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

By the way, have none of these people noticed that the Labour Party now behind the Tories in Scotland?

(xxp) Have you seen the constituencies the Tories won? If they were in England they'd be true blue 30,000 majority Tory strongholds.

By the way, have none of these people noticed that the Labour Party now behind the Tories in Scotland?

I guess their argument would be that this happened because Scottish Labour allowed itself to be outflanked by the SNP as the party of Scottish patriotism, and they risk the equivalent thing happening to them in England? still a terrible idea, though.

So now they don't care about losing 40 seats in Scotland, we can make that up in England?

Where UKIP did so well in the last election.

He claimed that some party activists worried that engaging with Englishness meant making concessions to racism and xenophobia, adding: “It doesn’t, and we’ll help show how.”

These twats never actually define what they mean by this non-racist non-xenophobic English patriotism, it's just vague guff that's designed to undermine rather than actually help anyone.

lmao, same shit from these muppets whether labour's polling in the mid twenties or mid forties. Labour outperformed expectations in June by aggressively wrenching the agenda away from this sort of cab driver bollocks.

was just about to say, show me an English patriotism that isn't based on chauvinism and xenophobia. the fuckers who say this stuff are dog-whistling and they know it.

there's no point "reaching out" to the people who get worked up about England because they've never been natural socialists in the first place

New Labour was in retrospect very lucky to have been coming up at the same time as Britpop/Euro 96 hysteria when half the country seemed to be waving a flag about and they just had to fall in line without thinking about it.

http://www.newstatesman.com/1997/2017/05/cool-britannia-where-did-it-all-go-wrong

But the Conservative Party had never been much good at allying itself with cutting-edge pop culture and the Major government was close to being a national joke – and besides, Blair had got there first. In the summer of 1995, he had sipped gin and tonic with Damon Albarn of Blur at the House of Commons, and turned up – for the second consecutive year – to the annual awards ceremony organised by Q magazine. A few months later, he made an appearance at the 1996 Brit Awards, to pay tribute to Oasis, the Stone Roses and the Clash and present a lifetime award to David Bowie.

Seven months on, his speech at the Labour party conference drew on the optimism kicked up by that year’s Euro football championships – which, with perfect synchronicity, had been staged in England – and the summer’s chart-topping anthem “Three Lions”. “Seventeen years of hurt ­never stopped us dreaming,” he said. “Labour’s coming home.” After the party won its landslide the following year, there was even
a brief spurt of enthusiasm for something called “The Rebranding of Britain”, which entailed the Foreign Office convening a task force chosen, according to the BBC, “to help give Britain a ‘cool’ image abroad”.

non-uk ilxors, pls feel free to offer your fond reminiscences of how the foreign office gave britain a 'cool' image in your part of the world

"what's that George, illegal invasion of Iraq? sure, that's cool"

the phrase 'a brief spurt of enthusiasm' keeps rattling around my head and i'm not pleased about it tbh

the thing that will save the union is investment, rebalancing the economy from london £ the SE, and improved material conditions. not this nonsense. sam tarry normally so sensible too

non-uk ilxors, pls feel free to offer your fond reminiscences of how the foreign office gave britain a 'cool' image in your part of the world

It was mostly about the Spice Girls iirc

and the glut of 'keep calm and ...' teatowels, mugs, posters etc etc

Some of the work was probably fairly successful tbh though i dread to think how much money was wasted buying Banksy prints for British Council offices around the world.

I should probably start collecting material for a thread on the international branding of Britain / adoption of signifiers of 'British cool' around the world.

xp that was later, post-2000

Yeah Keep Calm etc is was a post-financial crisis thing really.

Whole Keep Calm and Drink Tea aesthetic seems to have 'sold' both figuratively and literally much better to rest of world than cool Britain type stuff.

https://versobooks-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/000009/888/9781784780760-a5563c0e68445ac280534d2d538aed6f.jpg

KC&CO seems much more organic than the push to export 'cool', though is arguably appropriate messaging for a country that wants to be seen as stable, on one hand, and too unattractive for people to want to come here, on the other.

“Seventeen years of hurt ­never stopped us dreaming,” he said. “Labour’s coming home.”

Tony Blair is an asshole, but just purely as craft, this is fairly good.

Britpop was definitely cool for me when I began listening to music late 90's - early 00's. That Blur Best Of with the stylized pictures of them on the cover, and a bunch of songs that seemed to actually be about the world of today. Yeah, it was cool.

KC&CO is a story of its own..

