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

From what I've heard, her son didn't get into Stoke Newington School despite living in the catchment (it has always been seriously oversubscribed because it's a great school) and was genuinely worried about getting jumped into gangs at the school where he was offered a place (hence DA's coded reference to 'black mums going above and beyond' so she wouldn't denigrate the LA). Her child was the one who asked to be sent to City of London (which has large numbers of boys on bursaries). I cannot say I've ever heard a single POC in her constituency slag her off for his choice - it's mostly liberal white men who already hate her for being insufficiently attentive to whatever their needs are this week.

This is a bit of a left-twitter joke explained but its hilarious: https://anomiegeographie.wordpress.com/2017/03/27/the-jolyoncene/

Beyond that I love this observation:

A decade ago, Alastair Campbell stalked Labour HQ behind the scenes, while Jeremy Corbyn spoke on a platform at the end of a march down Whitehall against Labour foreign policy in Iraq. At a protest on 25th March 2017, their positions were almost reversed, as Campbell took to the stage to oppose Brexit. British centrists have had to ‘go activist’ to defend their inheritance.

xxp even aside from the ppl who really hate her and rant about her on twitter etc, there does seem a more widespread tendency for ppl to treat her as a joke, or obviously second rate, which I think is unjustified. (which is not to critisise anyone here who's not a fan, but she definitely gets treated differently to other politicians). I do wonder what would have happened if she had stood for the Lab leadership in 2015 rather than Corbyn - if she'd been elected I think she'd have made a better fist of being leader, not sure how she'd have overcome the ‘’most hated politician in the country‘’ factor (also, even more hated than Corbyn in the PLP). I think she would have been able to present herself as a truly 'different' type of party leader, which I'm not sure is really something that Corbyn has done to most of the country, despite all the talk.

like, I don't think most voters see Corbyn as radically different from the average out of touch politician, they just see him as an average out of touch politician but more incompetent and useless

Half of what I say is meaningless
But I say it just to reach you Jolyon

there does seem a more widespread tendency for ppl to treat her as a joke, or obviously second rate, which I think is unjustified.

Yeah I think the years as the Daily Politics' jolly comedy leftist have not helped here.

The sympathetic profile of Abbott that I read (in the New Statesman I think? Might even have been linked to here...) portrayed her sending her kid to private school as something she agonised about for a long time (yes I am aware that she would say that) and ended up doing as her "one concession" to her private life vs her work in politics. It's obviously not great but I think as far as blemishes go 99% of Westminster must have worse in their records.

Most of rage against Corbyn from right wing media (o hai tautology) is less about labour's poor polling, which they don't give a fuck about, and more about how a left wing leadership of the opposition means voices like Abbott's cannot be marginalized so easy.

This Week is so unwatchably bad. but was it quite as bad when she was on it? maybe this is my memory playing tricks, but seem to remember slightly less screen time devoted to broadsheet columnists gooning around in stupid costumes in the 2000s incarnation of the show. (I blame twitter for this hateful capering, tbh)

'Baader-Meinhof effect''thing is otm re:Jolyons

I used to think Abbott was a bit clumsy in presentation of policy even tho I've always broadly agreed with her. she's fully deserving of respect now for the reasons listed above, and the best of it is that I think she's gained this respect by just continuing to be honestly herself.

schools are a v tough issue. I don't think I could've sent my children to a private school but i'll happily accept that other people may have reasons where they feel they have to

DA is extremely smart and admirably resilient, and a good example i think of a politician knowing how to bide their time, until events suddenly and unexpectedly turn their way -- her TV slot legitimating andrew neil was frustrating bcz it looked like a pol who'd always risked being treated as a novelty and a pet (inc.by her own party) willingly letting themselves be turned into a pre-shelved* he-said-she-said cartoon for the crappy purposes of a very bad kind of telly, but in retrospect it maybe wasn't the worst place to be sat when the time came and the moment called?

