Psychoactive Substances: Rolling UK Politics in The Neo-Con Era

Thinking of paying three quid to vote Corbyn.

^^^ have had the same notion but purely for the lulz you understand

Understand only too well.

See the tweets now from MPs going on about how Kendall is polling best with the voters, as if the idea is to go where the public leads, rather than to lead them

It needs to be a sensible balance between the two - "leadership" is pointless without ground-up engagement and proper dialogue. The problem is that they are being highly selective about which voters they "listen" to.

As if any of "the public" know or care who Liz Kendall is.

Can anyone fill me in on who "labour first" are. All the major press organs have been giving them a platform to say that Corbyn's politics are not "ours" but googling them all I can find aside from this story is a two year old blog post that refers to them as "mysterious." Assuming that they're the Blair led pressure group that I read about before the election in something that implied they would hand pick the next leader, but I can't find that article

they're just neolib policy wonks with a faint glimmer of bleeding heart - for deserving, hard-working families

i believe 'strivers' is now the term of art. Given that Frank Field has apparently used it three times in two sentences.

But he added: “What is unacceptable is for the government to wallop strivers who are already in work, with their low wages brought up to a more decent level by tax credits.
“The Tory attack on strivers now gives us a chance to to reposition Labour on the strivers’ side and not simply be a pressure group for people on benefit whatever their circumstances.”

oh god it's all going to be strivers vs skivers next

a chance to to reposition Labour on the strivers’ side and not simply be a pressure group for people on benefit whatever their circumstances

vote Labour

Strivers vs strikers.

and the strassengers

Anyway..

Whatever Labour does, this is going through, right?

So, we have at least one candidate that is against this, and at least one that thinks its a great idea.

So, basically, everything is abstainable unless all the potential leaders agree, at which point something can be voted against even though the end result will be the same?

Or not?

Why does Frank Field still exist?

because God doesn't

The thing is that cutting tax credits is in and of itself an assault on "strivers", unless the skivers category has now been expanded to include the working poor as well. Even the ropiest of previous Labour front benches would have been hammering the government for this.

This sort of meek capitulation only serves to enable the Tories to shift the mythical centre ground even further to the right, it's falling directly into the elephant trap set by Osborne.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/13/david-cameron-open-to-workers-saving-up-fund-own-sick-pay

cutting benefits to the very poor while reducing inheritance tax for the wealthy is indefensible

but they don't seem to have to defend it to anyone, nevertheless

It's this continuous pushing of the idea that the general public is not to be trusted, that if you're ill that's down to your own lack of responsibility, that sick pay is 'a benefit', and that anyone in receivership of such benefits are to be treated with the deepest suspicion.
There really ought to be a moratorium on the word 'benefits'. Too many implications in that - that it's a privilege enjoyed by some people and not others as opposed to something that is really a bare-minimum essential.
The Tories use the positive connotations around the word 'benefits' to suggest that those who claiming them are lucky, that they should be grateful for the fact the government are 'paying for their lifestyle', as if they're using their JSAs on limos and fine dining, when it's the exact opposite.
And now they're quite egregiously going after the working poor by saying they should pay for their own sick leave. What exactly is national insurance then? How will it benefit anyone?! Oh hang on, yeah the private healthcare companies that's right...

OTM, fuck "welfare" and "benefits" both. The Guardian seems to be reverting to "social security" in most places, which is much more like it.

NI doesn't pay for SSL, employers do. Which essentially makes this wheeze another dodgy redistribution from the wealthy
https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance/what-national-insurance-is-for

er, to the wealthy even

Fantastic bit of political TV debate on C4 with Corbyn this evening. Trying to get a link now.

Lost the rag a bit, I thought, the Corbynator.

corbyourenthusiasm surely

It was a bullshit question, they kept interrupting him, and he called them out on it.
https://youtu.be/3z-a5hy7QO8

Krishnan Guru-Murthy is a manspreading twat.

When I lived in Clerkenwell, he could often be found sitting in front of the felafel place below my flat, with his stumpy legs akimbo in too-tight grey flannel trousers, knees at 8 and 4 o'clock.

fox hunting ban "relaxation" going to fail because of nasty scotnats interfering with English laws.

