PMs change and lol we're all gonna die (but brexit will never end)

i think alongside the "lunatic Trot who will sell out our nation and usher in a socialist dictatorship" you're gonna get a lot of "confused old duffer unfit to match wits with super-smart 2010s kid BJ" stuff

Yeah the press might as well have been writing Miliband’s name with echoes around it for the worst parts of that campaign.

The best route for Labour is to double down on the stuff that worked last time, win the social media election and have crystal clear policy positions. It's going to be tougher with Boris lying left right and centre and pledging to throw money at things that are more popular than "we'll sell your house from under you to pay for your care in old age". But he's also more toxic than even May was and the LibDems might yet end up doing Labour a favour by eroding into the soft Tory base.

xxp this doesn’t work well with reality, people might not like Corbyn but he is very much a certain type of weird & that doesn’t go along with what they’re trying to project onto him. He was very chill during GE17 campaigning apart from the end of the Neil interview.

Also there are very few Cabinet ministers who can be trusted not to completely shit the bed during an election campaign.

IIRC when election broadcast regs kicked in, people got a more rounded picture of Corbyn. The past two years there’s been endless chipping away at that, which is bad for left morale. I’m never shocked now by the amount of weird instant lines taken by Westminster bubble types that are wrong or unfair, which get all over the news before being quietly walked back to reflect actual facts.

Last I checked, Dominic Cumming was still held in contempt of Parliament so how is it he gets a Palace of Westminster pass?

nothing matters anymore iirc

Can't wait for the election so that Sarkar and young Momentum members can stop asking for a fucking babysitter. Yes uncle Corbyn will be there at a rally near you soon!

Most of the 'new' government are also in contempt so it's...fine

welp

Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, has restated her view that congress will not pass a UK-US trade deal if Boris Johnson’s government puts the open border between Ireland and Northern Ireland at risk, the Irish Times reports. Pelosi said:

"We made it clear in our conversations with senior members of the Conservative party earlier this year that there should be no return to a hard border on the island. That position has not changed. Any trade deal between the US and Great Britain would have to be cognisant of that."

Thank u Nancy!

yaaass kween slay etc

lol @ the amount of bootlickers in the replies upset Corbyn wants to take away their right to boil to death at a desk

Everyone should have the right to basic protections from working in unbearably hot conditions.

In government we'll demand that employers look after their workers during heatwaves like this.#heatwavehttps://t.co/tXyRqfKh8o

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) July 25, 2019

lol @ the amount of bootlickers in the replies upset Corbyn wants to take away their right to boil to death at a desk

Everyone should have the right to basic protections from working in unbearably hot conditions.

In government we'll demand that employers look after their workers during heatwaves like this.#heatwavehttps://t.co/tXyRqfKh8o

— Jeremy Corbyn (@jeremycorbyn) July 25, 2019

Seriously, what is the point of even looking at this stuff?

grim lols before the power goes out forever and we start butchering our neighbours over the last can of beans iirc

If you're lucky you might get one of these irrational ham-faced social media pricks.

it's all i have to look forward to anymore tbh

Also I am the whiniest Brexit-bad remoaniac melt ever (at least on ILX) and still all these fucking FBPEers being outraged every time Corbyn says anything about anything that isn't Brexit can get in the bin.

I will slap-fight you for that position, but otherwise OTM (as is the Ash Sarkar thread)

Everyone wants to take my badge away! But yes, good Ash Sarkar thread.

xxp this doesn’t work well with reality, people might not like Corbyn but he is very much a certain type of weird & that doesn’t go along with what they’re trying to project onto him.

I think possibly you (gyac) or someone here described him as a stereotypical chill older gardening type (I forget the exact wording, so sorry if I've misremembered) and I laughed because I realised an older friend who is suspicious of JC the politician is married to someone very Corbyn-like!

not for me to say but S Bush, or similar, said people understand him even if they don’t like him and every English person knows someone like him. Odd but in a way that people recognise - as opposed to Gove, for example.