corbz by contrast also bided his time -- stepping up to the plate when the time came, a move i would not have credited a few months before and respect him for -- but is maddeningly diffident abt the powerplays he currently has a (surely one-time only) chance to unleash: i recognise that this scepticism abt power is built into his brand of politics (socialism-is-people's-democracy bennism)**, but if the PLP hasn't actually defeated him it has certainly harried him to a standstill, and this is partly his fault***

*(DA's long game of course offers succour to my portillo's-VERY-long-game theory)
**(i remain a benn-sceptic: a poshboy westminster insider playing at -- for him -- near-lifelong easy-option dissidence, justifying his cincinnatian quietism by handwaving the unreadiness of the masses to shift towards action) (the bennite failure to address the issue of europe except via head-in-the-sand refusenik stubbornness as a species of refusal to address the problems of the aftermath of empire: benn was a pedant about the UK's constitutional exceptionalism, but this exceptionalism hardwon via the blood and labour of the non-UK labouring classes, first as slaves, then as subjects of the empress, by which i mean the subjects-without-the-vote)****
***if benn was cincinattus, corbz seems to be fabius***** cunctator, committing to a win by waiting out his opponents
****i don't deny this stuff is hard to think through properly -- hence so many leftists either thinking it through badly and glibly, or not thinking it through at all
*****irony alert, but his approach to the Art50 vote is an EXACT mirror of harman's to the workfare vote

"Lol where did all the Jolyons come from?" jaunty left-wing Twitter is hugely annoying at the best of times but that link Xyzzz posted is a lot more than that and I think he undersells it if anything.

(post structure^^^ reminds me that i invented the tweet-storm here on ilx, long years b4 twitter even existed :D)

the jolyon thing appears to run into a wall the moment we recall that corbz is (a) called jeremy, (b) has a brother called piers

(cf also jarvis "common people" cocker: this isn't a posh-people tic, it's a teachers-have-children tic)

class ressentiment's rarely a good look but sometimes yr kneejerk defense mechanisms lie deep

haha as soon as i posted "teachers-have-children" as a semi-defence i started thinking of the teachers' kids at the various schools i attended: almost invariably irritating spoiled arseholes

of course from a certain angle this genre also includes me

being christened James as the son of an upper working class Dad with aspirations for his kids who bought me a fecking briefcase when I started secondary school I learned a fair bit about the micro-distinctions of class and the cruelties they entail

lesson 1: find the kid one notch posher than you and try make him the scapegoat

I am speaking from near-complete ignorance, as I was paying more attention to another country's politics for most of her career, but I'd be surprised if a black female leftist could rise far in the Labour party, particularly starting in 1987, without some leverage on the level of "I'm on TV a lot".

all this opprobrium towards teachers' kids and easy-option dissident poshboys is most upsetting

the regular-bloke line on DA is that she is an anti-white racist fwiw, and that is unfortunately not going to change

i was lucky namewise: i arrived the year all the many marks sprang up like skeletons from the hydra's teeth (in one maths class there were five of us)

(i have never worked out who the kylie-esque celebrity patient zero was who encouraged all our parents admiringly to unleash the markspasm -- before the 60s it was quite a rare name)

Jeremy is a common-ish name, no? I sorta heard of Jo Maugham before but I didn't know it was short for Joylon?

I have much to learn about the UK before it breaks up

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/28/meps-veto-brexit-early-cut-off-date-european-parliament-freedom-movement

Jeremy is not uncommon but still connotes a level of poshness in England I think

not that connotation is fair or rational but

Lolyon

Right, I suppose if I don't hear enough people being called [insert name here] = posh. So Joylon, Gideon. On and on. xp

being christened James as the son of an upper working class Dad with aspirations for his kids who bought me a fecking briefcase when I started secondary school I learned a fair bit about the micro-distinctions of class and the cruelties they entail

See you, Jimmy. Is James hoity toity?

kids at school seemed to think so, a bit

tho of course at secondary school you mostly get called by yr surname or variant thereof

the briefcase was the killer, what were they thinking? me and my brother still commiserate with each other about this

James not posh where I come from, despite all those kings.

