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19 January 2020 at 23:16 #69247
Dr. Fish –
they wanted to gloss over Tesla’s support for eugenics and compulsory sterilisation of the criminal and insane
Ah Ha! I didn’t know that!
Okay, so that’s now two stories (Skyfall and this one) where eugenics – not just the murder of the ‘unfit’, but the breeding of the ‘fit’ – is in the backstory. Skyfall with the Nazi’s and their breeding programme, and Tesla proposing the ‘deliberate guidance of the mating instinct’.
19 January 2020 at 23:09 #69245And also, glaring incongruity – why did Lovelace have to get her memory wiped, but Tesla (who saw the inside of the TARDIS) didn’t?
I just answered that very question on T’Other Place. Ada Gordon and Noor Khan were both technically trained and had seen the future of their own planet. Tesla and Edison are both technically trained – but what they saw was the TARDIS and an alien spaceship from their own time – not the future of their own planet.
So I’d guess that people seeing alien spacecraft might be technically inspired, but not in a way that’s going to disrupt anything. However, seeing their own future technology might result in them inventing that future technology before it’s supposed to be invented. A zig-zag style diagram, destabilising the time-stream.
In the Van Gogh episode, I think the script had Van Gogh being pulled rapidly past the boombox and taken straight to the exhibition, so that he only really found out that he was going to be remembered as a great painter.
19 January 2020 at 21:15 #69236I thought she reckoned they might eat the bread instead of them. Anything’s worth a go when you’re being chased by giant scorpions.
19 January 2020 at 21:07 #69235Yeah, I think one possibility is that we’ll look back on the Chibnall era as the new golden age for the historicals. Some of them really have been a masterclass in ‘how to do a Who historical’.
19 January 2020 at 20:31 #69230Okay. Interesting. Is it my imagination, or does everyone seem so much more comfortable doing the historicals?
I’d rate this one as good, solid Who. Nice monster – and a possible series arc joke. We’ve been complaining about Chibbers seemingly stealing plots; now we have an alien race who have stolen all their stuff. Theft, taking stuff that doesn’t belong – and that ship had a certain hint about it of older TARDIS sets. Not to mention the aliens having more than a hint of Racnoss.
The aliens who steal are mirrored in Thomas Edison, who Tesla thought stole his ideas without paying him properly. But are they also mirrored in the larger arc? What have the Time Lords stolen?
19 January 2020 at 14:29 #69219To cast the debate about whether self -funded retirees have the right to protest about Oxygen RN is a compromise block attitude leading to a discussion about limitations of government & whether everyone really deserves it & how dare people protest who have paid tax all their life & who’ll fund every single thing they’ll ever need & the ORN of many others.
No,it doesn’t. I cast the argument as one of whether the Doctor has the right to prevent someone else getting their Oxygen Right Now because she decided that climate change was more important. Actually, we both know the Doctor would be more likely to give somebody her own oxygen, then go and sort out climate change while using her oxygen reserve system. Whilst making a witty remark.
(Also, I can hardly be saying ‘how dare people protest’ when I told you at the top of the post that you should be protesting.)
whether we should ignore the rights of poor people when ORN is more important
Are you sure you’re debating the right thing? Because what I’m arguing about is whether poor people, the little people, have rights. Have agency, have the right to make their own choices. The right, for example, to decide that they don’t want to join in your protest and would rather go to work. That’s not a ‘compromise block’, that’s a very vital discussion about what we do when rights clash.
Vilma was slowing people down; Vilma chose to charge the Dregs. Should the Doctor have rugby tackled her to the ground and ‘saved’ her? She has a right to life; what about her right to choose to try and save the others? Her agency?
Now, I happen to think – having had a worm’s eye view of the impact in London – that the Extinction Rebellion’s extended protest over here did over-step the boundaries between their right to protest and other people’s right to make their own choices. I really don’t want protesters kicked to death by an angry crowd furious at just how many days this protest has lasted -and if you think I’m kidding, this is the video of Canning Town.
how dare people protest who have paid tax all their life & who’ll fund every single thing they’ll ever need & the ORN of many others.
Not what I was saying. What I was saying, bluntly, is: does the fact that they’ve paid tax all their life etc, give them the right to act as if they are more important than someone else? Does it make them more important?
Should the Doctor see herself as more important than Yaz? The Master certainly does.
I don’t think this episode mentioned the B word? So arguments based on it probably belong in the pub.
Speeches in a fantasy show are fine. But if you’re trying to convince your audience about a scientific topic where the science is contested – you need a scientific adviser to look at the script. Preferably one who won’t tell you to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.
18 January 2020 at 15:23 #69204I’m not actually saying you shouldn’t protest – heck, with the recent devastating fires which were (very high probability) aggravated by an inadequate response to climate change, you should! But what I am arguing about is an assumption that the most important thing to you will necessarily be a) the most important thing to someone else and b) justify overriding their rights.
soon there will be no more work for the poor to get to.
Keeping this as a discussion around the episode, rather than one more suited to the pub – the Doctor plus fam are being chased by slavering Dregs, who seem to see them as ‘lunch’. Should their immediate action be to a) make a powerful speech about ignoring climate change or b) not get eaten for lunch.
The answer is b).
Equally, if you argue that ‘the poor’ soon won’t have any jobs to get to – those poor might well respond that if you don’t let them get to work today they will be in danger of not being able to ‘have enough oxygen’ for their rent and their bills. If someone’s spare cash per week is less than the hours your protest causes them to lose – then that’s a bit like asking our characters to stop worrying about the oxygen that’s running out right now while everyone else forces them to sit down and plan what to do about the long-term problem of the climate change that created the oxygen shortage.
Also, you’re comparing some protestors, people who are self funded retirees, to a vainglorious woman from a completely different century.
Well, ‘let them eat cake’ and ‘Marie Antoinette’ are both proverbial in the UK, even though she almost certainly never said that and would very likely have responded to a lack of bread amongst the local peasantry by paying for bread to be handed out. See, I do read history books. 🙂
But am I accusing self-funded retirees of having the attitude implied by that proverb? Yes. Completely. I think it’s a big problem at the moment. I’d be astonished if Chibnall is going that way, but I think that we could easily have a series arc where the Time Lords are us. Us, in the sense of people like me – highly educated people with a distinct tendency to think they know better than everyone else. 😀
People who don’t see themselves as aristocrats, but are used to having both the leisure time and financial means to go on protests and the expectation that other people will listen to what they say. Who then proceed to inform the people that don’t have that leisure time and money and who don’t expect others to listen to them very much that they should – if they are losing money from the protests of their ‘betters’ – ‘eat cake’.
Or, that they should listen to their ‘betters’ about what’s good for them and do what they’re told.
People, in fact, rather like the Doctor. Aristocratic rebels. The Doctor gets very, very annoyed when people call him/her out as ‘officer class’, but that’s what she is. She completely expects to be listened to, to take charge – and to tell human beings (and other races) what’s good for them. She often gets quite cross when people want to make their own decisions. Of course, the way the programme is structured, the Doctor usually is right and the people going their own way are wrong – but that’s drama, not real life.
