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

it was always burning since the world's been turning

The trash audience of fuckwitted chortling class arsewipes deserve negging as well imo. "Ho Ho Ho, Michael Gove just made the sexual harassment gag of season, my sides have split etc.."

political debate fans possibly the only scum more scum than pols

^ gets it

also ppl who 'love politics', all trash

I mean not that we need it but

Totally support Nusrat Ghani’s call for an urgent debate on misogyny by MPs. pic.twitter.com/cMzG6KvLY0

— Philip Davis 🇪🇺 (@philipdavis53) October 23, 2017

I'm paywalled, what's the gist?

https://www.economist.com/news/britain/21730634-centenary-october-revolution-good-time-reflect-labours-leadership-corbyns

THE Labour Party has an admirable record of realism when it comes to the Russian revolution and the regime that it spawned. From 1918 onwards Labour refused to work with the Communist Party and banned its members from belonging to it. Clement Attlee helped to construct NATO as a bulwark against Soviet expansion and described Russian communism as the “illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great”. Nye Bevan, one of Attlee’s ministers, accused the Russians of establishing “a whole series of Trojan horses in every nation of the Western economy”. Harold Wilson proclaimed that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than to Marxism.

Yet today’s Labour Party high-command contains several people who are more starry-eyed than gimlet-eyed when it comes to the Russian revolution. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader, has remained remarkably silent on revolutionary Russia given the amount of praise he has lathered on Venezuela and Cuba, much of it in the pages of the Morning Star, a newspaper once partially funded by the Soviet Union. The same cannot be said of Seumas Milne, his head of strategy and a man who, according to a statement from Mr Corbyn’s people on his appointment, “shares Jeremy’s worldview almost to the letter…they sing from the same hymn sheet.” Mr Milne got his start in journalism at Straight Left, a magazine that took the “Tankie” side in the argument between Eurocommunists, who were critical of the Soviet regime, and traditionalists, or Tankies, who were critical of the criticism. He then moved to the Guardian by way of The Economist and was a reliable warrior for the hard left. “For all its brutalities and failures,” he once wrote, “communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality.”
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John McDonnell, Labour’s shadow chancellor, has claimed that his worldview has been shaped by “the fundamental Marxist writers of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky”, according to an interview unearthed by the New Statesman. He has also doffed his cap to two troubling Marxist ideas. One is Antonio Gramsci’s notion of “the long march through the institutions”: you work within existing institutions in order to convert them to the revolutionary cause. The other is Leon Trotsky’s notion of a “transitional programme”: you make demands that you know are unachievable, in order to stir up more discontent with the system.
One of Mr Corbyn’s key supporters in the trade-union movement, Andrew Murray, makes both Mr Milne and Mr McDonnell look like right-wing deviationists. He is chief of staff to Len McCluskey, the head of Unite, Britain’s most powerful union, and was seconded by the Labour Party headquarters during the recent election campaign. A long-standing member of the Communist Party before joining Labour last year, Mr Murray had a reputation as not just a Tankie but a super-Tankie, because of his unswerving support for the Soviet Union and Uncle Joe. He once wrote an article for the Morning Star which, while lamenting Stalin’s “harsh measures”, quoted Nikita Khrushchev’s statement that “against imperialists, we are all Stalinists”. On November 4th Mr Murray is due to join Tosh McDonald, the boss of the ASLEF trade union, at a celebration of the Russian centenary.
Does any of this really matter? The Soviet Union died in the late 1980s. International communism has either mutated into autocratic capitalism, as in China, or retreated into a few dysfunctional enclaves, as in Venezuela, North Korea and Cuba. The history of Labour is littered with people who flirted with hard-left ideas only to mellow on coming to power. Denis Healey, one of the Labour Party’s great chancellors, was a Tankie as an undergraduate at Mr Milne’s old Oxford college, Balliol.

Alas, it does matter, and for three reasons. The first is that it provides a measure of just how much conventional wisdom has changed in the past few years. Positions once regarded as cranky or even forbidden are becoming mainstream. The financial crisis shattered people’s faith in the wealth-creating power of capitalism and the crisis-fighting power of technocrats. A survey by Legatum, a think-tank, found that people feel far more positive about socialism than about capitalism. The Iraq war and the election of Donald Trump have supercharged anti-Americanism. Just as striking as the rise of the comrades is the fall of the likes of Tony Blair, who vigorously supported the Washington consensus in economics and American-led intervention in foreign policy.

More powerful than guns
The second reason why it matters is that ideas have consequences, particularly ideas that you have spent your entire adult life repeating. Healey was in his 20s when he flirted with the far left. The comrades are now in their 60s. Mr McDonnell has carefully worked-out plans for nationalising key industries and extending trade-union powers. Mr Corbyn has spent his life campaigning against NATO and American foreign policy. Before becoming leader of Labour he was chairman of Stop the War, a group founded by Mr Murray and others, which has been less assiduous in opposing Vladimir Putin’s wars than wars in general.

