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

He’s the best omg

Continuity McDonnell. I am pleased that the Labour leadership candidates are largely following my policies but replicating my curtains as well demonstrates total hegemony. pic.twitter.com/chQ8GNPQFQ

— John McDonnell MP (@johnmcdonnellMP) February 16, 2020

"I remember reading mr tubular bells saying Branson was a rat and he once punched him on the neck for getting fresh with his girlfriend."

Reminded me of this bit from wikipedia re XTC's cheaply & hurriedly made video for "Generals & Majors":

According to Andy Partridge, Branson appeared "because he's a complete publicity hog. He decided he was gonna turn up and keep suggesting that he be in the video. That is the worst video ever made by man."

would totally read a compendium of former Virgin recording stars talking about what a twat RB is/was

err, anyway, politics. <3 JMcD

This is a piece on how attitudes to the rich are more complicated than the usual "we're all fucked"

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/12/why-people-hated-mayor-petes-wine-cave-fundraiser/604009/

I read that and it’s pretty otm for the most part, but the part that’s missing about Rich Kids of Instagram is that people who used to feature on it used to lock or delete their accounts after getting negative attention from being featured on there, and now the account partners with supercar and private jet rentals while collaborating with rich kids for coverage.

"Why did you say you wouldn't speak to The Sun?"

"We were in Liverpool."

Explaining the answer you gave according to the audience you were speaking to isn't great politics.

— Michael Walker 🌹 (@michaeljswalker) February 16, 2020

Starmer finds that happy medium between pretending not to be a tory and happily sucking satan's dick

the inference being he can't wait to get completely skullfucked by Murdoch, because that is what serious Labour leaders do.. but just don't admit it in front of scousers!

Lol what's happening pic.twitter.com/lRjmjoJgub

— Shrieking Tinman (@phased_bemused) February 16, 2020

Amazing.

Every opportunist remotely connected to Labour in the last twenty years grasping for Starmer’s coattails - see also the Reeves for Shadow Chancellor stuff today as well.

I did enjoy this video of RLB taking the piss; I would prefer her to be punchier and less, well, shit like she was in that horrendous Momentum video or v Peston.

Some of the attempted smears have at least made me laugh pic.twitter.com/ccU0bUu5Kp

— Rebecca Long-Bailey (@RLong_Bailey) February 15, 2020

"see also the Reeves for Shadow Chancellor stuff today as well"

How has it come to poisonous garbage like that being talked up as the potential next shadow cabinet? i seriously feel like vomiting.

Some right wing Labour prick sticking their oar in.

Thread that is (I assume) referring to that Guardian piece.

the truly poor hate the rich pls, it's downwardly mobile uni grads that entertain foolish hopes of becoming rich pls

— emotional support daddy (@lmartods) February 16, 2020

I think it is time for RLB to put the gloves on, fuck all this Labour family bullshit. Starmer is a lying slippery melt who has already said he won't consider a position for her in his cabinet - this is a factional war - go for the jugular and take down your opponent or just quietly fade away into insignificance.

Yeah I think she's too worried about looking leadership when it might be te to get the boot in

Having said that I'm sure the right realise that Starmer is probably not gonna welcome them back into the driving seat, he's just their spoiler candidate at the moment.

he might put on a bit of a fight for about 10 seconds for the paying punters, but it won't go beyond the first round imo. When they call him a "collaborator" it's all part of the game. Luke Akehurst has his back!

Starmer hasn’t ruled out giving her a shadow cabinet post but RLB may be calculating that she likely needs Starmer close to her, should she win, much more than he needs her. Either way, I think she’d be better off trying to set out a clear, attractive policy agenda rather than trying to trash him.

he has refused to guarantee a post which isn't far off and why not policies and trash him? When I say trash him I mean point out who his backers are and where he is likely to take the party. His associates have been trashing RLB from the start.

and for that condescending "well done" after he'd tried to finish the answer for her ,when she a Mancunian recognised Andy fucking Cole. That is an act of war!

She has plenty of people on Twitter doing that for her. The right-wing part of the Starmer coalition can afford to alienate RLB’s supporters. I am not sure RLB can afford to alienate the left-wing side of his support and hope to have a semi-functional party.

oh yes i forgot about Smarmer's "left-wing" supporters!

I'd hope putting increased scrutiny on Starmer's flakiness and right wing cop tendencies might make dem think rather than alienate them. But of course like the in the old Aesop fable it doesn't always work like that.

his side is always re-writing recent history to suit his "time to melt" undercurrent - she is already pushing a positive counter narrative to that - but lets not keep it too polite is maybe an option? Tell the truth, shame the devil or something like that.

because if all these bovine nominally left members are happy to deceive themselves that they aren't actually voting for a retrogression to a putrid revival of Miliband Labour and will never be dissuaded otherwise, then the job is fucked anyway.

As with most things in Labour, ‘left-wing’ should probably be in inverted commas but he does have backers who were / are in the Shadow Cabinet and were happy enough to be part of the Corbyn project. I think one of the biggest risks in really going gloves off, not just against Starmer, but the people supporting him, is the potential for it to look like the group she can realistically work with inside the PLP is even smaller than Corbyn could call on and, after years of dysfunctional attrition, members decide it’s not worth the fight. It might be unfair but she has to look like she’s open to working productively with Starmer.

yeah when i said "put the boot in" i wasn't meaning have a go at Starmer so much as answer questions with the snark and/or passion they deserve, worry less about the measured everything to everybody shit and yes, lay out a coherent, uncompromised policy agenda. generally more passion, sorry to repeat myself.

the rookie tryhard stuff is to be expected and it has hopefully been a harsh learning curve for her at some of these hostile hustings, which are like a day at the beach compared to what it is to come if she is LOTO. but still, I wouldn't vote for her or indeed like her if she was a natural born pol!

