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

yep

ffs let's not get too carried away here :p

I can remember some (Scottish?) NME hack decades ago, opening up a Boab interview with some very evocative prose about what a great political orator Boab sr was, a true inspirational w/c hero etc. Maybe he became infected by Boab's Walter Mitty tendencies or just thought it made good copy, but "Boab's dad could barely string two sentences together." deffo has the ring of truth.

Put it this way, he singlehandedly threw away a majority of 13,000 in Govan largely as a result a single TV appearance, despite his subsequent attempts to paint it as some sort of anti-Left conspiracy.

That and the fact he came over as yet another Scottish Labour dullard expecting to hoover up votes simply by pinning a red rosette.

thank god those days are gone :p

is there a Tom D bat-signal equiv. for every time Blobbly Gillespie is mentioned on ILX?

lol

What can I do, he's even getting mentioned in UK poltics threads now, he's following me not the other way round.

feel an MR James ghost story coming on.

'Cast your runes off, honey'

"Wailing Badly"

shake your tambourine and i'll come to you my lad

"There Was A Man Dwelt By A Burning Motorcycle"

Count Mani

irl lol at wailing badly

The Tractate Dimgoth

"Number 10"

any further detail on sample size, questions etc of TSSA polling ?

I've yet to see a link to, let alone screenshots/copies from that poll. Sample size 5,000, but that's about all I know.

Dear Leavers, Thank you. You were right to give the establishment a kicking.

If you were in control, what would you change first about life in the UK? #LetsTalk @CarolineLucas pic.twitter.com/5YRIVIGURj

— Dear Leavers (@DearLeavers) February 8, 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW-gerAdxpY

lol at caroline lucas’ gammon safari video showing plenty of footage of her listening to people but nothing of what they actually said, presumably because most of it was ‘hang the furriners’

if the Greens enable Brexit they could lose up to 45 seats

did we discuss the article re labour and antisemitism xyzzzz posted

was it even on this thread

I was nodding off to 40 mins of Labour AS coverage courtesy of PM earlier. If only they gave 5 minutes to Baroness Warsi's plea for an independent conservative party islamophobia enquiry the other day, over genuine use of p-word from members that wasn't being challenged.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/02/how-to-think-clearly-about-anti-semitism-controversies-in-the-labour-party

Like all segments of British society, the Labour Party does harbor elements of anti-Semitism, and it is even possible that Labour’s realignment has allowed fringe anti-Semitic voices to surface which had previously been suppressed by New Labour’s dominance. We cannot allow our positions on this issue to simply echo a media establishment whose goals differ so widely from ours, and neither can we dismiss anti-Semitism as a problem.

Instead, we should take our cues from our socialist (and especially Jewish socialist) comrades in the U.K., who have proposed that the anti-Semitism crisis become an opportunity for democratization and political education in the Labour Party. As they argue, the anti-Semitic currents in Corbynism are not the result of having indulged the far Left too much. Instead, they originate from a nostalgic nationalism, common on the left of the party, that yearns for the socialist England of the postwar years but lacks a broader internationalist horizon. When Corbyn defends strong borders, restrictions on freedom of movement, and more police on the beat, he is drawing on this same legacy with even more serious effects.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know much about this issue in the round so like to maintain listen mode mostly

Starting in 1905, immigration controls in the UK began for the express purpose of denying pogrom-fleeing Jews permission to come here. Follow @sisyphusa on Twitter, who explains about the antisemitic origins of immigration policy.

I think Luciana Berger is right to feel the party has let her down. That stuff about them concealing the threat to her was horrific. I know exactly how I’d feel if Corbyn was staying silent on racism directed at me over something as ultimately meaningless as a factional agreement. You can acknowledge that the people jailed for threatening and stalking Berger were fascists - which they were - but that’s even more reason for us not to expect her to put up with this shit in her own party.

xp
In Nikolaus Wachsmann's excellent KL book there was a case of the Jewish guy who faked id + a passport and pulled off a daring escape plan to get on a plane to London from 30's Nazi Germany. He pleaded with home office officials that he was in grave danger and would be murdered if they sent him back. They deported him and he was promptly put into "protective custody" in Dachau where he was brutally murdered. Hitler used the antisemitism of Poland/CzaristRussia/UK/France/Italy/US for domestic propaganda "no-one else wants them" etc.. Although lots of Tories love to remind of *us* of the time we saved a relatively tiny bunch of unaccompanied schoolchildren during the holocaust.

The DfT have quietly cancelled the contract with the pseudo ferry company, not that it is saving any of Grayling's face - that face is already in hell (with Ted Rogers?).

"The DfT said it had been Arklow Shipping’s backing that gave it confidence in the viability of the deal, and that it stood by the due diligence carried out on Seaborne Freight."

hmm why a company that actually owned the ships and had experience + competence in shipping would need some parasitic shell company taking a skim is a classic example of degenerate plutocracy.

Meanwhile, the weird dinner in Dublin seems to have gone ...well?
https://www.rte.ie/news/brexit/2019/0208/1028407-leo-theresa-dinner/

Also, this beats chicken lasagne and potatoes by a mile. Beef and salmon!

