Jack Hughes

THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS Along with Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, this book represents a view of the working class and "progress" being about their struggles that died as the 50s turned into the 60s. From the perspective of today, both books are prescient of a type of rooted, conservation, reactionary cultural analysis. In it's day, this book was hugely influential. I read this a few years ago when my thought was less developed, but it has floated around in the back of my mind. Time to return to it, I think...🧵

@EdwardJDavey It reminds me of Went The Day Well? A film about two groups of British people, being British in different ways and the divisive minority who seek to impose their own regressive, nativist notions of who does and doesn't belong.

Imagine seeing British people at prayer and thinking “this is a great chance to stoke fear, hatred and division”. People who do that should have no place in British politics. Freedom to worship is a fundamental British value – one the Conservative Party used to believe in.

@timecaptales I hear he was nearly as good as Andrew Tate.

Chuck Norris held a 183-10-2 record and was a 6x world champion in full contact bare knuckle karate. On top of that, he beat heavyweight kickboxing world champion Joe Lewis 3 consecutive times and also had a brutal sparring match with undefeated kickboxing world champion, Bill Superfoot Wallace, that lasted an hour and a half. According to Wallace, they practically stalemated and "beat the crap out of each other". Chuck was trained in kickboxing/boxing by Benny The Jet Urquidez and was also trained in BJJ by the Gracies and Machados for 20 years. Even being able to submit Carlos Machado himself on occasion. Chuck had a 315 Ibs bench press at 180 lbs bodyweight and was said to have a grip back in the day that nobody could escape from because he was so strong. Even Jean Claude Van Damme said he'd never fight Chuck Norris, despite being a kickboxing world champion himself. Chuck held a 10th degree black belt in Chun Kuk Do, a 9th degree black belt in Tang Soo Do, an 8th degree black belt in Taekwondo, a 5th degree black belt in Karate, a 3rd degree black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and a black belt in Judo. Rest in peace, Chuck!

The public overwhelmingly supported Powell's Rivers of Blood speech. The political establishment has been knowingly suppressing public objections and criminalising political opposition against all this since at least 1964 and palming the public off on the question for longer than that. If public opinion were an important issue in the political direction of the country, we'd be a virtual ethnostate that still had hanging and took a dim view of homosexuality.

@english_stee @MothinAli Your policies have been voted down at every general election since 1931, the British people have been asked, and they have answered.

Your obsession with it is a racist dog-whistle, that's why no one takes you seriously. However this is the wrong Eid...

@MorgothsReview Chuck Norris finally came for death.

R.I.P Chuck.

It seems highly symbolic that Chuck Norris, an icon of American masculinity and cultural dominance, has died.

Well, maybe a bit of that also. Another aspect is the extent to which many of the politicians were drunk with wartime bureaucratic power, and believed that elite people such as themselves could remake society as they saw fit. The newcomers were new and interesting elements to be managed, the complaints of the white working class were obstacles to the grand vision who were merely "resistant to change".

@ThreeJacques @GaelicFuturist @Littoria14 Yeah I may have simplified things a bit There was clearly an ethnic component re those who wanted that act passed A certain group was grossly over-represented among Labour MPs back then... Masters at manipulating the English instinct to be fair

Post WW2 Western parliamentary democracies follow the British pattern: Whigs/Liberals/"the left" pass an unpopular and destructive policy, then the Tories/Conservatives absorb the protest vote and manage the discontent while quietly implementing the new policy.

The thing about it though, is that as an act of science fiction world building, The Handmaid's Tale makes no sense. It is a manifestation of feminine fears and fantasies, a fever dream. It's one of the purest examples of the reality-warping powers of female psychology. It is manifested female hysteria. As an illustration of that, it is very good. As any sort of discussion about, or warning about the real world... not so much.

@LBC @stellacreasy Gilead was based on the Islamic Republic of Iran

'The Handmaid's Tale was meant to be science-fiction, not a manifesto for a future government!' Although steps towards de-criminalising abortion have been taken, @stellacreasy warns people not to let their guard down, and keep fighting.

@LBC @stellacreasy The Handmaid's Tale is a feminist BDSM sex fantasy manifesting female erotic attraction to their own fears of the sort that has women watching documentaries about sex murderers late at night. It has nothing serious to say about the world beyond the female erotic imagination.

