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

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

the worst of it is my conviction that nobody involved in putting those pages together gives a flying one about the baby or its parents or its extended family

Re: Oxbridge, I moved to Cambridge last year and have met quite a few current students, none of whom seem to be anything like the kind of person described above, but maybe I'm just not mixing with the right crowd (or the wrong crowd).

my friends who went to cambridge are just as normal/weird as before except now they like port

I hear there are a fair few punts in Cambridge.

there is a strong possibility that my experience was dictated by having come straight out of boarding at an independent school without so much as a gap year (i did work in a warehouse for six weeks in between mind you)

also i now like port too ffs

wtf at the 'much ado about nothing' line on the sun cover there, someone's having a laugh there with the link to shakespeare's birthday

i guess i fell in with the wrong crowd over and over again, like a moth to flame

anyway sorry for dragging this off-topic

kinda disappointing that the new royal only just overshot hitler's birthday, would have loved to see the sun's royalbabymania front cover on 4/20

Nothing is a double entendre; "an O-thing" (or "n othing" or "no thing") was Elizabethan slang for "vagina", evidently derived from the pun of a woman having "nothing" between her legs.

as a key ingredient in a Cheeky Vimto i think we can safely say that port is not just for poshos and olds any more

Port is a fantastic drink, but it makes my cheeks go rosy red and it is so easy to down fast - it could quite easily become one's ruin.

Rudd repeatedly using this gritted passive aggressive tone in her statements e.g. "Today I set out how we will offer the Windrush Generation greater rights than they currently enjoy". Fucking disgrace.

"gritted passive aggressive tone"

I think that is her only setting tbh.

I would be interested in polling how much they’re enjoying them right now. Which, I’m aware, is entirely the fucking point.

JRM's take on this is unsurprisingly terrible:

I do not believe that the interests of the collective allow you to crush individuals who may get in your way. I believe that we are a nation built on the individual, so that the rights of each individual are a valuable and important thing, to be protected by the government ...

I will draw a parallel with the Windrush issue. The Windrush issue came about because the state put the interests of the collective ahead of those individuals who had come here perfectly legally prior to 1973, and that it was more convenient for the Home Office to make them prove who they were and show their papers. This is socialism.