The last series was partly about the Doctor learning to stay and tell people how their loved ones died and not to fly off in her little blue box without looking back. To deal with the aftermath of what she does; take responsibility beyond the immediate moment. Possibly this series is going to look at the Time Lords and the Doctor and Master’s aristocratic attitude to other people. Or perhaps it’s going to be about the Doctor discovering both that the Time Lords lied and that maybe, just maybe, while she can stand up and tell people what she thinks is good for them – they have the right to disagree.
15 January 2020 at 23:30 #69132@whisht
[hands Whisht a teddy bear]If we have an arc about the basis of Timelord lies and make reference to a story where they actually lied, that may make sense.
You know what, Phaseshift? I think you might be on to something there. Because I seem to recall that when the Doctor said she’d realised Orphan 55 was Earth only a little before the fam did, Jodie Whittaker played it with what you might call a bit of a shifty look. I could go back and check…
… no. Actually, I couldn’t. Not even for a bonkers theory. But it would make sense, if every story this series was in some way connected to the evil that the Time Lords have, canonically done.
15 January 2020 at 23:19 #69131Just like to direct people to the following reports by the IPCC (these are both links to pdfs): A pdf Global Warming of 1.5 degrees C: a summary for teachers and Summary for policy makers.
The teacher one is far more readable if you don’t have a science background.
Me, I find them optimistic – in the sense that there are indeed things we can do and there is (just) time to do it.
getting into this with an 80-year-old won’t serve any purpose.
It will not. I only have to go back to my 2010 chemistry textbook that I was using for teaching to find global warming taught as something ‘most’ scientists thought was happening. Go back to the 1970’s and there was a substantial minority arguing for global cooling. Most reasonably technically aware eighty year olds will be able to give you a long, long list of things ‘scientists’ were confident about in their lifetime – and which turned out to be embarrassingly wrong.
This thought may help you grit your teeth the next time your beloved mom looks at you funny when you suggest that we need to use less fossil fuels. 😀
14 January 2020 at 15:26 #69088Well, I hope there’s nothing wrong with preaching because I have an actual licence to do just that.
Okay, let’s preach it, brothers and sisters!:)
Protesting meant doing so outside large corporate palaces where salary earners (not wage earners) were ignoring problems.
And did you check that the people who maintain, clean and do the low-level jobs in the large corporate palaces could get in? Did you check that you weren’t blocking access to a hospital? Because that’s one of the (many) things that went wrong in London. The protesters had a righteous cause – but they somehow thought that cutting off public transport at a major interchange was a good thing because the interchange was taking bankers to their massive corporate palaces. Forgetting (or not understanding) that the interchange was also taking people from some of the poorest areas of London to their wage paying jobs.
They stopped traffic in Central London – which meant that as well as the fat cats and the governments, Mr and Mrs Blogs were struggling to get through to their hospital appointment. A spokesperson had a major interview on a mainstream channel – and didn’t know what was in the UN report she was ‘quoting’ from.
Protest doesn’t replace knowledge. In fact, protest requires knowledge. One reason this week’s episode was so utterly infuriating was that it will not, as we’re all saying, do anything but preach to the converted. Because it has no knowledge. Less than none – how do people expect anyone to be convinced about the science of climate change when the production team are apparently unaware that fire needs oxygen and the writer knows so little science they don’t realise an apex predator is at the top of a food chain? Seriously? After that episode, I wouldn’t trust that writer to tell me that CO2 is a molecule, let alone how it can act as a heat trap.
Keep protesting. But don’t forget the science textbooks. 😉
14 January 2020 at 08:04 #69080This episode – I felt it was preaching to the converted
Worse than preaching to the converted. It was the relatively powerful (the Doctor) preaching to the relatively powerless (the Companions, and by extension the kids in the audience). It was also hypocritical, because the programme had flown its main cast out to South Africa to make the statement.
My worries about the current environmental protests can be summed up by the recent Canning Town protest. Relatively wealthy, well educated protesters decide to protest about our children’s future by stopping a lot of relatively poor people working to feed their children today. Then they’re shocked when the protest nearly turns into a riot – against them.
We are not going to save the planet by having Marie Antoinette lecturing us about the carbon footprint of cake. We really aren’t.
13 January 2020 at 21:47 #69059Another positive: Mandip Gill was doing some really good acting – completely horrified by one of the gruesome deaths. I wonder if she’s leaving at the end of the series? Or is going to turn on the Doctor? Either way, it feels like something is being set up – maybe a Tegan-style ‘I can’t cope with this any more, Doctor’.
13 January 2020 at 21:31 #69058Um. That script needed another draft. After the last two weeks, this week was very … well, I hope tonight was the ‘Oops, that one didn’t work’ episode.
Okay, positives. The actors were giving it their all and the direction was pretty good. The Moral of The Week was using a sledgehammer, but at least avoided landing the kids with ‘we’re all going to die’ learned helplessness. This is a possible future, not ‘the’ future. Something can still be done to change it (true, dat).
Negatives: for an SF-style episode with a climate-science moral, the science knowledge on display was bloody awful – I agree, @rob, I think the Green Death did this much better. Unless the Dregs burn magnesium or hydrogen, their fires would need breathable levels of oxygen to burn. Humans would be struggling, but they could breathe. Apex predators need something to eat – in fact, apex predators need an entire food chain – if the Earth is post-nuclear/post-climate change and the ground looks like volcanic sands, what are the local Dregs living on? Trees? There aren’t enough random tourists to support that many and there’s no sign of any other animal life.
If it’s so easy to terraform Earth, why has it been left to one teeny tiny hotel sized resort start-up with a staff of four? Why on earth would you chase after a missing guest with every single member of the cast?
In the end, my suspension of disbelief just kept snapping – there was one point where I actually yelled ‘that’s just b*ll*cks!’ to the screen, which is a first for Doctor Who. Most of this would have been perfectly tolerable if they’d either gone in a more fantasy direction (like this writer’s previous script, which was very good) or got someone to science-check the dratted script.
9 January 2020 at 23:10 #68937@blenkinsopthebrave and @vervain
I’m kind of inclined to a sleight-of-hand that involves a Moffat loop. Mainly because Chibnall was so careful to re-establish that the Doctor can solve a current problem after the solution to the problem has already happened.
I’d say the Capitol is in shreds, Gallifrey is burning – but ask if the Gallifreyans themselves were there at the time?
“Okay, kids, the Master’s on his way. Now, follow the Doctor, because we’re all going to go one hundred years into the future…”
Remember Missy lied, the first time she told the Capaldi Doctor she’d been on Gallifrey. But she lied by omission. She told the Capaldi Doctor that Gallifrey was where it always was. But she mentioned it wasn’t when it always was.
