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

ill allow it

What's that German chess term for "a situation where one player has been absolutely banjaxed for the last half hour by a stupid error from about 20 moves ago but only just realised something is wrong"?

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) September 21, 2018

lol

fraudandshowed

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/windrush-citizens-latest-citizenship-refused-home-office-sajid-javid-a8549101.html

the tory party reeks of death

“necessary good character requirement” if there was such a requirement to be an MP, 95% of these cunts would be gone.

'Brutal' headlines for May yesterday. Eulogised today.

Heaven needed a loathsome and vindictive micromanager.... Etc

Corbyn says he will accept any decision made by conference over a second Brexit referendum. Given there's no way that they'll vote against it I guess that's more or less settled but everything will depend on the wording of the motion.

no doubt Chuka and the melts gang will be saying Corbyn had to be dragged to this point, and then desperately struggling to find another line of attack .. because .. um .. what do we actually represent again .. erm..

I don't know what the latest polling is on brexit, but I presume people are turning against in significant numbers, otherwise this could be a bad move by Labour.

it will be extremely good when 'remain' wins referendum 2 and the team leave throw a shit fit

on the other hand, it's highly likely voters are less than sympathetic to the side they blame for re-opening a question they had thought settled and so leave would probably win referendum 2 by a margin

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DniNT9qWwAIurNN.jpg

I'm not surprised our lame brexit neggers are coming up short against this bad mofo.

I don't think Labour leave voters are that much of a problem really, certainly not as the picture gets bleaker as it almost certainly will.

They are certainly not that much of a problem compared to what we have at the moment, which is a choice between whatever May can cobble together or a plunge into the abyss. There needs to be some serious pressure from another direction and I can't see where else it would come from.

It's not even about overturning the result or even stopping Brexit, but anything that can be done to force a soft Brexit is a good thing right now.

"Best out of 7?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7N9J7PLps_8

a 2nd referendum with an equally narrow margin in either direction can only be great for the future of the UK

fuck the UK, fortunately

The current direction is not exactly going to be wonderful either. In fact it's pretty much impossible to see a scenario in which it ends well.

Ultimately you're serious about democratising the Labour Party then this is an important test case, the leadership seems ambivalent at best but the party is overwhelmingly in favour.

no, absolutely right, glad Corbyn is playing it sensibly. the still highly unlikely event of Ref 2 is not one to be excited about tho imo

There's no chance the government will agree to it but it has symbolic importance and puts clear blue water between the parties on Brexit issue (as opposed the slightly woolly/completely nonsensical Starmer tests). Labour need to be on the right side of the argument for when it all goes tits up.

It also significantly increases the Parliamentary pressure on May to get a deal that actually benefits the country, as opposed to one that satisfies her own backbenchers. Although I have zero faith in Grieve, Soubry etc not falling into line when shit gets real.

What does everyone reckon to chance of November election? Ordinarily I’d dismiss it, but May is stupid/bloody minded enough to see it as an opportunity to carry on with her Chequers plan, especially if Labour decides to support ref2.

(xp) OTM, the 'reasonable' wing of the Conservative Party generally crumble under the slightest pressure.

the so-called Tory rebels don't even smoke Gitanes and chew gum, and they always go to bed at 8pm.

Dominic Grieve is not a guy who inspires much of anything tbh.

if the outcome is remain next time, the EU should totally go "oops, we've changed our locks now, too bad"

http://www4.pictures.zimbio.com/pc/Dominic+Grieve+XGqduwr9cd6m.jpg

Grieve is so amorphous, characterless and bland that ppl literally look right through him.

i think you’ve posted the wrong pic there calz, that’s just a photo of a copper

I actually don’t entirely agree with Matt abt the six tests: yes they’re woolly and yes they are likely entirely useless on the campaigning doorstep to the average would-be voter — and yes, it turns out that play almost no part in the MSM discussion of labour’s position.

But if the last were ever part of the Corbs machine’s plan — given its almost total lack of interest in Campbellian spin and policy-of-the-dasy newsgrabbing, at a practical moral AND political level — it isn’t any more (as a consequence, they do need clear-red-water big-meme stuff at this point).

