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

Joe Kennedy has some takes

Massively important uncomfortable truth here. Milbank and those clowns imagine LS Lowry landscapes in need of a little Arnoldian cultural steering; this is not what they would find should they actually deign to *visit* Leftbehindland. https://t.co/NWDSP7RjaK

— Joe Kennedy (@joekennedy81) December 15, 2019

Folger's incest commercial was shot there

Joe Kennedy otm, can't even walk to Aldi round here without chancing a gauntlet of steroidal cokefiends casually fucking and voting Tory. and that's just the pensioners.

yougov poll for the most popular Labour politicians in the UK

former ilxor tom ewing -- whose job involves analysing nonsense like this --posted it on twitter: as he said, this is entirely irrelevant to choice of leadership, but extremely 👀 👀 👀 👀 👀 👀 just in flat content

Many xps but in all seriousness, Johnson can probably be fairly bullish about trade deals with India and China. May wrecked the relationship with the former- if Johnson can get the study visa and skilled migration bit right, it’s salvageable. The Chinese elite has more money parked here than anyone realises and is unlikely to want to rock the boat.

The big potential spanner in the works with China, as with the EU deal, is the US.

xp

all of the top 5 seem explicable except perhaps Broon

LOL Vernon Coaker

Balls was on Strictly Come Dancing or something. Blunkett is the really odd one, but I guess he kept up his tabloid column?

i know nothing matters anymore but this still seems like a pretty big deal, no?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson-russia-report-brexit-interference-general-election-release-a9248446.html

Blunkett - tabloid presence plus vestige of Tru Lab integrity cosplay plus patronising struggle against adversity soft disablism

luv2murder a million iraqis and still have 20% of the nation think i'm cool

i know nothing matters anymore but this still seems like a pretty big deal, no?

gonna go out on a limb here and suggest 'no'

xp

all of the top 5 seem explicable except perhaps Broon

luv2murder a million iraqis and still have 20% of the nation think i'm cool

^^^ and that, in brief, is part of the near-insurmountable fuckery of UK politics

Kate Hoey more popular than big John? LOL OK

They’d be fools to run Sadiq. His coverage would make Corbyn’s look like Cameron’s pre-16.

i would imagine that Sadiq's popularity is pretty London-centric

Find it hilarious that Corbs is still more popular than the king over the water

Interesting gender divide on some of these. Corbyn & Khan more popular with women, Johnson and Blair more do with men.

they both play to versions of deluded toxic masculinity

This social conservatism thing is nonsense, as we know. People saying this are getting mixed up with decisiveness and clarity. There is nothing inherently conservative about this, people just like to know where they are and what we're going to do, and dislike unnecessary prevarication.

It doesn't need to be cartoon hardhat performativity, it just needs to be clear. This can be done in any number of ways

blair at 21st place with boomers but fourth with gen x and fifth with millennials

what the fuck

the fuck is that a popularity chart is essentially nonsense

tony bliar we need u now more than ever

boomers left or right were always generally p suspicious of blair, he only picks up the tail-end of the long tail really

also what NV said, vernon coaker shd be at 87 at least

blair at 21st place with boomers but fourth with gen x and fifth with millennials

what the fuck

You have to ask why Blair is popular with Gen X? Gen X are the melts you know who tell you he won three elections bla bla bla.

i know, i'm one of them! just kinda shocked and depressed that people my age who lived through the entirety of the run-up to iraq and afghanistan and the subsequent two decades of carnage could look back and think 'yeah tony wasn't so bad i s'pose' xp

Many xps but in all seriousness, Johnson can probably be fairly bullish about trade deals with India and China. May wrecked the relationship with the former- if Johnson can get the study visa and skilled migration bit right, it’s salvageable. The Chinese elite has more money parked here than anyone realises and is unlikely to want to rock the boat.

The big potential spanner in the works with China, as with the EU deal, is the US.

― Srinivasaraghavan VONCataraghavan (ShariVari), Monday, 16 December 2019 bookmarkflaglink

He has attracted the racists that want no foreigners whatsoever. I'm not really sure he has the skill to sell it to the public. The media will help him all the way here though.

Be interesting to see what the atmosphere is like for foreign students for the next few years and whether they would want to keep coming.

Might be easier for China and India to take English academics lol. A brain drain is a possibility. It could sink a lot of universities and plunge cities associated to them further into the ground.

but then i always forget that people don't pay as attention to politics as us maniacs

i have a v depressing story about that from the weekend if anyone cares to hear it

Hearing from a couple of sources this afternoon that old friends Rebecca L-B and Angela Rayner have agreed between them that L-B will stand for leader, and Rayner as deputy. Not confirmed...

— Heather Stewart (@GuardianHeather) December 16, 2019

As long as it ends with lol we're going to die then sure why not xp

RLB should be shadow chancellor, if anything.

Please give this woman a shadow cab job.

Warrington North’s new MP @charlotte2153 says she’s not going to apologise for saying Lazio supporters doing Nazi salutes should “get their heads kicked in”. Says “sometimes fascism needs to be physically confronted”. I asked about the abuse she’s had in the campaign too: pic.twitter.com/gmvt56LBje

— Phil McCann (@phi1mccann) December 16, 2019

Rayner was an abstainer on the welfare bill vote.. just saying.

