brexit negging when yr mandate is is trash: or further chronicles of a garbage-fire

JOHN LANCHESTER’S novel, “Capital”, provides a vivid portrait of life in a street in south London in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis. The residents watch with delight as the value of their houses rises ever upwards (“Having a house in Pepys Road was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be a winner”). But there is trouble in paradise. The residents start receiving mysterious messages through their letterboxes proclaiming: “We want what you have”. Soon the messages are accompanied by videos and the tone becomes more threatening.

Mr Lanchester’s novel helps to solve the biggest puzzle in British politics: why the vast majority of young people voted for a 68-year-old who has spent his life flirting with organisations such as Sinn Fein and Hamas and backing hard-left causes like the public ownership of the means of production.

Far from being a repudiation of Tony Blair’s policies, Corbynism represents the completion of the takeover of Labour by middle-class people who put their own interests (such as free university education) above those of the working class. But Mr Gray’s strictures miss an important point: most young Corbynistas are not so much settled members of the middle class as frustrated would-be members. Ben Judah, a millennial-generation journalist and author of “This is London”, points out that members of his generation are angry that they have done everything they were told, from studying hard at school to going to university to trying to get a respectable job, but are still holding on by their fingertips.

middle-class people who put their own interests (such as free university education) above those of the working class.

fuck off

Desperation setting in with these clowns, tbh.

The most intelligent explanation has been provided by John Gray in the New Statesman.

this john gray article was literally the worst thing I've read in the past 6 months

I can't remember the Labour manifesto stating the costing for abolishing tuition fees was going to be from lowering the national minimum wage and raising taxes for low earners. Lol! and the Economist's tone is that the working classes aren't also a "self-interest" group in wanting access to higher education, oh no they don't need that!

calling for cheap houses and free cradle to grave education, how bougie

labour's success will depend on the extent to which it can embed its agenda as the new common_sense, which in turn will depend on the extent to which it can crush the neoliberal stockholm syndrome which leads ppl to internalise 'better things aren't possible'

Mr Corbyn continues to mesmerise his young supporters with offers of free tuition and well paid jobs.... And the political class as a whole ignores the deeper causes of Britain’s stagnation, from stalled productivity to a failure to produce high-growth companies.

🤔

the idea that capital explains anything is preposterous. tho it makes sense to see it here - an overlap between the london literary world nepotism that made a car crash like that book possible and this sort of op-ed finger wagging at voters is perfect.

I don't know what the author's problem is with, surely Corbyn should be welcomed for carrying on the grand tradition of British politics, that of middle-class people putting their own interests above those of the working class?

the only person I've ever heard say a thing positive about john lanchester's capital is an avowed labour centrist

Lol! If you don't want self-interest middle class politicians ... erm vote LibDem!

I can see how you'd be attracted to Capital if you were literally incapable of seeing people as anything other than vague archetypes.

I noticed this delicious headline in the Telegraph during the week...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/05/tories-biggest-problem-no-one-remembers-winter-discontent-anymore/

They are floundering this lot. Let's enjoy it while it lasts.

If only voters could keep something that happened 40 years ago, before millions of them were born, in the front of their minds, at all times.

Lmao that would be the winter of discontent caused by low paid workers' frustration boiling over at years of public sector pay freezes?

All I can remember about the WoD was the novelty of candle-light during the national grid shutdowns. The Thatcher years, oh they were really fucking great times though!

We're there national grid shutdowns? Sure you're not thimaking of miners strikes a few years before? Seem to have fused together in a lot of pepoles recollections. But maybe there were power cuts, it's not like I can remember, had no object permanence at the time

hmm. you have me doubting my own memories now, but no, there was definitely a period were we having a few brownouts a week. But these events might have been localised rather than the whole National Grid!

there were definitely blackouts earlier in the 70s, iirc during the winter of discontent we stayed warm and illuminated by setting fire to the corpses piling up in the street

brownouts prob the wrong word, sustained power outages - I should have said.

Lol!

i pause to note how these highly sophisticated and insightful political journalist don't consider the current Tory party to have much in common with the party of Ted Heath or Anthony Eden, and yet the lame LibLab government of 78/79 is the defining essence of the Labour party. they must think people are fucking idiots.

It is great that when the novel CAPITAL was mentioned it provoked a rare yet immediate response from Fizzles, the one person on ilx who has truly worked through CAPITAL in the utmost detail.

idk matt dc waded through the shit as well. it's the zombie novel that will not die.

