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

follow back pro eczema (for all!)

xp yes, I'm simply re-positing it to the DL type consensus!

PCPEU is another one that isn't intentionally related to drugs.

the history of how right-wing party rhetoric has often been most successfully utilised during "stabbed in the back" nationalist type narratives

I'm going to have to ask you to unpack this one - the pro-europeans are likely to to be the ones accused of stabbing in the back (on both sides, by the look of it!)

There is nothing to unpack, apart from your own myopic life throw a monocle pov!

Ah go on, give it a go - my monocle's in the shop at the moment, for a start.

that's what happens throw it, rather than looking through it!

anyway, people like you are always the worst commentators on brexit. Nothing personal, but you are.

ha! what

fuck me, i can barely put a fucking cogent sentence together at the best of times, jed! What?

no idea! people like A Farrell? there aren't many people like him.

People who incessantly, mono-manically cry about Brexit, tend not to give a fuck about lots of other issues that affect the working poor, the disabled, and other forgotten ones. So I basically don't care about their "concerns" either!

what the actual fuck

I don't think people like that are allowed here you must be mistaken. My monocle's AWOL too though. xp

nothing to "unpack". They chat much shite but have little of substance to say about those that need protecting. I'm cool with that. but will never agree with cunts like this!

Andrew is certainly a comrade with particular concerns and i don't know why you would think otherwise.

My fave remoaner hit is: "it's gonna worse for you ppl first". Cheers, but it's already shit and i didn't vote for it you fucking prick!

sorry I wasn't intentionally directing it all towards AF. I'm just a bit pissed tonight and sorry about any offence.

yeah, I can dig that. It's a truly awful time. Let's move on.

No offense here, it's been a shit day.

and I know it's been a bad time for you Cal x

if I'm ever in London again, i'll get you a beer in Andrew!

I'd be on for that - I know I'm a clever arsehole, and that obscures the fact that I know a lot of people are under the cosh for a lot of things. Because I'm Irish, the cosh for most of my loved ones largely reads 'Brexit'. But yeah keep your head up man.

Andrew doesn't half get some stick sometimes.

Hard-earned!

https://img.cdandlp.com/2017/08/imgL/118905627.jpg

I still think DL is a risible clown, but I feel I'm going into a terrible spin cycle here and better go to bed!

wtf is FBPE?

― We can be herpes (Tom D.), Tuesday, 12 June 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Its a twitter hashtag where Remainers can basically congregate to talk about how Brexit is terrible and its all Corbyn's fault and Neil Kinnock is a real Labour leader. I am sad to report I am mutuals with one of those ppl, who faves this lot like a drug so I get to see quite a bit of it, where its not someone from left-twitter mocking it.

There was a late night tweet from this person as to why this wasn't working.

the history of how right-wing party rhetoric has often been most successfully utilised during "stabbed in the back" nationalist type narratives

I'm going to have to ask you to unpack this one - the pro-europeans are likely to to be the ones accused of stabbing in the back (on both sides, by the look of it!)

― Andrew Farrell, Tuesday, 12 June 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not to pile on or anything in the morning after some colourful exchanges here but I saw a point someone make a couple of days ago, of a possibility - should the referendum result be turned back by a 2nd ref (and that is only 52% the other way), or by any means necessary - of an upturn in fascist-type attacks, where a lot of migrant communities would suffer.

Don't think anyone posted this but a really good piece by David Runciman - which is what various people argue (on here and elsewhere).

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n09/david-runciman/too-few-to-mention

And the last sentence:

But for anyone to undo Brexit, someone is going to have to do it first.

there have been multiple Dacre-bot "national betrayal" type headlines in the dying r/w printed press in the last few days, and no doubt May's continuing weakness and prevaricating will inspire many more. But I could imagine them becoming much more dangerous in a post 2nd ref landscape. I mean they only go out to a couple of mill these days, but are parroted by millions more on the parts of social media that hurts my eyes. During the first ref there were some violent flare ups between Asian and Eastern European communities locally. And that poor guy who got murdered in Peterborough come to mind, I'm sure there was much of this type of shit going down at the time. It would be absolutely foolish to ignore the dangers of these forces having a totemic "betrayal" narrative, whilst being useful idiots for the billionaire hard-brexiters who like the Singapore model very much.

oh, also the small matter of an MP getting murdered in cold blood by a far-right nationalist, that obv had no connection at all with "the message" they were putting out at the time.

sorry for shitting up the thread last night + no hard feelings Andrew, sometimes I forget finishing off the wine-box isn't quite like finishing off the bottle!

Xp to say nothing of various Labour MPs being threatened and abused constantly! One of the most persistent criticisms of Corbyn in the mainstream is that he hates Britain, and on the far right this transfers neatly to “loves foreigners AND hates Britain”. The betrayal narrative is very real and there are a lot of unsavoury people waiting to make capital from it.

no point trying to explain that to ppl like DL, who seem completely oblivious to what austerity is actually doing to other humans

In fairness I had a Twitter exchange with him about this and he was actually railing against austerity for most of the coalition years (and still says it's important as Brexit). I think a lot of London media Remain Twitter is a little oblivious to how monomaniacal and annoying it can be. But its also very easy to fall into the trap of believing the right of, say, Diane Abbott is an austerity-loving Blairite. God knows some Labour MPs have hardly helped themselves here but they've blown their wad on this and will probably never regain the trust of members, and rightly so.

