one out all out: a brexit from the modern world and every one of its problems please (we're all gonna die lol)

will no-one think of the wheatus fans

fuck i should have said ‘fan’

it me

Thank god Blobby doesn't need a visa

youre_locked_in_here_with_me.gif

if you thought this season of Dr Who was shite...

Dr Who isn’t funded by the licence fee as of this year, so don’t worry, still plenty of money for Chris Chibnall to write stories about how Brexit is quite good actually, and it’s the starving pensioners who are the problematic ones

come to think, David Cameron strolling off unchallenged while murmuring a jaunty tune is already every villain this series

lol I've not been watching, I thought this one was all SJWs, all the time

last week the baddie was an Amazon warehouse worker who tried to draw attention to onerous working conditions, and it got sorted by the warehouse itself murdering the colleague he had a crush on, to teach him a lesson, and then middle-management won Dr Who's approval by doubling the human workforce, halving their pay, and not changing the working conditions.

three weeks ago it was sad that a slave-owner died, but Dr Who dealt with the sadness by asking her slave to read the eulogy before he got euthanised now that he wasn't needed for service anymore

four weeks ago "Trump" was in it, and it was bad that he fired Dr Who's companion's mum, but it was fine that he smuggled guns into the UK, and made death threats, and buried toxic waste under one of his golf course hotels. (there were also giant spiders because of the toxic waste. Dr Who said it was cruel to put an injured one out of its misery with the gun, but instead locked half of them in a hotel room to suffocate to death, and left the other half to continue roaming Sheffield and eating people.)

maybe there's a real curveball of an end of season reveal coming

a heartwarming Hilary Clinton showing UKIP how to be good nazis storyline wouldn't sound too crazy for the xmas spesh going by them sic plot synopses.

lets have a drwhexit from all of the rest of ilx pls

Dr Who isn’t funded by the licence fee as of this year

I don't follow this. What do you mean?

It’s been moved from a BBC Wales production to a BBC Studios production this year, so commercial revenue is formally able to be directed to it.

Ah right - it's still paid for and commissioned by the public service side though. Nothing much has changed re: commercial revenue. They've sold the TV rights to other countries, DVDs etc for years.

Americans reading this thread are probably rolling their eyes now. I'm sure there is an Internet law that any UK thread will, given enough time, turn to a discussion of Doctor Who

yes, continued apologies but I can’t move to a Who thread on zing

Nothing much has changed re: commercial revenue. They've sold the TV rights to other countries, DVDs etc for years.

:) I had a vague idea of the latter, having watched the programme in Australia in some of the 54 years since they started selling it there, and at times moved the physical tapes from one rightsholder to another, or picked which episodes’ rights were being bought

The commercial revenue generated by the programme was not specifically allowed to be directed to the production of the programme, as opposed to the corporation, though. As it’s now made by a commercial entity, they can be looser with the purse strings.

(The 1985 equivalent of BBCWW tried to argue that cancelling the Beeb’s most profitable programme was counter-productive, and Michael Grade was able to happily ignore them.)

Blobby blobby blobby.

Mr Blobby in many ways replaced doctor who in the affections of the nation in the 90s. In this medium post i will

loool

This piece on why the Unionists could back May's deal: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/24/dup-theresa-may-party-conference-brexit-deal-conservatives

I don't particularly buy it but for those of us who aren't following NI politics day-to-day it tells you where they are at rn.

Read this on Edgerton's book on Declinism and theories of - just to ready yourselves for the next stage.

"Alex Kane is a former director of communications for the Ulster Unionist party"

ok lol the UP ruled northern ireland (and took the tory whip) for 50-odd years, since 2017 it literally has no seats at all (not that the relevant house is sitting, but…)

whatever kane is he is not an objective observer with the DUP's interests at heart

Doesn’t have the interests of the nationalists at heart either, considering he’s blamed the collapse of Stormont on the Irish Language Act.

But the DUP counters that claim with the argument that treating Northern Ireland so differently in such a specific and momentous circumstance would undermine the union and, consequently, embolden those – on both sides of the border – who want a referendum on Irish unity.