Likewise, it would be very Master-ish for him to truthfully say that he’d burnt Gallifrey to the ground, nuked it, jumped up and down on it till he got blisters – but never mention that he didn’t kill anyone, because they’d all left. He’d leave little titbits like that for the Doctor to work out. 😉
8 January 2020 at 21:46 #68908When I rewatched I noticed that Barton’s anger against his mother was planted in his very first scene. Yaz and Ryan, he thinks, have been granted an interview because it means there’ll be an article about him in the paper his mum reads. At the time you think it’s ‘legacy media’ he dislikes, later you realise it was his mum.
Have you read Eatwell and Goodwin’s National Populism: the Revolt Against Liberal Democracy?
Yup, as @lisa said, there was a fish picture. ‘What is image steganography?’ is currently trending. 🙂
Again, there is that running fan theory that Susan is the granddaughter of both the Doctor and the Master, but for some reason I’ve got it in my head that the ‘Timeless Child’ is more akin to the LeGuin Omelas story. I agree that the Nazi scene has more significance than just an opportunity to make the Master look really evil, but as I argued on T’Other Place, I think we’re deliberately being led down the rabbit hole of Nazi’s = racists. So we’re thinking the arc plot is about racism and murderous racial purity (which was the major topic of last series) and forgetting that the Nazi’s also had a eugenics programme that included breeding more little Ayrans.
If there’s one thing that might make the Master flip so badly that he burns Gallifrey to ashes, it’s the discovery that he and his entire people have been deliberately made. Designed. That he is the way he is because that’s what his designers wanted.
With regard to Chibnall as showrunner, RTD’s first series was very rocky indeed and we’re only two episodes into Chibber’s second one. Maybe by the end of this series we’ll know whether he’s taking the bronze or the silver. 🙂
8 January 2020 at 14:24 #68901it was the recycling in this episode that really stopped me getting into it and grading it higher.
Agreed that there was a lot of recycling, most of which seemed to be the Master recycling previous ‘greatest hits’. It’s whether it’s, y’know, recycling created by the BBC saying ‘we don’t like the direction of the last series, having told you we want something different we now don’t.’
Or, whether the recycling is a plot point. This series arc is going to be one that uses stuff from all (well, hopefully not all) the previous series, including BG. Did you notice there were at least two references to going ‘Classic’? But if one of the biggest complaints against both Moffat and RTD was that they presumed everyone watching had a detailed knowledge of the last fifty odd years including spin off media, then maybe Chibbers has decided that the casual viewer needs a recap of the important stuff before we set off on our viewing journey through the series arc.
As well as the things you mentioned, other recaps were: the Master’s tissue compressor, that Time Lords are telepathic, who, what and where the Doctor is from. I’d also include the ‘Moffat loop’, which makes re-using one of the most famous scenes from Moffat’s most famous Doctor Who script more an acknowledgement than a retread.
Has anyone else spotted other ‘recap’ items?
8 January 2020 at 14:02 #68900I think the ‘timeless child’ picture is a flash from the Doctor’s own buried memory – but we might have to agree to differ on that one until we both have more information.
@galaxymage
Welcome to the forum and to our bonkers theorising!I think that Daniel Barton was watching when the Master banged his head against the console.
or that the Time Lord species was built or somehow genetically engineered.
This is something I’ve felt for a long time, so it’s not really surprising a life-long fan like Chibbers might decide to use the same idea as a series (multi-series?) arc. The end-effect of all those producers and writers adding on Time Lord attributes so that the Doctor doesn’t die this week, plus the frequent use of Time Lord characters as ‘meglomaniac of the week’ is that they seem – designed. Designed to – not die. To be super-intelligent. To want to win wars, and not care about any other races that might get in the way.
They just don’t feel like a ‘naturally evolved’ species. They’re mirrors of the Daleks.
The other odd point about them is that they don’t seem to be arsed about the Master. More than not arsed, in fact. It’s as if he generates this massive ‘ignore me’ field for everyone on Gallifrey (despite his assassination of some rather important people) and even the Doctor seems to struggle to actually – kill him.
Now, for the Doctor this may be because the Master is a childhood friend and he/she simply has the same difficulty any of us would face if your best friend was suffering from mental problems that meant they were a danger to others. We could say that the Pertwee Doctor put a good face on things, and the later Doctors have been a bit more willing to try and push him in the direction of the people he’s hurt (and hope they do the actual killing).
But – could Chibbers be about to ‘explain’ the Doctor’s inability to kill the Master by having it programmed in? He can’t kill the Master because the Master is … what? The timeless child himself? This generation’s incarnation of Chaos? An eternal incarnation who simply doesn’t remember all his incarnations and periodically regenerates as a child?
Like, possibly, the Doctor…
8 January 2020 at 00:20 #68886I agree that the element of ‘melodrama villain’ seems more conscious in this Master. Doctor Who is melodrama (in a technical sense), but Sacha Dhawan seems to be doing the melodramatic villain as if it’s now an act the Master’s putting on for an audience. The top hat. The Nazi uniform. The scene in the plane hangar when his ‘I’m going to kill you … and then you … and then you’ almost has a subtext of ‘Where the bloody hell are you, Doctor, because I can’t delay killing your mates for ever?’. The whole two-parter is about alien spies, of course, but yeah, it really is like he has to put up an act in front of witnesses.
Alone with the Doctor he seems more serious, more reflective and @miapatrick, I’d say more broken. Not just desperate, but someone barely holding off a complete breakdown. Which is why he so easily flips into furious anger, even grabbing the Doctor by the throat.
Mudlark, I also think his switching allegiance was because Rassilon was the person who abused him as a child, treated him like a thing. He was willing to placate Rassilon if he’d stay alive by doing that, but once it became apparent that wasn’t an option, I think what came out were his real feelings. The Doctor is a friendly enemy; John Simm played that scene as if the Master genuinely hated Rassilon for what he’d done to him and would die with the rest of the Time Lords if he could just kill Rassilon first. [And he does seem to have forced him into another regeneration, even if he couldn’t manage to kill him].
It might be worth looking at that again, because I’m wondering if Chibbers is taking RTD’s quick explanation of ‘Oh, yeah, the Master is really evil but it’s because he was abused as a child’ and using it in this plotline. That is, he’s not ignoring the Master’s established backstory, or Missy’s character development. He’s using it. The previous abuse as a flashpoint that can make the Master flip (nuke the place, burn it, sow the soil with salt sort of flip) and Missy’s learning to feel remorse as the development that makes him (seemingly) then try and get the Doctor to help without outright asking her.
7 January 2020 at 23:43 #68885I’m betting that we are all being manipulated into thinking that the timeless child is a child.
The Doctor’s memory flash, or race-memory flash definitely looks like a child to me.
7 January 2020 at 23:34 #68883True, we are supposed to forget about the fact that if he was on Earth for 77 years he (presumably) managed to miss all the other Masters who were around London and the environs during the ’70s and ’80s, not to mention Prime Minister Saxon. But, as Mrs Blenkinsop wisely reminds me: “You are not supposed to ask those questions”.
I think that’s why they were the most irritating 77 years of his life. Not only did he have to survive every Earth-based episode of Doctor Who, escaping various alien Invasions With Extreme Prejudice, he had to try and stay alive during his own bloody plans – and he couldn’t contact himself, because he knew he hadn’t.
