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

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

Mate, the woman you’re talking about is Laura Kuenssberg

The woman I'm talking about is Jennifer Williams, and this is the tweet I'm talking about

V tired and more happy that this is over. But I WILL end it on my own terms.

So. To the Corbyn fans who managed to make me nervous about doing my job

Guess what

I knew what I was talking about.

BYE

— Jennifer Williams (@JenWilliamsMEN) December 13, 2019

And if you want to seriously make the argument that Corbyn fans are misogynistic

I think you should probably have a go at that one again.

(and just to say, could you stop sticking graphics in here 5 times the size of the screen?)

Jennifer Williams was referring to repeated incidents where Laura Kuenssberg has been booed at Labour conferences & Corbyn’s frequent attacks on the media. That’s what she’s been saying she feels threatened over for quite some time. So don’t try citing that devoid of context.

I think you should probably have a go at that one again.

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

We're presented with these two axes of 'cultural/social' and 'economic' but I think there's a an equally important axis - Psychological, or action/discussion. Maybe it's semantics and you could roll that under the social axis. Action vs inaction. The person trying to 'do a thing' plays better than the person 'wanting to talk about a thing'. Its message discipline, it wasn't there on Brexit and it wasn't there on Anti-semitism

My mum said she knew the anti-semitism was cooked up by the press, she knew it was nonsense, but it was still an issue for her. Why? Because "why can't he put this obvious nonsense to bed? why is he vague and defensive". She wanted smash it in the back of the net clarity, route one football, bam, answered, job done. This isn't cultural, it's not social, its psychological, just put this Neil cunt on the floor how hard can it be? Short answers. message discipline, clarity

Prevarication, waffling, meetings, this is all bullshit dreamed up by the managerial class to justify their jobs. The managerial class are scum and the minute they start waffling we know they're not going to deliver. And if you're not going to deliver on Brexit well looks like the same old same old all talk no action. "I don't want to do the guttering or weed the garden but I just get on with it. I don't really want Brexit either but its going to happen why delay it? what's the point in all these meetings, I don't have a meeting about doing the guttering just get it over with"

Labour was right in betting that Brexit wasn't really an issue for these voters. But if its not an issue why not just get it out of the way. Its this as much as the needing to overturn the 'they never listen to us anyway' narrative

No more meetings, meetings are obfuscations for people planning to make you redundant. No apologies just winning, eating skittles and scoring goals, like you know who

Blue ticks being snide to the little people on Twitter again, is it?

Honestly, what part of ‘be the better person’ does this woman not understand, considering she communicates for a living? The people who heckle her have their own agency, and pretending that a missive came out from Corbyn Towers to heckle journalists is a bit rich considering pretty much the opposite happened.

Thats to say it itself wasn't an issue (any particular outcome) but having it hang around like undone washing up was

So it turns out the graffitti-proof paint on the rail bridge opposite my house isn't that effective - someone has sprayed the '-er' version of the n-bomb in large gold capitals.

Contacted national rail to get it removed and about to head out with a sheet to cover it up. People don't need to be seeing that shit and it saddens me that people think this is more acceptable after Thursdays result :/

xp considering the actual physical threats to the very few left wing representatives out there, considering what a hate figure Owen Jones is for all these people, considering how easily they mix with the worst people in the name of civility

Yeah, not nearly enough was made out of Tories dithering over Brexit for 3.5 years and not giving Parliament a deal potentially close to EEA to cancel out the ERG. That’s on them, not the opposition.

Shorter version: fuck David Cameron forever.

anvil's been watching jreg lol

otm of course

Whats jreg? Don't you mean jvardy?

Re: Scotland

When I moved to Glasgow about fifteen years ago, Glasgow Council, run by Scottish Labour, was a fucking disgrace - lazy, complacent, indifferent. And I think the same was true nationally - Labour had been the unopposed majority for too long, and they totally took their eye off the ball - they looked away from the needs and problems of their constituents safe in the knowledge that there was nowhere else for voters to go. (It actually brought home to me the value of oppositional politics, even when the opposition is from a side I despise.) When a revitalised SNP showed themselves to be more in touch and passionate about Scotland and the needs and wants of its people, the Labour Party in Scotland floundered, had no response or explanation, and of course they played IndieRef very badly (a real harbinger of the way that English Labour handled Brexit) - they 'won' the union but lost everything in the process. Now they are down to a single MP in Scotland, and the SNP have the whole of Glasgow. The SNP have made mistakes, and Scotland has many, many problems, but they have also done a number of very good things for the country, and by and large (the Lord Provost excepted!) have remained engaged with the people. Sturgeon, of course, is an extremely effective leader and Scottish Labour haven't had a leader to match her for a long, long time - they couldn't even compete with Ruth Davidson, ffs. I really cannot see how they can come back from where they are now because they just haven't addressed who they are, what they stand for, and what they can DO for people that isn't just a pale echo of London/Westminster politics, and business as usual.

https://bylinetimes.com/2019/12/13/how-my-punjabi-immigrant-new-labour-supporting-parents-were-charmed-by-boris-johnson/

The rightward drift everywhere is partly this, action vs talking. Fighting the bureaucrats, the managers, the team leads, the inspectors, the traffic wardens, the pencil pushers, the safety protection officers, the people on three times your salary and you've no idea what they do, the people who pause and look at you before deciding if you're clever enough to understand what they're going to say.

