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

Hopefully the Charity Commission will properly crack down on "think tanks" this time but it's highly unlikely.

Jeremy Hunt off to a great start by referring to his Chinese wife as Japanese in a meeting with the Chinese Foreign Minister.

they've done a cracking job of stripping dubious organisations of their charity status so far, great bunch of lads!

I've just got my NEC ballot and voted for the JC9. My fuck off and die Izzard motivation to participate this year was just looking at the Progress slate for 10 seconds, and seeing that glowing Akehurst head.

Shocking when there are genuine charities out there, in need of support, like Eton College.

don't really understand why right wing pressure groups need ministerial access "hey Boris have you considered doing something really right wing?" "no i hadn't thought about that cheers"

― the Joao looked at Jonny (Noodle Vague), Monday, 30 July 2018 5:08 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

When there’s so many nasty things they could be getting up to, think tanks are there to remind them of the choices they have. Like this old canard from today:

Brexit will undoubtedly change the UK in many way, and this morning a centre-right thinktank, Policy Exchange, suggests the government should use withdrawal from the European Union to resurrect an idea last popularised during the Tony Blair era - identity cards. The report says the new “settled status” system for EU nationals who stay in the UK after Brexit (which does not at present involve a card, although the Brexit committee said recently it should) should be converted into a national ID card system.

It says:

The one welcome consequence of the Windrush scandal has been a revival of the debate about ID cards. With more people living in the country temporarily, with more conditions on their residence, some form of unique number identification for establishing status (with the state, employers, landlords and so on) is vital for all those without permanent residence status. The identity management experiment for EU citizens remaining in the UK after Brexit should be a prototype for a national system.

And it claims that having a national ID card scheme could avert the repeat of another Windrush-style scandal.

We also strongly recommend re-opening the debate about ID cards or some form of national identity management system to reassure people in a world of ever rising human flows that we know who is in the country, for how long, and what their entitlements are. This is surely a bulwark against ugly forms of nativism. The move from a low control to a higher control border goes hand in hand with the move from a low documentation society to a higher documentation one.

The often elderly Caribbeans caught up in the Windrush scandal were victims of that process being mismanaged, not the process itself. The justified outcry over the Windrush failure should not extend to challenging this shift to a higher control border, indeed a proper national ID system would have prevented the harassment of the Windrush victims. The system has evidently been too tough in some areas and not tough enough in others

god bless Progress, heaven needed some middle class liberals

good call on ID cards, i bet loads of elderly black people have fond memories of pass books

I'm honestly pissed off at the Guardian reporting of Hunt calling his Chinese wife Japanese as "Oh ho, this Foreign Secretary's as bad as the last" - it's embarrassing for him of course, and I hope his wife punches him every day for the next month, but

He succeeds the gaffe-prone Johnson – who once referred to Africans as “flag-waving piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles” in a newspaper column.

Is conflating an actual nightmare error with being a performative racist cunt.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjTE7NnXoAAN_9T.jpg

I don't know what Darren Gough has done to deserve messiah status, ugly bassa!

lol

is that arabic script beneath haha

looks like prophet written in faux arabic, a classic edgelord move

at least jesus had the decency to die for our sins ffs

I also voted for most of the left slate for the NEC. And Grace Blakeley for Labour's policy forum.

Do you have to have already been a Labour member for a period of time to be able to vote in this? Can't really find anything about eligibility online. Just thinking about the rules on entryism they used to try and oust JC a while back.

(not currently a Labour party member but considering joining)

I think you have to have been a member for eight weeks in order to have voting rights.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/30/conservatives-reach-younger-voters-offer-free-love-island-water/

Yeah that's right - we're giving away Love Island water bottles for the final (obviously). Some with a political twist, some not so much. Either way you're going to be staying hydrated.

With just a limited number available, winners will be chosen at random. So don't miss your chance to get yours. Just fill in your details below!

#FreeMerch #FinalCountdown #DontBeAMelt

no way does that look desperate

oh wow a use of "raunchy" out in the wild

what xover btwn free tommy and moatylegend

https://www.conservatives.com/loveisland

You don't need to click it, just... stare.

Limited number of bottles, you have to give your data to the Tories, you can’t choose what goes on the bottle...in conclusion:

Inch by inch, the Conservatives are understanding how to communicate on social media. @SamGyimah gets it. https://t.co/sTntoxm8La

— Sebastian Payne (@SebastianEPayne) December 29, 2017

I thought getting mugged off was getting a blow Job off someone with no teeth?

this is some real howdoyoudofellowkids.jpg bullshit

#DontBeAMelt
#DontBeAMelt
#DontBeAMelt
#DontBeAMelt
#DontBeAMelt
#DontBeAMelt
#DontBeAMelt
#DontBeAMelt
#DontBeAMelt

"a constituant asked me what i have been doing this year"

yeah, spunking your council tax up the wall on self-serving animations

(and isn't there a tense problem in the original question? asked / have)

Minister for Universities

tl;dw

Yeah that's right - we're giving away Love Island water bottles for the final (obviously). Some with a political twist, some not so much. Either way you're going to be staying hydrated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDvZr5J5y1Q

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjTE7NnXoAAN_9T.jpg

Also I have been staring at this for several minutes and cannot tell what exactly has been tattooed here. A shin? A forearm? A rancid slab of doner?

If it's a leg, where is the knee? Where?

