Ne'er get thee stitched til Booris be ditched: UK General Election 2019

red ed yas

The number of mad reactionaries, professional hatemongers and government-funded 'anti-extremists' signing the letter, the Freeland affair, the targeting of prospective Muslim parliamentary candidates by right-wing blogs and Sensible Commentators alike, Lib Dems sending out letters to Faiza Shaheen and others asking them to reject both antisemitism they have never been accused of and Muslim associations they have never been associated with, the Hamas / Islamic Jihad smears against Corbyn being applauded, etc, etc, etc are making it ever clearer what's driving this line of attack for a lot of people isn't that they think Corbyn is personally antisemitic, it's that they think he's in the pocket of Big Muslim. Labour has been infiltrated by a shadowy cabal intent on bending the party to its will, and so on.

Yep.

I’m glad this classic is getting another airing.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJXsSHAWsAATKTH?format=jpg&name=large

Because making the least well-off working people pay for your home broadband from their taxes is clearly a national priority Richard? #checkyourprivilege https://t.co/8k0z3p2HqG

— Chris Leslie (@ChrisLeslieMP) November 14, 2019

YES ED GO OFF

We’ve all been there: ‘oh no how do we respond to this?...blah blah, competition, growth, undesirable...gigabit’...oh dear. https://t.co/7f9zFDn8hZ

— Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) November 14, 2019

The nub of the Tory problem is that they know that people have had it with rubbish, unaccountable privatised oligopolies/monopolies but they have no answer...that is what is going to cause them real trouble around the response to this policy.

— Ed Miliband (@Ed_Miliband) November 14, 2019

Home internet is unusual but free, high-speed public wifi is the kind of thing that hypercapitalist countries like S.Korea provide because they know it fuels education, productivity and competitiveness. Free internet, and the ability to make a digital marketplace open to all consumers, digital learning open to all children and a home-office available without cost to all workers / entrepreneurs is the kind of thing consistent both with leftist politics and centre/right-wing politicians with any kind of vision beyond shoring up the profits of existing gatekeepers.

british andrew yang when haha

South Korea has free public broadband, although it’s a chicken/egg question about their high placement as a tech-focussed nation.

How many UK households do not have broadband right now? It can't be a whole lot, surely.

Free hi-speed public wifi seems way more pressing, emancipating and communist. It might indeed be something this idea has in common with hyper-capitalism - recognizing the need for it, anyway. Wifi rarely works (as promised, or at all) in UK buses and trains though. Fix that and you're solid imo.

Supposedly 10%, mostly in rural areas

Broadband is often very bad, even in towns and cities, even if if is technically available.

OJ going for the editor of Politics Home is extremely good

also, what the f*** is this? pic.twitter.com/793AEGYD5o

— Owen REGISTER TO VOTE Jones🌹 (@OwenJones84) November 15, 2019

uncanny so far...

The election was difficult to justify. The Prime Minister, recently installed in office, turned out to be a poor candidate who struggled on the campaign trail. The campaign went on too long, week-after-week in which Labour chipped away at what had at the start seemed an unassailable poll lead. The Conservative manifesto proved unpopular. With an unprepared campaign organisation, the Conservatives lost the ground war to Labour’s energised mass membership. The Labour leader turned out to be more effective than many of his critics had expected and Labour’s manifesto went down well with voters. The attempt to crystallise the need for a Conservative government into a punchy slogan attracted ridicule. The electoral strategy of sweeping through English Midlands and Northern Leave-voting constituencies failed, and the party ended the election losing seats.

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/will-there-be-a-general-election-uk-2019-boris-johnson

What exactly is their line on this? May got ridiculed for STRONG AND STABLE but at least you knew what they were saying about themselves...

Also the complaint last time was that the campaign went on too long, but they can thank the Lib Dems for that lol

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_Registration_and_Administration_Act_2013

Anyone have figures on how many people have BBC push notifications on? Must be almost eyewateringly large...

Almost a direct quote from the press release on people's lock screens in the middle of the evening on a Thursday? Absolutely incredible win for the Labour Party. https://t.co/BYkKJoXEFn

— Euan Healey (@euanspeaks) November 14, 2019

Get Brexit Done. (xxp)

What a journey:
2010: cut NOW or we're Greece
2013: Balls' Golden Rule means bankruptcy
2015: We desperately need a surplus
2016: OK maybe some investment's OK
2019: Sure, do several hundred £bn. I'll raise my growth forecast. Try not to waste it

https://t.co/1HQi8PygBG @FT pic.twitter.com/C0fPd7u069

— Giles Wilkes (@Gilesyb) November 15, 2019

do you know who else forced free super fast fibre-optic internet services upon his own people? that’s right. josef stalin

— hayls (@isamyelyah) November 14, 2019

Actually you love paying huge sums for shit broadband, you hogs

Sofia Virgin-Fibre | The Telegraph

— Nate Bethea (@inthesedeserts) November 14, 2019

cunt chicken tweet getting a workout today

As someone who has never noticed normal people giving a fuck, it’s nice to see “waaah Corbyn owning the broadband will mean he can spy on all his political enemies!!!1” takes. Maybe next time* you’ll actually look up what all those anti-terrorist laws he voted against were? Or learn from Trump inheriting Obama’s expanses surveillance state?