Discussions took place over a menu of cured organic salmon for starter and fillet of beef, dauphinoise potato, green beans and parsnip puree for the main course.

Dessert was a selection of Irish cheeses, meringue nest topped with seasonal fruit. Mrs May, who is diabetic, had fruit for dessert.

I bet Leo did too, seeing as he has the metabolic age of a 53 year old.

Oy!

I wouldn't fancy that meal much, but if that's all there is...

hard not to read that as "Mrs May, who is robotic".

Oy what? I don’t think the PM could eat a spice bag and she probably wouldn’t like black pudding.

haha i went back to my posts abt seabourne on the previous thread to see if i'd been owned by the plutocrats:

the dunking is fun (and there may well be lots that's dodgy or foolish still to emerge, since #failinggrayling) but not owning any ships is a red herring not a red flag: ferry companies routinely charter and it would be a genuinely weird and bad business decision to purchase any when ramsgate harbour is not even dredged fit for use yet, so they can just sit around to be pointed to

https://i.imgur.com/UOVaHoK.png

*e.g. if it has to go to a UK firm for optics sake, better the decision points are the guy's actual professional background and knowledge (admittedly still to be confirmed), and not whether he has a spiffy website up and running months before it's needed (this is me slightly side-eyeing elliott higgins hurtling up to dox the guy's internet uselessness, in his usual to-a-hammer-everything-is-a-nail style)

― mark s, Thursday, January 3, 2019 12:24 PM (one month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but (even tho as calz sez it's shell companies all the way down in the shipping industry) i think the involvement of arklow makes me right, and not the scoffers -- seabourne had ships to hand if this went through. and arklow weren't interested in a (for them) smallish and likely not especially lucrative project provided a Local Hero © bill forsyth could navigate the (likely ticklish and ridiculous) local politics

ans = no he could not of course, but the detail in the logistics (and in the practical realities of re-investing strongly in a small sidelined port) really isn't where everyone thinks it is, tremendous material as it is for dunking grayling

local villainy:

It looks possible that we've all been played by some property developers pic.twitter.com/KHiigxK4r8

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) February 9, 2019

(davies worth reading all morning on this, as well as before: the issue is less that seabourne were a bit dodgy -- you'd never get involved in shipping issues at all if yr allergy starts there -- than that this was a tiny local deal with many moving parts required to be completed to an absurd timetable in the magnified eye of all. apparently it's thanet council that blinked…)

arklow weren't interested in a (for them) smallish and likely not especially lucrative project provided a Local Hero

s/b

arklow were ONLY interested in a (for them) smallish and likely not especially lucrative project provided a Local Hero

did we discuss the article re labour and antisemitism xyzzzz posted

― ||||||||, Friday, 8 February 2019 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

was it even on this thread

― ||||||||, Friday, 8 February 2019 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

On the Ocasio-cortez one.

I'd prefer to be naive about this business of some rich tory donor putting on a captains hat and saying: arrr the sea is in my veins - but never even been in a toy dinghy tbh, and leeching gov contracts. It reminds of how NHS trusts have to pay rent for their own land to other similar parasites, it's fucking wrong, man! But I suspect in shipping it might even be the type of practice that even pre-dates thatcherism.

I mean even if it is standard practice, it is still shit and it's good that it has blown up in Grayling's annoying fucking face.

if not for the abuse of the tender process and blatant croneyism, I suppose Seaborne would be all go.

the shipping trade is where insurance (and therefore insurance fraud) was invented, it's the seed of the bad (and i guess the good) in capitalism, long before anyone else much was behaving like this (ie back into the classical mists of time)

ie the good is taking nice things back and forth across great distances, the bad was sailing yr ship full of whatever off to Port A as promised, diverting mid ocean to Port B, where you sold all the nice things and repainted and renamed the ship, then made a claim to the shipping insurers group back in Athens and said "my poor ship went down with all hands and also all the nice things", and they pay up for it all as per insurance agreement.

feel there's a trenchant metaphor for Brexit in there somewhere

schoolboy lols, The Greeks used to refer to that game as Bottomry.

The Greeks, being the strong individualists that they were, invented the insurance scam approximately 10 seconds after they invented insurance. It was perfectly normal for the boat owner to claim the boat had sunk, when in fact it was hidden in some foreign port. This was so common that standard contracts required the owners to pay the insurer twice the premium rate if the boat was concealed and subsequently discovered still floating. If you're wondering why the owners weren't jailed for fraud...that's rather difficult if there's no police force to make an arrest, nor a jail to put offenders in. If you were an insurer who'd been diddled, your only recourse was a civil court case.

highly recommended (and the entire source of my "knowledge" abt ancient greek shipping scams):
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/387/1*XUYtvWJRWdj4boSF2Nahfw.png

(full disclosure: davies takes the same line as calz on the grand old english word "bottomry" viz sniggering uncontrollably)

I'd like to think if you joined the Bottomry Investigation Squad back in the day, the job would come with a hat and a uniform. Oh I'll have to check out that book, thanx mark.

Is there a good name for March 29 yet? B-day is being used for birthday and bidet already.