“I take my responsibilities seriously. I did not lie” - UK politics June 23 on

I could actually imagine a horribly weird and vile paedophile like Heath having strong feelings and heightened emotions about music, couldn't imagine Starmer feeling anything about anything.

Of course Starmer's sister makes her own England shirt to wear to the ballgame

"It is a unifier. It doesn't need to be changed. We just need to be proud of it."

well how about publically burning it - if you detest it and everything it represents. That would also be a unifier.

listened to OJ's leaving Labour upload, he is right about Reeves' economically illiterate hard-right ideas (that they can somehow fund tax cuts/make savings/grow the economy by cruelly targeting disabled ppl and benefits) not working for Gideon and closer to Trussenomics than even the current UK Tory govt is. Which makes me think even if you are in a constituency with one of the *nice* SCG MP's - voting pro-genocide transphobic Labour has become an untenable position because of at least how dangerous and deranged they are going to be in govt.

(xp) Trying and failing to imagine a Scottish politician saying the same thing about the Scottish flag.

i was talking to a lad last night who's a stereotypical "b-b-b-b-but the Tories" guy and i didn't even have it it me to laugh, he sincerely thinks any cunt in a red tie is gonna be an improvement

xp the ones who feel like that largely feel it about the Union Jack, imo

if you have feeling about flags get tae fuck is how i break it down to an extent

(xp) Yes, but at least they couldn't get away with claiming it's a unifier.

Well now

Since October 2022 I have stayed silent, seeking to right the wrong done to me and the people of Ilford. I want to be absolutely clear - the Anonyvoter system was used to deselect me, rigged to change the result against the wishes of my local Labour Party. https://t.co/YrnibwloRZ

— Sam Tarry MP (@SamTarry) March 23, 2024

Access the article here if you don’t subscribe: https://t.co/DqpET0qAqI

— Sam Tarry MP (@SamTarry) March 23, 2024

i was going to point out to Sam that he could always leave this shit party but he's blocking replies

How many government agencies can we use to hound the sick to death

JobCentres will be made to work with the NHS under Labour plans to get the long-term sick back to work

Liz Kendall tells me Sir Keir Starmer's missions will fail if she can't deal with economic inactivity, saying it's "critical" to Labour govt planshttps://t.co/ymjlQ51pI6

— Chris Smyth (@Smyth_Chris) March 24, 2024

Problem is, a huge amount of these people will be long Covid sufferers so what then?

she's really up for some hardcore dwp corporate homicide on the disabled. 100 000 disabled ppl die - a statistic. One of these scumbags get's murdered - we never hear the last of it.

xp

I believe the gov.uk website with advice and signposting on long Covid is being taken down in April, so there's the level of concern

even the most exploitative/ruthless employers are not going to benefit much from workers who are constantly fatigued and experiencing regular brain fog and dealing with serious pain issues. But let's just attack anyone who needs to access benefits, just to show how tough we are.

Oh aye, that's one of the most fucked up aspects - I doubt any employer is pushing for this, it's not for their benefit

*The Day Today voice* Iain Duncan Smith has said he was impersonated by a pro-China “wolf warrior” and has called for the country to be labelled a threat to UK security.

https://cdn4.whatculture.com/images/2015/05/bOGtpvwV-600x338.gif

The former Tory leader said on Monday that the “wolf warrior”, a term used for combative proponents of the Chinese government, had impersonated him and sent emails to politicians around the world suggesting he had changed his views about Beijing had just spent the happiest day of his life jerking off over bronie porn

come on you wolves

A wolf in a much shittier wolf's clothing

Stephen Bush on Sunak:

While it is easy to find Tories willing to say publicly that Sunak’s government is too far to the left, it is hard to find anyone who will give voice to the truth: that it is in fact further to the right than Johnson’s, just as Truss’s was, and this is part of why the Conservatives are now doing less well electorally than they once did.

Some MPs and aides will say this in private — but they are outnumbered by those who think that Sunak is some kind of moderate and that the Johnson era shows that radicalism can be electorally effective. That delusion means that when the Tories lose the next election, the contest to replace him as Conservative leader will be predicated on the idea that he lost because he was too moderate, too centrist and too close to the middle ground of British politics. The reality that he has moved the Tory party further from the centre, and therefore closer to defeat, won’t be allowed to intrude.

why are so many tories convinced that Sunak is a centrist despite all the evidence to the contrary? Some of it must just be racism - though the same people generally don't seem to have the same delusion about Priti Patel or Suella Braverman - but maybe that just shows you have to engage in flamboyant panto villain posturing to convince these people that you're actually a right-winger?

maybe it's just that Sunak gives off Tony Blair Nick Clegg type liberal centrist vibes despite being to Johnson's right on policy, and that's what matters most? Or just that he's had the misfortune to become leader when the party is circling the drain, and a lot of tories response solution to any problem will always be moving further to the right, regardless of circumstances?

