The Great Moving Right Show II: The Kirsty and Phil Years

I'm an ideas man...

What I mean is: South Park Republican is a useful and accurate shorthand to describe a new breed of right-winger in America. Does PSC work the same in the UK as a term?

You gotta work it out better. I'll answer my own question.

* The Iraq War - Boo hiss! It was a cock up though they may have supported the invasion circa 2003. The failure was clearly the result of Americans being fat / lazy / stupid. They may point out that "it's all about oil" or that it "was illegal".

What does the "Peep Show Conservative" think about:
* The Iraq War - doesn't
* Global Warming - he watched that save the world gig
* Imigration - foreigners make good nannies/footballers
* Race - see above
* Mock The Week - hilarious

* Global Warming - LOL load of old bollocks. If it's like Malaga in Kent I'm all for it! I don't see why I should stop driving / flying / dumping fridges if China / Russia / India / some corporation is chucking x tonnes of C02 into the atmosphere! Anyway everyone else does / has done these things, it's my turn!

I wonder if our strawry friend thinks about house prices much. How old would you say this stereotype is Dom?

As old as the end of the Blair Honeymoon? So coming up to eight/nine years old?

In a Guardian Weekend interview Robert Webb did say his all-time hero was Christopher Hitchens, fwiw.

No, what age is the typical incarnation of the Peep Show Conservative? Between 17 and mid 30s?

From university age to married age, but probably specifically between 21 and 30.

25-40 more likely surely?

So, not overly concerned with house prices yet. They are in a sense apolitical, they'll join a facebook group protesting speed cameras or walking slowly but probably won't vote in an election. Apart from Boris (legund!!!) politics is gay.

DG, this is more about, if it's about anything, the student generation who have grown up with Peep Show and Family Guy as their Spaced and Simpsons.

No, I think there's a certain... youthdom to all of this? The idea that, hey, you can be a right-winger and still kick it with "alternative" culture". Qf this: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=11218380117, an alternative comedy club (with Richard Herring and all your other DIY comedy heroes as regular workers) actually advocating the removal of the right to strike for trade unions. That's beyond right-wing and veering dangerously close into Fascism.

xxp

is overt identification w/right not negotiable? i mean surely plenty of modern conservative characters would quite happily read G2 and watch the mercury music prize etc

...without any big C conservative affiliations

i mean surely plenty of modern conservative characters would quite happily read G2 and watch the mercury music prize etc

I _think_ that's kind of the crux of all this, and probably what man like mark s to turn up and point out "This really isn't a new development". I dunno, maybe me, acrobat, et al are just romanticising the left/right divide of the 60s and 80s.

Actually DG has a point that chime swith yours. Everyone want to be hip these days. No time for Mondeo Pop, we can combine hip young peoples young people stuff with reactionary views, easy. Vice paved the way. The failiure of the Nietzschized Left. We don't mind blacks and gays (they are funny though!) but don't get in out way chavscum!

there's got to be a good number of people who were against the CJB and other Major lolz etc but have kids and pay taxes now thus rightward drift but w/Toryphobia...but this is just nu-labour tho really innit

Calling it Nu-Labour does seem a little like... endorsing it? Or at least apologising for it. Post-Nu-Labour sounds more accurate, if ungainly.

Sort of, but it's anti Nu-Labour. Actually it's anti politics, Boris and J Clarkson are heroes cos they are outside politics, they tell it like it is. This generation barely remember John Major's era. It's a cake and eat it deal or something.

Yeah, Nu-Labour here are still seen as party of Political Correctness Gone Mad.

It's worth remembering that there was a lot of anti-war sentiment from the Countryside Alliance, and other people who thought that Blair was invading Iraq so he could force them all to convert to single parent homosexuality.

i think we've got 3+ separate groups under discussion here

Maybe, but you don't think they can all drink from the same font?

It's all Tory Fucks to me.

No. The thing is they aren't Tory Fucks. Or at least are unlikely to identify as such.

i think it's basically

1) teh kids - won't vote, naive uni rugby team style toryism
2) reluctant 30 somethings - won't vote conservative but have conservative tastes
3) countryside alliance types - overt tories and would vote
4) an offshoot of group 1 who call themselves 'libertarians' which i thought was a US thing but seems to be on the rise here; wouldn't hang with (1), wouldn't vote and certainly wouldn't vote for UK conservatives as the Tories' weak devotion to the welfare state is seen as bad as Stalinism by this lot

1) the police
2) arctic monkeys
3) classical (proper music obv)
4) radiohead

I wonder if the rise of trust funds and kids buying their own houses with their parents money aged 22, 23, 24 (plus the accompanying middle class debt) is the root of all this?

I don't think 1 and 3 come into it that much, they've always existed and probably always will. It is interesting though the juncture at which Country Side Alliance crosses over with upper class hippie culture though. I think 4 is the key, not that many identify as Libertarian but it is happening, they are out there and growing in number y know. I can't stop thinking about Children of Men, it's like the government in that, nominally democratic, "liberal" even but existing mainly to keep the wolf from the door. Your freedom to buy coffee shall not be impeded. I have been reading me some kpunk. Hah ha ha. Google politics.

xp DG's first list.

I have just been invited to this group on facebook: Roll on Recession

I like how the group defines itself for people with "Four credit cards or below", because four credits is a totally normal, responsible approach to handling your money, but five is just crazy madman style.

