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

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/10/windrush-people-wrongly-deported-jamaica-criminal-offence

After a lifetime out of the country he had no ties in Jamaica. As a child in the UK he remembers being abused in the streets. “I was called black monkey, asked if I came on the banana boat, and told go back home,” he says. Back in Jamaica he is seen as an alien. “I’ve been called names – deportee, foreign. I’ve been threatened. I often feel frightened.”

another Amelia Gentleman Windrush piece that illustrates Javid lip service hasn't made fuck all difference to the plight of those in the stateless hell the Home Office has dumped them into.

Harry Cole has spent so long trying to be a dark haired Poundland Boris and his wife was just like “why have the high street knock off when I can get the real thing” tragic https://t.co/719G30b1cM

— Congolesa Rice (@judeinlondon2) September 10, 2018

this has made my day.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DmuMIprWwAA6v2m.jpg

insert your own ironic star wars quote here i'm so fucking tired

https://i.redditmedia.com/-q0FDtkJotzhbeWYt91H1Qd06foQI6bgN8UVhstpRUU.jpg?w=431&s=eecf13941c4a40b623f1f04f0f990543

the force .. is weak as piss in this one.

my favourite part of the original trilogy is when luke agrees to share power with the emperor and then lets the emperor cut a swathe of destruction across the galaxy while luke hops anxiously from foot to foot in the background looking upset

can never decide if stuff like this is because of politicians being idiots or politicians believing the electorate are idiots

I couldn't remember that cosy coalition with vader bit of the plot, so they could exercise a non-existent "moderating influence" on him. "Here's the deal, you obliterate as many planets as you like, as long as we get plastic bag bill through parliament".

this just in: quinoa-eating labour are fucked, electorate says in shock new research

Labour has evolved from being the party of casseroles and bingo to the party of quinoa and student protests, according to research with swing voters in marginal constituencies.

Political analysts from the consultancy firm Britain Thinks carried out a pair of focus groups with swing voters from two marginal constituencies, Crewe and Thurrock and, separately, polled 2,000 people nationwide.

Participants in the focus groups, which in Crewe were 18-44 year olds, and in Thurrock, older voters, repeatedly mentioned the fancy grain quinoa when asked what food best represented the Labour party of 2018.

The Britain Thinks director, Deborah Mattinson, said there had been a consistent message from many of the voters they interviewed.

“It was so striking that what people said to us was: Labour used to be working class, it used to be a pie and a pint – it’s now a protesting student. It used to be someone playing the bingo; now it’s someone going on a demo,” she said.

The much larger-scale polling, carried out last week, underlined those perceptions and sounded a warning that taking a definitive position on Brexit could hurt Labour’s standing.

Voters were asked whether Labour represented a series of different groups well or badly. The net balance said the party did a good job of representing the working class, at 25%, and fell below that for “people who weren’t born in the UK”, at 27%. A balance of just 17% felt the party was good at representing “traditional Labour voters”.

A typical comment from one participant in Crewe was “I think they’re trying to appeal to literally anyone now”.

labour supporters historically v much opposed to protest, of course

turns out that this whole article is tendentious nonsense

(1)One single participant in a "Britain Thinks" focus group in Crewe said Labour had gone from "Pie & a Pint" to "Quinoa" (tbh they sound like a very Waitrose LibDem ) this was transformed by the Guardian into "research with swing voters". pic.twitter.com/EQrPYomh6r

— Solomon Hughes (@SolHughesWriter) September 11, 2018

shocking

they must have some posh foodbanks in Crewe if working class scratters have heard of quinoa, sort it out Tories!

the net balance said the party did a good job of representing the working class, at 25%, and fell below that for “people who weren’t born in the UK”, at 27%

I'm probably misunderstanding what net balance means but how is 27% below 25%?

they must have some posh foodbanks in Crewe if working class scratters have heard of quinoa, sort it out Tories!

Ditto some old biddy in Thurrock.

The stench of bullshit is totally humming off that survey obvs.

A typical comment from one participant in Crewe was “I think they’re trying to appeal to literally anyone now”.

Brilliant.

At the Economists for Free Trade launch where they have supplied this handy guide to dealing with a no-deal Brexit. Glad that’s sorted. pic.twitter.com/hTJPoMy3Bu

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) September 11, 2018

phew, glad that's sorted

the thread that follows is full of gems

eg

Jacob Rees-Mogg praises the two “towering” figures of Boris Johnson and David Davis for attending the event and then adds “and of course we also have Steve Baker.”

