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

this was apparently the average day for the late David Austin when he was the Guardian's pocket cartoonist (though presumably he was being payed less than £650,000 a year)

For nearly thirty years Austin shared a studio with Nick Newman and Kipper Williams, above a shop off London's Tottenham Court Road, to which he walked each day from his home in Highbury. Austin worked meticulously in spiral-bound workbooks to produce up to nine rough ideas each day, and in the afternoon walked over to The Guardian office.

As two of his Guardian colleagues recalled in 2005: "He came into the main building in Farringon Road, Clerkenwell, each afternoon at 4pm, read through the letters to be published the next morning, began identifying his possible themes, and went to the editorial conference at 5pm. Then he scowled, stuck in his ear plugs - defiantly not an office-dweller, he did not like noise - scrawled sketches across complete pages of his notebook, and produced a set of nine little boxes containing drafts of his ideas. The duty editor chose one, the letters editor another, and David polished off the finished product. By 6.30, he was gone." As one of the paper's editorial staff recalled, "the difficult bit was not picking two to adorn the newspaper, but having to discard at least three or four others which would also have been sure to give pleasure."

if anything, Matt is under-paid

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2015/2/18/1424279955896/9213023d-7a3c-4523-a066-f84ba65e9225-1472x2040.jpeg?w=700&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=abb835304d759aa45c58a3b39b010b69

(tbf austin's HOM SAP was a PE strip that *wasn'*t always entirely awful)

P29! There's 28 pages more of that?

if he did 9 images every day in the same ringbinder then numbering the pages seems a good idea?

the ranter is good on the proliferation of rich weirdos: http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2017/11/19/the-theory-of-the-eccentric-billionaire-and-why-politicians-got-so-awful🕸/

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DXxIiRDWAAEVSri.jpg
this is a quite startling FT graph where regional inequality 2000/2015 in "great" Britain is so erm.. great that it has been literally off the scale since the Blair era and much worse since.

Those Matt roughs look even more Wicked Willie-like than his finished cartoons!

Obv I haven't made a deep study of Matt's work, but my impression is that - unlike Mac of the Mail - his cartoons aren't even especially reactionary (eg, I'm pretty sure he's a Remoaner) - cue deluge of awful Matt cartoons proving me v wrong.

those are austin's roughs, not matt's

back when corbs dissed him, ppl did dig up a handful of dodgy ones but on the whole they are untypical, yes. his sensibility is very mind-mannered (i also think it's a tell that the private eye extract goes out of its way to describe him as "nice" -- this is VERY unusual for the eye!)

Very positive local result:

Rochester West (Medway) result:

LAB: 47.5% (+26.5)
CON: 39.5% (-4.0)
LDEM: 4.7% (+1.0)
GRN: 4.2% (-6.1)
UKIP: 4.1% (-16.2)

Labour GAIN from Conservative.

— Britain Elects (@britainelects) March 8, 2018

Labour has taken Kelly Tolhurst MP’s old council seat of Rochester West - possibly indicating that the UKIP vote is either moving to Labour or staying at home.

Still some way from unseating Tolhurst herself at the next election but the mix of ex-Londoners and disgruntled service workers (the NHS is almost certainly the largest local employer, probably followed by prisons and the council) could be a recipe for another Canterbury or two.

lol tolhurst

Beat me to it, curses!

gotta get up pretty early to beat me to the dumb, obvious jokes on ilxor dot com, my friend

She’s invisible as a local MP but I can see the Tories pushing her to the forefront over the next couple of years as she’s one of a small handful of them who kind of resembles a normal human.

Yeah this is the Tories' big problem in the SE and some other areas, the likelihood of people being priced out of London but taking their voting habits with them. Demographic change did for the blue doughnut in Outer London and that could spread further out into the cheaper parts of the Home Counties.

back when corbs dissed him, ppl did dig up a handful of dodgy ones but on the whole they are untypical, yes. his sensibility is very mind-mannered (i also think it's a tell that the private eye extract goes out of its way to describe him as "nice" -- this is VERY unusual for the eye!)

