Today’s Churchill – and Today’s Chamberlain

05/09/2019

If Tommy Robinson symbolizes a kind of politics of which Jacob Rees-Mogg disapproves, Rees-Mogg himself symbolizes exactly what Britain no longer needs: government by Oxbridge snobs who give belligerent Muslims the kid-glove treatment while showing nothing but contempt for their own working-class countrymen. Tommy Robinson is changing that - or, at least, trying to. Like President Trump in America, he is taking on the establishments of both of his country's major parties in the name of the people - and, like Trump, he is being vilified for it by a legacy media that is aligned with the political elite and that has convinced millions of low-information citizens that he is a bigot, a fascist, a Nazi.

Briefly put: Rees-Mogg postures as a champion of British values, but, in his tepid, temperate way, not only refuses to take the bold action required to defend those values but frames Tommy Robinson, who has risked his life to defend them, as their enemy. When he looks in the mirror, Rees-Mogg may think he sees an heir to Churchill, that great Tory PM of the last century; when he looks at Tommy Robinson, he plainly sees an upstart, a guttersnipe, a lower-class council-flats type who has no proper place in the councils of state or, for that matter, in any of the exalted locales where Rees-Mogg lives his life. In fact, though he may not look or sound the part, Tommy Robinson is the closest thing that today's Britain has to Winston Churchill. And Rees-Mogg, who looks down his nose at Tommy? He's Neville Chamberlain. At best.