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

even if you start taxing the rich without the punitive "fuck billionaires" talk, it's guaranteed the good old right wing British media (including the BBC) will provide the quotes - whether you actually say them or not.

Politics of envy, tax on aspiration and ambition blah blah blah

One woman interviewed in Wrexham said: “If you have worked hard you are entitled to it.”

Another person in the same group said: “It is not down to millionaires to sort out issues with poverty. They might be able to explain to people how to do things.”

The thing about these quotes is that they don't necessarily correspond to the prospect of increasing taxes to decrease income inequality, more like a choice of who to prioritise and concentrate blame on for...not even their problems directly but the nation's. And the problem must be the people below, not above. A bit like when people drop the old 'you can't tax the rich more or they'll beat us, I mean, leave the country and our economy will be suffer' classic.

Yep, otm, thanks for making the point.

Yes but we all know the press is going to behave like that whatever happens. But what are the alternatives? You either keep blundering into the same hole again and again or you tack so far right that your existence becomes pointless.

when studies say you aren't dealing with rational people who harbour strange and ill-thought out contradictory dualities, that doesn't mean you - the prospective government in waiting - have to try and placate this insanity imo.

Or you try to make the argument...?

Of course you try and make the argument, and that has to happen at grass roots and national level. But when your words are inevitably going to be twisted against you, how you frame the argument and present the narrative matters.

The irony is that at some point between 97 and 2003 or so the argument for higher taxation and redistribution could probably have been made and enough of the electorate would have been on board. As it is New Labour weren't interested and we ended up with a small amount of redistribution through stealth instead, pleasing no one.

who's going to go round making these arguments at grassroots level?

Lab's messaging and packaging on taxation was good in 2017 but yes it's relative success wasn't built on and there was something off about the attacks on billionaires in 2019 (an example was Richard Burgon responding to that IT consultant on QT complaining about paying more tax by attacking billionaires, instead of saying that despite being at the top end he would've paid a fiver extra).

(I think James Medway made some of these points in that Novara piece)

xps

Isn't that broadly what people mean when they talk about Labour having to reconnect at local level through councils, voluntary organisations, union reps etc? Obviously there are problems with that, specifically who is prepared to listen, and it's a long process of education.

For as long as I can remember, Labour has failed to make the positive case for a progressive tax system as something that's essential for the proper functioning of society but also in and of itself as an engine of economic growth and good for business. It's either been treated as a necessary evil, or they've tried to pretend they weren't doing it, or they've gone the other way and it's become about hitting the rich for the sake of it which becomes very easily swatted away by the right. Corbyn's 1% pledge wasn't bad in theory but it also wasn't really believed. Admittedly what can you do when billions of pounds are being spend to try and make people believe the exact opposite and these are probably ideas that need to be resold over decades, a lot of people at the sharp end can't wait that long.

It isn't really that dissimilar to the failure to make a positive case for the EU over decades and suddenly expecting everyone to believe it during the referendum campaign.

(xpost - the 2017 manifesto was probably the closest we've come to it, yes)

Yep, that was what I meant by challenging the narratives. Some of it isn't quick work but on the other hand "fairer distribution of wealth benefits everybody" shouldn't be that hard to attempt during an election campaign

At the very least if you go with "we're taxing you for your own good" then the super-rich (or their apologists) will have to squirm a little more in public and make their shitty excuses explicit

Hahaha the dumb fuck eugenicist has quit already.

lol

I know this will disappoint a lot of ppl but I signed up to do real work, not be in the middle of a giant character assassination: if I can't do the work properly there's no point, & I have a lot of other things to do w/ my life

— Andrew Sabisky (@AndrewSabisky) February 17, 2020

...and take your callipers with you!

In what kind of a world is "pointing out some things you said in public" a character assassination?

fuckin snowflake needs a safe space

#BeKind

Anyway.

In an anonymous survey sent by ITV News to all 65 BAME MPs, 62% of the 37 respondents said they had experienced racism from staff in the Houses of Parliament while 51% said they had dealt with racism from fellow MPs.

Of the respondents - which include MPs from the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats - several spoke of what they had experienced throughout their careers.