What he did during the Saxon period, I don’t know, given that Saxon was in control of the entire Earth for The Year That Never Was. Possibly he nicked a year’s supply of emergency rations and hid in a very deep cave as soon as the Vote Saxon posters appeared. 😀
a fair deal of observations/complaints about Thirteen mindwiping Ada and Noor,
Not surprised. That was scripted and acted in what seemed to be a deliberately disturbing way. Noor, working in a wartime environment, seems to accept the necessity, but the scene with Ada seems to be deliberately reminding older viewers of Donna’s mind-wipe. The necessity can be argued – someone as smart as Ada might have advanced the science of computing immeasurably with the glimpses she’d had of the future. But it really was a very disturbing scene, which makes me wonder if it ties into the series arc.
7 January 2020 at 10:56 #68878Sorry to hear that. Disobedient kidneys can be a Bad Thing, so I hope it’s now under control. Lovely to see you back
So far I’m up to two-thirds of episode 1 of Dracula and it seems very good. However, I also had a gift of Season One of Star Trek: Discovery, so after months of no telly at all, I’m suddenly in the position of trying to find time to watch everything.
7 January 2020 at 00:29 #68872He recovers immediately and demands that the Doctor kneel, but even as she complies it does not feel as if he is really in control.
Yes. He makes her kneel to him, call him Master, just like previous incarnations would have done – and then he needs to talk to her and kneels down to do that.
He kneels to her.
6 January 2020 at 21:24 #68869@miapatrick Having now watched it, I think this may well be a post Missy incarnation. When the Dhawan Master talks about the buzz that killing gives him, then adds that he knows ‘I’m in the right place, doing what I was made for’ – the look in his eyes is completely haunted.
He may also be referring to the Timeless Child reveal, that he’s discovered he’s not simply someone abused by Rassilon, but was actually made. Deliberately designed as a psychopathic killer – and one who finds killing fun.
The final edit often has Dhawan either slightly out of focus or shot to one side as if they’re trying to hide the Master’s real expression from the audience. But in the previous episode, when he says ‘everything you know is a lie’ there are tears in his eyes – we see that again in this episode in his recorded call.
I’m also wondering why he didn’t kill Noor. Was it because she’s a historical figure and he didn’t want to change history, or was it because she wasn’t frightened of him?
6 January 2020 at 21:11 #68868I’m not sure Chibnall is going to radically alter the Who Mythos into a Big Lie thing.
No, I don’t think he is. I have read the LeGuin story and the emphasis is not on the Big Lie itself as much as it’s on the choice people have to make, whether to continue in the lie or walk away. And I suspect I’m thinking of it because, in their different ways, the Doctor and the Master are both Ones Who Run Away.
I suspect what we’re going to find is possibly something riffing off the New Adventure novelisations, where there was a strong implication that the Doctor wasn’t who she thought he was. Possibly the Master, also, is not who he thinks he is. Not a radical alteration as much as one of those reboots where everything you thought you knew suddenly turns out to be for different reasons than we thought. Like the post-gap discovery that the Great Time Lord Hero Rassilon was actually more of an evil dictator than Time Lord history had recorded.
“The past/present isn’t perfect so burn it all down cuz who needs the future?”,
That it’s the Master who burnt it all down is a fairly good pointer that Chibnall is hinting that this was not the most optimal decision. 🙂
6 January 2020 at 14:17 #68862Frankly, this episode is coming off as rather bitterly timed.
That is, surely, precisely the point at which a non-religious hero like the Doctor needs to point out that darkness doesn’t win in the long run. Noor is heading off to die in Dachau, possibly one of the darkest endings possible for her own story on Earth – but in the wider story of Earth, the fascism she’s fighting won’t win.
Her contribution may have been tiny in the larger scheme of things; the point is that she made that contribution.
6 January 2020 at 13:25 #68860I don’t think it was a questionable choice at all – it links with the communications tech we meet fighting the Nazi’s being Noor Inayat Khan. O is perfectly happy to be a Nazi, despite this incarnation’s skin colour. Noor is risking her life (and will later lose her life) fighting the fascist doctrine that would call her ‘inferior’.
It may also link with the series-arc – at least, the Time Lords are historically a bunch of racist isolationists and the Master does seem to demonstrate that ‘other races are my toys’ attitude to the nth power.
So the Doctor gives him a very practical demonstration of why using the Nazi’s is ‘low, even for him’. The biter bit.
6 January 2020 at 13:08 #68859Ooh, it is nice being able to theorise about non-character arcs again. Mind you, Chibbers is a character driven writer, so my current bonkers theory is kind of character driven.
It’s noticeable that a lot of people seem to be picking up that the Dhawan Master is somehow not entirely what he should be. There was a lot of ‘is he helping the Doctor?’ last episode discussion and this one and last one @miapatrick, you’ve been ‘maybe between Simm and Gomez?’ The normal practice of the show is to have each Master/Missy we see follow the previous one, and I’m certainly inclined to have him follow Missy until proved otherwise.
My guess is that in this series arc, O/The Master needs the Doctor’s help, because he’s just burnt Gallifrey to the ground out of sheer fury and is now being driven completely bonkers by the remorse. That would carry on the Missy arc, anyway.
But this O is a combination and development of his previous two incarnations – the Simm Master and the Gomez Missy – he can feel remorse, but he can’t admit it to the Doctor, because if he does the Doctor’s won (or at least, is winning) his/her ages long battle to make the Master/Missy ‘guid’.
So he needs to get the Doctor’s attention, direct her to Gallifrey, point her at the ‘lie’ problem – and see if she can reverse or mitigate what he did. The Doctor has, after all, managed to reverse the destruction before.But because O still wants to win that almost life-long game, he needs to do this without admitting that he, O, is anything but an utter b*st*rd. Hence a lot of the ‘I’m really evil, me, look at me killing people for mad reasons.’
I need to do a rewatch, I think, but my first impression of the ‘recorded message’ sequence in the TARDIS was that the person recording it was being absolutely torn to bits by what he’d done and was trying desperately not to show it.
5 January 2020 at 23:13 #68846Okay, that was good. Couple of thoughts
This second episode is all about the Doctor going back in time and putting an ‘escape clause’ in the Master’s Evil Plan (TM). Which kind of makes me think that Gallifrey is currently a Schrodinger’s Gallifrey – neither dead or alive until the Doctor works out if there is an ‘escape clause’ in the Master’s burning of Gallifrey. But first she has to work out why the Master did it.
The name O is more than just a joke. But is it O as as in this Master now seeing himself as ‘nothing’ or is it O as in binary numbers? He’s the 0 to the Doctor’s 1?
I’m inclined to post-Missy, because if this Master is post-Missy, then the character development is that the stuff O discovered about the Timeless Child and the founding of Gallifrey being all lies was so shocking that it’s utterly wiped out the progress that was being made. It’s tipped him back over the edge. In addition, those comments about the beauty of chaos, and killing people making him feel like he’s doing what he’s supposed to do felt like they had a bit more ‘weight’ to them than ‘I’m really evil, me’.
