Anyone for a Bourbon?

The Bourbon Royal Family, it was said, learned nothing and forgot nothing which explained their continued disastrous cockups when restored to the monarchy in France after Napoleon.The same can be said for Remainers. Two examples from TV tonight:

1. C4 News, introduced by C Newman, who has now lost the ability altogether to ask an open-ended question (see below). She introduced the item on the crisis in the current Cabinet induced by the froth about possible illegal parties and the rumblings of discontent this has caused among the Tory Party by saying 'Boris Johnson, the man who wanted to take back control [geddit] now finds himself unable to control his own Government' or words to that effect.

2. A BBC documentary called 'The Decade the Rich Won' (bit clumsy, but standards have become more 'popular') described the course of the financial crash of 2008 and the remedies the Labour then Coalition Government took -- QE then austerity. Various persons were allowed to criticise these policies from conscience-stricken bankers and forex traders to J Corbyn. The main thrust was to argue for the massive increase in socio-economic inequality that was produced.

A first whiff of rodent appeared when sundry spokespersons began to predict social unrest and populism as a consequence. Varoufakis appeared to say that public anger was justifiable but misdirected -- eg towards Europe. As 2016 approached in the narrative, Nick Clegg (!) blamed 'snake-oil salesmen' (that bastard works as PR spokesperson for Facebook!)  who persuaded the discontented that all would be well if we left the EU. George Osborne regretted that so much attention had been given to Cameron's hypocrisy and denials about his investment in tax evasion scheme, instead of focusing on the more important issue of Brexit.

I wonder if Part 2 of the doc will develop this tired old stuff? [Of course it will].

BBC journos have learned nothing from, for example Briefings for Brexit/Britains' careful arguments about the actual evidence that the EU has always been unpopular, and not only in the UK,and that feeling left behind was not a particularly strong argument.The same old tropes surface again and again. No-one considered whether global developments of cowboy capitalism, addicted to risk, so well described by the forex trader, might have some connection to the EU.

It is tempting to explain them, as classic characteristics of ideology. Ideological themes have to be continually repeated,  as much to encourage the faithful as to persuade the heathen.Ideology also limits what can be explored in thought so that alternatives literally become unthinkable, let alone trying to search them out.Critics of the BBC who have referred to an insulated mind-set where the BBC really cannot even see what they might be doing to maintain particular worldviews are on the right track.

Tory scandals show Brexit was really right-wing populism

 An excellent revival of the frequent attempts to show how it all makes sense to the Islington petite bourgeoisie (journo tendency) in this welcome piece by J Freedland in the Grauin

This scandal reveals a Conservative party corrupted by Boris Johnson – and by Brexit

 Recent events show that the Conservatives aren't really (nicely) conservative according to Freedland:

no Conservative would have dreamed of partying in a government building on the eve of a royal funeral, even if there was no pandemic. They would have been affronted by the very idea of it....Once upon a time, a member of the Conservative and Unionist party would have understood that the fate of the union is imperilled if Scottish voters believe Westminster regards them with contempt

It’s Brexit that transformed the Conservative party.Where once Tories revered tradition, Brexit filled them with revolutionary zeal....Vandalism became a Brexit habit – hardly surprising for a project dedicated to uprooting a tangle of connections with our continental neighbours that had grown dense and thick over half a century – and this is the Brexit government. Like all revolutionary endeavours, it believes that the end justifies all means, no matter the damage to those things conservatives once cherished.... The Brexiters believed the referendum result had given them a super-mandate that trumped any conventions or norms: it made them anointed instruments of the will of the people, who could brook no challenge. The landslide victory of 2019 reinforced that conviction.

 The final conclusion:

 Brexit transformed it from a conservative party into a national-populist party. Its instincts now are those of Viktor Orbán, funnelling public money and jobs to ideological allies, ready to burn down even the most valued institutions that stand in its way

The critique of Johnson's boosterism and cronyism has something going for it, of course. What the whole piece also reveals is Freedland's own Little England nostalgic conservatism, of course, a place where we respected our elders, the Royal Family and the Union. His fears of the popular and thus populist have always been there and now they have surfaced in this overall nightmare that has only proved him right all along.