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

In light of this story, I’m struggling to think of two more unfortunate tweets to have made today:

Genocide ey? Nice chap https://t.co/9VmmFKfedd

— Ben Bradley MP (@bbradleymp) January 16, 2018

Genocide ey? Nice chap https://t.co/9VmmFKfedd

— Ben Bradley MP (@bbradleymp) January 16, 2018

Yet another example of Labour's #hypocrisy and double standards - "rich people are the problem" says Labour MP who is actively covering up his extensive wealth and properties #LabourFail https://t.co/xa2j5KzY4p

— Ben Bradley MP (@bbradleymp) January 16, 2018

Second should have been

Ben's right, I'd string 'em both up

It was funny reading the SW response to the sacking of Mr 2 Homes. They were reporting it as "serious signs of [Corbyn] accommodating to the right and big business".

He said: "From a personal perspective I think it’s a terrible situation that an aspirational, hard-working 30-something looking to raise a family, build a career and do well could ever not be a Conservative.

"In my mind that’s what we as a party are all about; the party of opportunity and of aspiration.

"The fact that so many working people didn’t vote Conservative shows just how bad we are at ‘selling’ not just our policies, but our values."

I wonder if he believes the stuff he wrote in his blog about these families 'that have never worked a day in their life'. It's difficult to tell sometimes. Is it a hissing hatred of others or rather a willingness to slander them for profit?

lol owned

Theresa May's chief of staff doesn't realise what Google ads you see are based on your own browsing history.#Oops pic.twitter.com/5bOUd1REDA

— James Doleman (@jamesdoleman) January 16, 2018

wait wtf that's from five years ago

there's a guido fawkes one that's great too

Yeah, it got covered on HIGNFY xpost

Looks like there is a growing feat Interserve could go the way of Carillon, though their shares have bounced back this morning, following a 17% drop.

The Telegraph, etc, narrative is that he problem with both is not shareholders dividends, it’s that they are not able to charge the government enough to deliver on the projects they commit to - which seems to undermine the whole concept of ‘efficiency savings’ through private outsourcing.

every single criticism made of New Labour (not to mention the Conservatives) in real-time by people like Jeremy Corbyn is coming up as absolutely spot-on despite being characterized at the time as fringe opinions held by out-of-touch adherents to an outmoded ideology. every *clap* single *clap* one

regulatory capture of government by high finance? untenable housing bubble built on disastrous level of debt? reckless PFI contracts that hand profits to private industry even while they fail to deliver? war in iraq? etc etc etc etc - all the people pointing this stuff out were boring old farts who didn't understand modern economies. how many times do these things have to fail disastrously before the people behind them become bywords for the greedy profiteering that they represent? it's taking far too fucking long

in my darker moments i'm convinced that these things will continue to fail disastrously time after time right up until the point where the societal ramifications of climate change collapse society entirely, at which point the robber-barons who have caused it will pull up sticks and emigrate to mars, leaving the rest of us to drown

i'm trying to think what my lighter-moments mindset on this is and i'm at a bit of a loss tbh

i dunno, maybe some of us will get to taste robber-baron flesh before we have our brains dashed out by the local warlord's gang of mutant thugs

No, they’d rather do reds-under-the-bed stories about Momentum people getting elected to NEC positions, scant months after Momentum people delivered huge wins even to MPs on the technocratic side of the PLP. ARGH.

our brains dashed out by the local warlord's gang of mutant thugs

read this was "the local waterboard's gang of mutant thugs", which tells me i am by no means free of the effects of this stupid flu

how many times do these things have to fail disastrously before the people behind them become bywords for the greedy profiteering that they represent?

the great thing about the Friedmanite/neolib narrative is that anybody who challenges it or reports negatively about it publicly is by definition a fringe dinosaur who should stop using played out words like Neolib. suggest "pro-abyss" as a replacement.

tbf no-one can say for sure what effect the arrival of the apocalypse will have on our public works xp

lol remember how the may govt wanted to turn literally every state primary and secondary school into an academy?? they proposed that. all the buildings, equipment, land and governance simply expropriated from municipal councils and handed to various consortia by national fiat. the radicalism involved is just.. i mean it's staggering. it outstrips pretty much any socialist "land reform" i've ever heard of. and then these people made the brexit vote happen, campaigned against it... and lost! we are expected to take them seriously on tv??? all my superlatives are gone. lost in this crisis of stupidity

No, they’d rather do reds-under-the-bed stories about Momentum people getting elected to NEC positions, scant months after Momentum people delivered huge wins even to MPs on the technocratic side of the PLP. ARGH.

The worse things get, the more Carillion/NHS type stories pile up, the more they're going to double down on stories like this. It's not about converting young people or even supporting Labour centrists, it's about scaring the older vote to prevent them defecting from the Tories. Whether these stories prove to be scarier for them than the idea of dying alone on a trolley in a hospital corridor is a moot point, but I doubt it.

As I mentioned upthread, huge swathes of the British right appear to have given up on young people altogether and are just doubling down on everything that alienates them. As approaches go, there's a very obvious shelf life to this. Millennials at voting age are going to outnumber the remaining baby boomers pretty soon, if they don't already. The Tories may yet scrape the next election but it's not going to prevent them reaching an existential crash point that will make Labour in the 80s look like childs play.

