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

Just caught up on this morning - what the fuck is the pink curly bracket in that logo about?

going back to ed's post from last night (re credible theories who leaked the darroch emails):

ABC had someone on saying this is some score setting by people who see the foreign service as anti-Brexit and trying to sabotage the glorious leap into neo-feudalism.

Conjecture is that this is either the start of a purge of the foreign service (because surely everyone in the foreign service has something they’ve written in a cable they’d rather not be published); or this is a warning shot to get in line with the DePfeffel doctrine or lose your pension.

― American Fear of Pranksterism (Ed), Tuesday, July 9, 2019 11:21 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

as ed has gone with a very stevolende formulation, i'm not sure who is conjecturing what by who (yes the second suggestion is bojo but who's the first)? i also read a tweet (by "anti brexit alien") saying that it was either done by an ENEMY POWER (the cui bono there makes sense, bcz that's who wants to fuck up yr diplomatic effectiveness) or a GOVERNMENT MOLE, which i'm still enjoying unravelling ("oh noes the govt has planted agents in the foreign office")

anyway darroch himself was retiring in like a week so it can't be about him and whoever the PM is they do actually have uncomplicated power to recall and replace ambassadors. this may or may not make things harder for johnson -- WHO THE FUCK KNOWS -- but it seems like a needlessly random flex

the radical right has the PROUD BOYS the radical centre has the CURLY BOIS

100,000 senile racist cunts will still vote have already voted for him

Which is my favourite of the bad scenarios - Boris comes to power already hated by a significant chunk of the party.

Apparently Mark Sedwill was favourite to take over from Darroch, the NYT suspects that it was a shot across his bows - cui bono might be Nigel Farage who'd quite like the job normally, but er he surely has other things to worry about?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/07/world/europe/uk-ambassador-kim-darroch.html

xxxp think this is deeply unfair, post doesn’t read like he’s just emerged from a month-long coma

Since the leak was hand-delivered to Isobel Oakeshott I’m tempted to believe it was a Boris fan with something to gain or one of any number of public-facing arseholes with Belizean passports. Like, duhhhh.

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fusatthebiglead.files.wordpress.com%2F2012%2F08%2Fborisdance.gif&f=1

can we just talk a little about how the smile slowly disappears off the face of the woman to Johnson's left

tag yourself, i'm the stone-faced guy with crossed arms who pops out from behind boris

I'm the deadly assassin sent by Xi Jingpin, disguised as mrs Cameron on the right.

president xi i'm begging u please send more effective assassins

how the smile slowly disappears off the face of the woman to Johnson's left

his eventually to be ex wife no less

can we just talk a little about how the smile slowly disappears off the face of the woman to Johnson's left

aka his wife, though he's probably forgotten her name by now too.

(xp)

Tbf i can't remember johnson's wife's name either

Do you have four children with her?

Not as far as i know fnarr fnarr

so this panorama doc eh?

so this panorama doc eh?

Spoken like a true Canuck.

pretty incendiary stuff in labour’s rebuttal

BBC press release claims Jennie Formby intervened in Jackie Walker’s case, but it doesn’t say how they intervened... turns out according to Labour Formby actually asked for the process against Walker to be sped up... not mentioned by Panorama...
__________

Labour says the BBC edited a Milne email to delete a line showing he was referring to Jewish members accused of AS

“But if we're more than very occasionally using disciplinary action against Jewish members for anti-Semitism...” doesn’t appear in BBC press release

_______
Panorama claims Seumas Milne directly demanded to be involved in the disciplinary process. Full emails released by Labour appear to show the former employee who leaked the emails actually asked Loto for their view first... this was not mentioned by the BBC in its press release
______
In other emails released by Labour tonight it emerges that it was former staffer Sam Matthews who actually wrote “I don't think it's a particularly strong case” re alleged anti-Semitism case... Labour says the BBC is reporting the “opposite” of the truth in this case

abolish the BBC

I think we knew most of that stuff anyway - doesn’t sound like there’s anything new in this that hasn’t already come out in gabriel pogrund’s (similarly selective) reporting?

Someone leaked a WhatsApp post purportedly with HQ advice on lines to take and the melts are going apeshit, as if political parties don’t regularly coordinate a pushback on coverage they disagree with. Bet Alistair Campbell’s ones were pretty martial in comparison.

generally horrifies folk to see how the sausage is made tho, unfortunately.

regardless of the substance of allegations - and the partiality and selective nature of reporting - this is going to stick with many people.

the whole "when you become the story" adage and all that wrt spin doctors

that ‘outrider’ leak has very big didn’t happen energy

Milne truthers are fucking obsessed with the outriders, who are like 5/6 people compared with the rest of the fucking media.

it’s only ever people who hate them who refer to them as ‘outriders’ too - big red flag to me that it’s madey uppy

Interesting to see how this plays out, and I haven't seen the documentary, but every institution that has ever been accused of wrongdoing has gone into full PR overdrive at the rebuttal stage, often just as selectively. Unless this is a straight-up hatchet job in which case libel laws apply and we'll surely find out in time.

Dude came back after TWO HOURS to say the lines to take were for amateur people active on social media, not professional writers and commentators, who he impugned by not being clear about that, just to cause a shitstorm.

A straight-up hatchet job.

shurely not!

I didn’t watch this but I clicked on the link in almost dread lol

copy of the last tweet and a synopsis here: https://t.co/E5m9ZnEpRB

— Gareth Jones (@jonerr) July 10, 2019

Did anyone here actually watch this?

