the day after the deadline: can the union survive brexit and other deep questions

colville has shat the bed again

For when it gets deleted pic.twitter.com/ojV8MoIesM

— Elliot Bowker (@Wlleiotl) February 22, 2018

In before the bloc

jesus that immigration article

I don’t think this is a mistake. I think they are deliberately doing it.

otm

xps: in my left circles this commentary is highly visible but they include people in the anti raids network who come out to protest and challenge all immigration checks & raids (@AntiRaids if you want to boost their signal, which IMO you should)

robert colvile is very bad at this

that immigration article sv posted, holy shit

amazing that in 2018 the uk is still finding new ways to squeeze fresh new horrors out of colonialism

Colvile doesn't have to be good at it. the most depressing - literally depressing - thing about looking at politics in social media now is this witless back and forth of grandstanding hysteria, not from the attention-seekers themselves but from the cadres of sharebots that follow them. i don't know exactly how what happens on the internet reflects the way people think about politics in general but it seems like there's no lie, simplification or conspiracy theory that won't get eagerly latched onto by whichever team wants to believe it.

i know it's old news but i've reached tipping point of reading this insanity this week, probably in the wake of the last mass shooting in the US but there's no barrier any more, just culture warring sea-lions honking along

otm, unfortch

i guess it's funny really because this is the culmination of the great lie of representative democracy, neo-Classical orators seeking to change each other's minds with the logic of their arguments, a polity built on rational debate hohoho

diane abbott’s immigration speech yesterday was class

What a truly foul ambush it is to pull the rug from under someone when they've been here since the 50's. That has all the hallmarks of May's vindictiveness as HS + PM.

an injustice that could be brushed away in a minute if it was a real oversight or unintended consequence...therefore, it's not unintended. the people responsible for this aren't people.

i actually do think the rightwing press has been rocked back much more firmly than it expected this week -- the botscape is something else of course, tho i am much less convinced than some on the borads that its effect is more than marginal

(and the counter to this is to ensure that political victories are not merely marginal: rovian 51% is a good tactic but a terrible strategy, and liberals and the left should not settle for it)

this is the real kicker in that piece

Howard, McIntyre and Griffith all have a legal right to stay in the UK because the 1971 Immigration Act gave people who had already settled in Britain indefinite leave to remain, but all have struggled to gather enough documents to convince the Home Office that they arrived before the cut-off point.

quite literally guilty until proven innocent

i genuinely don't know how the meme landscape reflects the general political (un)conscious mark, this is partly where the doubt and depression comes from i guess

http://www.dorseteye.com/north/articles/you-need-to-read-the-letter-from-corb-s-lawyers-to-ben-bradley-tory-mp

(pleased to note dorset eye using the approved ilx contraction there)

would have preferred 'absolute boy' instead, 8/10

ben bradley tho eh, what a cunt

NV: no i don't know either and i haven't weighed on US threads abt bcz i don't really have anything like a feel for the presence of this phenom in offline life -- i'm not sure anyone, not least bcz the US is just so vast (population 320 million)

the uk is not the us though: uk's primary amplifying puke-funnels are still its the daily newspapers, and i i really do feel that they're in disarray and retreat, numbers-wise and in terms of competence (as i said upthread, i'm inclined to read andrew neil's response as professional disgust at the latter, as much as anything: in his day, the print media knew how to line up and unleash a smear, these millennial hacks tho… )

i actually do think the rightwing press has been rocked back much more firmly than it expected this week

How so?

their primary tactic is and always has been bullying: getting inside the heads of those they go after

i don't seen any evidence of that having traction this time -- precisely the opposite, they've picked a fight (on very poorly sourced grounds) and their victim is taking the fight back to them

this kind fightback is not unheard of on individual terms -- various celebrities have sued for apology and recompense down the years -- but i don't really remember the last time it happened politically

more exactly: i don't really remember the last time it happened in above-the-line politics, obviously things like successul strikes by tubetrain drivers have been undertaken in the teeth of full media hostility

Was Neil editor of the Sunday Times when they made an almost identical claim against Michael Foot and he rinsed them for hundreds of thousands in damages? He left in 1994 and the smear campaign was run in the same year but I’m not sure whether it was after his departure.

yeah, anything other than craven capitulation to the murdoch empire from politicians is surprising so an actual 'fuck you' from corbyn is v welcome

xp I suppose the difference between this and EdMilli standing up to them after that disgusting article about his father is that the alternative channels of communication available to Corbs and chums are much more viable / potent now?

