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

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

Sarkozy and Hollande were both hyped as marking a significant shift in French politics.

This is simply not the impression I've got from the French ppl in my life, sorry. Neither of those dudes founded a new party, for one.

(also I doubt there's anyone on this thread who isn't personally affected by brexit in one way or another, EU citizen living in London here)

I almost posted earlier that, policy-wise, Corbyn's closer to Roy Hattersley than he is to Mélenchon but thought that was pushing it a bit...

I'll check it out, xyz. For the record, I'm in agreement with the majority of his proposals (that I know of), and mostly balk at the EU/NATO/antisemitism stuff (as regards the latter, I don't think Labour is any more antisemitic than other parties, but it definitely harbours its own specific strand, and the 'English irony' comments are utterly indefensible, though I'm not convinced this means Corbyn is a genuine antisemite). I'm comfortable saying the first two points are dealbreakers, though perhaps they wouldn't be if I were British.

Btw, I do think in 2018 Corbyn's nationalisation plans (which are absolutely necessary) paint him as 'far left' in the eyes of most observers.

Labour announced banning gambling ads during sports (or just football?) on TV. IDK about this - or at least I don't think it will play well (as with the 'Early gender tests 'leading to selective abortions of girls in UK' policy announced last week it struck me as avoiding a deeper problem). Prefer a focus on in-store addiction (FOBTs etc.) and staff welfare.

re the popularity or otherwise of nationalisation: this is a yougov poll from a year and a half ago

(= just before the 2017 election, so i don't know how much the numbers would have moved -- only a little rather than a lot, i'd imagine)

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/inlineimage/2017-05-19/National%20vs%20private-01.png

Only 50% for bus companies? I have to say it's one of the things that's been infuriating me the most since I got here. I'm always on the verge of throwing a shit fit whenever the bus arrives and it's the 'wrong' company. Likewise, having to shop for energy/water companies is utterly ridiculous.

What no prisons?

I think re-nationalising trains/energy/water is very popular with the electorate right now, and the Tories know it and listening to Chris Grayling coming out with the old "BR were shit, so therefore.." argument this morning shows they haven't really haven't got a plausible Private Sector better dialogue sorted and are out of ideas.

Oh right, you also have that, which is as fucked up as it gets. When it comes to this kind of madness, I feel like the UK has more in common with the US than with Canada. Sad!

xp

Re: Prisons. I was talking to a friend yesterday who knows someone whose 23 yr old son recently died in a G4S prison, and she's trying to take them to court. It seems like there is a lot of this going on right now, but it isn't really an emotive story, cos criminals.

This was a short take on how a prison is run badly:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/09/11/eleanor-fellowes/how-did-birmingham-prison-get-so-bad/

How did Birmingham get so bad? The reasons include privatisation, low staffing levels, new drugs, and government spending cuts. Privatisation alone isn’t straightforwardly to blame. Some private prisons are better run than their public counterparts, and there are prisons in public hands that would recognise themselves in Birmingham’s inspection. But privatisation has contributed to problems across the prison system, as the public sector has to be run for as little as possible to stay ‘competitive’. That’s the big picture; the inspectorate is more concerned with the detail.

how could the prison service have known that privatisation would be a net negative given there are no examples of it ever going wrong before