Corbyn the weirdo meanwhile Johnson paints a box bus

corbyn a frail old man whilst johnson is a picture of health

yeah i was gonna say, corbyn as weird in a world where our current prime minister is a bumbling public-school solipsist and our previous one was a transporter accident that melded together a terminator and a vulture is... not a reality i recognise

I’m not saying he is objectively weird, I’m saying that’s part of how he’s portrayed - I guess he’d be “eccentric” if he was on the right - but nonetheless it’s a portrayal that is both more accurate, more benign and more recognisable than any of the shite trying to paint him as autocratic or aggressive.

don't think i suggested that unsympathetic journos would paint him as weird but as a duffer, the PMQs bullshit the other day is the prelude to that. the truth of it has got fuck all to do with whether it will be continually pushed as a story.

very sick of that very old out of date photo of Cummings the press keep insisting on

"he totally freaks ordinary people out, like some kind of GEOGRAPHY TEACHER lol!"

and of course the idea of him as autocratic and aggressive is already well-established among a certain subset of perma-Tories especially in the working/lower middle class, the pure strain that goes back well beyond Robert Tressell's totally accurate portraits.

all future press pics of Cummings should just be of Cummerbund

as smaug

yes

one's a terrifying reptile intent on hoarding wealth for himself and the other is &c &c

(self fp'd for antisemitism obv)

yeah the irl NASA command genius doesn't look half as clever and mysterious as he is portrayed. then use Mads Mikkelsen as a stand in for Milne.

meanwhile let's check in with legendary british entrepreneur and proud patriot james dyson

The inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, James Dyson, has reportedly lined up the purchase of a second luxury property in Singapore, complete with an infinity pool and indoor waterfall.

Weeks after it was revealed that he had snapped up the city-state’s priciest penthouse, the Straits Times newspaper reported on Friday that the British billionaire had been given approval to buy another hugely expensive home.

The house, which was marketed at about S$45m (£26.5m), faces Singapore’s Unesco-listed Botanic Gardens.

For foreigners and permanent residents to be allowed to purchase landed property in Singapore they must have made “exceptional economic contributions in Singapore”, the newspaper said.

Dyson, 72, a prominent supporter of Brexit, announced plans in January to move his company’s head office from Britain to Singapore to be closer to its fastest-growing markets. His firm plans to build its first electric car in the city-state.

Dyson has also purchased a three-storey “super penthouse” at the top of Singapore’s tallest building. He reportedly paid £43m for the five-bedroom property which comes complete with a 600-bottle wine cellar.

struggling to get my head around a penthouse with a wine cellar tbh but i guess that's why i'm not a billionaire

the wine cellar is the rest of the building, i break the maths down as follows to some extent:

tanjong pagar centre = 64 floors =
3 storeys for the penthouse
one for the groundfloor lobby
the rest of the building = one floor per ten bottles (presumably one per room that's how i do it)

damn that's some real billionaire mindset shit

tapping_temple_wisely.gif except it's my gold top hat i'm tapping

if we're advocating for an unsympathetic approach to dealing with lexit labour members in clps and the unions on the basis of faith in cold electoral maths then there's no way that we can then insist the extremely loyal and reliable momentum contingent need to be appeased. in any case there's plenty of common ground to focus on and all this concern trolling is counterproductive

It's only concern trolling if the primary aim is to undermine while pretending to help. Tom Watson is concern trolling, Ash Sarkar clearly isn't.

Ultimately debate and dissent between groups whose primary aims are ultimately aligned (ie not including the Labour right) should be healthy and pretending otherwise does no one any favours. In the end what matters is that Labour win the election or at least emerge as the largest party and if they do then whatever strategy is taken will be vindicated.

The wider impact is negligible because the only people who notice or care what Ash Sarkar thinks already have a position on the issue that's unlikely to be changed either way.

afaict momentum ppl are largely calmly posting as they always do, even if they occasionally get suckered into the hysterical noise of the theatre. sarkar might know some ppl are v frustrated but this looks miles away from becoming a significant factor in labours electoral strategy and the idea that corbyn is at risk of losing his young remainer base has been pushed for a while be foot stomping remainers and hacks like behr who might say they would like labour to be electable but actually might vote lib dem or green if they feel like the messaging has not been to their liking. the underlying landscape remains unchanged, including the fact that as ever some ppl need to get a grip

that's barely english but you'll manage

otm

> gold top hat

gold-top hat

The issue isn't whether or not votes from Momentum types are at risk, with the exception of a small amount maybe flaking off the Greens they clearly aren't. I don't think Lexit types in unions and CLPs are either really. Other groups, maybe.

Ultimately if Labour are successful then it will be written off as having held their nerve, if they aren't it will look like complacency.

Obviously the picture will change quickly once the parties are in campaign mode but I think people can be forgiven for being fearful and nervous in the midst of all this agonising paralysis.

get suckered into the hysterical noise of the theatre

Did you mean: any other word

Sarkar isn't a random person. She has a following and a responsibility to represent what is going on in the Corbyn base with accuracy. xp