Muslims 'right about decadent UK'

[RogueTrooper]

Some fresh, in-the-door Tories spout some ow-rent right wing Americana

Muslims who criticise the 'decadent' nature of British society are right, a group of Conservative MPs has said.

In a letter to The Spectator, the six newly-elected MPs support criticism of the UK's "lawlessness, family breakdown ... binge drinking" and "brutishness".

Brian Binley, Peter Bone, David Burrows, Philip Davies, Robert Goodwill and Mark Harper represent a "new generation" of Tory MPs, they say.

...snip...
"Some liberals remain in denial, unwilling to face the decadent consequences of years of their ideas being put into practice, " they write.

"But whether it is lawlessness, family breakdown, the menace of drugs, binge-drinking, teenage pregnancies or merely the course brutishness which, as Mr Hayes suggests, has infested popular culture, the results of years of woolly-minded liberal thinking (with the licentiousness it has created) are plain to see."

When was the last time Britain had a government with liberal in it?

[eallen]

1. That link doesn't work.

[D-Notice]

5. Try this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4141294.stm

[Zenlitened]

2. Um, have any of these jokers ever read Charles Dickens?

I don't think "lawlessness, family breakdown ... binge drinking" and "brutishness" are recent phenomena, folks.

But hey, why let that stop 'em from uniting with their fellow fundies?

Taliban-wannabe's, everywhere you look. :puke:

[supernova]

8. Naw, cons think Dickens is a how-to manual

for society!

Work Houses for everyone! :crazy:

[Kipling]

15. IMHO they'd be more at home in about 1620, in a Puritan area.

Awful times. The south of England was one huge sea of small-minded bigots ready to kill anyone who stepped out of line, the north was poor and often abused, religious minorities were persecuted, and the Scottish ruling class was Anglicised. Torture was on the rise, perpetrated by the victors of any battle on offer. Terrible acts of mass murder were visited upon innocent peasants. Leading figures of opposition mysteriously perished. Industries went out of business and foreign investors made a killing.

And if you thought July was bad, you should have seen the 17th century.

[fedsron2us]

9. Yes the good old days

when you could get drunk on gin for a penny and dead drunk for two pence. At the height of the British empire half the country was out of its tree on laudanum.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laudanum

[LeftishBrit]

3. The last Liberal PM was Lloyd George...

elected in 1918; stayed in office till sometime in the 1920s. I believe there were a few Liberals in Churchill's wartime coalition, but they were not influential.

Obviously these Tories are copying American Republican rhetoric.

I have thought for a long time that the "Christian Right" and the Islamic extremists have an awful lot in common - interesting that our version of the former are essentially admitting it!! The UK could do very well without far-right fundamentalism of any sort!

[non sociopath skin]

10. I've been arguing on DU and elsewhere for quite some time ...

... that the mindset of the Islamic and Christian Fundies is virtually identical.

I'm almost relieved that the new generation of the now Far-Right Tory party has "come out" as sharing views with the Islamo-fascists rather than being mealy-mouthed about it as the US Neocons are.

Nevertheless, I can't feel good about sharing a small country with characters who think like this.

The Skin

[julianer]

19. Islamo-whatist?

They aren't fascists so we shouldn't call them that.

[T_i_B]

20. It's quite a trendy phrase at the moment

Here's a superb article about it from the Grauniad. It's a term bandied about by the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Nick Cohen quite a bit. IMHO it seems to be becoming code for "any Muslim I don't like", or in some circles, anyone who happens to be a Muslim.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1405605,00.html

Fascism is coming back into fashion, at least in the propaganda wars. For the right, it comes in the shape of a new word: "islamofascism". That conflates all the elements into one image: suicide bombs, kidnappings and the Qur'an; the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan; Iranian clerics and Hitler.

The term seems to have appeared first in the Washington Times in a reference to Islamist fundamentalists. Coined by Khalid Duran, a Muslim scholar seeking to explain Islam to Jews, the word was meant as a criticism of hyper-traditionalist clerics - who in turn denounced Duran as a traitor to the faith.

Usage has gathered momentum among commentators and academics who seek a verbal missile to debilitate those who disagree with them - look for it soon in the title of a neo-conservative think tank conference. Christopher Hitchens, a former socialist who now sits on the other end of the political see-saw, sprinkles islamofascism about like paprika. He and Andrew Sullivan, a voice of the right, both wrongly receive credit in some quarters for coining the term.

