PMs change and lol we're all gonna die (but brexit will never end)

id imagine that we're not talking about stromfornt here tbf

I don't think it's controversial to suggest that echo chambers reinforce groupthink and act as a blocker of sorts to understanding the wider world? Yes even in those scenarios you hear the views of people whose representatives shout the the loudest, but that still excludes a lot of groups.

I know, but I don't get the sense that for anybody here this place accounts for the majority of discussion they have about this, and the breadth of stuff linked suggests that people have a lot of other sources. I find it a really good repository of stuff I might not otherwise read as I tend to get a lot of my news from abandoned copies of the FT I find in blackfriars station in the morning.

Yeah I felt that went without saying...? Pretty hard to live in the UK and dodge right wing politics or viewpoints.

Yeah, whatever is wrong with xyzzzz, gyac, et al, I don't think it can be blamed on ilx.

Great contribution, manages to be ignorant (and ableist?)

ahh ..it's always nice to smell that first plop of ideological diversity of the day!

I like ilxor UK politics threads as a place to park information about news, to have a discussion that’s unlikely to be interrupted by cranks of the Chris Williamson ilk, derailed or derided by Centrist ‘90s Music Press Guys (and where we can complain about them), or people with other flavours of Corbyn Derangement Syndrome.

This is a rare corner of the interwebs where people are mostly intelligent and accommodating of others. It’s also a good spot to commiserate with others touched by austerity/Tory cruelty and having an outlet to clown
on the latest Jess Phillips/Stephen Kinnock/Change UK bullshit also a bonus.

Fred only visiting in between bans tbf.

the only way i can see out of this mess is for a Labour govt to massively reset the social compact (as Corbyn alluded to yesterday). if the programme is deep and far-reaching enough i.e. free education, renationalise utilities, war footing for climate change and social housing, tear up PFI and backdoor privatisation in the NHS, then frankly I'm not sure it makes a huge difference to voters whether we leave or remain. the ensuing arguments would come close to obliterating the memory of Brexit imo!

(Sorry to clarify I was talking about echo chambers in general, not ILX)

Brexit is like the 'global war on terror'. the US reacted to this massive psychological trauma - 9/11 - with an action that it thought could put the lid back on the pot of its anxiety. it couldn't. it never could. Brexit the same. the UK system is fucked. a decades-long experiment in privatisation and anti-municipalism has led to a stagnation that no one can see the end of. so let's do something dramatic! that'll put the lid back on the pot! but it won't. the problems have to be confronted at the source.

there has been lots of scaremongering about the effect of a Corbyn gov in terms of mass capital flight, but this happened to Labour in the 70's and there was no apocalypse. And brexit uncertainty is already blocking foreign investment to a trickle.

sorry typing on phone, sound like Russian

this is the thread for it

I was talking to lifelong Labour voter J last night (likes Corbyn’s domestic policies but voted Green in the EU elections because Labour’s Brexit message wasn’t enough for him) and we wondered what the Labour Leave option would look like if they got in and were the negotiators. I thought something along the lines of EEA/EFTA v. Remain (with reforms) and J conceded he could live with that version of Brexit. What do you lot think?

Fred only visiting in between bans tbf.

― Boulez, vous couchez avec moi? (Tom D.), Tuesday, 20 August 2019 bookmarkflaglink

Another ban, wonder how that happened..

posting as he normally does

Comments from Johnson and Foster v much indicate they have no interest or indeed ability to come up with backstop alternative.

When are we going full Hong Kong on this?

I was reading replies to the letter on the No 10 twitter account last night and Leavers were queuing up to say EVEN WITH THE BACKSTOP THIS ISNT GOOD ENOUGH. Pair this with the large number I saw raging about IDS’s pension plans and it’s not been a good week for them with a decent part of the voter coalition.

*backstop gone

What would satisfy them? Another Waterloo?

Nothing, there is nothing they can get that will satisfy them.

NDB

Nah even then they’d been agitating for public deportation or something. It never ends.

