Psychoactive Substances: Rolling UK Politics in The Neo-Con Era

when i'm visiting my hometown i'll quite often hear a conflation of 'junkies' // people who get everything handed to them on a plate while the rest of us get nothing // people who will stab you and mug you with no remorse, with little heed to the various contradictions that appear there. but i'm unconvinced that this is part of the same homogeneous mass that is the general vilification of 'scroungers' (indeed many of the people making this conflation are on benefits themselves). we're a sophisticated and nuanced society, we can hate a variety of homogeneous groups of people for a variety of fake reasons.

xxp I genuinely had no idea that 'chavs beat me up when I was a kid' was a common reason for people supporting benefit cuts. Does David Cameron have Korn to thank for his slim majority?

― Blandford Forum, Wednesday, July 15, 2015 12:06 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm still laughing at this two days later, but anyway, continue...

safe space

Late as ever, I think I'm just about coming round to see part of the objection to that post - yes I wd agree that most of the anti-benefits rhetoric, the stuff pumped out from above, and the attitudes pumped around down here by people taken along by it ... the majority of that rhetoric is about 'strivers vs skivers', hard work vs 'getting it handed to you', rather than about terrible feral yobs

Also what nv says:

also, there are quite a different set of assumptions and experiences made about "benefits scroungers" by people from different social classes and regions.

This rings true to me, something like:

'People who have never met anyone on benefits but reckon they're worthless and need a kick, or even worse, a helping hand such as making them pick litter'
'People who have some sort of shared life with people on benefits, see them as opponents, or as someone to distance yourself from at all moral costs'
'People who are themselves very poor and may be in receipt of a benefit who target other people in receipt of other benefits'

So apparently new libelous demagogue leader made an arse of himself on c4 news due to his being a god bothering dick who doesn't like gays or abortion

Not to mention Cameron not telling Parliament about 'embedded' British combatants in Syria, the action that same Parliament voted against.

WTF? This is some Bush-level shit.

yup, fairly egregious, yet somehow feels like water off a ducks' back. tories in power for the next decade, probably more, is a real horrendous thing to face. it's just going to be one thing after another after another

it doesn't shock because of how easy it is to imagine a Blair government doing same

Naaah, Tony Blair would probably tell people he was going to shit all over due process, and smile hopefully while doing it.

Backing the UK off Syria was probably the best thing Ed Miliband did in opposition and I hope when Parliament convenes on Monday to interrupt Cameron's hols discuss the matter, EM gets a chance to at least yell at the SOB.

This barely registers as egregious in the context of the last twenty years of British military policy. The vote in 2013 was over whether to conduct airstrikes against the Assad government in light of the alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians. This is not what was done, even if you don't buy the argument that lending three pilots to Canada doesn't constitute direct military intervention.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-33578174

really wondering what Murdoch's play is here

So, the FSA was too soft on bankers and too light-touch, and after the crash was replaced with the FCA. Whose chief exec has just been fired by Osborne for being too tough on bankers and "too much of a consumer champion". Osborne now wants a more ... light-touch approach.
https://next.ft.com/61f867fa-2c76-11e5-8613-e7aedbb7bdb7

I despair

this is brutal. and unsustainable. and utterly depressing.

Are you talking about the 40% budget cuts or Labour deciding it's okay to feed everyone earning under £18k into a car crusher if that's what the public want?

those fucks are all in this together

Can't believe I'm cheering on the Lords now. Today alone they've blocked both the right-to-buy from housing associations and take one of EVEL. Guess that's what a huge majority comprised of 200 pissed-off Labour lords, 100 furiously incandescent LibDems and 140 cross-benchers with no love for the current government gets you.

xp - both, Matt

bitter nat digression here but I wonder how no voters are managing to contort their minds into thinking they did the right thing as we face a decade (plus?) of tory rule, an ineffectual/pointless labour opposition, and the braying schadenfreude of middle england as the social costs of punitive austerity become more and more vivid.

I think they contort it by looking at Greece (and especially the Germany-Greece dynamic) and extrapolating from that what Osborne would do to Scotland. The currency issue has become even starker since the referendum because of that whole show, I think.

ah, fair enough, I suppose. need a more robust plan, currency union a certain dud.

I keep hearing people praising Osbourne's very clever act of stealing Labour's clothes, lol I am sure that took a lot of effort.

