"n'er cast a clout til May be out aka NO BREXIT: hell is other voters -- UK election 2017

gr8 post but isn't there perhaps an element that what the masochistic inferiority-complex-ridden genuflecting gbp want IS someone who's aloof, unapproachable, removed from everyday graces? someone who looks like they could just execute a thousand insurgents with a single gesture and no batted eyelid?

I think that is a very real possibility, yes.

remember during the last general election when there was this strange attempt to convince people that teen girls thought ed milliband was dreamy?

I will not stand for this calumny that Milifandom was anything less than a genuine grassroots phenomenon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milifandom

#Cameronettes, a Conservative response to the Milifandom, was suggested by 21-year-old Twitter user and University of Exeter student, Charlie Evans.[11] A Cameronettes Twitter account was created, that claims to be run by a 13-year-old girl. The hashtag has been reported by the BBC to be "less successful" than the Milifandom.[4]

someone who can command, destroy, do what they cannot

Love that Corbyn pic precisely because of how hard it is to imagine any PM of the last few decades or other Labour leader doing it. Plays well alongside the pic of May squirming between two schoolkids also.

one of the differences between corbs and may is that she was in the shadow cabinet (1999) after just two years in parliament (first elected an mp 1997), whereas corbyn -- rather famously -- was a backbencher from 1983 to 2015 w/o break. He worked on anti-war committee and justice for palestine committees and such, but will have had a LOT more time interracting with constituents than she has had, so yes, i think it's very likely he's pretty good at this. Two years* vs 32 years.

*she was a local councillor prior to this i think, but it wasn't full-time: she was already working at the bank of england at the time -- also councillors do a lot less constituency work, unless they're super-diligent and like doing it

(re that photo: michael rosen, author of "it's a bear hunt" and someone who spends his professional life reading to and working with schoolchildren, reported that JC was in fact excellent with them, as the photo tends tot suggest -- he's unselfconsciously prepared to dramatise the story as he reads… obviously it's a hostage to tabloid fortune, as is every unguarded expression while doing your real job and not working the media the way yr handlers say you must)

jezza won't help yer old fella from maidstone live out his arab-slaying fantasies. probably hug 'em. feckless

Blair sez Labour should take defeat as a certainty + concentrate on retaining enough seats to "hold them to account".

Could Blair be any more of a putz? No, don't answer that. It's rhetorical.

as is every unguarded expression while doing your real job and not working the media the way yr handlers say you must

At least Corbyn will never be papped while struggling through a bacon sarnie.

silly and strange as it was, milifandom was very much a counterspell to the sarnie episode -- the fact that a character-quality as interpreted in one platform will generate a totally different response on another (viz that awkward nerds are loveable and this quality could just as easily work for EM)

of course the scales of play were very different, and the different platforms didn't balance each other out at all -- or even, given bubble effects, interract much (they interract more now, two years later)

the victorious war on tabloid affect -- bearing in mind that print readerships are collapsing -- will be enacted in social media, with its weapons and all its irritating absurdities (is already doing so: cf kelvin mackenzie's suspension)…

(not to say that the right can't also use the internet as a weapon, obviously)

McKenzie was out and about today doubling down on the same old criticism re Liverpudlians persecution complex and blaming them instead of his own employers who definitely did not operate any sort of process where a barely-coded racist insult of a footballer in an opinion column couldn't have been deleted before printing.

yes trevor fkn phillips has been giving him cover re persecution complex

Nuttall quoted Phillips about six times in the last interview I saw with him.

the thing about milifandom is that there are teenage girls who think dzhokhar tsarnaev and james holmes the aurora shooter are dreamy so liking a centrist labour politician who may about to become pm is quite a bit more understandable

i can see why nuttall and mackenzie -- both racists after all -- assume that support from this quater does actually somehow absolve them, and that this issue will fade away… but i really don't think it will (and it won't do phillips much good either)

"Theresa May is not a people-person, she interacts very badly with the public and tends to detach herself from them as soon as the cameras are turned off."

Imagine the Conservative Party electing as leader someone like that, a woman too, and expecting them to win an election... oh hold on...

just read an otm comment earlier about how amusing the disparity is between the reality of TM's content-free listless poise + very Kim Jong Un style forays into empty looking warehouses with some happy/bored greetees in Derbyshire and the the fawning AUDACIOUS MAY PARKS TANK IN LABOUR HEARTLANDS type headlines that followed. Another 6 weeks of this and even the BBC might start turning on her.

They didn't even have to elect her this time xp

do you think she's much like thatcher though, tom, except quite superficially? i'm not sure i do

She's a space alien, so in that sense she's like Thatcher.

Actually, that is unfair on her, she's nowhere near as weird as Thatcher.