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) September 11, 2018

Here's the previous draft... pic.twitter.com/rBgtxQ8oIh

— chrispaston (@chrispaston) September 11, 2018

Also just in case you thought that was cherry picking:

https://www.twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1039496424206094336

A lot of it appears to be stupid, smug and flaunting a first-class education, IE has JRM written all over it.

It is odd that someone in the survey, who thinks Labour are getting too refined for them, should mention quinoa -- I am a middle-class metropolitan Labour voter and I still don't even know what quinoa is.

it is cutting-edge analysis:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dm1PBV0W4AEPM1Z.jpg

If it’s anything like the standard focus group, some bright spark will have made a list of terms and invited respondents to choose from that list, which will also have glib summaries of what is meant by each item.

thx for that heartening skip down twitter wasteman memory lane mark

gotta catch em all

"I am a middle-class metropolitan Labour voter and I still don't even know what quinoa is."

I'll give you a brief quinoa lesson here, Pinefox. It's basically absolutely minging winter hen feed or something, that even the very posh raw vegetable eating vegetarian Stafford Cripps had never heard of!

This guardian ridiculousness is mainly of interest to me as another illustration of the country's terrible relationship to food.

the wilful philistinism annoys me these days. And I don't mean Jamie Oliver's mediocre recipes. But for 3 decades I was guilty of terrible cooking skills and a terrible relationship to food. But you need time and space to sort these things out, and isn't just a working class thing. I was talking to a high faluting head practitioner the other day, who confessed that she hasn't a clue about cooking and just gets ready-meals and take-aways mainly. This quinoa thing is more disingenuous bollox, the truth is much more complex, as usual.

"croissant-munching, latte-sipping": instances of misconceived media-class self-loathing ITT

i don't think having a complex sociopolitical relationship to food is a peculiarity of the UK in 2018, and neither do i think that there are cultures that (have) live(d) in Adamic oneness with their diet

taste is literally cultural

NV, I have moved back to the UK after spending whole adulthood abroad and the one great thing that's struck me is the bizarre relationship to food, it is a source of daily wonder, one day I will make a go of explaining why it's so strange if I can.

I realize that the cultural nature of relationships to food doesn't mean that the UK's isn't *particularly* weird or depressing, having thought about it

https://i2.wp.com/img.amazon.ca/images/I/51AUh8mrS3L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

We'd need to pick out oafish stuff like this Graun made-up story and the other things the croissant thread was meant to point at from the higher picture, maybe

higher? could've sworn I typed "bigger"

eating fresh food + that's in season + knowing what food is in season at that season is some extremely bourgeois and expensive endeavor in the UK in the way that it just isn't in lots of other countries. the uk is local shops in v poor areas that don't have a single actual vegetable for sale (this covers a lot of people and these are people who can actually afford to buy food for their families) and people eating quinoa and goji berries and raw juice at the other end (hardly anyone but gets talked about a lot) the middle ground is harrassed people with little time to do anything other than make ready meals. hardly anyone just has a normal healthy relationship to freshly available foods/kknows what food are in season or what goes with what.

we're not alone in this (dutch food for e.g. is probably even worse) but even yr average pole or german can discuss certain cuts of meat or sausages in the way that most brits are just clueless about.

Quinoa's nice

Rural people are really attuned to seasonality, though - and I think people are much more clued up about that than they were twenty years back (with the caveat that many of the people into it are middle-class consumers).

Corbyn is the first politician to enthuse my dad. He wouldn’t touch quinoa with a barge pole.

Very much a jewelled rice with saffron man. https://t.co/T160DKpeZd

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) September 11, 2018

Bulgur is much nicer though tbh

I always have lots of dry bulgur in my stores <<< posh as fuck!

i like how you can cook bulgur by just soaking it with hot water

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dmz4uv1XgAEwgln.jpg

after Lucy Powell's incoherent rambling about online closed groups "normalising extremism" and a need for CCP style internet censorship in the UK, it seems she's a member of some herself.

quite a selection of MPs putting forward that bill: lucy powell, nicky morgan, stella creasy, david lammy, luciana berger, jess phillips, jacob rees-mogg, anna soubry

Online echo chambers are normalising and allowing extremist views to go viral unchallenged. These views are spread as the cheap thrill of racking up Facebook likes drives behaviour and reinforces a binary worldview. Some people are being groomed unwittingly as unacceptable language is treated as the norm. Others have a more sinister motive.

do you condemn garu g