bojo is king, brexit is on, stuff is fvcked, tomorrow starts here -- new govt new thread new battle

it would certainly have to be. At this point it is probably safe to rule out any Labour shadow cabineter who was idiotic/naively dumb/antisemitic enough to have taken a selfie with "fellow socialist" Chris Williamson.

is this Graham Jones tweet real? he's protected his twitter account

🐦[Graham Jones here descending into pure racism on losing his seat, absolutely good riddance to the bombfucking prick pic.twitter.com/Jsswv3LNxk🕸
— Jimatron (@JP_Maybe) December 13, 2019🕸]🐦

It frightens me that I'm feeling pity and empathy with a complete tory prick like baroness Warsi

The Hopkins attack on Warsi is a sign of things to come

I've been drinking since midday and now I'm listening to Asian Dub Foundation. It's got that bad.

be the [cans in the park after Thatcher's death] you wish to see in the world

Sorry for trespassing - I know this is not ILM, but this might be just what you all need and deserve right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TFqhCvLuTg

:D (the only good moments I’ve had today have been listening to music)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELs-JUBX0AARJbD?format=jpg&name=large

(xp) Bizarrely, I've spent the entire day listening to the Beach Boys.

is it...something we love to see? Today? Yes it is https://t.co/j3pbEwM5qS

— Jess (@jessmeacham) December 13, 2019

the specials
wynton kelly
eddie rabbit
marshmello (thanks kids)
samim - heater
alex gopher - the child (kenny dope bonus beat)

phone calls
bread
work from home

Spoke with an Irish bloke at the pub. Came to England to work in construction, loves Led Zeppelin, Chick Corea and playing the drums. Used to be a metalhead, was into Celtic Frost. Is not a UK citizen. Wholeheartedly supports Brexit and the Tories because too many Somalian refugees are taking advantage of the NHS. The EU fucked us all over by pumping our money, imposing a single currency and overriding border control. Doesn't think a Tory majority will affect him. Loathes his ex-wife who prevented him from joining a new band. Is in his 40s and dating a teenage girl. Thinks his family back in Dublin just doesn't get it.

loves...Chick Corea

Tells you all you need to know

Change - The Glow of Love
Twinkie Clark - Awake O Zion
Sharon Brown - I Specialize in Love
Sandee - Notice Me (Notice the House Remix)

cleaning the fridge
marinating a chicken

Return to Forever's first album isn't half bad tbf.

xp

Xps Thing is, people in pubs who want brexit where it's so insanely against their interests were only activated by Cameron calling the ref in the first place

that pagarini thread which comrade a posted up thread is easily the best analysis of the doorstep defeat i’ve read so far. so i’m posting it again

I did around 120 hours of canvassing in London, Bedford and Milton Keynes. I didn’t expect this result but here’s how I can make sense of it from what I encountered on the doorstep. 1/

— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019

I’m still heartbroken and reeling from the juvenile centrist post-mortem poison of certain colleagues and peers; a friend who grew up in Wakefield came over for breakfast and discussed the silent killer for Labour in ‘red wall’ areas: the Islamophobia amongst white voters that led them to vote for Conservatives or Brexit Party candidates, even if (as in Wakefield) those PPCs were British Pakistani.

Here as well is something that speaks well of Corbyn, the open letter from his sons:

From the three proudest sons on the planet pic.twitter.com/0IVLmcw0kD

— Tommy Corbyn (@TommyCorbyn) December 13, 2019

<3

Spoke with an Irish bloke at the pub. Came to England to work in construction, loves Led Zeppelin, Chick Corea and playing the drums. Used to be a metalhead, was into Celtic Frost. Is not a UK citizen. Wholeheartedly supports Brexit and the Tories because too many Somalian refugees are taking advantage of the NHS. The EU fucked us all over by pumping our money, imposing a single currency and overriding border control. Doesn't think a Tory majority will affect him. Loathes his ex-wife who prevented him from joining a new band. Is in his 40s and dating a teenage girl. Thinks his family back in Dublin just doesn't get it.

― pomenitul, Saturday, 14 December 2019 bookmarkflaglink

If you take out the "dating teen" bit it's perfect for The Guardian.

People who lost two elections trying discredit what was the best manifesto in decades. I'm not in the mood for voting for any melt candidates as long as I'm still a breathing and still have party membership. These moral midgets who always belonged on the other side of parliament can have their moment to gloat for the next few weeks, but there isn't enough of them to vote in some piece of shit establishment shill they fancy as the next leader.

The point about right-wing bigots adopting British Jews as an avatar for ‘the opposite of anyone we dislike’ has been clear for a while and gets clearer every day.

So now all the Jews are staying who do we nominate to leave?

— Allison Pearson (@allisonpearson) December 13, 2019

"the Jews"

I don’t know any of them! Where are you from?

