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

having some dynamic young gun like Hunt who turns up to live tv debates might be a game-changer for the tories.

What's her slogan going to be next time?

Was: Strong and Stable

Now: Broad and Adaptable

Stupid and Woman

But anyway Matt if you believe May would have lost her majority against Cooper or Kendall (lol) go ahead and think that

Read my post again, it's obvious I don't think that.

One area where the press treatment of Corbyn played to his favour was that he looked like such an obvious lame duck that as Nashwan says it led to extreme overconfidence, hubris and complacency from the Tories. They thought they had to just turn up and be gifted with a landslide. The fact that were enacting policies that were the last thing half the electorate wanted barely even occurred to them and in fact they ramped up the nastiness.

This all goes to show that Cameron wasn't wrong to try and remove that stuff from the party's public face. If he'd approached it properly, rather than just trying to airbrush it out of sight, the country might be in a very different position now, but I suppose you can't really purge all your backbenchers at once.

Surprising but good news RIGHT COMMUTERS?

http://londonist.com/london/transport/london-s-train-stations-toilets-free-to-use-from-1-april-2019

xp = yup sorry

But anyway Matt if you believe May would have lost her majority against Cooper or Kendall (lol) go ahead and think that.

― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 20 December 2018 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha sorry misread.

I guess my one-liner makes it look like I focused on Corbyn too much when its not even that much about the party leaders. In the past I have taken those things (campaigns, manifestos, etc.) into account though.

the toxic rhetoric around immigration and "citizens of nowhere" that put off virtually every socially liberal voter in the country

I mean you say this but Cameron won a majority in 2015 appealing to the country’s worst instincts. Plenty of those “socially liberal” people voted for him, Cameron’s numbers with young people and women were a whole lot better than May’s. Yvette Cooper stans still take to twitter/the airwaves/their newspaper columns every single day
arguing that her fight-the-Tories-on-immigration-from-the-right approach would have Labour 20 points ahead.

As for the question of being lucky with Tory policy, half the party is agitating for food shortages, troops on the street and no fresh insulin. Sort of pales in comparison to the dementia tax. They can’t go left because they’ll drop their UKIP voters, and they can’t go much further right. So what new ground are they going to fight the next election on?

Socially liberal is only half the story, people who are cool with gay rights but think the poor should be tolerated and immigrants controlled are responsible for voting for this mess in the first place.

I suppose the point I'm making is that things are very messy, contradictory, chaotic and constantly changing and I'd be wary of stamping any one narrative on the last election, let alone using that as the basis to fight the next one. You can't take it as *just* an endorsement of the Labour leadership or a rejection of May, or as Remain v Leave mk2 or anything like that. But the two manifestos did make a massive difference, I think.

At the end of the day millions *more* people voted for May than voted for Cameron, probably as a result of Brexit, it's just the distribution was wrong for them. But the Tories fought the 2015 election focused on Labour's supposed weakness on the economy, in 2017 they didn't and made it easier for Labour. The difference is that now the Tories don't appear to care about the economy at all, they'll happily destroy it based on a spurious interpretation of Will Of The People. That's a massive open flank for Labour to exploit.

The other thing that helped swing the 2015 election, certainly as far as poll responses go, was the bogeyman of a weak Miliband government under the SNP's thumb. Obviously the Tories can't try THAT one again.

Of course it’s not an unquestioning endorsement and you are as you usually are very much otm. But I don’t agree with the message that labour benefited only from Tory fuckups. Their policies were attractive to people and they didn’t engage in negative campaigning; they made a real offer to the electorate. The bread and butter issues did cut through and I heard and saw this with my own eyes. Policies do matter; people did warm to Corbyn.

Millions more did vote for TM but they were UKIP voters returning for the most part. This is part of the reason their voter profile was so much older in 2017.

Ia re the economy which is what I said upthread somewhere; can’t bleat about labour being weak on the economy when you’ve got half your MPs clamouring for no deal!

Cameron also benefited from the Labour collapse in Scotland and both Labour and the Tories benefited from the SNP losing seats in 2017.

Cameron also benefited from the Labour collapse in Scotland and both Labour and the Tories benefited from the SNP losing seats in 2017.

I don’t agree with the message that labour benefited only from Tory fuckups.

No I don't agree with that either, I think I was just reacting to xyzzz putting it all down to Corbyn/Labour's positioning. It's clearly a mixture of both - although I do think that the Tories would have squeaked over the line if May hadn't been so obviously inept and repellent.

The 2015 election is probably their high water mark in modern Britain though, their voter base is now so polarised age-wise it's difficult to see how they won't continue to decline.

amongst all the brexit chaos there is some quiet back-pedaling going on recently: talk of "soft" PIP re-assessments for people with lifelong illnesses, Amber Rudd hinting the UC rollout might have to be slowed down, NHS trusts getting magic money dosh - weak concessions really, but something I suppose. It possibly hints that if they have the time to put together a coherent "anti-Corbyn" manifesto it won't be anywhere as threadbare + so obviously complacent as the '17 one. But if there was a snap election in January I'd expect some real half baked stuff, but with them being tories they'd still be the fucking favs.

