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

SLab still polling p terribly i think but a metoo-inflected battle within the SNP between two of its neolib factions is going to do the corbs-mobile no harm

Unfortunately think Ruth Davidson will benefit much more than ScotLab from this.

can't believe you're implying that the SNP has a load of crypto-Tory support

it seems entirely obvious to me that there will be more women coming forward

i know a few women who worked with him in one capacity or another and every single one of them said he was a handsy creep, so yeah it seems inevitable to me

Richard Leonard doesn't seem right to me, not just the two first names either. I think I even prefer Ruth Davidson to him tbh. Maybe being a bit facetious here, but I can't imagine him spearheading a ScotLab resurgence any time soon.

If there was that much smoke around Salmond then it's very unlikely that other senior SNP members didn't know what he was up to, presumably before he stood for election in Westminster.

indeed

frank field gone

yay! hopefully Sheerman next.

Gone over anti-Semitism.

What's the real reason?

About to be deselected by his CLP?

that sounds likely.

Meanwhile Sky are happily reporting the news about the Sadiq Khan balloon while conveniently omitting to mention that the guy behind it is a massive antisemite and racist.

I'm not a fan of Khan, but props to him taking it in good humour.

Not death obv., what has never lived can never die.

Expect Field is boarding a ship for Whitby as we speak

Owen Jones is saying deselection. There were moves in that direction but I didn't get a sense of it actually happening.

I would like to express mild disappointment that the first post after devvvine's announcement wasn't maracas.

FF lost a no-confidence vote tabled by his constituency party a month or so ago (for voting with the government when he could have helped topple it)

I'm not a fan of Khan, but props to him taking it in good humour.

Also he knows the whole point of it was to troll him into accusations of hypocrisy after he let the Trump balloon go up, and he's not stupid enough to take the bait.

The Khan balloon sort of looks like it could've been designed by (a racist misogynist) David Shrigley.

wait shrigley is bad not good??

nashwan means *if* shrigley were bad not good in these ways he might have done this

Aye, I could've done words better there.

*deletes half-composed tweet*

Appearing at the state house in Nairobi in a joint press conference with May, Kenyatta was asked about an agreement to allow stolen funds in Britain to be returned to Kenyato fund health, education and other development projects

He said: “Last year, if you recall, the foreign secretary – then Boris, erm, Boris, Boris Johnson – the bicycle guy ... Boris Johnson was here with ambulances. These ambulances were bought courtesy of funds that had been seized, returned and utilised to buy ambulances which were distributed across the country.

“I believe this only strengthens that and the ability of our two countries and legal systems to be able to work together to ensure that any assets that may have been acquired in the United Kingdom – that are associated with corruption or any other such crime – are successfully returned and put to use for the benefit of the people of the republic.”

the bicycle guy because none of his own schemes were worth shit guy

Sheerman must be next, he's been on the counter-offensive to Momentum in the local rag and mysteriously an old racist tweet of his emerged the other day. Field was a mess on PM. He seems to think his massive majority in a Merseyside seat is down to him! Same with Sheerman, often people are saying he's just an old dodgy bastard that lives in a castle outside W Yorkshire, too busy with his lobbying/grifting income streams to gaf about Hudds. He pissed off the football fans by mistakenly cheering Sheff Wednesday's goal in the playoff game last year. And then he was criticising a proposed safe-standing area at Leeds Rd. Every time he opens his mouth something either completely wrong or bullshit comes out.

Field isn't entirely wrong, brand recognition counts for a lot amongst the bovine end of the electorate.

altho on his Five Live interview he didn't seem to appreciate the irony of complaining about people being allowed to rejoin Labour after standing against them in earlier elections, and threatening to run as an independent at the next one.

i'm high fiving TM on her latest dance moves, there's something there.

I feel a lot of empathy with socially awkward weirdos, but alas this one has long since crossed the rubicon, and would love to see her dancing off a bridge tbh.

simon danzcuk got just 883 votes when he stood as an independent against labour in 2017 -- field's been in place for a lot longer and probably will garner some residual personal loyalty but the "brand recognition" is as often as not the party rather than the person

I know in Hudds there has been a lot of ppl voting for the Labour brand, rather than the MP, and getting increasingly vocal about how the Sheerman brand makes entering that voting booth and voting in his name feel like an act of trudging through deep puddles of vomit.

Most people in Vauxhall have been voting Labour through very gritted teeth (I was going to say "for many years" but I don't know how many people who live in Vauxhall have lived there for a very long time. Vanishingly few, I'd imagine)

"Most people in Vauxhall have been voting Labour through very gritted teeth"

sometimes imitation is the most sincerest form of empathy :p

LOL @ Emily Maitlis' entirely balanced coverage of Frank Field's resignation on Newsnight.

great show of unity from the party members there "refusing to talk to each other directly"

tbf I'd refuse to talk to Chris Williamson directly.

what an absolute cunt he is. He makes me want to dance with Theresa May.

Has anybody ever seen Theresa May clapping on the backbeat? Thought not.

— Richard Williams (@rwilliams1947) August 30, 2018

tfw when you're being interviewed about swimming but really want to talk about making @jeremycorbyn PM 💖🌹 pic.twitter.com/L1L0UZ10bR

— Left Design (@UK_LDC) August 29, 2018

love this autistic guy and his companion!

Good work that man

fantastic.

The new centrist party, United For Change, has apparently split into two smaller centrist parties before launch.

Interviewee on Today just stated that Labour had "become the nazi party" and was not challenged at all about this.

ffs if journalists have to challenge interviewees' every self-evidently true assertion they'll never get anything done

Rusbridger's long read on who broke the news fleetingly making one nostalgic for ten years ago again :/

It does feel like we're trapped in a spiral where the media have cried wolf on Corbyn so many times that when something of substance crops up - as it did last week - you get a load of twats basically saying 'there is no antisemitism, it's all a conspiracy', which is just profoundly unhelpful. You only need to look across the Atlantic to see what happens when someone genuinely malevolent works out how to turn that to their advantage.

Like virtually every major institution in Britain has let people down over the last decade or more, and the current crisis is in a big way a crisis of institutions, and there are very good reasons why we're now such a low-trust society. The question of how those institutions rebuild that trust is a massive one, because some of the people that flourish in the wreckage are much worse.

I would 100% love to see a by-election in Field's constituency though, by all accounts he's just a terrible, lazy constituency MP, doesn't even live there etc etc. He would be comprehensively clowned and that would make this all worthwhile.

it doesn't help when everyone inc BBC is reporting that Field resinged because of AS - fact - when everyone knows he is so far to the right on immigration, that this holds no water at all.