Seizing back control: The ILX lol brexit is how we're all gonna die thread.

I’m sorry but drinking cans on trains and the NHS are the only good things about this rainy fascist island

A photo of me drinking from a can of M&S mojito on the Overground has been circulated. I'm sincerely sorry for drinking on TFL.

— Diane Abbott (@HackneyAbbott) April 19, 2019

be hugely interested in what english/british posters thought or knew about the north tbh!

Anyway, so I started asking around, you know
I started making a few enquiries
Just putting out a few feelers
Yeah? Yeah
I had a word with a couple of so called socialists on my way
And during the course of our conversation
I put to them a question, I said:
"How do you feel about Ireland?"
Ireland? Yeah, Ireland
That place, it's just across the sea
Oh yeah, I know the place
Well they said:
"We're for Sandinista, Cuba's militia
The PLO, M.P.L.A, Afghanistan and Babylon"
They went on and on and on and on
And I said: "Alright, Alright
But what do you think about Belfast?"
And what did they say?
Well, their replies were various
But they all had one thing in common
And what was that?

They all sounded the same
You mean they sounded alike ?
They all sounded the same

I didn't know anything about Lyra McKee beforehand, though it turns out she's a friend of a friend up there.

I'm regularly pretty ignorant of the north too, to the extent that I thought "This is a horrible story, but isn't 'riots and petrol bombs on the streets of Derry' also a story? Is it just what happens now and I haven't noticed before?"

I'm in the position where I think the killing* has been exploited for political purposes while still entity agreeing with the political purposes - killing a young gay Northern Irish journalist looks a lot worse than it would have the last time a journalist was killed 20 years ago, irrespective that it appears to be accidental.

Agreeing with the political purposes and with the exploitation, that is.

In other news, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/baby-citizenship-uk-status-child-immigration-home-office-parents-america-a8878421.html

London-born baby with British-resident parents denied UK status

A tale of Real England. The only unusual thing about it is that both parents are white.

xps One Of Those Things genuinely made me question just why I was wasting my time at Labour meetings where 95% of the time would be spent discussing [see Kevin's list above plus nuclear weapons] and 5% on, oh, I don't know, the NHS. Whereas when you went out canvassing people they very rarely mentioned El Salvador (but almost always mentioned the bins, some struggles are eternal).

A UK consular officer advised the baby to gurgle with an English accent to no avail.

sorry I know it is serious and horrible, but when they are doing this to what I presume are relatively wealthy white people, you feel like there might be a happy resolution for the family later. Unlike those poor people left to rot stateless and homeless in the Caribbean.

McKee’s killing front page of the Morning Star, for what it’s worth.

Yeah definitely, it's not surprising that one couple like that will get the same coverage that black families usually only get in bulk. Can't fault them for making the phonecalls to get the coverage though, and fair play to him / the journalist that the first quote is pretty much "we are getting the very best end of this".

(xp to calzino)

(xp to myself because I've just remembered it) As an aside, and ironically, given Rowlands background, when I lived in Brum in the early 80s folks DID occasionally discuss Ireland. I worked as a carer for a guy from Belfast whose best mate used to wind his friends up about losing the use of his legs in a punishment shooting (he actually fell of a roof nicking lead). Surest way to start an argument in a pub in Aston was to start talking about NI (Birmingham pub bombings still very much an issue even today much more so in the late 70s/early 80s) but at least it was talked about.

I can remember seeing Bobby Sands H-Block graffiti in Dublin as a kid and the Sinn Fein office in Kerry with Thatcher (with a noose around her neck I think) wanted dead or alive posters. And the frequent background hum of family dissing the fucking Brits and singing rebel songs when pissed up. I probably had much more than average (as a UK citizen) early exposure to this legacy of Brit imperialism in Ireland. But I still don't feel I'm Irish enough to have strong opinions on the North and only passively follow what is going on. It isn't that I don't give a shit and am massively pro United ROI obv. Probably cos I don't have much contact with Irish ppl anymore and the elderly ones in my UK family are dropping like flies - I don't really have any irl dialogue with people about the north.

sorry muddled shitpost. But I only really have the energy to despise one Tory at a time in my online interactions is probably the non tldr version.

Hatred for Tories is not strained, it drops as the gentle rain from heaven on the place beneath.

Diane Abbott as M&S canned cocktails: a thread pic.twitter.com/BYsJJnxIxP

— Louis Staples (@LouisStaples) April 20, 2019

Everyone backing Abbott on this apparently but I like the no drinking rule. Not everyone drinking on the bus is sipping an M&S cocktail, some are swaying about wetting themselves and spilling crappy cider over passengers WHO ARE JUST TRYING TO GET BACK TO THEIR FRIENDS HOUSE WITHOUT GETTING PISS ON THEM. Not that this about me obviously.

more power to the pissheads I say!

It was one of Boris's ideas, so fuck it.

https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/case-closed-red-stamp-text-white-43287144.jpg

I mean is it all possible that if somebody is going to get so drunk they piss themselves on public transport, this rule might not have registered that much with them anyway

yet another emblematic symbol of their political incompetence, a man with a bucket on his head could stop the pro-remain parties from getting a seat in the southeast for the euro elections

It is trickier for the other pro-EU UK-wide parties to worry about how this stunt may split the vote (in their second-best English region) when they are splitting the vote 3-ways anyway. pic.twitter.com/NrufBoWxFK

— Sunder Katwala (@sundersays) April 20, 2019

wrong tweet

The Buckethead stunt may make no difference at all. If he can get 50,000 votes (about 2%) he could help deny one of the pro-EU parties a seat. If unlucky with the maths, could even help the Brexit party, Ukip or Conservatives to nab a seat at the margin.