Here's the full interview. The 14 minute one's at the bottom.

http://www.channel4.com/news/jeremy-corbyn-i-wanted-hamas-to-be-part-of-the-debate

Guru-Murthy does seem to have that affect on people doesn't he?

If he actually thinks anybody wants wants to actually look at his knackers he must be fucking deranged.

he could often be found sitting in front of the felafel place below my flat, with his stumpy legs akimbo in too-tight grey flannel trousers, knees at 8 and 4 o'clock.

the devil's angle, no less

Govt withdraw amendment to foxhunting bill, Nikki Sturg once again showing the Labour Party what a real opposition politician looks like

Mhairi Black kicking Labour's arses:

https://youtu.be/lZAmhB55_-k

Bugger-all support in CLPs for Liz
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/which-clps-are-nominating-who-labour-leadership-contest

St Helen’s South and Whiston

come one the New Statesman, get it together

... though not as much as the fact that the Great British public lap it up.

One question that's been playing on my mind, looking back from this vantage point, is how much our situation in 2015 has to do with the kind of people who killed Sophie Lancaster, who was my age:

While returning home, Lancaster and Maltby were subjected to a "vicious mob attack" from "a large group of people" between 01:10 hours and 01:20 hours on Saturday, 11 August 2007, at the skate park area of Stubbylee Park, Bacup (grid reference SD865218).[3] The couple were walking home and came across a group of teenagers at the entrance to the park.[7] The group followed them, but there was no trouble until some of them suddenly assaulted Robert Maltby without provocation. When he was knocked unconscious, the gang attacked Sophie Lancaster, who was trying to protect him by cradling him in her arms. A 15-year-old witness told police: "They were running over and just kicking her in the head and jumping up and down on her head." One distraught witness used a mobile phone to call for emergency services saying: "We need... we need an ambulance at Bacup Park, this mosher has just been banged because he’s a mosher."[8] Witnesses revealed that afterwards, "The killers celebrated their attack on the goths — or "moshers" - by telling friends afterwards that they had "done summat (something) good," and claiming: "There's two moshers nearly dead up Bacup park — you wanna see them — they're a right mess."[9]

That's a teenage girl being kicked to death by kids who, let's be honest, came from families that were long-term benefit claimants and who, had they not been sent to prison, would have just continued along those lines; and that attack was just normal, just the sort of thing that used to go on at least once a month with kids at my school; I myself was a victim of such an attack, except my attackers got frightened off in time. (I got concussion though and still get the occasional hallucinations and deafness and blackouts years later.) Lancaster's killers may not have intended to kill exactly, but they had no problem with doing enough violence to kill.

I know someone who lived in Wales who was hounded out of her home, I've met a Morrocan man who, when he lived in Liverpool 7, got dogshit put through his letterbox every day and had dogs set on him and his wife and kids when they went out.

I know I'm talking about the most evil behaviour, of some discrete individuals, within the huge sea of people who one way or another need social security to help, where a neoliberal economy cannot or will not employ them. (This has included me for several long periods.) We all know that confusing the part for the whole is unreasonable, and that the monstering of 'scroungers and chavs and benefit cheats' etc is counter-factual.

Still though: when I think back to the eyes of my attackers, which as I recall were very piggish and tight and the eyes were all pupil and no white, when I remember that I meant about as much to them as an insect, I have a strong brief feeling that it doesn't matter if they get kicked off JSA, and starve, doesn't matter if they get gentrified out of wherever they live; after all, I hold down a job and like drinking coffee and reading books, and am either neutral or good to the people around me 99% of the time ... but send them to the food bank, then shut it down, why not? Really should I have to pay taxes on the off chance some of them will reform?

Then of course I come back to my senses. But I think a lot of people who got the treatment from 'chavs' are caught up in the hate spiral still, a lot of people in my office certainly, a lot of people I overhear, and not just ppl who shared my taste for stupid trenchcoats and t shirts circa 2003, but totally normal people who made the mistake of asking a neighbour to turn their music down. I struggle to 'organise' this: are people who've been in real conflict with real scum to be forgiven or not for hating 'people on benefits'?

Maybe not quite the right thread, but given we're stuck with this shit for five years it seems we can/should think through this?

Sorry but that makes no sense whatsoever, what does the benefits system have to do with any of that?

