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

https://www.artalistic.com/en/media/blog/images/Roy_Lichtenstein_1.jpg

"I lived a few weeks ..before I realised what a tragically bald melt you are"

kickstarter to add the flying sausage to *every* image with giant ben day dots

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0bpyszs

We're actually doing the fucking research. We've been working on this thing for a year. Each episode has had weeks of work poured into it.

the cleverest balds in the room have done their fucking research this time, that is very impressive.

this time, no doubt fans of Remainiacs and Oh God, What Next? will notice a discernible improvement now they are the only podcasters in town that do the fucking research.

DL's superhero name cld be The Spectator

Balder The Brave(s)

the word "city" has become practically meaningless now that Doncaster is one.

And Reading continues not to be one, sob sob apparently.

I'm afraid all the billions of dollars of FDI will be all be flooding into Doncaster and Bangor now, better luck next time.

Colchester also!

"England's oldest recorded town" is no longer a town.

(I seem to remember poster Imago and me discussing the place.)

and Milton Keynes, one of the newer made-up towns with a made-up football club. If it looks and feels like a Town, has a sub 250k population, then it is actually is a Town imo.

all towns are made up when u think abt it

Goole is a long-running practical joke, true

oh I know all Towns are made up, but a newish post-war overspill one like MK is trying to run before it can walk, if there was no history of dark satanic mills and Luddite activity then it isn't a proper town. I'm making the rules here!

Lol Goole actually bid for city status

Local councils and their attendant hangers-on are the worstest

Seriously just make everywhere a city who cares?

Come to think of it, destroy the UK and turn it into 200-odd city states just for fun

A town has been "left behind to decay" after missing out on city status for a second time, a business owner has said...

lol, what a bunch of Gooles

I know this one, a city is when a representative gets murdered

The EU Cities fund is gone now, and the only recent extra government investment was that one-off bribe Towns Fund. Where I live got some, but I haven't seen any evidence of infrastructure or aesthetic improvement. Maybe if they keep voting Tory....

xp

I had grim lol at that one, but will be careful not to post any more than that!

Reading some "We never wanted to be a city anyway, fuck the Queen" stuff from people from Paisley on Facebook. They doth protest too much me'hinks.

This is the worst thing anyone has ever made

WWII veteran John Pearce is releasing a single to honour the Queen's Platinum Jubilee.

“She was a real inspiration during the war and has continued to lead by example."

Thank You Your Majesty is a reworking of Go West by The Village People.

📺 Freeview 237, Sky 526, Virgin 627 pic.twitter.com/ZHjqZn0qEX

— TalkTV (@TalkTV) May 20, 2022

Even worse than the Captain Tom Moore song, the 23 seconds of it I could stand anyway

And Reading continues not to be one, sob sob apparently.

― Mark G, Friday, 20 May 2022 16:34 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I did think wtf what about Reading when I read the city news. It's 21 years since I moved away but I do think it's a bit ridiculous that a town with over 300,000 people is still not a city. Officially apparently Northampton is the biggest town in England because half of Reading's population is outside the city limits though.

I've been on a few away trips to Sixfields in my time and the impression I got from my limited exploration of the place (and it was a football excursion not an Ian Nairn trip) was that Northampton is distinctly NOT a big town!

Xpost yeah we can walk into the centre of Reading in 20 mins, but we are officially in Wokingham borough.

I'm fond of Sixfields.

Fairly random question - is the higher education system in the UK set to survive the pandemic and brexit? Will Oxford and Cambridge and all the preparatory schools always be determinants of your future?

as long as the existing class/economic/social nexus stands than yeah

not just surviving but thriving

Is there a chance that Cambridge could surpass Oxford, if anyone cares, on account of its strengths in the sciences?

Will rhetoric always be so important in making an impression?

My apologies for any false premises in the questions above.

Is meritocracy a set up?

a veneer on top of the set up maybe

i'm not in the place this morning to deeply pull at this but i guess you need to distinguish between the ruling forces within the UK, the economic base and its rulers on an intersecting global level, where the money that bolsters the power comes from, how they interact, how the media and adjacent social forces serve this and how they relate to it

on a very fundamental level the ruling class in the UK isn't different now than it was in 1800 except in trivial presentational ways

I don't think most people in the UK think in terms of Oxford vs Cambridge, as separate and interestingly different and competing entities, except people who have been to Oxford or Cambridge.

