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

lol, the idea of a Farage surge on the doorsteps of Islington North and Brexit Party polling at 21.3% is so ridic it isn't worth ....

normal

Socialist siesta pic.twitter.com/zUf95Cxg6U

— MoS_Politics (@MoS_Politics) June 29, 2019

everything good is bad

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D-OZbMnX4AcX8pI.jpg

the sinister 4 M's(not including McDonell!) and the "pliant" heir apparent to the dangerous cat-napping marxist.

god i wish i was driven home for a nap every afternoon

Quietly comforting that the ruling class are clearly shitting themselves.

xp same, sick of taking the bus

I just want to thank you all for subsidising my daily afternoon naps by paying for my ill gotten benefits :p

TACTICS: The Mail reports on a bloke at #Glastonbury wearing a ‘I ❤️ Brexit’ t-shirt not getting the abuse he expected. The bloke “wished to stay anonymous” according to the article.

Except. It’s the Mail journo himself. The same journo who wrote the article. pic.twitter.com/RJuTXXOfin

— The DM Reporter (@DMReporter) June 30, 2019

lol, mail reporter caught out trying to make a bs story about himself as the "anonymous" "I love brexit" shirt wearer at Glastonbury.

Should’ve gone with Maoist and then they could have made that Gang of Four reference actually work.

"Except. It’s the Mail journo himself. The same journo who wrote the article."

can't help reading this line in a Donald Trump voice tbh!

truly the spirit of gonzo journalism lives on at the daily mail

Bloke at Glastonbury wearing a "Did You Spill My Pint?" T-shirt fails to get into fight

More like, "Did you spill my Pimms?" amiritecomrades?

https://newsocialist.org.uk/editorial-chris-williamson/

The overall picture is not of a great hero of socialism, but rather somebody who has found an audience and is milking it. We should not mistake his hammed-up invective for actual conviction or genuine commitment to the movement which he seems determined to undermine through repeated antisemitic behaviour.

this is good and correct unlike the editorial in that shitrag the Morning Star t'other day.

That is a good article - I have to say my knee jerked a bit at that quoted part, as it, like Comrade Alphabet yesterday, seemed to suggest that if he was a better leftist, this would be fine. But the rest of the article is very clear that's not the case.

Also I didn't know (until I heard from the MoS) that Stalinist Control means "actually it's other people really in charge!"

"like Comrade Alphabet yesterday, seemed to suggest that if he was a better leftist, this would be fine."

When did I suggest anything about CW?

You're absolutely right, that was lazy and stupid of me and I should have checked my memory before shooting my mouth off, my apologies - I was referring to the libcomorg tweet you reposted yesterday, but you were only reporting to engage with the part of it unrelated to what I was talking about.

On a quiet day..

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/27/brexit-civil-servant-in-charge-of-no-deal-planning-quits

Lol more than two days ago but I saw it on the main page, hanging there

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/27/hunts-pledge-to-reduce-corporation-tax-will-cost-13bn-a-year

It's a good indicator of how little corporation tax actually gets paid that cutting it from 19% to 12.5% would only cost £13bn.

they'll be offering free milk for millionaires next.

the Mail thing from yesterday is stupid, in the text of the article it refers to the shirt-wearer as "our reporter" and the "Londoner who wished to remain anonymous" was someone who talked to him and is quoted in the article. I love a good "gotcha" but that just isn't one.

Are you sure this wasn't an edited version you read after the fool had the shit ripped out of him?

lmao at this incredibly tepid endorsement of jeremy cunt

Dan Dalton, who was a Conservative MEP until he lost his seat in the Euro elections this spring, has said that he is now backing Jeremy Hunt having originally started as a Boris Johnson supporter. He said:

All Conservatives agree that we have to deliver Brexit before the next general election, but to actually do it will need considerable skill, compromise and flexibility.

Of the two candidates in front of us, I have gradually come to the conclusion that Jeremy Hunt is the one more likely to do that. I do not say that lightly. I started this campaign as a Boris Johnson supporter, and he has many qualities, but having worked in Brussels throughout the Brexit negotiations, I just do not see how his strategy can work, whereas Jeremy Hunt’s might.

And he wonders why he lost his seat.

more free money (£6bn) pledged for our fishing + farming industries when business experts are saying manufacturing will be fucked much harder by a no-deal brexit.

Yes, but those were the stupid cunts who voted Brexit so must keep them sweet.

Hunt's campaign is really pitching hard for tepid, unenthusiastic support, cf the official campaign slogan "has to be Hunt"

"he has many qualities"

to be fair we can all agree on this

Many more than most!

quantity of quality over quality

is that quantity over quality squared or does it just end up as quantity

help

an abundance of cuntity

plenty of grit - after dodging a couple of bullets from point blank range, well more like the pathetic softballs out of May's toy blowgun. scratch that.

I'd be curious to hear any takes on this quietly radical paper from Keir Milburn & Bertie Russell which starts off being abt the false economy and disastrous structure of Public-Private Partnerships (i.e. Public Finance Initiatives) and outlining a model of Public-Common Partnerships as an alternative to nationalisation, which is really abt the much wider 'socialisation of the economy', self-governance and 'definancialisation of essential services'.

Featuring: Seven Sisters market! Preston Council! & the dream of a Greater Manchester energy company!

https://common-wealth.co.uk/Public-common-partnerships.html

mr seumas milne, necromancer

John Mann tells the Parliamentary Labour Party that he believes dead people are being kept on the books to inflate membership numbers.