I wouldn't call it a straight-up hatchet job without watching it first.

Sorry, I wouldn't have called it a straight-up hatchet job without watching it first.

I'd rather open a fucking vessel than actually watch it. I've already done a 3 to 4 hour labour AS shift on R4 during Today/PM listening this week, sometimes you have to look after yourself.

Funny you should say that but one of the participants said he contemplated committing suicide by jumping off the roof about Jennie Formby's office o_0

above, not about

I did! The Jewish rank and file party members were people I sympathised with, because nobody should have their ethnic or religious characteristics denigrated by people in the same political party, even through ignorance. Nobody in a political party should be allowed to be racist to anyone. Jewish people in the compliance unit obviously trawled through shitloads of horrible comments, memes and posts as part of their jobs and became anxious and depressed. Moderators for newspapers can experience similar. When they got to the bigger fish like Matthews and McNicol, they came off like witnesses who coordinated their testimonies at trial. And I am disinclined to trust the reporting of a self-described islamophobe who made previous documentaries unfair to Corbyn, especially in the light of how certain emails and the NDA issue were handled. There are obviously people deliberately spinning half a fact instead of showing things in their entirety that would change the context.

However, I swear the murky soundtrack was going to bust out into that foghorn bit from Scooby Doo, and the editing and aesthetic choices seemed designed to piss off the left side of the party because: representation and incense the right of Labour because: they fell short of proving anything about LOTO being AS-friendly (but enough stuff for Tom Watson to tweet about how ‘chilled’ he was by the party situation). Perhaps ‘chilled’ was not the word baggymp should have used.

tbf Boris has done his best to help out the Labour Party by his "Whatevs" reaction to this Lil' Kim Darroch story.

"Funny you should say that but one of the participants said he contemplated committing suicide by jumping off the roof about Jennie Formby's office o_0"

RIP ..Heaven needed another pathetic bbc/tory patsy who is beyond fucking contempt!

although at least he could be a useful cautionary tale for the centrist wing of "bring back national service"

was having a drunken late night *flashback to 2017* angry posting exchange with some prick over the use of the term "politically homeless" last night. Need to get a life, but told him it is a total misnomer when the LibDem and Conservatives are still active and his verses are very bad. He's a local p/t stand up comedian who models himself on the big yin but only really performs in shit pubs and dreams he's at Edinburgh fringe. He's a classic m/c extreme moderate who doesn't like being called a tory and probably won't talk to me again ;;

Is the full text of that Milne email available anywhere? Because the line being quoted by Labour Press Office isn't necessarily any more in context than the report is. And in any case anyone who has ever been a victim of racism knows that "but what about when [members of minority] do it themselves?" is a well worn obsfucatory device used by racists. Quoting one line in full doesn't necessarily provide the full context.

Seumas Milne is not a hill for anyone to die on but in any case anyone who thinks that institutional racism is about the acts of one or two powerful individuals doesn't understand what institutional racism is - we're really talk about the entrenched structures that enable the racism to exist and weeding that out is a lot harder than the Tom Watsons of this world would have you believe.

One of the ways this manifests itself is the use of various forms of hard and soft coercion (including guilt) to convince well-meaning people that protecting the good name of the institution is more important than dealing with the problem. This isn't just confined to AS or racism - we saw a similar effect in the way the Miliband-era party dealt with allegations of sexual harassment.

This might seem minor at a time when the government is literally repatriating people who have been here their entire lives, but it's still a symptom of the problem. And just because malign actors are out to exploit the problem for their own ends doesn't mean there isn't a problem. If anything it's better to deal with it transparently - in part to deprive them of a line of attack. (Yeah right, like they won't find another one...)

In that context, the response of the Labour Press Office - and the likes of Owen Jones etc - feels tone deaf. And that remains the case even if the programme is a hatchet job, in fact I'm not sure it makes much difference. Would be interested to see what the likes of John Lansmann and Rhea Wolfson have to say.

I think the numerous people out there all taking the line “of course, if it were any other form of racism” are themselves racist and obvious dangers. I mean, you could quite easily make the case for one of these supposedly superior treated forms of racism - it’s just that most of them are actively pursued by the government, the media and their enablers for ideological and electoral advantage. I parsed the Milne thing about being about optics as much as anything - not a great look if you’re a party of mainly gentiles seen to be persecuting Jewish people to root out antisemitism - But I agree with you that context is key.

Lansman had this to say about why he didn’t participate.

1/5 Antisemitism in Labour is a serious & complex issue which deserves fair & balanced discussion. But the contents of tonight’s Panorama exposé, some of which I’ve seen as a potential interviewee, suggest that it will fall well short of that pic.twitter.com/0kP5waqCUR

— Jon Lansman (@jonlansman) July 10, 2019

I mean, you don't have to go back to Ed Miliband for that attitude to harassment allegations - it's Karie Murphy again who's been saying "It's not a problem, we don't need to make a complaint of it, we can just get someone to have a word", regarding David Prescott and Peter Willsman

like the Jewish Labour voter on Today said when programs like the panorama one are incurious about the real history of AS problems among the left and its history beyond Corbyn, and have silly fucking voiceovers saying spurious nonsense instead, then it becomes an obvious crude line of attack that undermines any PLP attempts (as useless as they might have been) to deal with the problem and just becomes more noise in the cacophony chamber and doesn't do anyone any favours other than the Conservative party of course.