The extent to which the right wing press in general have been rocked back is something I'm not so sure about, while fully accepting that the industry in general is rocky / crumbly at the moment.

i think at the very least it seems less likely than ever that people's minds might have been changed by an allegedly 'bombshell' story about the leader of the opposition, and maybe even had the opposite effect in readers who might have seen the v thin gruel of the story for what it was

re EdM: partly that but partly corbs is just in a much stronger position politically, in parliament and within the party (and also i think less inclined to be hazed and fazed by such things)*

not^^^ a hit on EdM himself, who quite early on took a firm line against murdoch (re leveson and other things), but the team surrounding him -- and the party as a whole -- was much more inclined to be spooked (and of course he ended up doing that silly photo-shoot holding a copy of the sun: argument pro, a lot of labour voters buy the sun, it was reaching out to them not murdoch; argument con, doesn't need making here)

*one of JC's less-sung strengths is -- counterintuitively until you think about it a bit -- that he's spent a LOT of time on the far left, where things get VERY HEATED between those who (practically speaking) ought to be political compadres: and he's very good at staying in with all (well, most of) the squabbling factions… i think that speaks to a useful unflappablity which scales up and outwards

"is that the alternative channels of communication available to Corbs and chums are much more viable / potent now?"

It might sound harsh but EdMili's pusillanimous Tory lite manifesto and complete lack of conviction didn't help matters.

also not to be sniffed at: JC and some of his trench-mates were fiercely under similar guns from the same forces three decades ago, and look, they came thru that trial by fire and they're still here and basically (on many points) vindicated

As has been pointed out - the attempt to generate a treason narrative under the guise of just asking questions, the foregrounding of circus animals like Rod Liddle, the orchestrated anti-trans campaign in The Times, the relentless focus on the danger posed by academics, etc, looks like an attempt to import a US-style culture war to a country that, by and large, doesn't give a damn about any of it. It's a Tory press out of ideas and aware that it's losing the centre throwing whatever they have left at the wall in the hope that something sticks.

The area of print media I've been researching for the last two years -- the music press lol -- is a vanguard microcosm for the problems the "grown-up" end of it is increasingly facing: quite apart from the difficulties making it pay these days (the sense that advertising is a mirage combined with the sense that many advertisers don't much want to be associated with ruthlessly nasty divisive stuff), it's no longer anything like the escalator it was 30 or 40 years for smart kids of all classes to hone their craft -- and their grasp of the industry -- from the ground up. The regional titles have mostly collapsed into syndicated sameness -- certainly they employ far fewer people. The people it still holds any realistic attraction for are (a) graduates that (b) fantasise about becoming pundits. And most don't -- and if they continue in the industry at all, half of them end up working on papers they basically despise, directed at readers they despise even more. As a profession it's never been exactly a stranger to the self-hatred that comes from abjured idealism, but it's no longer a profession that seems to offer very much to anyone who doesn't already hate themselves.

(Which is unfortunate, given the need for genuine well resourced investigative journalism.)

an escalator to hone your craft from the ground up: no this metaphor is not a bit mixed shut up

Yeah the thing about all this shop-a-snowflake culture war stuff from both the Tories and the press is that the country can be broadly divided into three groups:

- People it will really really fuck off and repel - (30%-40% of the country at least, many of whom might have been persuaded to vote Tory under Cameron)
- People who really, genuinely care (a tiny sliver of the country who all vote Tory anyway)
- People who don't give a flying fuck what goes on on university campuses and aren't in the slightest bit intimidated by Czechoslovakia in the 80s (literally everyone else)

The entire strategy (if you can call it that) is entirely based around fluffing that middle group, while actively putting off the much larger first group and having no effect whatsoever on everyone else. It's moronic, especially when you consider they could just be hammering them on the economy or printing bacon sandwich pictures or whatever.