I wd imagine the hope in part is to keep Corbs & Co out at any cost in the hope that eventually a more tractable Labour party swings back into view. I worry there's only so long that a Momentum-leaning party can fail to win an election without a backlash.

i really like the sound of jon lansman's ideas that momentum should be expanding its menu of activities, running food clubs and offering volunteer advocacy for people affected by benefits sanctions

yeah I'm sure I've said similar in the past. from Momentum's perspective expanding the base beyond the usual politics wonks is a good and necessary strategy.

Struck by developments at local at Haringey and (this morning) Southwark. Scrutiny of plans is on the up, councilors going against people's wishes are resigning. The local elections will be important.

In some ways whether Corbyn makes it to No 10 or not is becoming (and should be) less of an issue than a left network and infrastructure that is set up in every corner of this island so the direction of travel is one way. XP = yes, Labour seems to be full of ideas like this. Building the movements that DO.

i really like the sound of jon lansman's ideas that momentum should be expanding its menu of activities, running food clubs and offering volunteer advocacy for people affected by benefits sanctions

yeah i was pretty impressed by the dsa's programmes for fixing brake lights and the like over in the states - 'good praxis' as the youngs are saying nowadays

What, Bennite dinosaur and loony left relic, Jon Lansman?

novara's ash sarkar was just on good morning britain making mince of piers morgan in a debate about the national anthem (she said wiley shd write new one), yes it's literally the least important topic ever devised, but i think her presence indicates a significant coming fracture point in who we're going to be seeing on current affairs TV (including quite big-viewership TV): we're going to be seeing a lot more young people, highly political, who've been chatting shit abt TOWIE and whatever all their lives, who will honestly just dance rings round the gerontocracy facing them. And TV will want them: it wants the young viewers who will come with it, and it wants the spark of it. Every move by the right to amp up the generational culture wars undermines their own media base (this is one reason the mail and the sun are crashing: they belong in a different time)

She rattled the PTB - there was a Mail Online splash about 90 minutes telling their readers how awful she was and how Should Of-type Tweeters found her repugnant.

who've been chatting shit abt TOWIE and whatever all their lives

sorry this is a bit random, what i mean that -- unlike the politicised youth of earlier times -- they are culturally deft and not at all unversed in or afraid of things that are popular

jon lansman who founded momentum and just got elected to the nec, several xps back to tom

sarkar actually said it shld be changed to "wearing my rolex" which I thought was a neat jab at liz

yeah lol i didn't actually watch it, i'm not that ill -- my wisdom as ever is supplied by the sages of twitter

me either, just paid attention to a more attentive twitter sage

well done us

I did see some fucking awful cunt who used to edit Loaded or something, talking about Carillion the other day, start a sentence with, "I'm old enough to remember nationalization..." and, I thought, you're dead mate, you're the fucking dinosaur now.

The Conservatives appear* to be mortally afraid of Corbs & Co not because they have more attractive policies (the youth possibly vote by rolling dice, or comparing Klout scores, or something else who knows who knows) but because they view him as an existential threat to the country.

"The 70s was a lake of fire from which Maggie rescued us" is not even a matter of faith, as faith is still a personal attribute - it's the water that they swim in (partly because it's the water all governments have swum in for nearly 4 decades).

So the youth are to blame, but largley because they don't remember the 70s and won't listen to their elders.

* Or want to appear, but to be honest I'm not sure what would convince me that second-level strategy is happening over there.

How are Labour's policies not more attractive (speaking around worries) to the young? End of tuition, house building program, end to austerity, etc.

a good way for getting someone to listen to you is to repeatedly tell them that you think they're all hateful weirdo idiots who don't grasp how great you're making their lives

he's saying that's what the tories think, julio

Sorry just read that post again..

Tracey Crouch is a new Minister For (the) Loneliness (of Britain).

I would v much like to see that Sarkar vs Morgan clip

They aren't worried that he'll be a disaster for the country, they'd fucking love that eventuality. They ARE terrified that he'll succeed, or at least do well enough that the country doesn't collapse in flames. In that case, he's an existential threat to the entire narrative the Tories have presented since the 70s, as Andrew mentions. As things stand, the Tories don't appear to have the self-reflection necessary to understand what's happening and why they need to change course if they're not to go over the electoral cliff. I'm not convinced that 'sound a bit more socially liberal' is going to cut it any more.

not gonna watch because morgan but here it is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0H-BykoktI

I predict that Tracey Crouch will deduce that housebound disabled people who have had their benefits cut, their mobility cars taken, their home help stopped. What they need is more platitudes about us all in it together, we are all the same etc blah blah ..

i realise calling a particular type of person a ham or a gammon is kind of bad not good -- body-shaming if you will -- but come on xp

I think you're describing what they should think, Matt - what I'm saying is that they've internalised that narrative, they see it as saving the country rather than defending the narrative.

As you say, as a party they're a little short on self-reflection (which is infuriating some of them because "biggest electoral upset in decades" is kind of a good time for that, but "Why would people vote for Corbyn?" is a question that their mind slides off).

Again I may be thinking what they _want_ me to think..

i think ascribing any 3d chess motives to this obviously flailing and incompetent government is probably giving them a bit too much credit

thanks for the clip BG, sadly it features too much Piers and doesn't get to the Wiley stuff which is what I'm assuming got him really nice and steamed

xp
more like Chess on a ZX80, innit?

anybody remember Scrabble on the Spectrum where you had to tell the computer if a word was legit or not using an irl dictionary?