Rolling Brexit Links/UK politics in the neo-Weimar era

if they'd just been honest and said "this anti-austerity shit is scaring off our sponsors and we didn't join the Labour party to fight for some hippy equality bullshit" they could've stood whoever they wanted

Cameron and Major - that ended well too

Hey, they won elections, which is all these guys care about.

All Prime Ministerial stints end in failure of one kind or another, it's just the degree of ignominy that varies. Major's doesn't look as bad all of a sudden and he nearly wiped his party out in most of Britain.

Major was awful and the eurospectics are running the show today.

Thank the almighty the people who only care about elections won't have a say on the next contest for leader of the Labour Party.

Ultimately the split between the pro- and anti-Corbyn factions is less about positioning on a left-right spectrum (although that does come into it) and more with a fundamental disconnect on what the role of an opposition should be.

On one hand you have the win-at-all-costs brigade who don't actually care whether they support austerity or not as long as it wins swing votes. Whether or not that approach would fail on its own terms is never actually properly considered by these guys. Politics as marketing without actually considering whether or not it's really a winning message.

The Corbyn camp sees its role as developing a grassroots movement aimed at generating real societal change over a long period of time, and many of them don't particularly care about winning the next election. The question of whether or not that approach would survive even one election without a severe move in the other direction doesn't seem to be considered either, nor is the question of whether or not the Labour Party as its currently comprised is the best place for that. Labour has arguably never experienced any major electoral pressure from the left, and it may function better as a pressure group to pull it further in that direction.

A lot of the panic is from the much larger group in the middle who believe that there just isn't time for the latter approach with the Tories wreaking havoc, that not caring about elections at all is a luxury that just doesn't exist right now. I have some sympathy for that tbh, but not if it only leads to short-termist fudges that can be rolled back within five minutes of the next Tory government.

Both the Corbyn camp and the Tristram & Chuka brigade feel wholly inadequate for our current times but I don't see who is out there that could possibly find a way through this mess.

The space was there to hijack the 'brand' and drag people along kicking and screaming - it has to be given a go. Considering questions sounds like thinking to a coma.

The space was never really there to do that, you have to actually sell your vision and convince people that you an actually deliver it, and that's only happening in a very lopsided way.

There wasn't much of a vision beyond notions of what is you are fighting against - war, cuts and the like. The door was left open and the opportunity was taken. Convincing people sounds like election winning talk and as you say you got to build a different ground to play on over a period of time. It might fail, but at least that aren't any more lies. Its a start, and important.

who was the last good Prime Minister? Seems like it's been a series of unmitigated disasters from Thatcher through to Blair's Iraq enthusiasm to post-2008 economic crash austerity policies

(says this American who is frequently baffled by the complexities of UK politics)

Probably Harold Wilson (legalised homosexuality, ended capital punishment, kept Britain out of Vietnam) and his first stint was 50 years ago.

New Statesman journalist Stephen Bush was making the case for Harold Wilson on twitter earlier:

@stephenkb Weird echo. Blair and Cameron both shattered by failure to emulate Wilson: to stay out of American horror show, to win referendum.

Aneurin Bevan left a good legacy, which even Thatcher/Blair/Neo-Cons still haven't managed to fully destroy yet.

I mean Thatcher was a terrible, destructive, evil presence but you can't deny she broadly succeeded at what she was trying to do, which is more than you can say about any other PM since Attlee.

Most of the others have been lightweights, although Cameron may turn out to have profoundly remade the UK through sheer fecklessness.

right, Thatcher's successors seem more generally inept, just poor decision-makers

re the legalisation of homosexuality, from what I've read Wilson was not particularly enthusiastic about this (or the other social reforms of the 64-70 goverment), according to Crossman's diaries he feared that the 1967 sexual offences bill would cost Labour six million votes, Roy Jenkins deserves more credit

To be fair to Wilson he had to take into consideration the views of his KGB handlers.

@stephenkb Weird echo. Blair and Cameron both shattered by failure to emulate Wilson: to stay out of American horror show, to win referendum.