In 2000, Stuart Manley, co-owner with his wife Mary of Barter Books Ltd. in Alnwick, Northumberland, was sorting through a box of used books bought at auction when he uncovered one of the original "Keep Calm and Carry On" posters. The couple framed it and hung it up by the cash register; it attracted so much interest that Manley began to produce and sell copies.[13] Other companies followed suit, and the design rapidly began to be used as the theme for a wide range of products.

In August 2011, it was reported that a UK-based company called Keep Calm and Carry On Ltd[17] had registered the slogan as a community trade mark in the EU, CTM No: 009455619 and also in the United States No: 4066622.[18][19] after failing to obtain registration of the slogan as a trademark in the United Kingdom.[20] They issued a take-down request against a seller of Keep Calm and Carry On products.[21][22] Questions have been raised as to whether the registration could be challenged, as the slogan had been widely used before registration and is not recognisable as indicating trade origin.[19] An application has been submitted by British intellectual property advisor and UK trademarking service Trade Mark Direct, to cancel the registration on the grounds that the words are too widely used for one person to own the exclusive rights,[23] but the request for cancellation was rejected and the trade mark is still protected in all EU countries. The company subsequently tried to register the slogan as its trademark in both the United States[24] and Canada.[20][25]

Basically, the original shop can continue selling posters with "Keep Calm and Carry On" on, but anything else is now owned by the jump-on trademarking company.

Keep Calm and Seek Rent

Tony Blair is an asshole, but just purely as craft, this is fairly good.

No it isn't, it's meretricious shite, as per usual. Of course, the camera panning backing to Baddiel and Skinner's faces after Southgate had trundled that penalty towards the German gooalkeeper was the highlight of 1996 for the rest of the UK.

Of course, the camera panning backing to Baddiel and Skinner's faces after Southgate had trundled that penalty towards the German gooalkeeper was the highlight of 1996 for the rest of the UK.

wait, what?

Non-english UK-ards don't tend to cheer for the England team, stevie.

*squints*

is this about... football?

Of course it is, it's Blair, what do you expect?

Theresa May probably deserves a microscopic amount of credit for being the first PM in my adult life not to even pretend to like football (excluding perhaps Gordon Brown who genuinely does I think).

I'm all for giving microscopic amounts of credit to Tories who don't bother focus grouping everything they are supposed to like. But still - to the gulags with them, but credit for not pretending you like the Arctic fucking Monkies or something.

You have to separate art and the artist.

Major 'liked' football?

I thought he was more of a warm beer + cricket ultra.

Let's blame Harold Wilson for piggybacking on the England World Cup win.

... and the Beatles.

Wilson always kept a photo of the Huddersfield Town triple title winning team of the 20's in his wallet.

Next to his pipe and baccy. Good if it's true, you never know with Wilson though.

Well, at least the public is aware the true PM loves Arsenal.

Major 'liked' football?

visual evidence:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/db/83/f9/db83f96fc5f7061d3ff0181f05b0fedb--john-major-bolton-wanderers.jpg

http://l7.alamy.com/zooms/67018b3999594153bb002894c8846ae7/john-major-playing-with-two-footballs-at-ednburgh-b4m4h5.jpg

Once Wilson said something hackneyed and cringeworthy alluding to northern toughness and how people aren't born t'up north, they are forged like steel. And some wag retorted "I always thought there was something fake about you".*

*probably a half decent anecdote poorly recounted here.

Cool Britannia worked because kids in the US - and around the world, because US culture is international default culture - needed to distance themselves from the mainstream and have a rarified "sophisticated" secret language. I think that's been totally taken over by Japan at this point though.

Yep, and it's worth noting that the Japanese government is milking that for all it's worth in the same way as the UK did. The university recruitment / cultural export sector has essentially gone Full Pokemon.

I know which I prefer. I guess the cool sophistication of Ocean Colour Scene has its fans tho

https://s3.postimg.org/qvyuztynn/20160916_114356.jpg

Pika-choose Kanazawa University for a Pharmacology course ranked in the world's top 200...

The UK seems to be falling back on Big Ben and umbrellas again but the cultural capital of the BBC (Sherlock and Dr Who, in particular) is still strong.

kami as cartoon top trumps vs the ghosts of colonialism's mechanism

read some fucking Orwell for the great taste of liberal hegemony

If I spin back the dials, it was all about 1995 and finding copies of mixmag in a big bookstore in town and realizing there was a whole island full of attractive people listening to the coolest music in awesome nightclubs all the time.

I never thought britpop was cool and couldn't give any shits about England football but I was definitely convinced the UK scene for dance music was the best in the world. And IIRC art and fashion weren't doing shabby either. It seemed like the most exciting place to live as long as you didn't care for food.

The funny thing is all the important creative groundwork started under Major, or seems to have. In one possibly notable example, Tories spun off Channel Four, which wound up bankrolling Trainspotting.