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

My instinct is election good but I'm kind of muddled. If election is bad, then when is good?

When the Tories are less likely to cakewalk it.

just trying to make sense (badly) of the wider PLP strategy beyond the loads of them that would rather see a hard right Britannia Unchained gov for 5 years than a Corbyn one out of pure bitterness. Lol seeing as I've desperately been wanting another election since a couple of months after the last one and I'm not so sure now, but things have have got much more complicated and fuck knows tbh!

Just heard Crobyrn was a no-show at the Bristol rally tonight, glad I gave that a miss tbh

too busy catching the 18:38 from st pancras to kirkwall iirc

When the Tories are less likely to cakewalk it.

Sure, I get this feeling, but when is that? I can see selling a short term strategic delay, but beyond that, I don't get it

The longer the clowns are left dangling on a string unable shit or get off the pot the better. I know zombies are popular but not when they're running the country.

bbc brexitcast quite the insight

The longer the clowns are left dangling on a string unable shit or get off the pot the better. I know zombies are popular but not when they're running the country.

I remain to be convinced how effective that will be or, for that matter, is at the moment.

Important reminder for all readers of this thread:

Watch out for the following slurs. They have no place in civil debate.

"Yellow Tories"

"Piss diamonds"

"You enabled social murder in exchange for a 5p plastic bag tax"

"I will not be voting for the Conservative Party"

Please #BeKindOnline

— Simon Hedges #BeKindOnline (@Orwell_Fan) October 24, 2019

I do fear the longer Johnson gets to posture like this the better for him tbh, hope I'm wrong of course.

Kate Andrews talking loads of shite again

"people in zero hours contracts are happy as pigs in shit" she says

BBC's new editorial guidelines on think tanks has predictably had zero impact. https://t.co/imWpdyS6cM

— Tom Mills (@ta_mills) October 24, 2019

The BBC has altered its editorial guidelines after persistent calls for the organisation to improve transparency around the commentators to which it gives a platform.

The broadcaster has now added “think tanks” to a list of groups that it says presenters and producers should “not automatically assume … are unbiased”. “Appropriate information about their affiliations, funding and particular viewpoints should be made available to the audience, when relevant to the context,” the guidelines say.

wow, you'd do that for us

Kate Andrews talking loads of shite again

And being applauded by the audience ... in South Shields.

'free-market' is a biased term ffs

there's no such thing as a free market

/When the Tories are less likely to cakewalk it./

Sure, I get this feeling, but when is that? I can see selling a short term strategic delay, but beyond that, I don't get it

Kate Andrews probably thinks her cleaner is a real whistle-while-you-work sort, and doesn’t have any meaningful relationships with people who rely on ZHC.

"bbc brexitcast quite the insight"

the other day one of it's producers was crowing "it's the biggest podcast in the UK is this" quoting their own viewing(?) figures.

Kate Andrews talking loads of shite again

And being applauded by the audience ... in South Shields.

― Michael Oliver of Penge Wins £5 (Tom D.), Thursday, October 24, 2019 3:29 PM (one hour ago)

here's the thing about that. you can interpret that as something spine-chilling - such a staunchly labour constituency, labour since the 30s, so safe that it was where david miliband was parachuted into etc. - and yet so gammony.

or it can just be the fucking fash at QT finding the local EDL lads and failed UKIP council candidates etc. to fill the audience.

or a bit of both i suppose

ps colman's chippy in south shields is very good if you're in the area

A lot of sus ‘Brexit Party/Tory pact’ people in the audience but it seemed like they came equipped to say that.

xp
My local chippy has an army trained master chef who was formerly the personal cook for a royal paedophile for years, but nobody will ever know how good his chips, collops, battered sausages, sweet bakery cakes etc are outside this shithole that is known as Thornhill (formerly Wakefield) Dewsbury. What a tragedy!

(xp) Yes, I noticed that. Brexit Party nothing if not needy these days.

Jo Swindon's shower displaying their true colours.

https://nursingnotes.co.uk/mps-vote-protecting-nhs-privatisation/

Anvil, you seem sure that Brexit isn't about immigration, and admittedly I only have anecdotal evidence to the contrary, but the only people I know who are pro-brexit are absolutely voting leave to stop immigration. I feel like I'm repeating myself here and tbh I am drunk af so probably am

Can't for the life of me see how an election now could be a good idea for Labour. They'd get massacred. Either Johnson gets his brexit deal in the next few weeks (unlikely) and he can go to an election having achieved EU withdrawal against the odds. Or he's stymied (more likely) and he can go to an election saying he's tried absolutely everything, including actually getting a deal with the EU, and needs a clean-out of the augean stables of parliament to "get brexit done". Either way, he wins easily. Much better to let him twist in the wind. Labour may cop flak for "running scared", but that will be easily balanced by the sight of a govt utterly incapable of doing anything.

(xp) We've had this discussion before and anvil has made the same claim before, so you might well be repeating yourself.

punchy antifa from the green brigade

Celtic FC v Lazio 24-10-19 pic.twitter.com/3iRh8NbBJL

— ULTRAS (@fotos_ultras) October 24, 2019

! That Mussolini banner

srsly

hmmmm don’t know now - james usually pretty astute and not a wrecker

Unpopular opinion, but I would abstain on Monday and demand the PM to carry on with the WAB or resign and let Labour take over and form a govt.