— Sunder Katwala (@sundersays) April 20, 2019

Is there a post-2008 golden era of TFL where there are never any drunk cunts annoying people on the tube, an era which Diane Abbott has now potentially destroyed in setting this example?

The answer is clear: she must be made to take that same journey again, so this time justice can be done and she can have been asked to leave the train

live webcast of Tommy Robinson making a citizen's arrest to follow.

There's a man who knows all about responsible drinking.

London-born baby with British-resident parents denied UK status

― Andrew Farrell, Saturday, April 20, 2019 1:56 AM (six hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

America sucks but birthright citizenship is good

I feel for that couple - I've been there - but the baby has a US passport. What sort of stamp do they expect it/he/she to get in it when they come back to the UK? A nod and a wave through? If you live somewhere you are supposed to have a document of some sort that shows you have the right to live there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm in favour of genuinely open borders pretty much everywhere and think documentation is an abomination fyi

Agreed

Yes, the bureaucracy around immigration has been made purposely complicated and expensive to dissuade people from viewing it as anything other than a nightmare but, at the same time, the genre of ‘middle-class white person hasn’t filled in the form correctly’ reporting is often extremely aggravating.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/ofsted-brexit-daniel-muijs-settled-status-eu-immigration-a8861401.html

Stefan Zweig on open borders before 1914 (from his memoirs, The World of Yesterday, 436): pic.twitter.com/qdbiPbyfaU

— Daniel Steinmetz-Jen (@daniel_dsj2110) April 20, 2019

I think he was mostly observing life through a monocle tbh. like as if some peasant from the subcontinent would decide on whim to move to Canada -tally ho it's the days of freedom!

Peasants kinda did "decide" to move despite the dangers and horribleness of the journey tho, right?

Maybe not from the more ruthlessly exploited ends of the Empire i guess

true, but they wouldn't have complained about filling in forms if it meant they wouldn't travel like cattle!

If there were a huge influx of Bangladeshi refugees every time there was a famine pre-1914, I think my man Zweig would have been stressing the need for "sensible borders" i.e. ones that only rich white folks can cross. I mean loads of my ancestors managed to flee a famine, but like you say at the more ruthlessly exploited parts of the empire no such luck.

I conclude that the early 20th C branch of FBPE might have been right about those ghastly Prussians but were ever so slightly smug and myopic!

zweig's perspective is very likely over-rosy -- i'm sure there were class gradients and race hierarchies at work!* -- but largescale migrations, forced, semi-forced and semi-voluntary, were common in the 19th century, within empires (inc.zweig's birth-empire the austro-hungarian empire) and between them. the brits routinely moved chunks of peoples around to suit their needs (hence the so-called "ugandan asians"). many chinese fled murderous civil upheavals (not to mention the various opium wars) to go settle in america -- tolerated bcz labour was needed to build west coastal cities and railroads. the big panic crackdowns in e.g. the US came largely in the wake of the waves of refugees that quit europe during and after WW1.

*money is one: an african labourer or indian peasant would simply never have earned enough even for passage on a package ship to america, say. and of course the border-checks met the package ships rather than the swish ocean liners. class is in fact the name for the gradient at work here, from forced at one end to freely chosen at the other. plus the nazi system of internal racial hierarchy and patrol (which zweig deplores) was very much modeled on the pioneering US version (= jim crow).

(the fact that the globe was divided into a small number of empires rather than a larger number of nations presumably surely had implication for relative ease of travel, for many)

Maybe the Spanish flu epidemic increased border controls in parts of the world more than the war - which helped to spread it?- just assuming here not read this.

"Before 1914 the earth belonged to the entire human race"

"Before 2016 perfidious Albion was actually known as fair and graceful Avalon... rah rah.. etc

ah yes life was idyllic in 1914

Yes I think you could get super-Foucauldian about this, and note that these bureaucratic exclusions arose alongside intelligence tests for the army and various inoculation projects: populations defined by medical and scientific (and pseudo-scientific) mapping and decision-making. But the war was a primary cause – as a vector for disease, as a demand for more0or-less instant armies, as a generator of politics with little to use.

i mean little to lose (i am reading abt lemmy)

I was just reading about how Roy Hodgson is a fan of Stefan Zweig, in fact he's a very well read man who should be invited to the next ILB FAP.

If there were a huge influx of Bangladeshi refugees every time there was a famine pre-1914, I think my man Zweig would have been stressing the need for "sensible borders" i.e. ones that only rich white folks can cross.

I won't deny that Zweig's vision was privileged and naive but I don't think there's really anything in his work to support this conclusion, tbf.

post-ww1 border controls passports primary functiom had shifted from a useful way of avoiding harassment while travelling to being a sweet bit of state control. re the empire/nation distinction afaik everyone in the british empire had the same passport til post ww2

no one was using passports for rail travel in zweig's era, idk abt sea voyages tho

One of the postwar immigration acts had stripped Falkland islanders of their uk citizenship. Which became an embarrassment for thatcher.

Can't remember which one and am on the phone.

It was the 1981 British Nationality Act lol. Obviously such hypocrisy meant that the Thatcher government was owned by its own logic, was unable to extract any political capital from the falklands war and was soundly defeated at the subsequent general election