Go on then, who do you reckon will win? The Labour Leadership contest, that is...

britain-hater: http://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/oct/08/jeremy-corbyn-rejects-formal-privy-council-induction-by-queen

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n19/ross-mckibbin/the-anti-candidate

Anyone paste this somewhere, don't have a subscription

get it while it's hot

http://pastebin.com/x0iGR6A3

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2015/10/meet-momentum-next-step-transformation-our-politics

what do ppl think of this? Not sure I like what its called.

tx ledge.

xp i think their website is unusable

(new statesman, not momentum)

On my browser, the text on their site is like 2 foot tall

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/08/hate-tories-conservatives-dominance-pointless-protest

All the hits in one neat little package.

"but the problem for Labour was that the story chimed with an ongoing impression of leftie piety and topsy-turvy priorities, and again highlighted the vacuum where clarity, direction and speaking to the country ought to go."

Can't get near the coffee machine at work for people talking about the Privy Council, tbh.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/09/michael-gove-reformer-liberals-prison-reform

I can hear all the instant objections. It’s lipstick on a pig. It’s words not actions. There are no resources. No sentencing strategy either. Prison staff aren’t trained or numerous enough. Probation has been destroyed. Social work has been starved. Welfare support is a joke when cuts have gone deep and will go deeper. Gove is playing soft cop to Theresa May’s hard cop.

Bits of all that are true (though there’s not much cooperation with May). And there is no disputing that the kind of approach that Gove outlined this week remains a world away from current realities. But it would simply be dishonest to pretend that this isn’t a change all the same. To state so boldly that prisons have failed makes this the most reformist speech by a senior Tory minister – and possibly by any minister – on penal policy for decades.

Remember that bit on Corbyn's speech about not settling for what you've been given?

I hope The Guardian lose even more of its readership. Really useless.

lol @ Kettle completely demolishing Gove, then being like, "but hey, it's still, like, reformist and stuff, yeah? And thus good and progressive, yeah? Guys? Er... guys?"

guardian definitely worse under new stewardship

It’s lipstick on a pig.

Always good to make people think of a pig's mouth when discussing the Tories.

"getting worse" seems to work ok for the mail's circulation but not the poor old graun's

is there new stewardship? Missed this- not Rubsrigshder no more?

He's been gone for months, there was quite a big deal made of the succession hustings. I hadn't noticed it being significantly worse but had sort of assumed this sort of group NuLab pantswetting would have happened under the previous regime as well.

John Harris is not noticeably more awful than before but that's a very low bar in the first place. There's so little added to the debate that there is literally no reason for this most recent article existing.

paper that supported the Tories in the 2010 election still supports the Tories, surprise

someone should set up a tumblr of all the Moderate Liberal journalists gradually realising that they are, in fact, complete tories

It's the sheer credulity of it, pretending this is about electoral strategy when all Cameron's speech really showed was "guy who worked in PR is good at PR", and the people whose jobs it is to subject that to scrutiny just can't be bothered to do so.

I think Corbyn's performance has actually been pretty weak in his first few weeks but plenty of party leaders start off uncertainly. I have made a point of never praising Owen Jones for anything but he has actually been pretty good at constructively highlighting ways in which Corbyn could win popular appeal for his policies, whereas the general received wisdom has been "Corbyn has no popular appeal, QED". Suzanne Moore has been particularly incoherent here.

Suzanne Moore doesn't know whether to shit or go blind (as my mother would say).

The current Guardian editor wrote the play I Am Rachel Corrie so I thought she'd be a bit less.... Blairy?

I also think that a lot of it is down to fear of an empty contacts book - most political journalists have ignored the Labour left for so long that they don't know who is and isn't worth talking to. It's also because pretty much all of them were predicting a Miliband victory until 10pm on election night and no one wants to look like a chump twice in a row.

Is it a bit boring to say "There's five years till the next election, Corbyn has at least a year before he has to look like a serious contender"

Also does no-one remember 'hug a hoodie', the Big Society and Cameron's previous half-assed attempts at humanising the Tories?

