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

You couldn’t make it up! Our esteemed Government chose the week that the ‘hostile environment’ news headlined to start a nurse recruitment drive in the Caribbean to cover the loses of EU nurses deciding to leave the NHS and UK. https://t.co/eoSa9bWMz0

— Declan Hoare (@declan_hoare) April 23, 2018

unfuckingbelievable.

re EU, my wife has a friend from Germany who was married to a British man who died a couple of years ago, she's lived here for over 20 years, is in her 60s and doesn't have any family left in Germany, she is convinced she is going to have to move back to Germany because with her husband dead she has no right to stay here - she has no visa/ILR and won't be able to get one. I'm sure there are many cases like this.

I agree with NV about old school stories, but I suspect Tom D has it right regarding the GBP - I also suspect there’s a glow over the Windrush generation, Desmond and the old characters Lenny Henry played - as well as benefiting from a segment of the GBP who feel ‘okay okay maybe we fucked up, but we did this thing so now it’s okay, right?’

"I also suspect there’s a glow over the Windrush generation"

To many of the GBP they are associated with overproof rum and jolly old good humoured scoundrels that run community barbershops. Not like them Asians who are all evil Muslim extremists of course, so should be fair game for deportation.

Bloody horrible stuff

I noticed May and Rudd seemed to put out some resources like a website etc to help people affected by the Windrush thing. I don't know how useful or helpful those resources really are, and obviously they done that because afraid of looking bad in the media, but, doesn't that really highlight though how the whole immigration business, the whole business of trying to sort out your status or get benefits could be made easy and user-friendly, if they cared.

Been watching the journalism/closed-shop thing with ghoulish interest too. That's probably a bit self-indulgent on my part though. I had a bit of a look at being a journalist once, one of my perennial slouches toward 'a career'. As with other professions whose networking events I attended whilst on JSA, I noticed that there was a real fearless projection of total bullshit going on with the personnel. Someone would be saying 'I think, I think, blah blah blah buzzword?' and the other person would go 'Yeah exactly, buzzword, blah blah blah, bibbidy bibbidy boo'. All so fast.

Omg did JSA send you to on work placement to The Canary? That is completely inhuman and I'd rather be packing Trill on a production line!

Oh no they sent me out to do Basic Employability and then Grounds Maintenance, and I've got a certificate for both, my name spelt wrong on both.

By the way I been hearing the 'tea' story a lot around the journalism question. Never quite bought this line about 'going in and making the tea' as a way in to a career. It didn't apply by the time I rocked up anyway. Did it ever? It always sounded a bit Festival of Britain to me. Is there a real tradition behind the phrase?

Julia Hartley Brewurgh kinda won the journalism/privilege thing with "I went to Oxford because I was clever*, not because I was privileged. Anyway why don't you moaning lefties support grammar schools so that at least some poor kids can get better educated?" (I'm paraphrasing, just a little)

* setting up Ash Sarkar and probably a few others for the "oh..what happened?" backslam

Doing an old-fashioned w/c apprenticeship, making tea and getting all the labouring type chasing, shovelling and sweeping type shit-work for 3 years and having someone say stuff like "get me the fucking engine driver, we don't talk to the oily rags here" is all character building stuff. Especially if you want to make more self-hating misanthropes. but most journalists are already like that to start with ffs! What a waste of resources and tea.

I do find it interesting to read about establishment journalists of yore who would do public school->Oxbridge and then work for a few years on the Rotherham Evening News before coming home to the Times.

xp Thing about Oxbridge grads like JHB is, there are many ways to get a fine education if you were interested in an education. That interest alone doesn't explain their choice of Oxford or Cambridge! They clearly wanted to be around powerful and wealthy people, and to acquire or maintain power and wealth. That's what Oxbridge is for. In the same way that there are many ways to get healthy, but that alone doesn't explain someone's choice to do lots of weight-lifting and hitting punchbags.

I got my start as basically a copyboy, which involved the making of gallons of tea, yes. Most of the people I worked with were posh-ish graduates for sure, but it was still possible to work up from bupkis.

