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

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.

Didn't Liverpool have quite a militant council in the 80s though?

well yes, in Yorkshire we just had the standard rotten councils

someone was making the point earlier that in these northern marginals that went blue, there is a common theme of rotten Labour councils that are silent about "difficult decisions" imposed by austerity and just generally being useless/corrupt + corroding trust in Labour

as led by derek hatton, liverpool's council was famously a militant stronghold, impishly refusing to knuckle down under tory budgetary strictures until -- eventually -- broken. tho i don't think all the councillors were militant, and actually vaguely recall it was a coalition of various flavours of labour?

neil kinnock's much-overquoted "grotesque chaos of a labour council -- a LABOUR council" speech was NK refusing to line up behind them: a moment still emblematic of whatever anyone citing it wants it to be emblematic of, great or terrible (my unhelpful two cents: the council played an impossible hand quite badly, not least bcz a little hatton went a very long way, bastani-style; none of kinnock's refusals of solidarity did him the slightest good electorally)

i've been wondering though if this turmoil did actually shake things up enough that -- in having to rebuild afterwards -- they were able to end-run the pervasive rotten borough problem elsewhere? or was it an effect of the reneneration after the riots?

the more I read the more those councils have a lot to answer for. It's like a delayed version of what happened with Scotland

xp not liverpool, the shit ones

Trying to think of high profile fights between labour councils and MPs in recent years. Only Lammy and Kober comes to mind....

Two other factors: Hillsborough probably kick-started a deep seated hatred of the establishment (and police) and sections of the right-wing press. And the other one is that it's more of a city.

Sheffield Hallam elected a (very good by the sounds of it) candidate to replace O'Mara. But that's a uni area..

But yes it's that kind of resistance -- with all its faults -- that I think will be part of what's needed. Showing people you care.

Reading about Northampton, Barnet, and there is room for it..

sheffield council* was also excellently bolshy in the 80s, refusing for a long time to set a rate for the council: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_South_Yorkshire

*(interestingly its leader was david blunkett, subsequently a notoriously authoritarian home secretary under blair)

handily dan davies just retweeted his 2016 "rotten boroughs" thread:

How did Labour lose the Valleys? (And Sunderland, Glasgow etc). A short tweetstorm follows, the precis of which might be....(1/n)

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) September 6, 2016

(enragingly one of its first respondents uses my least favourite reply-guy phrase: "spot on")

Got an email inviting me to a “celebration of the results” sadlol

I mean our mp did get re-elected but that wording is funny, it’ll probably feel like a funeral. The later email from Zeichner himself framed it more tactfully as a party to thank us for all our hard work blah blah

Central London bleak as fuck today. Passed around CHX and it’s just tents as far as the eye can see on the back streets. All the crowds rushing past without a sideways look as well. Just the absolute worst. Know it’s always like that but just the lights, the sparkle, and endless flimsy tents - it’s obscene.

this is good, a left sociologist door-knocking: https://medium.com/@DrDanEvans/reflections-from-the-doorstep-e4337513d909

@dai_alectic -- good work there lol

Not going to link but I see a centrist music writer formerly On Here has shat out A Take On Why Corbyn Lost. Don’t bother reading it, you’ll only annoy yourself.

v disappointed in geir tbh

FYI that was probably mostly written before the results were known!

Can really do without London writers takes on places they know nothing about and will never go to, never mind live

'Pregnant women died after fears Tory crackdown on mythical health tourism would bankrupt them, report delayed until after election reveals'#BorisJohnsonPMhttps://t.co/3fDku0KoxT

— potluck miscreant 🍲🍀👺 (@BinAnimals) December 14, 2019

That Dan Evans piece is great and crushing

Full text of the Conservative Party's plan for economic migration to the UK after Brexit, as privately circulated to journalists last week https://t.co/NUBnv6XgYb

— Free Movement (@freemovementlaw) December 13, 2019

Another one on shit Lab councils councils:

Final thoughts - before I walk into the sea - about Labour councils and councillors. The huge Corbyn inspired revival of socialism has been heartening, and there are too many of us not to triumph eventually. But some of our focus has been in the wrong direction 1/14

— Jimmy Byrne (@nomatestype) December 13, 2019

Dan Evans piece was good and tbh...there is work to be done there so not all crushing

FYI that was probably mostly written before the results were known!

