Friday 17 March 2017

"Dutch voters… halt the wave of populist successes that delivered Brexit and President Trump"

Emailed in by MBK, from The Times.

“It is an evening when the Netherlands after Brexit, after the American elections, said ‘Stop’ to the wrong kind of populism,” a beaming Mr Rutte told supporters last night in the Hague.

Richard Ambler, in the comments:

Really? Are we looking at the same figures?

Mr Wilders, was on course to win 19 seats, an increase of over 25%
Mark Rutte, the centre-right prime minister lost over 25% of his seats
Labour, lost 28 of 38 MPs or lost nearly 75% of their seats

This equally could qualify was a massive swing away from the centre left towards the far right… This blatantly biased piece of reporting tries to hide this swing and refer to Mr. Wilders as a populist, extremist who must be stopped at all costs and then tries to present this result as his humiliation.

9 comments:

paulc156 said...

A big swing to Wilders was followed by a sizeable swing against Wilders and back to the current PM. It's difficult to ignore the fact that int very recently Wilders was supposed to receive the biggest vote of any party.

Steven_L said...

Raedwald reckons the current PM had to adopt a more Wilders-like stance on immigration to get that swing.

It looks a good point to me.

paulc156 said...

Yep. Similar to here in the sense the Tories have tried to head off ukip with a stronger anti immigration rhetoric and so called hard brexit.

Mark Wadsworth said...

PC, oh, what you mean is "Wilders ended up with fewer actual votes than was predicted at some random stage in the opinion poll cycle"? That can be said for just about all the parties.

SL, yes, exactly, that is what I have been saying all along. If you have a clear objective, like UKIP or the Green Party, it does not really matter that you get few or no MPs, it is still sufficient to sway the larger parties in your direction. My whole strategy with YPP is based on this.

PC, don't be silly. The Tories have no intention of reducing immigration in practice, it's all talk. They've been lying about their intentions since 2010. Ditty "hard brexit". What does that even mean? Nothing. There is no such thing.

JH, see above, that might not matter.

paulc156 said...

MW. I did use the term 'rhetoric'. So the same as in NL. A move to the right to steal the far right's thunder. Cameron's original decision to go for a referendum was similarly a way to head off ukip inroads into Tory marginals.

DBC Reed said...

Would have thought that Cameron was nervous of defections , like Carswell's: UKIP doesn't seem able to actually win seats. Look at the failure rate of the odious Farage who must have maximum name recognition.
UKIP does affect other parties in the way Mark hopes (seriously?) for YPP .In the States the real Populists or People's Party ,an 1890's protest movement of small farmers and businesses against the monopolies, principally the railroads and the banks, got nowhere itself apart from generating big publicity such as the Cross of Gold Speech but all the populist policies leaked into the main parties ,so you afterwards get Teddy Roosevelt arresting bankers ( with chains).
The comparisons between UK &UKIP and NL and Geert Wilders are embarrassing: the Islamic extremists he detests are homicidal and genocidal; UKIP picks on Poles who, in identity terms, are more European than we are, stronger supporters of a peaceful religion and look to us as liberators from fascism. But they get jeered on Question Time and murdered in the street in Harlow (as was the MP supporter of integration).
Fuck around with this fascist shit and it will stick.
Whatever happened to Britain,the country I was brought up in, the mixed economy Welfare State that wouldn't give an inch to Enoch Powell's anti-immigrant bullshit and Oswald Mosley's at Notting
Hill?

Bayard said...

"Whatever happened to Britain,the country I was brought up in,"

I suspect that the nasty, racist, fascist little shits have always been amongst us, but just after the war was not a good time to be a racist fascist or vice versa. Now, after months of Bremainiacs telling us that 38% of the country are fascist racists (they must be or they wouldn't have voted for Brexit), they are all coming out from under whichever flat stones they've been living under, thinking, "hey, we're mainstream now".

DBC Reed said...

@B Indeed. This explains the fascist low lifes who, as you say, have been always with us. Mosley's "blackshirt legions " didn't disappear after being interned on the Isle of Man during the War; they re-emerged as the Union Movement dedicated to European Union which was meant, in his version, to kick out Commonwealth migrants and replace them with pure blood European labour. In the event it has transpired that the great British public won't tolerate European migrant labour either: they are more "racist" than Mosley ! Over on the Tim Worstofall website they are indulging in hate speech against the Scots, for daring to suggest that, as a separate country in some senses,the Scots should not be shoved out of the EU against a majority's expressed wishes.
It is the British ruling class that is at fault here, particularly the Conservative Party, which is too weak as moral beings, to tell UKIP and other anti-immigrants to fuck right off as has been the convention up till now.
I do not want to be identified as an Englishman when this has come to mean sacrificing your nearest export markets for the sake of gaining controls that allow GB to be nasty to foreigners. We are going to be despised.
It is incredible that it was Theresa May who warned the Tories that they were seen as the "nasty party" or nazty party.

Bayard said...

I think we need to separate xenophobia from racism. The Blackshirts were racists, they hated Commonwealth immigrants because they had brown skins. The British, generally, are xenophobes, they dislike anyone who isn't British. However it goes deeper than that, and was nicely illustrated on the "Now Show" by starting with a Man United supporter, who, of course hated Man City supporters and vice versa. Then up popped a girl from Liverpool, whereupon the two Mancs joined forces in their hatred of Scousers and so on with the entry of a Londoner, a Scot, a German and an American. Each time the internal enmities were dropped when faced with an outsider.