Coastalblog

Sajid Javid, Sajid Javid, you're hard, you're hard, Theresa May, Theresa May, you're hard as well. Yes, belatedly, here's the Coastalblog take on the Shamima Begum farrago, not so much a hot take as a lukewarm one, I grant you, but what the hell. Now, I hate to be so predictably on-brand about this, but, as I'm sure you've already guessed, I tend towards the view that the whole thing's a misconceived pile of easily-avoided fuck-up with a nice cool glass of racism on the side. It was when I noticed normally sane people starting to share Katie Hopkins videos that I realised that there was a disturbance in the force. Friends who I know to be mild-mannered and reasonable were quietly muttering about how she shouldn't be allowed back. What on Earth was going on? The facts of the case seemed pretty straightforward: idiot goes and joins ISIS, has a traumatic time of it, loses two children, figures baby number three will have a better shot back in the UK and...

You may remember, back in the dim and distant mists of time, the rise of David Cameron. As he clambered to the top of the landfill pile which passes for the modern Conservative party, David enjoyed warbling about green issues. he would lead "the greenest government ever" he twatted about in the Arctic Circle parping on about huskies. Whilst this was clearly a focus group inspired shift in the Tory line designed to attract a few Centrists who like to congratulate themselves for doing their recycling (and it worked, to an extent) it did at least signal that the conservative Party had belatedly grasped the idea that environmental issues were a concern for some of the electorate. as time has worn, and the situation has been revealed to be even worse than we thought back then in the heady days of the noughties, this has only grown more true. Which is why any politician with even the vaguest sense of how the electorate feel would have applauded yesterday's climate strike, i...