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

Wait is it true that Labour has somehow contrived to purge away its majority on Bristol City Council?

yes

http://www.bristol247.com/channel/news-comment/daily/politics/bristol-labour-party-hit-by-suspensions

The suspensions leave Labour with 34 councillors in City Hall - one below what is needed for an overall majority.

Anyone else think they may have suspended enough by now to steal the vote?

I might have a nibble on that 20/1 if it is still there

So like what does happen when Owen Smith and Donald Trump get in over the next few months.
Does everything line up for the rapture or something?

if the PLP managed to steal this I will be very drunk and on suicide watch, business as usual really! According to the YouGov poll they would have to ban a shitload of people to win it, probably more than they have the resources and time to ban. But you never know what these fuckers are capable of, especially when they are becoming increasingly desperate.

The purges and reasons given for them have that air of erratic desperation that suggests they lack both sufficient data on new supporters and members and sufficient confidence in Smith. BBC offers some useful figures here - 105,598 £3 supporters for Corbyn last year. Would love to know how many of them are now voting Smith against how many have been purged but can't see either figure getting up to half of 100k. Could be wrong hope not.

The purge purpose may be more damage limitation in trying to ensure that the overall turnout isn't greater than last year's - would be understandable if you take the membership surge this year as an indication of support for Corbyn.

Honestly I think a competent candidate who members believed could actually win an election could probably have beaten Corbyn, but both Smith and Eagle were very obviously neither of those things.

I was charmed by the Eagle/Mason interactions on Any Questions, particularly when she was yicked out by the idea of skinny-dipping Nigel Farage.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/scottish-independence-comedy-sketch-sparks-homophobia-row-over-ruth-davidson-immitation_uk_57dfb54fe4b0d584f7f1b315

The "Dykey D" thing seems spectacularly ill-conceived.

Culture Minister claims to be big fan of Skepta but can't name any of his tracks

didn't Tim Farron have Fuck The Police unexpectedly blasting out of his phone recently or something? I don't think aligning himself with Blair '97 is going win him much ground, either in terms wooing battle weary Blairite MPs or connecting with the tiny part of the electorate that actually still gives a fuck what a Lib-Dem clown says.

For a lot of Labour MPs, switching to the LibDems would be tantamount to just resigning their seat at the next election, it's a non-starter.

Labour's Jonathan Reynolds joins team legitimate concerns:

The Remain-campaigning Reynolds told HuffPost UK that people’s “genuine emotional concerns” about uncontrolled immigration cannot be dealt with just by pointing to reports and statistics which talk up the economic benefit of freedom of movement.

In a dig at colleagues such as Chuka Umunna who are calling for the Government to try and negotiate a compromise over freedom of movement in a Brexit deal, Reynolds said a “tweak” to the status quo “would not wash with people.”

His comments come days after three other high profile Labour MPs – Rachel Reeves, Emma Reynolds and Steven Kinnock – all called for an end to free movement to the UK.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/labour-freedom-of-movement-jonathan-reynolds_uk_57e2be9ee4b0db20a6e82ba3?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004

morbidly curious which way Owen Smith jumps on this issue once his leadership challenge finally limps to its conclusion

Do the "no free movement" guys have a coherent economic framework that supports their position or are they just racist dicks?

Reynolds and Kinnock jr both pretty much explicitly admit that there's no economic case against freedom of movement, but voters are "concerned" about it so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. (also in Kinnock jr's case there is a weird "we have to be a bit racist to placate slighty-racist voters who would otherwise start being REALLY REALLY racist" argument.)

Reynolds again:

“And that’s not always about personal impact on wages or personal impact on their community it is about a concern about what is, frankly, a record level of immigration to the UK and concerns about our ability as a nation to absorb that scale of immigration.

so if the concern is NOT about wages, or the impact on their community (by which I guess he means things like pressure on public services, housing etc), what does that leave exactly?

lol it very well might be "very genuine concerns about our nation's ability to not be racist dicks" which is a kind of pro-level concern trolling

actually, he's just made himself even clearer on twitter just now:

Dirk Singer ‏@dirktherabbit
One final question @jreynoldsMP if I may. Do you *personally* believe EU migrants are a strain on the job market & public services

Jonathan Reynolds ‏@jreynoldsMP
@dirktherabbit No. But I can recognise the desire to see immigration controlled and that concerns are cultural as well as economic

also agrees with Stephen Kinnock's argument that "to deny the reality of white working class people, quite frankly, smacks of ‘class privilege’."

is there a credible argument that "cultural concerns" is anything other that a weaselly euphemism for racism + xenophobia? what would that argument look like?