I'm willing to bet that both RLB and Nandy will end up in the Shadow Cabinet, partly because of the influence of Angela Rayner but mostly because the optics are better than they would be if Long-Bailey was immediately cast to the back benches. She'll either keep the job she's got or end up as Shadow Environment Secretary or similar.

On the Rachel Reeves for Chancellor thing, thought this was interesting from Stephen Bush a few weeks ago.

I’ve been performing a similar task with the role of Labour’s next shadow chancellor, asking officials, former special advisors, ministers and assorted others who they think could do the job. The exercise has again, produced a similarly short list: John McDonnell, Yvette Cooper, Rebecca Long-Bailey, Rachel Reeves, Ed Miliband, Keir Starmer, Anneliese Dodds and Hilary Benn. And again, many on that list drew equally sharp rejections. Just four were ever-presents: McDonnell, Cooper, Miliband and Reeves. There is a great deal of vacant ideological and political real estate between those four – many in Labour would be disgruntled by all of those picks. In any case, one of them, McDonnell, is unavailable, having ruled himself out.

Of the remaining three, Ed Miliband is the only one I can see being broadly acceptable to both wings of the party (in that both wouldn't exactly be happy but neither would be furious). Only problem is he's likely to be the one least acceptable to the country. Putting Yvette Cooper in such a senior post would be considered a big shot across the bows for the left. So whoever wins might end up going with Reeves on account of the fact she has the least name recognition and baggage.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/01/who-will-labours-next-shadow-chancellor-be

Surely Reeves is at least as toxic as Cooper, if not more so? I know she has been out of the front line for a while but it is going to take thirty seconds of googling to find ‘I want to be tougher than the Tories on benefits’, etc.

How convenient that of the four "ever-presents" were a trio of melts/beyond the pale right wingers and one token lefty who has ruled himself out of the running!

Reeves would probably not beg to differ with quite a few of the Johnson Cabinet on welfare and immigration issues.

This week in Faces of Meritocracy:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/16/tory-aide-wants-enforced-contraception-to-curb-pregnancies

Oxbridge-educated Andrew Sabisky is working as a No 10 adviser, having been appointed after chief aide Dominic Cummings put out a job description for “misfits and weirdos” to join him in trying to shake up government.

The 27-year-old, who is contracted on specific projects and is not a permanent staffer, wrote on Cummings’ website in 2014

wow dom is really casting his net far and wide to catch leftfield weirdos like this chinless recipient of an elite education who dom already knew, william gibson must be thrilled to see his ideas being put into action like this

Starmer Starmer Starmer Starmer Starmer comedian pic.twitter.com/6PAQYecWFz

— TheIainDuncanSmiths (@TheIDSmiths) February 16, 2020

Corbyn talking about reinforced steel drain covers would be more riveting than listening to this dreary bore. See how long you can endure Starmer's amazing anecdote test!

" this is absolutely true"

at first I thought it was a joke voice-over because it is slightly out of sync, but amazingly it is genuine.

On a par with John Rochardson tbf

This might be as good a place as any to mention that last night I dreamt that Ash Sarkar got put in charge of my local branch of Pret.

that sounds better than dreaming Starmer has taken over your local pub and rather than serving drinks he holds court with a microphone and says drinks later.. I've got this hilarious story to tell you first...

Charming people.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/17/no-10-refuses-to-comment-on-pms-views-of-racial-iq

I mean:

No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/23/africa/boris-johnson-africa-intl/index.html

Nothing new here, of course, but it bears repeating.

I always think of what a good friend of mine, who is in medicine, says about eugenics; namely that human genes often have more than one important trait, like with the gene for sickle cell anaemia:

People develop sickle-cell disease, a condition in which the red blood cells are abnormally shaped, if they inherit two faulty copies of the gene for the oxygen-carrying protein haemoglobin. The faulty gene persists because even carrying one copy of it confers some resistance to malaria.

quite apart from everything else, this sabisky prick's suggestion that enforced contraception would prevent the creation of a permanent underclass overlooks that capitalism has done a pretty good job of creating a permanent underclass without having to resort to tinkering with people's ability to make babbies

this of course is the efficiency of the free market at work

Yeah I thought their brand of disaster capitalism relied upon that to function.

I see the controversial young man was a speaker at a conference which even T**y Y***g declared to be full of "right-wing fruitcakes", which, well:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/London_Conference_on_Intelligence

also spotted him in the schedule for another education conference with an incomprehensible title followed by "a series of modest proposals", oh no

...I also note he lives not far from here so I'll be keeping my Classic-Dom-Energy-Spotting On Buses skill honed

The Communications Manager of UCL (a former ILXoR!) was round at mine yesterday - the committee that they set up a few years ago to think about what to do about the fact that a lot of scientists were pretty eugenicist and specifically three of four that they named buildings after - that committee is starting to publish their findings, so the timing of that arsehole wasn't really great.

ILX UK Politics thread darling Dominic Cummings has previous here.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/pete-shanks/genetics-and-intelligence_b_4166949.html