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

Also you have first past the post, so the Tories would be back 10 years later.

I'm sure Bannon's Bowel Movement or whatever it's called will be lobbying hard for UK PR soon enough.

jobbying hard morelike amirite

you're correct

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DnYMwRcVsAE49c4.jpg

People who live in council houses should be made to feel proud of their homes, Theresa May will say later.

The PM will announce £2bn to build new homes in England, in a attempt to remove the "stigma" of social housing.

wtf is she even talking about? there are 15 year waiting lists and a housing crisis getting as bad as the post-war one. The only stigma is the social one on slumlords who they've made life so easy for. The graph tells the full story of how to make a housing crisis by abandoning social housing and leaving it to private sector failure, again.

It is interesting to see that c.1968 was the peak for social / state housebuilding.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/58255000/gif/_58255383_eng_wales_births464x297.gif

the real "baby boom" was 1920 apparently.

but the late 60's was a notable period as well!

interesting, so in the UK the baby boomer generation wasn't really a baby boom at all (apart from immediately after WWII) - the peak was at the beginning of gen X

People who live in council houses should be made to feel proud of their homes, Theresa May will say later.

The PM will announce £2bn to build new homes in England, in a attempt to remove the "stigma" of social housing.

I don't even know where to begin with any Tory having the gall to come out with that statement. It's like a serial murderer saying, "Won't someone think of my victims for a change?"

I'm not totally into that idea tbh, why bail the Tories out?

At some point, as the chances of an election recede, Labour could start to see it as their best chance to inflict a government-shattering defeat on them. Particularly as pressure is growing on the leadership from both wings of the party.

Obviously there isn't a cat in hell's chance of the Tories agreeing to it unless it's somehow forced upon them. Labour's current plan, which seems to be to vote against any deal the PM comes up with, isn't likely to be warmly received by the electorate if the alternative is crashing out without a deal. But that might be the same with a people's vote as well.

People who live in council houses should be made to feel proud of their homes

'should be made' is a weird, vaguely threatening way of framing an allegedly positive policy

The most charitable reading I can muster here is that administrators and policymakers should be coerced, not the inhabitants themselves. But it comes off as a telling slip more than anything.

Aimed at the media too. If it isn't it should be.

you are more likely to be considered lucky to have a council house in this current era. May is projecting her own prejudices here in the usual ham-fisted manner, and it isn't a secret that her party is ideologically opposed to social housing, and some people haven't forgotten Cameron's "petri dishes for creating Labour voting bacteria" quip a few years back, wankers!

can't find a good thread about unions but does anyone else despair at the state of them? I'm in unison and my friend works for them and is constantly bemoaning how old fashioned, useless and unresponsive they are. we've had consultations going on with possible strike action looming but they've been on the back foot the entire time while failing to act on anything I and other members have said, my employer is running rings around them and will already have planned for industrial action, while other action is dismissed out of hand, emails not returned etc. reforming them from the inside seems incredibly difficult and I wonder if it would be better to start afresh.

A bit short + probably not helpful, but about 8 years ago a colleague joined Unite, and they were totally useless and the company we were at laid him off for having the temerity to join a union!

Can't see May's words as being any different from her saying ie. "people should be made proud to use food banks".

I'd be sceptical about how many local authority bids would be for pure social housing, and not these housing Association trusts or whatever, where the rents can be much higher than council properties.

this will surprise no-one here, but I have a friend who lives in a housing association flat in Hackney and has had to be moved around a few times because of structural issues and some of the rents that the temporary accommodation landlords are charging are fucking ludicrous even for London (he isn't paying them, the association is, but that's coming out of taxes somewhere). it makes no sense economically, it's completely political, of course New Labour were no better either.

I'm sort of a beneficiary of the right-to-buy scheme since my mum bought our council house and sold it 3 years later for 3x the price she bought it (which got me out of living in the council area where everyone hated me) but while it was a benefit to our family the failure to replace the sold-off stock was an awful policy for the country. not that this is news to anyone

can't find a good thread about unions but does anyone else despair at the state of them? I'm in unison and my friend works for them and is constantly bemoaning how old fashioned, useless and unresponsive they are. we've had consultations going on with possible strike action looming but they've been on the back foot the entire time while failing to act on anything I and other members have said, my employer is running rings around them and will already have planned for industrial action, while other action is dismissed out of hand, emails not returned etc. reforming them from the inside seems incredibly difficult and I wonder if it would be better to start afresh.

I'm not in a union but the people who are where I work are constantly criticizing them for being lily-livered, ineffectual and instantly backing down at any and every confrontation with management.

I don't know about that, but they have just acquired a new significance -- supposedly presenting a block to leadership candidates from the Left under Labour's new rules.

In this context, various people who are generally pro-union are now concerned about their having too much influence in this particular arena.

Yes, a lot of people want more direct local member control.

