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

His cut-outs have been hopeless in engaging with the media he has been avoiding, too.

Liz Truss was on tv over the weekend and was pressed on the fact that there wouldn’t be an implementation period if there was no deal to implement - her response was ‘well, the EU would say that, wouldn’t they?’.

Whats happening with this? I've not really been following it? Is he looking for an out? I've got a sinking feeling Gove is somehow going to end up PM

I don't think Johnson has a coherent thought in his head, which means we're heading for chaos that will make the May years look like a picture of order, and will probably end in some sort of emergency government or something. If he does have a coherent thought, he must have realised that a deal by Oct 31 is an utter impossibility and therefore no deal is his only option, given that he's painted himself into a corner on leaving by then. That will require an election, a populist turn and an agreement with Farage not to split the brexit vote.

lol, only a week or so ago there was some nonsense in the Graun about how people were shocked at how well organised and disciplined the boris campaign machine was, just because they were successfully hiding the prick away. The fact that they are confident to send Liz Truss out to talk for him confirms they have not a clue what they are doing.

His stans are all fucking idiots, so what are they to do?

he said he guaranteed a 31/10 departure in the laura K thing. may god have mercy on our souls

cabinet of all the talents and assorted dangers incoming

Bourdieu strikes again:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jun/25/britains-top-jobs-still-in-hands-of-private-school-elite-study-finds

scottish labour have increasingly been talking about nationalising private schools and incorporating them into the NES. hope UK labour makes this policy

I found it to be a useful addendum to that excellent piece about the reigning Tory elite's Oxford years in the late 80s. Oligomeritocracy (so to speak) does indeed appear to be an even bigger problem in the UK than it is in France or the US, where it's already a fucking blight.

xxp proof that ilx is elite

just straight oligarchy in many cases - there are lots of well connected dim bulbs

Wealth, strength of network, narcissism and habitus are what it comes down to 90% of the time.

It's an interestingly 21st century Graun list of top jobs - i don't see much value in comparing actors or pop stars with senior civil servants or judges tbh

Beyond the self-evident fact that the class system is as functional as ever is the truth that what really shapes the experience of the wealthy is the absence of precarity. Sure they have disproportionate representation in these top jobs but more importantly maybe they're never exposed to the stress and struggle of getting into any kind of employment. It's inevitable that they must be accommodated in whatever position they fancy, and when that's done the leftover places can be fought over by the rest of us.

At this point in life I should add that there's a majority who aren't even really "the rest of us", a broad class that can't even get into the meritocracy sweepstakes.

That's the largely unchanged truth of all the progress in social democracy and sensible grown-up politics we've been sold since universal adult suffrage was grudgingly kind of instituted. That's the rotten core of what politics in the UK is.

booming post

i don't see much value in comparing actors or pop stars with senior civil servants or judges tbh

i think there's definitely value in showing that actors and pop stars are increasingly drawn from the ranks of the wealthy and powerful, because it underlines that they're becoming the only sections of society able to stave off the dangers of precarity for long enough to hone their craft - the social safety net that used to allow artists to fuck about for years before they strike creative gold basically no longer exists

Yeah i should have said that that stuff belongs to a separate article - it's well-known, we've talked about it on here plenty of times, i just find it silly to lump them in with the visible mechanisms of power

the social safety net that used to allow artists to fuck about for years before they strike creative gold basically no longer exists

An evanescent historical fluke if ever there was one.

I was reading about one ilm fave musician who is practically from landed gentry and who had own recording studio in her house, a far cry from the proleys pissing about on the dole days!

I think it's clear that in the UK at least the welfare state and social mobility are largely evanescent historical flukes. Could do with a few more politicians acknowledging this.

Centrism in particular seems predicated on a Whiggish idea of history that makes it (willfully imo but it doesn't matter) blind to the frailty of every step towards economic or social democracy, so blind that they apparently don't notice when governments including their own push those steps back or find new ways to negate them.

insofaras various social democratic achievements can be registered post-war, i think all of them are as much a consequence of bismarckian investment in the resilience of empire -- our soldiery must be fit and our engineers must be educated! -- than some actual big fabian push in the 20s :(

which suggests that post-war social mobility and the space to fuck abt are basically epiphenomena of the removal of empire (in the same way as london being insanely the wrong size for a small north atlantic island): health and education were part of the admin machinery, except then the machine was shaken to pieces

(more things my book is sadly and secretly about tbh)

they're never exposed to the stress and struggle of getting into any kind of employment

Just to further corroborate this (which is as otm as it gets), as part of my mercifully brief stint as a visitor to Oxford, I've met two archetypes: the unquestioningly entitled, who are legion and neurologically incapable of envisioning a less than stellar future, and the token minorities, who are so proud of flying close to the sun that they're willing to overlook the bigger picture.

mark is right, we must rebuild our glorious empire

yeah mark i agree with your take. how that relates to "what politicians think they believe" is probably an interesting line of investigation

(also i swear i will read your book eventually :D)

also pom yeah that has also been my limited experience, otm

some of these melts should read the last couple of chapters of D Edgerton's Rise and Fall of the British Nation where he goes into a strop and can't disguise his contempt for Blairism/Thatcherism. But that is presuming they are the type of people who are open minded about their own take history/political events or even willing to have them challenged.

the centrists seem to think Blairism was morally superior to Thatcherism cos of tax-credits and whatever other worthless window dressing legacy shit that has been easily stripped away by a decade of austerity which arguably would been pretty much as bad even if Cameron had lost in 2010.

it finishes with a montage of people celebrating Thatcher's death in de-industrialised northern communities while Blair is filling his boots with ill gotten money from murderous dictators.

dunty declared Dr Liam Fox "one of the adults in the room" yesterday. he is beyond a joke.