Yeah, "let's be honest" seems to be working in its other mode of "let's focus on a detail I've made up to match my prejudices".

http://imgs.littlewhitelies.co.uk/uploads/2012/10/shock-corridor.jpg

"Would it really matter if one of these men died?"

I suppose cardamon is doing us the service of demonstrating how the very notion of a benefit claimant has been demonised, as if we weren't quite sure (n.b. I post to a football forum, and sheesh howdy)

solitary posts that effortlessly clown you for the rest of your brief online presence

Sorry but that makes no sense whatsoever, what does the benefits system have to do with any of that?

― holger sharkey (Tom D.),

Very little in reality but quite a lot in the imaginary

Yeah, "let's be honest" seems to be working in its other mode of "let's focus on a detail I've made up to match my prejudices".

It is possible that these kids were all millionaires on a day trip to Bacup, I'll concede that

"Would it really matter if one of these men died?"

What I was trying to do there was dramatise what I called a brief feeling of total callousness towards someone. Everyone I know irl who actually supports the benefits cuts reaches for justification to some situation they had with 'chavs', and the anecdote they choose gets held up as a sort of totem. What I'm saying is that due to getting me head kicked in, I can relate to some extent with what such people are doing, the idea of getting revenge on the benefits people (who have been melded with 'violent people') is indeed a potent drug.

I dunno, based on the reactions here, you lot must either have had similar experiences but nobly forgiven and never want revenge just a little bit, or just never had similar experiences?

feels as if the phrase 'ivory tower' is going be deployed within a short space of time

Everyone I know irl who actually supports the benefits cuts reaches for justification to some situation they had with 'chavs'

this is confirmation bias. however vindictive ppl feel towards individuals I think they have some more realistic sense of the venn diagram of head-kickers and benefits claimants

It is possible that these kids were all millionaires on a day trip to Bacup, I'll concede that

better than concede, maybe do a bit of research?

i was hoping you were drunk when you posted. wishing harm and misery - just for a moment! - on a large socioeconomic group of people because you had a bad personal experience with a few people from that group...yes that happens irl and people use those arguments in real life. it's a common aspect of every kind of bigotry.

http://www.theonion.com/article/recently-mugged-friend-a-racist-all-of-a-sudden-4827

xxp

What I was trying to do there was dramatise what I called a brief feeling of total callousness towards someone.

And what's more callous than cheering on as vulnerable people are stripped of benefits and doomed to homelessness?

I'd find more convincing an argument that placed the kind of brutish nihilistic violence and thuggery you describe on the same continnuum as middle england's loathing of people on benefits, both being symptoms of the widespread tendency towards callousness and and actual cruelty which does seem to be on the rise among all strata of society.

(yeah, yeah trenchant, whatev)

what you're talking about is the symptomatic effect of tarring everyone with the same brush, which does happen, and the media perpetuates this as well. but there's a long long history of casting poor people as something to be feared. you hear about 'rough estates', 'dodgy areas', 'places you wouldn't want to walk around at night' in towns and cities all the time, and to some extent it's not down to hysteria or snobbery; they're likely to be fairly dangerous places to go (but maybe not as much as they're made out).

the right-wing takes the stance that poorer people are violent and dangerous by nature; that they are in their predicament because of an inherent propensity to break laws and cause trouble. from this angle, there's a natural inclination to think of these 'undesirables' as less-than human and to enforce retributive sanctions on them (such as cutting welfare etc). hating on 'chavs' therefore becomes a noble sport because they are the ones who are ostensibly ruining society with their 'violent' 'lifestyles'. so welfare cuts get supported and notions of 'lifestyle' get upheld and the vicious circle is complete.

This is an unfair pile-on really in that Cardamon is fully aware that these feelings are wrong and pushes them out of his head, which is more than you can say for huge swathes of the population, including some working class people and even including some benefit claimants.

I mean slashing benefits is hardly going to make a cycle of poverty, crime and violence any better is it?

Fight over Europe! Hammer the Scots! Pay down the debt Labour ran up! Gerrymander the wards! Ban immigrants! Increase the cuts! Sell the NHS! Open consultations on a draft paper for proposal for a British Bill of Rights! Vote for Boris! Sign TTIP! Ban Porn! Spy on Everything!

Is there anything to look forward to?

― stet, Wednesday, June 10, 2015 9:58 AM (1 year ago)

No, FYI.