Second quote of the day 26th July 2019

Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the last seventy hours you probably cannot have missed that most of the British left in politics and the media alike have been throwing the most monumental collective hissy fit about the new PM and cabinet (see first quote above.)

I have not seen anything like it since the day after the re-election of George W Bush, when one of the centre-left broadsheets - think it might have been the Guardian but the Independent's coverage was equally negative - published a pull out specifically for people to vent about how awful they thought the US Presidential election result was.

It had a black front sheet with just the words "Oh God" in small letters and inside and on the back page was full of quotes people ranting about how terrible it was that Bush had been re-elected.

If you think I'm exaggerating by suggesting that much of the left has gone equally bananas about the new government, take a look at this rant about the new cabinet in the Guardian by Hannah Jane Parkinson. She rather gives the game away at one point by admitting that she is still sore about having been nominated for a Press award which she didn't get and seeing Sarah Vine win an award the same evening.

A feminist who was true to her own principles would regard Sarah Vine primarily as a journalist and regard it as disgracefully sexist to regard a professional woman mainly through the prism of who she is married to, but of course the left never apply to themselves the principles they expect everyone else to live by so Ms Parkinson writes about Sarah as if the most significant thing about her is that she's the wife of Michael Gove.

Not to be out-done, the "Independent" has published a list of jokes about the new government.

Anybody who thought more than one or two of them were funny needs professional help.

Anyone who thinks that list was worth being published by a website which was once a serious newspaper has an interesting set of priorities.

And then there is the display of outrage over the ethnic composition of the new holders of the four great offices of state.

In case you have not noticed, we have our first Muslim chancellor, our first female Asian home secretary, and the first ever government in which all four of the great offices of state are held by people who had at least one parent or grandparent who was an immigrant.

(Boris's maternal grandfather was a refugee from Turkey, the parents of Sajid Javid and Priti Patel were immigrants, and Dominic Raab's father was a Jew who fled Czechoslovakia in 1938 at the age of six to escape the Nazis.)

Now I would have thought that if a government is sufficiently open to all the talent that not just one, not just two, but ALL FOUR of the most powerful positions in it are held by the children or grandchildren of immigrants,  it is reasonable to deduce that such a government is not hopelessly hostile to people with an immigrant background getting on in society.

Try telling that to the left. One of their daftest attack lines over the past few days has been to accuse the ethnic minority members of the Johnson cabinet of being at best tokens and at worst traitors.

It's come from a range of sources but one of the more printable expressions of the idea came from Corbyn's outrider Ash "I'm literally a communist, you idiot" Sarkar, who tweeted

"The ascendance of Priti Patel and Sajid Javid to positions of power is only a sign of progress if you see tokenism (in which people of colour must assimilate to oppressive ideologies in return for representation) itself as progressive.

I don't"

In the circular argument of the left, if a right of centre party does not have people of colour and from other minorities and low-status groups in visible positions of authority that proves it is racist/sexist/whatever, if it does then those individuals must be tokens or traitors.

My reply to this nonsense is the quote above from American economist Thomas Sowell:

"I cannot understand those who say that minorities should be represented everywhere and yet are upset when there are blacks represented in the Conservative movement."