To the rest of us they're two halves of the same thing, though admittedly with some entertaining local differences eg: F.R. Leavis and the tradition of English studies at Cambridge.

tempting to say "there never was a meritocracy" but when I think about my mother and her four siblings, they certainly managed to move from working class to middle class + between the 50s and the 80s. would say that such a journey is not really possible now.

public schools + oxbridge certainly fit into our government's unspoken vision of the future, this is where the richest people in their world send their kids to be educated, maintaining the income and the soft power this generates is key to transforming this county to the Singapore of the west.

UK HE can survive the pandemic and Brexit, though it may be damaged by both. What it can't survive intact is the malign policies and actions of the corrupt UK government. These are quite separable from, and considerably prior to, those other crises, and are also ongoing now.

my fave Cambridge alumni were lads like Maclean and Burgess, who by most accounts were pretty fucked up and dislikeable people. But at least they hated the system that gave them an easy life enough to actively work against it.

I'm right here!

xp the rumour is that the Cambridge spy ring is the reason London-Cambridge transport links have been worse than London-Oxford. More plausibly this is why we've had eight Oxford-educated PMs since then, and exactly zero from Cambridge.

I think Oxford was always the politics place, Cambridge was more dead parrots and silly walks.

Baldwin is the last Cambridge-educated PM, going back more than a century you find that plenty (Bonar Law, Lloyd George) did not go to university at all, otherwise there's a fairly even split.

noodle v says:

on a very fundamental level the ruling class in the UK isn't different now than it was in 1800 except in trivial presentational ways

unless you simply mean it's still the few vs the many as it always was i'm not sure that i agree with this? in 1800 the ruling class in the UK was organised round the ownership of land, rather than industry or commerce or capital as it is today -- and companies and corporations as we understand them today didn't exist (or they kind of did in proto-form but the individuals owning them were entirely liable, so the org had not been severed from the wealth of its founder or owner or whatever blah blah).

the land-owning aristocracy does still exist (as major london-centred landlords the grosvenors and the cadogans still get into the top 15 uk billionaires) but as a class it is absolutely no longer the mover and shaker it was throughout the the 19th century. meanwhile what gives the newspaper barons their modern power is not that they are barons but that they run newspapers (and now other media).

a secondary point is that the UK just isn't very important any more: its ruling forces today are very much more outside and multinational forces than they were in 1800 -- the murdochs (from a relatively lowly background if you start at 1800) have far more oligarchical heft as a family than the duke of westminster does, and for all the fuss round the windsors today elizabeth ii has much less political power than george iii had: they function as spectacle and lightning rod and have little agency except defensively)

that's all fair and I picked 1800 to stretch my rhetorical point - it probably isn't far enough into the industrial revolution, tho i think you can argue that it was starting to be felt in the landscape of rulership by then, and i'd certainly argue that by 1850 it was dominant if not total. Murdoch and other press barons are new and different but idk if they're in the ruling class of the UK so much as powerful outside forces whose patronage is sometimes needed and who sometimes themselves seek patronage? royal family's relationship to politics looks different but mostly nominally so i'd say, and tho Elizabeth doesn't form parliaments in the way George III did this is as much about the face that the monarchy has chosen to wear to survive as it is about the mechanics of power imo

i am stretching my despair to prove a point but i'll stick by the feeling that the opening up of suffrage through the long 19th century hasn't made much more than hypothetical difference to the rulership of the UK. but that stretch maybe looks thin around the world wars and the post WWII settlement

anyway, i am exaggerating but not that much imo

agree that the UK isn't that important any more but always quote what Vaneigem said about Wile E Coyote not realising he's run off the end of the cliff yet

Is there a chance that Cambridge could surpass Oxford, if anyone cares, on account of its strengths in the sciences?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FTV4fmTXwAAkPGG?format=jpg&name=medium

Ian Austin says the current LOTO is way too soft on those totally evil and unpatriotic train union Trots!

former member of the Face Down the Unions Party

Kieth would be more than happy to condemn any union that takes strike action during jubilee events. He's just going through a bit of a quiet period whilst the guy who wrote his conference speech is talking up a rival for his job. Couldn't happen to a nicer person.