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...🧵

The idea of white women as sexually available, which was depicted in cinema, through encounters with tourists, and the boasting of migrants who had already come, is something that comes up in the migration stories of multiple diasporas. People talk about it now in terms of Bonnie Blue, but you see this idea of white women being easy and there for the taking going right back to the 50s in the accounts of West Indians, Indians, Pakistanis...

Along with contact through the army, and cinema... the hippies discovering themselves in India and Pakistan were among the postwar enticements to come to Britain...

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.

All the Conservative prime ministers after the War were natural Liberals, described themselves as Liberals, and might have been Liberals... but for the collapse of the Liberals. My theory is that when the Liberals collapsed, half of them took over Labour, and the other half took over the Conservatives. What was Thatcher's conservatism but a return to 19th-century market-driven Liberal economics?

@ThreeJacques @andy4wm A long time ago, the 1960s?

@commontruth_ @andy4wm When were the Conservatives ever conservative? They have accepted liberal progress as the inevitable future that had to be accepted and accommodated since Peel.

@andy4wm You are in the wrong party, go and join the liberal democrats, you are not a conservative by any definition of the word.

BRITISH POLLING & PUBLIC OPINION Back in 1939, 59% of the British public smoked. #BritishHistory #PublicOpinion

@AngloLancs927 Behind the scenes, the Attlee government did try to discourage more from coming. At that point, the numbers were tiny, though. 1-2k per year. Panic didn't set in until the US stopped West Indians going there in mid-1952 and the number jumped up to 10k.

Attlee then tries to justify Windrush by claiming that the majority of them are "honest workers". Despite many dozen still living in accommodation at the time of his writing. Also, despite the fact that the British people (nor some of his own MPs) never consented to it .

A quick thread detailing a letter written by a group of at least 11 Labour MPs who were outraged and disgusted at Prime Minister Clement for the importation of almost 500 Jamaicans in 1948 Aka, the Windrush. 🧵1/5

@1488RawDairy @A_British_Cause @Independent It took criminalisation, suppression and state indoctrination to get public racism and antisemitism down to the level it is at at the moment. I am not sure one needs religious explanations for Jewish influence finding its way into the ruling class. That is a tale as old as time.

@ThreeJacques @A_British_Cause @Independent Worshipping a Jew? Allowing jews into the country repeatedly? Giving charity to non-whites throughout history in the form of charity? Eradicating the notion of race so that we throw away our genetics and our heritage.

Author and DJ Zakia Sewell is using British folk culture to challenge far-right nationalism. Sewell has journeyed around the British Isles exploring Britain’s folk resurgence for her debut book, Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain. Finding Albion builds on Sewell’s hit audio series for BBC Radio 4, which saw her seek out a different, more inclusive idea of “Britishness” beyond the usual national myths and symbols. Click on the link in bio to read 🔗

@CatoThistlewood The key thing is that it should not be normalised. It should not have its moral weight removed. Far too much of the moral burden of life and death has been thrown away in the name of individual convenience. We need more moral burdens, not less.

I'm an atheist and I believe there's space for abortion IF rare, and the 24 weeks was about right. What's happening now, though, can only best be described as demonic.

@MillennialWoes @AcademicAgent_X My theory is that he was bitten by a zoomer and the transformation has begun.

@AcademicAgent_X puts out a 1h26m video in which he tries to "explain away" the recent disaster with his hair style. Desperation. youtu.be/3SAULlAum_M?t=…

@1488RawDairy @A_British_Cause @Independent How were they venerating non-whites. The postwar British public had the social views of Alf Garnett, only not taking the piss. They supported Rivers of Blood. Their opposition to non-whites was criminalised and suppressed for decades.

@A_British_Cause @Independent Maybe the veneration of Non-Whites has led us to this. Maybe embracing a foreign universalist religion was the key to our demise, and the systematic erasure of our people.

@Donnamayna49019 @snaz39 @LuckhamSusan A significant place.

@ThreeJacques @snaz39 @LuckhamSusan I live in London and my grandparents come from Tilbury where they landed

RESTORE BRITAIN: Just rattling my brain for a sec, is there a singer out there, or a band who could give Restore Britain a number 1 hit? It's not impossible, which means it's possible, but it isn't if we do nothing! Money goes to funding the party? Come on guys....

@snaz39 @Donnamayna49019 @LuckhamSusan It was bad in the areas impacted. Then the old populations were driven out and things calmed down.

@Donnamayna49019 @LuckhamSusan Sure, I know it's worse now, but it also wasn't that bad in the 80s and 90s, Only really after the 2000's when they really ramped it up. Again though, would have been better with none. lol

What about it? We aren't in some sort of suicide pact with Spain where if we accept West Indians and Pakistanis, they have to accept drunk working class Brits. How are the issues related? The prior population of Notting Hill may have had their lives ruined by West Indians, but on the plus side... look how bad Magaluf is?

@ThreeJacques @benonwine Okay, let's not dance around the bulrushes. You're, at the very least, anti-immigrant, right? In Spain, British immigrants are called (user-friendly) 'ex-pats'. What if Spain caught your bug and kicked them all out? I'll leave that with you.

This young lady says….. ‘Britain never asked the Windrush generation to come here. They were never invited from the start.’ ‘And Britain wasn’t rebuilt by immigrants after WW2. British people rebuilt Britain.’ What is Reaction to this statement?

@robinson_c87111 @benonwine Trivial numbers, the better part of 20 years after the war during a pay dispute with nurses who were already uncomfortable with imported West Indian labour. How many did he recruit? A couple of thousand?

@ThreeJacques @benonwine Enoch Powell 'invited' immigrants over, we've already established that, and it worked, hence more followed and settled here, worked, had families and are as British as you and me.

It seems like if Windrush was so great, massive amounts of official lying about it wouldn't be necessary. Plus again, they were thought to be more harm than help after the war. I'm aware of no analysis to suggest they were a help. One of the complaints in the 60s when race relations started to be pushed and opposition to multiculturalism criminalised was that the data to answer such questions was systematically not collected.

@ThreeJacques @benonwine Whether 'invited' or not, they came and the vast majority found jobs and built a life here - fact. Just how many were 'invited'? Three? A hundred? How many immigrants were 'invited' to America at the turn on the last century? The vast majority helped build America. Same here.