"we'll change the things that need changing and that's all we'll change": the paSUKification of post-brexit politics 2021

We must be days away from another rare Blair intervention surely.

there was a diabolical New Labour reunion on GMB this morning as well. Adonis would have had his silk wanking gloves at the ready

Calzino: No, I find it a mild coincidence that your ILX name is a bit like that odd person's (who was really called Calum and had devolved into Calzer by that point?), but I don't think you have much in common with him.

phew!

When did Tony Blair morph into David Icke?

That "lads" has had particular valence in Ireland is true, but whether it was a gender-neutral term, say a hundred years ago, I am more doubtful -- don't think I recall ever reading any evidence for that.

Flann O'Brien would be a good example: I don't think he ever includes women in "lads" (but then, TBH, I don't recall him using the word "lads" very much itself much either). Actually you could do some kind of search of eg the whole works of Joyce, Yeats, Synge, O'Casey and I think you'd find the same thing. So was real speech different? Unsure.

New Statesman headlines.

Why I will never forgive Boris Johnson for the damage he has done to the country I love
BY MARTIN FLETCHER

Peter Mandelson: “I’m afraid Keir Starmer has come badly unstuck”
BY ANOOSH CHAKELIAN

Why is the world’s best vaccinated country experiencing a Covid spike?
BY HARRY CLARKE-EZZIDIO

Is it time to end our Mitford obsession?
BY NEW STATESMAN

Who listens to Rag’n’Bone Man?
BY KATE MOSSMAN

My lockdown nostalgia
BY SOPHIE MCBAIN

The sex recession: How our love lives are stunted by hyper-sexualisation
BY LOUISE PERRY

Rachel Cusk and the art of the midlife crisis
BY JOHANNA THOMAS-CORR

Do Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner realise how much they need each other?
BY STEPHEN BUSH

As Tony Blair warns that Labour could die under Starmer, is he planning a return?
By Harry Lambert

Reading is bad for your health

Slough is even worse.

This deeply unpleasant comment also reveals quite a lot about how Mandelson views the relationship between Corbyn and the party. An incubus is specifically a male demon who visits women in their beds, copulating & giving them sinful & erotic dreams. It's an image of violation. https://t.co/MlWdSpBGN5

— James B (@piercepenniless) May 12, 2021

As an Irish woman who was amused to be described as part of nashwan’s collective “animated lads”, I have to say I don’t care if people were using colloquially it a century ago to refer to women as well as men, my point about being included as a lad in that context was really the only point I wanted to make lol

Confirmed. Boris Johnson has a county court judgement against him for an unpaid debt of £535, from October last year. He still hasn't paid it. pic.twitter.com/mHmSIyFwTU

— Peter Walker (@peterwalker99) May 12, 2021

Does this unpaid bill thing help our hurt him though

help OR hurt

Sounds like a load of faff made up by some jobsworth. Good job Bozza!

well the Downing Street redecoration scandal brought down his government iirc so this should hurt him a lot

he so badly wants to be Winston Churchill and he was also an overgrown rich brat and a spendthrift and a gambler, often with unpaid debts etc...

Useful graphs relating class to material wealth

Whilst we're back on the "Labour has lost the working classes" debate - a reminder that Lab is still the most popular party with people on low incomes *of working age*. The "working age" bit is crucial.

Here's the GE2019 vote by household income including retired people. 1/ pic.twitter.com/FDT8RagRw7

— Christabel Cooper (@ChristabelCoops) May 11, 2021

Gyac: yes, I was just taking an interest in this particular statement:

"lads" has been avowedly gender neutral in some~ cultures on these islands forever

and wondering how long 'forever' was.

"The supposed ‘culture war’ conceals an economic pincer movement: outside the overheated south-east and urban centres, Tory increases to the minimum wage and temporary uplifts to universal credit have been tangible, and come in the context of longer-term cuts to services, often administered by long-established Labour councils – themselves no strangers to venality. It’s no good for Labour to complain that voters do not understand that many of these councils have been destroyed by enormous cuts from central government, when the party has long abandoned any attempt to give a clear picture of how the state works. It is unjust that Labour local administrations have been tarnished by the austerity years while a Tory government in Westminster volubly splashing a little cash a decade later is reaping its rewards, but politics is often unfair. Corbynism and Brexit may both have accelerated the process of decomposition and realignment already underway in the party, but it is economics that will cement these blocs. Focus groups and listening exercises are expensive ways for Labour not to think about this fact."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/may/beyond-hartlepool

xp forever is a mighty long time.