As long as it ends with lol we're going to die then sure why not xp

i mentioned upthread that my insanely rightwing father-in-law was staying with us last week along with my mother-in-law

on saturday we went out for lunch and i ended up staying in the car for a bit while my they and my wife went ahead, because my daughter had fallen asleep on the journey

both in-laws had been pretty quiet following the election result, correctly feeling that my wife and i were extremely upset

m-i-l broached the subject and said that she hoped we could get over it soon, because 'it's not like anyone died', at which my wife fucking lost it and explained that actually 130,000 people were dead because of austerity, and that the country had ended up with vastly more debt despite it, food bank usage had gone though the roof - all the classic reasons why tory government has been bad not good

both in-laws were genuinely shocked that a) my wife had these facts immediately ready to reel off and that b) they were true, and they were flustered and embarrassed and unable to mount a defence even on the scale of 'well croybn would force us to share toothbrushes if he got in'

just completely unexamined, kneejerk support for the tories that collapses at the most basic scrutiny, but nonetheless i'm sure it won't affect how they vote at the next opportunity

lol we're all gonna die

He has attracted the racists that want no foreigners whatsoever. I'm not really sure he has the skill to sell it to the public. The media will help him all the way here though.

Be interesting to see what the atmosphere is like for foreign students for the next few years and whether they would want to keep coming.

Might be easier for China and India to take English academics lol. A brain drain is a possibility. It could sink a lot of universities and plunge cities associated to them further into the ground.

I am not sure Johnson really needs to sell much to the public other than the idea of a tougher points-based system letting in the ‘best and brightest’. The U.K. finance and tech industries - or any industries that need computers to make them work - will likely always require immigration from India. I’d imagine the vast, vast majority of those jobs are going to be in Labour-held metro areas.

iirc, despite May’s insistence that they be treated like criminals, foreign students are have generally polled positively -even with Conservative voters. The weird thing is that, even in the toxic atmosphere of the last ten years, student numbers have gone up. What’s been lost is diversity though - the volumes from India, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc, collapsed but were completely offset by more students from China. I wouldn’t be surprised to see China continue to grow (barring the kind of nascent Sinophobic red scare you are starting to see in the US happening here), with a decline in EU students offset by more Indians.

I’ve met a few U.K. academics at Chinese universities and it doesn’t sound a barrel of laughs, tbh. Branch campuses of U.K. universities in China, for sure, though. A brain drain to the US, Australia, Gulf, Singapore, etc, seems inevitable too.

I guess they’re thinking about their younger years when

Please give this woman a shadow cab job.

🐦[Warrington North’s new MP @charlotte2153🕸 says she’s not going to apologise for saying Lazio supporters doing Nazi salutes should “get their heads kicked in”. Says “sometimes fascism needs to be physically confronted”. I asked about the abuse she’s had in the campaign too: pic.twitter.com/gmvt56LBje🕸
— Phil McCann (@phi1mccann) December 16, 2019🕸]🐦

Finance will be in metro areas but tech for companies might be more spread around into grubby business parks in leave areas. I think it's about the discourse more than anything else and how that goes down with people who watch it from a distance.

"iirc, despite May’s insistence that they be treated like criminals, foreign students are have generally polled positively -even with Conservative voters"

Do wonder if that will keep going in the current atmosphere, red scare or not. Not so much Johnson but the people around him. xp

OMG gyac, she’s THAT Charlotte. Love her, hate her trolls.

ikr? I stan. Her and Nadia in the new intake ❤️

And Zarah Sultana as well, had so much shit thrown at her in the runup

"As a working-class Muslim woman, I feel the threats posed by a resurgent hard-right Tory party.

But our movement has before, & will again, beat the forces of hate, division & austerity. The response to injustice is & always will be socialism."

My acceptance speech last night👇🏽 pic.twitter.com/uVH5yzQGP3

— Zarah Sultana (@zarahsultana) December 13, 2019

did we talk about this last night? basically exactly the kind of shit you would expect

We are very far from being perfect at ⁦@BBCNews⁩ — but the bilge about ‘bias’ needs a response. @"GE19 - from the presenter's chair "https://t.co/aVQiGb27KU on @LinkedIn

— Huw Edwards (@huwbbc) December 15, 2019

lol linkedin

Tim Farron has told the BBC that he won’t be standing for the Liberal Democrat eadership. He held the post between 2015 and 2017, but told the BBC that if he were asked to do it again, the answer would be a “definite, definite no”.

didn't realise this dude was still an mp tbqh

I'm also a no

tbh i think farronism was never given the chance to fully blossom, let's bring the milk-loving homophobe back and give the libdems the leadership they so richly deserve

i'm a yes, we have little enough to chuckle at currently

been discussed at party hq and apparently the chairman of the board said give me just a little more tim

Huw Edwards doesn't address any of the specific charges only answers in generalities. This is because is he isn't very good, and probably worthless (though in the interests of balance I should point out I've no idea who he is and didn't read his article)

Just one of the absolute best threads on twitter ever and certainly the best stuff ever written about Tim Farron

pic.twitter.com/fjD8z6J46L

— ian ‘join labour’ mighty (@iammightor) February 3, 2017