love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

Isn’t the point that many of the UK’s establishment got their wealth through slavery and many of those people are in positions of power today? But yes, agree on you being a colossal churl.

sv and gyac otm

❤️❤️❤️

these things are deeply connected and agitation that churns up the deep placid assumptions abt the eternal truths of the british is where genuine movement comes and can somewhat stick: this is norman-yoke shit

it absolutely needs the two seemingly difft things being fought for tho

https://media.giphy.com/media/3o85xIO33l7RlmLR4I/giphy.gif

cok-ay-ne knee's up.

(that's all i have)

the del-boy through the bar thing makes me think that maybe rolling a statue into the river in bristol should become a yearly event. there are worse. could be new statues, made especially, topical, like the effigies in lewes.

I was watching that Jane Elliott piece on racism that was done here and the levels of resistance and blindness to privilege were unreal. People here complaining about Trump’s birthright citizenship proposals while Thatcher passed that legislation before I was even born. So yeah the conversation here is really behind in many ways.

They're absolutely connected but shifting the focus of action back to Oxbridge and Rhodesia is territory the UK establishment is fundamentally comfortable with imo.

But yes, both,

highlighting the racism entrenched in the state now helps to spike the guns of all the "they've got nothing to complain about" scumbags to some extent

it's not at all comfy abt the issue of long-standing land ownership and predatory landlordism

when you think about the era when Britain was like the Saudi Arabia of coal and all these landowners also owned the "underground plantations" on their land and made huge profits from paying poverty wages in dangerous working conditions that also exploited child labour, they can't be comfortable with that part of their ancestral legacy.

I wouldn't put any amount of "we provided decent jobs by the standard of the times and weren't you lot all moaning about closing the mines wtf" past them

I admit I've never heard the phrase "Norman Yoke" before, but sure, blaming stuff on foreigners is as close to an eternal truth of England as you'll get.

Frequently, critics following the Norman yoke model would claim Alfred the Great or Edward the Confessor as models of justice. In this context, the Magna Carta is seen as an attempt to restore pre-Conquest English rights, if only for the gentry. When Sir Edward Coke reorganised the English legal system, he was keen to claim that the grounds of English common law were beyond the memory or register of any beginning and preexisted the Norman conquest, although he did not use the phrase "Norman yoke".

t/s: English coke vs Norman yokes

What did Layla Moran say about STAR WARS?

"Meesa surely Jar Jar Binks wish yess. Weesa say nosa"

" "

its tricky bc by the time things grow prominent enough in the discourse to be noticed by ppl who don't normally pay attention they are so simplified/symbolic/superficial that they are always going to be a distraction to some extent and can be dealt with in a similarly symbolic/superficial fashion. wider anger about those things doesn't transfer to the specific details of whatever the latest policy/govt action is unless you have some sort of actually functioning representative democracy or other strong representative institutions.

remember when it was clear cummings had to go and all the focus was on that

normans are just yr standard invaders that end up sitting atop society earning resentment, eternal mb but not particularly english

the constitutional reforms of the 1830s-40s plus the institutional of empire in its post-mutiny form took much of the sting out of "norman yoke" rhetoric as a rough guide to the shape of injustice as felt at the time, and it generally fell out of use except among crackpots (me)

oh lol can somebody trawl back thru the thread and see who had money on DomCum to be gone by now

Normans anglicized themselves eventually altho important not to lose sight of the fact that aristocrats are always transnational because not actually human

I'm puzzled why Moran posted that. Now unavailable?

Arguably the events of the past week are profoundly useful to the government - coronavirus is not the top story for the first time in months, any upcoming spike can be blamed on protests alone and not government policy, and it's fuel for the next stage of culture war on terms they are comfortable with.

the industrial revolution, massive migration and land reform and abolition of tangible ties to the feudal era in general obv make the norman yoke seem a less relevant concern as so many ppl's sense of identity changed, but ofc power tends to look after itself p well and despite a degree of social mobility strangely lots of those v old families that cummings' father in law gets misty eyed thinking about in his crypt seem to have made it through. i've made all the points about land ownership, life expectancy & norman surnames before, you all know the drill

I'm puzzled why Moran posted that. Now unavailable?

