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

lol "Communist regimes"!

luv2engage in witless whataboutism over arms sales

it's like there's a tranche of old Labour nudniks who only joined in the first place to make sure socialism didn't get a grip

To be fair to Graham Jones MP I'm not sure anyone's told him about the end of the Cold War so you can forgive him for being nervous.

the BBC was going very strong on how acceptable Corbyn's condemnation of Maduro was the other day, it seems some genocidal + totalitarian regimes are worthy trading partners and immune from scrutiny though.

Graham Jones MP's twitter bio:

Labour MP for Haslingden & Hyndburn. Had enough of political stupidity.

It's very difficult to know which articles to trust re: Venezuela, much of what you read from the left feels like apologism, but let's not pretend most of the British right are even the slightest bit interested in the people suffering under Maduro except as a stick to beat Corbyn with.

A good case in point from The Sun's chief politics writer:

Here are Corbyn's words on Valenzuela. He is saying the protesters are as bad as Maduro. Extraordinary. pic.twitter.com/xkMeR3SweI

— Harry Cole (@MrHarryCole) August 7, 2017

BJ's response to the UK's amoral arms dealer status was roughly "if we don't sell to these genocidal regimes, somebody else will". But he can get away with casually terrible statements like that because their lack of nuance aren't pounced on by nearly every part of the media.

*pops monocle*

Nick Timothy, the man largely blamed for losing the Conservatives their majority, has a column in the Telegraph called 'ideas to win' pic.twitter.com/1TI6pazEdQ

— Felicity Morse (@FelicityMorse) August 10, 2017

It was all Lynton Crosby's fault really. This guy's a fucking winner. Now he's shaved his beard off he should change his name to Max Power!

he looks 10 years older without that beard

which is probably a winning move in the Tory party

The Telegraph probably made him shave it off, in case it offended Simon Heffer or something.

How many buttons open is that chambray shirt, do we wager?

Tell him to open a chambrey shirt...parsley etc

It's very difficult to know which articles to trust re: Venezuela, much of what you read from the left feels like apologism, but let's not pretend most of the British right are even the slightest bit interested in the people suffering under Maduro except as a stick to beat Corbyn with.

The general line amongst lefties I know (I'm not personally that well-versed in recent Venezuelan history) is that Maduro has been fucking up for a while but the anti-gvmnt forces are Not Good.

I suspect Corbyn chose his words carefully to avoid more "pro-terrorist" smear jobs but it's not like that's going to stop anyone.

was just honestly clapping Chris Williamson on AQ tonight.

Melanie Philips in the Times bravely taking on the task of fascist apologism, because of course she did.

phew, glad her moral compass is back to being snafu'd again after her worryingly otm piece on the charlie gard case

I can't believe the government actually had the brass neck to pitch those Brexit proposals today.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/sun-muslim-problem-investigation-jewish-islamic-ipso-trevor-kavanagh-nazi-propaganda-tabloid-news-uk-a7894231.html?amp

I hope Sarah Champion enjoyed the positive shout out in the article under discussion .

“Thanks to former equalities chief Trevor Phillips, and Labour MPs such as Rotherham’s Sarah Champion, it is acceptable to say Muslims are a specific rather than a cultural problem.

Were the UK to crash again, its government no longer has the political capital nor the fiscal headroom to save the financial system. And with interest rates scraping along the bottom, the Bank of England has barely any firepower left. Ten years of political fudge and failed austerity has left Britain’s state machinery tapped out.

Another good Chakrabortty piece today, but I bitterly concluded that another crash wouldn't be such a bad thing at all.

You're alright, we'd have to take you

Anthony Barnett‏ just tweeted this "Nothing like this has happened in 323 years" graph from the FT that shows we a bright future!

https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/http%3A%2F%2Fcom.ft.imagepublish.prod.s3.amazonaws.com%2F3714a79e-81fe-11e7-a4ce-15b2513cb3ff?source=next&quality=highest&width=1180

Chakrabortty also makes the good point about the banking sector gob-shiteing about how much they tip up into the Exchequer, with a collective amnesia about the 1.3 tr freebie they got after the last crash.