I’m still interested to know about JHB’s boast that she bought George Osborne in a slave auction* at Oxford and what she made him do.

*eurgh, they had loljoeks about that, how edgy

Everything wrong about Oxbridge can be summed up in the following exchange:

Me, to friend at Oxford: ‘how are you liking being a student?’

FAO: ‘actually, I’m an undergraduate...’

I did not get involved in the Heated Debate on Twitter because yanqui interloper and different rules apply but any American reading JHB’s assessment of herself as ‘clever’ would be at pains to point out that ‘clever’ is the shallow person’s ‘intelligent’.

An application system for EU nationals seeking to remain in the UK after Brexit will be “as easy as setting up an online account at LK Bennett”, according to Amber Rudd.

ah the people's choice of shop there, perfect

lol!

hard to imagine Amber saying that line at the 2016 Conservative conference, where she was milking the applause with a very different message.

I made the mistake of putting on R4 this morning where Labour Antisemitism has been mentioned about 20 times for every singular Windrush mention.

Humphrys got a bit annoyed with his Jewish guest for saying people should report PLP Antisemitism to the party rather than the media and blaming the NEC for not implementing things, rather than JC - who would be accused of being dictatorial if he had overruled them. Then a segment of her interview was played out of context to Gwynne afterwards. Just a total fucking shower of shit as per...

Thing about Oxbridge grads like JHB is, there are many ways to get a fine education if you were interested in an education. That interest alone doesn't explain their choice of Oxford or Cambridge! They clearly wanted to be around powerful and wealthy people, and to acquire or maintain power and wealth. That's what Oxbridge is for.

Not to derail, but while that may well be true of some people, I don't think it's true of more than a very small percentage of Oxbridge undergraduates (is that really how most 17 year olds think?!).

speaking as a legit ignorant working class 80s kid i just thought Oxford looked like what my dream of university was and I wanted to go there mostly out of romantic fantasy. didn't really think about what it might be like as an institution for several years afterwards.

http://www.oxfordpolytechnic.com/about-oxford

You can buy your dreams online from the Oxford Polytechnic, New Dheli, India. Former alumni include Harry Potter, the character Rob Lowe plays in Oxford Blues and some cheating fucker from Nuneaton!

xp ya anch'io, I got my sixth form college to enter me for the Oxon entrance exam pretty much out of pure egotism, had really zero concept of how I'd have fitted in (badly, I think I can say with some confidence).

I mean, I thought of posh kids as being like the kids who went to the handful of non-boarding private schools in Croydon.

my school advised me against taking the exam on the grounds that private schools had whole classes devoted to prepping their kids for it, but i think that was probably a bad idea since i was great at bluffing my way thru exams and not so great at turning up for an interview without drinking a bottle of cider on the train on the way down.

i mean i regrette rien but y'know

A good thread on the technicalities of Windrush: https://www.twitter.com/alexpiletska/status/984670703357177857

oxbridge is worse than what you all think

over many years i've come to that conclusion but wondering how you could've played your hand differently is inevitable sometimes

oxbridge is worse than what you all think

Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean the actual university, or the effect of the networking that goes on there on the rest of society? Maybe my perceptions of "posh kids" are way off, but I found them to be a small enough percentage of the student body that they had no effect on me then or since.

lord almighty, that lk bennett quote - these people are so fucking bad at this

Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean the actual university, or the effect of the networking that goes on there on the rest of society? Maybe my perceptions of "posh kids" are way off, but I found them to be a small enough percentage of the student body that they had no effect on me then or since.

