Welcome to The Worst Take of the Week – a weekly column in which NEO, AKA @MULLET_FAN NEO, pits two of the wildest takes the world's great thinkers have rustled up against each other.
What's the story? Theresa May's last appearance at PMQs. Reasonable take: What an awful Prime Minister who oversaw such cruel and inhumane policies and achieved nothing of note in her premiership. She will not be missed. Brain rot: Jeremy Corbyn failed to heap praise on Theresa May – what a cunt.As Theresa May appeared at her last PMQs in the House of Commons this week ahead of her resignation, someone, somehow, found a way of painting Jeremy Corbyn as flippant for not fawning over the departing Tory leader.
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“All Jeremy Corbyn had to do was be gracious to Theresa May at her last PMQs,” scolded John Rentoul, chief political commentator at The Independent. “As expected, he failed.”Rentoul reiterated that “all Jeremy Corbyn had to do was to say something generous about Theresa May and ask a gently sceptical question about what she thinks of Boris Johnson” and savaged Corbyn for his “graceless assault on May’s record on child and pensioner poverty, violent crime, NHS waiting times, school class sizes, homelessness and food banks”.
Of course, all John Rentoul had to do to saying something about the thousands of deaths May is complicit in, whether it was through harsh benefit sanctions, deportation, flammable cladding, arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the subsequent famine in Yemen or any of the issues raised by Corbyn – as expected, he failed.Takes like this just remind us of how the class-system is so indoctrinated in the British identity that our factory setting is to bootlick anyone in a position of authority, and shamefully, to think it’s vulgar to hold someone accountable if they are of the right social standing. And God forbid you do it in an “improper setting” – this improper setting being Prime Minister’s Questions in Parliament.It says a lot when the leader of the opposition is treated by the press like some estranged family friend rocking up to a wake half-cut, telling anecdotes of the deceased being a “real goer” back in the day, for simply questioning the Tory leader’s record in office on her “big goodbye”.
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We all wonder how we get crooks in our government, and then our political commentators lambast Corbyn for not being disingenuous and hypocritical with his assessment of May.Rentoul talks about Corbyn’s appeal to his supporters as “built on being an uncompromising Tory-hater who doesn’t observe the niceties of the establishment, but there are ways of using humour and politeness and still being vicious” and praised May for showing Corbyn how to deliver the classic British parliamentary banter. “As a party leader who has accepted when her time is up,” he writes, “perhaps the time has come for him to do the same.”In an attempt to paint Corbyn as petty, Rentoul talks about Ian Blackford, the Scottish National Party leader at Westminster “[showing] Corbyn how it should have been done” by commending May’s “public service”. He references Tory MPs Helen Grant who praised May for “her record in legislating against domestic violence” and Charles Walker who called her a “thoroughly good egg” and Labour MP Yvette Cooper who praised her “integrity”, as if this is all proof of Corbyn’s moral deficiency by not eulogising over someone who has spent the last three-years achieving basically nothing.Most people affected by Tory rule would probably prefer to see Corbyn reverse-suplex Tory cunts through the despatch box rather than stepping up to it to “spill tea” about their heinous policies before sitting back down quietly and respectfully, so his restraint is commendable.
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Rentoul describes how “the House rose to give a tearful May a standing ovation” with “Corbyn, graceless to the end” remaining seated.All these sort of takes tell me is that for middle-class commentators, a prime minister shouldn’t be remembered for their record, or how the lives of the worst off have either been improved or impoverished, but how they made them feel about themselves. They really don’t care whose in charge, as long as the status quo remains entirely the same.
What's the story?Boris Johnson becomes Prime Minister. Reasonable take: 40 years of neoliberalism in UK politics has led to this. Brain rot: You use social media, huh? Chat to your “pals” on there? Look what you did, idiots. Boris is PM now.Just when you feel the decades of neoliberalism and the ceaseless escalator of Tories ascending from the abode of the damned and forcing themselves upon us might be to blame for the state of affairs the UK currently finds itself in, we are confronted by the true reason: “how social media echo chambers fuelled the rise of Boris Johnson”.Suzanne Moore wrote that those “who blather on about being ‘woke’ do so in ever smaller circles” and the “results of this will confront them this week”.Moore says: “It is common now to gather online with those who think as you do. Here, you can hang out with those who will reinforce your worldview by adding their own frisson of outrage, even if that view is that the world is flat.”
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Whilst there is a lot to be said about the echo chambers of social media warping the perspective of true public opinion, this under-baked Black Mirror 101 take about who you follow on Twitter paving the way for Boris Johnson is utterly pathetic.
Maybe the lack of accountability our media affords the ruling classes that leads to the same posh cunts ruling over us since 1066, not some rando on Fiat 500 Twitter writing “Domino’s and Love Island #BitOfBest”.Even if we were to pretend for a second the UK wasn’t exclusively at the mercy of whoever the Conservative Party hoists up, the “banter lad” Facebook accounts – which may have somewhat popularised him by running a thousand jokes about him on the zipwire in 2012 or shoulder chopping some kid at the knees playing football – were not where “Boris” all started.This cunt who purposely dishevels his hair got dragged into the public consciousness and cultivated as the “loveable buffoon” by British liberals off the back of Have I Got News for You appearances and the favourable press he gathered off the very same people who would guest-appear alongside him.Having this demagogue in power is only of surprise to someone who has not come across a British newspaper since 1979. The Sun’s Friday front page of Boris would make Chairman Mao coy and bashful.
Moore says: “Now, however, the bubble machine creates a politics of purity: either Corbyn is the second coming, or – as the millennarian cult of the crazed Brexiters would have it – Brexit will herald utopia. Both are delusional.”
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Leaving us to deduce that only liberalism can succeed. What a surprise.Moore says she’s “not telling anyone to be mates with racists or stop being leftwing” she just asks that we are “less comfortably numb” and “stop shutting down people who think differently than us” and our “political purity has lead to an unholy mess”.
Boris is now the 20th Prime Minister to have attended Eton. It’s such a regular occurrence that each time an alumnus becomes head of the UK government it’s tradition to give the students a day off when they are appointed. However, unfortunately for current Etonians, Johnson was “elected” on a school holiday.When will these injustices against our best and brightest stop?Is it really so hopeless to expect British journalists to critique the Eton-to-Oxbridge sewage line that dominates UK politics when all they can muster to write is the equivalent of a Banksy wall stencil of an iPhone artistically rendered as a prison?Winner: Corbyn being criticised for not being disingenuous is a perfect summary of British politics right now, but our social media habits being blamed for Britain’s 20th Etonian prime minister is my victor this week.
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