No need to rely on the fatuous falsehoods being flung out by Boris Johnson. In Camborne-Redruth Conservative George Eustice is beginning to adopt an altogether more Old Testament approach to campaigning. He’s now begun viewing this election through Manichean spectacles of good versus evil, good being Boris and brexit and evil being Momentum, Corbyn and his ‘marxist’ crew.
It seems George has become quite an expert on marxism. He can spot a mode of production from miles away while means of production, the extraction of surplus value and class consciousness are meat and drink to him. One trusts his knowledge of marxism extends further than his knowledge of fishing and the potential impact of brexit on it. But then, when he was grilled on that one, he was only the fishing minister in a Tory Government, so what can we expect?
It’s good to see that George has recovered from the slight hiccup caused by his encounter with an actual voter while out canvassing in West Tolgus. Since then he’s been getting a ‘very positive response’ from voters, some of whose grandparents may even have voted for the Radical MP Charles Conybeare in 1885. Come back Charles, where are you when you’re needed?
George is in unstated alliance with the Lib Dems’ Flossie MacDonald, with both manically pushing the Great Brexit Distraction for all it’s worth. Makes one quite nostalgic for the good old days of the coalition government. Flossie persists in the thankless task of trying to persuade voters that a vote for her isn’t identical to gifting the seat to George. In return George is nice to all those ‘Lib Dem stalwarts’ who are all ‘polite and friendly in the best Cornish tradition’. Not like those evil Corbyn supporters schooled by Momentum to spread havoc and confusion in secret training camps on Carn Brea.
Of course, ‘best Cornish tradition’ here means knowing their place and regularly returning people like George to Parliament. Strangely, for someone who stresses his local connections going back thousands of generations to the time the first living Cornish thing crawled out of the slime and demanded a pasty, he seems blissfully unaware that in Cornwall ‘polite and friendly’ on the doorstep translates into ‘two-faced and duplicitous’ in the polling booth. We can only hope.
Labour
Meanwhile, Paul Farmer’s campaign for Labour is being fuelled by ‘people-powered effort’. None of that fossil-fuel power for Paul who’s stressing his green credentials even as his leader backs off from the urgent action necessary to combat climate chaos under pressure from the GMB. Labour certainly exudes confidence but how far it spills out into the mean streets of Camborne and Redruth is quite another matter.
We also have Karen La Borde for the Greens, who’s asking us to vote with our hearts. And face up to the consequences for the future of our actions in the present. Good luck with that one, Karen. And then there’s Paul Holmes for the Liberals, who’s yet been spotted on the hustings.
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Kernowpolitico: notes from the periphery 