Labour's Tulip Siddiq told ITV News that when she told a fellow MP in the chamber of the House of Commons she was pregnant, her colleague said she was surprised doctors had told her she was having a daughter, as she believed that people from an Asian background are more likely to abort baby girls.

“Speaking to a colleague of a mine, she looked at me in astonishment and said 'you know you're having a girl because normally they don't tell people of Asian origin they're having a girl because you know, then Asian people decide'... and I looked at her and I couldn't believe what she was saying,” she told ITV News.

ffs Angela!

Loki reckons this Sabisky incident was a planned sleight of hand trick where the real dodgy fucker he has actually hired has just sneaked through the door while this predictable sideshow plays out.

Introducing the gentlemen of eugenics calendar 2020 pic.twitter.com/Fb8DvDHkxi

— ipa fan (@ipa_fan) February 17, 2020

oh god

Sabisky: "Theologically speaking she is your wife and should submit to you as unto the Lord, so if you want doggy then it is your place to command her to get on her hands and knees and her place to obey.” pic.twitter.com/x6UtnuVdpP

— Andrew Learmonth (@andrewlearmonth) February 17, 2020

(also friendship cancelled with calzino for subjecting me to shirtlesstobyyoung.jpg)

I didn't mean to hurt you...I didn't mean to turn you on...

(xxp) This is exactly what you'd expect from an adviser handpicked by Dominic Cummings surely?

Do you remember when Milo spent five minutes glorifying in the post-Trump limelight and then found himself defending child abuse? Things like that are going to happen again and again for the next few years.

Let's hope they happen again and again to Dominic Cummings.

love how these independent and daring thinkers are all conservative Christians...he liked a John McGuirk tweet earlier

Here we go, Claire Fox (yes, I'm watching Sky News again), performing some extraordinary logical contortions to compare eugenicists to animal rights activists(!) and people who describe Brexit voters as morons(!!).

Hope they ask her if she still feels Gary Glitter was hard done by

was just thinking some of these people whose homes are currently flooded with effluent, they have no insurance and it will cost them £40-60k make their prop habitable again. was just thinking how much that latest flood themed Matt cartoon would cheer them up!

"Claire Fox (yes, I'm watching Sky News again)"

Please Tom do yourself a favour and get a twitter account.

This seems a simple thing to do but haven't seen it anywhere yet so here it is: Labour % vote share change between 2015 and 2019, by seat, giving the "net Corbyn effect" on the Labour share https://t.co/Ls5hW6GQGg

— Simon (@simonk_133) February 17, 2020

Nashwan (?) put this up, it will be a lot of ongoing work but some of the conclusions in the discusion point to a we don't need to press the racism button in an effort to chase red wall (not that you ever should be doing it but it's the Labour party). Lots of shift and territory to win, it's just whether etc etc.

who wore it better

Cracking on with preparations for my first Budget on March 11. It will deliver on the promises we made to the British people – levelling up and unleashing the country’s potential. pic.twitter.com/5msCVfJWN8

— Rishi Sunak (@RishiSunak) February 18, 2020

Writing my inaugural address at the Winter White House, Mar-a-Lago, three weeks ago. Looking forward to Friday. #Inauguration pic.twitter.com/S701FdTCQu

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2017

obv Starmer did it best by keeping the pen top on - which is apparently what all shit-hot barristers do!

Please Tom do yourself a favour and get a twitter account.

And post Claire Fox and Brendan O'Neill directly alongside the rest of the garbage on the thread - great idea!

huh? when did this thread get as good as garbage standard?

It's worked it's way up from abysmal lately.

just a short term boost from when the ILX titan of intellect trophy holder, Fred the Great, interloped on here briefly!

He's an utter catalyst.

Labour having to reconnect at local level through councils, voluntary organisations, union reps etc? Obviously there are problems with that, specifically who is prepared to listen, and it's a long process of education.

