bojo is king, brexit is on, stuff is fvcked, tomorrow starts here -- new govt new thread new battle

she could have at least paid one to nom her!

Not all of them nominated a candidate for leader either; Kate Osamor didn’t nominate anyone.

that very reductive and stupid comment by Rayner the other day makes you wonder what it is like to be a black labour MP.

maybe just marginally better than being a conservative one?

There was a shouting match between RLB and Len McClusky a while back, apparently.

I genuinely thought I posted the Geller thing - it's a week old. Sorry for the Standard, but it has the better photo.

Uri Geller applies for No 10 job after Cummings' call for 'weirdos' https://t.co/9AyN0FaTX7

— Evening Standard (@standardnews) January 8, 2020

--

Yes Andrew I thought the Uri Geller thing was also posted a week ago I just made the point/joke in regards to the conversation you and gyac were having over Graeber's piece.

A backdrop of bureaucracy, complication. administration, and lack of accountability. A class of people that not only benefit from this and get paid more than we do but appear to actively enjoy the meetings where they discuss another wage freeze.

Yes and who drives this? Let's take the NHS as an example, as it's one of the areas where government has control of most of the levers, and where this care workers thing comes from in part.

- New Labour wants to invest huge amounts in healthcare, is aware that it will open itself up to the charge from the right that it's wasting huge amounts of money. The result is more 'accountability', the creation or expansion of a bureaucracy in order to demonstrate 'value'.

- Tories get in, are immediately, "look how much money we've been wasting on management - let doctors run the NHS" (Doctors: "hmmm has anyone asked us if we think this is a good idea?")

- Tiers of management go, budgets tightened, wages frozen, the same thing takes place across the public sector. Next up, someone's daughter needs a dialysis machine, oh shit there isn't one. Why not? "There's no money so we fired all the people whose job it is to ensure we have a dialysis machine", or even enough beds, the basic functions that ensure that things work properly. But the government continues to demand 'value' on every penny spent, so you need people to track that.

So you end up with this festering resentment, the health service isn't doing the job it's supposed to, front-line staff can't do their jobs properly, but they're wasting all this money on paperwork. Answer, more reorganisation, more bureaucracy. Why can't you just let the people who know what they're doing run it? The same thing happens across any organisation, public or private, above a certain size - if it isn't taxpayer accountability it's shareholder accountability or similar. The crucial point is that it's always being driven from above middle management layer, but it's helpful to create a despised class as a buffer between you.

So now that the Tories are finally in power after 23 years of Labour bureaucracy, how do they sustain themselves? Create chaos, then benefit from the resentment the chaos causes, because it's always someone else's fault. You're dealing with a group of voters who are, often, low-trust but also low-attention, not interested in detail. So the government will get Brexit done in a month, if things aren't going swimmingly after that, then it's the EU's fault, it was supposed to be oven-ready, now everyone's getting bogged down in trade deals and why isn't the country getting better? Blame the EU.

The problem with all this is that it works until the exact point until it doesn't. People were surprisingly willing to blame the bankers for the crash, until the expenses scandal, when it curdled into anger at the political class that let it happen. You can't keep passing the buck forever, because people are eventually going to see through it.

re: Graeber. It says a lot about Corbyn that he got a lot of anarchist types to fuck with voting at all (I don't know enough about Graeber though) and then as a vote for this kind of mild social democracy/regeneration of capitalism. A lot of the anarcho vote was one of 'let's get the state to stop killing people for five minutes'/stop the fash, but I don't know if that was his reasoning xp

I should probably finish Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules at some point.

Agree with that mostly but the Tories have only been in for a month! After over 4 generations of Labour rule at the national level, and in some places still at the local level, it may take a generation to fix what Corbyn and Tusk have engineered over the last quarter century.

They were more successfully at pinning austerity on Labour in 2019 than they were in 2016. Relying on people to see through it eventually may be a long game thing. Can they avoid accountability indefinitely? no. Can they avoid it for 5 years? Probably. 10? who knows.

What eventually will catch up with the Tories isn't this. Its the voters they abandoned in order to win this election (and possibly next). They've explicitly concentrated on voters that are electorally significant today, at the expense of voters that are electorally significant tomorrow (much as Labour did in the past, cf every think piece of the last month)

Also I forgot the bit where Corbyn literally held up a document saying the NHS was on the table in any US trade deal. The result was that people didn't believe him, or didn't give enough of a shit to let it affect their vote.

the electorate didn't even give a shit about skinny + hungry children at that time when ppl tend towards sentimentality.

those little fuckers aren't really hungry until they swelling with edema

"The problem with all this is that it works until the exact point until it doesn't."

