ForenSix Opposition - Politics in the Soon To Be Former UK in Autumn 2020

it was mentioned on Today earlier Australia do have some limited arrangements on standards etc... but lol probably more than what the UK will end up with!

David Graeber in January this year:
"In Brexit the right had discovered an almost perfect political poison, not only dividing British society into two hostile camps, but bringing out the absolute worst in both of them."

— rachel shabi (@rachshabi) December 11, 2020

Graeber knew the score

for those who liked this govs handling of covid, get ready to love their handling of no deal brexit!

i mean maybe who knows right

I wish there was some profit to be made from the potential end of this grim Boris and the Britannia Unchained crew iteration of the Tories. But now we've got the other Tory party as well, with the promise of competent and sensible stewardship and trusted by the status quo for another decade of austerity. I knew there would be very grim long term consequences from what happened on that very shit day a year ago, and here they bloody are.

lol, when Kieth leaks an exclusive about his bold new vison for Labour that will be revealed in his New Year speech, to The fucking Spectator, that tells you all you need to know about where he is going.

it does interest me about the spectator. like you can see the reasoning with the mail, as given the size of the its readership, it actually* has more labour voters reading it than the guardian (*is this a factoid? i certainly read it somewhere). but the spectator is just ideological wingnuts and dyed-in-the-wool Tories, so no real advantage you'd've thought. i wonder if there's some sort of attempt to shape right-wing messaging against current gov, so you get right-wing commentators saying things like 'when even Kieth Starmer is outflanking the Tories on x the Tories need to start looking at their etc.'

More likely it's the boring pragmatics of a political editor saying 'fancy an interview here kieth we'll make it sympathetic.'

Boring pragmatics of a Kieth countenancing collaboration with a hate rag

yeah the spectator circulation is only around 80000+. But then again a lot of his electoral math is screwy and seemingly more concerned with winning small numbers of grim troglodytes possibly at the expense of many many more BAME and younger voters. He doesn't know what he's doing imo!

In his head I imagine this is statesmanlike, engaging with the grown-up agenda setters. Agendas like transphobia etc

I think Kieth will always be insecure about perceptions of him not being hawkish enough, conservative enough, bigoted enough etc and will always be willing to go one step further to prove his doubters wrong.

I remember feeling the positivity from Dan Hancox posting about the demographic timebomb that would be an existential threat to the Conservative Party and be its eventual undoing for decades, now I definitely don't have any positive thoughts about the future.

I don't think Kieth will ever be PM but what I'm certain about is by the time he's consigned to the political dustbin, the right-wing of the party will have a much stronger hand and the next leadership competition will be between 3 ugly arseholes (that make Starmer look handsome) and 1 hitler.

What a fantastic boost for immigration mug makers. https://t.co/0MZjBpNo1k

— Mr Demos of Pnyx (@gem_ste) December 11, 2020

lol he's such a natural at vacuous soundbites with a sinister undercurrent

xpost

I am a little more sanguine - think the left is in a stronger place than it was in 2015, and the conditions that led to Corbyn - austerity, debt, poverty, precariousness - aren't going anywhere, indeed likely to get worse. The membership isn't going to tolerate a post-Kieth Liz Kendall/Dan Jarvis/Andy Burnham face off. There are some dece young left MPs in the Campaign group now, and hopefully they are more clear-eyed about the wreckers/obstacles within the party, and more ruthless about removing them.

hope your right, but I keep reading about all the Labour-right fuckery going down in the NEC and I've lost a lot of faith in the membership. But I have seen some Kieth voters expressing dismay at the choice they made, that's a start.

Last night I woke up at 4am punching the bedclothes because I was dreaming about KS lying about JC and it made me furious.

I drifted off to sleep again and dreamed about BJ lying about JC. Then about having an argument with someone who was repeating KS's lies about JC.

I woke up again, furious again, and couldn't get back to sleep for a long while this time.

For @LRB I wrote about last week’s deportation flight to Jamaica, “criminality”, and how our rhetorical reliance on the Windrush “scandal” to oppose deportations restrains our imagining for a world without the Home Office https://t.co/zXICevPaRp pic.twitter.com/Z9Y3bPUnjN

— Jason (@jasebyjason) December 11, 2020

^good politics for a different country, a country that cannot even be seen from here on a clear day.

🐦[What a fantastic boost for immigration mug makers. https://t.co/0MZjBpNo1k🕸
— Mr Demos of Pnyx (@gem_ste) December 11, 2020🕸]🐦

lol he's such a natural at vacuous soundbites with a sinister undercurrent

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/dec/10/uk-to-deny-asylum-to-refugees-passing-through-safe-third-country

we've got our country back. and it turns out it's a shithole filled with racists.

yeah, what a little country.

“The UK has a proud history of providing sanctuary to those in need"

I keep hearing this claptrap from idiot pols of all parties.. I mean has it really? Kindertransport aside there are not really many examples these mealy mouthed pols can bring up to back up this canard. Tell that to Jews who were hiding in Clifford's Tower and so on and so on. They've only ever really provided sanctuary to wealthy foreigners or those from the Caribbean whose labour they needed and are now deporting their children, to their deaths in in many cases, "back" to a country they've never even visited. It's nasty little madly xenophobic island nation, always has been.

