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

both of them are complete wasters.

i read the chris williamson one and it includes both the phrase 'common sense socialism' and signs off with a 1983-vintage quote from tony blair which reads 'socialism corresponds most closely to an existence that is both rational and moral'

reader, i am now a tory

I don't know why I embedded the tweet, just LOL at garbage site PoliticsHome. I'm sure Schofield will follow up 'gosh, Williamson's response also created waves and now nobody knows what to think as we drown in all these tit for tat waves' noble journalismz

i refuse to be rational or moral fuck you Williamsong

Williamson is like a lot of so called Left Twitter, he's continually retweeting Canary, Galloway, RT type dross and was adding fuel to the Antisemitism row by completely dismissing it out of hand. Just an embarrassing fool who needs deselecting just as much as the Streeting type detritus do. Austin was rightly exposed as Hepatitis on a recent Tory leaflet.

I'd argue the Williamsons of this world need to go before anyone else if only because the damage they could do is so much greater.

Please do :)

fairly stonking speech about where we are w brexit at the moment

https://policyscotland.gla.ac.uk/blog-sir-ivan-rogers-speech-text-in-full/

Apologies for posting from the Mail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5775673/Moggs-Moscow-Millions-Brexiteers-firm-poured-fortune-Russian-companies.html

Andrew Marr almost asked for his permission before asking him about this this morning, if only he still had a forelock. To be honest, I was distracted by the fact that the studio lighting contrived to give JRM a Hitler moustache throughout most of the interview.

I feel like my day + general mental health has been 100% improved by choosing not to watch Marr this morning, but JRM's special treatment did sound as predictable as watching the national Test Cricket side getting arseholed, again.

Also predictable that he gave Labour's Parrott-like (John, that is) Shadow Health Secretary a harder time over some Tory policy that hasn't even happened yet.

i tell you what guys, not watching current affairs programmes makes every day a little bit more beautiful

I put on 5 live's Pienaar show earlier and someone was saying (without any sense of irony) that statist broadcasting channels in countries like Russia should be forced to carry a propaganda warning with any political content they broadcast, or something similar.

i heard that, he was some Tory "Backbencher of the Week", and i had similar thoughts about labelling dishonest propaganda on TV i.e. it will be great

i was intending to make sure the warnings were carried by all bullshit news outlets tho

Looking fwd to russia being forced to put propaganda warnings on its state run broadcast channels by some tory employee if the week

Someone just made the very good point that the BBC should be compelled to reveal the funding sources of the various right wing think tanks that keep sending their spokespeople to QT on a weekly basis.

Kate Andrews is on our screens more than Ant & Dec.

She obv needs to get pissed more often.

The increasing use of Spiked and Spiked-related talking heads is worse tbh.

agreed, especially that imbecilic plastic paddy dickhead.

the latest Spiked hot take is something like: Left wing Momentum gammon sneering at that endangered species - The White Working Class, Frankie Boyle is probably avidly reading it rn, I'm certainly not.

Oh God, the point of gammon is that it describes RIGHT WING people.

and they should at least have a very ruddy complexion and come from N Yorkshire.

Its a ruddy disgrace, whats point of having nuclear weapons wiout using em? If you wont fire em get someone in who knows what thas doing and get em fired

speaking as a white working class dude i'm happy to step down tbh

also Brendan O'Neill can go fuck himself, the middle class twat

the beauty of the gammon furore is how protective certain elements have felt about nine furiously nuclear patriots from QT and how they have been variously said to represent all old people, all brexiters, the entire working class and anyone to the right of diane abbott. the way ppl show themselves up in their wrongheaded attempts to take offence is delicious

tbh it's a phrase wide open to that kind of willful misinterpretation and should probably be retired at this point.

