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Tories slammed for anti-democratic election changes after shock London Mayor poll
(leftfootforward.org)
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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UK Politics
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Yes. Trump is the archetypal anti-establishment candidate. He wants to burn down the existing order and recreate it in his own image. I think you're conflating 'anti-establishment' and 'left-wing'. Radicals exist on the left and the right - and in their (establishment) targets and their methods, they often end up having rather a lot in common.
It's not that uncommon to come across people like Claire Fox (whose career took her from the Revolutionary Communist Party to the Brexit Party) or George Galloway (who went from the anti-Blair left of the Labour Party to endorsing Nigel Farage and Brexit). There was a recent Economist article about the number of recent books by ostensibly right-wing US Republicans that peddle anti-capitalist narratives more commonly found on the left; you see this too in the tendency of US Republicans in recent years to pick fights with large corporations (such as Ron DeSantis's 'war on Disney') and Boris Johnson's famous 'fuck business' declaration during the Brexit negotiations.
When a politician starts to define themself as against 'the establishment' (instead of as for something), it's too easy to find themselves sharing a bed with a host of other characters you might have assumed they would find unsavoury.
We’ll just have to disagree about this. What you misread (which is exactly what Trump and the right-wing Tories over here want you to do) is that they want to tear down the structures of power and wealth. They really don’t. They might want to gain advantage within the Establishment but none of them want to see it brought down. It’s purely rhetoric. Look at Truss as an example. She bent the knee. They all bend the knee. Starmer has literally kneeled down and been knighted.
Sorry but I think you're dramatically misreading the politics of our country if you think people like Johnson, Truss, Braverman etc are fans of the status quo. They are not. They pretty evidently loathe Britain as it is and their every action in government has been aimed at tearing down the status quo and creating some radical right-wing conservative dystopia in it's place. Truss was the single most radical, anti-establishment prime minister of my lifetime, even more so than Thatcher, and we're profoundly fortunate that she was removed from office before she could do more harm.
The post-2016 Tories have vandalised so much of the fabric of modern establishment Britain - the NHS, the BBC, the courts, the professions, the universities, the civil service, the police, our rights and civil liberties, our reputation in the world, our place in the European Union. It beggars belief that anyone could think that these people are supporters of that very same establishment that they have been so busy tearing down.