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

my mum was right all along!

There are already existing threads for giving patriotism a kicking but the question is "who are you reclaiming it for?" I feel like anybody whose primary political motivation is patriotism, especially in a state as rotten with murderous colonialism as the UK, is not a cause worth pursuing.

This is true but I can understand why politicians on the left who are consistently told their policy platform is unpatriotic might want to turn that around and suggest that solidarity, fighting back against atomisation and collective action for the common good are actually much more in line with ‘British values ‘ or whatever, than dismantling society while waving a little flag. I don’t think it’s a great idea or going to be effective but it’s not necessarily evidence she’s triangulating to win over diehard racists, as Nandy is.

it still feels like a blunder to me. You can allude to community cohesion or whatever without playing to whatever shit the right wing media throw at you. You are on a slippery slope when you frame your campaign around whatever shit they are going to throw at you imo

I agree, though I don’t think this was intended to be the main thrust of the campaign and there is some mischief involved on the part of The Guardian and others in framing it that way.

It's going on a drunken rampage when England win in the football, daubing St George's flags on the homes of migrants - but only when the women's team win

— Dan Hancox (@danhancox) December 30, 2019

lool, dan otm!

agree with you SV about the motivation behind this, but it's clumsily done. as comrade alph said that doesn't really matter at this point in the process. gutter press gonna gutter.

it's necessary to have a response to "you hate us for our freedoms" but i wouldn't wrap a flag around policies

My inkling would be to try pushing local, civic or social pride over national pride where pride is something you can elucidate with evidence (positive stories from the area you represent).

The idea of 'Britain' is nonsensical in 2020 anyway.

Apart from the usual Orange headbangers in NI and Scotland no-one knows or cares what it means.

Was just gs-ing it and Biden was hawking about the same expression back in April _(´ཀ`」 ∠)_

municipal pride ftw

The idea of Britain might be nonsensical but the idea of things being ‘un-British’ is still potent. It’s not just (or even particularly) the right-wing conception of Britishness that needs to be addressed, it’s the pervasive idea that the national character is inherently small-c conservative. I think a lot of the centrist hostility to Corbyn, which more than anything else was also reflected in stuff like the BBC coverage, stemmed from the belief that the British have essentially agreed that ideology is dead. The Thatcher / Blair model of neoliberalism (which is not seen as an ideology) fits the national character and attempting to do anything else is somewhere on a spectrum between silly and dangerous. I don’t think RLB has approached it in the right way but whoever wins probably has to do something to situate left-wing politics as congruent with Britishness, however nebulous and dangerous that term might be.

I’m not 100% sure that municipal pride get you over many of the barriers.

maybe not but towns and cities might be the only counterbalance we’ve got to 10 more years of tory policies

clive lewis apparently saying corbyn should have backed remain

Clive Lewis says a lot of things

however we try to reassemble the wreckage i don't think Labour will come out worse from not going full FBPE

Clive Dunn(ce)

I often get strong Lance-Corporal Jones vibes off Clive

municipal pride ftw

The thing fascinating me most about visiting the US last year was the amount of US flags everywhere (homes and businesses alike at least) followed by Packers flags/banners (I was in smalltown Wisconsin) in second. I wanted less of those and more state flags (noticed none).

I think I hate municipal pride more than I hate national pride tbh.

not sure States Pride would be a thing you'd wanna see more of in the US

just wanna see more old fashioned pictures of animals around generally

Is there not an extent to which this is what Billy Bragg's been trying to make happen for a few decades?

England not Britain iirc

pretty explicity stated he wasn't looking for a new England

Whereas William Bennett...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Britain_(album)

pretty sure Bennett now feels comfortable joining the Conservative party

Seems par for the course for a middle aged antique dealer.

I must have got the lyrics wrong - I always thought that Bragg song's narrator was an ageing predatory paedophile complaining that he can't get away with hanging outside schools any more!