Love too simultaneously bang on about The Cult of the Leader and insist that the majority of Labour’s problems could be solved with the right hardman.

Now I’m afraid of my kidneys failing

My knowledge of it being ‘hot take written before the results were known’ is DEFINITELY a criticism, let’s just be clear. Zing from Vice published a parody of instant election hot takes before the result, and it’s worth a look.

I’m at the “party”, there are about 5 ppl here so far and nobody is talking lol. I went straight for the free booze

I got the invite for that too but I won't be joining sorry :(

xp that’s what I thought, sorry if snappy (I just hate these brain dead takes)

On this theme of rotten Labour councils etc.. A couple of years ago I went to a meeting at my son's special school about cuts to transport funding and disabled services. The local Labour council guy was sat right in front of me and ended up moving a few seats away cos he knew I was planning to garrote him. There was a woman whose husband had recently died and her autistic grandson would refuse to get on a bus without him and have a meltdown if she tried to bring him on the bus, and she was being told perhaps her transport provision was "non-essential". This cunt from the council didn't once say that their hand is forced by central government spending cuts and I kept pressing this matter with him and all he could say is "this is what we have to work with, deal" basically. Such an arrogant, cold, condescending piece of shit and the lady I was talking about was in tears. I would wager this Labour council fellow hadn't probably voted Labour since at least 2005. His attitude was glaringly Tory to the core. I fucking despise these people.

I got the invite for that too but I won't be joining sorry :(

A lot of representatives at local/national level are not there for honest reasons and doing a job they’re blatantly not suited for. A lot of the MPs parachuted into areas they had no connection with the people who actually lived there were a colossal waste of time and you have to look back at the selection decisions and think, why? So many people in the party where you do see, why are you in Labour?!

John Woodcock in Barrow and Furness is a prime example- straight from university into politics, spent his time in office gladhanding with various dodgy regimes. Spent the last few years lashing out in the press. What did he have to say to a constituency with the 44th most deprived wards in the country? Just treating the electorate with utter contempt.

_I got the invite for that too but I won't be joining sorry :(_


Ah would’ve been nice to see you again 🙂 it livened up once more ppl arrived and I’m feeling a lot more positive, ppl are energetic and focused and have a good sense of what we got wrong nationally. I guess I must have a chip on my shoulder about my hometown cause I always expect a smug complacence to be the baseline. Only potential yikes moment was when I was having a nice chat with a woman and she said “the manifesto fudged certain women’s issues” in such a way as to make me nervous and just go “mmm” and change the subject but again might just be me being a cunt

interesting abt the Labour councils thing

obviously the plight of Oxford is a long way from what we're talking about but I've def had conversations along the lines of "you're telling me a Labour govt will be less moneygrubbing and corrupt than a Tory one, but <long list of things the city council has done which are bad>"

(the bugbears I hear mainly centre around a lot of ill-thought-through transport redesigns or high commercial rents squeezing out anything other than identikit tourist shops, but they did knock down a block of accommodation for the homeless to get cash from developers to build flats instead and haven't got round to building the promised replacement accommodation yet iirc, so that's not a very good advert, esp when the flats haven't been built yet either and there was just a gaping hole and some rubble last time I went past)

Lol: ‘The Liberal Democrat message that “Jo Swinson could be the next prime minister” was one of the worst performing messages we have tested anywhere in Europe.’

— Richard Ensor (@richardjensor) December 14, 2019

This is a good thread, there's also an issue of ppl getting treated really badly by the council, and also councillors & council leaders have a massive reputation for lining their pockets

— ESOLallstars (@ESOLallstars) December 14, 2019

The comments at the bottom of a good-ish thread on councils. I think Lab could make a start on stopping the rot by going after these shitty councillors.

I am feeling more hopeless now than I did on Thursday night, just going to the guardian and seeing all the articles from told-you-so pricks, the ones which are supposed to be hopeful are the worst.

Tony Blair won because he was charismatic and he had murdoch behind him, at least at first. Think that is literally all it takes to win an election.

Those guys have had those takes sitting on ice for two years.

So basically we're going to have a Brit version of ICE

New department for borders and immigration, separate from the Home Office, is mooted in Sunday Times splash, among other machinery of government changes pic.twitter.com/42S2VgE2Q8

— Sunder Katwala (@sundersays) December 14, 2019