This is all of course up against the wider background of collapsing trust in the media in general.

If anything they're actually compounding the error they made with all that 'Citizens of Nowhere, maybe killing foxes isn't that bad' guff before the election.

a *lot* of bacon-sandwich stuff was thrown at corbyn in the run up to the election (by which i mean goofy looking photos etc ): maybe without it he'd have won a resounding victory but i'm inclined to think that this stuff has sharply diminishing returns once voters begin to feel precarious, economically or politically -- chuckling at that kind of stuff and fashioning your politics accordingly now feels like a bit of a comfortable luxury tbh (which is maybe why it impresses the established london media classes so much more than anyone else, i don't know) (this is a hunch not an analysis)

It's also that they aren't especially bothered about alienating a generation who will never buy a newspaper but WILL hate-read stuff online. As a long-term strategy there are a few holes in it to say the least.

There was a v odd Tory boy on C4 the other day arguing that the worst deterrent for would be students was the 'scare-mongering' re fees as debt. I couldn't tell what his argument was besides perhaps 'look just embrace the debt and pay your way it will be fine you will probably stay too poor to pay much of it back anyway you freeloading poors'.

apropos my point abt the escalator i looked up rod liddle's background: two months older than me, son of a train driver, comp education, had a punk band called DANGERBIRD, joined the swuppies aged 16, began as a reporter on the south wales echo

the world is no longer this shape

stop making me think about rod liddle's shape

A punk band named after a Neil Young song, aye, right.

liddle feat

I appreciate that exit polls are the only ones that really count. But the numbers from that latest YouGov/Evening Standard London poll are looking like they are getting a thorough London routing in May. Some professor-wonk was saying even safe seats like Kensington and Chelsea can't be taken for granted post-Grenfell. I'm going to get some popcorn and good booze in for May 3rd.

He was living in Middlesborough as a teen so presumably this is the same Dangerbird:

https://www.discogs.com/Various-Teesside-Riot-Vol2-PunkIndie-1977-1982/release/8293056

They were no Adenoids of Glimf.

Roddle Lidl, the son of an engine driver who made a career of working for oily rags.

The local elections are by the looks of it going to be a disaster for the Tories.

It's been suggested the papers do want to ramp things up so that someone physically attacks Corbyn, which post-Jo Cox is more than possible. The Czech non-story is purely to harden the division, not about winning anyone over.

a *lot* of bacon-sandwich stuff was thrown at corbyn in the run up to the election (by which i mean goofy looking photos etc ):

I think this mostly had less traction in 2017 than it did in 2015 because both leaders were older and so the focus was different. May is clearly quite image conscious but Corbyn famously doesn’t give a shit about it and it’s one of the things that plays into his whole image of being unpretentious (if you like him) or a typical unwashed lefty (if you don’t).

One of my favourite anecdotes from the snap election book Betting the House was about Corbyn and Milne seeing the Sun’s polling day front page - they both burst out laughing. Miliband post leadership has taken a much tougher line on the press, but then he followed the party’s lead during his term which is why he went softly softly on it the whole time. Don’t want to scare the voters!

The main difference between the two is that Corbyn was coming in from decades on the back benches having supported a number of unpopular positions and as a result was much more inclined to do things his own way. Why shouldn’t he, he might think, he’d been elected by the membership with a huge mandate for being himself? Miliband had been in government as a minister and he’d based his approach on what he’d seen work successfully for others. They should have let him be himself.

Tomorrow's front page: Don't chuck Britain in the Cor-bin pic.twitter.com/43iypkcpwB

— The Sun (@TheSun) June 7, 2017

^ the polling day cover

Miliband being way more empathetic and generally likeable since giving up politics.

There's a lot in that category

Miliband is still an MP!