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

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Labour source on Kober's resignation: tipping point was Haringey manifesto meeting last week. The left proposed several measures already in place in neighbouring (Labour) boroughs Hackney, Islington and Camden - Kober and the right denounced these as dangerous Trot radicalism

— dan hancox (@danhancox) January 31, 2018

obv a lot of folk will be totally gutted that a firm that has created systems that send truancy notices to dead pupil's parents and delay payments to terminally ill people until they are dead are struggling to make a profit. Rinsing the fuck out of the public sector might be a bit more difficult than some people think.

it's almost as if there's no ongoing profit in public sector admin work

re that Dan Hancox thread, it still leads me to the overwhelming question: how the hell did the likes of Kober wander into the Labour party in the first place? it surely can't just be careerism, there must be better paid non-jobs out there.

Anyone who views the protection of social housing tenants as "ideological dogma" is definitely a Tory.

never in doubt, so what makes a Tory wanna be a Labour councillor for umpteen years?

blairism is a helluva drug

which reminds me, why hasn't that "don't vote Labour" douche been officially drummed out yet? it would be v satisfying

I don't think they saw any contradictions at the time, which begs the question for me. What kind of sociopath would happily engage in the destruction of social housing whilst espousing the type of drivel they do. That must be a very difficult spiel to maintain, involving more faces than Big Ben.

Connexions Card – A £109million scheme that involved issuing 16- to 19-year-olds with smart cards that recorded their lesson attendance and rewarded them with discounts on consumer goods. It ran from 2002 until it was terminated in 2006 owing to lack of uptake.

One of Capita's great ideas in the Blair era.

The short answer is that Labour is usually the only game in town in a lot of London boroughs. Labour has 49 of 57 wards in Haringey.

Kober’s background is NUS to voluntary sector to council leader and I would guess the next step was meant to be MP though, so she is fully embedded in the careerist Labour production line that brought us Wes Streeting, etc.

identifying the most pressing problems for the country

You've got to wonder what the large number of #Labour MPs who will now probably never hold office are going to do with the second half of their careers. Genuine problem. https://t.co/YESyzEESqc

— Glen O'Hara (@gsoh31) January 31, 2018

There isn't any reason why a centrist Labour candidate who actually inspires people and has some vision couldn't win a future contest. The problem is that so few of them do.

"All we're missing to be up there is a 25 goal a season striker"

i keep saying it but have any of u (not just matt) srsly considered going into politics

The lad, Chuka, he's a confidence player.

i guess not

It would require a lot of self-reflection and a complete reassessment of what 'centrism' actually means in the current environment rather than just reheating Blairism and treating it as some kind of universal truth, *and making enough people believe in it* and I seriously doubt many of the current lot are capable of doing that.

centrism means "status quo with cuddles" to these people, i don't expect to see some visionary Third Way any time soon

Any revival of centrism in labour will come from people currently identified as Corbynites imo. It'll involve much of Corbyn's domestic agenda repositioned as centre ground, sensible social democracy while shaving off some of the harder edges around foreign policy and defence. That is maybe where Clive Lewis is headed.

^^^ This is kind of what I was getting at, a big part of Labour's performance at the last election came out of people actually listening to the policies and realising that most of them weren't miles off what they thought anyway, outside the shrill noise of 'ZOMG Marxist IRA Venezeula!' A lot of what Labour is proposing to bring back are things that a lot of voters thought should never have been taken away in the first place.

There's also a huge difference between positioning yourself to attract as many floating voters as possible and 'centrism' as it's currently defined as an ideology. Most of the public don't give a shit about public private partnerships, for example.

Also at some point in the next 10-15 years Labour is very likely to become an explicitly pro-European party again, depending on how public opinion evolves.

Depends on whether Europe re-configures itself over the next decade.

I would say what was seen as unsayable foreign policy wise could become normalized. A big moment was Corbyn's speech post Manchester, which was expected to sink him. Yet it did not.

Most of the public don't give a shit about public private partnerships, for example.

most people *didn't* but is that still true given what's just happened to Carillion and what is likely to happen to Capita?

Yes but centrism as it's been defined over the last 20yrs or so as been about heavy boosterism for those kinds of contracts - it's one example of where centrism-as-ideology differs from what voters think.