The major difference I can see between Thatcher and the post-2010 brigade, is that they have not even attempted to buy off any part of the electorate. Thatcher laced her economic terrorism with right-to-buy bonanzas, but austerity hasn't come with any bribes. I guess the royal mail selloff was an attempt to rerun this, but it didn't really pan out.

"but austerity hasn't come with any bribes"

that is what I don't get - she has made so many working people noticeably poorer, and then has the audacity to feign being on their side. But according to the latest YouGov poll lots of the people she has fucked over actually like her.

Old Spitting Image clip doing a bit of a round the other day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1l1XGiXgo0

I was thinking earlier that May would be a gift to Spitting Image.

ugh i hate spitting image worse than the tories and hignfy combined tbh

I thought it was ace at the time, never re-watched it since like.

Apparently that clip is from 91 but I didn't think they made Major entirely grey until a bit later. It's pretty weak as a sketch though was just surprised at the audacity of the writers risking the perception of calling the viewers stupid (as opposed to the politicians) in the process.

Not a great a sketch, because it can't decide whether it is taking the piss out of Tory voting Pimlico Plumbing type wealth creators or the working class Tory voters.

it was always totally tin-eared about class (and women)

(in brackets bcz not strictly relevant to this skit -- but actually the aspect that enraged me most)

Meanwhile, his sister Rachel has announced she has defected to the Liberal Democrats to stop a hard Brexit, telling a "moving" tale of how her 19 year old son Oliver cried on the morning after the referendum and said, “Boris has stolen our futures.”

I'm sure the thou doth protest too much BJ nephew will get this detail deleted from the internet at some later point, but can imagine him played by the young Charlie Boorman in Excalibur for a dramatised version of this moment.

Nuttall now standing in Boston & Skegness (CON HOLD) after failing to identify a winnable Labour seat.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C-aR-7DWAAEPLm8.jpg:large

JC's excellent first week continues

praise from cesare borgia

Barwell was just sounding weak as piss on the housing crisis and trying to argue that the building of 500000 new council houses would somehow exacerbate the problem. It takes some fucked up Tory rong-thought to come up with that conclusion, but most of the PLP wouldn't probably argue with more "affordable housing" being the answer.

the LibDems are campaigning on building more social housing as well, the uncompromising stance the Tories are taking on this would be hard to defend in a debate.

debates are for the feeble

I'm gonna end up saying this every week until it happens but Blair expelled from the party has to happen

Labour need to make people realise that in fact the Tory party and Theresa May, well sort of hate most of the people in this country.

the problem is that most of the voters in this country seem to hate most of the people in this country. eg that sociopathic "poor people shouldn't have children" tweet Matt posted - sadly I just don't think that would be even close to a dealbreaker for the electorate. most of them probably agree.

I'm wondering if this is a specifically English/British trait because you're very right lex, the little lord of the manor "my family and bollocks to everybody else" mentality feels like it runs thru the history of Englishness, you could write a great book about it, but am I just sulking about a world-view that's more or less universal?

TM seems quite confident that she can actually make the working poor poorer and deflect all their anger onto "benefits scum" rather than Tory tax credit cuts they ought to be pissed off about. But of course some working people don't like to admit their shit wages were ever being propped by benefits. I think the basic need to feel superior about others and complete indifference to others problems is a probably a universal thing, history is littered with evidence to support this imo

am I just sulking about a world-view that's more or less universal?

why be cynical about your fellow countryfolk when you can be cynical about the whole hunan race?

there's a reason I'm Alright Jack was given that title and it nails a similar vibe in 1959

I have the feeling that this is the sort of stuff that works and works and works with the electorate until suddenly it doesn't and then yr authority pretty much evaporates overnight.

Re: Blair, it's very noticeable that Gordon Brown, who wasn't a good PM at all, has had the good sense to keep his mouth shut for the time being.

there's fascinating stuff about the suppressed history of the Blitz and the amount of opportunist burgling that went on while people were hiding in the air raid shelters. Dickens and Fielding full of scumbags, Pecksniff or Blifil feel like great universal Brits and I hate the idea of universals, fucking Polonius man, the archetypal stolid business Brit

IT TAKES A NATION OF SHOPKEEPERS TO HOLD US BACK

I dont think its specifically English and I think its more than fuck everyone else, its cathartic nihilsm. Cut your own head off to spite the rest of your body who cares. Anger as addiction

I have the feeling that this is the sort of stuff that works and works and works with the electorate until suddenly it doesn't and then yr authority pretty much evaporates overnight.

see 79-97 tory government. They certainly weren't worse in the last five years than previously, but all of a sudden they can't buy a vote. Perhaps the 'not being worse' was a factor in them losing the uncritical support of fascist newspaper barons, idk

last five years, ie lingering death of Major government