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

I was thinking with some horror that maybe a lot of the younger "trot entryists" of '16 are turning into melts now - history has shown (80's radicals turning into risible Blairite arsewipes in the 90's) they usually do but not so rapidly ffs!

Sad history of political parties is they tend to bend the membership to their pattern rather than the membership reshaping the party

I've said it before on here but the two Corbynista types I personally know were largely apolitical before Corbyn, I've always suspected they might end up following some other craze. One of them I recently blocked on Facebook following an argument about some replacement theory tinged bollocks he posted. The other one is now claiming to have found the personality cult around Corbyn distasteful!

I was largely unenthusiastic about politics until Corbyn really. Sure, I vote, and 2016 absolutely crushed me. But I came really late to Corbyn, like 2017 campaign late, and I regret that cos I missed all the earlier stuff! Think it was his speech on terrorism that did it for me, but then most of his foreign policy positions have never been that controversial for an Irish person. His flaws have been much discussed here and everywhere, but he honestly surprised me because I hadn’t ever felt “spoken for” in politics in my life, and now people are characterising him as a demon, so. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Like I mocked this at the time but like

He remembers meeting older Irish men who had come over to London as builders. They talked in minute detail about the villages they were from and where they intended to return. “And they never went back. They kept saying, ‘When I go home’,” he recalls, “both of us knowing full well they’re never going to go home.”

It's profoundly sad or depressing, take your pick, that the best human being to lead a major party in a very long time if not ever has been so vilified and slandered. Yes he had flaws. But the fact of his humanity is something like a miracle in this vile sham.

I can practically picture the Holloway Road post office queues of seandaoine

The Holloway Road Post Office, which is now a B&Q.

My mistake, it was the Seven Sisters one!

"Yes he had flaws. But the fact of his humanity is something like a miracle in this vile sham."

I'm almost literally crying for real here!

Just normal, normal stuff here. Very normal stuff that happened very normally. pic.twitter.com/txnaJYdzAm

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) January 1, 2020

I have always felt that the Swift Boating handed out to Jeremy Corbyn (‘ooh, let’s brand an anti-racist as the very opposite and make it stick’) is one of the most disgusting character assassinations ever visited on a public figure.

the gall of these wankers that tethered the party to this 2nd ref corpse, to blame the defeat on Corbyn just really boils my blood.

My mistake, it was the Seven Sisters one!

New management, fucking horrible now.

be saying the same about the PLP soon enough it seems!

TBF the membership as a majority wanted a Remain option, and did not see how a proposed ratification vote could anger Brexiters, having themselves been asked to ratify their choice of Labour leader in 2016, and gladly going along to vote.

The chicken coup was down to Watson and Benn, btw, not Starmer. Have we heard much from Hilary Benn these past few months?

I thought vast numbers of brexit voters might have stopped giving a fuck and might actually have liked many of the labour policies, but I was wrong as well. I think even McD was pushing for 2nd ref, but these cunts that were behind that pressure that are now blaming Corbyn can stfu - it's mostly on them.

I think the Conservative central government plan of squeezing Labour councils’ funding in the North and the Midlands did A LOT of the Tories’ dirty work for them, plus the incessant ‘traitor’ bullshit in the media.

it's easy to step back with hindsight and look at what a blunder it was, but now it seems they did exactly what Cummings wanted and it played beautifully for the Tories imo

it would have been brave to ditch it before a snap election, but the warning signs were there.

obv it wasn't as hard to understand as the media made out, but it certainly wasn't cutting through in the north!

once the tories quickly and successfully became the party of brexit and taking back control, there was no good option for labour. cummings can't take any credit for that, he just rode that horse home.

suzy that's the thing i keep coming back to, is labour councils trying to operate on 50% of their funding and getting the blame for it. it's a perfectly conceived malevolent policy. it destroys the productive links between local government and voters.

Is this the Finsbury Park PO? The Seven Sister Road one on the northeastern end of the road is my local, but I rarely notice an Irish accent in it.

(sorry for pedantry, gyac otm)

Perhaps could have gone with a "renegotiate the WA and leave on those terms" policy which would have bought time for other options to emerge more organically but it's likely there was no sane winning Brexit policy that wouldn't have damaged the party

xp seven sisters road, I went there a couple of times en route to manor gardens (which is very close to it)

Maybe all the seandaoine have moved on, or “moved on”. I’m talking 6.5 years ago tbf

xxp

for people to frame the defeat around Corbyn rather than the clusterfuck he faced varies from outright disingenuous bullshit to self-interested melt bullshit imo

or the people saying the manifesto was too "hard left" can go take a flying jump as well!

