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

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

"she has an accent not dissimilar to that of fraser nelson"

this current iteration of the libdems and every cowardly, self-interested decision they've taken in the last decade, and every fucking clown of a leader they've had. Just makes me hanker for the good ol' tories tbh.

tbf she's just got a Miln-gavvy Douglas Academy head girl accent whereas Frahzoor Neheeilsoon has an accent that he seems to have constructed from various sources in some Victor Von Frankenstein science-gone-too-far fashion.

Laura Pidcock was quite impressive on Today just now, not quite DESTROYED nick robinson but she had the oily creep in her pocket.

i was listening and was as outraged/amused as her when Nick Robinson dismissed the story and tried to get onto his preferred subject

yeah let's talk about the polls instead, with the proverbially 10 pts behind Labour Party behind blah blah.. never mind the important subject of the civil service being fucking tory activists.

almost have to admire his chutzpah

wtf is wrong with these people

Brexit Party MEPs turn their backs in European Anthem at opening session of European Parliament pic.twitter.com/M1J5rdzb8e

— James Mates (@jamesmatesitv) July 2, 2019

Woah, wut?

hell yeah, that’ll show the perfidious johnny eu the error of his ways

not psycho xenophobes at all

Can anyone enlighten me how many times this has happened in parliaments? The only time I have heard of this happening before was the Nazi’s in the 1930s.

this is going to help the negotiations for the deal tremendously.

this is going to help the negotiations for the deal tremendously.

twice, even

shitting my pants at the european parliament to own the damn eurocrats

Here are Nazi party members at the Berlin Reichstag doing exactly the same thing, in exactly the same way, for exactly the same reasons. pic.twitter.com/LzzvcaKNcQ

— Glyn Arthur (@GPEArthur) July 2, 2019

At least the nazi's made good use of their time turned around by reading the daily Zeitung, it seems.

xps was hoping for a fizzles post! god save our inexpert forum. this is the first time I've seen something like this articulated and as a tantalising/frustrating sketch is largely pointing towards good further questions. this model recognises the importance of stakeholders, which seems to be coming up a lot lately (even in nassim taleb's new book lol) and it's good to see something more seriously long-term and significant than cranking up the dial or putting a few worker's representatives on company boards laid out. the question of how/who determines how a common association and joint enterprise are comprised would be critical (who governs the governors), and yes it seems clear it would be v obvious in some cases and not at all in others (perhaps this is part of what is meant in talking about the necessary conditions for commoning? PCPs beget further PCPs?).

part of what's so encouraging to me about this model is that it steals the tory trick of making part of the economy more insulated from central govt but instead of handing it to the private sector devolves governance locally. it can exist within/despite a tory govt and could help make the local economy more resistant to future central govt cuts. if we are serious about investment factoring in wider social impact, well-being &c. then the issue of stakeholders is crucial or you are relying on the caprices of the govt/national electorate/media. this is about addressing the undemocratic nature of the current model.

if PCPs were widespread you can see how they would be interconnected, how this would create a different economic culture and how they might help sustain each other, but it's unclear how you'd get to that point even with a labour govt pushing for it. investment is the main problem (as it is under the current model!) and I'm not sure how much can be generated locally, or how this would affect redistribution across regions. devolution without some mechanism for investing in a way that addresses these inequalities can end up with a situation like wales.

I am barely awake and am resolved that all political matters are to be resolved by a committee of sleep-deprived ilxors