Had friends round for dinner last night, not something we’d done for a while, and it was dismaying to see the extent that neofascist propaganda has already thoroughly soaked into the minds of formerly centrist people. E.g. a retired senior nurse thinks “We should give him a chance.”; when countered with the fact he’ll axe the NHS (and most other public services), she simply doesn’t believe it is even possible - as though - despite decades of erosion of services - it somehow is still magically invulnerable to the depredations of vested interests…
The thing that really struck me is that all present clearly believe that the current propaganda is not just all true, and all relevant (e.g. that some scared brown people risking their lives in oversized inflatable pool toys, or lifting thousands of British kids out of poverty with tax changes, are the greatest existential threats to our nation right now), but that they have always thought this way.
Ignoring for now the fact that humans are all, at an instinctual level, at least slightly xenophobic, it is simply not true that these people have always thought this way. When you’ve known someone for more than a decade it’s easy enough to track their broad socio-political leanings. It really demonstrates the power of propaganda, and the fact that most people’s political beliefs are little more than swaying with a currently fashionable trend. This makes Farage’s owners’ jobs so very easy, not least because they also own most of the media as well…
I’ve been convinced for months that Farage will be a shoo-in in '28 (if Labour are allowed to continue even that long), and with every passing day it becomes more of a cast-iron certainty. The fact that he’s demonstrably lazy, dishonest, incompetent, corrupt, bigoted and vile, and that his party would be an utter disaster for us all is entirely irrelevant - what seems crystal clear to us, is opaque and uninteresting to the overwhelming majority who will vote him in.