No voters are rushing to defend them, but do you reckon it's possible to the average voter to get a handle on them enough to stick them in the box of "this was a bad idea when Blair / Cameron did it, Corbyn hates them"?

xps

potentially otm - I think it was still a bit of a broadsheet story when it was just Carillion, but once you start pulling on the Capita thread… the amount of stuff that could break if/when Capita goes (or even restructures) is almost incomprehensible and will likely cause deaths - a neolib/austerity version of the winter of discontent. Broad popular understanding of the scale of government outsourcing and public-private 'partnerships' could swing things much more firmly towards Labour.

Treasury Minister Lord Bates just resigned from the government after apologising for missing a question from Labour's Baroness Lister of Burtersett. pic.twitter.com/3hLXmaDC2B

— Richard Morris (@imrichardmorris) January 31, 2018

Leader of the Opposition in the Lords, Baroness Smith of Basildon, interrupts the beginning of Lord Hague's speech on the EU Withdrawal Bill to say that Lord Bates really doesn't have to resign for missing a question. pic.twitter.com/BJdRXqji0b

— Richard Morris (@imrichardmorris) January 31, 2018

amazing how ministers are hammering the ejector seat button at every opportunity but the pm still shambles on despite having died in june last year

excuse me but pm corbyn, my father, is still alive and well

Sometimes I wonder if May's retreat is somewhere on the dark side of Mercury rather than Chequers, she's like some fucking water-bear on steroids.

lol bg

So he's just done with it then? Steady flow of cheques for the foreseeable future in the bag I presume?

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51TCTY8xYHL._SX326_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Fake Gor font! Shld always be:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51EVvcQhiSL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

fair

Wait Outlaw of Gor was a book?

Did you think it was only an MST3K episode?

Yes

?

http://mst3k.wikia.com/wiki/MST3K_519_-_Outlaw

(I should note that the opening credits do say it was based on the book. :-D )

not strictly politics but the reaction of the gammon to F1 stopping the use of grid girls is epochal.

thread

THREAD: you ready for another boys and girls? Well get comfortable as Alice raises a great question which I want to answer in regards to the #HDV which is very related

The then CEO of Barnet Council (nicknamed 'the easy council like easyjet) spearheaded this outsourcing project https://t.co/tTveksch5k

— Seema Chandwani ™ (@SeemaChandwani) February 1, 2018

There seems to be a reasonable amount of confidence in the city pages that Capita won’t go under afaict. Their share price dropped by about a quarter again today though.

this lept out from that:

Nick Walkley to step down from Conservative trailblazer Barnet council to take reins at Haringey, which has no Tory councillors

from The Guardian!

thanks for that link.

can seizing the means of production be far behind

Labour is considering forcing landowners to give up sites for a fraction of their current price in an effort to slash the cost of council house building.

The proposal has been drawn up by John Healey, the shadow housing secretary, and would see a Jeremy Corbyn-led government change the law so landowners would have to sell sites to the state at knockdown prices.

Landowners currently sell at a price that factors in the dramatic increase in value when planning consent is granted. It means a hectare of agricultural land worth around £20,000 can sell for closer to £2m if it is zoned for housing.

Labour believes this is slowing down housebuilding by dramatically increasing costs. It is planning a new English Sovereign Land Trust with powers to buy sites at closer to the lower price.

This would be enabled by a change in the 1961 Land Compensation Act so the state could compulsorily purchase land at a price that excluded the potential for future planning consent.

Healey’s analysis suggests that it would cut the cost of building 100,000 council houses a year by almost £10bn to around £16bn.

With the “hope value” removed from the price of land, the cost of building a two-bed flat in Wandsworth, south-west London, would be cut from £380,000 to £250,000, in Chelmsford it would fall from £210,000 to £130,000 and in Tamworth in the West Midlands, where land values are lower, it would drop from £150,000 to £130,000

outrageous Trotskyism, what's wrong with speculating on land value to nobody's benefit but your own?

i'm so fucking proud of these guys for pushing this stuff, for getting civil servants to do the research and produce the policy papers. it's like a little flicker of light in a dark, dark wood