Blair backing transphobes and islamophobes whilst deriding the "woke" left demonstrating he is still as anti-black as he was when he was Labour leader. https://t.co/MH9gEeHhvs

— Simon Vessey (@Simon_Vessey) May 12, 2021

As an Irish woman who was amused to be described as part of nashwan’s collective “animated lads”

Frankly I probably deserve a chiding just for trying to play on Tom D's display name so feebly

I know a few people who support BLM and trans rights, in an airy fairy liberal way, but also express admiration for Blair due to remainiacs brainworms. Wonder how they'll react to this.

Does this unpaid bill thing help or hurt him though

big CON +4 vibes all over it imo

Gyac: yes, I was just taking an interest in this particular statement:

"lads" has been avowedly gender neutral in some~ cultures on these islands forever
and wondering how long 'forever' was.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, 12 May 2021 10:46 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Mea maxima culpa, the forever was carelessly deployed and "these islands" related to literally the three you can hit with a stone without leaving my parish

These Blair statements are actually more dire than I would have guessed.

He wants to pretend that when socialists went out knocking on doors for JC, they put people off by bringing up J.K. Rowling and Trevor Phillips.

Most voters don't care about those people.

I like Darraghmac's image of the islands and have been trying to remember what county he lives in. Laois?

_As an Irish woman who was amused to be described as part of nashwan’s collective “animated lads”_

Frankly I probably deserve a chiding just for trying to play on Tom D's display name so feebly

How tf does the pinefox know about Laois

the pf is in his own way a phúca imo

im of the western isles, pf, go raibh maith agat

famously coastal county, Laois

Who listens to Rag’n’Bone Man?
BY KATE MOSSMAN

Dont put your blame on them

Ol' Tonty Blairs is the real rag and bone man.

famously coastal county, Laois

Was going to say islands are surely one of the last things you'd expect to see in Laois.

Mandelson seems to be heavily hinting at the idea that Labour should, in effect, disaffiliate from the unions and move away from being a mass membership party. Seems bold in a context where they can’t seem to find any major donors elsewhere.

Tom D, I agree, not large coastal islands, but I was hypothesising about inland lake isles, of which one or two have been reported, in Ireland. However, a search suggests that Laois doesn't even have those.

-- The Pookafox

Well, this is political news:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/12/jo-cox-sister-labour-batley-spen-byelection-kim-leadbeater

she's thick as a plank and has made some utterly ridiculous statements conflating "left extremists" with the murder of her sister on look north. No thanks!

not that it would be a barrier to being a Labour MP tbf

Labour is too inwardly focused here's my 1000 word blah blah woke left blah Union barons selection processes blah doorstep technology AI change waffle waffle waffle.

Not a single actionable idea contained within any of these pieces, it's almost enough to make you feel sorry for Starmer having these guys in his ear constantly.

if he wasn't already finished, he could maybe go back to those 10 pledges

Think things shift after that maybe as boomers filter out of the system, but if the median age increases (and percentage of working age voters declines) in a majority of seats, thats a deeper structural issue Labour are going to need to have serious answers for, for any elections after that

Don't think demographic changes are going to make that much difference, as the Boomers die off you have a whole generation underneath them that is poised to inherit way way more than previous generations ever did. That's going to change the game again. It's also the major reason why May's electoral campaign was such a catastrophe, because it threatened to wreck that massive, one-off transfer of wealth.

Admittedly that might be counterbalanced by a growing younger and increasingly pissed off group who will have to wait longer to either buy or inherit.

Its a good decade out so difficult to predict.

I can't really tell just how many generations are going to be stacking up in the inheritance queue! Or what happens when pensioners and boomers are not longer the same thing

I think the demographic change is in the fact that the number of seats where working age people as percentage of voters is increasing, is fewer than the number of seats where its decreasing

Once you start banking on demographic changes to help you out you're in trouble, that's a watched kettle right there.

From the council election results it's clear the composition of seats are changing given there are gains for Lab in parts of the SE but this is more of a rearrangement as the Tories are gaining up North. And actually that gain has paid dividends for Tories more than Lab.

The stuff that can arrest that decline is Lab trying to deliver for constituents as seen in Preston and Salford. Unfortunately it's all very local as Lab nationally are merely positioning themselves as caretakers when the Tories next fuck-up.

Xpost

Problem with waiting for old tories to die is they just get replaced by younger lab/libs turned tory.

Labour is too inwardly focused here's my 1000 word blah blah woke left blah Union barons selection processes blah doorstep technology AI change waffle waffle waffle.

Not a single actionable idea contained within any of these pieces, it's almost enough to make you feel sorry for Starmer having these guys in his ear constantly.

Problem with waiting for old tories to die is they just get replaced by younger lab/libs turned tory.

Very much so! This has always been the case in fact. The question is whether there's anything unique regarding the ride that boomers had, that filtered into political calculations, or not. Are over 60s more important than they were electorally 15/20 years ago?