TBH I didn't know about that Ally Fogg thing and assumed he was responding to this unbelievably stupid Zarb tweet:

If Brexit is the biggest issue affecting your life then you must be doing alright. I’m happy for you. Most people have to worry about more pressing issues than the UK’s post-Brexit institutional arrangements. Stop confusing your only concern with the country’s main priority 🙄

— Matt Zarb-Cousin (@mattzarb) June 9, 2018

I mean he's right that for most people in the country healthcare, jobs, housing, education etc trump Brexit as a voting concern every time. And I'm hugely mistrustful of people for whom Brexit is suddenly the only thing that matters. But at the same time Brexit will fuck all those things up, the whole problem is that Brexit and austerity can't be separated, they exacerbate one another. I don't think it's invalid to question whether Labour would struggle if they suddenly inherited a rapidly deteriorating economy.

I'm also very suspicious of people like Zarb for the unrestrained glee they're showing here. There's also a very good reason why Corbyn himself isn't taking such a gleeful line (ie it would be electoral kryptonite in a lot of Remain-voting marginals). (I do wonder if some people on the left would be taking a more vociferously anti-Brexit line if Corbyn himself also did, but that's neither here nor there.)

Also nowhere in Zarb's thinking does Northern Ireland exist, or indeed the concerns of any Europeans (especially Eastern Europeans) living in the UK whose lives are being fucked up by this. The people who are actually likely to be at the sharp end of the increasingly emboldened arseholes who think they've voted to end immigration, or have carte blanche to shit on anyone who looks a bit foreign. Zarb is framing it as a privileged conceit while revealing a lot of unexamined privilege of his own.

In short it's complicated. I wish any of the vocal Remoaners were demonstrating that kind of nuance tho Matt - that they don't is why they infuriate and so are fun to bait.

It's enormously dispiriting to see notionally sensible people banging on about "brocialists" but the elevation of sections of the Twitter left (Zarb, Bastani, Sarkar, etc) to figureheads / spokepeople for the politically-engaged youth has massive drawbacks and this is one of them.

(That Ally Fogg thread is very good by the way but then again it basically approximates my own position so I would say that)

And of course one more time, the EU was fine with austerity, even when it wasn't dishing out its own to Greece etc

it's a complete clusterfuck, and lots of Blue Labour's take on it is so simplistic and deluded, and quite the opposite of a Matt DC post!

Yeah but that's largely irrelevant given that the UK is outside the Eurozone, I doubt the EU would have cared much either way about UK monetary policy even if public spending had continued to grow, this is all at the door of Osborne and Cameron and I'm 90% certain Brexit wouldn't have happened without them.

(xpost - isn't Blue Labour more likely to take a pro-Brexit position, given that it's all legitimate concerners anyway?)

Best thing you could say about Lexit is it's a hell of a gamble- so no wonder Zarb-Cousin is keen lol

Also yeah I don't think it's a coincidence that most of the voices I trust on the pro-Corbyn Twitter left are women.

Blue Labour tends to steer pro-Europe but with immigration restrictions - the 'have your cake and eat it' model that Cameron tried and failed to win.

Blue Labour want racism but at a cheap gite supranational level

my point about the EU and austerity is that it and its supporters made a terrible job of selling it during the referendum and there are legit reasons for that

Xp to say nothing of various Labour MPs being threatened and abused constantly!

Still, that Momentum, they're the real threat to our democracy.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44452529

And thank fuck I'm not on Twitter, it's hard enough work being on ILX.

in fact my legitimate concern is that the EU has not much more to offer the poor and marginalized than centrism does in general

I'm guessing it'll take a shock in Europe, maybe Italy maybe elsewhere, to force the EU to get its own house in order but I don't think most Leave voters were really taking Greece or Spain into account when they voted.

The approach should have been 'neither Leave nor the status quo but working for sunlit uplands within the EU' but the entire tenor of British politics for the six or seven years before the referendum made it impossible for anyone to make that case, irrespective of what the EU itself was doing.

increasingly seems to me that there are lot of issues inc brexit which have similar generational splits with gen xers complaining about the dangerously antagonistic tone of millennial leftists, and millennial leftists rolling their eyes at gen x pretensions to sensible, broad-minded debate

selling EU imposed austerity: "don't worry about your living standards dropping to early 20th century standards, welfare state shrinkage, homelessness and disabled bodies piling up, just look at the respectable gdp per capita ranking and record low unemployment figures for that feelgood factor!"

I guess the referendum would have only been held under a tory government and was mainly done to quieten down elements of that party. But going ahead and voting for the possibility of a Lexit under the current government seems self-defeating. Would think you'd want there to be a comfortably established Leftist government before you could begin to have things set up for that.

It's usually 40-somethings and older circling the wagons because the younger generation doesn't think that their progressive utopia was all that great in the first place. And yeah a lot of them will make that point clumsily because - gasp - they're kids and some of the figureheads know how to whip that up to their own advantage.