theresa may: is her project subtly machiavellian or merely cunning, baldrick-style?

Tony Parsons also took this line: it's an outrage that bright kids like him should not be allowed to escape their background and kick the ladder down behind them as they count their dirty cash

It had great force in the 80s, and naturally appeals to people who benefited from it personally (Gove is possibly another).

But a lot of the underlying dynamic resentment currently stems from communities that feel they've been left behind (and are ignored and despised): the bright kids went off to college and to that London and now sneer at those they were once at school with, well fuck them, let's vote to troll them. I've seen a handful of people tackle the darkside of "aspiration", the bad energies and community-corrosive issues of internal migration -- Alex Harrowell on his blog, Dan Davies on twitter -- and I think it's one of the things that the left is going to have to wake up to, that the interests of various regions have been allowed to getwildly out of kilter (it's one of the things that the term "heartland" obscures: labour now has several "heartlands" whose natural interests clearly clash…)

A lot of working class grammar school boys are tremendously fond of their alma maters which I read as half Stockholm Syndrome, half Judasism and half willful, privileged blindness to social reality.

Step forward, Old Grammarian Andrew Neil.

to add a fourth (slightly more sympathetic) half to NV's stated three (all of which often also apply): artistic or bookish ppl escaping from homes or neighborhoods destructive or dismissive of the possibility of same may well have v complex/conflicted feelings abt both (and a degree of not-unjustified gratitude to the means of their escape)

i sometimes wonder what my debt to the county of my birth wd be in a just economic/political settlement :|

depends which county

https://britishcountyflags.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/insert-image-1-salop-flag1.jpg

you probably owe very little

Step forward, Old Grammarian Andrew Neil.

Though the Scottish Tories do not support the reintroduction of Grammar schools. Funny old world, innit?

cos anyone who experienced that particular type of grammar school “transformational” effect in scotland then left?

No demand for them, I assume.

yeah mark I am more mindful of the benefits that grammar schools conferred on otherwise isolated w.c. kids than my unnecessarily grumpy post let on

cos anyone who experienced that particular type of grammar school “transformational” effect in scotland then left?

― conrad, Tuesday, October 4, 2016 6:41 AM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think the thing is that time for most scottish people - well certainly in glasgow and the west - even if you went to grammar school and it ended up benefiting you and you did well in life you, generally, continue to believe that you are the salt of the earth/are a bit ambivalent about it all

not sure what you mean but surely you don't think e.g. an andrew neil or a michael gove might consider themselves virtuous in any way rather than revelling as they surely must in their own cynicism and poisonousness

andrew neil is definitely a counter example to my thesis

I'm sure andrew neil thinks that he deservedly ascended from his humble origins due to meritocracy

when paul foot described him as a member of the establishment, andrew neil angrily threatened to cancel his subscription to the LRB

(it was pointed out with some glee that he actually received a free issue)

have decided that theresa may is machiavelli only in the sense of standing in the head of a giant government baldrick operating the levers.

also

this is good on the nature of the HO and why Theresa May felt at home there, what this implies for her government and the "protective state".

A powerful image emerged of a department that had become embattled over a long period of time. In a ‘neoliberal era’, in which national borders were viewed as an unwelcome check on the freedoms of capital
..
However Theresa May’s long tenure (6 years) and apparent comfort at the Home Office (often a political graveyard) suggests that these symptoms may have become more pronounced in her case or meshed better with her pre-existing worldview.

to add a fourth (slightly more sympathetic) half to NV's stated three (all of which often also apply): artistic or bookish ppl escaping from homes or neighborhoods destructive or dismissive of the possibility of same may well have v complex/conflicted feelings abt both (and a degree of not-unjustified gratitude to the means of their escape)

Can highly recommend 'Respectable' by Lyndsey Hanley on precisely this subject - and why the destructive/dismissive reaction of those trapped within the system is perfectly understandable.

(and the title is a nod to Mel and Kim, if that helps tip your hand)

(it was pointed out with some glee that he actually received a free issue)

... you can take the boy out of Paisley.

... but only via the mechanism of selective education iirc.