Ah no, that's the other end of the road - PO website thinks it's called 'Holloway'?

You’d think this element would be happy, but they seem even more miserable than ever.

Finsbury Park itself is quite Irish? There used to be someone living just outside the station and their huge Irish flag was one of the first things you saw coming out. The announcer used to have a very Connacht accent that made me smile every time. This is going back to 2009/10 though.

The same things are happening to Labour councils in London but those are being forced to sell assets (mostly property) and raise business rates to paper over the cracks. They have the assets because they’re in London - someplace like Wakefield only has cuts and more cuts. There were shop owners near me voting Tory because the Labour council had raised rates (and rents) so high and these people did not/chose not to understand the reasons they had to do that.

I think the Conservative central government plan of squeezing Labour councils’ funding in the North and the Midlands did A LOT of the Tories’ dirty work for them, plus the incessant ‘traitor’ bullshit in the media.

― santa clause four (suzy), Thursday, 2 January 2020 bookmarkflaglink

This does let these shitty Lab councils off. Lack of militancy, just laying down and letting the narrative be that just isn't going to do.

You’re in Lambeth, which has been given over to technocratic housing melts for 20+ years.

The manifesto was full of good ideas, some of which polled well, and some of which were "Ah they'll like it when they see it", but put together and presented as it was, came across as "And this! and this! and also this!" in a way that didn't seem to produce much confidence.

I mean also separately it's what we'd need to not fuck the country and the planet.

Yup! xp

More left twitter people need to be selected, is the lesson I’m taking from this.

Of course, right wing rag Guido refers to Lazio fans doing Nazi salutes on the streets of Britain as "Italian tourists". My granddad didn't risk his life in WW2 to beat fascism 'in the marketplace of ideas' and as a Jewish person I'd rather drop dead than apologise to Nazis 🙄 https://t.co/ZwyUsvQIll

— Charlotte Nichols (@charlotte2153) January 2, 2020

Maybe all the seandaoine have moved on, or “moved on”. I’m talking 6.5 years ago tbf

... to the graveyard probably.

Matt Zarb-C described the manifesto as looking like a second-term project, an expansion on previous achievements, rather than one for a prospective government looking to win the trust of the public. That feels largely OTM to me.

sounds a bit unfair in the context of a snap election to me, yeah maybe too much manifesto..

i mean the tories barely had a manifesto, it might have seemed a good idea at the time to have have one. I don't see how Zarb works out that it wasn't a serious pitch to the electorate, just sounds like more chuntering bullshit to me!

Overstuffed manifesto will never be more than a minor factor to me.

Most voters don't read manifestos, or even address them in a cursory way - they rely on soundbite tidbits of it. So overstuffed manifesto + oppositional media = useless manifesto as far as getting people to understand the difference between option A ("get brexit done" with funny haha shagger man) and option B (whole load of good ideas communicated poorly by people you've been told to hate).

Like, I think the Labour manifesto was good - I read a chunk of it and engaged and agreed with the ideas - but I'm not a floating voter.

Meanwhile Austrians are having their 5p plastic bag charge moment via the Greens:

Sebastian Kurz' has swung from far-Right to Greens to form new government. Policies include ban on Is­lamic veil >14, de­ten­tion of asy­lum seek­ers, en­vi­ron­men­tal tax for trucks & air­plane tick­ets, sub­si­dies for pub­lic trans­porta­tion. @WSJ https://t.co/kgFWlBWEJV

— Bojan Pancevski (@bopanc) January 2, 2020

Hilarious concept really the overstuffed manifesto...nobody who has a sense that a LOT needs to change about our society was going to be put off by such a thing, except the brainwormed 'MBGA' types already lost to the right who wanted Brexit at all costs.

Yes, but very few people have that sense - which isn't the fault of the manifesto.

I keep seeing "I'd come back to the party under starmer" type replies to news stories and talk about how he "looks like a leader" or whatever and I despair unfairly or not

xp

if 10 million is a very few to you AF, lend us a grand pal!

the overstuffed manifesto has come up a few times irl, and I think probably ties in with the incompetent Labour council problem

people who aren't particularly politically engaged but live in a place with a useless Labour council project that onto the prospective Labour government and think how will they renationalise the railways etc when they can't even fill a pothole

Potholes probably a better example than I'd intended, since I just remembered they are the responsibility of the county council (at least where I live), which in my case is Conservative, but the town council is Labour, and they probably get the blame for potholes even though they aren't responsible for them.