Mine’s uses just very basic stuff, “cute”, “amadán”, “

that pagarini thread which comrade a posted up thread is easily the best analysis of the doorstep defeat i’ve read so far. so i’m posting it again

🐦[I did around 120 hours of canvassing in London, Bedford and Milton Keynes. I didn’t expect this result but here’s how I can make sense of it from what I encountered on the doorstep. 1/
— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019🕸]🐦

this is a misleading picture. the leadership came up a lot on the doorstep, but most of it was utter nonsense. it was a combination of anger at objectively correct stances that corbyn and others have, and pure fake news. how do you fight this? https://t.co/T93Jgjfd6W

— ryan 🚩 (@ryxnf) December 13, 2019

My kinder politics stopped when the Tories killed 100,000 people.

— Lloyd Russell-Moyle🌹🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈 (@lloyd_rm) December 13, 2019

otm

a ragbag of good things:

just gone out to get milk, saying hello to a couple of people out and about, talking to a woman buying charcoal and firelighters - 'yeah, i'm doing catering today - jerk pork, jerk chicken' - Lambeth has something of the feel of an enclave. feel v warmly to it rn.

getting totally shitfaced with my lovely colleagues last night.

and as i said on twitter one of the few silver linings from the last three years is finding journalistic voices i *do* trust:
Faisal Islam at the BBC, Jennifer Williams at the MEN, Sarah O'Connor at the FT, Stephen Bush and the team at the NS (not you Jason Cowley), Lewis Goodall at Sky soon to be BBC.

i don’t always agree with their stance and observations. but they do the work of thinking, asking and explaining. it's been a v information poor GE, and much journalism has been rightly condemned, but these are serious people doing serious work and we'll need them more than ever in the years ahead.

also the work that the team at eater london have done to open up the restaurants of london's amazing and diverse communities.

listening to The NWRA last night. breastcrawl's post up thread, ilx UK politics people and threads generally. thank fucking god for these things.

idk. The Photoshop stuff is there but I think what Luke's thread talks about is that it really speaks to the +50 demographic that have already been talked to by the right-wing press for 20 years. They are very much distributed around those leave towns that never stopped wanting to see the ref result being fulfilled. Hence the majority.

It's very interesting how this really hadn't come up in 2017 when Corbyn was respecting the referendum result. And by that point there was a good two years of demonisation.

The left could use a lot of the same tactics, however if the vast majority of those leave voters share the racism and deference it would probably get a nod xp 👍

And this is v good and links in nicely with Luke's thread:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/14/labour-meltdown-decades-govern-votes

I mean I don't think Boris' campaign was well run compared to Labour. That is neither here nor there. Corbyn was really fighting the Blair/Brown legacy.

And this is vital.

"In the 2017 election I wrote that a party that grew out of social institutions needed to turn itself into a social institution in precisely those areas it historically took for granted. That remains the key task: providing advice to those whose benefits are being slashed, legal support to tenants under the cosh from their landlords, haggling with the utilities to provide cheaper and better deals. Add to that: teaching political and economic literacy to voters, not just activists, and consulting constituents on what issues Labour should be battling on."

Second calz on people (assume, like me, you are thinking of ex-Miliband adviser Ay3shs Har1z1ka?). The amount of sheer bile directed at Owen Jones, Ash Sarkar and (to a lesser extent, Aaron Bastani who is a clown) is really revealing. The media colleagues who said nothing as they were named in a doc sourced from Neo-Nazis? Grim. Who said nothing about OJ being assaulted, or worse tried to argue that it didn’t count as he wasn’t actually a journalist? Bleak. Those same people tee-hee-heeing away with the likes of Tom Newton-Dunn today and tomorrow? Awful. And sorry to my bin Chinese king, but Jennifer W was sneering that she was right and that Corbyn had “made her scared to do her job” bc there’s nothing to be concerned about the government’s treatment of journalists that called it out during the campaign.

Funny to see people annoyed at Gary Lineker congratulating Johnson - this is Ellen all over again and underlines the point that class solidarity is not understood at all among too many people.

But on a positive note, this has been a real scales from the eyes moment for a lot of people, including some I know irl, and that’s a comfort in itself.

oh, as I say, I didn't always agree with those people in that list, but they are doing serious journalism and in Jennifer W, has done so much excellent work to highlight poverty and social circumstances of people living in Manchester. The absence of that sort of journalism more generally in the GE was a serious problem imo.

The point about right-wing bigots adopting British Jews as an avatar for ‘the opposite of anyone we dislike’ has been clear for a while and gets clearer every day.

🐦[So now all the Jews are staying who do we nominate to leave?
— Allison Pearson (@allisonpearson) December 13, 2019🕸]🐦

underlines the point that class solidarity is not understood at all among too many people.

it is an amazing thing about this country that it has for so long until recently sought legitimacy for its leaders in large part through economic arguments while economic literacy is so low. I sometimes wonder if there's an element of neoliberal governance that is little talked about of mystification. This goes beyond the "pure means" argument wherein neoliberalism converts every question of policy into a set of technical problem and derives economically grounded 'solutions' that bypass any political argument about how we want a country to actually be run and what values underwrite this. But again and again we witness politicians talking about national budets as if they were household budgets (and even then never mentioning, say mortgages). The 'realism' that supports these arguments is obviously illusory and distorting but to a population where economic illiteracy is near total this can never be properly argued within the public sphere. And it is near total, it drives me crazy. Labour's spending plans were stoic and realistic but it was so easy to paint it like a spending spree and I think this was accepted by people across the political spectrum, even on the left probably. I suspect that even for a lot of people who were in favour of those spending plans there was a giddy nihilism in the hope of splashing the cash.