"Things have deteriorated so far that Liam Fox is now one of the adults" was the line, in fairness.

― Andrew Farrell, Monday, 24 June 2019 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's still nonsense tho

― mark s, Monday, 24 June 2019 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This was fantastic, well done to all involved.

arguably doing a lot of work there!

Great posts, all. I just so happened to read Sean O'Hagan's 2014 piece which brushed on the same thing (w/r/t pop stars), about the working class being pushed out of the pop and acting scene by the rich and privileged:

Pop culture has, of course, always had its share of often-credible posh performers, from the likes of Pink Floyd and Nick Drake in the late 60s to Radiohead in the 90s. But the dramatic increase suggests something has gone seriously askew. Pop music has always been a prescient form – the Beatles signalled the coming of Harold Wilson's Labour government, punk the rise of Thatcherism, and Britpop soundtracked the birth of New Labour – so it seems appropriate that the rise of posh in pop culture should chime with the ascendancy of the current Tory leadership. (David Cameron is an Old Etonian, George Osborne was educated at St Paul's. Both were members of Oxford's infamous Bullingdon Club alongside Eton-educated London mayor Boris Johnson.)

Choice quote but read the whole thing, it's good: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/jan/26/working-class-hero-posh-britain-public-school

some fun stats from polly toynbee's column in today's graun

Here’s Prof Tim Bale’s latest analysis for the BBC of the Tory membership voting on behalf of us 65 million: 70% are men, 97% white, 60% southern, 86% higher social classes, average age 57, a high proportion no longer in work. Six out of 10 want the death penalty back.

lol we're all gonna die

Staying true to democracy's Athenian roots.

I'm surprised the proportion of men is so high and the average age so (relatively) low. The only Conservative assoc meetings i've ever seen IRL have been massively dominated by women in their 70s-80s.

If only we had a progressive government with a big majority which would be able to enact legislation to make Parliament more democratically accountable/functional. Maybe if such a government had 10 years or more in power they could get round to sorting this

SV i guess the membership doesn't necessarily reflect who bothers to turn up to the meetings

That’s definitely true!

have you been a member long yourself a mhic

i was playing cricket in SV's neck of the woods on Sunday and it definitely seemed like the kind of place where the tory membership abide in packs

Haven't read it but this looks good:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jun/25/the-new-left-economics-how-a-network-of-thinkers-is-transforming-capitalism

However often McDonnell says in interviews that he wants to see a democratic economy, the adjective most frequently applied to him is still “Marxist”. “The new economic thinking is almost like a frequency that can’t be heard,” says Guinan.

Multiple xps - SV’s mother is a Tory but I’m not excusing any of the rest of his behaviour

I read in the CH comments (ofcccc) that Tory women members were valuable because they would turn up and do the organisational (ie women’s) things associations need to run successfully, and that there were proportionately fewer since membership declines. How far this goes beyond some old fella pissing and moaning about having to licj the envelopes himself now, I have no idea, but there were definitely other commenters who’d noticed fewer women about too.

big hitter vs mcshitter pic.twitter.com/pgIodRkQIO

— joe (@cillanoir) June 25, 2019

yes the old tory institutions ran on scary rural tory ladies but the supply has been dwindling for many years (their granddaughters are now all pop stars)

her father, Sir Charles William Somerset Marling, the 5th Marling Baronet, ran a recording studio, introduced her to folk music and shaped her musical taste, an experience that Marling later described as, "a bit of a blessing and a bit of a curse. ...

it can be a curse having everything handed to you in some senses ... but extremely low sympathy rating for that curse!

tear her for her bad verses

I refuse to listen her after Marcello dismissed her as a "tory twat"!

but hypocritically I listen to many fascists from history still .. but I'm probably probably bad.

at typing for a start!

but my hatred for tories was so glowing white at the time she emerged .. I refuse to listen to her.

boy's clubs, you simply love to see them!

Asked by one member what he would do with the NHS, Johnson told the crowd it was a “crowning glory” of the UK but was “not getting the kind of support and indeed the kind of changes and management that it needs”, suggesting he as prime minister would aim to undertake an overhaul of the health service.
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He said Simon Stevens, the NHS chief executive, had once helped him get elected president of the Oxford Union as a student, and together they would “sort things out”.

In remarks that may alarm those opposed to another reorganisation of the NHS, Johnson said: “It needs more money but where you are absolutely right is that it needs reform.”

woke matt* welcome to the #resistance

pic.twitter.com/fVN99w2nM3

— Matt Cartoons (@MattCartoonist) June 25, 2019

*(every-face-a-willy matt is already in the #resistance)