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

some guy on twitter talking about Paul Nuttall:

mark cönwáy‏ @1markconway

@fossy49 @BBCNews He's a scally. They're all scallies. I've no idea where we'll end up. Thank God Theresa is a real grown-up.

bad bootle ukip meff

^^^i am prepared to accept this caricature :D

it seems significant that when "chavs" became a thing in the 2000s that the chav stereotype was dim/slow-witted, which was never the case with scallies as far as I remember, scally sterotype = weasely, cunning little bastards

Before we actually start comparing them to Raptors, Nicola Sturgeon has announced a second Indyref.

Or has announced that she intends to:

She says she will ask the Scottish parliament to vote in favour of this next week.
She says the details of the referendum, including the timing, must be for Scotland to decide.

She says it should take place when the options are clearer than they are now, but while it is still possible for Scotland to stay in.

She says she expects the outcome to be clearer by next autumn. So that would be the earliest date.

She says it should take place between the autumn of 2018 and the spring of 2019.

They'd lose again if they held it tomorrow so obviously betting on Brexit turning out to be a colossal fuck-up.

Safest bet in the world, la

re: scally - the origins of the towie look are def older but I don't think it really took off til around that point. i'm not totally convinced by that anyway, it seems like more of an adult look whereas we only ever used scallies to refer to teenagers. some ppl I know are v firm on never using the word & would judge you for it, & it doesn't trip off the tongue anymore, it just reminds me of being 13, which feels a long way away

counterpoint: brookside's SIZZLER (brookside is where i first heard the word "scally")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu_681EK8Pc

The upshot of that timescale is that May could be gone before Brexit actually occurs.

in comedy marmalades news: https://twitter.com/jimwaterson/status/841653201044721664

re: Catholoc discussion above - odd coincidence (of sorts) I finished Tabucchi's Pereira Declares. Really great book about a catholic man (editor of a culture section of a newspaper no less) who is eventually dragged into the politics of Salazar's Portugal (book is set in '38) and the Spanish Civil War. That sense of deep morality (his favourite fiction is French Catholic writers like Mauriac, and then Pessoa of course, although his politics were more fucked so this seems odd), a sense of right and wrong mixed with a sense of passivity. Unless things really get in your face.

I should read those Father Brown stories sometime.

Share memories with ogmor about 'scallies' and think ogmor OTM although hem hem possibly best not me getting back on to that topic here

Etymologically speaking though it's interesting that scally connects to 'scally wag' (i.e. something you might call your own lovable, cheeky children, softening the derogative) whereas 'chav' connects to the Romany word for 'boy' or 'child' IIRC (i.e. brings in the idea of the demonic other more so than the earlier term). And it was 'chav' that made it from playground to mainstream press usage

the JUSTICE FOR MARINE A dipshits in my extended family are already wetting themselves with joy on facebook over this sentencing downgrade

just a lil' shooting of an injured enemy combatant followed by a verbal acknowledgement a war crime has been committed let's be cool abt it

Brexit Secretary David Davis says Government has not done an economic assessment of the impact of not reaching a deal with the EU on Brexit

brexiteers in 'being entirely unprepared' shocker

They could've done an assessment that said it would be bad. People would not like that.

Or they could've done an assessment that said it would be OK or even good. People would not like that.

I didn't realise that Neal Ascherson had come out in support of Marine A

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/26/author-admits-shot-two-injured-soldiers-bid-help-jailed-marine/

Marine A

Aqua-Marine A

Why won't you say, that you'll always slay

Prisoners disarmed

Fuck that guy

I didn't realise that Neal Ascherson had come out in support of Marine A

best defence for a war crime? more war crimes apparently

OUR BRAVE BOYS ARE NEVER WRONG *clutches union jack*

ascherson is a great writer (also a scot nat rather than a union-jack clutcher) but seems to me he's belatedly working through his own war guilt issues here

very likely, aye, and he got what he wanted anyway with the downgrade of the sentence. not at all sure that 'i've committed a war crime too' is a helpful addition to the conversation tho

U-turn on the NICs and Corbyn can't even manage to formulate a question? FOR FUCK'S SAKE

It's probably the first he's heard of it to be fair.