The biggest reason why it matters is what it says about the Labour leadership’s mindset. The gravest intellectual malady on the left is its habit of making judgments on the basis of people’s intentions rather than their results. This finds its purest form in the idea that the failures of the Russian revolution can be justified, or partially excused, by the nobleness of the intentions of the people who launched it. This not only applies the wrong metric to judging progress (Adam Smith’s great insight was that economic progress usually proceeds regardless of the intentions of businesspeople). It prepares the way for the pursuit of traitors when noble intentions fail to produce noble results. The Labour Party was on safer ground when it spoke the language of priorities, rather than the language of millenarianism.

iirc Stafford Cripps was suspended at one point for being a communist party member, and later after his diplomatic posting in Moscow he became a lot more of a Bolshevik sceptic.

Thanks for that. The last sentence provoked a near-literal retch.

I stopped reading after the first paragraph. Lol they backed the LibDems in the last election, so at least they haven't lost their sense of humour.

If it had to be Stalinists vs Centrist Dads I'd be cheering on the gulags tbh

Gulags are somewhat underrated imo!

Although I next time I read some Solzhenitsyn, need to think about Good Gulags not bad ones!

I have a little fairly substantial list

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNQbyFTXcAACBah.jpg
Crabb getting pasted tomorrow, Stephen Crabb a devout christian etc....

On replay that Gove/Kinnock incident sounds even worse, not only uproarious laughter from the audience - but loud applauding of the "joke".

thought the crabb sexting scandal was well known. it was that that sunk his leadership attempt last time round

DD groping thighs and ogling tits according to shippers. o'mara scandal was always going to bring a plague on the tories house

I think this might be a newer one, the torygraph aren't just going revive a 2016 story are they? But yes, a plague on their house would be good. Apparently May gets regular info from the internal Tory NKVD on the sexual indiscretions of her MP's called the "ins and outs" briefing.

While MPs make millions suffer this is many of them are up to:

Anyone got the full copy of this story? pic.twitter.com/OZrfB3f9cZ

— Mediocre Grave (@MediocreDave) October 29, 2017

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNTWBqZW0AIfLxD.jpg
not from the '77 archives, this is now.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-41794625

The international trade minister also confirmed calling her "sugar tits," according to the Mail on Sunday, but he said it did not amount to harassment.

gavin and stacey, so much to answer for

Barring a colossal legal effort I can't see Boris Johnson coming through the upcoming storm unscathed.

= ann soubry's long game all along

(ps i don't actually believe this)

This sex toy story is an interesting test case of how damaging these stories might prove.

Kind of a Laboratoire Garnier, if you will lol

https://shechive.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/giphy8.gif?w=500&h=280

lol

"There are mums and dads who have daughters who are politics students hoping to get a job in Westminster, and they must be able to be confident that if they get that job, their daughter will not be subject to some of these behaviours that we have been seeing."

Jeremy Hunt sticks it to the patriarchy

Smart of Hunt to put the message over to the daughter's parents because hell knows their daughter isn't voting Tory.

When Hammond made the comment about trains being so easy that women can drive them, his defence against sexism was that he was "a parent of two high-achieving daughters".

"My mum's one"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-41795133

cheers Baz, this will help

Good to see Baz finds time away from his lobbying interests to remind everybody why he needs deselecting. He can't even take the moral high ground over Heaton-Harris with his double brexit/polytechnic snobbery, just a complete waster.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNX5HbUW0AEwrEH.jpg
That would explain why the Tories seem better at maintaining party discipline.

So Perrior's admitting that the whips routinely blackmail MPs. NAGL for the party of law and order.

So let me get this right .. All those maverick Tory MPs who vote against the party whip - They are the ones that haven't been inapproprite so are safe from whip blackmail?

I don't think many Tories have defied a three line whip in recent history. Soubry hinted that she would in future on AQ a couple of weeks back.

David Davis voted against the "snooper's charter" bill, and he looks like someone with dark secrets.

That should be a scandal in itself -- instituionalising and weaponising abuse like that is pretty evil even for Tories. Imagine if the Catholics had been keeping quiet on known abuse not just as part of their coverups but to blackmail key people in the Curia?

I feel like saying that it seems like behaviour that used to be termed "sleaze" has become so normalised in politics etc... but that might sound a bit Society Is in The Gutter.

Like for instance in the 90's MP's went to the sword over the Cash For Questions scandal. Now Bazza just openly declares he is owned by lobbyists and it barely makes a ripple.

although this isn't really to do with the *other* types of sleaze.

in all parties the job the whips are paid for is control of the vote in the house, the firmer the better, and they've always been "by any means necessary" about it: happy to believe there's more suss behaviour among the tories right now, but highly doubt the whips in the other parties wd prioritise their duties much differently tbh

^

If stuff comes out about labour whips office, maybe it will be a blessing that they were hostile to corbyn at least until june.

Altho lol nuance, obviously

they've always been "by any means necessary" about it

Yeah, and that's all jolly and self-important of them, but if the means extend to colluding in covering up illegality I'm not sure it's going to be defensible for long. Though, yep, can well believe all whips various are in on it.

who's Bazza?

Barry Sheerman, safe seat wasteman MP, lobbyist, intellectual giant who didn't go to no shit Polytechnic, no.

if there's a counterforce within the tory party that is keen enough to respond to public disgust on this topic that it defies the tory whips and mobilises to demonise them (risking all the dangers of the party being out of power for a long time as actual real socialism is being brought back) then i would maybe start to bet against the whips, as the crew that rides this out

i still think this is a pretty big if -- but there are now two quite distinct lines of fracture opening up (brexit being the other), and that's lot for a party without a proper majority