For some reason, the Ursula K. LeGuin story ‘The ones who walk away from Omelas’ is now really running through my mind.
2 January 2020 at 13:56 #68757Another possible suggestion is that this Master does come after Missy, but ‘everything you know is a lie’ includes what he’s doing right now. Not my idea – someone on T’Other place suggested it.
I think either is possible – a few people have noted that the Dhawan Master seems very much riffing off the Simm Master’s early style. Is this because he comes immediately after the Simm Master? Or is it because he’s post Missy, getting less uh, bonkers – and trying to remember how to act crazy.
In other words, ‘I’m bonkers, me, look how bonkers I am’ is an act. Because whatever the Glowy Monsters are doing, they could be spying on everyone at any time.
[And a slightly later thought.] He establishes himself as ‘O’, gets fired by MI6 and then promptly retreats to the middle of the Australian Outback. Where he’s completely alone, so moving from Missy’s Doctor imposed isolation to self-imposed isolation. A possible hint that he is still progressing?
Okay, we’ll probably see Sunday whether he’s reverted to full on evil, but if not – I was suggesting last series that Yaz’s arc could easily be about her tendency to go all ‘greatest good of greatest number.’ What if the Dhawan Master is trying to be good, but is following the ‘greatest good of greatest number’ Time Lord morality? So he’ll tissue compress MI6 analysts and arrange for the assassination of C because he’s trying to save the billions and billions of people on Earth?
1 January 2020 at 20:34 #68741But you had a special line, all for you. Didn’t you notice?
@pedant
I now want to re-watch so I can spot the clues – agreed, it was a world-class fakeout. But Dracula is in twenty five minutes.1 January 2020 at 00:21 #68709This has been a difficult year and a difficult decade for many of us.
So, may 2020 and the new Twenties become a story of finding light in the darkness. For ourselves, and for the Doctor.
A Happy New Year, especially to those who are finding it difficult right now.
27 December 2019 at 10:55 #68687Cummings would need a TARDIS. UNIT were ‘suspended’ last New Years Day.
::pauses, thinks::
On the other hand, Dominic Cummings as The Master works really well…
26 December 2019 at 19:35 #68682Yes, the Muppet Christmas Carol is one of the great Christmas Carols. Happy to welcome you to the fan club.
26 December 2019 at 19:22 #68680I don’t remember ever hearing much of a coherent argument for principled reasons to leave the EU (a lot of empty phrases and lies).
I would say that this was possibly because the ‘principled reasons’ weren’t your primary goods, so you may have dismissed them as empty phrases – not realising that they were deeply important to a lot of people.
Essentially, the coherent argument was
1. We don’t like the direction the EU is travelling in. (Ever closer union)
2. We don’t believe that we in the UK have enough influence to change that direction.
3. So we’re going to change our direction, ourselves. By leaving.That’s the basics. Phrases like ‘sovereignty’ got used a lot, often attacked by smart-alecs who demanded Leavers define sovereignty. Apparently it didn’t occur to them that they themselves wouldn’t even be able to define ‘chair’ on request. Words are slippery things. 😉
26 December 2019 at 15:36 #68679Gosh, I go on holiday and come back to six mentions.
There is one thing on which we agree absolutely.
But within a few minutes we covered quite a lot off ground because we fusking listened to each other.
Yes. A thousand times yes. We need to f*ck*ng listen to each other. Not shut conversations down. Don’t assume one side is virtuous and the other evil, because that way madness lies.
I doubt you and I are going to agree about Brexit; I suspect we could both shoot down different arguments from each of the respective sides. But I think I decided to put my head above the parapet because I was sick to death of feeling that I had to keep my mouth shut about a perfectly legal vote in a perfectly legal referendum. Because too many people who didn’t vote my way were entirely prepared to tell me why I voted the way I did.
Multiply me by 17.4 million voters. We were told we could make a choice about whether to stay in the EU or not. We were told that the result of the vote would be enacted. We believed it, because the UK is a democracy.
And then, when we found we were actually in the majority, suddenly we’d voted the ‘wrong’ way. And were told ‘why’ we’d voted the wrong way, even when it wasn’t the reason at all.
Can you understand – not only that I’m somewhat p*ss*d off, but that that very reaction by people who had lost a vote acted to increase my concerns about what our membership of an essentially bureaucratic, appointee-led system was doing to the UK’s tradition of liberal democracy?
As @thane16 says – it’s a very frustrating issue. 😉
26 December 2019 at 14:41 #68678@janetteb and @blenkinsopthebrave
I very much enjoyed the new version of A Christmas Carol. A faithful retelling it certainly isn’t. But it works, I think, if you take it as a work of art in its own right, based around Dicken’s novella.
There’s stuff I could critique about the writing, but it’s beautifully directed and acted. Well worth a watch.
20 December 2019 at 08:52 #68638Hi folks!
Currently away, so a short post.
One question to throw into the ring: if one side says they are ‘uncomfortable’ about current levels of immigration and the other side says ‘that’s because you’re racist’, how is it possible to discuss immigration?
As @thane16 is saying dis-ease is a couple of steps away from anger. I’d also say it’s a couple of steps away from racism. But jump straight through the steps to ‘uncomfortable = you are racist’ and the conversation is now one of good vs evil with the ‘uncomfortable’ side cast as ‘evil’.
No conversation is possible. The situation either resolves itself or continues. If it continues, it’s now more likely, not less, that people will get angry – because you’ve just added ‘insulted and not-listened-to’ to ‘uncomfortable’.
And yet we are trying to stop the anger before it becomes anger, so we can deal with the racism in the longer term.
16 December 2019 at 20:33 #68583They’re not racist, but… they’re uncomfortable.
Absolutely agree. I think one of the pressure points for leaving was that ‘uncomfortable’ feeling – as I said above, one-third of the Leave vote agreed that ‘control over immigration’ was the reason they voted Leave. But I also think that there’s been far too much of confusing a ‘pressure point’ with racism.
Basically, if someone is uncomfortable about a local/national issue, what can they do? Talk to their MP at a local surgery. What can the MP do? Talk to their party leadership. What can the party leadership do? Try and get elected as the next government, if they’re not the government. Possibly, along the way, your local/national issue will be resolved, or possibly you’ll discover that most people don’t agree with you. Either way, there’s a sense that the individual citizen is not completely helpless, that there’s a ‘release valve’ for such pressure points as worries about immigration.
But if people are ‘uncomfortable’ with an issue that’s decided EU wide, where do they go to? Their MEP? And what, exactly, will their MEP be able to do about it? Especially when the issue is one of the Four Freedoms and people are being informed by the BBC that even the Prime Minister can’t get a temporary reduction on freedom of movement (technically, I believe, he should have been able to get it; practically, he was advised that he shouldn’t even ask for it).