Matt you are reading way more into my post. I wasn't going to drag a whole account of the general election again.

All I was doing was stating a fact that this Labour leadership has held May to account - by the fact that her majority has been lost under the good campaign they fought. And I was comparing that to the media, which on a day-to-day basis is not doing even questioning what this govt are doing, preferring instead to employ lip readers.

Yeah of course there are other factors in play - and given our inclinations we will put some of these more in play than others. xp

I’m reminded of a NYer column where the writer talks about Corbyn being warm and nice and gentle seeming and how his politics are, in contrast, “anything but anodyne”. I feel like the opposite of this impression formed with voters last year - THIS is the terrifying monster of the redtops?

Another factor in the election was unsexy strategic fuckups on the Tories part - misreading the map and rushing resources from winnable seats into ones they had no chance in, eyes gleaming with the prospect of destroying opposition for a generation. Hilarious in retrospect but if they hadn't done that, they might still have a majority.

aye, that was well documented as a major fuck-up in Betting The House.

I've not read it - would you recommend?

yeah, it was obv written very quickly but it was good stuff. I don't know if I read it now I might pick holes in it though, seeing as a year is like a decade these days!

Going back a bit upthread to the Gillian Duffy thing, I think part of it was that Brown was super civil to her when talking and then called her a bigot behind her back. Now, this is very understandable (and probably how I'd have handled the situation), but I think that it angered ppl not just because he was calling her a bigot but because he was being duplicitous about it. So if when questioned on it he had said "yeah, that woman was totally a bigot", I don't know if that would have had much political impact, because the overall message - "these elites hate you and won't tell you that to your face" - would've remained.

very good article in the FT by the reliably good Sarah O'Connor (not behind the paywall as it's part of their christmas appeal) about the working homeless. She also did the excellent Blackpool piece, which is worth reading in conjunction with this. Contains a series of very effective charts mapping out how much homelessness has increased and how, over the last eight years. in relation to ogmor's post – james brokenshire's comments were foul and i assume deliberately so – this article should be wrapped around a rock and hurled at his head.

“There isn’t enough social housing, therefore more people are in privately rented homes and the housing benefit doesn’t cover it,” says Matthew Downie, policy director at homelessness charity Crisis. “If you were to invent a system to create homelessness, this is the way you would do it.”.

when you break it down to the root causes of the homeless epidemic it's transparently all on them + it's quite simple really - nothing "complex" about it at all. Complex is their fave weasel word when talking shit about the carnage their welfare reforms have caused. Deathpits are too good for them tbh.

there's a refusal to even think about housing coherently, everything is broken down to small, unconnected unfortunate local contingencies and acted upon accordingly. when there is talk of rough sleepers (and it's worth looking into how they get the figures that get quoted here, how the censuses/headcounts are done etc. because it shows you how deep the rot goes; the goal is total obfuscation) specifics from particular instances are seized upon that do nothing to illuminate the link with temporary accommodation, or the terrible state of so much social housing & housing associations, or fuel poverty, or personal debt, or any of the other huge costs to society that the current disastrous housing situation produces.

even the most unsympathetic budget-cutter wld start to realise the false economy of cuts to social housing and housing benefit if they looked at the bigger picture. instead there's a culture of piecemeal & short-term thinking which has been inculcated through years of structural reforms and downwards pressure. the ideology has become embedded into the structure of housing as an issue, and it leaves everyone who gives a shit doing small scale fire-fighting while the bigger question is not just no one's responsibility but not even articulated. this is why it's in tory interest to focus on (certain) personal stories. an appeal to values is not enough, and any successful narrative account will have to be a major scale one that reckons with what a disaster right to buy has been for the country.

When I say it's all on them - it's not quite right because New Labour have been part of the long-term problem as well. But without going all Eejit Marsan - New Labour did get homelessness down on their watch and it wasn't them who caused local homeless services up and down the country to be cut to shreds. But also they embraced right to buy, built no social housing and I can't recall any radical landlord reforms under their watch.

ogmor otm. It's obvious to anybody who looks that the steep increase in rough sleepers has been happening since the early years of the coalition. Nothing that Brokenshire points to as causal didn't exist long before 2010. But it happens to people who are of no interest to the Tory Party, and the wider impact of this surge mostly affects non-persons too.

Obviously New Labour were more liberal with the short-term ameliorative measures, but as with everything else they did the lack of underlying structural reform just held this shit in abeyance. If Brown had lived long enough to deal with the consequences of the economic crash I'm not sure how much different things would be.

The push of lower income people into private renting, due to lack of social housing, the subsequent squeeze on housing benefit to prevent public money going to private landlords, with the effects summarised v effectively in this visualisation is a great example of how the lack of coherence ogmor mentioned results in damaged personal lives, and also, if you want to take it to the tory home ground, a bloody expensive system. of course, as everyone's said, more important to the tory's than that is the ideology of personal responsibility rather than structural or societal contexts and causes, mainly as a cover ideology for siphoning money to private capitalists. basically they don't really care if it's costing the country money as long as a landlord is making it somewhere. it goes without saying they really don't care about the people.i know this is tory 101, but it's wild how blatant it is the amount of money and effort goes into legitimising it across our media channels and in much of our politics.

http://i64.tinypic.com/dgn6o.png

it's worth noting that despite my agreement on the New Labour lack of social housing being a cause of this, and yes the sell-off of social housing for Tory votes more generally, 2014 is relatively recent for a substantially different picture (I assume it's that housing benefit squeeze again).