That reminds me, I had a very peculiar conversation with someone the other day, not a stupid person, about the size and population of the UK. This person - very much a Remainer - seemed to have reacted against the jingoistic nonsense of the Brexit camp by minimizing the size and importance of the UK to such a degree that they were genuinely astonished that the UK was third only to Russia and Germany in terms of population in *Europe. They thought the UK was probably about the size of **Portugal and you could fit four UKs into France!

(*Not counting Turkey. **tbf they had no idea what size Portugal is either.)

https://countrymeters.info/en

^^

you should send them this link!

I should know better but I'm constantly amazed by the stuff people don't know.

I had a jigsaw of Europe as a kid, it was Eastern Bloc era of course - but I've always been obsessed with the size, shapes and of populations of countries. There was program on one of the Habsburgs, might have been Catherine I can't remember. But one of the things they talked about was the poor standard of Habsburg cartography at the time meant the emperor had a very poor sense of the scale of her own empire and even the courses that the big rivers took etc.

I had a jigsaw of Europe as a kid, it was Eastern Bloc era of course - but I've always been obsessed with the size, shapes and of populations of countries. There was program on one of the Habsburgs, might have been Catherine I can't remember. But one of the things they talked about was the poor standard of Habsburg cartography at the time meant the emperor had a very poor sense of the scale of her own empire and even the courses that the big rivers took etc.

and i’m kind of fascinated about cadastral knowledge and politics etc. how we define and map space and the people who live in that space, literally origin of statistics really matters and will define emnity, solidarity, movement, economics etc.

yeah it was an in our time, that was the one!

this is a great piece on how spatial and cartographic representation is manipulated when you want to make a *point* or sell something (to Tom D and calz’s posts)

https://link.medium.com/zIsgUwbC9bb

perception by remainers of an essential smallness or irrelevance to counteract brexit bombast being a version of this.

like there’s a reason kant was interested in cadastral definition: these create ontologies of understanding and perception. they define our reality.

The one that gets me is, "We're just a little island". Well, yes but there actually aren't that many bigger islands in the world and one of those is Greenland.

... and at least one Arctic Canadian island with a population of 12.

and most of australia is uninhabited.

Australia is not considered an island though.

The "We're just a little island" line being extremely popular with those with genuine concerns about immigration - so we're being squeezed into a smaller and smaller space at both ends of the Brexit argument.

yes one interesting thing that’s shared by brexitera and remainers is that we’re somehow a failure as a country and that we don’t have genuine success stories like, to pick three:

• pharmaceutical research
• data driven government (including our government digital services)
• further education

‘lol, we are a small insignificant joke of a place with delusions of grandeur’ has been common currency at least since the junior-partner relationship over Iraq and probably extends back much further. It may be true in some senses but idk if it isn’t also a way of coping with / distancing from the legacy of Empire - a counterpart to ‘imperialism was a long time ago, forget about it’ on the right. If you pretend the U.K. is a small, powerless, hot-air factory, you can ignore the arms trade, propping up dictators, exploitation of resources overseas, etc.

lol i’m skating over the fact that i didn’t know that australia isn’t considered an island though i did ask myself before i posted “land mass? maybe but so what” “continent? no”.

i never really know how to define australasia/apac/australia while we’re talking about cadastral definition.

‘lol, we are a small insignificant joke of a place with delusions of grandeur’ has been common currency at least since the junior-partner relationship over Iraq and probably extends back much further. It may be true in some senses but idk if it isn’t also a way of coping with / distancing from the legacy of Empire - a counterpart to ‘imperialism was a long time ago, forget about it’ on the right. If you pretend the U.K. is a small, powerless, hot-air factory, you can ignore the arms trade, propping up dictators, exploitation of resources overseas, etc.

Of course the flipside to the minimising complex is *The British Isles* look pretty big and at least half the size of India on most of those decorative BE maps. If you can murder someone to steal their train ticket these days, alls you see is mostly vast expanses of nothing between Birmingham and London and similar between Yorkshire and Scotland, it isn't as densely populated as Japan. And it's never had 100% food self-sufficiency for centuries - even when the population was less than 20 million I think.

If you can murder someone Sir Kieth to steal their train ticket these days,

is good self sufficiency an important metric? or, to put it another way, does it matter?

is good self sufficiency an important metric? or, to put it another way, does it matter?

need more lebensraum, need more Australian bacon rather than Danish!

There's plenty of raum to leben in Scotland.

"If you pretend the U.K. is a small, powerless, hot-air factory, you can ignore the arms trade, propping up dictators"

I got this link from a slightly "tin-hatty" twitter poster about the UK's huge *invisible* military industrial complex (something like 140+ foreign military bases) which is not something the UK govt boasts about very often!

yeah, national military pride boasting - lots, inaccurately, dark nasty military stuff - not so much, also inaccurately.

> ‘lol, we are a small insignificant joke of a place with delusions of grandeur’

but isn't the flip side of this british exceptionalism? and that's dangerous too.

(i guess the truth is somewhere in the middle, "Parts of it are excellent!")

yeah it's the binary stuff that's dangerous. people who aren't capable of saying 'these things are good, how do we build on that' 'these things aren't so good, how do we make them better' are a problem, because you have 'fix everything' solutions like brexit, or remaining in europe will solve everything.

There are specific ways in which the UK won't be able to feed into climate change response because it isn't part of the EU anymore, I think. So it may have less power.

And by becoming poorer and more insular we will be on the path to perhaps closing some of those bases, but still exporting hardware and the like and doing more of the nastier stuff. Maybe like a Gulf-style state?