How can you counter these assumptions that sideline the effect of fiscal stimulous and recognise the hobbling effects of stagnation? These assumptions that simplify how fiscal policy works to the point of inverting its most basic principles? Its so easy for any right-wing think tank question time guest to make these arguments to easy nodding along and I have no idea how to counter this. This is the basis of the "disinformation" that the right peddles and in many ways its more insidious than any corbyn loves the ra t-shirts as it seems to form the background of the way we think about everything.

I realise that one could make similar arguments similarly about all kinds of things, and that these are linked to fiscal policy health and say social care or social inequality or properly funding other measures that are much cheaper than the subsequent strain on healthcare system for eg.

However I recognise that its far more complex than this, and the example of immigration policy shows us how people's prejudices and resentments make certain simplistic arguments the only credible one. Another example being the Sarah Champion framing of Rotherham as being about how Asian men are treated with kid-gloves by the policing system rather than girls in care being treated with contempt.

Anyway sorry for directionless rant, but increasingly frustrated by the sliding walls of other people's ignorance, especially after being treated to a blow-by-blow account by my bf of his dinner with tory-voting sister last night. Its impossible to even start. How can you canvass that?

booming post

So is the pathway absolutely clear to just 'do Brexit now' or are there any other obstacles that could allow it all to blow up in Boris's face before it can be passed rather than in the long aftermath?

http://www.edmundgriffiths.com/greatleap.html

and

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/14/labour-meltdown-decades-govern-votes

both good on the boring unspectacular* necessary long-slog element of politics

*debord sense also

Was as much time ever spent on why Labour lost all those seats in Scotland - which really cut them off at the knees in terms of forming a majority government - or was it just assumed “Scottish people hate England lol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ “

certainly what i’ve heard from former labour voters in scotland who turned towards the snp is that they dutifully voted for labour for decades and saw no real improvement in their quality of life, so they became disillusioned and started seriously considering independence

also ‘fuck the english’ obv

I’ll have to ask my Larkhall pal - his uncle was huge in Scottish (new) Labour.

Also people saying Labour needs to be more “culturally conservative” need to get fucked, now and forever.

Labour has always had to appeal to different groups of people. The notion that Labour somehow doesn’t care about “the working class” and needs to discard progressive policy is out there and spread with spite by people paid by the word to launder propaganda for the breakfast table. Of course, there’s nothing wrong in their assumptions about working class people; that they are only receptacles for food, water and reactionary beliefs.

They’re not LGBT, they’re not disabled, they’re not precariously employed, they’re certainly never immigrants or BAME or trans or exhausted single parents trying to navigate the remains of infrastructure outside the cities. As Jude said a couple of weeks back, lots of groups who are culturally conservative do vote Labour, because it has something for them outside those parameters.

certainly what i’ve heard from former labour voters in scotland who turned towards the snp is that they dutifully voted for labour for decades and saw no real improvement in their quality of life, so they became disillusioned and started seriously considering independence

also ‘fuck the english’ obv

The optics of all my middle-aged peers in the media roaring about activists and voters half their age has a real ‘get off my lawn’ energy about it, too.

I met more Liberal Democrats yesterday (from Wokingham, and Paisley)

The one from Wokingham was perfectly pleasant and 'decent' but told me she had never met a Labour voter with a decent job before, and she was genuinely fascinated. She couldn't wrap her head around the fact someone "not on benefits" would vote Labour. I thought about how to answer, and said something like "Mostly for structural reasons, I think its economically advantageous to invest in things to counter the effects of wealth concentration, which is inherently unstable. Basically we need to loosen our belt in order to grow the economy"

Different worlds

but Jennifer W was sneering that she was right and that Corbyn had “made her scared to do her job”

Corbyn's fans, not Corbyn - obviously some Corbyn fans are fucking horrific, particularly when given a target painted on a woman.

/but Jennifer W was sneering that she was right and that Corbyn had “made her scared to do her job”/

Corbyn's fans, not Corbyn - obviously some Corbyn fans are fucking horrific, particularly when given a target painted on a woman.

I met more Liberal Democrats yesterday (from Wokingham, and Paisley)

The one from Wokingham was perfectly pleasant and 'decent' but told me she had never met a Labour voter with a decent job before, and she was genuinely fascinated. She couldn't wrap her head around the fact someone "not on benefits" would vote Labour. I thought about how to answer, and said something like "Mostly for structural reasons, I think its economically advantageous to invest in things to counter the effects of wealth concentration, which is inherently unstable. Basically we need to loosen our belt in order to grow the economy"

Different worlds

https://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Q2.-Party-by-demogs-no-location.jpg