First sign of choppy waters and it'll be over the port side with all this caring sharing Conservatives bollocks.

Yeah, at the moment, they are all "We can say what we like, we can do what we like, and THEY DON'T HAVE TO BE THE SAME THING!!!"

I have made a point of never praising Owen Jones for anything but he has actually been pretty good at constructively highlighting ways in which Corbyn could win popular appeal for his policies...
― Matt DC, vendredi 9 octobre 2015 16:53 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fully otm. I expect OJ was offered a packet for his services but he serves a more useful function advising from the 'sidelines' like that (fully think he still has a direct line to CMJ, they're bffs since a long time) socialising the strategies/ideas

Dude seriously how did you switch your ILX to French I want to do that.

Suzanne Moore has been particularly incoherent here.

she's all over my facebook moaning about how all of the corbynites hate her because she is msm. i had time for her before all this but she has become v tedious and self-pitying.

also the people who predict with absolute certainty that labour will lose the 2020 election... it's five years from now. literally anything could happen. surely only a fool would be so convinced their crystal ball was that accurate.

she's all over my facebook moaning about how all of the corbynites hate her because she is msm.

She's what?

pretty sure Suzanne Moore has been alienating all sorts of left liberals for a good long time now

merdestream media xp

I'm right naive, me.

https://twitter.com/lukeakehurst/status/652497030489751553 the collective brain hemorrhage of labour 'centrists' remains a remarkable sight to behold

Also does no-one remember 'hug a hoodie', the Big Society and Cameron's previous half-assed attempts at humanising the Tories?

https://medium.com/@kindofwater/david-cameron-s-speech-journalists-do-your-jobs-6c805877fa77 this article is good on this point imo

The piece she wrote bemoaning Corbyn's lack of modernity while simultaneously admonishing him for over-reliance on social media made no sense at all.

The journalists are doing their job though, the job of getting the Conservative Party re-elected <--------- satire (xp)

today's LOL: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/oct/08/social-media-disconnecting-labour-from-wider-public-says-tristram-hunt?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

We offended the British people’s sense of fairness by appearing to oppose the benefits cap – but we didn’t have any new ideas.

I'm getting old now so maybe its my memory but I don't remember an opposition to this in the first place?

At least he has a sense of what it is to be a Britisher when using this bogus notion of a sense of fairness to brutalise the poor and disabled.

Can't Tristam fuck off and get back to boring ppl to death about Marx and Engels?

the more these people bang on about the importance of immigration to the electorate the more i wonder who they're trying to convince

None of these things would matter at all, even spending plans wouldn't matter, if Labour was trusted to run the economy competently.

i think that's broadly true and i have about a gross of "buts" to append to it

Interesting interview w/Corbyn and McDonnell pre-election: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/jeremy-corbyn-john-mcdonnell-interview-election-2015-labour-party-674

For most Labour critics 'economic competence' seems a crude but convenient mask for their real objections - their perception of how the money is raised and spent (otherwise how has Osborne been able to borrow/spend far more since with so little scrutiny?) ie higher taxes (anti-business!) and bigger welfare (soft touch on the rabble!). It's hard to see what else it amounts to.

Yeah but "economic competence" isn't really about govt borrowing or spending in the eyes of most voters, whatever the Tories or the press would like you to think. I reckon most voters are sort of vaguely aware that the deficit is a bad thing, or that public debt is high, but they don't FEEL it in a way that they feel the fear of losing their jobs or their pensions or the value of their house collapsing.

And the Tories have been lucky enough to get away with what job losses there have been because they've been largely in sectors or locations that typically don't vote Tory. It's not Cameron sits awake at night contemplating all those lost votes in Redcar.

voters have been hit over the head by every news outlet in the land for decades that public debt is a mortal sin; they may not ~feel~ it but if someone pops up saying they'll don't mind increasing it strategically i.e. in counter-cyclical keysnian fashion it's like "who is this maniac"

the trade deficit is indeed bad and directly responsible for a lot of people being without jobs yet weirdly it isn't obsessed about by the press the way it once routinely was hmm wonder why that is