for me jolyon invariably brings this (annoying but harmless) fellow to mind:
http://en.tintin.com/images/tintin/persos/lampion/C2042D1_en.jpg

(in OG Hergéian French ^^^he's called SÉRAPHIN LAMPION, which i can't begin to parse classwise -- meanwhile the only other travelling sales in fiction that i can recall is dorothy sayers' MONTAGUE EGG)

IMO most of this kind of material stems from dubious generalisation out of reasonably accurate first-hand empirics

xp

my dad once told me that the scottishness of mine and my brother's names was deliberate, but he never really elaborated

i think nowadays having parents give you a briefcase to take to school is grounds for legal emancipation

To return to Diane Abbott on This Week, her Oxbridge chumminess w/ Portillo was nauseating enough but worse was she was never sharp enough to get the better of Portillo and Neil, who, week after week, ran rings round her. Two against one was unfair, of course, but her choice to pick up the appearance fees.

tho of course at secondary school you mostly get called by yr surname or variant thereof

imo this is v antiquated now, and therefore posh. when i was at high school the fact that at my friend's high school they called each other by their surnames (along with the fact that the rugby team were socially at the top of the pecking order) was the damning evidence that despite both being comps, his school was way posher than ours and basically a private school

but yes > most of this kind of material stems from dubious generalisation out of reasonably accurate first-hand empirics < is definitely true, suspect a lot of this stuff is v localised

"Lol where did all the Jolyons come from?" jaunty left-wing Twitter is hugely annoying at the best of times but that link Xyzzz posted is a lot more than that and I think he undersells it if anything.

― Matt DC, Tuesday, 28 March 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah its a good short piece around technocrats trying to do something like activism. The weird thing is actually those two poles seem to talk to each other in Greece under the Syriza banner, until it all fell to pieces. The name is a side-issue but it will probably dominate and overwhelm any of the serious point its trying to make.

Jo Maugham has already replied "the left can make fun of my name but I'll go ahead and change things/be the opposition" or some such. Twitter far-left mirrors his tweets with @dril posts, and in the meantime the world keeps falling apart.

The Mark thing is absolutely mums with a Richard Burton crush c. Cleopatra who did not want to go with Richard as a name choice.

I'm v antiquated tbf ogmor :)

week after week

have to look a bit askance at someone who was watching week after week -- very first question come my revolution will be about thursday-night TV viewing, anyone admitting to the BBC's politics output will have their head on a pole so fast their eyes will still be widening

xp cleopatra came out when i was 3 so this seems implausible to the point of being uncanny

Abbott's choice to take an unprecedented opportunity to be a regular visible presence in the media as someone like her - wouldn't fault that for a second (also bearing in mind she was replaced by another old white geezer).

Following Diane Abbott's departure from the show, Neil would joke that her leadership bid and later appointment as Shadow Minister for Public Health were part of her "insatiable lust for power".

On the rare occasions now that she makes an appearance on the show, Neil introduces her by saying "And back by absolutely no public demand whatsoever..."

Typical Beeb bias

Duncan Smith did not specify what “red tape” he wanted to abolish, but the Telegraph published a panel citing the EU working time directive as a law it would like to abolish, as well as regulations relating to bananas and to the great crested newt.

have to look a bit askance at someone who was watching week after week

This from the guy who watches The Good Old Days every week :-o Week after week was a slight exaggeration and it was more watchable with DA on it as opposed to Alan Johnson, who really was kicked about like old fitba' by Portillo and Neil.

i remember arguing when galloway went on big brother that the idea behind the idea -- that modern politics very much needs to know how to work the seam of popular slebhood -- was by no means a bad one: the gorgeous one is and always was a degraded wasteman cockfarmer obviously, and his specific working of said seam developed not necessarily to his advantage, as they say…

but look where we are now, bigger-picturewise

the question has become: which formerly indispensible institutions and/or estates can you now and in the near future effectively end-run?

xp the good old days is on a FRIDAY tapping_head_wisely.gif

Mark's long post with lots of *** notes above reminds me of Robin Carmody.

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