Given how hauntingly gripping their tabula rasa fantasies have proven themselves to be, perhaps the UK should also pull out of every other treaty it has signed over the decades. Emancipation from the EU is just the first step on the path to insular autonomy. Survival of the fittest was formulated by an Englishman, after all.

UK government source hits back at Tusk and Commission

“If the Commission only wants to offer the same failed backstop that will not pass then they are essentially choosing to risk either a hard border in NI or a border in the Irish Sea. That is not what anyone wants.”

— James Crisp (@JamesCrisp6) August 20, 2019

Does nobody want a border in the irish sea lol

but aNnExAtIoN

"Look, if we can't come to an agreement, you will be evicted from your house, or have the opportunity to move to a much nicer house, and no-one wants that"

Or as the og FBPE guy would put it, CAKE OR DEATH

that reminds me

I dearly wish a reactivated IRA would sucessfully blow up that scumbag Johnson and his evil cabinet.
At least their useless, morally-empty lives would have served a purpose.
— MarcHayo #FBPE (@markhayo) August 20, 2019
― ogmor, Tuesday, August 20, 2019 2:21 AM (seven hours ago)

this has been deleted :(

Follow Back Primeminister Explode

fenian brexit preliminary exhortation

why delete the best ever tweet with the FBPE hashtag ffs!

Some recruit the milkmaster to thread for some much needed dissenting opinions

I troll the trolls. https://t.co/3y8cE8iurv

— Mike Gapes (@MikeGapes) August 19, 2019

Does anyone at all who isn't an MP, a wonk or a fanatic actually give a shit about the backstop or consider it a hill to die on?

its weird how nobody ever tried to sell the backstop as actually a somewhat impressive strategy for squaring a circle. There are positive things to say about it (from the point of view of a feat of negotiation) and it seems May never tried to construe it as a success even though it was her achievement. she seemingly thought that marketing it as a failure and an acquiescence would work?

she was caught between ERG and DUP on this so apologetically old what was as you say a significant negotiating victory as an awkward fudge.

i mean i feel a large amount of personal animosity toward theresa may and am quite glad of anything that contributes to the shitting up of her legacy. what an asshole.

she is the central mechanism between cameron’s brexit result and where we are now, no doubt. dragged it all rightwards to the ERG and to no deal die hards.

as well as being vile for other home office reasons.

While it's of course hugely *disappointing* that a grown man who runs a parody account in the guise of a landmark peace agreement should be caught sliding into women's DMs to talk about his dick, it is also in no way *surprising*.

— Aon Foucault Eile. (@EXECUTIVESTEVE) August 20, 2019

lolled sadly at the reply to this gently correcting someone: "there are several GFA parody accounts"

#notallshitposting

Ah no, this isn't the one who pretends to be the border, this is the one that pretends to be the actual Good Friday Agreement.

— Aon Foucault Eile. (@EXECUTIVESTEVE) August 20, 2019

explain pls

The border account is bad and stupid and objectively less funny than the extremely stupid Anglo Irish treaty parody I wrote in my history notebook in secondary school, thank you for reading

Perhaps relevant to some of my friends on here

Can’t abide Jeremy Corbyn? Learn from the moral of Ed Milibandhttps://t.co/YstXqavq4F

— Aditya Chakrabortty (@chakrabortty) August 20, 2019

The same tabloids that today are rightly attentive to Labour’s issues with antisemitism spent years splashing on photos of a Jewish man struggling to swallow a bacon sandwich – the subtext of which was never hard to read. The Mail famously conducted hatchet jobs on his dead dad, who’d fled the Holocaust. Even the posh papers would tut over this “north London intellectual”, this rootless cosmopolitan, before just a couple of years later clutching their pearls over May’s line about “citizens of nowhere”

Also, Jeremy Corbyn called out the antisemitism committed against Ed and Ralph Miliband, in print and on TV.

aditya’s the fuckin best

does everyone at the guardian work from home or does he have to like share an open plan office with simon jenkins?