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

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

leavers (increasingly belligerently): "brexit is brexit!"
eu paladins: "lol, brexit is what the eu decides it is"

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-brexit-latest-nationals-uk-stay-immigration-a7351446.html

re: non-early election. This summarises it: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/12/no-early-general-election-theresa-may

So this article p/much falls on the majority of 17 and defining crisis because the crisis is what Brexit comes to mean and why this u-turn was called in. The majority may not be enough. Labour (from the grammar school to today's session) seem to be gathering some unity (Corbyn has basically told the PLP to fuck off w/shadow cab elections I'm the leader -- and the PLP seem to have accepted they can do little in the short-term -- and Keir Starmer is looking like a solid appointment, with the diff on immigration being buried down for the moment).

However yes the 2011 Parliament Act (the hurdles described above) and also I think everyone was pretty much drained from the long referendum debate, as was the electorate. That's my take on "public dislike early elections". Also the election would've turned into the "what Brexit means", with almost no coherence.

_accidentally mugged_

i would like you to elaborate on this term, fizzles

ah yes. (i'd forgotten what that referred to, and thought it somehow referred to lab and cons botching of strategic advantages via sporting analogy of "mugging" - as in last minute undeserved goal etc - and spent some time trying to "see" it - then i remembered my post...)

so i was v stoned in my room on a sunday evening and remembered i needed to get some cash out to have money for the following day, as rent was coming out, and if i let it i wdnt be able to withdraw cash i needed to eat or drink probably more importantly.

so i went out in flip flops etc to a local cashpoint which was round an unlit corner. then two men approached me from different sides, one of them grabbed me and pushed me up against the wall and said "where the fuck is it" and i said what i probably wdve said regardless of the question "what". he then said "where's the money, you're going to get us out £x" i can't remember the amount. then his friend said "it's not im, mate, it's not im" "yeah it is where's our f'ing money you c" etc. there was a bit of to and fro'ing that i can't remember now but i seem to recall i ended up getting out the very small amount of money i had available and giving it to them tho by that stage they had become more uncertain but decided i shd give them some money anyway.

in fact as i write that i realise the only other time i was mugged was also "accidental" or inadvertent. i was in poland and had been getting drunk with some young polish blokes who, when i left about two am to trudge across the snowy urban scrub came after me, having put bandanas on. i said "i've just been drinking with you i know what you look like" (more in drunken outrage at the stupidity rather than through any bravado). to which they responded that i shd give them my wallet which i did. they then rifles through taking out the money - złoti and then largely worthless in terms of £££ - and other things like bus tickets. then they came across my university library card and on examining it said "oh you are english we thought you were russian or german" and gave me everything back including bus/tram tickets and gave me a cigarette by way of apologies. that cigarette being polish probably had some GBH element to it but i smoked it with relief accompanied by some rather shaky laughter.

the point being in the first one, if it wasn't clear from my phone typing, that they had mistaken me for someone who owed them money.

the downside of being fizzles, the man of many faces

Fizzles lives an exciting and sometimes dangerous life !

"oh you are english we thought you were russian or german"

Or as a Polish woman I used to work with once put it, "We're so unlucky to be stuck between the two worst countries in Europe".

Fizzles lives an exciting and sometimes dangerous life !

it's like one long sax rohmer novel.

by that stage they had become more uncertain but decided i shd give them some money anyway

an admirable pragmatism today's politicians could learn from

The NHS to the Brexit committee: "Where's our f'in money you c?"

Surprisingly critical piece on the BBC news website by Mark Mardell:

Behind Mrs May's brisk self-confidence there must be an awareness that she is not there because of a vote by MPs or a general election. She came to power, almost by accident, because of the referendum. So she has taken it (Brexit) as her mandate, the source of her authority.

The prime minister has moved from her enigmatic, almost mystical, "Brexit means Brexit" phase to a more doctrinal interpretation of the vote of 23 June.
She has said the British people voted against unrestricted immigration, an unresponsive democracy, elites, inequality, the banks, unfairness and liberal views on crime - and for job security, patriotism and government intervention in the economy.
She hasn't quite told us that the British people were voting on how to pronounce "scones" and the best way to get to Woking, but it may not be long....she has placed herself in the role of High Priestess of Brexit, alone able to divine its deep meaning, jealously protecting the holy aura of the oracle.

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.