Doesn’t undermine the union when women are prosecutee for taking abortion pills up there, or when gay people can’t marry. Weird!

Forcing Northern Ireland to be treated differently would lead to serious problems and destabilise the peace process; maybe even end it.

Shure those Fenians near the border don’t matter like. Also lol at claiming a party who opposed the GFA care about the peace process.

Cool, thanks - I am even worse on NI politics :) although I am looking at anything around people's stated hardline positions on this deal, and where that could change as we get close to the vote.

obviously kane is a unionist and thinks like one, i was just somewhat cloudily pre-empting any idea that someone from the UUP is necessarily an entirely honest broker when it comes to the affairs (and indeed the secure future) of the DUP: they are bitter rivals

Like the government and, um, the rest of the government

https://media.giphy.com/media/RFIuO4XWzU8gg/giphy.gif

xxp Sorry mark, definitely not criticising you, just reacting to the article. Obviously am not unbiased myself.

Yes, the UUP and DUP are rivals but in the end they want the same thing. Donaldson left the UUP for the DUP because he wouldn’t support the GFA and Foster defected too a few years later.

But the UUP aren’t exactly covering themselves in glory and (again from my POV), it’s debatable how much less hardline they are these days esp when they’re competing for a lot of the same voters. A lot of their members opposed the GFA then and now. An MP they had before the GE last year was criticised for being photographed in front of a bonfire with an Irish flag on it. He then lost his seat to a DUP candidate. And my skin crawls every time Lord Trimble talks about Brexit.

I read a while ago that Trimble was quoting some Policy Exchange report that said the border wasn’t as important as Dublin was making out and that technological solutions between NI & IRL was enough to get the job done. Who wrote that report? Graham Gudgin. Why do I recognise that name, I wondered, and then Googled:

A key adviser to the North's First Minister, Mr David Trimble, has challenged nationalist arguments that unionist governments engaged in widespread discrimination against Catholics in the allocation of jobs and housing.

Dr Graham Gudgin argues in a new book that the claims of such discrimination by civil rights activists in the 1960s, and since then, were exaggerated and did not take account of nationalist discrimination against Protestants.

I still think unionists of any stripe won’t risk a Corbyn government; Trimble has said that John McDonnell would meet up with “his mate”, Gerry Adams and plot to hand back NI, which is ludicrous and offensive scaremongering.

Sorry if a bit incoherent, I’m not an expert here by any means!

more Corbyn scaremongering and talking about his bridge to a castle in the sky again in the Boris DUP speech. You'd think he'd stfu about that bridge considering his recent history with another bridge and that the concept has been rubbish by people with engineering/construction knowledge.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/no-left-wing-case-for-brexit/

this is good i think on the need for a renewal of leftism as an urgently needed trans-national project (and how an old-school bennite lexitism can't really get us anywhere close to that)

Great piece.

This is neither “leave” nor “reform”: it is “transform”.

A lot of arguments around leaving are that effectively the world stops at the end of March on any kind of progressive politics. Anything that can be done that is progressive is tied around the EU and you need to look beyond that.

I still think unionists of any stripe won’t risk a Corbyn government

So is this then a reason for the DUP to back May's plan?

To succeed, it requires an extremely large base of popular support, a mass of citizens sufficiently politically mature to resist the appeal of the far right acting in collusion with neoliberalism. After years of xenophobia, austerity, cuts to education, dismantling of unions and the progressive erosion of political learning platforms, lasting support on the ground is likely to be very thin. Reviving civic republican sentiments begins to look as hopelessly idealistic as the kind of cosmopolitan aspirations that left nationalists criticize.

This is true but I'm not convinced that it's any less distant, or with significantly less support, than the kind of international co-operative socialist institutional reform that she's talking about here.

