brexit negging when yr mandate is is trash: or further chronicles of a garbage-fire

Last night's doc on Boris (really should stop watching politics TV) surely underplayed the strength of his popularity among the Tory base and round the country due to his antics around the Brexit vote.

Only popular in comparison to other Tories, which is why J R-M talk lasted longer than 5 mins.

Yes I could have been clearer, I meant popularity or at least “respect” within the party, based on (possibly the myth or ghost of) popularity with the public - the idea (which I don’t necessarily subscribe to) that if he was fired he could expect support for any ructions he gets up to, because he’s not just a candidate for the next leader but the candidate, and so picking the wrong side would be more dangerous for others than it would be with a wider field.

Footnote to myself: a) I’m not sure how popular he still is, and b) remember the fate of the most popular politician in the US in 2013, outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

shook (cont.):

Repeatedly told at #cpc17 Tories are fighting "not just for the party but the survival of capitalism".

— Dawn Foster (@DawnHFoster) October 2, 2017

damn straight

Momentum must be more tooled up than I realized

Tories being warned of saying Venezuela more than twice in any one speech for fear of it suddenly materialising around them.

super-psyched for the collapse of capitalism tbh, can't wait to look back at theresa may with gratitude for ushering in our fully-automated gay space communist society

you missed 'luxury', learn 2 meme properly m8

i can live without the luxury tbh, but def unwilling to negotiate on the gay part

dude, space is the key to luxury

space is the (luxury) place iirc

bachelor pad
launch pad
galactic pad
cosmos pad

it's weird that the tories are focusing so much on demonising Corbyn, this didn't seem to work very well during the election campaign, so why would it work now?

(I guess the argument is - at last election no-one thought there was any chance of Labour forming the next govt, so ppl could vote Lab without worrying too much about Corbyn's suitability for role of PM, this will not be the case next time around - but I get the impression that there are not enough ppl who buy this "most dangerous man in Britain" description to make it work as an attack? particularly as they're now focusing on his economic policies, which a lot of the country seem quite keen on, rather than his position on nukes, terrorism etc)

They seem intent on doing something even more bizarre than demonizing Corbyn, selling Capitalism to the uncomprehending masses who are, apparently, poised to become fully-fledged Marxist-Leninists.

luv2cheerlead for wholehearted embrace of capitalism at a time of unprecedented income inequality

capitalism will continue until morale improves

They are demonising Corbyn because they don't have any direction or new policies or even a single idea and they can't really talk about brexit because they've fucked that.

They're saving the awesomeness of Brexit for when they really need it, their ace in the hole.

They're falling apart in front of our eyes and it would be a+ hilarious if the stakes weren't so incredibly high right now

they have the backing of the silent (and absent) majority tho

Huge blocks of empty seats at the Con conference, sections closed off for want of bums on seats. Labour was packed pic.twitter.com/c7E6p5bEWU

— Kevin Maguire (@Kevin_Maguire) October 2, 2017

xp
yeah it would be very entertaining to observe this unravelling from a safe distance, but they will take loads of us down with them.

banks of empty seats and softballs getting launched at Tories by protester crowds outside are memorable images of this conference.

I've been pondering whether protesty mobs are a good thing tactically or whether they just smell of the SWP but I don't care really

if the pm won't visit the people, the people must visit the pm

and then, ideally, kill and eat the entire cabinet

I know the disabled protesters were definitely nothing to do with the SWP, and when they are depriving Tories of tv shots of them making a dignified entrance to the conference, then good work I say.

Packed house at #CPC17 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/MIrKWsi9P9

— Kevin Pascoe (@KevinPascoe) October 1, 2017

fucking hurry up and die you shitheads

Dunno who the two Morrissey groupies in front are but surprised they got in with those jeans.

What's Len McCluskey doing sitting there in the middle?

Dunno who the two Morrissey groupies in front are but surprised they got in with those jeans.

tolerating denim is the tories' latest attempt at youth appeal, look for rees-mogg to appear on question time in a full canadian tuxedo by the end of the month

Was just listening to a quote on PM from a Tory activist who has been attending conferences since '84. It was something like: attendances and takings both way down, previously there would be queues for many of the speeches, prevailing mood of defeatism, worst ever etc

absolutely loving conference season. conservative conference is a shitshow

For the last 25 years the Tories have been a shit-show. Could be argued (and has been by a Marxist somewhere) that Blair's government was the most stable period of Toryism.