If the press can force a U-turn when there's virtually zero threat from the opposition then it suggests that personal tax rises of any kind are politically nearly impossible right now, and as a country that means we're even more in the shit.

It's also the second budget to unravel in two years, and yet their supposed economic competence is still taken as read by so many.

http://i.imgur.com/NNomjDJ.png

Labour under Corbyn caught in the same Tory trap his predecessors were, of course, even if JC and JMc wish to exit it in the other direction: the issue of raising taxes. Miliband said no way, which hobbled him. Corbyn wants to say YES WAY -- but that makes it hard to make proper hay of Hammond's difficulties here.

Think it was the Machiavelli-Baldrick thread where I said a strong leader is one that can rhetorically fuse (and thus defuse) these kinds of contradictions so that people stop seeing them (or stop caring): it's very evidently something Corbyn can't or won't do. (He may, with a residual Bennian romanticisation of the democratic nature of the working people's movement, actually consider it a dishonest skill -- I'm not a Benn stan, but i don't think this is an error he would ever have made if he'd been allowed within sniff of a leadership role… )

Corbyn wants to say YES WAY -- but that makes it hard to make proper hay of Hammond's difficulties here.

My feel is that if you're own position is clear and bold enough, it hardly matters what it actually is, you can make a lot of hay with your opponent's difficulties and equivocation. Maybe this will occur to someone in the labour party by about the year 4545.

your lol

Have to say I'm not that convinced that "effective performances" at PMQs are all that important any more: the audience it once spoke to has dwindled, and the commentariat, when it isn't so straightforwardly partisan it can't be swayed, has far more of an eye on other measures of success (especially polls, which retain a quasi-scientific aura that entirely gets the guard of the scientifically illiterate gang who mainly make up the commentariat).

Michael Rosen on twitter just now: "PMQs isn't 'debate'. It's a knob-wrestling match now serving the purpose of keeping press in work doing theatre criticism on it"

This^^^ threatens to turn it into "Corbyn wins by not participating in this stupid game!" vs "It's his job to participate and he does it badly!", neither of which get us much further. And theatre is a needed skill in politics. But Rosen is entirely correct that the game is now both stacked and rebarbatively stupid. The big threat currently isn't that the table can't be overturned, it's that the people overturning it are shrieking predatory monsters.

Sturgeon''s intervention was also excellent table-turning, mind you -- she of course has access to an entire political machinery that isn't Westminster-centred.

It's dickwaving that no one pays attention to really but it does contribute to the steady subliminal drip-drip of wider sentiment and that has had an effect on Corbyn's own wider perception. Obviously the media is near-blanket hostile but that can no longer be used an excuse - "he'd be doing better if people who disagreed with him weren't constantly trying to undermine him" doesn't hold water in politics where everyone is constantly trying to undermine everyone. And on the rare occasions where he DOES get a direct hit at PMQs people pay attention - cf the case with that Surrey council - because it gets the TV news 20-second clip. Corbyn's main problem here is no that PMQs doesn't matter, but he also thinks it doesn't matter and can't be arsed to go through it.

It wouldn't really matter that he's largely ineffective at PMQs if he hadn't also been completely ineffective in opposing the government on the biggest call in a generation, which people really do care about and where he might have had some impact.

Obviously Corbyn probably agrees with the NI rise in private, but the line of attack here is "the Chancellor clearly thought this was the right think to do, so a) did the PM tell him to row back, and if so did she know about it in advance. If not, do they just not communicate on something as big as the Budget, lol incompetence. Or b) see how easily the Chancellor is bullied into a U-turn". And it should be repeated again and again. Corbyn has largely failed in making it about their incompetence, not his, partly because his own incompetence and lack of authority is so easily thrown back in his face.

Corbyn is routinely praised for PMQ performance - but I guess this depends who you follow (e.g. I see no praise for May, perhaps it as common in the right quarters). It's not something I'd do myself as I agree with the general negative judgements of PMQs and don't watch them.

