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

Probably gutted that they couldn’t use Dirty Fozen tbh.

"

Great post!

Meant to say...

"DIEHARD Tory Remainers were accused of treachery last night..."

Yes, by the Daily Mail

*Dozen

pic.twitter.com/Tj80NSwA43

— Mollie Goodfellow 🤶🏻 (@hansmollman) December 14, 2017

alex tomo currently giving tulip siddiq a doing on channel 4 news

I'm surprised more isn't being made of this, cozying up to her murderous authoritarian aunt and washing her hands of british citizens who are disappeared. how is she still in the labour party?

For a start, the people involved are not British citizens aiui.

Having spoken at an event organised by her aunt’s political party (bearing in mind they are the largest in Bangladesh) is fairly light-touch as far as cozying up goes. She has kept her distance from Bangla politics for the most part.

She came off appallingly in the initial interaction with C4 a couple of weeks ago but she is not really under any more obligation than anyone else to take up specific causes.

That interview was awful but the guilt-by-association dogwhistling that's been going on in sections of the press is grim.

Yep. All the ‘where do her loyalties really lie?’ stuff, when her position throughout has been ‘I am not a Bangladeshi politician and I can only represent my constituents’ has been bad.

yes looking at it the person mentioned by alex thompson was a bangladeshi citizen who had studied here. if, as they show in that report, she speaks regularly with her aunt, goes with her to meet world leaders, has spoken at her party rallies and claims she couldn't have won without their support that seems... very cozy? her dismissive, hostile reaction when asked about raising this issue seems like a huge red flag. shades of that (plus some some disingenuousness/confusion/idiocy) in hasina's defense when questioned about disappearing people - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/25/bangladesh-pm-sheikh-hasina-claims-forced-disappearances-take-place-in-uk-and-us

if as the report says other MPs with connections to bangladesh are involving themselves it seems hard to come up with an unterrible motivation for her behaviour

comes from the same place as asking Sadiq Khan how it feels to be home. best press in the world.

If any other politician rang their relative to cut through some red tape, we’d be here talking about how unseemly it was.

xp for real you think the fact that an MP who is cagey and defensive about the fact they're a close relation of a PM who gets their security forces to arrest, hassle & murder journalists and political opponents is of no interest?

i don't think helping releasing ppl from being illegally detained/tortured or whatever comes down as 'cutting red tape'

What do you think her motive is?

I think she doesn't want to rock the boat with her extremely powerful aunt

more information would be good obviously, but I'm struggling to square everyone's blase reaction to what we know so far. it at least seems worthy of further attention

tbf, a lot of the grass roots pressure has come from Bangladeshi opposition groups in the UK who have had a longstanding issue with Siddique being an MP in the first place. By and large it is guilt by association stuff designed to make her uncomfortable / defensive rather than in the expectation that she could effect any meaningful change if she wanted to. She is seen as a beneficiary of the party’s corruption, even if it is mostly by accident of birth.

The RW press going in on her, while handwaving away arms sales to Bangladesh, obv have a different agenda.

I think that's probably true. I also think it's very possible she has no influence with her aunt in any case. It's also possible/likely that she doesn't want to cast herself/be cast as unofficial Bangladeshi liaison officer because of who her family are, which I think would be fair and reasonable given that none of us are responsible for the actions of our older relatives.

I'm not really sure what she's like a consititency MP, and I'm conflicted as to whether she should have been selected in the first place given the potential of her connections to cause (at best) extreme embarrassment to the party. But let's not pretend that the plight of Bangladeshi dissidents is what interests the press here. (xpost)

in general I don't know how it's possible not to be extremely suspicious of people in politics with close personal ties to repressive governments, and political dynasties/family connections in politics more generally, because there's always questions of conflicts of interest, especially when people are so cagey. I don't think you can be a priori dismissive about political associations: the importance of having effective diplomatic ties with even the grimmest regimes doesn't mean that the motives of everyone involved will always be pure or above suspicion; most ppl ITT have probably felt aggrieved by associations in the past (thatcher and pinochet, say); and, from an admittedly out of context speech, she herself seems to have suggested her career has been dependent on her family ties.