Someone on twitter made a point that the cherry on top of the '97 Blair coalition was the UK crashing out of the ERM and the subsequent recession -- and that those people that voted Tory and went Lab in '97 were already down in approval terms by '98 or so in a lot of those areas.

So what is the event here where the Tories really can't blame it on someone else, what is the thing that will get people to vote Labour, and not to vote for things to be run differently, but to patch things up so things can go on as before? It could be a potential hard Brexit, it could be trade deals with the US going badly (China and India could be smoother as SV was saying a few weeks back)...or it could be people just getting poorer and managing the slow (and the key word is slow) decline in their own fortunes. New year's eve was very quiet in the pub I was at compared to last year. Not enough accoutants and lawyers and consultants doing so well, with a markedly reduced safety net to fall back onto if the line in the graph veers slowly downward.

xps - still thinking through this but it is a gap in Graeber's piece. The NHS does cut through, but does it? There is either a complacency over the NHS or maybe a lot of the public that have been let down over decades of deindustrialisation aren't bothered enough about free healthcare when so much else has crumbled. The Brexit dream will deliver something far more significant than the creation of the NHS from the rubble of actual war.

Also I am thinking the manager vs care worker dynamic I think works very much when talking about the Labour party membership but not so much in the rest of the country.

http://www.electionpolling.co.uk/battleground/targets/labour

Also look at the margins here, the idea that the Red Wall seats are probably gone forever now is defeatist nonsense.

Too right and I keep hearing it too.

Yes, it is. People keep saying that once voters go Tory it’s easier to keep voting that way, but I’m sure a lot of the numbers reflect a big drop in Labour turnout rather than wild enthusiasm for the Conservatives.

how many of those Red Wall seats are towns that will be beneficiaries of that £3.6 bn Towns Fund? Where I live is one of them and I'm betting it's still a top 5 worst shithole long after that fund has been pissed away.

There is either a complacency over the NHS or maybe a lot of the public that have been let down over decades of deindustrialisation aren't bothered enough about free healthcare when so much else has crumbled

A bit of both but probably more the former - a mixture of 'they wouldn't dare touch it / they wouldn't dare touch something that affects me' with not being able to imagine what it would be like with it gone. Complacency coupled with inability to imagine.

Also I am thinking the manager vs care worker dynamic

Its broader and less literal than that, the managers don't have to be in your place of work, the managers are everywhere, its the managers that made it that there's no one answers when you call the bank anymore. Its the managers who fucked up the last place you worked. and the one before that

the Red Wall seats are probably gone forever now is defeatist nonsense.

Red wall seats are far from gone, but prob need to differentiate between Red Wall seats (Preston, Blackburn) and RedGrey seats (Blackpool)

£3.6 bn Towns Fund?

thats goes straight into the hands of......bureaucrats and expenses

Appreciate the sensibilities of the creatures of the night may be a bit different, but lol, what the fuck Rentoul

It’s simply incredible that we have a national press that covers the full range of permissible opinion from “Immediately deport the foreigners” all the way to “Don’t call the man deporting the foreigners a baboon”, and nobody involved thinks this is weird or bad. pic.twitter.com/eSsDKW3MAc

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) January 15, 2020

"thats goes straight into the hands of......bureaucrats and expenses"

good job tbf - i find the prospect of improving/adding infrastructure to this shithole horrifying. it's shithole status is its main USP!

Also I forgot the bit where Corbyn literally held up a document saying the NHS was on the table in any US trade deal. The result was that people didn't believe him, or didn't give enough of a shit to let it affect their vote.

To paraphrase the Laura K response - 'sure, the document says what it says, but why would the government do anything that was unpopular?'. One thing that seems quite apparent is that it's extremely difficult for the left to turn fear into votes without the apparatus of the tabloid press behind them. Where a huge amount of the culture war stuff seems to have been effective is in seeding the idea that the left (or 'the youth ' in general) complains about everything and exaggerates how bad the situation is. The more focus there is on climate change, excess deaths under austerity, the danger to the NHS, the risks of no-deal Brexit, etc, the more you're going to run into a brick wall of 'well, i'm sure it won't be as bad as you're making out'.

Exciting news for @BooksSphere as the @LittleBrownUK imprint is set to publish a fiction début from @tom_watson —the former deputy leader of the Labour Party has penned a political thriller called The House, with co-writer @RobertsonImogen. More here: https://t.co/mJCiyQGHI0 pic.twitter.com/GTh3tsa9d9

— The Bookseller (@thebookseller) January 15, 2020

you spoil us Tom. I'm only just getting to grips with your diet book - it's all I've been eating since 5 minutes ago!

I guess he’d know all about ambition and betrayal.

he could have probably done with paying a bit more attention at the machiavelli finishing school for all he succeeded in gaining from 10 years of continuous plotting + backstabbing!

