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

he speaks like he does not give enough of a shit. i think that could be his undoing. leader with his heart where it needs to be, but oddly, almost deliberately, refusing to really sound like it.

Knives already starting to come out ..

Labour MPs Margaret Hodge and Ann Coffey have sent a letter to John Cryer, chair of the parliamentary Labour party, submitting the motion.

^^ That's a motion of no confidence in Corbyn BTW!

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/live-experience/cps/512/cpsprodpb/vivo/live/images/2016/6/24/42055472-9576-4e4e-bbc3-b0d38d8ccdff.png

excellent, we need a Labour leader who will acknowledge voters' very real concerns about immigration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mARXEQ1X_vQ

The possibility of Boris being PM and Donald being President reminds me of the photo of Thatcher and Reagan in a golf buggy.

Re: Corbyn: He always struck me as a "Reluctant Lottery Winner", the type of bloke that decides he's not giving up his previous occupation.

Hodge is repugnant and has been talked up for months as a possible stalking horse.

xpost - honestly, that IS what labour needs.

problem with the left, the white left, is that they dont know how to talk about immigration, in the same way that the tories dont, but for diff reasons.

lefties dont want to seem racist.
tories dont want to seem pro.

its pathetic. they need to talk about it, but just not with the usual hate-filled spiels. gary younge at the guardian is good on this topic.

what should they say about it? service shortages are not a result of excess immigration but of massive government underspending which most of us supported?

otm. Politicians seem to talk about nothing other than immigration.

Ask questions about job, education, training, housing, infrastructure, health and you'd get 'it's not racist to be concerned about immigration'. It is the no.1 tool for scapegoating failures.

how about "the UK has a duty to accept refugees and asylum seekers especially from a middle east ravaged by post-colonial adventurism?"

"what should they say about it? service shortages are not a result of excess immigration but of massive government underspending which most of us supported?"

yes. exactly that. it needs to be discussed. when you choose not to talk about it, for fear of rhetorical ugliness, it just makes that elephant in the room that much larger.

at this point, im expecting it to be the usual BS in british politics. both parties 'cracking down' on immigration, stoking up fear, while still letting more people settle here, cos someone needs to do those low paying, low status jobs.

"Politicians seem to talk about nothing other than immigration."

but in the stupidest, basest, most dishonest way.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/15/honest-debate-immigration

"Vine claims that Sturgeon has contacted Sadiq Khan to explore possibility that Scotland and London can somehow opt out"

as if!

This morning the Guardian had regional voting results split into

Scotland
Northern Ireland
Wales
London
Rest of England

"Ask questions about job, education, training, housing, infrastructure, health and you'd get 'it's not racist to be concerned about immigration'. It is the no.1 tool for scapegoating failures."

im not in favour of scapegoating.

im in favor of people understanding that services are not being taken away by migrants, but by governments. but if you pretend that immigration ISNT an issue at ALL, then it just makes people angrier.

I think Corbyn, for his faults, has been trying to move in that direction. However, f he says anything remotely positive / realistic about a need for continued migration and a sensible approach to accommodating it a chorus of his own MPs / liberal journalists pops up and says 'well, that won't win back the UKIP vote'.

you see that bit where Younge says "there is no sensible debate on the subject you can have without talking about international trade and development, war, environmental catastrophe and global economic inequalities"? none of the MPs who want to knife Corbyn are interested in that.

they should just split the tories and labour

make four new parties

He got absolutely slated for making pro-immigration noises at the weekend. Clearly he's not the best communicator but it's not an easy argument to make at the moment. xp

Crazy news to wake up to here. Was out to lunch with a friend yesterday who spends a lot of time in Spain for work, and he was noting what this means for Brits scattered and living or working or running businesses throughout the (erstwhile?) EU, it's just going to be chaos. Per the above somewhere, passport/visa issues alone will be nuts, right?

Osborne's been very quiet, hasn't he?

So, I assume he's going to propose an emergency budget, that's going to get voted out, at which point he resigns.

