Better emoticons, the bitter Brexit divide, and Sadiq Khan’s bonkers Labour politics
We are all only too well acquainted with ;-), :-)), :-(, ;-\ and so forth…but after a while it all gets a bit boring. This is why the dweebs in tech companies invented yellow faces, champagne bottles, hearts and high-kicking dancers to add variety. But to my mind, these latter images are a disturbing sign that far too many Twenty-First century citizens struggle with any form of expression beyond comic strips.
I’m a great believer in doing something pointedly unexpected as opposed to repetitively clichéd. In this regard, the French keyboard is a rich seam of lateral possibilities.
Say, for example, you wish to hint that a male politician you can’t name (but who has a moustache) is a crook; or a female politician who suffers from envy of men has a facial hair problem. Your troubles are over, because : – }( is available for your use.
Or you may want to be more overt and suggest that contemporary political debates remind you of snake pits, in which case you can employ §§§.
Perhaps your aim is to communicate that (for example) Theresa May has been shitting bricks bigtime on Amber Rudd. And if you do, look no further than ¤¤¤ >>> : – (( .
If you feel a government is falling apart bit by bit, how about IIII////__ ?
I suspect – as we all do from time to time – that many Government ministers don’t know which way is up or even what day it is. So I’d say that < > h µ? – o sums that up rather well.
And finally, should you sense that a pompous MP deserves to have red-hot rods stuffed up the nasal orifices, then a terrific visual summation would be : >= [
Think of the time saved by busy tweeters. Think of the paper saved by going back to Egyptian symbols. Think very hard about whether I’m really being serious here.
Talking of politicians who don’t know the up-down-East-West-day-of-week thing, we hear today that on the one hand Theresa May has been accused of resurrecting “Project Fear” (after her Business Secretary warned that thousands of jobs will be at risk unless the Government adopts a customs partnership with the EU) but on the other hand, we heard three days earlier that she’d conceded her plans for a customs partnership with the EU were “dead” after senior Cabinet ministers turned on her during a crunch Brexit meeting.
Harold Wilson said that a week was a long time in politics. Fifty years later, 72 hours is a Millennium in politics.
The fact is that we are going to go round in ever-increasing circles on Brexit, because the Conservative Party is not so much split as ripped asunder by the issue.
But Labour Party leaders and activists (while they may sound assured) are in exactly the same boat. Their leader is a closet europhobe, whereas his Shadow Chancellor sees the EU as a carrier of the Red Flag. A solid 70+ Labour backbenchers either always were – or have become since Brexit – fairly hardline Brexiteers. Among the rest of the Party, there is a stark difference between soft dealers….and those ageing (threatened) Blairites who want the entire Referendum result reversed in perpetuity.
Brendan O’Neill was right the other day when he wrote that all other political issues now pale in comparison to the Brexit divide. It has become the defining British civil war of our times. Tragically, the one Party that truly believes in British independence is IIII////__ , and its former Leader is clearly ¤¤¤ >>> : – (( its remnants…without having the °° to come back and retake charge.
Finally, I did say many months back that we should stop being nasty about Sadiq Khan as Mayor of London, and give the bloke some time to settle into his approach.
I still think that was fair advice. But Mayor Khan has had his allotted time to show us what he’s made of, and we now know what that material is: the standard Labour Islamic denial of reality.
Khan made a statement two days ago asserting that “Britain has an Islamophobia issue”. It was a disturbingly Orwellian thing to say. He then blurred the violence problem by saying it was a “national” phenomenon.
I agree that, generally, it is. But the rise in gang, revenge and drug-related murders isn’t. It is not just a London development, it is an ethnic concentration problem. One cannot explain away 60 murders in the capital in four months as “media sensationalism”. Those numbers are at 1920s Chicago levels.
One of the more odd outcomes of Corbynista hijacking of the Labour Party has been that it is now a Londoncentric Party in terms of support. It is way, way out of step with what repressed working class Labour voters think…..and low turnout local elections will never be a reliable guide to that.
I said 18 months ago that, mathematically, Momentum Labour is unelectable at the national government level. Without alliances, it cannot win. I am very happy to stand or fall on that observation.
The Slog 