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

Grim lols

A new cross-party movement for progressive liberalism that could endorse candidates in favour of the EU and immigration at the next election is being set up by politicians, celebrities and intellectuals.

The initiative has the support of Jonathon Porritt, the environmentalist, Caroline Criado-Perez, the feminist writer, and Luke Pritchard from the band Kooks, as a space for people who want a voice for openness and tolerance.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/19/liberals-celebrities-and-eu-supporters-set-up-progressive-movement

already seen it. lolled.

Luke Pritchard from the band Kooks

no gaz coombes, no credibility

Have we all seen the Boris/Kerry video?

I'm guessing May will be swilling her brandy and cackling at this, like some Bond movie baddie.

If you're trying to prove that your (still) biggest rival for the leadership is completely incapable of standing on the international stage there are worse ways than putting them on the international stage. As long as he doesn't actually start a major diplomatic incident and May doesn't end up looking like a complete moron for putting him there in the first place.

Oh I'm sure she'll be fine, it always works out ok when Tory leaders take international policy gambles in an effort to strengthen their own position.

Hang on, Luke Pritchard? Lead singer of the band The Kooks, and he's also a

(sorry, fell asleep)

Latest YouGov poll:

Westminster voting intention:
CON: 40% (+10)
LAB: 29% (-4)
UKIP: 12% (-8)
LDEM: 9% (+3)
GRN: 3% (-)

I know lol polls etc but even so that is a BIG drop for UKIP - if this continues it suggests that, without Farage, without a raison d'etre (other than 'ban immigration'), and perhaps without adequate funding, it may just shrivel up altogether. The projected UKIP surge in Labour heartlands is so central to the strategy of both the Labour and Tory right that they may be bombing off down the wrong road entirely.

looking forward to the resurgence of the bnp as ukip voters head back to their natural ideological heartland, their anti-eu mission accomplished

The Resolution Foundation think tank, which has long supported Universal Credit, said the government should consider whether the "current design is right for the new economic conditions Britain faces".
"With most independent economic forecasts pointing to higher inflation and lower real wage growth in the coming years, implementing Universal Credit in its current form risks deepening the squeeze on living standards facing low and middle income families," said the foundation's senior economic analyst David Finch.

So they are pausing universal credit until 2022, but basically fuck the areas where it has already been rolled out and contributing towards the child poverty spike and many other social ills.

sorry I forgot to add #One nation

nice to see the guardian editorial team concur that theresa may's unfunny, unpleasant jeering at pmqs is the kind of charisma the country needs

"her final words suddenly took on the resonant tone of Britain’s only other female prime minister. It was a spine-tingling moment"

"The Guardian editorial team" is a somewhat misleading way of sourcing that. Those are the words of Mark Wallace of ConservativeHome, the token Tory on the panel the Guardian put together for a roundtable verdict:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/20/theresa-may-first-pmq-prime-minister-questions-panel

sorry i meant to quote the other three clowns as well but was overwhelmed by listlessness when doing so; i appreciate the correction, tho

Polly Toynbee:
"Serious and commanding, she showed how PMQs should be done – with forensic fact and deadly precision alongside flick-knife jabs."

Ayesha Hazarika, "a senior Labour adviser to Harriet Harman and Ed Miliband and now a political commentator":
"Theresa May had a brutally brilliant PMQs debut ... rose to the occasion and hit the back of the net again and again. "

Joseph Harker, Guardian 'deputy opinion editor':
"Corbyn ... sounds self-righteous, more at home in student politics."

i feel demeaned that i'm saying this, but thank god for john crace /:

May did seem a tad snide at the time. Do hope the members that benefit from JC do get the full benefit and he isn't stuck with clowns for the next few years.
Is the party just going to remain dysfunctional or is it going to be purged of its 5th column?
Would bet that further voting fees that don't come with full membership will have people either looking elsewhere or giving up.
& further rebel stooges will be beyond a joke.

Is Toynbee right wing Labour or where does she lie? I know her from strips in the Guardian etc that I thought were at least semi political. Does she have a regular column now?

There's a world of difference between acknowledging that Theresa May performed well at PMQs and thinking she is what the country needs!

xp she's a Brown-ite ultra basically

not xp no there isn't

celebrating those values is playing the same stupid game unless i'm misreading "more at home in student politics"

politics as spectacle, as arena sport, yay leadership, etc etc etc

Moving towards a position I agree with there, I guess, but wary of asserting that what happens within the parameters of current political culture just doesn't matter.

it's not that it doesn't matter - it probably matters less than a lot of players like to believe, but still - but that the politics as sport approach is only fine providing you've given up on the hope of politics as force for change

there is a deliberate, vicious circularity to hack telling us how impressed the public are by a "good performance" in Parliament at the same time as they're hyping and defining what constitutes a performance

Last week, in David Cameron’s final PMQs, Corbyn played a blinder: full of warmth, humour and self-deprecation. This week that seemed to disappear. We know he can do better than this: if he’s to hold off Owen Smith’s challenge he will need to.

