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

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.

Given that this is inextricably bound up in attitudes to the state of Israel, young people tend to have more negative opinions on Israel, not only is that my experience but I'm sure there's polls to prove it - don't have time now, got to go to work.

i'm not sure the exact momentum-CPLD stitch-up sbush is referring to, but a fairly hardcore bust-up on the left (over tactics and strategy and who was in charge of them) was dodged a while back as some urgent challenge or other loomed (i want to say the leadership challenge?)

at which momentum while large was new and didn't yet carry the internal heft it now has: and it wasn't yet clear that those in the party and the PLP who favoured expelling momentum en masse weren't going to win the day

^^^so this is what was "in it" for momentum at that point

xp also my experience but doesn’t seem to come with quite so many references to the “lobby” or “Jewish plots”!

another layer not really being addressed -- obviously it doesn't remotely apply to willsman -- is the basic fact of trolling and false-flag accounts being set up online by opponents (and by ch4nner-type nihilists)

i was just going to post "it's good to remember that political parties are for shit" but mark's version is more eloquent and nuanced

on an unrelated note i had the pleasure of hearing Dan Hodges on the radio this morning. he once found an accommodating home in the Labour party.

23 deaths in police custody last year, at least a third not white. still never been a successful prosecution of a police officer for one

xp also my experience but doesn’t seem to come with quite so many references to the “lobby” or “Jewish plots”!

Well, I don't know about that. One thing I have noticed is the idea that Jews aren't really the victims of discrimination, they're doing pretty well for themselves, so how exactly are they suffering from racism? I had this exact conversation with a black woman I work with. Also they control stuff.

When I lived in London I can recall quite a bit of antisemitic speak in some workplaces, and often from other ethnic minorities. It wasn't the first time I'd heard this kind of thing, but up to then it had been quite rare, coming from a Town with a population 0 of Jewish people.

To say that Jews don’t face disparagement or discrimination despite having money or influence is kind of ridiculous. It’s like saying Islamophobia is not a problem because there are rich Saudis.

ch4nner-type nihilists also some part of the rise of Corbyn - more significant by noise than volume, but I imagine there's some nervousness in Momentum about whether they stick around when the memes end.

citation needed

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.

― gyac, Tuesday, 31 July 2018 09:49 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Careful - I can hear xyzzzz starting up his chainsaw

well if they're actually sticking around for the politics then by definition they're not nihilists, whether or not they arrived from 4chan -- but what i mean are the online types who enjoy stirring up forums and riling up hiveminds just for the fun of watching others fight, without any investment in the politics (or whatever the topic is)

this can turn party political -- to some extent it did with gamergate -- and can and has been adapted and/or captured by various flavours of political activism, but there's a persistent element buzzing around way beyond this wihout loyalty beyond their own immediate fun