The Bangla community in her seat is something like 1% if the electorate so idk how useful the Siddique name has been there.

The conflict of interest line would be extremely valid if she was shadow Foreign Sec and taking a soft line on Hasina, or actively lobbying for pro-Awami policies from the back benches, but she isn’t afaict. She’s just not getting involved in an area some people want her to.

She was originally a councillor for a Camden ward with a large Bangladeshi community.

xp if she had no significant contact with her aunt or bangladeshi politics and was in a position where she felt she could be critical of the govt I'd agree with you!

I remember a Bangladeshi, as in Bangladeshi not UK Bangladeshi, guy I work with talking about her (Tulip, that is) but fucked if I can remember what he said, I think the gist of it was her family are bad people.

A substantial minority of Bangladeshi people would agree.

My contacts over there are not enthusiastic Awami supporters, by any means, but are pretty proud to see her alongside other Bengali-origin politicians in Parliament.

Paul Golding arrested in Belfast. Also WTF he's 35 LOLOLOL bullshit.

speaking as a 23 year old that seems plausible

Kan u not

Also WTF he's 35 LOLOLOL bullshit.

A diet of nothing but roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and a full English every day will do that to a man.

You forgot the side-order of ignorant hatred. P toxic that stuff.

Pollonium Twat.

still amazes me that farage is only in his early fifties

might have to put up with him for another 30 years ffs

No fucking way, he's a coronary waiting to happen.

He needs to stop smoking and cut down on the shouty high-octane r/w soundbites, maybe he could start a Centrist Party?

Oh do Centrist Parties avoid soundbites and smoking?

Probably not, but it would be amusing to see Farage on a platform with Dave M and Chuka. Lol, there is a Centrist Party called Platform as well btw.

flatporm

I thought flatprom but in essence yes

lol a centrist party literally named for a Houellebecq novel is tres jolie

"Against the World, Against Life" would be a pretty good slogan for our new centrist party overlords

@bbclaura
Laura Kuenssberg Retweeted Sebastian Payne
EU says all EU Law will apply until end of transition, assumed to be 2021, and we have to stick with all four freedoms, which means EU immigration carries on as is for five years after the referendum

Have to? LOVE TOO stick...

Same thing happened when we voted against the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

We chose not to use the tape. It was poisonous stuff. But it was one voice; a few sentences; totally unrepresentative of most Tories and their leadership. Most of all we worried about its impact on the public debate. We never released it. (And it will certainly be gone now).

— Theo Bertram (@theobertram) December 15, 2017

^^ twitter thread from a former Blair/Brown advisor Theo Bertram (tldr, during the 2005 election campaign Labour's research team had a tape of someone from the Conservative party making racist remarks, Bertram says that if the tape had been made public it would have completely discredited the idea that the tory focus on immigration "are you thinking what we're thinking" etc was anything other than racist dog-whistling, however the research team chose not to release the tape)

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/stopping-brexit-labour-tony-blair-jeremy-corbyn-eu-referendum-general-election-a8114531.html

well i've gotta say i'm shocked

the left don't care about winning

What is it with Blair trying to be 'statesman like' well past his date? Why is he in the news at all? Does he have any leverage or influence at all? (being in the media is not the same)

i wonder if there's some conspiratorial sense in which his thinktank influence is greater than we can realise from our vantage points. In the media he is a pretty pathetic figure, issuing pearls of wisdom to the eyerolls of all

but there is a whole generation of new-labour ppl in quango/tertiary positions or idk university vice chancellorships that are still intent of steamrolling through kinds of NL/Coalition consensus reforms to "energise" their agencies. There is a very real sense in which the alveoli of the state are all being poisoned by these ppl. These are Blair's people who I think he is really speaking directly to(?) I doubt he has any interest in "common people", Blairism, as such, has always had a strong seam of technocratic rationality (and the post-Trump conflation of democratic process with populism and weirdly by extension fascism, largely plays into this) and the administrators of these kinds of "expertise" still are very powerful at more local levels. This is less easily addressed than the horrors of zombie new labour councillors turning every council estate into an investment opportunity and the link between the third sector and government was badly severed by Cameron's big society bollocks.

sorry, gibberish