Use of the term to describe Muslim clerics and stateless terrorists has neatly pre-empted any chance of labelling Bush a fascist - no matter how many suspects are kidnapped by the US authorities and tortured; no matter how impervious the border; no matter how effective the use of propaganda to destroy the opposition; no matter how many countries are invaded on false pretenses; no matter how strongly a minority religion may become a mark of guilt.

[Anarcho-Socialist]

4. That David Lloyd George

It's all his fault :D

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. I'd love to ask these guys what they thought of Thatcher

and "there is no such thing as society", or the expansion of greed under her. Somehow they always managed to blame liberals, don't they?

[Greeby]

11. A page out of the Rovian playbook

Blaming society's ills on illusory liberals? Wow, that's new :eyes:

[mogster]

7. What's wrong with decadence?

I love it ;-)

Here:
'lawlessness' - you can smoke pot without being treated like a gang-rapist or serial killer

'family breakdown' - feminism, single moms, equal rights. I'm cool with that.

'the menace of drugs' - see above. And besides this problem is hugely flogged by the media, which is reveling in their misery.

'binge-drinking' - I will defend the upgrowing generation's right to party and have fun, with my life! They have a right to experience all the fun I had during the eighties, when I was a kid.

'teenage pregnancies' - if we taught how to use the day-after-pill and condoms at school, and eradicated all fundies blocking any common sense approach to this issue, it would at least go down, if not disappear altogether.

'course brutishness which, as Mr Hayes suggests, has infested popular culture' - Mr Hayes must mean the ugly comedians having fun with politicians. The coarse hollowness of popular commercial culture is a result of twenty years with raw capitalism, btw.

'woolly-minded liberal thinking' - on this point he's right, though. My head was full of wool, but isn't anymore ;-)

[philarq]

18. Its a real head scratcher

Attempting to determine which decadence is bad decadence, which decadence is good decadence and which may be just indifferent.--where do you roll the clocks back to 1900? 1790? 1640 as has been suggested above? what was the good times that are being sought?

In the US it seems that the 1950's somehow are the perfect time-- I beg to differ but that seems to be the conservative position. In britain shoud we say that everything past say 1066 is just rot, and toss it all? King John--BAH--

Bring me roving bands of vikings and un-repentant happy go lucky Normans to go with it--and while we are at it, let's get Thatcher to run it all---

Just an idea--just an idea---now back to the cricket-:toast:--

[T_i_B]

12. No doubt about it, Britain IS decadent

The West as a whole is hugely decadent. What's more I think it's fair to say that the overwhelming majority of the British people want to keep it that way. I don't see people queueing up to join a Monastary or to emigrate to less decadent climes such as North Korea or Niger.

And what's more much of that decadence is stuff that the Conservative party very much approves of such as rampant materialism. And yet again, it is foolishness for the Conservative party to play the "family values" card as people still remember back to basics.

[D-Notice]

13. But they're justifying terrorism!

Arrest them!

Expel 'em!

Srick a control order on 'em!

Put 'em in Belmarsh!

We can't have people saying thse sort of things at a time like this!

[Kipling]

14. Isn't it good to see extremistpsychowhackjobfascist solidarity?

[kiki]

16. On the bright side,

the worst comments I see are "family breakdown" and "teenage pregnancies"... there's nothing about homosexuals (explicitly), teaching not-made-up science in schools, or abortion - and they don't mention Jesus once. It'll set a worrying precedent if anyone pays any attention to these pencil-neck fascist dweebs, but compared to what they've got in the US right now, these "people" are pussycats.

[T_i_B]

17. Well it's been a long while

since the Tories were going after single mothers in a big way. That seemed to be the favourite Tory target when I was growing up.

P.S. I must mention that for my sins I picked up a copy of the Spectator in WH Smiths on Saturday and the letter was in reply to an article written the previous week in the Spectator. There were two other letters about it, one I can't remember too much about and the other was calling the article a load of RW tripe. I suppose one of us had better brave their website to find the original article. As it is we are dicussing Tory MP's agreeing with the Spectator, which is hardly suprising news.