This is the point, I think, where people started thinking that Leavers were voting Leave because of xenophobia (all these immigrants, coming in taking our jobs, etc, etc) rather than recognising that the ‘release valve’ had been blocked and people had realised that – it was just that one-third had spotted it because they were ‘uncomfortable’ about the recent rapid immigration. The EU had tried to insulate itself from populism, but in the process had created a situation in which there was no way to ‘appeal to Caesar’.
Which is why the slogan ‘Take Back Control’ was so very, very powerful.
I haven’t read in our media a believable analysis that says UK will be better off economically (at least in short term).
There isn’t one for the short term. I’ve read loads of economic analyses, quite a few before the campaign period – some of them do argue we’ll be better off long term.
But I don’t know any Leavers who think the UK will be better off in the short term. I’m sure there are some, somewhere, given that about 6% of Leavers put ‘economy’ as their main reason for Leaving – but outside political speeches promising puppies and unicorns, everyone I know reckons it might be a rough few years. Even the ones who think the puppies and unicorns will turn up in a decade or so.
But if you argue on economics, you will never convince people on the Leave side, because they are (and surveys back me up) mostly motivated by the question of how the country is governed. They do not see ‘the country’s economy’ as their primary good. They voted to leave primarily because they thought decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK, because they wanted to control immigration and because they thought the UK had very little control over the future direction of the EU.
That was the mistake the Remain campaign made – they argued almost entirely about the economy, when it wasn’t ‘the economy, stupid.’ For slightly over half the voters, it was a question about how we run our country. A classic example of preparing to fight the previous war.
– Corbyn (perceived as: antisemitic; Marxist; holding an uncomfortable position(s) on Brexit; possibly hard to understand or warm to in interviews)
You missed out ‘weak’, which was what I heard from a few people, including some who’d lived in his constituency. I also think people may have underestimated how ‘supported the IRA’ would play among the generations old enough to remember the Troubles.
The Print media has always been mainly right wing.
Agreed, but I think we would disagree on the reason for that. I would say that the print media in this country is mainly right wing because their readers are mainly small-c conservative. They’re right wing because it sells papers, not making naturally progressive people somehow morph into right wingers.
Again, I remember being told immediately after the Referendum that the dreaded Murdoch had caused it because his papers had supported Leave and replying that if you check, the Murdoch papers had actually supported both sides, depending on the paper. Whatever sells… that seemed to be the official position of the Murdoch group.
confused Labour message
Comedian’s joke – the Russians interrogated Comrade Corybn for a week, and they still don’t know his position on Brexit…
16 December 2019 at 19:13 #68582Well, I suppose you could say an 12.8% rate is rare. Sorry, I didn’t know you’d lived in the States (so have I).
Look, I seem to be misreading you. Please remember that I’m dyslexic and that it’s very easy for me to miss nuances and subtleties. You asked if busy folk have time to read pamphlets and I picked up on that. Your real point is that – what? That people are going into their respective echo chambers? Agreed. But I would argue both sides are going into their echo chambers.
Again, studies. 91% of Guardian readers voted to remain. But when the Press Gazette reported, they took the angle of reporting on the newspapers who strongly favoured Leave (The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express and The Telegraph).
So, with 91% of Guardian readers voting Remain, and 85% of Independent readers voting Remain, the Press Gazette chooses to lead on the four very popular papers which didn’t even hit 70% of their readers following the paper’s party line… heck, Telegraph readers were split 55/45.
As a Guardian subscriber I have to wonder who’s living in an echo chamber. 91% of readers voted the same way? That’s actually quite scary.
@blenkinsopthebrave
Basically, None of The Above. I’d agree with @pedant about Adonis, but with the caveat that his Twitter feed has sometimes suggested that he’s suffering from Brexit Derangement Syndrome – bit like Trump, sometimes you wish a friend would just prise his phone from his hand until he can calm down.Dominic Cummings is this generation’s Alistair Campbell, and I would never trust Campbell. I spent some of my childhood in countries run by actual fascists, so I’m not sure I’d use the F word – I think he’s on the more libertarian right wing – but certainly a guy most right wingers would see as to the right of them. A very, very clever man, with a real talent for finding out what voters are thinking and how to target them.
Given that Milne has worked for Communist publications, the C word is probably accurate. Also a very, very clever man – responsible for creating the Guardian’s online comment section in the days when it was an exciting place to be, with lots of genuine discussion. Also comes under my ‘would not trust as far as I can throw him.’
On the whole, I’d say that I don’t think Dominic Cummings would have me shot for the ‘greater good’, though he’d certainly fire me in a skinny minute. But Seamus Milne, I think, would.
@thane16 – Junior Syzygy – the influence of slavery on the United States is definitely worth looking into.
15 December 2019 at 14:54 #68563Looks like a very busy New Years Day – Doctor Who AND Dracula.
Interesting that the BBC thinks Sherlock is the big selling point.
15 December 2019 at 14:02 #68562it’s a complicated mess.
This. Times a thousand. As you can see, Brexit brings up very strong emotions in the UK.
The main problem with Brexit is that both sides are right. But in politics, especially if you know that you are right, it can be very hard indeed to take a step back and try and see that. That, in fact, the Remainers and the Leavers looked at the same facts and came to utterly different conclusions. They did this because Remainers were mostly motivated by what Brexit could do to our economy, where Leavers were mostly concerned about how we run the country.
But if you can’t step back and see that voters made these very different decisions because they prioritised different goods – it becomes very, very tempting to decide that the other person voted the way they did because they’re racist/stupid/racist and stupid/positively evil/uneducated/easily led by fake advertising/did I mention stupid?
The truth is that I find it far easier to believe that a losing side is making excuses for losing than that 17.4 million people in a notoriously non-volatile country morphed practically overnight into a bunch of racist, far right, nationalist loons. Especially when pretty much all they’ve done since is troop off to the polling stations and confirm that they mostly haven’t changed their minds.
Yeah, it’s tricky when you’re commentating on this from another country, so you probably weren’t aware that we’ve had a number of court cases trying to delay or ::cough:: redirect Brexit decisions, generally brought by people who do have the time and money. I thought you were referring to those.
He did not emerge victorious according to the vote-count.
Trump’s awful, but you’re showing a fundamental (and very common) misunderstanding of the U.S. Constitution. The U.S. President is not currently supposed to be elected by majority popular vote. He (or hopefully, at some point, she) is elected by the Electoral College because that gives the less populous flyover states a say – rather than having the President essentially elected by the East and West coasts. It also allows states to decide for themselves whether to use a ‘winner takes all’ system for the representatives or allocate them according to proportional representation.
I think there’s been five presidents who lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. John F Kennedy also came within 0.17% of losing the popular vote, so it’s not just the less-well-regarded ones.
On regard to whether busy folk have time to read stuff – when we went for universal suffrage we made a decision that our country may be run by politics nerds, but the politics nerds get elected by everyone. Part of that is admitting that the person who doesn’t have much time for politics should still have a say in how they’re governed.