Lol it's a novel! I'm such a idiot and didn't even read the opening sentence in that Economist piece. I was thinking what the hell has Marx got to do with it. I was noticing somewhere that 58% of The Economist's print + digital editions are sold in N America. So they probably can be as tin-eared as they like about UK politics.

lmao @ mood of elegaic mandarin despair emanating from these fuck at the moment tbh

It suddenly becomes apparent that there are people who have not actually read this thread:

At 10:35 on an early summer's morning, John Lanchester sat down at his study desk, switched on his new Dell computer, opened up the word processing programme that the computer had come with and began

Ah I see! Some people's idea of shockingly bad "state of the nation" type novels are other's idea of research!

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n14/william-davies/reasons-for-corbyn

Meanwhile this is good:

Reacting to the breakdown of the vote on 8 June, business leaders and conservative commentators have expressed their disquiet at the fact that young people are so enthusiastic about an apparently retrograde left-wing programme. ‘Memo to anyone under 45,’ Digby Jones, the former director general of the CBI, tweeted: ‘You can’t remember last time socialists got control of the cookie jar: everything nationalised & nothing worked.’ To which the rebuke might be made: and you don’t remember how good things were compared to today. Speak to my undergraduate students (many of them born during Blair’s first term) about the 1970s and early 1980s, and you’ll see the wistful look on their faces as they imagine a society in which artists, writers and recent graduates could live independently in Central London, unharassed by student loan companies, workfare contractors or debt collectors. This may be a partial historical view, but it responds to what younger generations are currently cheated of: the opportunity to grow into adulthood without having their entire future mapped out as a financial strategy. A leader who can build a bridge to that past offers the hope of a different future.

Theresa May will move to bolster her precarious position in Downing Street with an unprecedented invitation to Labour to help her create policies for a post-Brexit Britain as she attempts to quell a Tory plot to replace her.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/09/may-to-invite-labour-to-help-create-policies-amid-tory-plot-to-oust-her

Apart from anything else, I'm not sure 'quell' is what this idea's going to do for a party that was salivating over the prospect of a 100-seat majority just over a month ago.

This'll apparently appear in a speech tomorrow echoing her commitment to fairness and equality as set out in her first speech as PM a year ago, and nowhere else since. There's always been a hard-left element to our policies.

I wouldn't put it past her/Tories to have her stand down on the 13th or 14th - PMs have to serve for a year before they qualify for the biggest state-sector pension of them all.

need to clamp down on these benefits scroungers exploiting loopholes in the system for an easy life :P

I'm loving May's desperation, but I think the only cross party cooperation that should be going on is with Tories that are pissed off enough to back a vote of no confidence in her.

Allegedly there are some according to Sunday Politics guest yesterday.

Does she honestly believe Labour is up for this? Or is it to be all "well I was reasonable with these extremists, see what they are"?

"i can't get the lid off this jar, you have a go"

No she doesn't, but the Mail will spin it that way; 'Mrs May's bold gamble to save Brexit sabotaged by Labour'.

LOL. Corbyn: "Have you tried running under the hot tap first?"

Oh FFS, this is why recent Classic Tory QT Archetypes keep popping up whenever a vox is required, talking about some kind of cross-party approach to Brexit. THESE ARE FAUX CENTRISTS and they can fucking well wear this disaster themselves.

BTW I think the Grebt Repeal Bill contents are revealed this week - good time for Corbyn to pipe up about staying in the ECJ and Europol with a reminder that maintaining settled human rights protections was at the heart of his Remain vote.

I can't think of anything less likely to endear her to her own party or deter a leadership challenge. Maybe she was just waiting to hit the one year mark and this is ritual suicide.

It would be so ironic if the manner of TM ending her career was basically a calculated manoeuvre to bludge extra benefits.

Most scrounger rhetoric is projection, so....

What the actual fuck?

http://m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/uk_59638608e4b02e9bdb0e2c77

Sack her and sack her now

:/

It's nasty, racist & old-fashioned, but an expression people have used historically, a hangup of a generation past.

— Rupert Myers (@RupertMyers) July 10, 2017

Ah, is Rupert Myers the chap behind race-mixing comedy 'Corbyn: the Musical'?

UGGGGH

the minute i read this i was waiting for someone to defend it on that basis, like "it's just a saying" etc, however the truth is that the only people who'd say "n-word in the woodpile" are racist and retrograde tories who refuse to stop using the n-word. in this respect it's prob even worse than many other contexts in which a white person might say the n-word - it has a clear association with stubborn prejudice.

somebody else said this recently enough, right? i feel like it's not been that long.