DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived post-Murdoch era

"Sanya-Jeet Thandi, a 20-year-old LSE student living in Holborn who joined UKIP when she was a sixth-former and was described at the party’s last national conference as future leadership material"

She was on Ch4 news in the week. I've never heard anyone more posh and clueless.

Something a bit weird is going on at the moment in that Ed Miliband has a) announced some policies and b) they don't appear to be totally stupid and reactionary and lowest common denominator.

he's also making noises about 'clamping down on immigration', the yang to the no-bedroom-tax ying

Just posting this here for posterity:

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/9/20/1379696877910/George-Osborne-jogging-012.jpg

morrissey let himself go

Morrissey wishes

http://twitpic.com/deq8z0

^ Tory blogger Iain Dale decides to start wrestling a protestor on Brighton seafront

he's quite proud of himself

http://www.iaindale.com/posts/2013/09/24/it-shouldn-t-happen-to-a-publisher-protecting-an-author-during-a-live-interview

I did what any self respecting publisher would do, got out of the car, ran across and pulled him out of the shot. He started resisting and we ended up in an unseemly tumble on the ground. I was conscious of the photographers and other cameramen who were present filming the whole thing, but I was determined this idiot shouldn’t disrupt what was an important interview for my author.

because wrestling with a harmless protester won't disrupt anything

I am someone who runs a mile from any form of physical confrontation normally, but

is he going to be charged with assault, and if not why not?

I never understand why broadcasters seem to accept without question that someone with a placard or a loud voice should disrupt this sort of interview

Because we live in a democracy and they chose to conduct the interview in a public place?

Living in a world where you feel justified in wrestling an OAP to the ground for annoying you. Oh dear.

is he going to be charged with assault, and if not why not?

The usual: Lack of evidence...

i think they protestor would have to lodge the charge himself, in this case. i hope he does.

i can't understand why the electorate is so apathetic nowadays with guys like Damian McBride and his pals generating important ideological content every day

looks like i picked a bad week to give up calling for purges

what the fuck are you playing at, labour

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/10327874/Labour-new-measures-to-make-insulting-military-personnel-a-criminal-offence.html

also, dispatch from the frontline of the Labour conference: Chuka Umunna is just THE WORST. Those days I was optimistic about him seem very far away now

okay can we just purge these fuckers and start again from scratch?

What did he do? Is he just a teflon neoliberal careerist or is there new info? xp

why the fuck do war-loving anti-socialist Torybots in disguise even want to be in the Labour oh never mind

nothing especially new on top of that suzy, undisguised corporatist thru & thru

actual exchange in Umunna fringe event:

Q from audience member who said she was a young party member but had surely just come to the wrong conference, paraphrased: I'm disillusioned about what Labour are going to do to my aspirations, if I'm successful they'll just take half of it away in tax

[rumblings from audience]

Umunna, with unseemly enthusiasm: Oh, no! We WANT you to make your first million!

(This on top of a speech in which he'd repeatedly conflated "betterment" with "earning more than your parents". Fuckwit)

plus he literally defended that Mandelson filthy rich comment by saying "oh what no one reports is that the second half of the sentence was "as long as you pay taxes""

That's just fairly standard NuLab True Believer stuff really, surprised anyone expected anything different of him.

i mean i always knew blunkett was a confused moralistic authoritarian moron, but jesus.

I could have sworn I just read that he actually compared online pornography to the rise of the Nazis, but I can only assume that I just haven't woken up yet.

Q from audience member who said she was a young party member but had surely just come to the wrong conference, paraphrased: I'm disillusioned about what Labour are going to do to my aspirations, if I'm successful they'll just take half of it away in tax

lol sounds legit

xp well, you see, online porn made people scared of diversity and then they had no choice but to become fascists, that was how the weimar republic collapsed

Oh wow Sodom & Gomorrah AND Nazi Germany. I'm trying to think about what might be the third bit of that trifecta and coming up blank.

I'm disillusioned about what Labour are going to do to my aspirations, if I'm successful they'll just take half of it away in tax

funnily enough their refusal to do this is why I'm hugely disillusioned by labour

Nazi fetsih porn became so widespread in the Weimar republic that eventually it became cool to be a Nazi.

Miliband's "freeze energy bills until 2017" policy is all well and good until energy firms decide en-masse to get all their price rises in at once, just before the cut-off.

"Robin Hood and the outlaws - they were called that because they were outside the law - that was not a sustainable position in the 13th Century and it's not a sustainable position now."

Helen Goodman there, shadow minister for media etc

"Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of unsustainable and financially unviable men.."

Striking imagery:

2) Brown used to rehearse his speeches while McBride shouted abuse at him

This was done when he first became prime minister, to prepare him for hostile crowds. Favourite heckles were: "You stole my pension, Brown!", "You're a bigger bastard that Blair!" and "Where's the gold, Brown?", which particularly infuriated him. Sometimes he could not help shouting back.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/shortcuts/2013/sep/24/damian-mcbride-10-things-book-labour

#10 is pretty damning.

the evening news is full of spokespeople for big businesses bleating like crazy, EMil must've said something good

"You're a bigger bastard that Blair!" is my new favourite insult

those pretend insults are way tamer than what Brown must've experienced irl

looking forward to the movie from the people that brought us The King's Speech tho

Fuck sake yeah, where's the stuff about him being mentally unstable and on drugs, you know like Andrew Marr laid on him?

Or not caring about dead soldiers and going out of his way to actively insult their mothers, like the Sun accused him of

got vision's of EMil's spin coach locking him in a room bellowing "A DECOND DLASS DETURN DO DOTTINGHAM, DLEASE" at him

is he going to be charged with assault, and if not why not?

Iain Dale quizzed over Brighton scuffle.

The Daily Mail, which has been railing against high energy prices and the energy companies for as long as I can remember, was utterly wrongfooted by Miliband's speech. Whoever the columnist was just started ranting about how terrible it was that he'd pledged to do what they'd been campaigning for all along.

srsly since last night Radio 4 has been nothing but energy company PRs making increasingly hysterical threats to leave the country, kill the first-born, blow up the sun etc

this week's conference was about as a socialist as a Jim Davidson gig but the trolling of the rich has been A1

Credit to them this is about the most populist policy imaginable. Energy companies and rabid free marketeers are about the only people who will care.

Possibly the more significant move is Ed Balls offering up manifesto pledges to the OBR is a smart move as well in that he knows full well the OBR won't do it and it will look like the government have something to hide.

The Daily Mail, which has been railing against high energy prices and the energy companies for as long as I can remember, was utterly wrongfooted by Miliband's speech. Whoever the columnist was just started ranting about how terrible it was that he'd pledged to do what they'd been campaigning for all along.

I just spotted their front cover in the supermarket and it was hilarious. the headline is all, like, "they are threatening boosting minimum wage! and threatening keeping energy prices from rising!", and I'm thinking, you'd have to do some pretty impressive journalistic jujitsu (they don't) or have a particularly addled readership (they do) to argue those as bad things, surely!

Credit to them this is about the most populist policy imaginable. Energy companies and rabid free marketeers are about the only people who will care.

Hopefully they're doing a sort of switcheroo here, re-directing the GBP's righteous fury at welfare recipients to someone more deserving of their ire, corporations/ cartels/ capitalist scumbags in general... hopefully

An energy tycoon plans next move against Miliband, yesterday

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/simpsons-mr-burns-blocks-out-the-sun1-640x353.jpg