― mark s, Friday, March 9, 2018 12:55 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm sure I remember another article in the eye not too long ago describing Matt as "the Telegraph's piss-poor cartoonist" or similar

you can be nice and piss-poor at your job tho tbf

ask my colleagues

as well as "nice" they also describe him in the extract as "undeniably funny" -- which tbf for the eye *IS* being pisspoor at yr job as a cartoonist (=being not at all funny)

by nice i assume they are talking abt the person himself but i also think the general tenor of his cartoons (including the dodgy ones that i've seen) is "unspiteful"

it helps that everyone in them looking like an amiably woebegone foam rubber penis

Yeah this is the Tories' big problem in the SE and some other areas, the likelihood of people being priced out of London but taking their voting habits with them. Demographic change did for the blue doughnut in Outer London and that could spread further out into the cheaper parts of the Home Counties.

― Matt DC, Friday, 9 March 2018 14:01 (fifty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

stephen bush has just written a column on this
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2018/03/i-used-think-tory-problem-was-housing-now-im-not-so-sure

xpost
Thank you for the correction, mark s. I was going to add that Austin should then def get on that cock and balls cartooning gravy train, but looking him up on Google I see he died in 2005 :-( One nice detail from his small Wiki entry - He has had a train named after him by his widow, Janet. From time to time I may have confused him with another Private Eye regular, Ken Pyne - possibly a better illustrator than Austin, but never ever funny.

For some reason I remember Simon Mayo being a big Matt fan, back when Mayo was a breakfast show DJ.

looking him up on Google I see he died in 2005

this has genuinely shaken me to my core, i would have put money on having seen a new austin cartoon within the last six months at the very least

https://independentaustralia.net/_lib/slir/w500/https://independentaustralia.net/sc/DavidAustin.jpg

can't work out which one's meant to be dave mustaine

maybe they're recycling them

once as tragedy twice as tragedy

My father-figure void has never been more acute pic.twitter.com/mBUYaAMe8Z

— COUNTERPLAN (@deep_beige) March 9, 2018

omg

spokesperson for PM imo

hee

A Momentum spokesperson said: "The only 'great fraud' are the suggestions that Momentum members don't believe in parliamentary democracy or tell the Leader of the Labour party what to do. The Gang of Four our members prefer is the post-punk pride of Leeds."

"the gang of four our members (correctly) prefer are jiang qing, zhang chunqiao, yao wenyuan and wang hongwen"

how is corbz team so good at this

i guess they have the confidence of knowing that corbyn can get away with a level of informality in official communications that more hidebound politicians can't - feels like they've been testing the waters for a while now and they now feel able to go full dgaf when the criticism they're responding to warrants it

mcdonnell good this morning on today imo

kept prefacing things with "as we move into government" - not subtle but it's necessary

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-43364336

Lansman drops his bid for the general secretary post.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/mar/12/london-property-prices-plunge-as-brexit-effect-deepens

#lexit

see, it's all up-sides

jesus bring some of that over here pls

Lets get Brexit signed and sealed y'all.

strong and stable property collapse be grand

and I'm here for it.

I'm too busy trying to figure out whereabouts in Islington the photo accompanying the article was taken.

Though it probably isn't Islington.

Myddleton Square, maybe?

No, good guess though.

Second guess would be Highbury Place though the band of white across the top might not be right.

My initial thought was it was around the corner from Mark S - but no. There are a fair few little squares though.

Bit of detective work tells me it's Milner Square.

They've painted that door then - probably to throw off tourists.

The report coming out at the same time as data showing that high-end rentals are increasing possibly suggests that a lot of the financial sector ppl who had been driving the property boom are hedging their bets for now.

This is Stalybridge Labour Club today flying the hammer and sickle. Its been up for 24 hours. Disgraceful!! Care to comment @jeremycorbyn , @OwenJones84 , @jreynoldsMP, @UKLabour ?? pic.twitter.com/ENSAfJhena

— Mike Chapman (@mikechapmanUK) March 9, 2018

They are trying to wind up Mordy in Stalybridge today!