^very good

if only there were no possibility of an andrew neil once removed having any subsequent effect upon a paisley

xps
that's an interesting article - it tallies with what I've seen of HO. From the off I've wondered what years as Home Secretary has made of May - I mean on day one I assume the permanent types sit you down and say 'Britain is under threat all the time' and show you folder after folder of terrifying stuff that's going on. Six years of that must really skew your vision of the world. (And then the protect/paranoid vibe that's inherent in HO's role then gets amplified by being in the gunsights of the Daily Mail all the time). But I hadn't thought how it might fit with her personal predispositions or wider politics - class issues, other policies, departmental fights.

yes interesting

"Is the fact that liberals haven’t experienced being the victim of regular petty crime or a failing school now going to be the main basis for ignoring them?"

what do liberals' experience of crime have to do with it? (it being foreign workers, 'citizens of nowhere', Brexit, etc)

Lots of liberals have experienced lots of crime, of various kinds

I'm left-wing and I have been burgled - despite CCTV footage of my burglar selling a box of my records in MVE and providing his driving license to the staff, Kentish Town police somehow failed to follow it up and I got a shrugging letter a few weeks later. Useless fucking idiots!

Yes.

We are breaking the mould.

yeah that liberals/crime thing was a bit weird. i once got accidentally mugged in oxford while pathetically unresistingly stoned and wearing flipflops #liberalelite

the institutionalisation of pastoral paranoia and protectionismfeels very '70s creepy vibe tv, with PKD's The Penultimate Truth its logical end point.

http://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/the-protective-state/

More on what Theresa May might be up to..

Think May isn't up to anything as calculated but the picture of her arriving to this from her time as Home Secretary is p/gd.

Former Polish minister of finance Jacek Rostowski: "With a hard Brexit, the Leave camp can avoid being seen by voters as the supplicant in negotiations with the EU – which it inevitably would be, no matter how often May denies it"

In other words, skip past all possible humiliating negotiations to a very bad endgame that doesn't require euro-permission (which is an upside if yr a brexiteer trying to save face at home)

(btw re yesterday's storyt in the times of the very bad figures shown the cabinet re the uk's economy post-brexit: the figures are the treasury figures from before brexit -- in other words the primary shock reveal is that the cabinet are learning that remain expertise was otm and that these are the facts they are going to have to work with)

also: http://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/james-obrien/which-eu-law-are-you-looking-forward-to-losing/

Imo the folly is less that people vote illogically than to be surprised that this is often the case

Sorry I won't stand for facts and figures and logic or lack of. I have my views and that's enough thanks.

What do you think? Call the BBC now and treat us to your ill-informed opinion

Sir Gerald Howarth ‏@geraldhowarth: Frau Merkel, the UK rejected free movement. It's free trade or a trade war. German business won't be clapping if we stop buying BMWs #brexit

^^^"they want to sell us caaaaars" is a much-laboured refrain (and this is nutpicking a little, don't think howarth is currently in the cabinet)

https://twitter.com/geraldhowarth/status/784427139550613510 <-- first few responses are good

Someone on the Torygraph quoted Howarth as saying the decomissioning of The Britannia (or some ship) was the worst day of his life. Tweet has gone now.

I don't think Germany will mind that much if Frankfurt picks up financial business lost by London post-passporting.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37523553

Paris is way ahead of Frankfurt rn

i've read ppl talkin abt vienna and dublin also (not right now but only a few relatively easy tweaks away)

Not sure that's a reasonable conclusion from that article, but there's a lot to go around.

Oh that wasn't my conclusion as such.

I've only seen articles relating to Paris but I'm sure there is plenty of others if I cared to look yeah

Musha and welcome to be sure to be sure

She's far more ideological and less pragmatic than Cameron / Osborne - or rather less concerned with money and more with 'Conservative principles'.

In the short term, this will work just fine - she'll give the Mail/Sun/Express exactly what they want for long enough that they'll keep cheering despite the shaking heads from the City and the Economist/FT.

In the longer term I think this is potentially disastrous for the Conservative brand. When they are doing well, their number one electoral asset is their ability to convince enough voters that they are Just Doing What Works. A bungled Brexit and a tanked economy will make it much, much harder to maintain the fiction that they are pragmatists rather than ideologues.