Bernie is able to connect on this level but who else?

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.

This is true all over. In Portugal at the height of EU enforced austerity I had so many conversations with people as to why it doesn't work as an economic strategy and it would always go back to the "if you did this as a household..." line of argument. Also a widespread misconception that economics is numbers therefore maths therefore hard science.

That labour canvasser group I found through this thread: a lot of sharing of links for charities and food banks, which is important and essential work at this juncture but also of course a retreat, cleaning up after the tories and doing the govt's job for them. Also a post saying we should all support Bernie Sanders, which I guess solidarity is nice and all but we're not living in the US and cannot accompany its political process as anything other than spectacle. Most of the people in there are very young.

i was struck and a bit shaken by that canvasser's post-mortem thread (posted above maybe, or on the old thread) which described talking to young people on estates who had simply never imagined they deserved anything better than they had -- one of those moments when someone describes something in a way that clarifies and solidifies something you've half-assumed as a potential threat, but also perhaps rationalised away or waved away as something always challenged (i mean i just helped edit a book -- on sound-system culture 70s-present -- which firmed up the continuity of exactly the opposite dynamic)

the main project i've been working on these last few years is exactly about young working-class people stepping into history and making their futures (as buzzcocks manager richard book once put it): one of the things i'm gloomily realising is how much that success back then masked that many never caught up in were being left out of the reckoning: the older ones angry, the mid-age ones despairing, the young -- apparently -- without even a hint that this kind of story could apply to them, culturally or politically or whatever

Mr. Ward Fowler OTM.

Too many Scottish Labour MPs were either cynical careerists who couldn't wait to hop on the first train to London and find themselves a cushy position in Westminster or horrific socially conservative Old Labour dinosaurs, many of whom could barely string a coherent sentence together but could fill in an expenses sheet with aplomb.

Of course, but it’s better than feeling hopeless and doing nothing.

Thinking about the appeal of get Brexit done:

Prevarication, waffling, meetings, this is all bullshit dreamed up by the managerial class to justify their jobs. The managerial class are scum and the minute they start waffling we know they're not going to deliver. And if you're not going to deliver on Brexit well looks like the same old same old all talk no action. "I don't want to do the guttering or weed the garden but I just get on with it. I don't really want Brexit either but its going to happen why delay it? what's the point in all these meetings, I don't have a meeting about doing the guttering just get it over with"

FBPE fools with their flags and face paint as the modern workplace putting up cheery posters for mental health awareness week while they relentlessly run their employees into the ground.

i was struck and a bit shaken by that canvasser's post-mortem thread (posted above maybe, or on the old thread) which described talking to young people on estates who had simply never imagined they deserved anything better than they had

McDonnell leaves shadow cabinet:-((

Dilly-dallying will always be worse than outright lying. Outright lying is honest, dilly-dallying isn't even honest about its dishonesty. Meanwhile the washing up still isn't done

Richard Burgon is standing, in a campaign that is almost guaranteed to attract no support whatsoever.

fuck no to Burgon. He's another halfwit who stuck up for Chris Williamson

Just looked up at the TV to find secret ILXor John McTernan doing a jig on Corbyn's grave.

Burgon’s not standing, that account is fake.

Boris in Sedgefield, that's the funniest thing he's done in a while.

Turning the TV off now though.

Just looked up at the TV to find secret ILXor John McTernan doing a jig on Corbyn's grave.

Just looked up at the TV to find secret ILXor John McTernan doing a jig on Corbyn's grave.

OK that got me. It had genuinely never occurred to me that anyone might bother to set up a Richard Burgon parody campaign account.

One of the unfunniest cunts on twitter is behind it, because that’s what people need in this time apparently.

Certain celebrities are quite helpful because they are stupid enough to say out loud what smarter media types have just enough savvy to keep to themselves . pic.twitter.com/M9cHbsNKYp

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) December 13, 2019

Many of these celebs are horrible reefs, including her, so she can fuck off back to the toilet police.

UK comedians are such dregs, every last one of them.

Was ist a reef?

I assumed autocorrect of terf

Preston, which voted 53% Leave in 2016 but where a local Labour council is committed to reversing austerity and empowering the local community, returned a Labour MP this week. Tory/BXP vote hardly shifted. Would love to know more about this.

— Daniel Trilling (@trillingual) December 14, 2019

now that is interesting