It’s the back of the leg

ah right
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ujT4ZPGn_WI/hqdefault.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calf_(leg)

if that tat is real i will pray every night that Robinson gets outed as a nonce at some point

An absolute moral and political liability. An absolutely essential demand for next year is that decisions over who is on who is on the left slate are opened up and high standards demanded over time servers. https://t.co/LI7J55QPSo

— Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) July 30, 2018

This is so exasperating because it's so stupid, predictable and avoidable.

i voted for him yesterday i love democracy

i have to detach enough to keep exasperation to a minimum or i'd just forget about it all entirely

so depressing, and an absolute gift for the opposition, and will dominate the news cycle. i give up!

between that and this hammer-blow from dominic lawson at the weekend, labour is fucked

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjVzgqpXoAAKyCb.jpg

^^ things that look like they're from the Onion but in fact aren't? smdh

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2018/07/pete-willsman-labour-anti-semitism-national-executive-committee-momentum

This is pretty brutal as well.

The toleration of Willsman speaks not only to Labour’s anti-Semitism problem but to Westminster’s collective failure to address allegations of sexual harassment (the only lasting casualty of which may turn out to be the Sports and Social, the staffers’ bar in Parliament, which has closed down).

It’s not as if Willsman’s behaviour is surprising or new. But he retained his position on Momentum’s slate because he is the chair of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy. (The CPLD is the original Bennite vehicle for campaigning for party reform and in internal party elections and has a backroom deal with Momentum to run joint candidates for the party’s ruling national executive committee and other internal contests.) The benefits of the deal to Momentum are frankly, unclear: Momentum has in excess of 105,000 followers on Twitter and more than 200,000 on Facebook, plus a large and growing mail list. The Campaign for Labour Party Democracy has 3,488 followers on Facebook and 4,644 on Twitter.

The indulgence of Willsman has a lot less to do with any organisational heft and a lot more to do with factionalism. It’s the cost of doing business as far as many professional Corbynites are concerned.

It’s also seen in the Corbynsceptic reaction to John Woodcock’s exit from the Labour Party. We’ve heard a great deal about the merits of Woodcock’s proposal that Corbyn’s internal opponents should seek to form a new party outside Labour: we’ve heard nothing about what, exactly, the “independent process” to which he pledged to submit the allegations of sexual harassment against him, will look like or when we can expect it to emerge. It’s also in the sound of silence emanating from the Conservative Party following Sayeeda Warsi’s allegations of Islamophobia from within the Tory party and cabinet. In all those cases, political convenience trumps any real effort to diagnose the extent of the problem, let alone find a cure.

And while there are undoubtedly people who hold anti-Semitic views within the Labour party, their strength comes not from people who agree with them, but who regard it as something that has to be ignored in order to prioritise retaining control of the institutional levers of power within the Labour Party.

Pretty sure that if you want to retain control of the Labour Party then indulging and promoting anti-Semites is proving to be one of the worst ways to go about it.

The last three years have brought a lot of new blood into Labour. While a lot of the membership gain is from older people, enough of them are young - and crucially, Labour won in every category of working people in 2017.

What I wonder about things like this is if this will provide the galvanising push for the young left to press forward. Up til now they have been in a supporting role, but how long will they stay happy for this to be the case? They are the people angriest about this, to whom the cranks are the biggest liability. There is no obvious successor to Corbyn yet but i wonder if there people in the wings who could step forward and keep going in the same direction, minus all the awful old shit like this that the party seems incapable of dealing with.

i fuckin hope so

ash sarkar 4 pm obv

An assumption seems to be being made there that it's only older people in the Labour Party who have issues with anti-Semitism.

the problem with the labour party's unreconstructed machineries -- rules, codes, practices -- has been trundling down the pike for years to be honest, as something it's always "the wrong time" to confront and transform

not to mention the fact that the mechanism for transforming them isn't really in anyone's direct gift: corbyn can't make a proclamation, everything has to go through conference etc, you can't dispense with the tradition of voting slates by airily rejecting slate-activity (bcz you'll immediately be overridden by yr opponent's slate), taking all this on openly as part of yr project is exactly what gets politicians dismissed as impractical idealists (everyone anywhere urging pragmatism as a value is basically rubberstamping this kind of stuff)

this is part and parcel of the decomposition of the entire existing british political structure, obviously -- and i think whoever confronted it even slightly was going to (a) have a fight and (b) have to wade through a fkn stinking mess by no means wholly of their making

(this is an oblique way of saying that i'm not at all sure any of this WAS avoidable: certainly something *like* this would have erupted at some point, bcz so much garbage is so embedded in so much of the machinery (in and far beyond labour)

they are going to have face up to the fact that if that kind of speak is acceptable behind closed doors, they have serious problems that need addressing. It's like the type of dog whistle the far right would use, it's completely bad and just adds more bigotry to the internecine clusterfuck.

An assumption seems to be being made there that it's only older people in the Labour Party who have issues with anti-Semitism.

I feel pretty comfortable in saying that the majority of the worst twitter trolls and defenders of this shit tend to be older. Conspiratorial rhetoric crosses political divides and again, more often older people who are most susceptible. Occupy/anti capitalism rhetoric gave it a shot in the arm but it’s much much less common among younger activists (which is not the same as saying anti Semitic doesn’t exist among that group). Willing to be proved wrong on this, if you have any evidence against.