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Roland Smith

@rolandmcs.bsky.social

24K followers 350 following 5.9K posts

Tracking the decay of the Right and patrolling the culture war's boundaries. Former Fellow of the Adam Smith Institute. Now centrist. Telegraph watcher. https://open.substack.com/pub/rolandmcs buymeacoffee.com/rolandsmith

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · Nov 10

Long thread on how Brexitism started and evolved over 75 years, drawing from Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon's 'Continental Drift'.

Global Britain, Free Trade, Cakeism, Federalism, anti-federalism, EEA, Winston Churchill, Empire, 52-48 referendums, Enoch Powell, 1975, Thatcher.... It's all here. /1

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1m

Yeah, it's hugely different between a 60 year-old and an over-80.

Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 17m

May could easily be added, and eventually Johnson too (due to the 'Boriswave').

Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 34m

I wonder if there'll come a point when someone on the Hard Right tells us that 'Priti Patel can only be properly integrated when she changes her name to a more Anglo-Saxon one like Petra Paterson... a bit like the Jews did in the good old days.'

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 38m

It looks like a half-attempt to say that not all of those 14 years were the Tories' fault.

Yep, it's just another example of the modern Right's need to blame someone else.

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1h

And to state the grimly obvious, this is all going to be less of a problem with each passing year...

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1h

Is it a big problem? Where the over-80s are concerned, in my experience they are not as caught up in the online world as other generations, so that does have a counter-balancing effect to the risks I outline above.

In short, they haven't used it for most of their lives so it's a bit alien.

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1h

But yes, the 'trusting what you read' element could lead some down radicalised rabbit holes.

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1h

Scamming old people works using both macro & micro frames.

Their lack of surety about today's tech world makes them vulnerable. And then 'Microsoft', 'Lloyds Bank' or 'BT' contacts them, and the person instantly believes these trusted names.

I've seen it first-hand.

observer.co.uk/news/columni...

Teenagers’ phone use? It’s the grandparents we should be ...

Maybe our fears about the ill effects of social media, screen time and doomscrolling are wasted on the young

observer.co.uk

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1h

I agree there is concern about over-70s' phone usage. At macro level, the over-80s in particular often don't fully understand/accept today's world, so mistrust it ('not like the good old days'). And yet at a micro level, they can be far too trusting of what they read.

observer.co.uk/news/columni...

Teenagers’ phone use? It’s the grandparents we should be ...

Maybe our fears about the ill effects of social media, screen time and doomscrolling are wasted on the young

observer.co.uk

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 2h

"They'll be too busy stoking civil war inside America. This is, after all, an America First administration."

(What Vance should have added.)

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 3h

JD Vance: "The idea that we're gonna have troops on the ground in Gaza and Israel -- that is not our intention, that is not our plan."

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 2h

“If Robert Jenrick had seen you or Kemi Badenoch in that area, he would have just assumed you were poorly integrated.”

Kevin Schofield @kevinschofied.bsky.social · 3h

LBC Presenter Points Out To Priti Patel The 1 Obvious Flaw In Robert Jenrick's 'White Face' Claim

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/lbc-pr...

LBC Presenter Points Out To Priti Patel The 1 Obvious Flaw In Robert Jenrick's 'White Face' Claim

The shadow justice secretary sparked a backlash over his remarks.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

I mean, it's actually quite a good speech. Just ignore the entire backdrop back in America.

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

Jared Kushner now saying how lucky we all are to have rules and morals and laws.

Yes, an American close to Trump said this.

Mmm, righto.

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

Lots of cheering in Tel Aviv at Trump's name. Chants of 'Thank you Trump'.

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Reposted by Roland Smith

Darren Guy @darrenguy.bsky.social · 1d

3 days old but popped up on my feed today

www.spectator.co.uk/article/its-...

Brexiters calling for uk steel industry to be killed off.

You just cannot make this up

Britain's steel industry must die

It already faced tariffs in the United States, and it has been struggling to cope with some of the highest industrial energy prices in the world. Now what remains of the British steel industry faces w...

www.spectator.co.uk

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

Lots of jeering in Tel Aviv at Netanyahu's name.

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

There's a thought...

Bloomberg News @bloomberg.com · 1d

Margaret Thatcher led the way in turning Anglo-Saxon conservatism into a revolutionary political doctrine that may have destroyed conservativism itself (via Bloomberg Opinion)

Margaret Thatcher Is the Mother of Conservatism’s Crisis

Three of Margaret Thatcher’s dresses encased in glass boxes and a stall that invited attendees at last week’s Conservative Party Conference to “ask the Iron Lady” to opine on contemporary politics. A “Thatcher fest” in her hometown of Grantham that features the “smash hit” play Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho. A grand dinner at London’s Guildhall hosted by, among others, Mark Thatcher and Joan Collins: “In a world craving true leadership, relive the legacy of the Iron Lady…” The British are trul

bloom.bg

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Reposted by Roland Smith

Peter Walker @peterwalker99.bsky.social · 1d

I realise I slightly go on about this, but I'm not sure enough attention is paid to the fact that a fair proportion of comment articles in the modern Daily Telegraph are utterly unmoored from any sense of even tenuous reality.

Daniel Hannan

Britain has given so much to civilisation. Now the barbarians are inside

The poisonous ideas of Vladimir Lenin have infected our progressive elite

Contemplate those elderly buffoons in blue berets who hand out EU flags at the Last Night of the Proms. Do you suppose they have any real interest in rejoining the EU? Do they strike you as having looked into the budgetary, migratory and commercial implications? Of course not. They just loathe the people they imagine having voted Leave.

Listen to Sir Lenny Henry, who thinks that, as well as handing over squillions to the West Indies and Africa, we should pay black people in this country. So much for the notion of equality before the law.

I could go on. The museums rushing to give away legally purchased collections to people who have never owned them, and who will very probably sell them on to private collectors. The diplomats longing to surrender British territories in defiance of the wishes of their peoples. The universities eviscerating the Western canon in the name of decolonising the curriculum.

“Colonialism-and-slavery” is proffered as a binomial phrase, like “law-and-order” or “gin-and-tonic”. Few kids in our schools are given the slightest notion that the first, at least in Africa, was driven by the desire to extirpate the second. Even fewer are taught that African kings fought to defend the institution.

The Benin Bronzes, which our cultural leaders are so keen to give away, were seized to defray the costs of an 1897 expedition against a state that buried slaves alive. The British Museum, which owns most of them, dares not mention it. Instead it says the carvings were acquired during the “expansion of colonial power”

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

Comin' over 'ere, taking all our pension benefits...

Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

I like the cut of your jib

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

Noooooo.

bsky.app/profile/rola...

Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

Argh. [Runs screaming into the night]

bsky.app/profile/rola...

Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · Feb 1

To clarify my point: SM *and* CU should not be pitched as an objective. It's dishonest. The objective here is Rejoin. Say so honestly.

The SM *and* CU scenario *can* have a walk-on part as a stepping stone to a baldly-stated goal of Rejoining, but that's all.

[It seems the Libdems are ignoring me]

Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

So they are....

Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

Yes, and how many are: (a) in work; (b) working in, for example, nursing?

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

Standard 'front page' fare for the Telegraph these days.

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Roland Smith @rolandmcs.bsky.social · 1d

Can we widen this to 'if you permanently emigrate anywhere', perhaps including pensioners who get citizenship of Spain, Portugal, wherever?

A kind of 'one in/one out' policy.

Ros Taylor @rostaylor.bsky.social · 1d

I’m afraid that if you emigrate to Dubai for the tax breaks and 24-hour security, you really should give up your citizenship here for someone who wants it.

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