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

it seems to be putting the jitters up the very ppl a strong opposition party should be scaring the shit out of, but let's be honest - he's no Gerry Adams!

Not sure I agree

if you can find anything worthy of respect in the government's conduct since the referendum, please feel free to elaborate

there's only one gerry adams tbf

Virgin Trains
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Jim Waterson
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Lads just a quick heads up that you've got the whole shadow cabinet and half of Britain's journalists about to get on your network in an hour and they're all hungover and grumpy and wanting to nationalise things.

1:18 PM - Sep 26, 2018

nice!

Really good speech!

The "solidarity fund" lines were so clean and simple. Good stuff.

if you can find anything worthy of respect in the government's conduct since the referendum, please feel free to elaborate

― heteroflexible pansexual polyamorous relationship anarchist (bizarro gazzara), 26. september 2018 16:19 (forty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh, it's not that, it's more the first half of it. I really don't know enough to say what Labours strategy on Brexit should be.

Wait... does Wes Streeting think the Winter of Discontent and the General Strike were one event? https://t.co/mR0lLJ0ADZ

— Jack Saundrs (@jack_saundrs) September 26, 2018

No one good has ever been called Wes - discuss.

Fucking idiot. Why did these people join the Labour Party in the first place?

Wes Montgomery alchemises two distinctly unpromising forenames into a reputable person

Wes Montgomery is God tbf!

Hello, Wes Hall?

Maybe narrow the Wes hunt to white people

Anderson obv

White Wessies could be the anthropological label for gammon!

What, no Hoolahan? :-O

lol I clean forgot Anderson

streeting aka the mcshitter > anderson

Wes Chatham as Amos in The Expanse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTMfSBRvfiw

counterpoint!

Wes Streeting's New Nightmare

... a Labour Government.

So this happened. pic.twitter.com/Osqq7oJPnK

— Clifford Singer (@cliffordsinger) September 27, 2018

This feels significant I think - they haven't found a way to attack the employee shares thing, partly because they know it appeals to soft Tories, and they're freaking out about it. But it's also reflective of the way Brexit is completely dominating the government to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, allowing Labour to make the running and set the agenda.

given the extent to which Corbyn's critics usually misrepresent his politics, this Daniel Finkelstein piece seems like a pretty fair synopsis of Bennism?:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d37ff42a-c0d8-11e8-a932-84839f5183a4

(Finkelstein thinks it's self evidently ridiculous/sinister of course, but I don't think distort it for the most part?) (imo everything he describes sounds great, and the main problem is the likelihood that it will be substantially watered down if/when Labour actually take power)

Isn't the employee shares proposal what used to called, gulp, popular capitalism?

they'll be giving Billy Smart's Circus a run for their money next week going by recent conference performances. They have become so myopically a single issue brexit party, and making a dog's breakfast of that. I feel like whatever the Maybot does will be a farce. Whether it be some hastily put together Corbyn-lite concessions or doubling on the current trajectory of doom. I used to think the Conservative party had some preternatural ability to keep the factionalism under wraps better than Labour, but deffo isn't the case rn.

I used to think the Conservative party had some preternatural ability to keep the factionalism under wraps better than Labour

This definitely wasn't the case from the early 90s onwards, pretty much up until the point when Cameron took over.

oh yeah not in the Major years or the Blair era, but in recent history.

everything old is new again lads

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Long_Knives_(1962)

Gave rise to Jeremy Thorpe's finest moment:

Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe, in a humorous twist on a biblical phrase, observed that "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life."

Conference speech was good and coherent and passionate - it was the first time since before the election that I felt they were making a real offer. Since last year it seems like they’ve been stagnant and then dealing with various scandals, but the policy offering is strong.

EXCLUSIVE: Check out our new TV broadcast, Our Town 👇 pic.twitter.com/v1eA76SpL3

— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) September 26, 2018

This video was great and the narrative speaks to the kind of voters they need to attract or retain for a majority.

What do the conservatives have to offer except more of the same?

Sad that the Tory Party Conference surely can't be as shambolic as last year's.

o ye of little faith

You would think not but May's still in charge so...

given the extent to which Corbyn's critics usually misrepresent his politics, this Daniel Finkelstein piece seems like a pretty fair synopsis of Bennism?:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/d37ff42a-c0d8-11e8-a932-84839f5183a4

"Corbyn's grand plan is to subvert parliament"

So our current right-wing commentator position is that taking powers away from parliament and giving them to the executive is good (Henry VIII laws) but taking them away from parliament and giving them to the people is bad except when it's good (Will Of The People and all that), is that right?

We must save the people from embracing policies they support and agree with.

Well, it makes a change from Fink calling Corbyn-supporting Jewish people kapos, I guess.

When did he do that? Pretty sure you’re thinking of someone else.

Cameron shaped the factionalism into one enormous issue that fucked the entire country.

it's so cool that britain had one epoch-definingly bad pm followed immediately by a second one who might turn out to be even worse and we didn't even have to vote for her

good luck uk

xp it was a post-Jewdas spat with Dan Hancox, IIRC. I’m not keen on Tory members of the Lords employed by desiccated Australian anti-Semites policing my Jewish friends’ Jewishness, so it was a fairly memorable incident.

I remember that and it was pretty appalling but he didn’t actually call him a kapo. That one seems to get thrown at left wing Jewish people a lot, and a lot of it on Twitter is done by right wing non Jewish people as well, ugh.

oh yeah remember the northern powerhouse

The government has spent two years and £40,000 of taxpayers’ money trying to hide how little the Northern Powerhouse minister visited the north of England in his role, in what one prominent northern figure called “a blatant disregard for the principles of democratic accountability”.

In February 2016 the Guardian submitted a freedom of information (FOI) request to the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) asking how regularly James Wharton, who had then been Northern Powerhouse minister for just over six months, travelled outside London.

The department flouted a requirement to respond to the request within 20 working days and did not provide a response for more than four months – at which point they denied the application.

The Information Commissioner’s Office then undertook an investigation, during the course of which it found that the department adopted “what appears to have been a strategy of wilful procrastination in order to obstruct a request for information”.

DCLG appealed the decision to the first-tier tribunal of information rights, where in early 2018 Judge Hazel Oliver ruled that the department must hand over Wharton’s diary.

From start to finish, the process took 26 months.

The department fought for so long to prevent the release of the information that two other men, Andrew Percy and Jake Berry, have since taken up the role of Northern Powerhouse minister, and the entire department has been renamed as the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.

The government has spent two years and £40,000 of taxpayers’ money trying to hide how little the Northern Powerhouse minister visited the north of England in his role

Shame, that would have paid for three or four train journeys between London and Manchester.

lol

got to give it Gideon, he said the north/south economic inequalities could be bridged and his policies have made it so I can get on a train to Leeds and pretend I'm in London as I walk past 100's of desperately hungry + despairing homeless people.

Boris accusing his own party of a "conspicuous infirmity of purpose". True, but it totally bodes well for next week.

Ian Lavery saying: events, dear boy, events in broad Geordie on QT was quality!

JRM saying "magic money tree" also bodes well for next week.