DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived post-Murdoch era

I am someone who runs a mile from any form of physical confrontation normally, but

is he going to be charged with assault, and if not why not?

I never understand why broadcasters seem to accept without question that someone with a placard or a loud voice should disrupt this sort of interview

Because we live in a democracy and they chose to conduct the interview in a public place?

Living in a world where you feel justified in wrestling an OAP to the ground for annoying you. Oh dear.

is he going to be charged with assault, and if not why not?

The usual: Lack of evidence...

i think they protestor would have to lodge the charge himself, in this case. i hope he does.

i can't understand why the electorate is so apathetic nowadays with guys like Damian McBride and his pals generating important ideological content every day

looks like i picked a bad week to give up calling for purges

what the fuck are you playing at, labour

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10327874/Labour-new-measures-to-make-insulting-military-personnel-a-criminal-offence.html

also, dispatch from the frontline of the Labour conference: Chuka Umunna is just THE WORST. Those days I was optimistic about him seem very far away now

okay can we just purge these fuckers and start again from scratch?

What did he do? Is he just a teflon neoliberal careerist or is there new info? xp

why the fuck do war-loving anti-socialist Torybots in disguise even want to be in the Labour oh never mind

nothing especially new on top of that suzy, undisguised corporatist thru & thru

actual exchange in Umunna fringe event:

Q from audience member who said she was a young party member but had surely just come to the wrong conference, paraphrased: I'm disillusioned about what Labour are going to do to my aspirations, if I'm successful they'll just take half of it away in tax

[rumblings from audience]

Umunna, with unseemly enthusiasm: Oh, no! We WANT you to make your first million!

(This on top of a speech in which he'd repeatedly conflated "betterment" with "earning more than your parents". Fuckwit)

plus he literally defended that Mandelson filthy rich comment by saying "oh what no one reports is that the second half of the sentence was "as long as you pay taxes""

That's just fairly standard NuLab True Believer stuff really, surprised anyone expected anything different of him.

i mean i always knew blunkett was a confused moralistic authoritarian moron, but jesus.

I could have sworn I just read that he actually compared online pornography to the rise of the Nazis, but I can only assume that I just haven't woken up yet.

Q from audience member who said she was a young party member but had surely just come to the wrong conference, paraphrased: I'm disillusioned about what Labour are going to do to my aspirations, if I'm successful they'll just take half of it away in tax

lol sounds legit

xp well, you see, online porn made people scared of diversity and then they had no choice but to become fascists, that was how the weimar republic collapsed

Oh wow Sodom & Gomorrah AND Nazi Germany. I'm trying to think about what might be the third bit of that trifecta and coming up blank.

I'm disillusioned about what Labour are going to do to my aspirations, if I'm successful they'll just take half of it away in tax

funnily enough their refusal to do this is why I'm hugely disillusioned by labour

Nazi fetsih porn became so widespread in the Weimar republic that eventually it became cool to be a Nazi.

Miliband's "freeze energy bills until 2017" policy is all well and good until energy firms decide en-masse to get all their price rises in at once, just before the cut-off.

"Robin Hood and the outlaws - they were called that because they were outside the law - that was not a sustainable position in the 13th Century and it's not a sustainable position now."

Helen Goodman there, shadow minister for media etc

"Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of unsustainable and financially unviable men.."

Striking imagery:

2) Brown used to rehearse his speeches while McBride shouted abuse at him

This was done when he first became prime minister, to prepare him for hostile crowds. Favourite heckles were: "You stole my pension, Brown!", "You're a bigger bastard that Blair!" and "Where's the gold, Brown?", which particularly infuriated him. Sometimes he could not help shouting back.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/shortcuts/2013/sep/24/damian-mcbride-10-things-book-labour

#10 is pretty damning.

the evening news is full of spokespeople for big businesses bleating like crazy, EMil must've said something good

"You're a bigger bastard that Blair!" is my new favourite insult

those pretend insults are way tamer than what Brown must've experienced irl

looking forward to the movie from the people that brought us The King's Speech tho

Fuck sake yeah, where's the stuff about him being mentally unstable and on drugs, you know like Andrew Marr laid on him?

