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

The 'take back control' point is a good one, it's a bit like Make America Great Again, er, when was that exactly?

Mark S: there seems to be a surprising conflation between 'a good time for me personally' and 'a better time for society and politics' there. Even those of us, for our sins, very interested in politics probably wouldn't often conflate the two.

― the pinefox

Yes but you must allow that this is a very guilty board

i'm too sleepy to put this clearly i think but no, i wasn't saying people are conflating "a good time for me personally" with "a good time for society" -- i was saying that people in this time of crisis remember "a good time for me personally" (and that afterwards things went wrong) and feel that in order to return to this good time personally, the clock will have to be reset years previously, in order that the things which caused the good personal time to go bad to even *start* happening

i think people think like this precs=isely bcz they know NOT to conflate their own good times with societies as a whole

i also said, which did not help my clarity, that people often somewhat misalign the timing of their good time with what they think of as the precise time it happened in public terms, but this is a different phenomenon

I'm not sure how much "a good time for me personally" comes into it - this seems to be more common among the centre-"left" who really blatantly just want it to be the '90s again - but the industry of nostalgia for the '50s and '60s (and before) aimed squarely at people way too young to have been there has been going on for some time. So on the one hand you have the aesthetics of colonialism, of '40s fashion, of village fêtes and twee cupcakes and GBBO, creating this illusion of a golden age, but crucially on the other you don't have an education system in which Britain faces up to the atrocities it committed worldwide in the name of maintaining that golden age.

I mean, there are probably many different forms of nostalgiae working in parallel, I guess

if there'd been no "good times for me personally" (where "me" is this person we're trying to imagine and explain) then there'd be no real investment in the past at ANY point, as opposed to the possiblities of the future, say -- weaponised nostlagia is a consequence of things shifting (personally)* from "seeming to get better, give or take" to "seeming to get worse"

it's because things were once OK for person X (say at time B) and then began to go awry (at time C) that person X is looking back beyond time B to time A, when the forces that came together to make C bad for them hadn't (so they think) at all started

the Bs and the Cs are probably all over the place -- which is one reason that A needs to be more or less at the start of our shared memory time

*i'm not ruling out a depersonalised (which is to say public and politicised) sense of better and worse in operation also, but i don't think that's primarily in operation in this instance

i literally cannot write to save my life today -- you can blame either rachel maddow or the scary bumblebee that got into my bedroom at sun up

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.

Nostalgia for those days.

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2017/mar/15/second-tory-reveals-police-investigated-him-over-spending-allegations

i was just about to say "£70,000 seems cheap to buy a close election" but it sounds like somebody in the CPS was way ahead of me

"Politics is not a game" is becoming the go-to line for when their own game-playing gets called out.

Meaningless hardly covers it.

There should be a tougher penalty than this, the seat should be invalidated and put out to by-election.

they may yet be

"Given the range of technical errors made by a number of political parties and campaign groups, there also needs to be a review of how the Electoral Commission's processes and requirements could be clarified or improved."

"Your honour, given that other people have broken the law in the past I think we should change the law."

This first surfaced a while ago, thought it had been forgotten about, as I'm sure the Tories had, but looks like the Old Bill might have been working on it all along.

No wonder the police were complaining about being dangerously underfunded the other week.

re: nostalgia and taking back control

happiness depends not on your circumstances but how your circumstances compare with your expectations. I think perhaps the biggest driver of the lingering crisis of national identity lies in how the way the country feels about its future has changed. to look back now on the 60s is to have it backwards. this isn't the future people expected, no one saw it coming, it doesn't even have an architect. to the extent that looking at things in terms of these very general underlying sentiments makes any sense - poignant pause - the EU has been a scapegoat at times, onto which all the unease and uncertainty people have felt with the future over the last 40 years has been projected. the future of the EU was always deliberately and necessarily vague, I think ppl underestimated how unappealing those features were to the british public

it's not a coincidence that ppl like me & the rest of lefty ilx who would feel more unease at reverting to the past also have no real positive sense of national identity or a national future. there is something to the point about being a citizen of nowhere, it also makes it v difficult for the left to sell anything as part of any coherent vision at a national level

couple of interesting things in this (interview with bill rodgers, the member of the gang of four who no one can ever remember)

http://www.newstatesman.com/2016/01/bill-rodgers-it-s-very-difficult-very-painful-leave

not the we-were-right-it-was-painful stuff (you were wrong, i'm glad it was painful, at least for you, bill) but his comments on what the party was always like -- just constant internal arguments since the 1950s, as bad then as now, and (implied) a succession of solutions which, as means to unite successfully, just didn't take (there was a backlash against wilson as against blair)

but also -- against this -- his apparent ultimate belief in the lasting resilience of the party

ogmor otm in the post above btw

I ask myself when the Blairites modernized the constitution - abolition of Clause 4 etc - did they leave anything that resembles a set of core beliefs? a broad coalition of interests is one thing, but without core aims and beliefs what do get? Electability?

