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

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.

"Yes," I said, "for the love of God!"

https://cdn.pastemagazine.com/www/articles/henrytrainheader.jpg

Sometimes I'm thinking about how the distance between my childhood years and WW2, and 2018 and the 90's is roughly the same. And how wartime attitudes were still quite resonant back then. I used to water this old lady's flowers (no innuendo intended) very halfheartedly and get treated to a few Pontefract cakes for my labour, which no doubt would have been considered a veritable sweetie bonanza back in the day.

licorice and granny's garden. red mites and white dog poo. austin maxi. mates, we are set.

ooks 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.

Sounds like they've decided to make knife crime the central issue this time round, which is pretty risky as it's very easy to Khan to turn that around and blame it on police cuts.

understatement, it is a line of attack that doesn't hold any water at all, unless Khan is a master of disguise who has masqueraded as Home Sec and the current PM.

I'm not a Khan fan, but blaming the crime spike on him is beyond disingenuous ffs. But that's how Conservatives roll in 2018.

i <3 R. Peston. Sometimes when he does his report on the evening news he is depressed af but other times he's like this:

.@Peston tells @BorisJohnson
"It's worrying" how little he understands about global trade and the EU https://t.co/PyJS3JpadJ

— Paul Waugh (@paulwaugh) September 28, 2018

Labour Tommorow member Chris Leslie has "overwhelmingly" lost his his no-confidence vote tonight in Nottingham East. Sort of weird that back in 2015 Corbyn picked him as his first Shadow chancellor and he predictably refused the position, 3 years is a hell of a long time in politics!

Wait, what? Corbyn wanted him to stay in post as shadow chancellor?? That's bonkers if true.

Extremely poor judgement from both of them tbh, as Corbyn surely would not have survived his first year if thus had happened.

um .. I saw some link last night where he was listed as the Shadow chancellor who refused to serve Corbyn, but it might have been hypothetical .. cos that would have been leadership suicide!

"let us gather the warring tribes and bring them together under one umbrella" is corbyn's default position

To make the numbers he had a few rookies doubling up in that first cabinet, and he was definitely offering olive branches to hostiles who were carrying knifes. Strange that it was only 3 years ago, it feels like a decade.

knaves caryying knives even!

I'm pretty sure that McDonnell as Shadow Chancellor had been in the contingency plan for this most unlikely of all scenarios since about 1986.

No no no no no, the offer was for something like Shadow Defence and apparently CL was weirdly stupid about the world outside the UK.

this is v funny. the event app for the tory party conference lets everyone log into each other’s profiles with just the email. massive security breach for journalists and mps alike as it a) allows you to see all the info with which they registered, and also change it.

It's let me login as Boris Johnson, and just straight up given me all the details used for his registration pic.twitter.com/fLNC06azx7

— Dawn Foster (@DawnHFoster) September 29, 2018

circus drum roll. mp3

this sir is an insult to the car-debarking clown community

I cannot work out how to log out as Boris Johnson, and am getting constant notifications pic.twitter.com/ZsYGmv0zIT

— Dawn Foster (@DawnHFoster) September 29, 2018

the comments! "Launch a leadership bid!"

never forget:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoRKuxNo6xY

solitary tweets that effortlessly summarize the spirit of ILX

The best British politicians of the last century:
1. Winston Churchill
2. Clement Attlee
3. Roy Jenkins
4. Aneurin Bevan
5. David Lloyd George
6. Tony Blair
7. John Major
8. Michael Heseltine
9. Harold Wilson
10. King Edward VII

— Andrew Adonis (@Andrew_Adonis) September 29, 2018

lol

obviously i very much disagree with this list but i can kinda sorta see how someone could make an argument for 1-9, individually if not as a collection -- but 10 is just like "fuck it who else was british in the 20th century, i can't think of anyone" (i mean if yr going there E2R makes more sense)

should have just put tony blair again

where's ruth davidson

what would be the argument for John Major as one of the 10 ten? the same sort of thing as when ppl argue that Gerald Ford was the best post-war president because even if he didn't achieve much he didn't do a huge amount of damage either?

Agree with Adonis that Lloyd George gets mad props for destroying the Liberal party

architect of the good friday agreement (or the secret talks that led up to it)

i think he has a better case than heseltine, who i genuinely struggle with and seems well down any list even of tories: if you want a consensus britain tory go with macmillan, who also recognised the inevitability of the end of empire

LG was the first ever "BIG BEAST", we established that elsewhere on ilx

(he in my first two sentences being major, in response to a sceptical soref)

Robbie Williams

xpost Timing!

unless he means "best" as in most adept at working the floor and juggling the factions (but heseltine doesn't come very high on that list either)

Noted Europhile Adonis, I assume picked Edward VII for cultivating the Entente Cordiale, though in common with the time some of his views were less progressive.

I guess he would have picked Heath if it weren't for the accusations of paedophilia.

Entente Cordiale which made such a positive contribution to the death toll of WWI

agree that Heseltine is a lazy nonsense pick but so's the whole list really. admiring politics as a skill divorced from ideology, intent and results is for horrible assholes anyway.