I'm not a fan of any appearance-based criticism but it was a funny word and kind've passed the Henry Fielding test for meanness so what the heck

Absolutely, when applied to the nine people it was originally given to. It’s on shakier ground when broadened out.

it shows the inconsistency and absurdity of centrist calls for respect and polite discourse. the idea that it captures something distinctively nasty about some part of the left is nonsense, and I don't think it will go anywhere as long as it keeps hitting a nerve

it reminds me of that amber frost piece on the necessity of political vulgarity: I found it v uncompelling and she ends up with a very unattractive position praising trump for his raw honesty or w/e, but I think the more instructive issue is not so much on the value of vulgarity so much as the way attempts to police it reveal the motives and reasoning of a certain class and the imagined political tensions driving them

concern about polarising discourse is too selective to be credible, especially when it is so readily deployed against imagined middle class corbynite rudeboy folk-devils in defence of people's right to aggressively barge into public forums to represent murderous hegemonic authoritarianism

"manners" have always been a class shibboleth so it's only natural when people use them to shut out discourse they don't want to hear

I think gammon is really the equivalent of the loony left, which I've never heard anyone complain about, and I expect it to stay around. the dickens quote from nicholas nickleby is ofc further proof of its timeless appeal

It certainly revealing how many centrists jump to the assumption that the gammon stereotype is intended to pillory the whole of the working class or all white men, etc, but the sloppy way it has often been used on Twitter leaves that door open, imo.

The value of vulgarity aside, it feels like a lot of people have been searching for a kind of counterpoint to pejoratives applied to the left and there’s a risk that is just playing into the culture war narrative .

Either way, giving people with a persecution complex an excuse to argue they really are derided on the basis of their race, age, etc is probably generally unhelpful.

i don't think your real gammons are open to the loving embrace of logic and persuasion tbh

Your real gammon would probably thump you if they heard you call them working-class. They are petit-bourgeois golf club whingers.

Absolutely, whoever said they were working class? Apart from middle class journalists who assume anyone who doesn't talk with the same accent as they do, and all their friends/ families/ relations/ colleagues, must be working class.

Middle-class Oxbridge southern journalists, for the most part, letting regional accents signify class in ways that aren’t accurate.

I think gammon is really the equivalent of the loony left,

That's loony lefty luvvie libtardflakes to you lad.

It's the middle-class journalists who have the soapbox and the incentive to deliberately misrepresent the term to their audience of the perpetually aggrieved.

However, there'll always be a few examples of an over-broad use on left Twitter to back them up.

The one gammon, out of the original Magnificent Nine, who subsequently turned up on another programme I was watching, was a farmer. Inevitably, he was simultaneously bleating about there being too many immigrants and about the prospect of there not being enough immigrants to pick his potatoes, or whatever, for him.

I'm not in favour of the lazy gammon takes accounts or the way it will lose its power as it gets spread about but that's inevitable. going to out myself as an occasional HIGNFY watcher here but I thought the richard ayoade bit on gammon and centrists dads and so on the other week when there was this strange self conscious and sort of divisive moment as the show dealt with something that mocked it was p interesting viewing

I can't believe ppl really think these red faced men publicly fantasizing about armageddon are crying out for respectful dialogue, and the idea that they represent any sort of middle ground to be appealed to is absurd. these are ppl who thrive on upfront & zesty statements of grievance, a bit of honesty in response is necessary imo.

the way ppl are concerned by the gentle lampooning of these ppl reminds me v much of the way the notion of legitimate concerns was deployed, this invocation of civic respectability which I think it's much more useful to expose than kowtow to

but the sloppy way it has often been used on Twitter

What word hasn't?

Either way, giving people with a persecution complex an excuse to argue they really are derided on the basis of their race, age, etc is probably generally unhelpful.

They will find something to fume about either way, no need to try to assuage them imo.

going to out myself as an occasional HIGNFY watcher here but I thought the richard ayoade bit on gammon and centrists dads and so on the other week when there was this strange self conscious and sort of divisive moment as the show dealt with something that mocked it was p interesting viewing

It felt to me like they quickly reduced it to "gammon = leave, centrist dad = remain", in order to best assimilate the terms into their business-as-usual shtick.

Still not as urgh as Sarah Pascoe just using gammon as a catch-all for white people on that Frankie Boyle thing mind.

tbh there have always been ways to lampoon them that don’t touch directly on race / age / appearance and don’t feed the (unfair) perception that the left is hypocritical in not wanting race / age / appearance-based epithets applied to other people. We survived with Little Englanders, Golf Club Bores, Col. Blimps, etc, for long enough.

Colonel Blimp was himself not a Colonel Blimp of course

I've been tired of his rote gadget-show-presenter shteez but he was gently confrontational and mocking in parts there in a way which felt out of keeping with the very familiar comfortable cynicism and received wisdom the show's become known for while nailing the quick pun-intensive tone which made the it popular

Guys, every fucking lamer is using the term now. It's over, let it go.