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

people still going on about the eaton/scruton thing. I’m old enough to remember when george eaton was a melt with one source who used to chat shit off the back of every PLP meeting

careful, Scotland, what you wish for, as John Harris is promising to be "back there in a flash" should there be another independence referendum https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/28/england-mess-scotland-splitting-away

surprised to find out he owned England tbh

xxp I remember when he tweeted that he had proof Corbyn voted Leave!

Like most Scottish ppl I didn't realise Scotland was such a liberal utopia until mr Harris told me it was. If that cunt can drive from London to Scotland in "a few hours" he has a future in Formula 1.

I'll pay him to ferry me back and forth, saves paying an arm and her leg to sit on a train for 5 hours or a coach for 10+ hours.

what does a country "pushing itself into the future" actually mean in real terms outside the world of frothy bullshit speak? When opinion pieces sound like politicians - it's a total fail.

But he's probably learning from the master of that genre - Polly Toynbee!

Can someone please help me with the etymology of 'melt'?

I'm sure someone else will give you a much more comprehensive guide, but for me it encompasses the ppl who are all but tories in party membership in uk politics, not tories in disguise tho cos that mean actually having a disguise!

I’d say: liberal people who clamour to object to anything to the left of them (usually people and sometimes policies) but who never object to anything to the right, see also: white people who cry when accused of racist speech or actions.

Nah it exists outside of political Twitter as well, although one of the most tiresome things about what passes for modern political discourse is when people complain that being called a melt is unreasonably abusive. It's about as offensive as calling someone a wally or a plonker.

xxxp https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/slugs-melts-inside-language-culture-corbynite-left/ I think a lot of the terms are also widely used on football twitter (apart from slug which is from the Office)

xp quite right, esp when those calling it “abuse” are often guilty of far worse themselves

xxp These are definitions! I don't know what the etymology is (or the start of the current usage in political twitter (etc)) but I assumed it was just an evolution of calling someone "soft".

yeah assume so, probably a reference to the soft left in this context/labour version of “wets”. From the article:

Zarb-Cousin describes a melt as “someone who parrots rhetorical devices”, while Frayne-Reid considers it to be “somebody who displays political cowardice”.

It refers to the soft left, especially in its willingness to compromise to get ahead in a mainstream media career.

“Melt has a lot more weakness to it than slug,” says Morris. “It gives in under pressure.”

i presumed it was to do with salt causing slugs to melt but can't find any evidence to back this up

it's unclear to me/ambiguous whether a melt is defined by having melted to mush themselves or melting the brains of whoever beholds them, medusa-style

it feels very drowned in sound

along with calling someone a cockbastard thundercunt bellsniff

I remember in the late 1990s one of the men's magazines tried to make "Soft Lad" a thing, proving that none of the editorial team had spent much time in the north west.

As far as i'm aware "melt" is reasonably long-standing cockney slang based on uselessness under pressure

Probably popularized more by stuff like Love Island than politics nerds on Twitter i'd've thought

melt
an absoulute complete fucking idiot
he/she is a melt

your a meltboy

shutup you melt
#melt#meltboy#idiot#prick#wanker
by annoymus November 30, 2007

So yes let's stop pretending that Matt Zarb-Cousin or Aaron Bastani invented the word or that it has anything to do with political centrism really.

this is all perfectly normal.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/queens-speech-delay-brexit-extension-theresa-may-parliament-commons-a8891006.html

The Queen’s Speech will be delayed until Brexit is delivered, Theresa May has said – despite no sign of a breakthrough at Westminster to end the stalemate.

The prime minister’s spokesman said a new session of parliament – due to get underway in June – would not begin until the withdrawal agreement had been ratified.

“That is part of the current Queen’s Speech cycle and we need to finish that work,” he said, admitting there was “no specific date” for a new session.

I mean they skipped the Queen’s speech last year, might as well skip it this year cos there’s no new legislative agenda lol

xxp

I don't have anything to do with either of those bell-ends, but am quite happy with that interpretation of melt. Because it gives me a shorter catch-all insult for slimey, corrupt, crypto-tory cunts.

it's jude in london's usage that made it mean centrists to me.

The term melt was certainly not invented recently and I don't think anyone claims it. I came across because it was in circulation by a couple of left-wing twitter people (who are based in the North East iirc, and aren't very active now) and re-deployed it to troll centrist Labour people. That worked great (which is how I saw it because I love watching people I hate being in distress online ofc), and more people in left-twitter took it up (where Z-C comes in to add some Essex boy bullshit or whatever). Then I think a journo wrote it up (Dawn Forster perhaps).