One of the things about the Race Relations Act and the 1964 Labour government is all that required actively suppressing discussion of the issues that their original base was facing in immigrant areas, and threatening people's careers if they spoke up. It's much more complicated than just "being nice". By 1955, Hugh Gaitskell was already suggesting the white working class were a diminishing base and Labour needed to look beyond them. A political machine began to be built in these immigrant communities in the late 50s/early 60s.

@GaelicFuturist @Littoria14 The vast majority of immigration to UK occurred under the Tories and yet Labour get the blame @Littoria14 's original point is good: Labour allowed the Windrush to dock not realising what they were starting They also passed the race relations act b/c they wanted to be nice

@CatoThistlewood @LBC @stellacreasy One is a feminist BDSM sex fantasy, and the other is a functioning society?

@LBC @stellacreasy What's the difference between these two images, luv?

A description of how sexual frustration amongst low-status men in conservative societies, in this case Pakistan, bombarded by images of easily available female sexuality from the West, drives immigration.

Another story of an illegal Pakistani migrant to Britain. The extent to which these communities have always been based on immigration fraud, tax fraud and benefit fraud is a lot, going all the way back to the early 1950s.

Books on the actual mechanisms by which people have been illegally transported into Western Europe are exceedingly thin on the ground. I thought this might be an interesting window into the topic...🧵

He's also come here from a country that tore itself apart through ethnic violence after the British stopped keeping order. He comes from the majority group that the British thought were kind of uneducated and stupid. Since independence, they have been getting ethnic revenge against the Tamils. It's like being lectured to by a black South African who has fled because of what a violent shithole his country has become, about how superior and necessary his people are. As with India and Pakistan, a lot of them have come through fraud.

Holds an intergenerational grudge/blood liable against us. Also wonders why we have a problem being replaced by people with said grudge. Fuckin gaslighting twat.

@commontruth_ @andy4wm A certain amount of optimism is necessary. ;-)

Sadly, when it really comes down to it, you are probably right. If I had to choose, I would pick your offer over the ills liberalism has brought to our society. I try to remain an optimist, but unfortunately the world does not always work like that, and sometimes two nice ideas are not compatible in reality.

Iftars across the West Midlands brought people together across faiths and communities. Open, shared, and rooted in common values - that is the kind of country we should champion.

You are talking to somebody who puts TEDx speaker in their bio. That's like a less dignified version of being a crypto-bro. Sri Lankans came over because of the shitty ethnic violence in their country, and have brought their shitty attitude with them. As with India and Pakistan, a lot of them came through fraud.

@Kusal_CFP @GoodwinMJ So you admit you guys being here isn’t actually beneficial and is just some weird karmic revenge thing?

Just one generation from now: The white British in the UK will go from over 70% to 33% The foreign-born & their children from 19% to over 60% The share of Muslims from 1 in 17 to 1 in 4 My new book Suicide of a Nation (link below)

The thing is that the sort of illiberalism and will you would need to be able to force things off their current path couldn't really lead to that soft, polite, comfortable, safe liberalism you are thinking of. That was the world that the clockwork naturally took us to. To wind the clockwork backwards, against the mechanism requires far more force and would break a lot of teeth off a lot of gears.

@ThreeJacques @andy4wm I don’t completely disagree. I am no fan of liberalism, but considering the problems we currently have, a reversion to the 60s, or to before the post-war settlement, would be a substantial improvement, in my opinion.

One could say the same thing looking back 25 years for the past 200 years. The Conservatives of the previous generation have always been the true conservatives that modern conservatives need to go back to. Whatever 1960s Conservatives were, they were radically incapable of stopping, and unwilling to stop the progress that you want rolled back. This is the desire for Lothlórien... to have society magically exist in a socially conservative mode, frozen in time... without the illiberal, hard and unkind things necessary to maintain that social conservatism.

I don’t think it’s helpful to go that far back. “Conservative” and “liberal” mean very different things in the 21st century than they did in the 19th. Even pre-1998, the Conservative Party at least had some basis to claim the name. Now it has none. Social conservatism is treated as far right, and every party is liberal. A reversion to a more 1960s-style conservatism, with liberal ideals secondary to nationalist conservatism, would be more than acceptable.

The Conseratives spent the 19th century accepting that they had lost to "classical liberalism" and retreating. They have never conserved anything, or believed they could. Salisbury talked about the best they could do being to implement liberal policies in less damaging ways than the Liberals would if they did it.

I agree on Thatcher. I would say that a more classical brand of liberalism could be sustained within a conservative party. The modern variant, however, could not. Liberals once recognised the importance of a presupposed culture to draw upon. That is no longer the case, and that is where the real tension lies.