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

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

Local government has been hacked to the bone already and other institutions that might enable that kind of grassroots engagement have withered.

Shit anecdote time: got invited to a kid's birthday party recently, held in a largely forgotten local bowling club hidden behind rows of houses. The place was amazing - had its own bar, its own dancefloor, loads of outside space. It was utterly 1970s and unwelcoming for anybody below 50, mind — you could tell it was the place where the committee meets monthly and people raise points of order that are duly minuted etc etc, but I was still quite taken at the possibility of a space and environment like that, if properly aimed at millennial purposes.

It's like said upthread, there's a third generation here now that hasn't really had contact with third-space social spaces and institutions, and so the older ones are withering and nothing new is coming along. But the same needs of community, connection and support exist, so the opportunity seems pretty ripe for modern versions of some of these institutions.

The conditions have never been better (in the depressing sense): lots of very cheap high street and local property is on the market for buttons, people are looking for new centres of gravity, demand for social help is high, oppressive government is rising — this is fertile ground for organising.

(Many XPs — and the other thing about institutions like this is they become the feeder routes for local councillors; that's how you start to tackle that shitshow)

xp to matt way up re "what is to be done?" (©lenin lol):

as owen hatherley says, nobody knows how to do this. it's one of the big things the left has been wrestling with since at least the 70s (the era of the so-called "great downturn" viz of the class struggle as then understood). the trot solution was (literally) to turn to students (and young ppl generally) to bulk up the falling rolls, but this only exacerbated the gulf to be honest (tho if even recognised at the time this effect was largely waved away). and trhen a significant sector of the youth semi-recruited at that point -- via rock against racism or whatever -- have ended up comfortably self-gentrified and a long way distant from the (cultural or economic) straits some of them genuinely battled their way out of. nu-lab's approach coincided with many of these same ppl achieving mid-level footholds in the relevant reaches of the media, which seems to have operated since as the worst echo chamber in terms of belief in a personal change that isn't actually a general change, quite the opposite.

(this was roughly my argt when hatherley did a Q&A with me abt the book and point-blank asked "why did so many of yr old pals end up the worst centrist-dad melts?" -- that it's extremely hard to adapt to the realisation that it's the partial success of yr well meant utopian project that can end up working hardest against the next step… )

momentum feels like it tripled down on the "mobilise the kids" approach in 2017 and 2019, meaning students and the young urban precariat -- but by its nature GOTV is (kliche klaxon) a sprint not a marathon and the entire geography everything is playing out on is now punishingly tough. hence i think the backlash right now (from melt twerps but also, more thoughtfully, from ppl who actually themselves put the work in: http://www.edmundgriffiths.com/greatleap.html): it's the beginning of an acknowledgment of how much else was needed, that was skimped, that there genuinely wasn't time or headspace for, that the corbz faction were never in fact in a position even to begin to think abt thinking abt -- but that (given how the 80s version turned out in the 90s, which several senior figures lived thru) there was nevertheless not so much excuse for not thinking abt…

i mean in a sense the concluding advice of the outgoing leadership shd be echoing david steel in 1981 and saying "go back to your constituencies, and prepare for government!" -- but beyond boiling centrist piss one last time this merely puts a colossal interpretive weight on what the word "prepare" entails. it means "build a world from scratch (ps time is running out)" but it also requires the details to be filled in, and it turns out we need them to have been filled already

(the "rock" bit of "rock against racism" had already priced in a generational divide -- which in retrospect was exactly the issue that needed addressing, but was instead being end-run)

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.

Its worth pointing out however that getting misty-eyed about "grassroots" purity also misrecognises the more complex social and institutional factors that fed into say setting up the NHS, getting overly sentimental in this way is another red-herring.

Anyway, its incredibly disheartening to wake up to "the long slog" narrative of virtuous ascension to power having so recently witnessed firsthand how successful dishonest opportunism works. Why can we be sure in the end that the thing we'll have been striving for will still exists, such is the future that has just been written for us. I'll stop posting, I don't want to spread this negativity. I haven't walked the dog.

Every now and again it feels like my brain refreshes on the bbc news front page to see the exit poll headline again for the first time.

The dishonest opportunism works because it has the ground already prepared for it and a receptive media, is the horrifying thing. Hence the return of the long slog, I guess.

Yep, the idea that Labour should become more like Hamas build from the ground up by filling the gaps in community / social services may be true, as far as it’s possible, but it also feels like an abdication, in certain quarters, of the need to set out a coherent national agenda and international outlook. You can maybe win trust and gratitude at a local level but you’re still going to need to take a position on the environment, foreign policy, taxation, spending, etc, etc, and if Aditya et al are so down on the last manifesto, they’re going to need to outline what they would change,

right, there's a big difference between eg local communities commandeering employee benefits and a national program of universal healthcare. Not least the fact that one establishes a single market and almost total monopoly market which is hugely consequential as should be evident when one considers the implications of the monopoly busting that the US trade deal would bring about. Local networks and institutions have a more complex relationship to national politics than a parent-child flowchart and this is mangled by splitting it into false binaries between local and national politics that come to fetishise one or the other.

Is anybody saying that, though? The point I hear most is you need both. Especially from Mark’s link, which is saying that Corbynism vaulted over the local work to create a national agenda that in the end turned out to have insufficient local support.

Yup agree. The work in local communities should feed up to the agenda that can be set at national level too.

Former lab MP staff thinking he is entitled to a job.

I don't want your pride @jeremycorbyn. Because of you I'm unemployed and, worse than that, the country now has at least five years of a right wing government pushing through a reckless Brexit. So well done. Now just go. pic.twitter.com/v0oTdg7bRo

— Jordan Hall (@jordanBhall) December 14, 2019

i’ve heard of people running food banks thinking about voting tory. we struggled to convince some nhs workers, it’s unbelievable how big the disconnect is, so yeah i think it’s essential it’s party affiliated

— don’t give up (@multiplebears) December 14, 2019

He knows..

"I've done my bit, we need to move on"

Labour's John McDonnell confirms he won't be part of the next shadow cabinet, following the party's defeat at #GE2019https://t.co/pdSgd90ZUL pic.twitter.com/ghQmUDOj8m

— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) December 14, 2019

fuck it mask off

Damian Green Tory MP saying on @lbc that we all need to start paying towards an insurance type system to pay for our care.

And there it is.

That is what we are going to get.#GeneralElection

— Dr. Mike (@EmergMedDr) December 13, 2019

mask off, but Green hasn't taken his latex wanking gloves off yet

Social care. Important distinction. They just didn’t put it in their manifesto like May did.

Former work and pensions minister Damian Green has called for an insurance-based system of social care.

— Adam S. Business Owner,Anti-Brexit Campaigner#FBPE (@Adam_SH69) December 14, 2019

probably a wise move! I thought Green was supposed to be one of the moderates - not heard him ripping into the NHS before.

"moderates" I meant

Yep, the tories will be waving the Labour manifesto and saying "Here's what the people voted against! Here's what they don't want!"

Social care is just so bleakly on the nose considering it’s going to affect their voters.

tory boy Bamford on for a hattrick for Leeds Utd today.

Social care is just so bleakly on the nose considering it’s going to affect their voters.

some fine long posting on this thread today folks.

yeah, great work folks, as much as i wish it wasn’t required - a lot of stuff to think about

I wish Yorkshire could be more like Merseyside who are a credit to the North, but alas it is a hive of fucking beetroot faced bigots and inbred tory/farage loving scum. So fucking depressing when these muppets vote for the cunts that annihilated their industries and then spent decades demonising them as lazy feckless scroungers.