Even this mildly supportive comment doesn't get it: the people who put Corbyn in don't care a damn for PMQs - only weirdos do.

there is a deliberate, vicious circularity to hack telling us how impressed the public are by a "good performance" in Parliament at the same time as they're hyping and defining what constitutes a performance

― PLPeni (Noodle Vague), Thursday, July 21, 2016 7:12 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ty i was trying to work out how to articulate this but i am so very tired rn

for some reason i find "In the real world, these just people with ideas" stuck in my head a lot the last couple of months

there is a deliberate, vicious circularity to hack telling us how impressed the public are by a "good performance" in Parliament at the same time as they're hyping and defining what constitutes a performance

Yes, that's often the way things go, I've been thinking lately. It's a bit like the old "Now, I'm not racist myself, but I can tell you a lot of people are going to have a problem with you doing x" thing where people (maybe unconsciously) use others a proxy for their own prejudice. Don't piss on me and tell me its raining.

On the other hand, to continue with the urine theme, one media player refusing to acknowledge a strong dispatch box performance on the grounds that parliamentary competence is a bourgeois construct would maybe be pissing in the wind.

if you have a voice in the media as a "commentator" then i assume you're free to construct whatever narrative you see fit, either that or gtfo of the job

even "strong dispatch box performance" - what does that actually mean? because "strong" and "performance" are doing a lot of unexamined work there

"fired off a few lazy zings" i thought 4 weeks ago we'd decided as a nation that this was bad politics

It should matter, it should be the opportunity for the Leader of Opposition to hold the PM to account. Unfortunately it isn't and it doesn't matter to most people who aren't political hacks or wonks.

It matters a lot to the media obviously and it feeds right into the way they shape the narrative around any given leader. And unfortunately that does feed into how the public perceive them, often to the detriment of the country - Cameron was regularly judged to have "won" PMQs, usually by blustering and obsfufating and shooting back a few zines and generally refusing to answer questions. And look how that turned out.

Argh zings not zines. He wasn't hurling badly photocopied reviews of indie-pop bands across the Commons.

not having a go at you personally Alba here. there's something ludicrous about politics pundits' failure to acknowledge or recognise what Corbyn's support is, what the appetite for a new politics is: not somebody in shirt sleeves with some young people cheering for them, but a real demand to debureaucratize and dehierarchize the mouldering corpse of the Labour Party, to form a politics that has more connection to people than the 19th century tableaux presented by the mother of parliaments to distract us from where power really lies

i may be fantasising but i see no choice between attempting to build on that fantasy or giving up on political engagement

i agree Matt that it is part of forming a narrative - i think the connections of that narrative to how people vote or act are more complex than party nerds are able to conceive, and i think people who want change have a duty to question the whole narrative and not just slip into their accustomed role within it

I half wonder whether that process of democratisation within Labour could be a viable way for the centre/right of the party to get rid of Corbyn if he beats Smith - or a better way to have gone about deposing him this time.

If he wins, centrists could agree to support his leadership in the interim, join the shadow cabinet and back a programme of breaking down hierarchies (possibly including mandatory reselection every two terms, or something similar) in return for him agreeing to put the leadership up to a vote of members every year - which he himself has proposed. It would remove the need for plotting, give the party a viable out if things aren't going well and give the membership a sense of more control.

if the right is as populist as it believes then why not? but it's bureaucracy as well as democracy - it's ludicrous that only the people able to dedicate the most time to a party have the helm, which is how it's worked for a long time. political parties are still built to deal with a 20th century media landscape and 19th century notion of what constitutes "winning the debate" - that needs to be addressed too.

and this needs to happen in the context of a demand for genuine PR

and no more Labour isolationism - form links with the Greens, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, hell even the left leaning Lib Dems if they're willing - build a coalition of the Not Neolib ffs

The SNP is the big problem there - you can't build popular support for that coalition without fundamentally changing the narrative in England around them, and possibly by actively changing their chosen goals, which just wouldn't happen short of a second failed referendum. Not to mention that the SNP themselves have a huge vested interest in putting as much distance between themselves and Labour as possible.

The SNP is the big problem there - you can't build popular support for that coalition without fundamentally changing the narrative in England around them, and possibly by actively changing their chosen goals, which just wouldn't happen short of a second failed referendum. Not to mention that the SNP themselves have a huge vested interest in putting as much distance between themselves and Labour as possible.

from the English perspective i tend not to worry about the sort of jerks who are instinctively anti-SNP but i have to admit (English) nationalism is my big blind spot anyway - i don't understand it and i have no idea how to work around it. i just assume or hope it isn't an over-riding factor in the votes of most sane people

I suppose my issue with Corbyn is that he seems to have no idea how to even begin channelling all that support and genuine demand for change into anything useful. And that approach may do more damage than good to the whole project.

Fundamentally whatever happens to Corbyn over the next few months and years, the forces that put him there are not going to go away, if anything they'll grow and they will probably coalesce around someone more capable than him - either within the Labour Party or outside it. It doesn't really matter to me which. Corbynism will outlast Corbyn and may in time turn out to be more popular than him.

agreed. he is still maybe at heart a party man and a committee man and a tribalist up to a point.

re nationalism/anti-immigration etc. ultimately i don't think you can pander to bigotry - sure you have to try to persuade and try to avoid being snide unless you're dealing with full on hate but what can you seriously do about it except change the economic/political landscape in a direction that takes people's thoughts away from it?

but Corbyn's refusal to play the grandstanding leader is also good and important in the longer term i think, even if people seem lost without a nice demagogue on hand right now