It must be noted one of the group founders had a £3000 loan during sixth form to buy himself a home entertainment system. He was also responsible for this 2001 classroom exchange:
Him: I think bombing Afghanistan is a brilliant idea.
Idealistic Teacher: So would you bomb Belfast just because there might be terrorist there?
Him: Yes!
It should also be noted that on September 12th 2001 Idealistic Teacher asked a year 8 drama class to act out "burning to death in the World Trade Center". He wasn't kept on long.

Sounds like a bit of a character

Well, Jess, the model is this (bear with me):
Styles that will later dominate the mainstream and contribute to how we perceive a particular decade begin in media enclaves like Pitchfork and Vice. Actually, that's not even true; they begin in the art world. No, that's not true either, they begin in widespread social trends which artists are often the first to pick up on (the mainstream is usually slow to change its representations of the world, even when the world changes and moves on). Once they get into art shows, these new images and styles are legitimated: they begin to be seen as acceptable for wider use. People in advertising, music, publishing etc pick up on them, and soon (if they resonate with wider trends, ie the whole post-PC thing, or the fact that demographic growth in the US is coming from Asians and Hispanics rather than either the black or white populations) they reach the mainstream.

A case in point would be how Corinne Day's photos in the 90s (influenced by Nan Goldin) led to a moral panic over "heroin chic" which spilled out of the fashion world and left a mark on the 90s via "Trainspotting" etc. Heroin use in itself doesn't make "heroin chic" a legitimate style; it needs to be picked up by artists, then percolate through to wider cultural resonance via films, records, magazines, photographs... One consequence of this is that we wake up one morning and find that a particular sensibility is literally paying our bills.

-- Momus (Momus), Saturday, 3 June 2006 15:05 (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

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Momus this'd all be so much easier if you'd just say "I happen to like Vice," but, as with all your interests, you want to argue for its "importance" or "vitality," for prescience really: but do you honestly think (you can't) that trends didn't cycle prior to Vice? make any reasonable fashion claim today, in ten years or so it'll have cycled in & out and then you can call yrself a prophet if that's the sort of thing that's important to you.
I am rather glad though that Vice was not ahead of the game in making it OK for white people to call blacks "nigger" and "chink," and that the attempted resurrection of the "reclaiming the word!" ("reclaiming" by people who don't have the moral right to say what gets reclaimed when) trope seems to have died a richly-deserved death in the racial sphere anyhow (I wish it were still considered more bogus to call women "bitches" but you can't win 'em all)

Momus OTM however about how sexism doesn't get nearly the rise of of ilx that racism does, but this is my ol' hobby-horse

-- Thomas Tallis (Tommy), Saturday, 3 June 2006 15:06 (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

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Momus arguing that the social class to which you happen to belong is, in fact, the driving social class: is it any wonder everybody hates artists, who in fact pirate their ideas from the social sphere, not the other way 'round as you'd like to claim?
-- Thomas Tallis (Tommy), Saturday, 3 June 2006 15:08 (1 year ago) Bookmark Link

I started thinking about B3ta the other day, and how they were all "Ha ha, dead racist scum is dead" when Manning carked it, but then they'll still do "Here's a joke for ya: Who should be lynched? Black people!" "deliciously politically incorrect" gags at the end of each newsletter.

young people today with their emo and their facebook and their not being that arsed about voting tory.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,2190985,00.html

That article is 100% proof that the Lib Dems will take power in '09 if Lembit takes charge.

The article has a superficial authoritativeness to it, but lazily recycles a few long-time cliches:

- there's no political characters any more

- there's no one thinking about 'the kids'

- this generation raised on..(fill in according to year)..is the first 'apathetic generation'

- "natural choice for a first time voter"

- the 'new' scepticism of people towards politicians

- "at the next election, this first time voter will have been x ...when... (defining moment)

I have a cynicism of politicials, but at least they seem to have some energy in what they do compared to political journalists.

The defining moment when I lost around 90 per cent of respect for political journalists was the endless recycling of garbage around the Spice Girls being part of the 'Thatcher's Children'.

otm

British newspapers will and should be subject to some form of new external regulation, the outgoing prime minister, Tony Blair, said yesterday in a broadside that attacked the media for behaving like feral beasts and eschewing balance or proportion.

In a sweeping critique of the industry, Mr Blair claimed newspapers, locked into an increasingly bitter sales war in a 24-hour news environment, indulged in "impact journalism" in which truth and balance had become secondary to the desire for stories to boost sales and be taken up by other media outlets.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,,2196055,00.html

qed

Better step up my "emigrate within the next 5 years" program.

Better step up my "emigratehijack a plane and crash it into the Channel 4 offices within the next 5 years" program.

Fixed.

Home life: Kirstie went to nine schools before settling at the private school Bedales in Hampshire. She bought her first property aged 19. Her father is Lord Hindlip, the former chairman of Christies, and she is married to millionaire property developer Ben Andersen. She has a son and two stepchildren.

bandelete kirsty allsopp

same school as lily allen /carmody

there's something singularly objectionable about a school called 'bedales'. you may well claim that i'm not really in a position to judge people by their school. in that case, i shall draw attention instead to the 'nine schools' bit, the 'first property aged 19' bit, the peer father bit, the Christies bit, the 'married to millionaire property developer' bit, and (possibly above all) the 'two stepchildren' bit. argh argh argh.

Steve Mannion left the group Boris Johnson is a fucking Tory for Christ's sake.

RIP

http://music.guardian.co.uk/pop/story/0,,2246084,00.html

"Old clothes old ideas and all this resting in the country business"