Or not caring about dead soldiers and going out of his way to actively insult their mothers, like the Sun accused him of

got vision's of EMil's spin coach locking him in a room bellowing "A DECOND DLASS DETURN DO DOTTINGHAM, DLEASE" at him

is he going to be charged with assault, and if not why not?

Iain Dale quizzed over Brighton scuffle.

The Daily Mail, which has been railing against high energy prices and the energy companies for as long as I can remember, was utterly wrongfooted by Miliband's speech. Whoever the columnist was just started ranting about how terrible it was that he'd pledged to do what they'd been campaigning for all along.

srsly since last night Radio 4 has been nothing but energy company PRs making increasingly hysterical threats to leave the country, kill the first-born, blow up the sun etc

this week's conference was about as a socialist as a Jim Davidson gig but the trolling of the rich has been A1

Credit to them this is about the most populist policy imaginable. Energy companies and rabid free marketeers are about the only people who will care.

Possibly the more significant move is Ed Balls offering up manifesto pledges to the OBR is a smart move as well in that he knows full well the OBR won't do it and it will look like the government have something to hide.

The Daily Mail, which has been railing against high energy prices and the energy companies for as long as I can remember, was utterly wrongfooted by Miliband's speech. Whoever the columnist was just started ranting about how terrible it was that he'd pledged to do what they'd been campaigning for all along.

I just spotted their front cover in the supermarket and it was hilarious. the headline is all, like, "they are threatening boosting minimum wage! and threatening keeping energy prices from rising!", and I'm thinking, you'd have to do some pretty impressive journalistic jujitsu (they don't) or have a particularly addled readership (they do) to argue those as bad things, surely!

Credit to them this is about the most populist policy imaginable. Energy companies and rabid free marketeers are about the only people who will care.

Hopefully they're doing a sort of switcheroo here, re-directing the GBP's righteous fury at welfare recipients to someone more deserving of their ire, corporations/ cartels/ capitalist scumbags in general... hopefully

An energy tycoon plans next move against Miliband, yesterday

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/simpsons-mr-burns-blocks-out-the-sun1-640x353.jpg

is he going to be charged with assault, and if not why not?

Iain Dale quizzed over Brighton scuffle.

realistically what would he get if this went to court? or would it end up as a caution? if it could somehow wreck his career then some persuasive folks need to take placard dude out for a nice meal and get it sorted. the blog post was the most pomous repugnant thing i've seen all week - proud he'd knocked around an older smaller harmless man and his dog. guess he wouldn't get prison and he'd warp it to some marytr campaign but if it could somehow mess with his life by banning him from going to certain places or something then it'd be so worth it

No way would that lead to a prison sentence, more's the pity

also, damian mcbride really does have the face he deserves. a nauseating shiny sweaty shifty-eyed headblob, disgusting looking man to match his disgusting deeds. i know alastair campbell's deemed an a1 scrote and all that but his rant against mcbride & co on bbc5 the other night was some stand-up-and-cheer stuff. that guy can speak

does his subsequent blog post break the law at all? whole unsavoury proud rant about how he shoved about an old man in a public place. just wondering if the poor-person equivalent - say someone roughing up someone outside a nightclub then bragging afterwards on facebook - would receive lighter/heavier punishment

cheering for Campbell attacking McBride is the vanity of vanishingly small differences

Campbell's probably done shit that's as bad or worse than McBride (lol Iraq etc) but you get the sense that what's really fuelling his anger is McBride's decision to sell bits of his book to the Mail on the eve of the Labour conference. That would be unforgiveable crossing over to the other side for Campbell who's about as tribal as they get.

for a guy who helped drive the stake thru the heart Campbell is weirdly attached to the idea of the Labour party, whereas yr McBrides strike me as agents of fortune who happened to wind up in that government, but they're all still cunts

This is cool, though: 'Det Sgt Stephen French said: "A man was exercising his right to protest in a public place when this incident took place.'