When it comes to actually articulating what local level action should mean there have been quite a range of ideas laid out, from Alex Sobel's quite realistic idea of keeping constituency offices working in seats Labour have lost to the more... ambitious Aditya Chakrabortty idea of having Labour run food banks and citizen's advice bureaus and basically providing a shadow welfare state. The idea that you can educate ppl out of voting for Brexit and so on is, let's be clear, patrician and fraught. Increased awareness and engagement can cut both ways. There are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of ppl who voted Labour last time out of pure partisan/class loyalty who might not have if they knew some of the things they were nominally voting for, or are vulnerable to being put off by more culture war wedges. That's not to say this is a bad idea, but it's an absolutely enormous undertaking, and has ofc been slowly happening with demographic shifts over my lifetime. The electorate that elected Labour in 97 doesn't exist, and the educated, open, liberal left is much larger than at any time in history, but they're still a minority (depending on how you define it somewhere between 10 & 20% of the electorate I think). Wanting to speed up this process (and not taking it for granted) is understandable, but... how?

The situation with councils should be well known, the voluntary sector is v busy trying to compensate for govt shortfall, and the unions are in a sorry state of affairs: they're politically neutered, the big ones are all fairly ineffective at organising members, they're often not very democratic and effectively operate as a branch of human resources. They're also not full of left-wing liberals and I don't know how or why they'd start making the case for immigration and so on.

The only ppl who have really made any new efforts in recent years in terms of reaching out beyond left-liberals on the national level so far are Momentum, who are under so much scrutiny and attack from left, right & centre it seems, at best, unclear how much further they can grow. So when ppl who can't even be bothered to pay subs to the party and whose sole political activity is voicing opinions online are like "If Labour wish to sort their act out and be taken seriously they should simply disperse hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country to reform society and defeat authoritarian chauvinism in the marketplace of ideas", I'm not particularly enthused.

It's about your attitude to power. If you reject the service model, if you don't want to leave it to the professionals, if you think that the media class is truly toxic (& don't just want to mirror them, lampooning their vapidity with glib superficial despair, following them over the cliff to mock them as they fall), if you are not satisfied with waiting for demographic change, or the next economic crash, or for some invincible saint to come and save the left, then what are you going to do?

Ppl say the left is a mess, but its the best organised section of the electorate. It's got hold of the Labour party, has articulated a coherent and popular set of policies (some of which will even be borrowed by this allegedly hard right Tory govt), and just got over 10 million ppl to vote for it despite everything. The left keep losing - you keep losing - but the centre is barely even competing, and you don't have to be Nassim Taleb to know that failing is not a sign you're not close to winning. The Tory party is centralised and undemocratic and gets by through sabotaging their opponents. They are mercenary and ruthless and good at exploiting divisions, but a lot of the left & wider electorate is v against those things and I'm not sure how much you can adopt those tactics before it becomes self-defeating.

Consuming 'politics' through any sort of media is disempowering, both due to the passivity that comes with watching at a remove and the demoralising effect of seeing ppl scrutinised and failing, and it leads easily to a cynicism that masks total complacency. It is v obvious that the current model of politics as service and spectacle, with the electorate as critical consumers, is one which favours undemocratic, centralised parties (& ofc especially ones that represent the wealthy and powerful), and it's also clear that 'having opinions online' is not great praxis, so the acceptance of this mode of engagement (or accepting of the rules of the capitalist realist game, if you like) is accepting defeat. Get involved imo.

It's got hold of the Labour party, has articulated a coherent and popular set of policies (some of which will even be borrowed by this allegedly hard right Tory govt), and just got over 10 million ppl to vote for it despite everything.

this is a huge positive that Labour Right are trying to wipe from everyone's memories, they were trying to rewrite history literally hours after the defeat. it's something to build on imo - not tear down.

History is written by the, er, losers?

xxp That is a great post! (signed, a consumer)

xp

lol no, but trying to say the electorate largely rejected their manifesto in a harsh as fuck FPTP arsekicking in a Brexit election is bullshit, 10 million is a whole lot of electorate,

"and it's also clear that 'having opinions online' is not great praxis"

erm point of order having opinions online taught me to speak up and be divisive at Lab party branch meetings thank you very much ;-)

A Lefty Oxford Prof writes
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-left-needs-to-campaign-for-social.html

xp do you just stand up and read out tweets from your phone?