Remain and Leave mean very little without concrete ideas of how one can go from where we are to where we aspire to be

This is very OTM though. A lot of the Lexity noises that the likes of Paul Mason - in effect that the Corbyn project wouldn't be possible under existing EU rules - have been largely debunked at this stage. But the Tories aren't just going to go away and they will have the first bite of the cherry when it comes to reforming post-Brexit Britain, and recent history suggests that when they break something it's usually a lasting break. Or as lasting as matters within the lifespans of most people in this country.

yes it feels like asking for a long-term project right as we're hurtling off the edge of a series of immediate-term cliffs (and not even the EU cliff poer se: i mean the dislocations already happening from climate catastrophe, which are already exacerbating social breakdown in the middle east countries, plus the general crisis of institutions* all over the place…) :( :(

i've tended to "theorise" this as "the adults aren't coming back", but of course the politics a resistance to this is "we ourselves need to be the adults we are lacking = create the NEW institutions we ALREADY need", and this is unavoidably not a short-term or a crisis-management project

The idea of trans-national political organizations is important. Imagine a Europe in which migrant workers arrive already familiar with, contributing to, and protected by an existing party, with union support.

and recent history suggests that when they break something it's usually a lasting break. Or as lasting as matters within the lifespans of most people in this country.

If we are talking about austerity or the breaking of the social contract I feel like that can be re-drawn. Not least because changes due to climate change will require it.

A lot of the Lexity noises that the likes of Paul Mason - in effect that the Corbyn project wouldn't be possible under existing EU rules - have been largely debunked at this stage.

Links to anything supporting this?
Not having a go, I'm genuinely interested because most of what I've read on this recently seems to point the other way e.g. https://www.patreon.com/posts/notes-on-eu-and-11833771

^ That's an old article I guess, but was doing the rounds a bit on twitter after the draft withdrawal agreement. Like I say, I'd be interested to know if there's been any subsequent change of direction in terms of the ECJ rulings.

Actually, does that go some way to explaining the opening up of the NHS to absolute privatisation under TTIP that iirc Cameron fought to get concessions preventing?

Labour argues for article 50 extension if Brexit deal voted down https://t.co/cQkxY7zxZs

— Guardian politics (@GdnPolitics) November 26, 2018

So is this then a reason for the DUP to back May's plan?

Not at all, considering May has always been the one to blink first previously. But they are also under considerable pressure from many of their own constituents (incl business community) to support the deal and considering how everything’s gone so far...¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I guess if you were an accelerationist you might think a prospective or actual PM who’s on the record as supporting a United Ireland might cause their support to cleave closer to them though.

Oh, also:

Boris Johnson is facing accusations of hypocrisy after a letter leaked to The Times revealed that he gave his reluctant blessing to checks on trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland while he was foreign secretary https://t.co/08EOfRzXzb

— The Times of London (@thetimes) November 26, 2018

'boris johnson' and 'allegations of hypocrisy' are basically synonymous at this point

Oh absolutely but he’s not the one being embarrassed here.

Hope you're all stoked for a festive Brexit TV debate between May and Corbyn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cringe_comedy

If I was Corbz I'd be extremely wary of the fact that May, who has run away from every TV debate up to now, is taking the initiative on this one. Seems to me the intention will be to expose the many ambiguities and grey areas in the official Labour position and to try and spook enough Labour MPs to vote the deal through.

Difficult to see what Corbyn would gain here unless May really chokes it (and she's likely to have a better grasp of the detail for obvious reasons). I guess he wants to try and hammer her on domestic policy, which could work but could also make him look evasive.

Whether the British public will be excited for a debate on a subject they don't get a vote on right in the middle of the prime-time Christmas TV schedule is another matter.

"Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable demanded to be involved as well..."

I'd forgotten the LDs had a leader.

May is so very bad at this type of thing outside of the playground safe-space of Parliament where she can get away with all sorts of dubious statements. So obviously she feels Corbyn is on shaky enough ground here to make some political capital. Obv I hope the gamble completely backfires, be fucked if I'm watching it though.

That does look like his angle:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/nov/26/labour-to-block-peoples-vote-taking-part-in-brexit-tv-debate-jeremy-corbyn