ShariVari OTM about the notion of being 'un-British' - although I might expand that to include 'anti-British'. It's one of the right's favoured attack lines and needs to be closed off as much as possible. Corbyn walked straight into that time and time again - we saw that in the Hamas 'friends' interview before he was even elected leader, he had no response other than over-explaining and getting tetchy and he never really managed to counter those kinds of arguments against them. And they were used time and time again - the Salisbury poisonings, oil tankers, Iran - he made it too easy for his opponents to paint him as taking the side of a nefarious foreign power over Britain. It doesn't matter that he was in the right on some of those occasions, as an attack line it worked. One of the issues with Corbyn's Labour was its inability to pick its battles and these were not hills to die on. And when it came to Brexit, too many of the people whose votes and trust he needed weren't prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

So there's a question of how Labour is supposed to win an election in *highly* jingoistic times without joining in that jingoism. Which leads me onto RLB...

This isn't a good article, it reads like too many of the vacuous, over-spin doctered pieces from various Labour right figures over the years. It feels like her team felt so confident of winning the membership vote that they could pitch directly to the country before winning the membership round, and I wouldn't be so sure about that. She's presumably had years to hone her leadership pitch and should have had more to offer than this cobblers.

TLDR I think she's fucked it.

I wouldn't go that far, she's still got how bad the competition is on her side.

From now on whenever RLB makes a misstep I'm just going to blame it all on Rayner, cos she is the one with the suspect voting record etc!

We’ll see how the debates go.

this is depressing and we haven't started yet

so much dirt on brylcreem boy from his cps days. Was looking earlier at how he's in the doghouse with rape support groups for fuckery towards legislation that meant less expert barristers on rape cases.

he's an utterly rotten character to the core, whose done a good job of keeping a low profile for the last couple of years.

he's the main competition - so that is a problem for the melts.

for me he's in the wrong party. And I can't see him winning over the membership either.

The second preferences are going to be unpredictable. RLB or bust still likely means having to pick the least worst alternative.

I'm not sure if I'm not getting the joke, but I didn't mean A New England, which was four decades ago. I meant stuff like England, Half-English, or y'know, his book "The Progressive Patriot".

I mean, I think this angle from RLB is soft-headed, but I don't know if it's nefarious, and it's not new.

yeah that Bragg book has been ripped to pieces on these pages before, he's a total Paul Mason style dolt iirc.

I'm just shoehorning Gapesy onto my ballot as my 2nd pref

"And when it came to Brexit, too many of the people whose votes and trust he needed weren't prepared to" ..vote for his 2nd ref policy basically. That obv did more damage in the lost marginals than him not being good at doing the standard bullshit hardman act whenever the UK got entangled in messy events involving other countries.

As I said, England not Britain iirc

I think Bragg was voting/stanning for the LibDems back in his progressive days.

what is the political make-up of the half million or so membership? I know there was a lot of 2nd ref pressure coming from a section of them, but are they all really buying into a candidate who was part of the reason Corbynism happened? It's all very well him paying lip service to anti-austerity now, but history shows he goes with the wind and basically has a right wing core. Just basically Yvette Cooper again.

Cooper afaict has made no concessions to the left / being wrong. Starmer’s positioning so far has been substantially to the left of the anyone who ran last time, other than Corbyn. He may not believe it, idk, but he seems to recognise that you can’t just have a return to Rachel Reeves et al hammering the Tories from the right. The key thing will be how much power / decision-making would be decentralised to the membership under the various leaders, though.

He has to put on this charade though SV, his track record is not good and there won't be much scrutiny from the press who probably love him. Even Thornberry was criticising his conduct as DPP at the time, that is pretty damning for someone trying to convince members he is going to pursue anything more radical than a lukewarm centre-left agenda.

when I say they love him, they will much more than RLB obv

my brain is melting right now, but not my heartfelt belief that he is rotten to the core and would be a disaster for the party.

I can remember Owen Smith making similar noises about his socialism with about as much credibility.