I wouldn't use words like 'knob wrestling' or 'dick waving' partly because I don't like them in general, also because the dominant participant in this case, at the moment, is a woman, so even the perhaps otherwise valid point that these debates are often about men performing their masculinity isn't valid.

That note on idiom doesn't mean I disagree with any of the substantial arguments above.

I like Sturgeon's intervention, despite not wanting Scottish independence.

It is as though she is responding to a slow motion car crash by crashing another car into it. And the people who very deliberately crashed the first cars furiously say 'What on _Earth_ do you think you're doing, crashing that _car_??'

PMQs is like Newsnight; it doesn't matter because it has a huge audience but because all the politicians and journalists watch, and it sets their agenda, which it turns feeds the national agenda. If you can't cut through there, you don't get your 20s clip on the 10.

Running away from the wreckage surely?

(May is also very bad at PMQs and not good at being put under pressure generally, so it's also a missed opportunity to make her look worse)

Corbyn is routinely praised for PMQ performance - but I guess this depends who you follow

Are you following Seumas Milne perhaps? Now the government and the opposition are hopeless at PMQs can we just call the whole thing off?

it sets their agenda, which it turns feeds the national agenda

i am no longer convinced this is true re PMQ: it continues to a pretext for punditry but i don't believe anyone could transform the situation from its platform -- which possibly you could once upon a time

what i'm getting at is that in days gone by it was a simultaenous test of two things -- mastery of the detail of your brief and your project, and mastery of the arts of parliamenary banter

but that partly depended on a preponderance of journalists -- even partisan ones -- who were able to get their heads round the first and judge the content, setting it against judgments about the effective theatre

i don't think such a preponderance now exists: there's a handful, peter oborne, stephen bush, but they're fairly marginal, newsnight doesn't have any (tempted to say the satanic reign of paxman saw them off, as i am quite anti-paxman, but it was more to do with editorial decisions probably)

I mean the collapse of a singular national agenda is partly to blame for all the bullshit raining down on us right now to my mind, so that PMQs has a smaller impact on what's left of it would naturally follow I guess

as significant: the collapse in a layer of trusted (and trustable) expertise

>>> Running away from the wreckage surely? <<<

yes, I agree, the metaphor which feels compelling to me in one way, seems wrong in others -- you could say that she is pressing the ejector seat rather than crashing the car.

But there is something about what she has done which is: responding to a crisis by creating ANOTHER crisis -- and she is almost literally the ONLY person who could do this (the Lords, or NI Assembly for instance, evidently can't) -- and I have found this temporarily liberating, because the ONE slow-motion car crash crisis that we follow every day had seemed (and indeed is) so inescapable -- when the NEW Scottish crisis pushes it sideways or diagonally in some way, that is some relief.

Put yet another way, Sturgeon seems to be the ONLY person who has any capacity for leverage over the Brexit people, ie can do anything that actually scares or bothers them; and I cannot help admiring her for this.

Yes I feel the same way!

I'm not sure she does have much leverage in the commonly understood way, and that leverage is perhaps not the point - her aim is not to overturn Brexit, it's to secure independence - and the government would be torn apart from within if it were seen to be offering her too much ground (maybe any ground).

Where she might have leverage is over the date of the referendum - she can perhaps get May to agree to the referendum as long as she promises not to hold it at a crucial stage in the Brexit negotiations.

i think as well there's leverage at a symbolic level: brexiteers enjoying the thought that soon things will all be back as they were in the golden times confronted with something which absolutely doesn't belong anywhere in those golden times, viz a uk w/o scotland -- as in, "you have no grasp of what you're going to get"

the threat of it screws w/ppl's warm nostalgia fore the comfortably familiar -- and actually helps dramatise what a radical step is being taken

Also quite a lot of satisfaction in the (fair few) Brexiteers who were all "this will make Scottish independence even LESS likely!!" and "there will be no second referendum" becoming all spluttery. Tiny taste of what's to come when the negotiations begin.

come home to somebody on PM gently making the case for war crimes being OK. this is the really scary shit, the steady retreat of civilization.