Not that Wilson got any credit from the (non-parliamentary) Left for keeping the UK out of Vietnam, he was like the devil incarnate to them. He botched Rhodesia/UDI and allowed a bunch of racist shits to thumb their nose at the world. He (and Barbara Castle) did try to reform the Unions but got torpedoed, from the right, by Jim Callaghan and we all know how that turned out for industrial relations in the 70s

Generally, the left thought he was an unprincipled traitor to socialism and the right thought he was just devious and unprincipled.

maybe there is a case to be made for Alec Douglas-Home as Britain's last good prime-minister

http://cdn.quotationof.com/images/alec-douglas-home-6.jpg

Supermac!

A plot to kidnap Douglas-Home in April 1964 was foiled by the Prime Minister himself. Two left-wing students from the University of Aberdeen followed him to the house of John and Priscilla Buchan, where he was staying. He was alone at the time and answered the door, where the students told him that they planned to kidnap him. He responded, "I suppose you realise if you do, the Conservatives will win the election by 200 or 300." He gave his intending abductors some beer, and they abandoned their plot.[n 13]

a more civilised era

lol oh man

Are there any novels or plays about Douglas Home? There's surely some Beckettian absurdity to be wrung out of a very short premiership in which virtually nothing happened.

according to wikipedia the incident described above was dramatised as Radio 4 play called The Night They Tried to Kidnap the Prime Minister in 2009, with Tim McInnerny playing Douglas-Home

At Eton, his contemporaries included Cyril Connolly, who later described him as:

"... a votary of the esoteric Eton religion, the kind of graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with favours and crowned with all the laurels, who is liked by the masters and admired by the boys without any apparent exertion on his part, without experiencing the ill-effects of success himself or arousing the pangs of envy in others. In the 18th century he would have become Prime Minister before he was 30. As it was, he appeared honourably ineligible for the struggle of life."

He could be describing David Cameron.

So, is that good or bad?

It's nice, but.

Douglas-Home went on to serve as foreign secretary under Ted Heath - there's a bit in Philip Ziegler's biography of Heath where the two of them are talking about some ceremony which was to be attended by Macmillan and Wilson as well as Heath himself, and Douglas-Home says that there's no need for the foreign secretary to attend if there are already two former prime ministers going, Heath reminds Home that he himself is also a former prime minister and Home says "oh yes, I'd forgotten"

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CmtRGvuXYAAIzA6.jpg

RIP journalism

That wallpaper gives an appropriate getting burned in hades effect.

Is spinning on graves a thing?

Do they still mock up a front page for a non existent paper?

Is spinning on graves a thing?

― koogs, Wednesday, July 6, 2016 10:08 PM (40 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
>

Does seem to be a hybrid of spitting on their and turning in their dunnit?

maybe spinning adds a sense of loopiness

like

you know

he is loopy

maybe Blair's become a whirling dervish

he's also 'the wold's worst terrorist' which keeps sounding to me like a mark of ineptness not magnificence.

Just had the news on in the background all day so hearing the same comment all the time.

a fantastic terrorist, really terrific

I would have thought PLP might have tried to get Dan Jarvis to say some bullshit about the war, but he only seems capable of saying yessir! at the best of times. They really have gone into full silence mode now.

I think it's spinning as in spinning the facts

Who photoshopped the lines onto Blair's forehead?

it still sounds like a very clunky malapropism

it's a pun on spin via humour guys

it's kinda like something that Tony Soprano would say

Is this report going to be available to the general public at all. I don't know how they handle these things, or is it just available to the need to know?
Or does it tend to come down in some kind of mediated print, abridged book or anything?

http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/the-report/

right, thanks

It wasn't an "unnecesary" invasion, as the Independent puts it.

Was it misrepresented? Was it Blair hardmanning w/ lies and deceit? Was it bombing a dictator with absolutely no plan whatsoever for the situation afterwards, Blair not in the least caring about what would happen after the dust settled because he wanted to be "everyone's friend"? Yes. He's an utterly inadequate imbecile.

But his biggest crime, to me, is him starting a war and not having the guts, or intelligence, or think about the consequences. Invading Iraq isnt the problem. Not as much as doing so by a) doing it on a personal agenda and lying to everyone and no one to get it done, and b) having no plan or clue whatsoever to what happens after all the bombs are dropped, Saddam captured etc.

Seeing Dubya in those tight blue jeans turned his head.

That and his psychotic will to create his legacy.