It's literally just the perceived racism of the working classes. There are a million things affecting 'community feeling' in deprived areas they've ignored or cheered on for decades - from the decline of traditional local industries to cuts to communal council resources to the ongoing encouragement to demonise each other as less deserving of assistance - none of which they appear to be interested in fixing now. They've just decided that everyone outside of the fancy bits is a diehard racist and pandering to that imagined sentiment will turn the clock back to 1960.

There was an interesting suggestion that the Tories are planning to plough huge amounts of 'financial aid' into the Visegrad countries as an attempt to bribe them into not doing this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-37396805

idk how well that would go down in the UK or Poland.

this "large numbers of voters feel this way and we must respect their wishes" stuff feels borderline Powell-esque at times:

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?
The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.
I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking - not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/Enoch-Powells-Rivers-of-Blood-speech.html

there's obviously an argument that gentrification (for example) is (at least partly) a "cultural concern" (rather than a purely class concern) -- but this is the wing of the party that has embraced development-as-renewal most uncritically, while undermining extant versions of planning*, local or country-wide, which were accessible to democratic oversight and discussion

*not that these have ever been unflawed: cf our friends in the north etc

The most sober arg you will get from MigrationWatch, News Corps etc. is that no free movement is the best chance at cutting net migration down by their desired 80% (over, what is it? 10 years?). It's their fantasy of a nation such as Britain remaining economically and perhaps even infra-structurally strong(er), yet magically repellent to more than 30-60,000 people a year (and that's just 'skilled workers'). Possibly within that they think/hope racial harassment and scapegoating dissipates - more likely they don't give a shit as long as they just see fewer foreigners everywhere.

'working class reality'!

there have been plenty of arguments over the effect of immigration on 'social cohesion'. there's one famous study (from the US) which purported to show that more diverse communities had lower levels of trust across the board (inc. within ethnic groups) and this has been seized upon by the likes of david goodhart but ofc there's a study (from london) showing the exact opposite, with no one entirely clear what trust or social cohesion mean

it's interesting to see how the Labour right is split on this issue; Progress have recently published a few articles defending freedom of movement and criticising the Reeves/Kinnock/Reynolds×2 position

http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2016/09/19/no-compromise-with-reality/

http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2016/09/22/labour-must-stand-by-the-single-market/

(lol at Angell's argument that if the left hadn't opposed ID cards we might still be in the EU)

Accusing all white working class people of being racist is the kind of ignorant stereotyping you'd expect from people with real contempt for the working class, not from Labour MPs oh never mind

"She was just a sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be Labour"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Rachelwikinew.jpg/220px-Rachelwikinew.jpg

I can well believe they have people banging on about immigration at them constantly fwiw, it's the question of whether you take that at face value or you actually try and do something about the underlying reasons. This might just be impossible territory for Labour, I dunno.

It shouldn't be impossible for the PLP's conviction free marketeers unless they think the electorate is best lied to

Umunna also now saying that he backs end to freedom of movement, even if that means leaving single market:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/chuka-umunna-single-market-free-movement-brexit_uk_57e3e201e4b0db20a6e8b057?ncid=engmodushpmg00000004

who is there in the PLP who has come out in favour of freedom of movement and single market membership? David Lammy, anyone else? Obviously the Corbynite wing of the party is sceptical of freedom of movement and single market as well. Clive Lewis has said some good stuff in the past about the importance of immigration to UK economy and futility of trying to mimic UKIP's policies.

fuck this party. all of them. except Lammy.

This is proving to be an excellent barometer of the general cowardliness of our politicians. They clearly know that leaving the single market will be a disaster but hey fuck it, most people don't even understand what the single market is whereas everyone knows what an immigrant is, so just go with it and worry about the consequences later.

May appears to be moving very cautiously on this issue, probably because she'll be the one actually carrying the can for the clusterfuck that would follow.