— Kevin Schofield (@PolhomeEditor) July 1, 2019

And here I thought he was a friend of Frank Field's too.

(A friend of Frank Field - there's a euphemism if ever I've seen one)

Take away all the dead on the Tory books and, well...

xxp lol I was just coming here to link that one myself...

I like how organisational incompetence just never crosses the minds of Labour conspiracists? Like, there’s no possibility that they need to clean up the lists and that they’re no better at this than any other organisation? No, instead it’s THE DEAD HAVE RISEN AND ARE JOINING LABOUR

Better dead AND red.

Grieve's attempt to block No-Deal via government defunding has been stopped by Bercow just not selecting it as an amendment.

LOL Jo Swinson and Ed Davey both prepared to 'push the nuclear button'. I don't think there's much doubt that the Lib Dems are seriously going after Tory votes.

Sorry, Sir Ed Davey.

orange bookers gonna orange book

jo swinson - she has an accent not dissimilar to that of fraser nelson

she has big bearsden energy

https://common-wealth.co.uk/Public-common-partnerships.html

― ogmor, Monday, 1 July 2019 15:32 (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i need to read it a bit more closely. the first part is a handy look at the follies of PFIs. I'm less clear about PCPs as a solution. The point about 'value for money' being driven by negative externalities is an important one. It seems feasible on a local level, with a shared community of interest (where it seems to be working in Preston) and where there's a good possibility of making a surplus (some of the energy examples cited). In the former case, it's helping a community starved of cash. In the latter, it's a standard co-operative business model afaict.

(I should say, my preferred model would be to see more regional financial and political devolution. local politics corrupt in many places of course, but equally a government putting in funding for potholes, or deciding whether trees can be cut down or not, is a) absurd b) leads to pork barrel politics and putting more power back into local politics may have an energising effect on local democracy. The nationalising turn by Labour is the thing I favour least about currently policy.)

The other crucial thing, pointed out here, and regularly missed, is that investment in public assets should be on the asset side, rather than the liability side. That latter alone would significantly change the investment logic for public infrastructure. (I'm surprised this isn't the case tbh - it seems like basic accounting?)

The two suggestions alone would require a sympathetic government. And although we have to assume a sympathetic government for anything like what the report suggests to be feasible on any sort of scale, it seems it would require a long term single-minded purpose to effect many of its most basic requirements.

I'm not at all clear from the report how the idea can reach any sort of scale outside of that requirement for a sympathetic government, too. One of the things that occurred to me when I first read the Chakrabortty piece on Preston was that while it was a welcome and positive story, things like improved transport links between somewhere like Preston and Manchester - increasing the ability of people locally to work in the nearest, biggest city, would be where you would want local investment to go, and that this, while welcome, was not a replacement for that.

For me the key questions are

• governance
• the raising of capital
• the requirement for surplus
• the scope

With the recommendation that surplus money gets invested in a general PCP pot, I'm not clear what the incentives are to invest in shares in a project. If the project is for you or represents your interests, then it may make sense to invest in order to accomplish the required end (a market, a road). It seems to me that this is where Preston has been succeeding (though it should be noted that an original enabling capital investment came from a George Soros fund).

Report points out that there will be a natural desire to reinvest capital in the supply and distribution chain verticals around them, but that this needs to be balanced out against "the wider project of socialist transformation". Again, there's a sort of handwave at 'negotiation' – negotiation is hard enough when there's a single public service actor, or a PFI RFP, I dread to think what it would be like in this situation. It seems unfeasible.

the requirement to generate a surplus makes it difficult to imagine many important infra and services projects taking place under this approach. report recommends starting with projects likely to generate a surplus energy, water, housing, and transport infrastructure - in order to kickstart what looks to me a rather optimistic image of cross-funding through surplus income. (that diagram seems wild to me - and more generally in the piece things get a bit vague, and the language gets quite bad, around the most optimistic scenarios.

I just had a quick look at the 2012 PFI info, and it will surprise no one to learn that the biggest spenders were health, education, transport and the MoD - oh and a massive wodge of PFIs in Scotland. of those it seems to be that only transport and defence have the potential to generate a surplus. but i feel I must be missing a central mechanism of how this is supposed to work. Clearly health and education are by far two of the biggest consumers of public finance. I can't see how this model would have been a replacement for standard state financing in those critical areas.

Interesting to see from that same report that 'Local Government and Communities' were also fairly big on PFIs - those projects seem to me to be ideal candidates for this model.

That leads to my final point on scope, which I've mentioned before, which is that this seems to work under some conditions, but I'm not convinced about the ability for it to become a model capable of delivering essential social goods. I would like to understand more on this point:

create commons where the conditions for a commons exist, but if not introduce democratic mechanisms to produce the conditions for commoning further down the line.

What are the conditions for commons? I may have missed it (i'm quite tired), but it would be good to see them listed.

As I say, feels feasible on a local level (though even there how you define a shared commons seems to me quite fraught outside the two examples of a limited set of shared interests - traders - or a sound business model - eg energy), but beyond that, I struggle a bit.

I feel I may be being unimaginative! as i say, I'd just like to see more state and local funding on the current models, and the investment in the public realm to be seen as the creation of assets, as well as having a positive social and financial impact on society. (ie, a good health service reduces the number of days lost through illness, good social care reduces pressure on police and hospitals, good education increases GDP etc etc ad infinitum, fuck the tories etc).

should add that as is probably fairly obvious i’m no sort of expert in public realm financing at all. in fact said realm would probably be ruins within a decade if i was let near public finance.

idk id read the fizzles annual govt spending almanac tbh