The country is still burning so it doesn't make a massive difference to anything.

it's a good one because it has that duality of inferring that they are idiots as per urban dictionary definitions and also untrustworthy, like some agent from the opposition "melting into the crowd" as to seem innocuous.

fwiw the first time I saw the word melt used in a political context was "that melt Corbyn" by one of those centrist ex-Melody Maker journalists that one of our esteemed ILX colleagues is friends with

so is brexit just gone away again until a week before the next deadline?

Never used 'melt', wasn't really aware of it, but I wouldn't be if it's some twitter-driven shite.

seriously

I keep reading these "If Labour doesn't go hard 2nd ref now they will lose all their members" tweets by people who never wanted Labour to have all their new members anyway, and did all they could to expel/suspend/resist the membership surge.

— Solomon Hughes (@SolHughesWriter) April 29, 2019

The Guardian keeps reporting on "warnings" that Labour leadership "must back" ref2 or... or else? I guess it keeps getting clicks

Yeah the guardian runs a variation of this exact piece every week, imagine how much we might know about <insert any leftist political topic here> if they hadn’t just been lazy fuckers getting John Harris & Nick Cohen to do the same piece every so often.

Also as Tom Watson is very blue labourish imo I could easily see him going both ways on this & briefing each side (how out of character, I know)

https://www.thesocialreview.co.uk/2019/04/26/stephen-bush-interview-part-1/

The first two parts of this interview with Stephen Bush have been really good imo, novel to see anyone nominally of what will have been called the "centre left" attempting any kind of actual self-reflection about their current position

Stephen Bush is very good and he’s a Blairite. I find him very fair in his assessments usually.

Meanwhile, remember the local elections? And CH? Here’s an absolute comment shitshow that’s straight out of comrade alphabet’s “love to see my enemies upset” mood from earlier.
https://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2019/04/vote-conservative-in-next-weeks-local-elections.html

Gotta say no voter feels more vindictive than a Tory scorned

The comments are incredible. People saying that if they don’t vote Tory then the council could be lost to Labour or Lib Dems and other people replying to say that they don’t care, they still want their protest vote in case the Euro elections are cancelled(!)

It’s even funnier if you imagine them having an average age of 84.

even even funnier if you imagine some of them having aneurysms as they type and desperately trying to rattle out the last few words

thanks tom, love u too boo

Another tweet endorsed by @tom_watson - calling his own party's members "a moronic cult" and "racist misogynists". pic.twitter.com/gwUhqrzepE

— Ronan Burtenshaw (@ronanburtenshaw) April 29, 2019

Stephen Bush is very good and he’s a Blairite. I find him very fair in his assessments usually.

Yeah he's the dispassionate, rational centrist observer all of those other dimbulbs wrongly imagine themselves to be, I probably don't share many of his political instincts but rarely feel he's being intellectually dishonest

he's normally very good at concealing his biases and talking about politicians in terms of how effectively they're behaving relative to their own objectives, without giving much sense of what he himself thinks is right or desirable. Unlike e.g his colleague the maverick communist agitator 'George Eaton'

not trying to diminish S Bush cos I like him and his wry sense of humour and sometimes quite otm observations, but ffs all ppl outside of the murdoch/tory press who are paid to comment on uk politics should be as impartial and competent as him as a minimum standard, he shouldn't some "he's pretty good at this political commentary game is this one" outlier.

I notice the other day's the Grauns joke book section featured that garbage Corbyn biography on the recommended reading list. The one that was heavily mocked by all and sundry, but especially taken to pieces by S Bush.

In case you’re wondering what the deputy leader was listening to as he faved all those tweets:
https://www.last.fm/user/baggymp

High Flying Birds? Gtfo.

There's a bit in that Stephen Bush interview where he (measuredly i guess) makes the case for politicians as technocratic specialists in their field. But fuck whatever specialism Watson and his ilk represent, it represents the precise point where the deficit between the political class and actual democracy is sharpest.

Also I wondered why IDS was trending & then saw why lol

They had a WTO expert on and he reviewed Iain Duncan Smith's brexit plan but I don't understand sign language, is this goodpic.twitter.com/W72j1pJ1dv

— James Felton (@JimMFelton) April 29, 2019