"oh you don't get me I'm the end of the union": lol brexit is how we're all gonna die

3. Read John Harris articles

3. Read John Harris articles

not sure if serious

Those people used to live in London then moved to the country on account of all the immigrants iirc.

2xp

The various Brexit-related videos John Harris has done for the Guardian are OK (despite he)

not sure if serious

― ||||||||, Wednesday, 30 January 2019 20:43 (three minutes ago)

I was lampooning ogmor

thank fuck! it's bad enough occasionally hate-reading JH's myopic London-centric smugness on autism/SEN matters, but on fucking Brexit as well ..nooo!

but ogmor is quite often very otm.

He is! His London hate/prejudice is therefore doubly baffling.

As a clueless out of touch Londoner I sometimes find myself wondering if members of the provincial angry white working class have developed some kind of secret early warning system for use when John Harris is spotted chuntering around their town centre while people are just trying to get on with their shopping.

london is bad not good this is canon

think harris actually *lives* on the welsh border somewhere, he wrote a piece abt moving out of london in like 2006

londoners are ok, i am one (tho born and brought up on the welsh border lol) (i moved in 2006 iirc)

i have been to london on several occasions, it’s a solid 7/10 imo

I lived in Plumstead/Woolwich for a couple of years. I was always in awe of the history of the area, and the City itself. But not so much in awe of living in a room with a shared kitchen fer' the bloody rent of a 4 bedroomed house.

^^^

London gets far too much attention paid to it as it is.

well you see in 1649 Oliver Cromwell invaded Ireland...

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, 30 January 2019 18:41 (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fwiw i regret how uh testy the thread on american racism got but cmere listen this isnt great

Sorry to go on about this but it is a semi-mystery/irony to me that I would really like Single Transferable Vote in general elections as I believe it would break down the two-party system and make voting for smaller parties less risky, giving them and their voters a chance to be heard - and yet since STV was introduced in NI Assembly elections the harder parties on each side of the divide have become more and more entrenched...

― a passing spacecadet, Wednesday, 30 January 2019 11:58 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It probably deserves a separate thread but the growing trend in Australia is for conservative Liberal and National MPs to get (fiscal conservatives, headbangers/knuckledraggers on the environment, immigration and social issues)to get challenged by independents, often female former liberals who feel pushed out by the knuckledraggers. If Tony Abbot and Josh Frydenberg get rolled by independents it will be happy days even if they aren't replaced by labour or the greens who couldn't win in those seats anyway.

Anyway, STV should be pushed for because it seems like a much better way of rolling out an MP who is out of step with a constituency on certain issues but not on others.

I THINK YOU GUYS ARE GONNA BOMB GERMANY!

What just happened during the closing headlines on the BBC’s 6 o’clock news? Voice over about Theresa May heading back to Europe over black and white archive of presumably RAF aircraft during WW2. WTF? pic.twitter.com/zl3jRLpUBb

— Simon Cousins (@FroggySimon) January 30, 2019

lol the BBC preparing the nation for war

if you hear Churchill tonight, let me assure you he's dead

Not dead, just in that cave with King Arthur ready to ride to the rescue at our hot of greatest peril.

veiled threats to nuke/firebomb Berlin haven't been put on the table for a long time tbf!

yeah usually it's "nuke Dublin"

even then its just by yknow having sellafield

curious ilxors looking in from abroad should be careful if they do accidentally read some stuff written from outside london as they might miss insights from ppl who think "read things that are not x" means "don't read x" or even "read john harris"

You did however express the specific opinion before that London ilxors should be excluded from the uk politics thread, in jest or not, so, you know, you have form

pretending that you never had this animus and that my jokey interp was shockingly off, is however, cute

why grapple with the structural forces driving regional inequalities and their concomitant resentments when you can just pathologise everyone as they complain abt them?

there is no chance that a curious ilxor looking in from abroad wld fail to hear lots of london takes, but given that plenty of ppl in the media do not have much of an understanding of what ppl think outside the metropolis I think its worth having a broad diet and developing an awareness of geographical context as well as historical context.

guys can we get back to the important work of dunking on chinless conservatives / praying for the advent of fully automated luxury gay space communism / fantasising about cannibalism itt pls

https://i.redd.it/zbqaz7b589nz.jpg

Do you kids want to be like the real Brexit process, or do you just want to squabble and waste time?

Mr Blobby shall lead us in this brave new world.

Blobby is pretty chinless that much is true.

Also definitely laughed seeing Jeremy Hunt float extending A50 today.

xp his deranged state suggests he is not unacquainted with the pleasures of guzzling human flesh

The first thing we have to do is demonstrate that our commitment to the Belfast agreement, the Good Friday agreement, is absolute. And we will do that.

Secondly, we have to show that any solution that changes the backstop won’t lead to us trying to access the single market by the back door. And we recognise that the way that we access the single market, because we are not going to be embracing free movement, will change.