Exactly

his demeanour is unsuited to culture warfare, regardless of what he's saying he presents like a cameron or clegg, ranting and "gaffes" are required and stories about obnoxious things he says in private but I suggest he start putting in the effort ASAP

Or just that he's had the misfortune to become leader when the party is circling the drain, and a lot of tories response solution to any problem will always be moving further to the right, regardless of circumstances?

They did the same thing when Blair won.

as chancellor he presided over one of the - if not the - biggest, most sustained social welfare programmes in post-war history, shovelling billions of pounds into the pockets of people unable to work because of covid, and it worked, which is i think in the eyes of many tories simply inexcusable

also the tight-arsed (in comparison to the French equivalent) Cost of Living payments - the absolute socialist horror of giving free money to poor ppl upset some of the hard-right. I think he was using them against Truss in the leadership debate, who was a bit fuzzy on committing to further payments.

He was at the height of his popularity during the eat out to help out scheme.

Tories like to give money away as long as they are destroying state capacity, but Covid did short circuit them.

isn't it just that they think he's a centrist because he's marginally less unhinged than like, truss, badenoch or braverman

is he though

Think that before becoming PM he was seen as somewhat quieter compared to Truss, but yeah he is just as unhinged now he's at the top.

Truss had many years of Cabinet membership to grossly inflate her sense of competence and resulting Main Character flameout. Sunak seems to have a bit more self-awareness and isn't as pig-in-shit comfortable dipping into culture war BS. He does seem more Cameron/Osborne-like to me.

i think all of them are products of 'the moment' more or less in that, while I don't doubt they are all pretty hateful and would send us all to the camps without a second thought, i think the ratio of zealotry to opportunism is often overstated on the part of these ghouls. They're hateful but they peddle hate mostly because its useful to them. For this reason I think its difficult to gauge what motivates them by the policies they push and place them on a swivel-eye scale. all that said, my instinct is that truss and braverman are more motivated by an actual belief in their bullshit than sunak and to a slightly lesser degree badenoch who both strike me as primarily immoral blaggers.

yeah i pretty much agree with that

another caveat for me is the difference between culture war zealotry and libertarian roll back the state zeolatry, obv these things have close ties but they're not identical and you can be a partisan of either while assuming the mantle of respectability on the other, but at heart they're both roads to cruelty & fascism

like for Sunak surely Prime Minister is not the most personally lucrative grift open to him, but it gives him power to push the economic landscape in ways that enrich him and his allies long term, so it's easy to see the adoption of bigoted stances as just flavour sauce for the useful idiots

Badenoch is very much a zealot btw.

Tell me more! I hate her but she always comes across as a total cynical grifter to me

Whenever I think of Kemi Badenoch I think of that period I was reading conservative home every day for the loonies in the comments

https://conservativehome.com/2017/12/21/interview-kemi-badenoch-im-not-really-left-leaning-on-anything-i-always-lean-right-instinctively/

Badenoch: “The escape from Colditz is I think probably the coolest thing any British politician has ever done.”

Bacon: “One or two lords escaped as well.”

Badenoch: “They were made lords because of their war service. So that we do have a lot of war heroes. But when you think about MPs, when I listen to MPs, again, I must sound so tribal, but when I hear a lot of the whining from the Opposition benches, you think about people like Airey Neave, and what they got done, and I just imagine if the current Parliamentary Labour Party and probably a few others on our side were in prisoner of war camps, they’d probably just die.”

ConHome: “Well Dan Jarvis would be all right.”

Badenoch: “Maybe, maybe Dan Jarvis. But I feel we are much softer as a generation, and that’s probably a better point to make, it sounds less party political. I think that we have gone a bit soft in terms of how resilient we are in dealing with adversity.

“And that’s not as politicians, but just the country as a whole. I don’t feel that we’re as tough as we used to be, if we had to deal with rationing or not having everything 24/7 immediately available.

She's one of the more enthusiastic, and genuine, culture warriors in the Tory Party.

i also enjoy thinking about Airey Neave getting done tbf

Idk for badenoch I always get the sense that it's just some dumb game and that particular slice of drivel does little to dispel that feeling. To be clear what I'm claiming is very much an instinct and thus fairly resistant to being disproven empirically.

Truss is also somewhat moot as her brain is clearly mush

What is a “Blueberry & Yuzu Blondie”?

Come on, Leon, why not offer a delicious Chelsea Bun!#ReviveTheChelseaBun pic.twitter.com/QLbhHQ8JC6

— Greg Hands (@GregHands) March 25, 2024

i only found out what a yuzu was in the last few days (courtesy lidl's japanese week) -- did everyone else (except greg hands) already know?

anyway they're really nice

I am going to have to try this.

Greg hands is the mp for chelsea obv. which is why he's being such a tit about it

We’re about the stage in the Tory lifecycle where we’re due a citrus fruit related autoerotic asphyxiation.

This time the fruit will be Yuzu.