The "guilty No voters" rhetoric feels very uncomfortable to me. A No vote wasn't an vote for a Tory Gov't, it was a vote for a united country. There are still children in poverty south of the border and I still don't feel it's a morally strong position to look after your own and leave them to it, even if we have a horrible Government only because of pockets of England. I mean, this argument has been done to death in various threads so I don't see how rehashing it is going to do any good, but it's a done deal and I don't think bitterness will accomplish anything - tbh I think it almost undoes a lot of the good work that independence supporters have managed since the referendum.

imo the polity of the rUK will forever be tory, or at best you'll get blairite labour every few decades if youre extremely lucky. imo this was foreseeable last september, and is a certainty for the next several decades, ie the meaningful tranche of most scottish adults' lives, especially my glaswegian brethren who don't live long anyway.

i no longer live in scotland, and am not politically involved, so im quite happy to be bitter and know that it has no consequence. it is obviously not politic for pro-independence activists and groups to be divisively derisive of the majority of scottish voters.

the No vote sure as hell wasn't a vote against an eternity of right wing governance

that was a big part of what it was, especially amongst the 10% or so that swung in the closing month.

It wasn't necessarily a vote *for* either. I ended up spoiling my ballot paper because I couldn't reconcile my complicity in terrible nationwide governance with my guilt over the sections of society that would benefit from the continued presence of Scotland's (theoretically) traditional gravitational pull to the left, i.e couldn't vote with my head and my heart at once

maybe it's easier to despise the UK and everything it represents from England

I would say so, pretty sure living in Scotland during the referendum would have driven me into the Unionist camp.

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/4AFC/production/_84369191_84369186.jpg

This photo is amazing, it manages to capture each candidate so perfectly - incredulity from Cooper, fence-sitting "hmmm, I'm going to look like I think you have a point there" from Burnham, full on vicious contempt from Kendall.

Corbyn 17% ahead on first preference votes

still don't believe Corbyn will win this. if he does, the carnage is gonna be exquisite.

whatever happens, a whole swathe of Labour MPs are going to have on record their complete contempt for the values and aspirations of a sizeable cohort of their own party's members

wd dearly love this to be Ragnarok but I'm sure cowardice and temporizing will prevail

Corbyn already pointing out that maybe what Labour is waiting for is the Chilcot inquiry result.

Corbyn's plan that the leader will have to be confirmed every 12 months gives him a good exit strategy. Could work relatively well: year or two of outright attack while they prep an election-winner for 2020.

I think that's almost exactly what the idea is - he didn't see himself as a potential winner but now he is I find it very doubtful he sees himself as a potential Prime Minister. But this has revealed a massive disconnect between the PLP and the rest of the party, if only to confirm they aren't prepared to sacrifice every principle for the sake of getting into power. A leadership election two or three years down the line would have a markedly different tenor, I think, although there would obviously be at least one Blairite true believer involved, there'd be a wider selection of actual ideas involved.

FWIW I don't think anyone on the ballot looks particularly electable and given the choice between failing with some principles and failing without any, I'd go for the latter every time. The wider public will smell bullshit with the latter approach as well, Labour could adopt every single Tory policy and still not win.

Whichever cockfarmer it was who was whining last week, "we cannot just allow our party, a credible party of government, to be hijacked in this summer of madness" showed a breathtaking lack of self-awareness. a) I think two successive election defeats against a govt as transparently unloved as this one rather proves that you are not a credible party of government, and b) if you move to unseat a popular choice you don't agree with then you are the people doing the hijacking.

All this stuff is usually couched in some bollocks about "meeting the electorate where they are, not where we want them to be", which is nonsense really given that the Tories never really bother with this.

it would be refreshing to have someone treat being the leader of opposition as an important end in itself, rather than as a platform from which to send smoke signals to the electorate

I wonder when one of the losers is gonna crack and start whinging about entryism distorting the election, either from the left or the right

the state of labour at the moment is actually embarrassing. they should have appointed a leader after the general election. this public floundering is ludicrous. they owe it to people to mount some kind of credible opposition, not give the tories a free pass to do whatever until labour are done self-flagellating.

also the whole process is like transparency with a shit in it

hard to mount a credible opposition if your MPs don't really oppose anything the government wants to do

This is the thing, if the public actually wants an eviscerated welfare state, then we should have a Tory government. The idea that Labour might have a duty or responsibility to the millions of people who DON'T want that doesn't seem to resonate with them at all.

they seem to think that the fact a slim majority voted for a different party and their policies means that they must now become that party. like some of them, i don't know what they are because they aren't politicians. there is no belief system left.

http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2015/07/22/tony-blair-is-to-blame-for-the-rise-of-jeremy-corbyn

This is broadly on-the-money. The confusion he highlights re: Andy Burnham was also present in Ed Miliband in a big way, despite the apparently determination of Blairites to view him as a traditional left candidate.

Blair on hand to lend his trademark guidance:

http://i.imgur.com/h7buH9u.jpg

It's also worth pointing out that Blair won three elections in pretty much the most benign economic, political and competitive conditions, and not once did he go into an election pledging to cut public spending.

He was also up against a succession of useless Tory leaders.

... as you say, benign political conditions.