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

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FQ90fveXsAUuYld?format=jpg&name=medium

check out this from a Telegraph piece on dense Tory halfwit Frank then! tbf he'll still never be as utterly reprehensible as Gary Neville.

going to back into that new Kieth book again later, do some hardcore hate-reading!

For the last time, I am not a duck. I merely look and quack like a duck and also have been one my entire life

Basically, he's not stood for parliament

The ballot paper's come over and I've put my cross next to the Tory candidate.

Not real, as acknowledged in the replies to the tweet it originates from:

Hahaha! Well remembered. Forgot about that one. #Ingsyhttps://t.co/ce28MccTz1

— Sean (@shornKOOMINS) April 22, 2022

it's fantastic news that there are still prem players that down pints and get obsessed with pub fruit machines in the 2020's!

even if it's fake

after May kiboshed the McKinnon extradition, such was Kieth's utterly pathetic lapdog relationship with the US AG, Eric Holder, he furiously got straight on a plane to Washington to plead with him that the outcome wasn't his fault and that hopefully it wouldn't sour their friendship going forwards, and also from McKinnion's ma:

I couldn't understand it. Kier Starmer had written six books on human rights. I had such faith and expected so much more of him as DPP, but when I made a point of speaking to him after the session there was no trace of understanding.
"I'm feeling very uncomfortable", said Mr Starmer. "Speaking to you is making making me feel very uncomfortable".
Did he have any idea how that sounded to me, when he was supporting the extradition of my son to some foreign hellhole?"

not to speak of an unfortunate non-white and "extremely vulnerable" autist like Talha Ahsan who was extradited to the US under his watch for briefly having a very negligible connection to an Islamist website and served a 6 year sentence there for nothing really.

sorry for repetition, but I just really despise this cunt and people are saying you have to vote for him "to get the tories out"

1/5 🧵BREAKING! We’ve won - the @ukhomeoffice
has officially announced that it is going to abandon Channel pushbacks in the face of legal challenges from us, @pcs_union, @Care4Calais & @FreefromTorture. ✊💥 pic.twitter.com/7aA6C3njoX

— Channel Rescue (@ChannelRescue) April 25, 2022

if you find yourself thinking the news is absurd - you're not alone

Take a break from Twitter and spend the evening with the writers we turn to when we’re overwhelmed by the 24-hour news cycle and need to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

oh no

I don't doubt there will no shortage of laughter from the appalling audience

Absurdity? Twitter has you covered on that front too.

For the blocked pic.twitter.com/e1zPrbE7O1

— Philip Proudfoot 🟨🟥 (@PhilipProudfoot) April 26, 2022

if you find yourself thinking the news is absurd - you're not alone

Take a break from Twitter and spend the evening with the writers we turn to when we’re overwhelmed by the 24-hour news cycle and need to laugh at the absurdity of it all.

― conrad, Tuesday, 26 April 2022 00:28 (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Found my birthday present @Sharivari

Sounds like something somebody who secretly wants to go see Marina "oh my sides" Hyde would say

So, the UK is currently one of the very few countries in Europe without a noticeable fascist minority party; UKIP/Brexit Party were kinda that but seem to be pretty much over. Obviously I'm not making the case that this puts the UK in a better place compared to its European neighbours but I'd like to explore why this is. Is it about:

a) The conservatives successfully stealing far right talking points while maintaining a veneer of respectability

b) The overton window having shifted so far to the right in the UK that far right parties can't position themselves as sufficiently anti-establishment

c) Other factors?

A and b, IMO. But also UKIP did their job of pushing the Tories further to the right. Once their talking points and policies were adopted, there was no further need for them.

yeah their big successes as a right-wing pressure group made them electorally irrelevant

I wonder if Baron Hyde talks in her column style at these public events, with lots of prepared devastatingly witty wordplay

There's plenty of far right Tory MPs, even if the party itself gets away with not being considered far right. Plus you could argue that the far right are actually on power in one part of the UK.

Wouldn't rule out the Reform Party causing a stir before the next election. What's left to pressure the Tories about? Well, capital punishment for one...

at the height of UKIP rising Ch4 did a what if drama about Farage winning an election and starting a mass deportation program, can't remember much about it other than it was bad and like the Tories/Republicans he had right-wing BAME people (or possibly just one) in his cabinet to deflect accusations of racism. The fact that the Tories were actually running a real mass deportation program at the time seemed to be lost on the writers.

I recall Nick Griffin saying the reason the BNP got wiped out is because people didn't need to vote for their racist policies when UKIP existed. Now people don't vote for UKIP because the Tories exist.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FRKsnZuXsAMrTcw?format=jpg&name=large

There's plenty of far right Tory MPs, even if the party itself gets away with not being considered far right.