But they are the party of establishment, they aren't going away, May got 40%+ - so I am not sure how this is going to play. Down but never out. I can see them doubling down on racism and authoritarian nationalism. Cameron's liberal detox now gone for good you'd say there is little else they can do.

They do need to find someone they can go to. Boris is really too toxic now, so it'll be someone unknown.

Can't take your eyes off these bastards.

So yeah, thinking out loud: the establishment party are being hollowed out. They will fight back, but how?

Anyway, this was really good: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2017/oct/02/protester-tells-jacob-rees-mogg-hes-despicable-video

Young angry man is very good + wasting his breath on that fool. He could have a lengthy debate with Mogg and lay precarious employment, disabled people dying, endemic child poverty, and all the other austerity ills out in an articulate fashion. All he would get back is that pedantic Oxford debating society shit: Well actually a shambles is butcher's back room you fucking pleb ..etc...

"Let's leave my despicableness to one side for a moment" > "Strong and stable"

Hammond today: "Ladies, and Gentlemen, 40 years ago this week, here in the north-east…"

...We nuked Hartlepool, because they fucking deserved it!

I've been pondering whether protesty mobs are a good thing /tactically/ or whether they just smell of the SWP but I don't care really

Groups of women born in the 50s were out in force today with WASP placards.

I meant a specific kind of non-specific-issue "hang the Tories" protest really, but like I said I don't care, whatever makes people feel good

i'm writing up a stephen king film right this minute, and one of his things -- i gather, i'm not an expert -- is crisscrossing the borderland between the cartoon monster and actual dark social reality

anyway i just struck me that one reason pennycorbs has the tories so rattled is that he's passed -- very suddenly -- from being a cartoon monster they cynically deployed (to scare children) and yet also somewhat nurtured* (to destroy the labour party) to a social possibility they genuinely fear and belatedly recognise is, well, very extremely real**

*toby young and others becoming lab party members at £3 a pop to vote for him hoho what larks
**i also suspect this transition is what has left so much of centrist-dad-land so flailingly baffled and prickly: when you've spent all your adult life adapting to a terrain of (what slojterdijk called) "cynical reason" (and others incorrectly term pragmatic*** realism), there's something very disorientating but also very accusatory abt the changed reality
***i'm very much a pragmatist, bcz it's how you get through the day, but it's about learning to work with how things unavoidably seem right here now today, oftentimes a kind of self-protective quietism, not with how they actually are or (as we suddenly grasp) could be

Lol @ Amber Rudd hiring Crosby.

Is he literally the only campaign manager they know or something?

they just know he's a real winner, cos only losers quit when erm.. keep losing.

*they keep losing.

He must have a lot of dirt on them, or something though, tbh.

It can only be hours before Corbyn appears in a "I <3 the Winter of Discontent" jumper, attempting to knock some of the older Tory MPs off their branches for a by-election.

it ends in a blether of not very self-aware nonsense* lamenting the vanishing of the "militant moderate" but this is otherwise p good on the sheer complexity** of the tory party's historical backstory and hence underlying make-up (much of it presently obscured under the fast-thinning silt of the thatcher renewal wave): https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n19/colin-kidd/gove-or-galtieri

*it morphs sentimentally out of a somewhat more plausible mythology -- ie when modern democratic norms were being established in the past, the existence of a moderate party on the right held more reactionary elements and forces at bay
**inc the labyrinthine interweaving down the decades with factions from the liberal massive-as-was (which coalesced in the 1830-40s out of a coalition of reform peelites, whigs and radicals)

It was a v weird ending, there was nothing moderate around Clarke "closing hospitals for breakfast" when he was health sec (his wording on QT).

basically i think the writer leads himself into a silly trap: quite early on he wonders if the left aren't going to "regret the defeat of the statist vision" (as offered in nick timothy's 2017 tory manifesto) bcz "in the quest to capture the middle ground that wins elections" the left's vision requires an opposition that shares at least some of its goals, hence the left requires the continued valence of a group that is "moderate"

but "middle-ground" is -- as the evidence of his own historical sketch demonstrates -- not an easily defined or located unshifting centre between recognised limit-points of acceptable politics, but actually a complex, mutating, multi-dimensional field where very different (and mutually contradictory) elements uneasily intermingle, some gaining and losing valency down the decades… we can identify and map the shifting path of this mid-ground retroactively, but the great whig delusion (that it can be managed and curated, and that this management and curation are for the best) is just that: a delusion

When I read it on Sunday I thought the crushing of timothy-ism was sorta interesting. Thanks for explaining the bits I couldn't parse.