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

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!!

Gonna have an actual Tory to zap. Quite exciting

re: NEC & STV, the previous system used was FPTP, which meant the left was capable of winning the entire slate of nine CLP seats during the Corbyn era. STV is a proportional system, so it dilutes the left's influence at that level, which is where they're strongest, as the right obviously has institutional advantages elsewhere in the NEC. in 2020 the results for those CLP seats were 5 left/3 right/1 soft-left, which shows the left could have still won all or nearly all of those seats under FPTP.

"so it dilutes the left's influence at that level" / "which shows the left could have still won all or nearly all of those seats under FPTP" - Yeah, these are the bits that don't make any sense to me. I know what FPTP and STV are - that's why these bits don't make any sense to me.

under the previous system, everyone could vote for 9 candidates and then the 9 candidates with the highest votes won seats, so it was in practice a winner-take-all system. this meant that the left got all 9 seats during the corbyn years with around 55% of the vote. under STV, the left only gets 5 out of 9 seats with that sort of small majority of the vote (as they did in 2020) and would need ~90% of the vote to win all 9 seats.

Funny how the ones you always imagine to be utter cunts turn out to be utter cunts.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/28/mp-liam-byrne-should-be-suspended-from-commons-for-breaching-bullying-rules-panel

xp right, so it's gone from overwhelming majority to just majority

there are also a lot of appointed positions (some appointed by the leader's office, but others by various bits of the party bureaucracy) on the NEC which tend to be dominated by the right, so overwhelming majority in the positions that members vote for was the only way the left was likely to ever get a majority on the NEC as a whole, even when they had all 9 member appointed positions it was pretty slim, I think?

richard seymour (twitter's @leninology) on the eagleton book: https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/04/tell-us-who-you-really-are-keir-starmer

yes i know it's the new statesman; but it's an incisive review of a book that may be better than i'm entirely expecting (as some are aware i'm not a fan of the eagleton branding, tho perhaps it's not fair entirely to tar the son with the dad's flaws) (the two or three oliver eagleton pieces i've read in the last two or threee years i've broadly agreed with AND been irritated by lol, perhaps my abreaction against terry's affect has poisoned my brane)

if i have a reservation abt this account (= seymour's summary of eagleton's narrative) it's that it overstates how *early* starmer had fully hardened into what's he become; how soon his clarity of political purpose had emerged to him (starmer) without it being apparent yet to anyone else -- yes, he may always have had an inkling he could win, and may well be more ruthless and ambitious than he seems publicly, but i don't really believe in political strategies that are full set in place in advance of all the opportunities that subsequently emerge to be seized… he's a lawyer, which means he's attuned to the tactical, and subtly twists and turns as events allow… and political acts don't really exist as long as their locked in a single person's head

but maybe i just want SKSQC not to seem as successful (if only on his own terms) as this suggests

very little about his record as LoTO suggests he's that clinically machiavellian, this is true

I saw this guy by the Dixons ice cream shop the other day who was at least facially an absolute dead ringer for Kieth - even the same glasses and hairstyle, apart from he was about 6"2 and looked like a bit of a doorman/bruiser type, quite comical.

The muckraking Eagleton did even before his DPP tenure show he'd already "journeyed to the right" somewhat, as in advising the CPS to scrap any charges against the anti-GRT hate mob in Firle. Although you have to be evil to be offered the job, it gives the impression that the previous DPP and others in the dept were a little surprised and expecting him to be more progressive.

yes the review talks abt that -- but to me that's evidence of situational adjustment to underlying outlook (he's a cop) more than it's evidence of a cold-eyed long-distance step-by-step project, for himself or for the party (to be clear this is the only aspect i'm hmmming at; i think his victory to date is more a product of persistent stubborn lack of imagination as it jigsaws into the endemic lack of imagination of the political landscape, and of constrained vision of potential transformation as it jigsaws ditto ditto; more a product of this anyway than of any useable kind of political deftness, be it never so narrowly focused so far)