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

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

roll out the preston model

we'll have a barrel of fun

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

― mark s, Saturday, 14 December 2019 bookmarkflaglink

Yeah but the bit at the end where the Lab canvasser says that another world is possible and this young voter fraud immediately connects with it was a good ending (maybe too good)...its like the canvasser is performing the role of the music press #backintheday

the rodent on the nand:

The thing here is, Nandy isn’t even wrong - there is a huge disconnect. The problem with it is that she has no ideas that can repair it or even any actual demands that could be met even if we wanted to try, except for “Put me and my mates in charge”. https://t.co/AH7KF98Xpi

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) December 14, 2019

plus a good owen hatherley glossing same:

exactly: you can't do this by 'being more racist and patriotic on TV' because even aside of it being immoral it will be incredibly shallow and collapse again, you can only do this by rebuilding an entire infrastructure of unions and clubs and chapels https://t.co/BWVuXxpVHm

— Owen Hatherley (@owenhatherley) December 14, 2019

("glossing same" -- hark at my facility with the vernacular of the back-to-backs eh)

How do you even begin that process with the Tories in charge, is the question. Local government has been hacked to the bone already and other institutions that might enable that kind of grassroots engagement have withered.

Preston and Blackburn both went Labour, Burnley Conservative - but neither Preston or Blackburn have 'surrounding areas' within their borders. Burnley does

Also Preston is super connected, and not a 'left behind' town like Blackpool. Blackpool South went Tory and has 8 of the 10 most deprived locales in England within its borders. Preston is a bit like a mini city rather than a big town

My sole experience of Burnley was when I was in a pub there once, waiting for a train, and a bunch of guys asked one of the guys I was with which football team he supported and he stupidly replied, Celtic (ironically as he wasn't even a football fan) and next thing it was, "Fenian bastards" etc. We made our excuses and left.

Burnley is the quintessential last stop on the line town!

Time to look to the lol 19th century.

This is an ok at times reflection on Wales. Similarly to Ward Fowler's post it speaks of the long term failures from Welsh Lab.

https://medium.com/@DrDanEvans/reflections-from-the-doorstep-e4337513d909

"With Ford soon to close, the last vestiges of traditional industry will leave Bridgend, and the world of work will increasingly soon look exclusively like this- couriers, callcentres, warehouse workers. Zero hours contracts, unsociable shift work, no trade union presence, no camaraderie with work colleagues."

"We have to strive to find ways to connect to workers in industries in which they are encouraged to act like ‘self-employed’ entrepreneurs, with all the ideological baggage that comes with that pernicious term, and articulate a language of class conflict which overcomes these atomized working conditions."

19th century for lessons on what people in isolated areas might have done to build a community/class consciousness for places smaller than Preston.

To answer Matt I think a lot of Lab councils are just utter garbage. I don't think they attempt to do a thing that is outside of the council, and in Lambeth they are totally coasting new Lab types that don't even try to do anything for people who need it the most. I don't have the answers but I know this won't do.

Any serious approach to turning this situation around has to begin with questions like how you go about creating decent jobs in places like Bolsover. It's a hugely challenging question but one Labour needs to be seen to be engaging with. The Tory majorities in a lot of these new seats are slender and they can be won back but there needs to be engagement in good faith.

How do you even begin that process with the Tories in charge, is the question. Local government has been hacked to the bone already and other institutions that might enable that kind of grassroots engagement have withered.

― Matt DC, Saturday, 14 December 2019 13:43 (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is something I've thought about for a long time now, but I look at the approach of say Lambeth council where I lived for years which, despite having infinitely more wiggle room than other more marginal councils, had given prominent roles to blank blairite careerists and seemed determined in its pursuit of a 'realism' that in effect simply pitted it against residents. I'm not sure how much of this can be attributed to the fallout of lefties crushed by the aftermath of Foot, but a comparison of the kinds of opposition put up by Lambeth in the 1980s compared with its current incarnation leaves me with enough unease on this question to make me genuinely concerned about what the fallout of this might end up being.

One thing is clear from this vote and many others is that what people embrace in the aftermath of a crisis has little to do with a good clear analysis of what went wrong and what could counter this, it is easy to imagine the bromides of a Nandyish approach of draping everything in st george's flags will be accepted by more people than many of us are willing to accept now. I couldn't have easily accepted how many people would have accepted what they've embraced in this election until it actually happened. Its not obvious to me that the immigration mug approach which was burgeoning prior to Corbyn's election as leader will definitely not be allowed to fully flower as it threatened to when championed by say cooper, kinnock and director of the v&a.

James Butler in one of his LRB blogs, which I think have been one of the more readable commentaries throughout the last few months, made a point that really alarmed me when I read it. He pointed out how demands such as the minimum wage and 5 day working week had come from below and forced their way up from grassroots support and organising into mainstream politics. By contrast, nobody believes in change anymore and idealism has become something that central party cooks up with think tanks, fully costs and then has to sell to an already bruised electorate that no longer believes it even deserves something better or what that might look like. I know these points have been made elsewhere in this thread but I think inversion of this model as intimated in this argument really does get at what the terrible challenge to grassroots organising that the party faces.

lol everyone hates lambeth council