In other news:

Salzburg summit hasn't started yet, but the scale of May's problem on NI border is already clear. Her pitch to EU27 leaders tonight: how would you feel if your country was carved in two?https://t.co/sZRYXSjPjA

— George Parker (@GeorgeWParker) September 19, 2018

Going to be a stretch for Varadkar on a couple of fronts to imagine his country split in two.

the Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Slovenes, Austrians, Hungarians, Rumanians, Germans, Poles and probably a bunch of other countries will all have thoughts on that issue I would think

she has a 2:1 in Geography, perhaps her stronger suit is the physical/geology side!

salzburg are you ready to ROCK

ah look a petition on Open Selection. Beyond what the NEC is or isn't doing I think this points to ogmor's point on the uselessness of Unions, and whether Labour can be re-shaped to include them, but to also go above them - one type of org among many.

Today it doesn't look at all good.

on the union-y plus side tho https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/sep/20/wetherspoons-and-mcdonalds-staff-to-strike-together

Jammy cnut

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/20/ian-paisley-dup-mp-survives-first-ever-recall-petition-lobbying

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/sep/20/the-death-of-consensus-how-conflict-came-back-to-politics

This is very good and actually gets what's happening, and why New Labour were complicit in it.

Once again, I am irritated at how Macron gets systematically dragged into this. French presidents are notoriously despised by the population irrespective of party. Sarkozy quickly slipped into unpopularity. Hollande, who leaned further to the left than Macron ever will, hit rock bottom. Say what you will about Macron's supposed 'illegitimacy', the far left didn't even make it to the runoff and Le Pen came out of the entre-deux-tours debate utterly humiliated. Which I suppose is this piece's point: we're more fragmented than ever, dissensus is omnipresent and the fiction according to which any given party (including the hard left) can speak for the 'people' no longer lends itself to suspension of disbelief. I am torn between a positive reading (this plurality of voices is precisely what democracy is all about) and a calamitous one (we'll tear each other apart before the next decade is through or, more likely still, we'll settle for a strongman). There is no easy solution here. The notion that one's political enemies will suddenly open their eyes and see that their best interests match your own discourse is naive at best.

The 'hard left'.

Yes, the hard left.

This from last year is good on how the ‘centre’ started to stoke a lot of the populist fires even before the economy died.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n18/pankaj-mishra/what-is-great-about-ourselves

Neither Sarkozy nor Hollande were hyped as a sea change in the way Macron was*, and obviously neither of them received his international attention either. The situations aren't comparable.

* Ok, some ppl advocated for Hollande as this, but it had much less momentum

Yes, the hard left.

Name names.

Mouffe's take on democracy reads like recognising or even celebrating a tug of war that never actually produces a definitive outcome (progress). CHAOS IS A LADDER.

i personally prefer a monist model of politics in which parliament is an indivisible singularity that exists outside of time

Sarkozy and Hollande were both hyped as marking a significant shift in French politics. Their campaigns garnered less international attention, no doubt about it, but that's very much a symptom of Brexit/Trump/migrant crisis.

As for the hard left, I'd put Corbyn in that bag. Mind you, I'm of the opinion that the English-speaking world needs such politicians far more than France. A shame about the whole 'fuck the EU, tacitly' thing, which I simply can't endorse (this affects me directly btw).

winning elections in the UK has never been about consensus. Centrism is still a near-meaningless term given that it represents wholly different world-views depending on the decade and the polity.

Mélenchon actually put a coalition together of left and communist groups right? That's not what Corbyn is doing at all. He has always been in the Labour party.

And Mélenchon has all but absorbed the French Socialist party at this point. There's a fluidity to these positions – which incidentally goes to show that the so-called 'centre' isn't necessarily more nebulous than the so-called 'left' or 'right'.

Macron is going to get dragged into discussions here because he is the nearest person in terms of policy to the Labour centre-right who has any political power.

I also don't buy that the French will just hate a president. From what I could see Sarkozy and Hollande were awful, policy-wise.

Then why didn't they just vote for Mélenchon, since I assume his beliefs are closest to your own? Why did Le Pen make it to the run-off instead of him?

Trying and failing to think of a single policy idea of Corbyn's that could be described as hard left tbh.

Macron is going to get dragged into discussions here because he is the nearest person in terms of policy to the Labour centre-right who has any political power.

He was dragged into the article in question... by Labour centre-right politicians and ex-politicians.

The English use our respectable parties to absorb racist policy. That clearly isn't enough for the French. xxp

I will revel in any Macron fail, because he is a loathsome piece of garbage, and listening to his UK fan-club in recent times has been excruciating to say the least!

the fairest thing to do would be to judge the right of the labour party on policy and intent and the left of the party on optics

Pomenitul you should read this sometime. I'd say its an accurate summary of Corbyn's leftism and where that falls in with Labour Party history:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n18/lorna-finlayson/corbyn-now