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

You can be friends with who you want tbh, happy to judge MPs purely on their political activity

noodle vague massively otm

The flip side of that is that "some of my best friends are repulsive shit bags who strive to make the world crueller for the marginalized" doesn't make you some great sage either

I don’t have a problem with judging her for being friends with JRM, who’s meeting with Steve Bannon & defending his opposition to abortion on the news. How is that not political? The only person benefiting from this is JRM, it makes him seem more palatable.

xxp
I wouldn't say that if I saw someone taking a grinning selfie with Livingstone/Galloway or even Tommy Robinson. I'd say there are limits to who you can be friends with when you are public office and fuck anyone who doesn't want to see Mogg burnt alive tbh.

Both fair points well made

otm and otm

Nobody would know she was friends with JRM if she hadn’t made such a big thing out of it for explicitly political reasons - partly to trash Laura Pidcock

if I was an MP* I'd be in the Lords and Commons cricket team alongside all sorts of bastards and I'd be thoroughly civil, try not to drop too many catches off their bowling etc, but I'd vote left on everything in Parliament, and of course not get too close or refer to these bastards as friends, which is her error. civility is perfectly fine though

*lol

I mean you say “lol”, but, like, Michael O’ Halloran. Simon Danczuk.

excuse me if I don’t want to be friends w JRM

Dear @AmberRuddHR , I’ve just had 40% of my constituents at advice surgery today tell me they’re ready to end their lives because of the misery your Universal Credit system.

Letter to follow with the individual cases, but ultimately the system is failing. pic.twitter.com/xc8SV1P9WL

— Cat Smith (@CatSmithMP) March 8, 2019

Not interested in being friends with Tories and the five Lib dems that exist full stop.

I'd be fake friends with people on the 'centre-left', or single-issue ppl (nationalists, Greens) as long as they can go left now and then.

Jess Phillips and JRM is no worse than Diane Abbott and Michael Portillo, probably less so given that Diane Abbott was happy to get clowned by Portillo and Andrew Neil on This Week for year after year.

i'm really good friends with ayman al zawahiri and GROWN UP enough to overcome our political differences and just have A LAUGH

we almost never talk about using violent means to enforce a highly conservative ethnostate.

She can very occasionally be on point but she's such a showboater, I'm not sure she's even on the right of the party, she's just so scattergun all the time and I think she just relishes the attention you get from being a self-styled maverick.

Think we shd be a bit past the point of saying the system isn't working, and recognising that it is working very well for its purpose

Next government priority will be to get more of that 40% to follow thru tho obviously brexit is taking a lot of time atm

Jess Phillips and JRM is no worse than Diane Abbott and Michael Portillo,

I mean, JRM dined with a group who think all black British people should be repatriated. There’s odious and there’s this.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Traditional_Britain_Group

Not interested in being friends with Tories and the five Lib dems that exist full stop.

I'd be fake friends with people on the 'centre-left', or single-issue ppl (nationalists, Greens) as long as they can go left now and then.

Nationally the Lib Dems are a pointless and ridiculous party but I'd have liked it if some Labour MPs had bothered to turn up for my LD MP's bill to repeal the vagrancy act

if leftish MPs would like non-Tories to "go left now and then" perhaps they could turn up and vote when they do, instead of going home because wrong coloured rosette. similarly disappointed by the turnout for the recent climate change debate

(maybe there is some reason why repealing the vagrancy act is right not left and/or bad not good, idk; please do point me at a link if so)

The recent climate change debate was just talk - there was no legislation attached to it. We need a series of new legislations, and to ultimately re-develop our economy and our entire way of life in the next few decade and beyond. Nothing is happening rn because of Brexit.

Portillo is as vile as JRM fwiw.

never forget
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/wj7975/i-tried-to-interview-michael-portillo-about-austerity-and-it-didnt-go-to-plan

Labour policy is to repeal the vagrancy act and I thought they had said they backed it anyway? Was there a vote on it that took place?
http://www.laylamoran.com/labour_back_homeless_law_change

Portillo and Abbott is an outlier - they are from the same town and went to the girls/boys grammar at the same time. May have even known one another as teenagers?

She's from London, Portillo's not from London, is he?

They’re both from Harrow.

Ah, right. Still there's plenty of arseholes from Paisley and I don't hang out with them.

my apologies - I had thought the Vagrancy Act debate this Jan was a vote, but it was not. it was poorly attended all round but it looks like it was timetabled at the last minute so probably inevitable (plus, yes, no time in this all-Brexit-all-the-time parliament). glad Labour are backing it & I take it back, sorry for poor research as usual

I had def heard that Portillo and Abbott knew each other in schooldays but not from a reliable source so who knows. and there are a lot of people I was vaguely aware of at nearby schools who'd have no idea who I am, so "knew each other" may or may not be doing a lot of work in these assertions anyway

x-post to 'abysmal real names'

Sir, Amber Rudd was guilty of a solecism in referring to Diane Abbott as "coloured" ("Rudd apologizes after calling Abbott 'coloured'", News, Mar 8). However, the context makes clear that the overt intention was not offensive but supportive.
Ms Abbott's propensity to take offence perhaps reveals more about her intolerance than Ms Rudd's purported intolerance.