If we can overcome those two issues, which I think we can, then I think we will be able to have substantive discussions.

jeremy cunt, the very soul of optimism

why grapple with the structural forces driving regional inequalities and their concomitant resentments when you can just pathologise everyone as they complain abt them?

there is no chance that a curious ilxor looking in from abroad wld fail to hear lots of london takes, but given that plenty of ppl in the media do not have much of an understanding of what ppl think outside the metropolis I think its worth having a broad diet and developing an awareness of geographical context as well as historical context.

― ogmor, Thursday, 31 January 2019 10:46 (fourteen minutes ago)

definitely what you were doing, and not just posting vindictive, puerile snipes at Londoners to get easy + cheap points

anyway, i think we're on the same page about structural forces driving regional inequalities, so long as you don't confuse "people living in London" with the hegemonic forces ruling from London". Little tip for you to avoid pissing off ordinary working plebs in future, there.

Anyway this is more interesting than this inane beef:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/files/2018/05/Screen-Shot-2018-05-04-at-10.12.26.png

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/files/2018/05/Screen-Shot-2018-05-04-at-10.13.28.png

If this polling data is accurate (big if) then immigration *was* cited as the single biggest factor by Leave voters, and Remain voters thought they felt the same way. BUT look at the huge margin of error in the second graph, Remain voters still overestimated the importance of immigration by ~20%.

In doing so they *massively* underestimated the importance in Leave voters' minds of the EU's role in UK lawmaking - it's a very close second in Leave voters' minds and a distant fourth in the impressions of Remain voters. But it didn't play as prominent a role in the campaign as immigration, the economy or the amount of money going to Brussels etc.

How much of that can be subsumed into generic anti-foreigner sentiment though Matt? Thinking of that racist pensioner vox pop I saw where the auld lad was ranting about “we won the war and now they’re trying to tell us what to do!»”

definitely what you were doing, and not just posting vindictive, puerile snipes at Londoners to get easy + cheap points

anyway, i think we're on the same page about structural forces driving regional inequalities, so long as you don't confuse "people living in London" with the hegemonic forces ruling from London". Little tip for you to avoid pissing off ordinary working plebs in future, there.

Well, I live in London and vindictive, puerile snipes at Londoners are fine by me, I do it myself often enough.

Out of curiosity, what kind of laws has the UK been prevented from implementing as a result of its purported vassalage to Brussels?

we can only eat ramrod-straight bananas now, and we're prevented by mincing milquetoast eu law from implementing tried-and-true british bulldog working practices like installing live power lines while waist-deep in water - that kinda stuff

won't have much inane beef readily available after march 29th :(

Also sausages made of sweepings, pig arseholes and sawdust can no longer be called sausages.

It’s 100% pure pig arsehole or nothing.

^ Cameron's legacy

We can take Leavers' concerns about lack of lawmaking independence seriously as a voting factor, but it's still essentially another lie, or series of lies, fostered by the press, as that document listing all the EU myths demonstrates. And as gyac says, its enough of a co-factor with xenophobia to be suspicious - why isn't it the type of laws that matters, not where they come from? If Westminster enacts unfair laws, why should we not equally give a shit about that?

I don't see why one type of xenophobic delusion is better than another type of xenophobic delusion.

I posted that chart before. I live in a northern leave constituency and immigration DID factor less than is portrayed in media and 'EU fools straightening our bananas" DID factor way more than is portrayed in media. Anecdotally sure, but as I said before we've had decades of tabloid media pushing this stuff. The leave campaign didn't start in 2012, it started in 1986 or whatever. Effective relentless propaganda with no pushback, decades before anyone came up with a bus

Did any of it make any sense? No. It was purely symbolic, no substance to it - but Brexit is identity politics writ large, why would you look for substance?

i missed this yesterday but it's good to know the government is still coming up with crackerjack policy ideas despite the distraction of brexit

Staff at Clarks shoe shops are to be asked to engage children in conversation to improve language skills, as part of a government attempt to tackle “concerning” rates of early literacy.

Thousands of workers will receive training on children’s speech, language and communication development as part of a campaign that will also involve private companies helping fund literacy projects.

The government pointed to analysis from the National Literacy Trust suggesting 7.1 million adults in the UK have very poor literacy skills. Ministers have prioritised improving rates of early literacy and communication among disadvantaged families, which they see as being of particular concern.

As part of the scheme, WH Smith will advise parents in Swindon, which has relatively high levels of illiteracy, on how to support their children’s language development.

The government said it hoped such schemes would help parents improve their children’s skills by the time they finished reception class, at age five. Last year, the education secretary, Damian Hinds, set out an ambition to halve the proportion of five-year-olds not meeting expected standards in such skills.

The children and families minister, Nadhim Zahawi, said: “There’s no instruction manual for being a parent. For some who left school a long time ago or who have low confidence in their own abilities, it can be overwhelming to know where to start with supporting children’s learning at home before they start school – and we know that too many children are arriving at school already behind their peers.

“By working with a growing number of businesses, charities and experts, we’re making it easier for parents to kickstart this early development – helping to take forward our national mission to boost children’s early development.”

7.1m adults have literacy problems, u say? this calls for a shoe-store intervention