― toby, Tuesday, April 24, 2018 10:50 AM (forty-nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

- almost everyone becomes a posh kid no matter where they're from
- that said the actual posh kids tend to dominate the social fabric and they're invariably terrible, yours truly included (although i plead aspie obliviousness to the worst of it)
- complacency, arrogance, casual bigotry as a joke, gowns. this applies both to the university and the ensuing knock-on effect in society at large
- an oxbridge degree is a passcode and the notion of academic furtherance in the main a joke. most undergrads are not contributing one iota to their subject, just to themselves, and of course, financially speaking, to oxbridge
- the fucking gowns
- bizarre secret-society hierarchies that are of course mirrored later in life amongst the august corridors of whatever power an oxbridge graduate is born to
- the graduates who believe in oxbridge are like some sort of ghastly team, agreeably spreading their privilege across britain. those of us who don't - we are isolated, ineffectual dissidents. we use our degrees for employment purposes and scowl at the memories. nobody is interested in our story.

xp Yeah, I should make clear that even if they don't technically have citizenship, Amber Rudd opening the statement with 'Well, actually' was so fucking boneheaded.

I wonder if the oxbridge culture imago describes is largely on the arts/humanties side of things, not so much science?

Some of this is pretty reasonable, although "most undergrads are not contributing one iota to their subject" is surely even worse at most other universities. Also is "complacency, arrogance, casual bigotry as a joke" any worse in Oxbridge than anywhere else? But the domination of the social fabric by actual posh kids wasn't my experience at all - they just seemed to be some completely separate world that was very easy to ignore. Similarly the secret societies.

must we throw this filth at our just-popped kids?

Jeremy Corbyn SILENT for HOURS after Kate and William welcome royal baby

JEREMY Corbyn took more than three hours to congratulate the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the birth of their third royal baby child - a boy - at the Lindo Wing of St Mary’s Hospital, sparking frustration across social media.

Another user commented: “3.5 hours later, not a single congratulations on the royal birth from @UKLabour or @jeremycorbyn.”

Meanwhile, other Twitter users said: “#Royalbaby Why hasn't @jeremycorbyn sent congratulations? He's supposed to be Leader of Her Majesty's LOYAL Opposition.#

Prime Minister Theresa May was quick to congratulate Kate and Prince William, extending her well wishes just half an hour after Kensington Palace’s official announcement shortly after 1pm.

Mrs May said: “My warmest congratulations to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on the birth of their baby boy. I wish them great happiness for the future.”

Meanwhile the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan tweeted: "On behalf of Londoners, I want to send our warmest congratulations to the Duke & Duchess of Cambridge on the birth of their baby boy."

The Royal Navy and the BT Tower also shared messages of congratulations to Kate and William.

May: arguably her job
Khan: arguably his job the right wing little twat
Corbyn: pretty peeved he didn't tweed "make sure it learns a trade we're coming for you"

i don't know which ridiculous irrelevant paper that story came from but i'm pretty sure it wouldn't use tweets from random lickspittles as evidence for any argument it didn't agree with

He's supposed to be Leader of Her Majesty's LOYAL Opposition.#

i picked a bad week to try not to feel all Rote Armee Fraktion

it was from the daily express, which i feel is underappreciated as the worst paper in the nation

tbf that's because 3 people read it

just checked the abc website and the express has - i shit you not - 581 paid subscribers

It would have been fair for Corbyn to point out as LotO that in an era when the UK has dropped below Romania in the EU child food insecurity table and repulsive aberrations such as the 3rd child tax credit rape clause exist, that perhaps another rich pampered brat being squeezed out isn't exactly the big whoopee the right wing press paint it as.

lol why does it bother? can’t wait for the day when it becomes the ex-press tbh

xp

I'm amazed any Express readers know how to get on the internet, turn on a computer, recall the names of their great-grandchildren.

the only time i hear anything about the express it's either yet another piece in private eye about what a hellhole it is to work at or it's some utterly egregious clickbait ad headline that bears virtually no resemblance to the story it links to

sounds like they're pretty sussed on the internet media world then

i wonder if you could make a good quiz by taking the names out of Canary and Express headlines then getting people to guess which one was produced headline?

Probably.

Front of the Express today

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/D96C/production/_101006655_eex24p001-1st.jpg

Actually the front of the Sun is much more effective in its emetic power

https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/660/cpsprodpb/1007C/production/_101006656_sun-front-page-for-24_04_20.jpg