Beyond just him, does it not empower the hard right in general if this wagon circling happens?
One of the things that’s been really empowering for the hard right (in my opinion) are conditions in Europe, including sex crimes. Because of just who was committing those crimes, they were able to gain a temporary monopoly on “justice” as a platform for that particular issue.
Do people realize how bad that is for Liberals?
They’re building a narrative that the Left and the Liberals are thick with pedophiles, molesters, and sex traffickers, and that when they aren’t committing those crimes themselves, the Left and Liberals are willing to overlook them depending on ethnicity.
Circling the wagons isn’t what the Liberals should do. The way to prevent the hard right from gaining ground in Rotherham was to be better than they were, by actually enforcing the laws, like they are supposed to and, ostensibly, which is in line with their principles.
We’ve seen that at least some of the hard right are willing to fabricate a narrative if they have to, but a non-fabricated narrative has a lot more solidity to it.
So maybe they circle the wagons, and this outsider can’t actually take these guys down. But what if the point isn’t to take them down? What if the point is recruitment? Long-term recruitment, shifting the margins of power, which, when you only need a majority, matters.
Their faction is relatively small right now, but it has room to grow in proportion to how badly their rivals fuck up and/or are disconnected from reality.