Lloyd George wasn't no wizard, that's for sure. He was a bit like Boris in many ways - a mendacious windbag who could talk up a storm without knowing his arse from his elbow and with a penchant for casually dropping racial slurs. Presumably Wilson get's a low showing for keeping us out of a evil and pointless US war, unlike his fucking chum.

Apropos Chris Leslie’s tantrum in the Guardian, this beautiful thread:

Today’s the day! The big one. Yep: the third anniversary of Peak Leslie.

Exactly 3 years ago Chris Leslie’s historic interview with the Observer was published. It stands as the most succinct explanation for the demise of New Labour, a masterpiece. Thread> https://t.co/Xml1t3Fh2a

— Alex Nunns (@alexnunns) May 30, 2018

great thread. alex nunns needs to ditch the wellend haircut tho

haircut Nunn grata! Which? Magazine strata??? What fucking drugs was this numpt on?

This unexpected insight may have been inspired by Tristram Hunt's claim that Lab needed to win “John Lewis couples and those who aspire to shop in Waitrose.”

and ppl wonder the word "gulags" kept popping up on this thread!

cracking thread!

that the likes of Chris Leslie + Tristam Hunt aspired to be a big beasts at this juncture of the PLP's history, should never be is quite easily forgotten.

Reading various bits of commentariat this morning would appear to suggest that the Labour conference this year marked another turning point. All the build-up suggested it would be overshadowed by rows about antisemitism and Brexit but the former barely came up and the latter was dealt with reasonably neatly. It didn't even feel like it was about Corbyn, really. Instead it was about eye-catching and forward-looking ideas that are being taken seriously in and of themselves, even if they're obviously ideas in development and need work.

They're also freaking the hell out of Tory commentators because they know that these ideas are attractive to voters. There's an argument that things like massively expanded employee share ownership or universal basic income form the basis of a new centre ground because they appeal to both left and right and allow them to see elements of themselves in them. They also appeal to ordinary people who identify as neither. It's also increasingly difficult for the Tories to recast them as 'back to the 1970s'.

Contrast it with the intellectual bankruptcy of that Chris Leslie piece, no one seems to have mentioned a new centrist party for a couple of weeks.

Especially fun to contrast it with the Tory conference having its first exploding comedy clown car moment before it's even begun.

I see boris johnson wants to do another bridge

That's the thing with employee ownership, are you socialising the means of production or are you literally giving people a stake in capitalism? As long as ordinary people are benefiting, does it even matter which?

It's one reason why I think the £500 dividend cap is a mistake, some employees would stand to get a lot more than that and if the rest goes to the state it's very easy to recast it as corporation tax by the back door. It's also easier for a future Tory government to roll it back, whereas proper employee ownership schemes could become embedded into British society and politically impossible to get rid of precisely because they would be so popular.

maybe McDonnell was expecting the "this Class War must be stopped!" onslaught to be as strong as Chakrabortty was predicting it would be took a more gradualism type approach? This onslaught has been pretty weak so far, so perhaps that is a sign that it isn't really as radical a policy as some of the commentariat made it out to be.

Chris Dillow has been looking at it in a similar way, here

Which raises the second question: mightn’t these plans be just too mild? Is a 10% stake sufficient to create a feeling of ownership? Are £500 a year of dividends sufficient incentive to boost productivity? As Tom and Jon point out, these are mild social democratic plans, which might arguably give workers less power over firms than they currently have in Germany.

What’s going on here, I suspect, is that McDonnell is laying down some stepping stones. A 10% stake isn’t the end of things. If it proves mildly successful – as it might well – it’ll lead to demands for bigger stakes and a bigger worker say. And let’s face it, the case for worker-shareholders is in some ways stronger than that for outside shareholders: it’s long been known (and was proven by the collapse of banks in 2007-08) that these are incapable of overseeing management properly.

He does get quite concerned about the performative or rhetorical framework of such policies to depress investment, due to a perception of an assault on capitalist institutions:

Another barrier, though, might be more intractable. It’s that neoliberalism is partly performative. For decades, the dominant ideology has been that economic growth requires a quiescent labour force. As a factual claim, this is wrong. But if firms believe it, they’ll respond to the sort of policies advocated by the IPPR by reducing investment. To this extent neoliberalism might be self-fulfilling. And even if this is not the case, a government implementing a meaningful shift towards social democracy would be seen as radical, which in itself might create uncertainty – and uncertainty, we know, often tends to depress capital spending.

This might make a gradual implementation the better approach. In one sense this is central to Labour's challenges – that any given policy comes from Labour affects the perception of it, and subsequent reactions, regardless of its benefit. In another sense, it's so central that you *have* to ignore it to a degree, or at least, what would not ignoring look like? Well, it probably looks something like a perception of a Blair government – winning business over – and, assuming that's effectively centrism, that's simply not a goer.

As Chris says further down (from a piece on the recent IPPR report, which i really must get around to reading):

One reason is that it is obvious to everybody except the 1% and their shills and lackies that capitalism is failing in its current form. Equally, though, capitalism has served us reasonably well for decades. It therefore deserves the chance of reform, which is what the IPPR offers.

So as with much of Labour at the moment, and to use a McDonnell phrase, it feels like tightrope walking.

what calzino said.

http://uk.businessinsider.com/theresa-may-gives-standing-ovation-to-speech-branding-boris-johnson-irrelevant-and-offensive-2018-9

Lol.