Essentially, I would say that if the question of Brexit really was too complicated for busy people, then that is the fault of the 554 MPs of all parties (not the SNP, I think) in Parliament who voted to put the question of Brexit to them. It is not the fault of the busy people. People voted in very large numbers (72% turnout), they discussed it beforehand and an awful lot of people did seem to realise that they were being asked a very important question about the future of the UK.
15 December 2019 at 13:10 #68561I found the ‘not my President’ thing profoundly depressing because it was coming from people who’d spent the last eight years insisting that President Obama was everyone’s President, because that’s how the Constitution works.
Within a matter of days people shifted from a principled defence of the Constitution to ‘eeek, Trump is horrible, so Not My President.’ I’d never have voted for Trump – I remember well my shock when I went to bed with all the UK commentators saying Hilary Clinton had just swung it and then woke up to discover it was now President-Elect Trump. But the rapid about face when the election didn’t go their way shocked me.
Unless the US armed forces are all Trump supporters, I don’t see how he can ‘reject the umpire’s decision.’ The President may be their Commander-in-Chief, but their oath is to the Constitution. One of the cheering things of the last few years has been the discovery that the US Constitution was obviously designed to cope with ‘We’ve just elected an idiot.’
14 December 2019 at 23:42 #68556Have a good evening, and if you don’t want to argue about it, that’s fine.
14 December 2019 at 23:40 #68555Yeah, I would be up for compulsory voting – though I will say that until fairly recently Britain also had the ‘everyone abides by the umpire’s decision’ attitude. 2016 shattered that attitude, painfully and spectacularly. For that matter, I voted for AV proportional representation in the 2011 Referendum and didn’t even dream of contesting the vote, or calling the people who didn’t want it names. Likewise, the Welsh devolution referendum was a incredibly close run thing, and I remember my reaction to that as being a mere ‘oh, bugger’.
I first noticed the ‘not my president’ mantra with Obama, when I did put it down to simple racism. But then Trump came in and suddenly the exact same people who’d been bitterly complaining about people not accepting Obama were hysterically rejecting Trump. So I suspect this ‘votes only count if they go my way’ is part of a wider cultural shift.
A worrying cultural shift. A deep conviction on both sides that their opponents are disagreeing with them because of either a) stupidity or b) actual evil is not going to end well. Neither is thinking that you can overturn a democratic majority because you don’t like the result.
14 December 2019 at 23:24 #68553This is your decision. The government will implement what you decide.
In writing. In the 2016 government leaflet. Sent to every household in the country.
Of course, after the vote to leave the EU, suddenly the legal point that it was ‘advisory’ became quoted rather more by the Remain side than the embarrassing statement (in writing) that the government was committed to implementing the result.
And seventeen and a half million people who had voted in the expectation that the winning vote would be enacted suddenly found themselves being called far right, populist, and confused by misinformation. Possibly Russian agents. Definitely racist. Certainly thick. Have I missed anything out? Would you like to add any more?
They were accused of all these things for the terrible crime of casting a democratic vote in a referendum and daring to use it to say that they wanted to change the current system.
For wanting to leave a economic and political partnership…
I said up above that I think the British people had to make a decision between Mr Saxon and the Slitheen. Clearly, we disagree about who the ‘tiger’ is. But I will say that the 1930’s did not just see the rise of Hitler. They also saw the rule of Stalin and the great purge. The deaths were probably in the hundreds of thousands and may be more than a million. Millions more were imprisoned, despite mostly being utterly innocent of anything. The far left have, in documented fact, easily killed as many as the far right.
The left have no monopoly on virtue and the right have no monopoly of evil.
14 December 2019 at 13:12 #68550if the falsity of the referendum wasn’t exposed. Are they owed the truth?
The ‘truth’ has been extensively discussed in the UK, in huge and nit-picking detail, for the last three years. And each time there’s an election, a large number of people quietly trot down to the polling stations and effectively say ‘Yup, we really, really meant we want to leave’. Because they vote for a party or parties that tells them they’ll enact the Referendum vote.
And a large number of other people insist that if you add up all the other votes (and possibly add in how people who weren’t eligible to vote at the time would have voted) then there’s now a majority for Remain. Plus, Leave cheated. They did so cheat, look at the court cases. Oops, we lost that one, well look at the other court cases… ignore the fines levied on Remain campaigners, they don’t count….
Et cetera, et cetera. Claiming that the referendum was won on false pretences is now the only argument left to them, you see.
I’m not surprised that it’s the one you’re picking up in Australia, because the die-hard Remainers have very loud voices.
14 December 2019 at 13:00 #68549thane16
If the message of the referendum is deliberately misleading, then legally, I suppose, one could find an alternate measure of more accurate reasons for Brexit.
One law for rich and poor alike, that allows them equally to take time off to fight extensive legal cases?
In the event, I didn’t vote Lib Dem. They don’t like me. 😉
Because of FPTP, tactical voting (voting against your least-liked candidate) is indeed a ‘thing’ in the UK. I was suggesting that Pedant’s blithe assumption was wrong – 53% of the vote spread among several different parties doesn’t necessarily represent an anti-Brexit majority. For example, there’s a number of SNP voters who vote SNP because they want Scottish Independence AND Brexit. 🙂
Who is arguing that the message was misleading? That would be the very people who lost an April to June campaign with extensive opportunities to contest any ‘misleading’ messages. Before the campaign there was also an official leaflet from the then government stating that the UK government wished to Remain. Essentially, their ‘argument’ is that they shouldn’t have lost, they did lose, so somebody must have been cheating. Remain are as pure as new fallen snow, Leave are very naughty boys and girls.
If you’re arguing that successive governments have been fairly crap on agreeing exactly what Brexit means (starting from David Cameron’s decision that it meant resigning), you’re perfectly right. But then, that’s what UK elections are for.
Which we’ve just had, again, and again the party voted into power was the one that has stated it will enact the vote. Which gets me back to my original question, I suppose – how many times do Leave have to win?
14 December 2019 at 12:34 #68546@thane16 Syzygy Snr
did Jewish families move accounts off-shore or was this a deliberate ranting?
I realised a bit too late that I should have put that bit in quote marks. 🙂 It’s untrue, and was a deliberate rant. It combines two racist tropes about Jewish people – one, they’re all rich. Two, they’re not ‘really’ loyal to their country.
Anyway the final bit about the 2016 Referendum (probably to huge sighs of relief – sorry, folks, this has been a really extended rant).
The reason Britain voted to Leave the European Union in 2016 is because Remain lost. It’s that simple. Despite being called ‘Remain’ their official campaign did not give any positive, hopeful messages of ‘What EU membership means.’ Instead, they went with a ‘change is scary’ message.
Added to this, they were complacent. They assumed, in the face of a number of polls telling them that Leave had about 50% of the vote, that people would change their minds and stick with the status quo. That’s the ‘bubble’ effect. Most of the people they knew didn’t want to leave, and they didn’t listen to the people telling them differently. They assumed that enough people would decide the system was working for them, or would go with ‘change is scary.’ If you analyse the voting patterns, it is noticeable that majority Remain areas have a lower turnout than majority Leave areas.
