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

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.

Think Corbyn’s refusal to play dirty on leadership in some respects to blame for message of uselessness - never booted out wreckers, never put antisemtism issue conclusively to bed by taking strong action AND calling out wreckers, had all these cunts briefing against him after leaving the party without ever whipping his glasses off and going “let me tell you a thing or two about this prick”.

I'm glad he didn't do any of that as it would just as if not more likely backfired. It's just not in his nature anyway and this was a big part of the attraction to him for many in the first place.

Good tweet by Rayner that links the need to nationalise with action on the climate change.

Meanwhile In Germany, All Deutsche Bahn rail fares (over 50km) will drop by 10% as part of the government's climate initiative. The state-owned company is also set to spend some €12 billion ($13.46 billion) by 2026 to buy new trains,most of it for its Intercity-Express fleet.

— Angela Rayner 🌈 (@AngelaRayner) January 2, 2020

Those bloody tankie christian democrat german melts making us look like a retrograde backwater again!

I don't know that assuming everyone who voted Labour was "woo let's go, let's transform this fucker" is any better an idea than assuming everyone who voted for Labour in the 2017 election was 'in the bank'. Some of them will be lifelong Labour voters who justly hate Boris, some of them might just trust History's Greatest Monster Jeremy Corbyn and assume he'd probably have a good idea what to do.

Like, I would love it if the vast majority of voters did so with an informed view of what the policies were and what the effects would be, but I don't think we're there yet.

Good point:

really cba with discussing labour but it does occur to me that if we are going to talk so much about qualities outside of policy positions, 'which leader can get 28k people to sign up and doorknock on election day' might at least be worth considering

— worm (@SzMarsupial) January 2, 2020

I think most people DO want transformative change but probably a lot get less enthusiastic when this is translated into actual policies that could fail or are seen to be having failed in the past. The tories successfully spun a vote for Boris as a vote for change, despite the patent absurdity of this position, because brexit works as a kind of amorphous idea of transformative change that doesn't actually come with any policies (well it does, but only those opposed to it seem to care about those).

xpost

I'm glad he didn't do any of that as it would just as if not more likely backfired. It's just not in his nature anyway and this was a big part of the attraction to him for many in the first place.

Also it contributed to a lack of a sense of what the priorities were, transformative change is obviously good but if you give the impression you're going to change everything at once people are going to conclude you can't do it all and are going to fuck it up. It obviously wasn't as big an issue as Brexit, but the 2017 manifesto was a smallish number of very clear policy positions that were able to cut through rather than crowding each other out.

I think there's an argument that playing dirty on Boris's personal life (or even obvious public-interest stuff like Arcuri) would have backfired and made him look petulant and niggly rather than focusing on positive change, hope etc. In the end that didn't work but it almost wasn't worth bothering with because barely anyone who isn't already a Labour voter cares about any of Johnson's indiscretions anyway.

Going on the offensive against Boris would have been total non-starter. Standing up for himself more when under attack would have been better though and thats not playing dirty.

He kind of did a halfway house, didn't defend himself but didn't laugh it off either. Tetchy weak responses worst way to go

The one commonality between Corbyn’s coalition in the membership and the country, intriguingly, is that he did far better with women in both elections.

— Stephen Bush (@stephenkb) January 2, 2020

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENRlimUWoAE0h-R?format=png&name=large

too many man

Again far be it from me to factor human decency into that

Obviously there's a ton of sociological stuff going on in that graph but it's weird that the Tories only really plunge into the testosterone zone over the last few years, apart from a brief period around the time of the Falklands War.

OTOH the Tories have made themselves actively repellent to a lot of female voters over the last decade but I'm surprised it's that recent a phenomenon.

keir starmer was the reason that boris johnsons girlfriend had to crowdfund 'not letting my rapist out of jail' last year

idea he is some electable safe pair of hands that the tory press will struggle to smear is just wilful blindness https://t.co/KTSErjCOMv

— bread and poses (@MrJackGrant) January 2, 2020

I think Keir might have some very serious problems being as popular with female voters as Corbyn was.

Slightly different being led by serial REDACTED Johnson than say T May I guess

The one commonality between Corbyn’s coalition in the membership and the country, intriguingly, is that he did far better with women in both elections.

Just floating a theory here, but is there a similarly gendered correlation in how seriously people take climate change?