I don't buy vague comparators to the status quo as aims or beliefs btw - "fairer", gtfo

The Labour Party is a democratic socialist Party. (This is either untrue or a lot of members, including the majority of the PLP, don't belong here.) It
believes that by the strength of our common
endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone (meaningless rhetorical platitude),
so as to create for each of us the means to realise
our true potential (meaningless ontological platitude) and for all of us a community in
which power, wealth and opportunity are in the
hands of the many not the few (many/few is sufficiently vague but I struggle to think of many recent policies that aim in this direction) ; where the rights we
enjoy reflect the duties we owe (meaningless authoritarian platitude) and where we live
together freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and
respect. (KUMBAYA)

there are no politics in the Labour Party's Aims and Values, good work everybody

clause four: "To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service"

there's a bit of fluffle here -- "most equitable… possible", "best obtainable" -- but on the whole it's admirably direct, and i LOOOOVE the phrase "workers by hand or by brain" (and also think it was politically important, insisting on a sense of equality that 's badly gotten away from us)

adopted 1918, 99 years ago

yeah exactly. I'd forgotten/didn't know that Clause 4 was rewritten rather than scrapped, but the comparison between the 2 tells you everything about the party from the death of Smith on. it also says to me that people like Rodgers were never honest adherents of the party's core aims - they were the entryists all along

Fabians innit (but they were there from the start): party was always an uneasy coalition (background as much in Methodism as Marxism blah blah)

lol this i did NOT know till just now: "The Fabian Society was named [“]in honour of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (nicknamed "Cunctator", meaning the "Delayer"). His Fabian strategy sought gradual victory against the Carthaginian army under the renowned general Hannibal through persistence, harassment, and wearing the enemy down by attrition rather than head-on battles"

that bit I did know

I guess I'm being unfair to the old-school Fabians in that as far as I remember most of them were not opposed to the nationalized industries staying nationalized, at least pre-1979, so they could argue they did have a relationship to the original Clause 4.

second punic war was a topic of great interest to me as a child so was familiar with him but always assumed they'd got their name from elsewhere, that's curious, kind of a great way to troll the revolutionary left

something something "rivulets of blood"

main SDP planks were europe, arguments over how the leader was selected (not just over union involvement, tho they thought this was too great), and distrust of tony benn

(haha this makes them sound much more justified than they were)

privatisation was not something they were actively pushing or against -- in the sense that being pro it wasn't why anyone split w/labour i wouldn't say

no, that would be how I remember it - but I feel like the SDP rapidly ditched any interest in socialism, democratic or otherwise

and as I say, the old Clause 4, even the current version, essentially state "this is a party for people who believe in a socialist economy". love it or leave it imo

Rdogers talks abt leaving entirely in terms of pain -- meaning the sundering of friendships and professional relationships as much as anything -- but another aspect of party-quitting and floorcrossing which people don't talk much about is political and moral disorientation. You've been surrounded for many years with people you sometimes agree with and sometimes quarrel with, and you use the fact that you compromise with them sometimes or refuse as a kind of moral compass. These are people you know, well, so you know what it means to agree with them, and to disagree.

Once you quit the rooms they're in and enter new ones -- at least once you're past a certain age -- you find you don't have access to that collective moral compass you had learned to trust (even when you disagreed with most of your fellows). I think people -- even really strong-minded people -- who walk away because "the party has left them" or whatever are often afterwards much more bewildered and manipulable than they admit (or recognise).

Not applying any of this understanding to Dr David Owen, mind you. He's an egomaniac arsehole who I loathe unreasonably more than any other politician to this day.

i LOOOOVE the phrase "workers by hand or by brain" (and also think it was politically important, insisting on a sense of equality that 's badly gotten away from us)

Ralph Miliband had a thing or two to say about this (condensed version - "lol u crazy, workers by brain have never identified with workers by hand") and that's more of a problem now than it ever has been.

He was right, it was a romantic reach and possibly delusion -- but tossing the phrase aside addressed nothing.

(Mentioning Ralph M reliably reminds me of the moment in Miliband of Brothers where Ed bobs up to say "I'm a cyberpunk!" -- which somehow also has relevance here, AT LEAST TO ME)

always think of "workers by brain" as a pacifying shout out by the Webbs to their more genteel brothers and sisters in the nascent party

maybe that's what the webbs were thinking; to me it's an acknowledgment that intelligence isn't just a middle class attribute and that literacy used well is a political weapon

except expressed in a way that reminds me of little schoolkids in crocodile, hand in hand and pals 4evah

WTF George Osbourne named as the new editor of the Evening Standard?

total wtf

in practice i'm unsure what this means -- does he stay on as MP? given journalistic background (none?) is he figurehead or hands-on? -- but further grist to my feeling he was always less damaged than cam by brexit

(doesn't strike me as particularly helpful news for may)

these fuckin people

jesus

ok he's staying on as mp for tatton

He claims he'll continue as an MP but if I were Theresa May I'd basically force him to make a choice between continuing as an MP and editing the Standard. He'll use it to undermine her government on a daily basis and for her it would be a good way of getting rid of a potentially troublesome leadership challenger.

it'd be better for lolz if she doesn't manage to make him resign.

Interesting, a leftward turn at the sub-standard

"In 1993, Osborne intended to pursue a career in journalism. He was shortlisted for but failed to gain a place on The Times trainee scheme; Osborne also applied to The Economist, where he was interviewed and rejected by Gideon Rachman.[11] In the end he had to settle for freelance work on the Peterborough diary column of The Daily Telegraph"

^^^Wikip's current acid commentary on his background in journalism

fair play to nineties Telegraph for having that level of regional coverage tho- probably all been cut now

He'll use it to undermine her government on a daily basis and for her it would be a good way of getting rid of a potentially troublesome leadership challenger.

Under current conditions, why would he need to challenge May? He's been promoted above her.

Now just waiting for Gove to be officially editor of The Times.

unless there's already parliamentary rules against something like this, i'm not sure TM *can* require him to resign as an MP -- how would that work, esp.if he fought back?