*they won’t

means 👏🏻 tested 👏🏻 broadband

Nationalising Openreach is perfectly plausible. But why should broadband be free and not - for example - water, food, heating, clothes, all of which are rather more essential to the human condition.

— Polly Mackenzie (@pollymackenzie) November 14, 2019

"What big free broadband networks you have... all the better for watching you!".

xp she's so close, so close to getting it

why_not_both_girl.gif

broadband policy is a promising portent that the manifesto might have a big offer on UBS

also completely spikes the guns of BJ’s personal pet policy he’s been trailing for months (full fibre broadband for all*)

*not free, mind

We're radicalising plastic bag lib Dems

Of course. I await the manifesto with interest. You’re right that the path remains open to a consistent approach to providing all things for free. Once everything is free we can also abolish wages.

— Polly Mackenzie (@pollymackenzie) November 14, 2019

“Why not free water, too?” Justin Webb asks John McDonnell. Why not indeed. #r4today

— Hicham Yezza (@HichamYezza) November 15, 2019

You can just imagine Big John trying to hold back on the laughter

Labour's Magic Broadband Tree

Chris Leslie bravely doing a noble job of defending the corner of consumers that love nothing more than spending money on stuff after reading Which magazine

Amazing if you read his infamous 2015 Guardian interview how he’s actually to the right of the Tories economically now.

Read a thread last night that said if Cooper had won in 2015, he would have been her shadow chancellor. (Burnham’s would have been Reeves and Kendall’s would have been Umunna).

Johnson doing a phone-in on Radio 5.

Q: Parliament should get us out of the EU. And taking no deal off the table is a mistake. Parliament is not fit for purpose. Oliver Cromwell was right 500 years ago. Good luck to you.

Johnson says he agrees. He thinks parliament has been “senselessly” blocking Brexit.

Surely not the Oliver Cromwell who dissolved Parliament and became a dictator?

xp
fucking hell I shudder whenever i see Reeves popping up on my twitter via the friendly melts I endure!

this is also a really important policy for putting on votes in rural areas, where labour currently struggle

The Register finally has coverage of this

https://www.theregister.co.uk/AMP/2019/11/15/labour_pledges_free_broadband_via_partnationalisation_of_bt/

However, Matthew Howett, analyst and founder of Assembly, also said such a move would be extremely difficult to deliver.

"This is a spectacularly bad take by the Labour Party. The almost cut throat competition between broadband rivals has meant faster speeds, improved coverage and lower prices for consumers up and down the country.

Labour will also announce today a proposal for a new Charter of Digital Rights intended to protect data and online rights.

That will include powers for individuals and collectives to challenge algorithmic injustice, where online algorithms cause disproportionate harms to particular groups.

It will also prevent the use of digital infrastructure for surveillance; and hand rights to individuals to protect access to and ownership of their data.

Q: Would you introduce free broadband?

Johnson says what he would not do is introduce “some crackpot scheme that would involve many, many billions of taxpayers’ money nationalising a British business”.

🙄

Labour is saving the future of ILX with this plan.

nationalise ILX imo

Wrt "free water" it's useful to note that Scotland's water was never privatized,and while not free, is cheaper than all the private providers in England

(To be more accurate much of scotland's water provision is privatized but it is delivered by one public company with a monopoly)

The Tories, understandably, are critiquing "free" broadband as impossible. But they're not dealing with proper Labour. They're dealing with Marxists. Everything is horribly, brutally possible. All there in their writing. Corbyn guru Murray's essay "Lenin's Leaps" is a key text.

— Iain Martin (@iainmartin1) November 15, 2019

Free water is the opium of the masses.

Just curious, on water, are these figures on average more or less correct?

if you take Southern Water as an example, and using water AND wastewater as a standard:

One person - £322 per year and £26.80 per month
Two people - £449.40 per year and £37.40 per month
Three people - £576.90 per year and £48 per month
Four people - £668 per year and £55.70 per month
Five people - £740.90 per year and £61.70 per month
Six people - £813.70 per year and £67.80 per month

https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/blog/how-much-is-the-average-water-bill-per-month

Because that's really steep. We pay less than half that over here iirc.

xp lol pom

Yes, that might actually be slightly light but it's in the right ballpark.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmusingsatmidnite.files.wordpress.com%2F2016%2F08%2Fwater-gif.gif&f=1&nofb=1

That's a lot of money down the drain. I pay something like £40 per quarter (two person household). It's semi-nationalized and by law made impossible to be privatized.

Yes I pay more for water than I do for energy. Although the no standing charge gas tariff I was on is about to disappear so need to find an alternative.

Everything is horribly, brutally possible.