There was a news report about the actor who played Jar Jar Binks saying he'd be available to come back if wanted and Tim Farron, in his ongoing attempt to ensure that he's remembered as a self-aware tragic loser, rather than just a tragic loser quote-tweeted it with something like 'it's like me saying i'll come back to lead the Lib Dems', but in the broader sense, yes, we are all puzzled by Moran posted that.

Moran and Tim please join Labour we need more like you to provide forensics.

the norman yoke often pops up on the dark heart of middle england consumer program You and Yours where callers who thought they wholly owned their house have been diddled by some subtle form of leasehold feudalism.

channel islands = still full feudalism aiui

not that the channel islands belong to the uk anyway

isle of man too ofc, the most fucked up place in the world

I mean, leaseholding in its most annoying sense (where you can't force a fair payment to buy it out) is I think an entirely English phenomenon?

Public flogging is still legal on the Isle of Man, I believe.

only if you ask really nicely

LADS

a cousin of mine from Dublin who is a bit of headcase once told me he to do a runner from one of the channel islands, i can't remember if it was Guernsey or Jersey. He was working in a butchers and during a bit of friendly horseplay with a co-worker he accidentally cut his face with a cleaver! This co-worker was from some top family on the island and he said he had to run for his life, or they literally would have buried him alive or something!

burned alive in a wicker horse iirc

ofc henry cavill, one of the most uncanny stepford/lynchian humans in existence is a channel islander

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naa0znjb7nQ

Barclay Brothers the poster boys for evil residents here

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2020/06/keir-starmer-colston-bristol-slave-statue-protestors-labour-response

"The unfortunate reality for these people is that Starmer has very little incentive to keep them happy on every issue: even if he isn’t as strong on certain issues as they would like, they have nowhere to go."

I love the worrying about the black vote that followed just as Starmer triangulated on the slave trader statue

love that it's Keir disappointing "the Left" and not "black people and anybody else who doesn't enjoy white supremacy"

"they have nowhere else to go" is not exactly a strategy with an impressive recent history

They have nowhere else to go - that old mandellson chestnut! In a first past the post system taking bame votes for granted is a dodgy game, because they might just reply fuck you then!

Especially as direct action can get results, why beg Sir Haircut for crumbs?

I have a feeling that how they respond to anti-black racism within the party is going to be more of an issue than a fence-sitting response to the statue being pulled down.

This is fucking outrageous. The British government co-opted the image of Angela Davis for propaganda targeted at black and Muslim women, reveals investigative reporter @IanCobain.https://t.co/yhBJkfKkML

— Damien Gayle (@damiengayle) June 9, 2020

Periodical question of whether Tribune is worth reading - the issues have been piling up, have they sorted out the layout yet?

I have a feeling that how they respond to anti-black racism within the party is going to be more of an issue than a fence-sitting response to the statue being pulled down.

― Matt DC, Tuesday, 9 June 2020 bookmarkflaglink

It's more about law & order and migration type policies and if they are always going to go on about more cops, etc. a lot of BAME voters may not bother. The statue throwers aren't going to be fence-sitting.

can't believe parents don't have more faith in the exemplary leadership of our great nation

Only one in four children returned to schools in England last week, wrecking Boris Johnson’s ambitions for a phased reopening of schools to allow parents back to work to boost the economy.

According to official statistics published by the government, just over half of primary schools in England reopened to more pupils last week.

Only a quarter of pupils who were eligible to return from 1 June, the first week that schools in England began admitting more children in reception, year 1 and year 6, actually turned up.

Figures published by the Department for Education show that just 52% of schools opened to these three year groups, reflecting continuing safety concerns among headteachers, parents and local authorities.

Ministers say numbers have gone up this week, but the government has been forced as a result to back down on its ambition to get all primary school children back in class for a month before the summer holidays.