Yesterday the Tories and much of the media created a phoney row about something I didn't say.

Here's why... pic.twitter.com/AADuxGiW3D

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) December 20, 2018

my only knock against this vid is that the angle they use for his face when speaking directly to camera is not ideal

Corbyn PLEASE. Also I note that he doesn’t actually say “stupid people” in the video for us all to compare, lol.

I wondered if he was gonna, but that would've looked more desperate. Tbf I think he probably said "woman" but I don't believe anybody can read lips with 100 percent certainty.

I don’t think he said people but I don’t think he said woman either.

"Stupid wankers"?

#kindergentlerpolitics

my only knock against that vid is that he says pantomiNe

I noticed that too lol

Isssssues

More on carve-ups as reforms:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/emilydugan/this-leaked-document-shows-judges-are-furious-about-the

They said: “Judges were encouraged by the Senior Judiciary, who had been involved in early discussions, to take as a given that the revolutionary IT would be delivered and would work well. Regrettably the visible objective evidence points to the contrary. The most recent example is the much vaunted first virtual hearing in the Tax Tribunal last week that had to be abandoned due to excessive buffering and crashing.”

The submission also gave the example of Birmingham Civil and Family Justice Centre, which has had £8.1 million spent on it to make it a flagship of the Court of the Future project. “Despite this vast expense,” the documents says, “the fact remains that the majority of hearing rooms in the building including courtrooms still record proceedings on primitive cassette machines with only a minority having digital recording equipment.”

just skype it and get the old grundig reel to reel tapes out - the court of the future! This government's implementation of tech in this era inspires so much confidence in that digital frictionless NI border some of these clowns have been talking up.

cosign that excellent fizzles post. whether you point to housing benefit or huge cuts to council funding there's clearly been a tipping point in the last few years. there's been such a lag between it becoming very obvious to ppl on an everyday level and the discourse/data/any sense of political urgency building that I think it's clear there's been a problem of perception, or, to misuse kuhn, it requires a shift in paradigm to make sense of what's going on.

Back in the 90's (in my experience) and even the early 00's you'd see vacant council houses/flats with the steel shutters on for months at a time and if you wanted a council flat in your late teens - you'd get your mam to lie that you've been thrown out onto the streets. Then as licensee with notice - or whatever the term was you could expect a flat within a reasonable amount of time. This seems like some crazy talk from the 50's now!

Yeah we had a council flat in the late 80s or early 90s precisely because the council didn't want it lying empty

I got on the waiting list in 2005 after illness and a breakup and it took two years’ accumulation of points to get housed. That was quick by London standards at the time (I am fairly good at bureaucracy) and I got a huge amount of points just for being in the same borough for 10 years - a friend with more need spent 10 years in hostels, including mother/baby housing, and another friend spent 15 years on the list before Kier Starmer intervened on her behalf about a month ahead of Camden reworking the points system - she’d have been taken off the list if she had lingered in private accommodation any longer.

When I lived in London for a couple of years in the 90's I didn't even consider getting on waiting lists. But I'm sure the odds back then were much more favourable than now. Social housing is so fucking good, and all you ever get in the press - going back as far as I can remember is the HIVES OF SUBHUMAN SCUM variety. There should be a dialogue about how fucking good social housing is.

This country really bought into the homeowner thing propagated by Thatcher, it would be interesting to look at how widespread that aspiration was pre 1980

and of course how much of that aspiration has been driven by the size of rents under the nu slumlord culture that's risen in Thatcherism's wake

I'm thinking the right wing press have probably been demonising social housing at least since the 80's in my memory. I wonder if there is any current Tory as brave + emboldened enough as Cameron was about 5 years back when he was heard loudly dismissing council housing as "petri dishes for Labour voters" in the current climate.

Home ownership was growing steadily from the mid-50s iirc, Thatcherism kicked it up a notch but idk if there is any reason to think it wouldn’t have kept going in the same direction, albeit at a slower pace.

Sure and economically that would make sense but I'm thinking about the way people think about home ownership, from the classic "renting is just throwing money away" to the almost moral imperative to leave property for your children (big assumptions there obv).

No doubt none of the attitudes to this were invented from whole cloth in the 80s but as I understand it these aren't universal across developed countries and like calz I can remember a time when council houses were a fairly unremarkable fact of working class life, not the marker of marginalisation and/or deprivation that they've become in some circles.

I've lived in a housing association flat for many years (nearly 20, i think) and got it though exactly the means that calzino noted upthread - i.e. by pretending that my mother had thrown me out and that i was sleeping on friend's sofas. afaict the situation with social housing in scotland is a lot better than it is south of the border (and certainly a world away from london's situ).