Zac Goldsmith is the far-left of the Tory Party, purest château bottled shit
– Perry de Havilland
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Samizdata quote of the dayOctober 2nd, 2015 |
 21 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Blimey, you guys actually read my twitter? 😀
For those outside London, Mr Goldsmith is a Conservative MP, son of Sir James Goldsmith, a moderate Eurosceptic and immoderate environmentalist, and now Conservative candidate for the unnecessary position of Mayor of London.
He is richer than Mr Cameron, a bit posher via his mother (FWIW), and also politically greener and probably wetter.
I suppose the issue is: You wait ages for a useless prominent Conservative, and then two come along at once.
‘He is richer than Mr Cameron, a bit posher via his mother (FWIW), and also politically greener and probably wetter’
Pretty much like the current P.M. of Astraya who was installed by a putsch. He’s adored by the ABC/MSM and Fauxfacts an extreme Left newspaper, he’ll probably last two years which is becoming the norm, till he’s putsched by useless poseurs who aren’t being given the recognition they feel they deserve.
Someone has to be the far-left of any party, by definition.
If you lose the likes of him you move the centre of the party right. The ideologues love that, and it sounds to appealing.
And then you end up with the situation that the current UK Labour Party is in, so far to one side that you are un-electable.
So is Zac Goldsmith the best left wing Tory you can have? Or do you slag him because you want a “pure” party and deviations should not be tolerated?
If OZ is anything like the rest of the West, then as an ideologue (i.e. someobe who thinks that ideas matter) I’d say ‘one can only hope’.
No he is pretty much the worst.
I think if someone is a radical environmentalist & Big Statists profoundly hostile to free markets who should really be running as a Green Party candidate… then yes, they should not be tolerated in a party that hilariously calls itself the “Conservatives”.
Alisa,
Ying and Yang is good but politics practised by treating the sheeple like Pavlov’s dog i.e. Ring a bell and come and pick the toppings for your pavlova is detrimental to freedom and prosperity.
Fascism/Marxism although discredited by history are still perpetrated on the sheeple.
What does this mean?
Wetter = more socialist. It’s a term that was very much in vogue in the early 1980s when the Conservative Party was split between the Thatcherites (or dries) and the “Wets”.
Got it. Thanks Patrick.
It just means more centrist or leftwing. Its only used for tory party members and I think the phrase was used first or at least most famously by Thatcher about certain people in her party.
PeterT
Wet certainly does not mean “centrist”, whatever that really means.
The Wets were those without any spine whatsoever and who would cave in and veer Left at the slightest whiff of grapeshot.
They sought to destroy Thatcher, and eventually succeeded, much to the detriment of the UK.
Thatcher’s worst mistake was not making Nick Ridley Chancellor. He was the very epitome of “dry”, and a huge loss when he resigned.
That adds nuance but is consistent with my understanding
Ah yes, Nick Ridley. I read somewhere that when he was interviewed after being elected was asked what he proposed to do now that he was in office. The reply came back ” As little as possible”. Not laziness of course, but perhaps the true stripes of a libertarian.
Wets = Teddy Heath and his mob.
Dries = Mrs Thatcher and her mob.
Amusingly (and rather lamely) this rather obsolete terminology has popped up in Australian conservative politics of late. Even worse, some Australian Labor Party MPs have led calls-to-arms to urge the True Believers to fight the “tories”. Tories? You’re in the wrong country, you wankers.
James Waterton,
Bob Brown was off the planet on a good day and was disappointed when inter-planet aliens didn’t send messages of support.
I can remember “wet” and “dry” being used to describe the factions of the Liberal Party frequently during the endless battles for party leadership between Andrew Peacock and John Howard, and maybe even for the internal struggles of the party when Howard was treasurer and Malcolm Fraser was Prime Minister. There might now be a resurgence of the term after a period of disuse, but use of the term to describe Australian conservative politics is not a new development.
As for “Tory”: well, that’s not right. There aren’t any Tories in Australia, as far as I can tell. It is a mistake to think that conservative parties in Australia bear any significant resemblance to those in the UK, because politics is very different. It drives me mad when British people do it. (This is equally true on the political left. Labour and Labor are not greatly similar, either. You will seldom find a more wreched hive of scum and villainy than the Australian Labor Party (particularly the NSW right), but it would never do anything like elect Jeremy Corbyn as leader. It’s a Labor party, but it’s not a socialist party, and never really has been. It’s sort of more Fine Gael in a lot of ways.
My guess is that he’s a bed Wetter that wakes up in a pool of his misdoings and denies what happens or says its outside his ability to prevent…
> Labour and Labor are not greatly similar, either.
That’s a bit of an overstatement. Both are full of the ‘dregs of the middle-class’. The main difference is that Aussie Labor still has a lot more sensible working class people as members (or former working-class people who didn’t study Sociology at Uni). They’re what keeps the hard-left at bay.
Point is we ripped these terms off the two opposing camps engaged in the ideological warfare that Thatcher ultimately won. Their lazy application here are in line with the current imprecise use of words like ‘liberal’, which people like Malcolm Turnbull partially conflate with the American corruption of the term (he means centrist) when comparing himself with ‘conservatives’ like Abbott. Fact is that Fraser was the last great Liberal wet. Since his demise, the Liberal Party has been predominantly dry, using the British definition of the term.
As for the use of “Tory” to refer to conservatives in Australian politics, it seems a Twitter thing. Off the top of my head, former Labor Cabinet Ministers Anthony Albanese and Craig Emerson (who was a frenetic Twitter user even when a senior Cabinet member) used to brag about “fighting Tories” in Tweets. Young Labor types love talking about hated Tories.
Like I said, wankers.
I’m not entirely sure this is true. Chifley’s ‘light on the hill’ seems like something approaching a socialist vision to me. Menzies named the successor party to the UAP the Liberal Party because, in comparison with the ALP, it *was* actually quite liberal (using the proper definition of word). Consider that the Labor Party that lost the 1949 election wanted to nationalise the banking sector and had maintained wartime-era rationing years after the war ended. Menzies got rid of all that.
And an Australian Corbyn isn’t *that* unthinkable. If centrist Malcolm Turnbull proves a more successful PM than he did opposition leader, this will likely push the ALP leftwards in the hope they can poach back some of the Green votes they’ve been bleeding over the last few electoral cycles. The upside of such a scenario is that the NSW Right you rightly loathe will be decimated, along with the influence of its right-wing union backers (the Shoppies, TWU, AWU etc). The downside is that the number of delegates the leftist unions (AMWU, CFMEU etc) can bring to the National Conference will expand at the Right’s expense, and so will their proxies in caucus. Anyway, who cares, the party will be circling the bowl if it gets to that point, anyway.
Incidentally, the Australian Greens boasts a Senator, Lee Rhiannon, whose parents were committed communists in a party aligned with the USSR that peeled off from the main CPA – the splittists weren’t for turning, in spite of the invasion of Czechoslovakia etc – and when Lee came of age, she joined the hardcore communist group. She was associated with the party right up until the demise of the USSR. She pretty much immediately joined the Greens after that. If the ALP drift far enough to the left, she might jump ships and offer her services as captain!