If I did a graph on how close I am to the absolute limit of my overdraft in the last ten years, it wouldn't be much different from the one above. But I get the feeling I wouldn't be alone there.

sorry for the chain-posting, five shit posts for the price of one on offer today!

No, that's some good stuff, thanks.

My friend is off to Scotland and just texted me to say Jeremy Corbyn is on his train (Lake District/Cumbria events obv).

First class or on the deck?

sorry for the chain-posting, five shit posts for the price of one on offer today!

this is the kind of blitz spirit which will see britain thrive after brexit imo

"five Trevor Francises' for the price of one, even allowing for the liquidation of the Bank of England."

if QE in 2008-09 had been a 1.3tr helicopter drop we wouldn't be where we are

Paul Krugman the Nobel Prize winner for Economics stated in his New York Times column that "Mr Brown and Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer have defined the character of the worldwide rescue effort, with other wealthy nations playing catch-up." He also stated that "Luckily for the world economy,... Gordon Brown and his officials are making sense,... And they may have shown us the way through this crisis.

well initially it was more of a £500 bn helicopter drop wasn't it?

thinking of some of jingoistic claptrap coming from the Mail + Telegraph + Farage about that latest Nolan travesty. It reminds me of a Boss who called a meeting after the last banking crash, which was just basically a "the whip's in my hand now + you're lucky to have a job" type arsekicking. But with a similar ropy grasp of history as Nolan he said something like: "this is the biggest threat to the UK since the Nazi's were amassing their tanks on the beaches of Dunkirk".

in an actual real full-on £500 bn helicopter drop, everyone in the entire UK population wd have received c.£750 each if i'm counting correctly

i worked it out (using country meters) that we would have all received £7623.22 each! have you missed a nought on billion or did I add one?

oops yes i missed a 0, i misremembered and input 50 billion not 500 billion, so yes, 7.6 thou each: a wildly stimulative jolt in the reaches of the market which have instead been so horribly squeezed (also the reaches of the market least inclined to pop it away into savings)

The Brown bailout involved taking major stakes in the banks, and wouldn't have been a disaster if Osbourne hadn't decided to start selling them off at a fraction of what they could have been worth.

A helicopter drop wouldn't have been much use if half the banks in the UK had collapsed, but if the government can find that much money at short notice then perhaps they aren't telling the whole truth about what they can and can't afford the rest of the time.

yes, to be clearly i'm not really actually advocating a "pure" helicopter drop (in which none of the support went to banks, and they dodged collapse only via the means of "trickle-up"), except as thought experiment for better solutions at the time -- there was an actual urgency in late 2008, as widespread bank collapse is bad and shd probably not be encouraged just to stick it to banksters (jailing them is a better way of sticking it to them)

(googled "trickle-up" to see if i'd just invented it: sadly it already exists, tho not at all widelry enough IMO)

as a means of replacing vanished demand (which has still not really come back) it would definitely have worked better than quantitave easing, with the added advantage of actually being a progressive policy

I find The Economy such a mysterious + nebulous + headfucking thing to think about, but always get thoroughly disappointed when ideas of: let's reset everyone's overdrafts + have a free luxury piss-up at the banks expense, turn out to be damned thought experiments!

otm

I hope Sarah Champion enjoyed the positive shout out in the article under discussion .

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/16/sarah-champion-quits-jeremy-corbyns-shadow-cabinet-warning-pakistani/

her concerns sound legitimate

I wonder if there are any other types of people raping and exploiting white girls, or if there are any non-white girls being raped and exploited in Britain. Maybe Sarah Champion could use her newly freed-up time to compile some figures.

I guess this endorsement was inevitable:

This is very sad @SarahChampionMP is an independent minded and impressive MP who is needed in Shadow Caninet https://t.co/zHuudwqvrA

— Kate Hoey (@KateHoeyMP) August 16, 2017

Champion seems like someone who is intelligent and capable in a lot of ways but who also has painfully bad political judgement?