. One almost might come to the conclusion that the attack was designed to support the US action.
Anyway, what is with this "normally I would agree with our military, but"? What with your support for pro-IRA candidates you are turning into a bit of a liability.
orchard
Player Valuation: £60m
He's stated he wants us to become a us state, at least he's being consistent for now, however abhorrent i find the notion.
NilSatisOptimum
Player Valuation: £70m
Blimey, May will miss out on the "war legacy", as well. Suppose hanging on to beat Brown tenure will be her legacy.
And apparently Iran sponsors terrorism, on the say so President Agent Orange, all things being equal we get to go up against Saudi Arabia as well.
It's bemusing that flag waving Brexiteers are even concerned with America and Iran, if they only new their history...
And apparently Iran sponsors terrorism, on the say so President Agent Orange, all things being equal we get to go up against Saudi Arabia as well.
It's bemusing that flag waving Brexiteers are even concerned with America and Iran, if they only new their history...
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