The more focus there is on climate change, excess deaths under austerity, the danger to the NHS, the risks of no-deal Brexit, etc, the more you're going to run into a brick wall of 'well, i'm sure it won't be as bad as you're making out'.

From people who would secretly like it to be a bit like that because they resent their parents for admonishing them as spoilt because they didn't fight in the war

Can't miss a target if you abolish a target. Christ. https://t.co/NXyGonbczH

— James B (@piercepenniless) January 15, 2020

Targets are made by managers and bureaucrats innit

I didn't realise how bad that had got till last year when I spent 2 and a half hours waiting for an ambulance that never came after alex had a bad epileptic fit and fell into a wall. If it wasn't for people bringing out a blanket and a cushion and an off duty nurse giving us a lift home it would have been a much more terrible experience.

Sure sure thing:

NEW: Lisa Nandy will strongly defend freedom of movement in a speech this afternoon, saying: "We should have been bold enough to defend free movement, and the opportunities and benefits it brings... I believe in free movement."

— Sienna Rodgers (@siennamarla) January 15, 2020

This crown ain't big enough for the both of Rigby and Kberg

@BethRigby
What is fascinating (and impressive) about Johnson - and reflected in his big election win - is the amount of clear water he’s put between his administration and the past 10 years of Conservative rule. The strategy is to always look forward, never look back #PMQs
12:09 PM · Jan 15, 2020

more reason that the UK is not the US - there is essentially no mainstream British publication which would be bold enough to say e. g. "the BBC has it in for Corbyn", despite ample evidence over four years. but one CNN debate and this is what The Nation runs with https://t.co/9QYFAozqqo

— ld 🐐 (@l_a_dunn) January 15, 2020

Jfc

Labour leadership contender Jess Phillips has called for a citizens’ assembly on how Britain should tackle climate change, to help restore trust in democracy. The public should be more directly involved in determining the policies Britain should adopt to tackle the climate crisis

— AirportWatch (@AirportWatch) January 15, 2020

i think it's gonna take more than that to restore faith in democracy tbh

Yeah we definitely need more posh focus groups that'll sort it out!

Maybe it's time for a comtade's assembly.. You're fired!

Citizen’s assembly worked in Ireland and I assume that’s where they got the idea from, but it wouldn’t work in this country.

referenda seem to work in Ireland as well...

that citizens assembly in full

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.dailymail.co.uk%2Fi%2Fnewpix%2F2018%2F05%2F14%2F16%2F4C3AA76D00000578-5727397-image-a-20_1526313276868.jpg&f=1&nofb=1

Checking in on that focus group and...

Christ pic.twitter.com/ZhnMLdRe3P

— How Upsetting (@HowUpsetting) January 13, 2020

Public participation in decision-making is potentially very good and important but this feels more like ‘i don’t have any policy ideas to share’.

speaker 1: we need to tackle climate change by closing our borders and taking care of ourselves first and foremost
speaker 2: yes, it's got to be machine guns at dover immediately

it would be ok if you could believe for a second that the section of people used are truly diverse and representative and would actually be listened to if they said what the fucking itinerant all-listening melt twats actually didn't want to hear!

increased democratic accountability is good, asking people questions about issues they don't really understand is not good, asking questions not predicated on "if we don't do something radical we're fucked" is...well, anyway, we're fucked.

Yeah, Citizen's Assemblies are good if there's a general feeling of "you and I disagree but in the larger picture we're all in this together" but I don't see that in the UK as much as Ireland where we're all in it against the Brits

Time left in chapter: the rest of your life.

why don't we start a crowdfunder to acquire enough highly enriched uranium to build a working nuclear device and detonate it under my sofa at 11pm on january 31st so i never need to see facile remainiac bullshit like this ever again

Why don’t we start a crowdfunder to hire the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to play the EU anthem ‘Ode to Joy’ on a boat on the Thames and light up the London Eye with the EU flag at 11pm on January 31st as a touché to the Big Ben bongs for Brexit. pic.twitter.com/x2ulqdZXzr

— James Melville (@JamesMelville) January 14, 2020

.@lisanandy how come the website https://t.co/JEwUYZTwFx redirects to yours? Not a great look to be stealing to Tories dodgy election tactics tbh 🤷🏻‍♀️

— Fianna Hornby (@fiannahornby) January 14, 2020

Nandy playing by the dirty and low tory book of no rules.

DAVID GRAEBER: The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers!
PARTIES OF ADMINISTRATORS: *wriggles its way out of the jam even more easily*
GRAEBER: Ah! Well. Nevertheless,

just passed mike gapes in the street he appears to be growing a beard

Sad to hear he had to lay off his personal stylist, but times are hard