Here’s why I think it’s not total nonsense. Since the election, they’ve stuck — without breakthrough success but also without slippage (in the face of the most hostile media coverage an opposition’s ever faced) — to a strategy of “don’t interrupt when yr enemy is making a mistake”. Which is always good politics (even if its probably a slight duff idea to just tweet it out, as barry gardiner did a couple of days back).

Give that this entails being seen to do literally nothing almost all the time, and given that, as signalling, this hardly cultures anything to stop rising anxiety and irritation among those who (a) blame corbyn for brexit anyway and (b) are beginning to scream 👏 SOMEONE 👏 DO 👏 SOMETHING 👏 , it’s not a bad idea to be sending out — much quieter — signals to specific constituencies, if not about what the plan, then about what the plan very much won’t flirt with. It shares form and function with GBrown’s five tests — for not entering the euro — and it operates in a similar way: Brown couldn’t say out loud “we will never enter the euro”, bcz of the internal NuLab ructions this wd cause, and the hostage to fortune it wd give to the hostile forces arrayed before them. So he drew up a — usefully foggy (iirc even foggier than Starmer’s) — list of principles, malleable enough that he could always tap the sign when anyone got arsey about it.

These are the main constituencies I think might sometimes have got arsey at GB:
1: the city and big business
2: the other countries in the EU (many of of them busily and at the time happily plunging into the eurozone, a future pitfall we ended up dodging)
3: and the shadow cabinet itself, bcz it’s useful have a set of state principles (however vague) that shape the limits of agitated discussion. You can just rule a bunch of stuff out.
4: wonks in the media (at the FT end of things, not columnists or telegraph editorial writers)

Same applies for Corbs, with some demurral re 4.

1: the corbs team will have been having continued behind-closed-doors discussions with worried corporate and money ppl, abt what they intend, despite their seeming inactivity — backed up possibly with firmer individal commitments not made public. The continued salience of the six tests is useful as a low-key nod and a wink in this direction, to say “nothing’s changed”.

2: Same as one, except also establish political relationships on the down-low, with at least some of the EU27, which offer about as much as it’s even sensible for a party in opposition to offer as their alternative approach to either continued brexit negotiations or kicking brexit to the kerb. At a minimum this signal says (to the EU27, whose diplomats are expert at decoding such things), Labour under Corbs has no interest in no deal.

3: Very important for a shadow cabinet that brings together ppl with quite different political outlooks and quite different loyalties EU-wise. It’s a steady-as-we-go index that ensures everyone on the team continues to pull with the team (and as such a striking contrast with how division in the May cabinet has been handled).

4: I’m not sure how important 4 actually is now… it was more pivotal I for GB, still in the Campbellian era; it is very evidently much diminished as a concern to the Corbs team. who on the whole seem to take the internet more seriously than they take the legacy media. So possibly it’s been supplanted by unaligned and/or party partisan wonkish types on social media (really just saying this bcz ppl like Dan Davies and Alex Harrowell — who aren’t fools and are hired out as analysts of best business decision re the immediate future in a variety of business areas — seem to take consider the 6 tests a useful talking point when arguing on-line, in FinTwit and elsewhere). I can’t yet bring myself to believe this is more than my best-choice forensic bubble though — it’s not a constituency with much of a long tail as yet.

So that’s why the six tests aren’t entirely nonsensical.