Her biggest tactical error so far is failing to call an election, she'd win by a comfortable margin if not a landslide, and that current slender majority leaves her very open to rebellion. This faultine within the Conservative Party has tended to run along European lines but it's really a free-market vs RW-authoritarian divide and there are enough disgruntled Tory MPs in the former camp to make life very difficult for her.

Like so much talk of early elections, that ignores that it isn't her choice anyway. To call an election, she'd need to got throught the process of repealing the fixed term parliaments act, or she'd need 2/3 of MPs to vote for it (Labour has over 1/3 of seats), or got through the clusterfuck of engineering the loss of two votes of confidence.

She could introduce a bill for an early election and challenge other parties (labour) to vote it down (lets leave aside whether enough labour mps would go for an early election to fuck up corbyn), taunting them with being afraid of democracy and all that- but labour are so obviously cratered at the moment that they might be prepared to suck that up.

Sorry I won't stand for facts and figures and logic or lack of. I have my views and that's enough thanks.

Definitely. They're my two fingers and I'll do what I like with them.

I took Matt to mean calling it right at the point of accession to PM -- which I think might* have got the 2/3s it needed (from all sides of the house) in regard of the constitutional nicety of actually having an election to change PMs. That's the chance she missed. Later than that as you say is just "early election chatter"

*who can say, it was a weird two weeks…

day after Brexit: colossal gift handed to labour by tories, labour (beset by internal squabbles) squanders this gift
three months after Brexit: colossal gift (ie labour's further internal squabbles, allowing tories to get out ahead) handed to tories by labour, tories -- for reasons that range from hubris to simple out-of-depth incompetence, squanders this gift

In the history of "events, dear boy, events", it would be a rich (and darkly hilarious) irony if the labour leadership battle turns out to have a valuable pause for and spur towards reconfiguration rather than a catastrophically wasted season (ok, i'm not holding my breath about this -- but literally nothing may's front benchers say abt brexit suggest any of them have grasped the amount of chewing they face, given what they've bitten off)

Otm

accidentally mugged

i would like you to elaborate on this term, fizzles

xxp I concur but the takedown is great and it’s so nice to see an audience member that’s not a red-faced fash.

Ah good point, most of the traditional Bufton Tufton numbskulls are just perennial backbench fodder but Hunt, oh yeah, he's a contender

https://youtu.be/EmYwBHooA_M Something positive about him being PM

Cometh the hour cometh the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Official_portrait_of_Chris_Grayling_crop_2.jpg

THAT WAS A PICTURE OF CHRIS GRAYLING

the anonymous absence seems appropriate

running for leader of the Tory party now would be like breaking into the cockpit of Flight 93 to offer the hijackers a hand

he's running
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/Official_portrait_of_Mr_Jeremy_Hunt_crop_2.jpg/220px-Official_portrait_of_Mr_Jeremy_Hunt_crop_2.jpg

prime minister jeremy cunt is kinda the logical endpoint of the last five years of uk politics tbh

this great nation deserves nothing less

Very old popbitch anecdote about him:

"I was working in London during the 9/11 bombings.
My colleagues, concerned about the breaking news,
had the radio on in the background. Our boss
promptly came in and told us to turn the radio
off and get back to work. In fact, I do not
think I have ever met a man less interested
in art or other cultures.

Lo and behold, I turned on the TV recently and
there he was! Shadow Secretary of State for
Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt."

china ... japan .... it's all same country innit?

i know the #banterheuristic is now deprecated but PM JH is none more #banterheuristic, and that includes grayling, no i will not show my working

What about the SoS who didn’t understand how NI works? Or Matt “call app Britain” Hancock?

https://thequietus.com/articles/08944-jeremy-hunt-levenson-enquiry-hotcourses

Weird to see an anonymous Popbitch article and know immediately where it came from.

Ah right, different person, same story.

which backs up the veracity of his rhyming slang credentials

I meant to say .. alleged - but there isn't much doubt that he's an absolute hunt.

Ignorance and hatred of culture is a standard qualifying requirement for Culture Sec I thought?

I heard David Mellor loved the footy.

https://nvm.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Sorted-PORTRAIT-RGB.jpg

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi2-prod.mirror.co.uk%2Fincoming%2Farticle9129154.ece%2FALTERNATES%2Fs1200%2FBaldrick-May-main.jpg&f=1

And in the end it was compulsively proven that the answer was... NEITHER.