This whole thing is an excellent illustration of the danger of promising things without taking account how you're actually going to get there. There appears to be no way of actually implementing Brexit without either trashing the economy or pissing a lot of people of.

Not "appears", there *is* no way. It's always been a fetish/fantasy. It's the closest I've seen in real life to the emperor's new clothes, tbh

Basically the Labour party is, on the whole, stuck replaying the minutes after Gordon Brown was caught (correctly) calling that woman a racist for eternity, like some grim Groundhog Day.

May appears to be moving very cautiously on this issue, probably because she'll be the one actually carrying the can for the clusterfuck that would follow.

Yes, the strategy seems to be 'hold May to account for the inevitably disappointing-to-the-hard-right failure to cut immigration to five figures even if you know that successfully cutting immigration to five figures would be a disaster'.

It's disgraceful short-termism and isn't even going to work - xenophobes aren't going to rush to Labour because they'll never believe the rhetoric.

Can genuinely see myself voting lib-dem at this rate.

Bit too busy to frame the question right now but I was thinking earlier today of starting a "T.May: subtle macchiavellian or hopelessly out depth" thread

pretext for it was this: https://cpianalysis.org/2016/09/20/hinkley-c-power-project-offers-a-lesson-in-how-not-to-deal-with-china/
(the hollowing out of senior civil service competence is actually a cross-party blunder but this was apparently precipitated by a key advisor of may's)

also this by Robert Peston re May's decision to make The Disgraced Liam Fox head of a dept for international trade: https://www.facebook.com/pestonitv/posts/1697230203935051
(where the error is actually the title of the department and not that she picked Mr Disgraced to head it)

I generally agree that she has been super-cautious but both these are unforced errors -- also faint but scary pre-echoes sounding in the shipping and shipping finance markets to add to the many burdens of economic life outside the single market (viz the means to get stuff to and from can, aus, nz, china etc soon likely to be much pricier)
:( :( :(

the rhetoric of Kinnock jr and pals boils down to "we are listening to you fucking idiotic racists" while feigning a soap actor's concerned face. Which is just another (but with added condescension) version of the "we can do austerity as harsh as the tories" line that failed them in the last election. People who want nasty or racist are more likely to vote Tory or UKIP these days, albeit probably in dwindling numbers for the latter. Too many of the PLP are smug degenerates who seem to suffer from some kind of lobotomised "we are the good guys" delusion, whilst being transparently unscrupulous. I mean this is just imo, but I do think even the most politically indifferent of the electorate these days have an awareness of the current lack of ideology and therefore trustworthiness of the Labour right.

I do think even the most politically indifferent of the electorate these days have an awareness of the current lack of ideology and therefore trustworthiness of the Labour right.

I think in the later days of Blair up until 2010 a lot of people would have generally shrugged when asked the question "what is Labour for?" And that would have been inconceivable even a decade earlier.

Wanted to quote Polly Toynbee's list of glorious new Labour achievements as a response to your post but fuck it, too depressing

Brexiteers: "Soon we'll have the freedom to do deals and trade with whoever we want in the wider world!"
The wind, gently whispering: "How did EU membership affect the Hinkley C deal and its quality or indeed lack of either way?"
Brexiteers: "STFU you're not even from here."

from what i understand hinkley is essentially a UK bailout of EDF. given that EDF own ALL the other nuclear reactors in britain, which account for approx a fifth of UK energy generation, they have May over a barrel. "you want to drop this deal? fine - have your ancient, vastly expensive reactors back and good luck decommissioning them and finding a way to replace the energy they generate"

is there a credible argument that "cultural concerns" is anything other that a weaselly euphemism for racism + xenophobia? what would that argument look like?

imo it's very difficult to separate legit cultural concerns from xenophobia, because the concerns tend to include a clause that says 'immigrants have magic powers to change a town or district beyond recognition in the space of one generation'. Which always sounds bullshitty to me? Dunno?

what are "legit" cultural concerns?

Arranged marriages might be one, I suppose? Traditional African or Asian parents rejecting their kids thru homophobia? These things go on, but then the idea that they go on enough to be a concern (one that should affect immigration policy) also sounds bullshitty