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

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.

Marcus B: "Who goes? You decide!"

you know they did that entire new Labour Party party political broadcast but replaced Jeremy with another Englishman, Richard Leonard, which was fantastic and will certainly get Labour a lot of votes up here.

I really don't like that guy, and wouldn't blame Scotland for thinking he is a cunt tbh.

he's snidey af

when the conservative party has arguably their least despisable player in Scotland and are cashing in on blind sectarian votes, and the SNP are rebounding back. Lets just try out this horrible English mediocrity and see how it plays out.

Next week is going to be a total clusterfuck. It feels like the most disaffected Labour MPs didn't bother to attend the conference at all and the ones that did were reasonably toothless.

A lot of would-be Tory leaders look like they're ready to start turning over tables and May herself is in a much weaker position than Corbyn. Unlike Corbyn she's also faced with the necessity of actually doing something decisive soon and whatever that is is guaranteed to start a massive fight.

Sam Gyimah was saying yesterday that they can't out-Corbyn JC because that would drive voters to the real thing, and that they don't have a palatable/credible way of saying "lets plough on with rampant poverty, underfunded schools, underfunded LA's, shit zero hour contract jobs etc, cos it's an economic model to admire" and her only policy seems to be chequers rn. Something like 90% of the grassroots members oppose chequers according that piece in the graun, where some brexiter ignoramus accountant from Hornchurch is espousing that "we fed ourselves during WW2" myth. May is in such a weak position and there are so many forces playing against her, that just getting through the conference in one piece will not happen, without even factoring in her usual indecisive blundering m.o. They might have worked out a functional adhesive for arranging words on a background wall this time, but I think the conference is going to be a mix of dull, unrelenting gruel and open warfare!

stick a fiver on May to do an Edge of Darkness during her speech

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a15ac8701bbce932b63fbaf93575dffdfeda8c6e/0_398_5976_3586/master/5976.jpg

Been looking at this glorious Real England photo for a solid two minutes. (from here)

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/a15ac8701bbce932b63fbaf93575dffdfeda8c6e/0_398_5976_3586/master/5976.jpg?width=1300&quality=85&auto=format&fit=max&s=f4eb98b63d31445aa1ae22376aadb931

Sombre reptiles

Kennedy Martin's original ending was more fantastic than that eventually used in the finished serial: he had proposed that Craven would turn into a tree but this was vetoed by members of the cast and crew.

Would watch.

xp

unsurprisingly, that's (in the middle) the ignoramus brexit-voting accountant who thinks we "fed ourselves during ww2"!

A return to rationing, that would have played really well on the side of a bus in 2018.

When he says "we" he means members of Parliament who continued to use restaurants and massively subsidised places that were not subject to rationing, to say the least.

xposts

let's pretend we still have a global empire and the biggest merchant navy in the world.

the crash from currently heaving supermarket shelves full of readymeals and pre-prepared salads to digging up all the parks to turn them into allotments for self-grown food plus the return of powered egg

https://secure.i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01572/IWM_PST_008105_1572968b.jpg

I'ver seen the future and it's 'Incredible edible' ran Gulag style

Dr Carrot is light on his feet

but needs glasses, hmmmm

there's always fairy toast!

https://s-i.huffpost.com/gen/3809460/thumbs/o-WAR-FOOD-570.jpg

anyway the ordinary people of this country have no faith in self-proclaimed experts like Dr Carrot

back then, in that so-called golden age, we had the most expert heavy government of the entire history of the UK!

yes enforcing the rule that rich and poor alike must leave every shop with the same (quite meagre) helping is unimaginably far off off-brand for the tories

Looks like Tories will go with Shaun Bailey for their Mayor of London candidate. Arguably just as dog-whistley about Khan in the past but then it's not like they have actual MPs who could stand this time.

I was just tipping some potato peelings into the composter and an apparition of Dr Carrot appeared from nowhere and was tutting at such a flagrant waste of good protein. Next time I'll make some lovely homemade crisps to go with my stale bread, bit of green mold makes yr hair curl!

as i read through the page of rationing recipes that i found fairy toast on, i could hear my mum -- a proud war baby -- approving some of the sensibiliities: she wasn't a make-do-and-mend type (she hated knitting and sewing) but she did re-serve unfinished food in many forms over several meals and encouraged dad in his willngness to "just finish up this piece of cheese" (weeks past the sell-by and hard as a piece of sweaty plastic. one of the recipes was for BRAIN SOUFFLE and this totally reminded me of her -- she always said she cooked brain well (tho she never tried it out on her children that i remember) tho she also had a story abt a souffle cooked as a nice surprise for dad during the very early days of marriage, that entirely failed… so his surprise was her weeping in the kitchen and nothing to eat. welcome to brexit!

Love a bit of cheese like that tbh.

it'll be fine. all this country really wants is nationalised industries run by paternalistic toffs. bit of bunting and toffee and we're good.