If he tables a one-line bill then I would amend it with a date in Spring 2020. It forces him into more extreme positions to get his GE.

— James Mills (@JamesMills1984) October 24, 2019

Anvil, you seem sure that Brexit isn't about immigration, and admittedly I only have anecdotal evidence to the contrary, but the only people I know who are pro-brexit are absolutely voting leave to stop immigration. I feel like I'm repeating myself here and tbh I am drunk af so probably am

― Colonel Poo, Friday, 25 October 2019 01:21 (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

its a factor, for sure, and there are a myriad of different reasons (and for some that will be the number one reason. and there are 17M plus leave voters so finding people that immigration was the primary factor for isn't going to be difficult). I'd say a mixture of tabloid propaganda about "they want to straighten your bananas' and a sort of unfocussed feeling that 'clueless people far away are making decisions for us" is bigger

But even that is secondary, Brexit is largely existential and looking at it through a lens of tangibility is to miss a huge chunk of the picture. Same with many Remainers. Tangible arguments have gradually been put back in the drawer. Brexit is about the wrong people having a say over your lives and has been ever since Henry VIII first came up with the idea. Brexit is trust in the boss man, disdain for paper pushers (Remainers of course love stationery, meetings and managerialism. Power without God)

The managers came in and fucked us over worse than the owner ever did, and they don't even know what they're doing. At least you knew where you were when it was just us and the owner, and he was from round here too. Common sense.

People understand underlying truths, whether they can put it into words and explain it or not, and your pieces of paper and your studies and your economic assessments can do one. they know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Brexit doesn't need immigration to exist, it doesn't even need the EU to exist. It is the restoration of traditional hierarchy. Telling you what to do is the role of the big man, and all who attempt to take that role and go against the big men need to go. Its hating your manager. Its unconscious hatred of capitalism

TLDR Brexit/Royalist Venn diagram

Great post

Anvil's post is very good and a seductive narrative but - as with most narratives - it's only part of the story.

Immigration is a big factor - it's not the main factor but a big deal all the same - and narratives like this, however well intentioned, serve to undermine the lived experience of immigrants and children of immigrants.

I can’t believe xyzzzzzz hasn’t posted this yet

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/25/rory-stewart-calls-three-london-men-filmed-in-walkabout-video-minor-gangsters

Dying at the last paragraph though

In 2010, Stewart apologised to his Cumbrian constituents after saying that local people were “pretty primitive” and held up their trousers with “bits of twine”.

Haha I was just about to post that

Xxp Lol we're not BBC interviewers, we can keep more than one line of reasoning in our heads. I think the post makes connections I haven't seen elsewhere.

I also think the notion of brexit as existential is both true and not true at the same time. The biggest brexit supporters I've met were white former EastEnders living in Essex/Kent who could talk about taking back control in a room full of Bengali and European coworkers without seeming to experience any dissonance, something I found quite strange. These were people who got invited to Bengali households for Eid and were very comfortable with many aspects of multiculturalism and indeed closer to it and friendlier with it than the "legitimate concerns" brigade. Nevertheless there was an idea that "we need to control our borders" that I have no doubt was essentially racist but seemingly could exist alongside what seemed to be at least a coherent and genuine embrace of multicultural values more encompassing than the average fbpe er.*

*To clarify, I don't think leaving the EU actually gets rid of the non white people, but I recognise that these ideas seem to have been strongly linked in a variety of ways including the heads of an archetypal leave voter.

discus
https://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.com/2019/10/saying-no-to-boris-johnsons-election.html?m=1

I’m not sure people having individual Asian friends prevents them from being hostile to Asian/Muslim people in Britain as a concept, you know, the whole “oh YOU’RE ok but the rest of them need to go back”.

xp broadly agree with that piece, tho every position is still full of unknowns and at best a calculated gamble. also that piece ignores the fractures within the PLP which certainly isn't a tactically coherent unit

Damn, gyac and LBI beat me to it lol.

I largely agree with that piece (and this piece arguing the same thing but coming from a different angle). I do foresee messiness for Labour in any scenario, GE or no GE, but that's not something they're not used to tbh. Keeping BJ in limbo is the best bet imo.

I noticed when Kate Andrews began talking up the benefits of immigration on Question Time the audience went very quiet. (xps)

In many areas in the North support for Brexit is very high exactly from children of immigrants! Northern urban UKIP candidates around 2015 weren't particularly white - which doesn't mean they weren't anti-immigration themselves and there might have been some PR calculations going on too, sure. But theme of "people far away making decisions for us, telling us what to do, how to live our lives, when they know jack shit" is the strongest sentiment, just not one necessarily concisely expressed

The thing with immigration/benefits-concerned people is that it’s never the people they know personally/their friends from those groups who constitute a problem for them, it’s people at a remove who can be caricatured. More than once, I’ve had to point out that those other immigrants or benefits claimants probably also have friends or neighbours telling them ‘oh we don’t mean YOU, you’re all right’ too.

Will people ever stop making eyes at the king across the water?

I truly believe the day David Miliband left British politics it all started to unravel. https://t.co/ipJBEwZY7X

— James Corden (@JKCorden) October 25, 2019