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Malankazooie, on 26 July 2022 - 09:00 PM, said:
Caught some clips of the debate from evening past between Truss and Sunak. Obviously I don't have a dog in the fight and know nothing about these folks, but Truss has one of them British accents/dialects that I find annoying. Not sure what region of origin it is, but it's one of the annoying ones. Only caught bits but my take away is China is scary, and the rest of the world better get serious about competing, and the UK is a leader in providing support to Ukraine.
Oh snap, the latest debate cancelled because the host fainted? Where's Chuck Todd when you need him?
Oh snap, the latest debate cancelled because the host fainted? Where's Chuck Todd when you need him?
Think that's just a Leeds accent? His accent annoys me---it manages to simultaneously sound posh (which I don't necessarily mind, if it also sounds euphonious) and sonically ugly, with an added lisp (IDK if that's some sort of speech impediment?...). Or maybe this is more precise: 'Rishi Sunak is that posh boy at uni who had a posh accent but affected glottal stops and said he was from south London (Surrey) and his dad was a builder (CFO at Barratt homes).'
https://twitter.com/...877692716879872
'One of the most bewildering things I've come across as an adult immigrant to the UK[...] is how people talk about class. British people from well-off backgrounds will drop, quite unprompted, into conversation that they went to private school but that it was a "cheap" one. [...]
It took me a while living in this country to figure out what was going on. It wasn't class oversharing, but class discounting – a way for people to establish that their status[...] was earned and not bequeathed. [...] inherited family wealth is fast becoming[...] the most important determinant of how well-off a person will be later in life. Britain is also a place where the alumni of a small number of expensive schools and exclusive universities hold a wildly disproportionate share of the nation's power, wealth and top jobs.
[...] The study identified a "grandparent effect", by which people from privileged backgrounds over-emphasised the working-class credentials of extended family members, even though they have little impact on an individual's life chances.
A particularly outrageous example of this is unfolding in the absurd class cosplay of Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. Sunak, in an enormous reach, has to hark all the way back to his immigrant grandmother to ground himself in a rags to riches story. He likens the pharmacy his mother owned to the greengrocer's owned by Margaret Thatcher's father (the difference between groceries and pharmaceuticals is material in terms of class, but he has to work with what he has). [...]
[Truss's] journey was only possible, she claims, "through aspiration, ambition and enterprise". Nothing to do with the fact that she grew up in an expensive suburb of Leeds, in a comfortable family, with a father who was a professor of mathematics, and attended a school that at its worst was labelled "satisfactory" [...]
The most delusional part of this performance is the idea that class says something so definitive about a person's values or politics that it, alone, would make them suitable to lead. As the sociologist Stuart Hall wrote: "There's no permanent, fixed class consciousness. You can't work out immediately what people think and what politics they have simply by looking at their socio-economic position." Whatever Sunak and Truss's class, Sunak does not want to give immigrants the right to come to this country to have a shot at our great meritocracy, Truss believes that British workers are among the "worst idlers in the world", and both enthusiastically supported a lying prime minister. That is all the personal history that counts.'
What the absurd class cosplay of Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss tells us about Britain | Nesrine Malik
'The Battle to Become Britain's Next Prime Minister Is Suddenly All About Fashion
CLASS WAR
Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries lashed out against the expensive suit and shoes of prime ministerial hopeful Rishi Sunak. Her mistake was to bring Liz Truss' earrings into it.
On Twitter, Dorries taunted, "Rishi visits Teeside in Prada shoes worth £450 and sported £3,500 bespoke suit as he prepared for crunch leadership vote," a transparent attempt to knock Sunak's campaign platform, which is based heavily on a descendant-of-immigrants, started-from-the-bottom-now-we're-here success story.
In contrast, Liz Truss, Dorries' chosen candidate, "will be traveling the country wearing her earrings which cost circa £4.50 from Claire Accessories," Dorries said. (In fact, both candidates have been derided for inventing hard-luck personal narratives although they both come from comfortable backgrounds.)
"FFS Nadine! Muted," tweeted Guildford Conservative MP [...]
[...] hyper-awareness and hypercriticism of class background and class signifiers as a means of determining a candidate's worth are integral to the British electoral process.
[...] Dorries' luxury clothes-knocking is a perfect example: Why would a man of the people wear Prada?
Ironically, in 2007, Dorries told The Guardian that "I will wear cheaper clothes but there are things I will not compromise on, like my £6,000 diamond earrings."
In 2017, Dorries told another outlet she favors purses from high-end brand Mulberry and that she buys "clothes at the start of each season, rather than monthly, so I do two big hits a year where I probably spend over £1,000."'
The Battle to Become Britain's Next Prime Minister Is Suddenly All About Fashion