Remain lost. They lost on the campaigning, then they didn’t get enough people who wanted to stay in the EU out to vote.
Leave, however, did a stunningly good campaign, mainly playing on people’s desire to be governed by a system that they understand. That’s why I think the 2011 AV referendum is important. People were offered the choice between a simple (if unfair to smaller parties) system that they understood, and a ‘fairer’ system which was more complicated and more likely to result in coalition governments. Most of those who voted went for the simpler system.
And that was repeated in the 2016 Referendum. People were offered a choice between a simpler system (revert to the old Westminster Government and First Past The Post system ) and the more complex, more coalition-style EU system – and they went for the system that was simpler and allowed them to vote out governments they don’t like.
Since 2016 many highly educated, highly sophisticated people have been utterly unable to get their heads round the idea that a system which does indeed work so very well for them was not working for about half the country. They’ve been unable to get their heads round the idea that a majority of the people who voted to remain in the then EEC back in the 1970’s have now changed their minds.
And because they can’t – they’ve recast Leave voters as stupid, uneducated, knuckle-dragging, racist populists who are too thick to understand what’s so clearly obvious to their ‘betters’. As, at best, deluded – and at worst evil.
It’s one hundred years since working class men and women got the vote in the UK. And I may not be a class warrior by any stretch of the imagination, but I will fucking well NOT have any party, any political persuasion, telling people that they should vote the way their ‘betters’ tell them to. That a party ‘owns’ their vote. Or that their votes should be ignored, because they’re, um, easily led. That if they are so stupid as to vote the wrong way, we should ‘do over’ until you get the vote right.
No. One person. One vote. And if the rules state in advance that the result will be enacted on a simple majority, we enact that vote. Otherwise, our system is a sham.
And besides – what happens the next time people want change, if they then have proof that they can’t get it through the ballot box?
14 December 2019 at 11:52 #68544@thane16 Syzygy Snr
Is it consistent though? If the wrong message was sent to the wrong people -ie “Pakis are taking all your jobs; more mosques than Christian chapels” & a vindictive social media campaign propelled a lop-sided message, would it be appropriate to have a “do-over?”
Was immigration a factor in the vote to leave the European Union? Yes. One third of Leave voters said that control of borders and immigration was an important factor. Note that this is ‘one-third’, not ‘a majority’. Also that the word in the question was ‘control’, and that Leave voters weren’t asked if they wanted to ban immigration. They wanted control.
What sort of immigration are we talking about? You’ve quoted an explicitly racist message about non-white Muslims (yeah, there were definitely some of those during 2016 – looking right at you, Mr Farage), but most current immigrants to the UK are white and Christian. Since the 1990’s, most immigration has been from the EU, and the UK government of the time took ‘freedom of movement’ to mean ‘no restrictions at all’.
If you’re from the (mostly white, mostly Christian) EU, that is. People from outside the EU (mostly dark, mostly non-Christian) already come under a strictly controlled immigration system. Talking about institutional racism, we’ve actually managed to end up with an immigration system that doesn’t treat all non-UK citizens equally, and privileges those countries which are majority white.
Since the turn of the century the UK (then pop 59 million) has grown by 6.6 million people. Half of that is due to direct migration, another thirty percent is due to the migrants settling down and having kids. This is the longest period of high, sustained migration the UK has ever seen and it’s often impacting areas where ‘immigration’ previously meant ‘somebody moving in from a nearby town’. To make bad worse, successive governments of both parties have not built sufficient social housing/hospitals/schools for the new people coming in until very recently.
But when working class people tried to discuss this, they were shut down as ‘racist’. It’s ‘racist’ to argue that an 8% population increase over twenty years might be problematic (especially when we often weren’t building social housing or hospitals to absorb that increase), and ‘racist’ to say that you would like control to be returned to the UK government. It’s ‘racist’ to say that you don’t think a system that makes an immigrant from Pakistan jump through hoops – while an immigrant from Lithuania can just pick up a bag and come here – is a fair and equal system.
Generally speaking, surveys show that the UK is one of the least racist countries in Europe – and many of the ‘hate crimes’ reported post the referendum turned out to be not hate crimes at all. Post the referendum, surveys show that the UK is now more comfortable with immigration.
The powerful message that has been sent post 2016, however, is that ‘everyone’ voted Leave because of ‘racism and xenophobia’. Very powerful, because who wants to be called racist? It doesn’t make sense – the fact that the message you picked up was that people were voting about leaving the European union because of immigration from Pakistan shows that it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t match the surveys, either. But the argument goes, ‘people don’t want to admit they’re racist’.
Well, maybe they didn’t want to admit their racism to me, but the comment I heard most about immigration was ‘fairness’. People didn’t understand why someone from Australia, with British relatives, had to leave after two or three years, while someone from France (with no British relatives) could stay forever. They didn’t understand why one co-worker couldn’t bring her Granny over from Bangladesh, but another could bring her Granny over from Poland without any worries. And they were definitely worried about the social housing and the hospitals and it was along the lines of ‘all these people coming over, and we’ve already got a ten-year wait for housing’. ‘Control’ was what they wanted – immigration policy to be again decided at the national level, rather than having to discuss it with other European leaders.
Okay, one more post to go….
14 December 2019 at 11:02 #68543@thane16 Syzygy Snr
Okay, Brexit. It’s fairly difficult to be detached on Brexit, because I’ve spent the last three and a half years having people inform me that the most carefully researched vote of my life was made because I’m a racist, xenophobic, knuckle-dragging idiot. In fact, there was a point when I didn’t come on this forum because that assumption was so strong, I didn’t feel comfortable here.
So, officially outing myself as a Leaver. I voted to leave. I still want to leave. I think the EU is heading in a direction which downplays democratic government and prioritises government by technocratic bureaucracies. In the three years since the referendum I have not seen anything to make me think my view was wrong. Instead I have seen my opponents use every legal and political trick in the book to try and avoid acting on what is now a succession of democratic votes.
Yes, a majority of 4% is very close. However, those were the stated rules in advance of the 2016 Referendum – and there have been previous Referendums where the majority was even closer (the Welsh Assembly and Welsh devolution was voted in on a majority of less than 1%).
Pedant is using sophistry because in 2016, the Leave/Remain question was asked on the ballot paper and the vote was counted country-wide. But in 2019 we were voting for parties, in individual constituencies. In my local area I seriously considered voting for the Liberal Democrats despite their Brexit stance because I was trying to figure out who, in my safe Labour seat, had the best possibility of unseating the Labour candidate. Apparently – if I had chosen the Lib Dems – Pedant would be using my vote against anti-Semitism to argue that I’ve now changed my mind on Brexit.
Which is why it’s probably safer to look at the trend, and the trend is that the parties since 2016 who get the biggest number of votes have been those who supported enacting the result of the 2016 referendum. The parties which suggest revoking it or a ‘do-over’ either haven’t got out of minority status or have suffered a vote collapse.
Aaaand on to ‘was it racism’, which requires another post.
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