Yes but this applies to establishment/centre right parties in plenty of European countries too, there's always been fascists in, for example, the German CDU/CSU. I'd say traditionally during the latter half of the 20th century far right politicians had to pick between joining the establishment right and becoming a domesticated fascist with his "ain't I a stinker?" moments or sticking to the far right and accepting you won't get anywhere close to power for a long long time. Now that's no longer the case ofc.

another big factor is FPTP making it much much harder for minor parties of any type to get any real electoral foothold, even at UKIP's 2015 peak they were only able to get a single seat in the House of Commons despite having significant portion of the vote. they very much filled the same sort of role as the more outright fascist right-populist minor parties in the rest of Europe though

Wide scale protests are the only way to stop this now.

Much of the left’s attention today will rightly be on the abhorrent & repressive policing bill and its restrictions on the right to protest. But some ought also to be on the government’s seizing control of the Electoral Commission in the Elections Bill yesterday.

— James B (@piercepenniless) April 28, 2022

BREAKING 🚨🚢: Contracts obtained by ITV have revealed P&O replacement agency staff will be paid just £3.94 an hour - to work 12-hour days, 7 days a week.

— Trades Union Congress (@The_TUC) April 27, 2022

meanwhile

https://www.ein.org.uk/news/nationality-and-borders-bill-become-law-labour-decides-it-would-be-inappropriate-house

Labour Lords whipped to abstain on blocking the Nationality and Borders Bill. now that's what i call opposition

kinda gutted at having to boycott P&O as it's my preferred route out of Hull but the thought that the ferries are probably terrifyingly unsafe ameliorates it a bit

you'll be gone by the morning light

sorry, the pun has probably been done at least five million times

I'm glad that Calzino is reading Oliver Eagleton.

I think that the bad current situation is not just that we have those bad far right parties / politicians, but that the Opposition is almost indistinguishable from them.

If we actually had a social democratic or even liberal opposition in this country it would make a difference. We don't.

idk call me a melt but there's a clear distinction between wonkish law-and-order classic-centrism (which I won't be voting for) and dismantle-everything neocon populism (which I'd still very much like to get an almighty kicking at these elections pls)

(will probably vote Green as the likeliest to nibble at Labour from the left in Greenwich/Woolwich. then two days later I move to an absolute doozy of a constituency lol)

I don't agree.

KS is corrupt, mendacious and malicious, a person with no concept of truth, honesty or integrity, and has spent most of his time as leader orchestrating brutal purges of socialists on false pretexts.

Meanwhile his disgusting health spokesperson has been arguing for privatization of the NHS.

You think that's 'wonkish law-and-order classic-centrism' ?

I'm afraid you're kidding yourself on this one.

I know he's been doing that - the sacking of RLB was when I quit the party - but I think much of that stems from a total lack of imagination and a desire for 'electability' whose instincts are conservative. Obviously not someone you want in charge of the Labour Party but not really what the Tories are currently either (namely, flash culture-war dragoons)

flash AND fash, indeed

I mean, on one level 'they are both terrible' is true, but on another level, one party still (just about) has McDonnell, Abbott, Whittome etc in it, and on yet another level, there is a scenario where I'd consider voting Labour through the most gritted of teeth to get the Tories out if they were the obvious alternative (thanks to our terrible FPTP system that is bad not good) - if that makes me a melt then I'll own it, but you won't catch me actively standing up for Labour as it is now - a dislikeable, punitive shambles

don't ask me what I'd do if Burnham was leader tho ;)

What good does it do that McDonnell or Whittome, or indeed Sultana, are in the party when they are hated by the leadership, the management and most of their colleagues, and will have less than zero influence (literally, because the party will deliberately do the opposite of what they want) over anything that the party does?

Maybe it matters. But does it? How?

You'd have to ask them, but they are still there. They clearly have hope that something can change in their favour

That reminds me - there was a reference on a Novara post ("Is there any point staying in Labour?") to how "the shift to a single transferable vote for NEC elections has weakened our ability to resist <Starmer's McCarthyism>". Does anyone have a good article explaining this point of view, the ones I've found on the subject reflect my instinct that STV only makes things worse if "we" are good at organising holding our noses for power and "they" are fractious and principled, which is not the way the sides in this war map out in my head?

D'oh, that should be italics instead of strike-through!

Lol

Starmer's McCarthyism so out of control it's even censoring Andrew Farrell's posts.

I'm glad that Calzino is reading Oliver Eagleton too - I'd like to read that book

but I would not like to read this book:
https://productimages.worldofbooks.com/1783341920.jpg

(will probably vote Green as the likeliest to nibble at Labour from the left in Greenwich/Woolwich. then two days later I move to an absolute doozy of a constituency lol)

― imago, Thursday, 28 April 2022 bookmarkflaglink

Is that Kensington and Chelsea?

we are all easily wound up at present and i can forgive this online unkindness but really i draw a red line at voting labour when it would clearly make a tory seat more rather than less likely. it is impossible to falsify polls by that much surely. if you can show me a recent finchley poll where the labour vote hasn't (unfairly) tanked then fictional finchley lj will recant and apologise

― imago, Tuesday, 3 December 2019 12:48 (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

*nervous laughter*

Lol real melt land!!