What odds would I get on that scenario?

can someone crunch the numbers and tell me what proportion of the UK actually voted for leave then? i.e. taking into account non-voters

Thing about immigration is that we are not even in the ballpark of what's going to be required once global warming really kicks in. And I don't see our chances of dealing with climate change improving much with a far weaker Europe.

very quick fag packet guess = around 15/16 million out of a population of 64 million

and only counting those eligible to vote

just wondering really if non-voters didn't know enough, didn't care enough, assumed status quo would continue quoing

think the electorate is about 38 mill

cheers drive

no I'm quite a bit off:

The total number of UK parliamentary electors in 2015 was 44,722,000, a fall of 1.3% from 2014.

that's only people registered to vote, not all eligible people

I suspect 20-odd years of having 3 main parties with similar economic policies might've put a few people off bothering

im prob feeling very cynical right now (or ok, the last month), but immigration is never going to be off the agenda. its so routinely used to exploit the electorate, cos its such an emotional subject that cuts right through peoples intellects and deep into their guts, that either you talk about it, or you get the current shitswill that made people (partially at least) vote brexit.

id actually like to see a more general poll on how british people feel about immigration/migrants/kids of migrants (then again, perhaps not).

its so embedded in our culture, in the very grain of britishness, to hate/sneer down/mock anyone 'other'. even i sometimes wonder if its a mistake to let migrants in, for all the trouble it brings, and im the son of two of them! even nice middle class people i often think only really like migrants so they can feel good about how open minded they are and 'try something different.. oooh look how open minded i am! can you see how tolerant i am! arent i liberal?!' (then again id still prefer that sort of self-deceit to ukip supporters).

off topic entirely, but i remember signing up to the guardian dating site once and being surprised at how nearly all the women i met didnt seem any more politically progressive or open minded than your average mail reader (slight exaggeration but prob not much).

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/05/brexit-has-its-roots-british-empire-so-how-do-we-explain-it-young

it needs to be discussed. when you choose not to talk about it, for fear of rhetorical ugliness, it just makes that elephant in the room that much larger.

Immigration can never be discussed enough for many of the people who voted Leave - in much the same way that there will be always be too many Muslims and Polski skleps for those same people (regardless of the actual figure).

that either you talk about it, or you get the current shitswill that made people (partially at least) vote brexit.

not an either/or though is it? It's been talked about constantly, and we have the current shitswill.

is shitswill the right word here?

London voted 60% in favour of remaining in the EU, although within this there were significant splits between boroughs, with inner London notably more pro-EU than the outer suburbs. For example, Lambeth recorded a 78.6% vote in favour or remain, while in Barking and Dagenham this was just 37.6%

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/24/voting-details-show-immigration-fears-were-paradoxical-but-decisive?CMP=share_btn_tw

Yet the details of the referendum demonstrate a paradox – that those who have experienced the highest levels of migration are the least anxious about it. The highest levels of remain voters were actually in areas of highest net migration while some of the strongest leave areas have had the fewest recent new migrants.

Looking forward to London becoming a West Berlin-esque Scottish exclave

Yup

they should just split the tories and labour

make four new parties

Yup. Need PR first, though.

xps
It's the catch 22 you get when people are conned into believing that everything wrong with their lives boils down to one abstract thing. If the answers you give them don't address all their anxieties then nothing you have to say about the issue will ever be enough and of course no answer on immigration that isn't an outright lie can achieve that.

the explanations for anti-immigration sentiment seem weak to me; normally explained as people disaffected after suffering from global capitalism (which is obviously vague to the point of meaninglessness), or concerns that rising population puts pressure on services

but neither of these things are unique to the UK. the population growth rate in the UK is not that high. the only thing I can think of which is unique to the UK is the media

Wtf did you guys do?

It's not really a paradox. Immigrants go where the jobs are, 'native British people' are less resentful where the jobs are.

I was in Doncaster, which went 70% leave yesterday, and barely saw anyone who wasn't white and didn't speak to a single Eastern European other than the bemused Serb i was showing around. There are just no jobs there. It's easier for politicians and the media to encourage a discussion of immigration than it is to admit that Doncaster is functionally useless viewed from London.

agree it's difficult to see any historical precedent for poverty and political disengagement leading to right wing racism

corbyn has to be playing the long game here (because as this proves labour had no other to play). let it all fall and rebuild the base. right...?

but neither of these things are unique to the UK.

It's all over though. Trump, Le Pen, Wilders, Pegida, to some extend the Five Star Movement and the new populist party that took Rome recently, etc, etc.

"It's not really a paradox. Immigrants go where the jobs are, 'native British people' are less resentful where the jobs are."

also, immigrants/children of migrants will not likely vote brexit, duh (well some will, but stupid, illogical people come in all stripes).

xxp

possible up to a point. the most pressing problem he has that he's got any hope of addressing is getting rid of about 200 useless MPs

Hard to imagine Corbyn is capable of any type of long term machiavellian shit.

Indeed