It’s not a local phenomenon either, there’s research by Piketty showing female voters moving broadly left over the past decades. Noticed this in Ireland too, there was a gender gap in the abortion referendum too. And if you look at who vote UKIP/Brexit party here, the difference is even clearer.

https://ukandeu.ac.uk/nigel-farages-brexit-party-attracts-more-men-voters-than-women-heres-why-thats-a-problem/

Beyond Brexit, there could be other factors at play too. Compared with men, women are generally less supportive of spending cuts to public services, and this is even true among supporters of parties of the right. Women are also more likely to give priority to healthcare and the NHS. The YouGov poll found that 37% of women selected health as one of the three most important issues currently facing Britain – ten percentage points more than the 27% of men who felt the same.

The extensive problems with Keir Starmer's past - a thread 👇🏻

{CW: discussion of sexual violence with regards to prosecutions}

— jenn (@JennThorburn_) January 2, 2020

Yeah but he looks like a proper leader

I wonder if anyone in a position of influence is going to point this shit out now, or whether they'll just wait until he's elected and the press decide to do so.

I read something the other week how he reduced the amount of expert barristers required in rape cases, but ffs that thread really hammers home how bad he is.

He’s a conduit for fascism you fool https://t.co/wv6WTaO61O

— Labour Towns Source (@judeinlondon2) January 2, 2020

while most switched on people consider Cummings a dangerous idiot, this fool sees some wisdom in his macho-darwinist blathering.

Saw this and checked tl of person I can rely on to be wrong about these things & to them it’s such larks, Jude otfm

Cummings is delightful because he despises the status quo, unfortunately so did Hitler

Cummings is the status quo: married to money, in love with his own galaxy brain, working for the PM.

I should send a link of the IQ scores of all the Nazis on trial at Nuremberg to Bastardi, some very clever, quote-worthy lads with some bold ideas about whipping the civil service into shape!

I once made some cheerful minions memes with quotes from hitler, goering and goebbels, was trying to make some sort of point about something but forget what it was.

The Conservatives were successful in running a campaign as though they were in opposition in Labour were the ones in power, but more so than expected. Is there any reason that they can't maintain that and govern as though they were in opposition, passing blame to Labour? I had thought you would need a Trump like figure to carry that off but maybe it doesn't seem quite so necessary

Cummings is the status quo: married to money, in love with his own galaxy brain, working for the PM.

... public school, Oxford, they've never seen the like in the corridors of power.

Cummings appears to be motivated almost entirely by a hatred of institutions - the EU, the BBC, the civil service - and that coincides with the public mood right now. When you factor in the vague sections of the Tory manifesto about British constitutional reform, there are going to be some profound changes coming up that have been neither talked about nor scrutinised.

Quite how this fits with the jaunty pseudo-One Nation guff that's coming from Johnson I don't quite know. Probably because it's all bollocks.

He is the crazy disruptive end of the establishment, it's worse but it's not the same - certainly not in his head. It's probably dictionary definition of Reactionary

When I said he hates the Tory Party as much as me I wasn't joking

"Probably because it's all bollocks."

this much is guaranteed!

cruel starvation jokes from the architects of the boris johnson brand https://t.co/09xiLbACqr

— sean morley (@seanmorl) January 2, 2020

fuck off and die HIGNFY and every unfunny melt cunt that participates in this including ILX fav Brooker ..forever!

I raised the points about Keir Starmer-as-DPP people have made to someone who worked with him for five years, who said:

‘All the decisions you refer to would have been made in accordance with the law as it stands, and with the application of the Code for Crown Prosecutors, which applies to him in exactly the same way as it does to the most junior prosecutor in the Service.’

...what this (and other things the person had to say about the chatter about Starmer) says to me is that the electorate, us included, needs serious education about the role of the CPS in general and the DPP in particular.

I know a cowardly melt when I see one Suze and he would ruin the Labour party as leader in every way possible.

and MP's like RLB and Paula Sherriff didn't have his exalted highfalutin background when they voted against the welfare act.

He’s my MP and has solved problems for everyone I know who has gone to him with their issues, and was in the Camden New Journal talking about how there was no going back to the triangulation of New Labour, or abandoning the anti-austerity commitments of the last manifesto. And I am extremely worried about the plans Tories outlined on p48 of their manifesto.

The other thing I gleaned from the conversation with his former colleague was apparently Orange Juice is his favourite group.