Clem Vogler
Fouslsham, Norfolk

I am really wondering what the conversation between Amber Rudd and (her current partner) Kwasi Kwarteng must have been like the evening after this happens.

You don’t need to apologise - I was just surprised cos I knew it was policy!

Kwarteng probably uses coloured for black people who didn't go to Eton.

I am sickened by the abuse the wonderful Jess Phillips receives.

The intolerant Stalinist left believe you can choose your own gender...

But as soon as a brave parliamentarian from a solid middle class background chooses to identify as working class they are viciously attacked.

— Oliver Laughdugry #FBPE #ABTV #TBEU #AKFNLW #Peopl (@laughdugrylegal) March 9, 2019

(xp) Given that he's one of the "Why can't you lazy plebs be more like the Chinese" bring-on-the-Brexit crew I can imagine they don't talk much about the day job.

well she did used to be married to a a gill for years, so maybe as a complete arsehole she's quite happy in the company of other complete arseholes without needing to compartmentalise. And oh yeah lol he was a tankie.

Just on the off chance anyone was expecting a moment of self-reflection from the Home Office...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47512659

Two more women from the UK who are being held in Syrian camps with their young children have been stripped of their citizenship, a report says.

It comes after the death in a Syrian camp of the baby son of Shamima Begum, who left London to join Islamic State and had her UK citizenship revoked.

No dignified self-governing state should abandon responsibility for its own citizens in this way, trying to dump them on to poorer countries with failed security arrangements. Mr Javid’s behaviour is a recipe for refugee chaos and moral cowardice of the worst sort.

Lord Macdonald otm

whole episode reminded of this seemingly throwaway line from one of stephen bush's columns last year

... increasing numbers of Tory MPs are no longer talking about how best to win back those voters who supported David Cameron in 2010 and 2015, but defected to Labour in 2017. Instead, they wonder how to “maximise the white vote”, as one Conservative MP puts it.

I finally unfollowed Lineker over this pathetic Phillips love-in lol

I read the interview and even though Rachel Sylvester is supposed to be a diligent journalist, she repeated the ‘I told Diane Abbott to fuck off’ story that first brought JP all those laurels from media melts. Diane says it never happened.

How unusual for Jess Phillips to tell a self-aggrandising Look At Me And My Gob story, and how unusual for centrist arseholes to just allow it.

just on the white vote point, bush’s piece on the recent University of Manchester’s revisionist Runnymede Report (on the 2017 GE) was interesting:

And that’s perhaps the most important lesson here: that the Conservative position among ethnic minorities is worse than we thought and that a great deal of work, both in terms of increasing affluence and reducing the reasons why ethnic minority voters distrust the Conservative Party, is required.

also

The significant lesson is that Cameron’s big electoral success wasn’t among well-paid ethnic minorities but among their white neighbours. This is revealing of a broader part of the importance of David Cameron’s political project: it’s not just that in a more diverse democracy, you need to get ethnic minorities to vote for you – in a diverse, fairly well-integrated democracy like the United Kingdom, increasingly it will be a bar that has to be passed among white voters, too.

the fact that they did do better among British Jews is “visibly and obviously” not anything positive to do with the Tory party. only positive news for them is British Indians.

that they’re not doing anything to rescue this situation is fairly obvious from the news.

what’s not clear to me is how much it matters politically, which surely must depend strongly on how demographics play out across cities, suburbs, towns and rural constituencies.

link here sorry.

report here.

xxp why are the same people fucking obsessed with the ~Corbyn outriders and presenting themselves as though they’re the ones in the minority? Swear to fucking God like 99% of people obsessed with Grace Blakely think that ordinary voters know or care who she is.

It’s telling that everyone accusing Seumas Milne of coordinating a WhatsApp group for leftie commentators is a member of Tom Watson’s ‘birthday’ WhatsApp group.

None of this is complicated is it?

Except the whole "why don't you own your right wingness?" but i think i understand that

what do we make of the recent set of leaked emails to the times ?

Don’t think I claimed it was complicated, it’s really ducking obvious. But some commentators seem to think it’s not 😶🙃

xp not great, a lot of these people should be sacked & procedures seem unfit for purpose.

Worth pointing out that that ILX was calling Seumas Milne a prick years before it was cool.

talking of political friendships, how the fuck can you trust some cunt who is simultaneously friends with Peter fucking cunt Mandelson + George shit eating dog Galloway?