(lol i am cleaning my flat today, extremely meticulously, as you can all see)

adding, re diplomats decoding things: they enjoy doing this, it's their superpower, and (i imagine) they very much don't take seriously ppl who just send out chaotic or high-publicity bullshit signals: greece were somewhat doing this a year or three back (step forward mr yanis "game theory is garbage i have the cunningest plan" varoufakis, who while an entertaining fuck-the-bankster-squares performer on the world stage was p much completely useless at the actual negotiating table). insofar as its attempting anything, the may brexit team is replaying the varoufakist tragedy as, well, you know where this going

haha so to my actual point, the fact that labour has been sending out grown-up diplomatic signals over the last two years plays well for them and may even encourage some of the EU27 to manoeuvre the situation behind the scenes towards labour coming to power and changing the game (something they very very obviously could never say openly)

^^^this is entirely speculative and i doubt we'll find out either till after we're all dead (over to you bizarro)

I hope your flat remains a shit hole, because it is good to read some non voice of doom longform brexit posts sometimes!

lol we’re all gonna die

(booming posts tho mark)

"the corbs team will have been having continued behind-closed-doors discussions with worried corporate and money ppl"

this has definitely been happening + Baron O'Neil (ex-Goldman Sachs bigwig) and various FT heads making positive noises about the prospect of a Corbyn government in recent times, probably adds weight to the idea that things are a changin. The money people know a spent political force when they see one. I'm starting to think a Corbyn government might end up quite disappointing. They still need more radical changes of policy than on the manifesto. For starters Universal Credit needs annihilating, not the pause and fix .. I repeat it needs to be annihilated!

Corbyn apparently asked about the mural once again by Marr and didn't just say yes to it being antisemitic. Perhaps in doing so he would only invite the criticism of not having realised this at the time but given the alternative it's like come on.

McDonnell has been spending a lot of time in the City of late but I think things like the O'Neil statement are as much about the Tories evisceration of their own brand as anything else - a once-in-a-generation fuck-up that could take them another generation to put right.

The useful thing about the six tests is that they enable Labour to continue sitting on the fence, sending a nudge and a wink to both sides at once, which is a *very* Blair/Campbell thing to be doing. It's also the case that Labour's Brexit policy doesn't really matter that much as they're very unlikely to be in a position to enact any of it before Britain leaves the EU.

After Britain *does* leave they will have to outline a blueprint for how a Labour-governed UK would relate to the rest of Europe, which really WILL matter and both will and should be subject to greater scrutiny. The problem with fence-sitting as a political tactic is eventually you're going to have to get off the fence, and when you do you'd better not fuck it up (as the LibDems found out to their cost).

(xpost - oh god, he really is Tim Farroning this entire issue isn't he?)

the thing is the UK has never really been interested in the history of WWII so you can't expect people to recognize antisemitic symbolism in 2018

they have been very interested in a fantasy version of WW2, but yeah!

I recently read David Edgerton's Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War. It runs a bus over Nolan's Dunkirk and much other widely believed nonsense!

Huge. https://t.co/7sGMNQVdM0

— Aditya Chakrabortty (@chakrabortty) September 23, 2018

this type of stuff is v good, it works in Germany and they don't have a productivity crisis.

In the last 8 years we've had the great minds of Raab and Patel deducing all our workers are lazy bastards is the problem, something had to change 4real!

finally, some much-needed common sense from the torygraph

https://i.redd.it/llwj807wd6o11.jpg

He can fucking die already tbh

oh dear. and they didn't even go by snopes to check

Above all, the Nazis were German white nationalists. What they stood for was the ascendancy of the “Aryan” race and the German nation, by any means necessary. Despite co-opting the name, some of the rhetoric, and even some of the precepts of socialism, Hitler and party did so with utter cynicism, and with vastly different goals. The claim that the Nazis actually were leftists or socialists in any generally accepted sense of those terms flies in the face of historical reality.

Something else the moderate right (lol) are doing is equating Corbyn to Trump

some rare examples of attempts at socialism the nazis exhibited were.. erm some shitty wooden social housing with only basic electric lighting and a shared outside khazi, or the strange period when brickies working on the Atlantic Wall were earning more than brain surgeons! Oh yeah and cheap crystal meth for all, but Kershaw's a knob and his Hitler books has been completely eclipsed by the V Ullrich one, so there!

earlier on R4 someone misspoke statist as stalinist whilst talking about McDonnell's proposed water privatisation.

predictably the bbc is taking quite a hard-line "stop this madness, what about the shareholders" stance on McDonnell's evil Stalinism.