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

(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.

Calls for a Renters Union are excellent if long overdue.

xp

I meant nationalise in that post obv.

only a complete arsehole could object to Landlord reforms right now, they've been taking the piss for way too long now.

How many tory MPs are landlords again?

Also we can freak Liz Truss out again by demanding better support for pet-owning tenants.

shit, imagine if Fabricant was yr landlord!

the horror in Pienaar's voice earlier, these centrists really do hate everything that is good.

hypothetical landlord t/s: michael fabricunt vs fred west

All (water utility) staff will transfer on a TUPE basis in the same roles, except for senior executives and directors, whose posts will be re-advertised on dramatically reduced salaries capped by our 20:1 pay ratio policy.

bladow!

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/almost-one-in-five-mps-are-landlords

was gonna say, not just Tories

Lammy and Thornberry the two standout Labour names.

New MP Laura Pidcock has said: “I think that anyone who is a landlord should not be able to vote on legislation affecting landlords, it is a complete conflict of interest.

“The people of Grenfell Tower have had their concerns repeatedly ignored and it is part of our long history as working class people to have our concerns ignored.”

laura pidcock otm

that last landlords bill that got torpedoed was famously trying to write it in law for their properties to be fit for human habitation. Most landlords would probably say: no, my tenants are all subhuman scum anyway.

A fifth doesn't actually seem that bad, or at least wouldn't if it wasn't 87 Tories to Labour's 28 I mean fucking hell.

I remember Richard Drax being on South Today and my student housemates joking about how he looked, sounded and had the name of a comic book villain. Now 18 years later he is a landlord and a tory MP.

r4 have this awful consumer affairs program and one week they were like: lets listen to some landlord sob stories just for a bit of balance. At the end I was thinking .. cut Mao some slack, these parasites are the true enemy!

Be interesting to know how many BBC employees own BTL properties (I'm guessing quite a few)

if you don't wanna be a landlord and deal with tenants, then sell your properties before the market crashes again and laugh all the way to the bank ffs

As far as I know, McDonnell’s policy has been tried in one other comparable situation. In the early 80s, Sweden’s Social Democrats promised to give 20% of company shares to workers. Named after its architect, trade union economist Rudolf Meidner, the policy was popular with the party faithful.

But in this polite and outwardly cohesive country, it caused outright war, writes Robin Blackburn in his classic history Banking on Death: “Business leaders were intensely alarmed and spent five times more money attacking the plan than the cash laid out by all the parties on the 1982 election. The privately-owned press ran a sustained and vigorous campaign … under assault, support for the scheme ebbed and the Social Democrat leaders believed that it was prudent greatly to dilute the scheme…” By the mid-90s, the policy was dead.

Chakrabortty is predicting there will be a serious establishment onslaught on McDonnell's "Class War" and maybe more so than what we have seen yet!

It's not 1982.

*checks calendar*

he's right, folks

Labour's leadership is the sweetest agony atm

Foolishly glanced at part of the editorial from the odious CIty AM this morning and they were howling in horror at Labour's latest proposals against poor defenceless bankers and bad businesses as usual.

lol love city am

What's the deal with the centre left press fawning over McDonnell all of a sudden? It's been going on for a few weeks now and seems to have come out of nowhere.

isn't there a theory he's plotting to overthrow corbs?

I don't know if the stress of intriguing against a friend and taking on the leadership at the time when that position will be taking some serious flak would be great for someone who had a heart attack only 3 years ago.

they’ve been taken in by his emollient bank manager routine

Yet confusingly he's the one consistently saying remain isn't an option LIFESOCONFUSING.GIF

thread on the labour leave fringe meeting:

Austin Mitchell says our “poor prime minister” was “viciously attacked” by the EU last week. #Lab2018 pic.twitter.com/amtIprcfvX

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) September 24, 2018

can't stand that old cunt!

people who wish were dead but aren't.

Kate Hoey says the reason so many young people support staying in the EU is because they have been indoctrinated by Remain-supporting university lecturers. #lab2018

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) September 24, 2018

people who wish were look dead but aren't.

Every time Norman Tebbit shows up I find myself torn between a jaded "of course he's talking shit, he's Norman Tebbit" and an indignant "you've got a nerve, showing up here alive and having opinions"

— Buckfast at Tiffany's (@DismalChips) September 24, 2018