bojo is king, brexit is on, stuff is fvcked, tomorrow starts here -- new govt new thread new battle

This is a bit of a tangent, but how did you feel about the US when you found out that Trump got elected?

Well, sad for my friends who live there and terrified because of what it was going to do to the world at large? Plenty angry too, but "well fuck 'em" isn't even an option when you're talking global superpowers innit.

Scotland voting Yes to independence in a referendum organised without Johnson's consent.

Is this actually possible? I guess with the amount of overturning norms corrent legal procedure is no longer as much of an issue...

Former Ulster Unionist Party leader Mike Nesbitt in a BBC interview tonight-
"The great irony of all of this is that for decades unionists have looked over their shoulders and decided that Irish nationalists were the great threat...but actually it’s English nationalism"

How about reading about 1798 instead of sticking 1690 on your banners, you morons?

This is where we're at right now, almost everywhere in the world, and it's bound to get far worse before it gets any better. Yes, it's depressing as fuck and I'm more than a little terrified by what awaits us all.

untold millions of people who don't look like boris johnson are going to be displaced by climate change in the coming decades and they're going to be desperately seeking refuge in less-ravaged nations around the world - i don't see that lending itself to a more inclusive worldview in places like the uk without an unprecedented effort to address racism

Is this actually possible?

it happened in catalonia! it did not go well :(

Are there any stats on the vote breakdown?

Good luck joining the EU without a consensual referendum. Tories might be happy to cut Scotland loose for a guaranteed majority forever

Though

Feel like SNP fucked Labour getting a majority anyway

And on the "different context" point, I prefer to just use the numbers because everyone can make their own context adjustments. If you spot Brown the recession, at the very least you have to spot Corbyn and Miliband the rise of the SNP.

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) December 13, 2019

5L callers keep saying this a.m. that they couldn't vote for corbyn because of 'his baggage' and 'the people around him', that he gave 'too much ammunition to the right wing press' - all from a kind of meta level that OTHER people would be put off. i guess this is the 'electability' mentality. nobody actually talked about what they themselves didn't like about him.

the electability narrative is such infuriating bullshit

Absolutely irate caller on 5L, just livid - can't believe he's got a Tory MP in County Durham.

'If you want Brexit, you vote Conservative, and that's what we've got. .... Why didn't you vote Labour? And if Corbyn was no good we could have just got rid of him? That's what the Tories have done the last four years! Just put in a Labour government and if Corbyn's no good get rid of him!'

absolutely irate caller on 5l otm

Tories got just a little under 300,000 more votes this time than in 2017

While Labour lost around 2.6M votes

What a staggeringly shit system

Feel like SNP fucked Labour getting a majority anyway

Post the Independence Referendum the Labour Party now has the handicap of being down upwards of 40 seats in General Elections.

Absolutely empirical proof exists that the Tories are better at committing regicide than Labour.

It's like dragging a ball and chain about.

(xp)

thank you david, very cool!

Betrayal is the cry of the Left against Labour in govt. Now we have seen the truth: Betrayal is when an in-credible, sectarian Labour opposition fails to provide a viable alternative to a distrusted Tory party. They get rumbled. The Tories win. The country loses. https://t.co/IlHhescGYF

— David Miliband (@DMiliband) December 13, 2019

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELqLYbmWkAMqQz4?format=png&name=large

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELqLvMYXkAAf9YJ?format=png&name=large

johnson's slogan: get brexit done
sky's strapline: the brexit election
every centrist melt: whyyyy don't you back remain

same melts on 13 dec: ACTUALLY it wasn't really about brexit

great to see the politics of aspiration breaking through to the most deprived areas in the country, looking forward to local people bootstrapping their way to prosperity through enthusiastic entrepreneurship

(kill me)

Gary Younge is typically clear headed here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/labour-why-lost-jeremy-corbyn-brexit-media?

was just about to post that - excellent piece

Yeah, that's really good.

Yeah really impressive to turn something that rigorous and concise around, quite painful reading but it needs to be really

Maybe Tories are going to get a Trickle Down Big Society after all - forcing people into forming systems to help each other out of their own time, labour and pockets.

Not really looked at many results properly yet but re individuals losing seats Pidcock's hurts the most right now (Kensington I was a lot more braced for).

So presumably there are now significantly fewer women in Parliament even if the Tories share has gone up a bit.

Superb piece, but as usual the people who need to read it won’t.

Yeah that's going to be the most lucid contribution to the debate that there ever is huh

Good piece however.

"It matters who runs the Labour party, but it’s not the only thing that matters."

It does matter more than this is letting on? If you talk about likeability of the leader and his ability to see off the right-wing press.

Also the leader will choose a team who will drive policy and direction too. The activists that are part of Lab will not sell racism.

argh

I’m not saying that Boris Johnson’s victory is a victory for fascists.

But fascists are. pic.twitter.com/Si7IC3jzTz

— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) December 13, 2019

So presumably there are now significantly fewer women in Parliament even if the Tories share has gone up a bit.

Not so - 220 women is a new high, including 104 out of 203 Labour MPs.

The comments on Yongue though.

Thanks Andrew that's something

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tactical-voting-blog/labour-general-election-brexit-leave-corbyn-voting-a9244931.html

(In short: the Labour vote didn’t collapse in lots of places, but there was a blue surge)

nuke katie hopkins

The comments on Yongue though.

― stet, Friday, December 13, 2019 1:25 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Pouring one out for the Graun's comment police today; what a day to be doing that job.

Heh, seriously.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tactical-voting-blog/labour-general-election-brexit-leave-corbyn-voting-a9244931.html🕸

(In short: the Labour vote didn’t collapse in lots of places, but there was a blue surge)

“I can’t believe we’ve got a Tory MP up here”

“You vote Brexit, you vote Tory… That’s what this country has come to”

Caller Shaun in Consett doesn’t hold back about his constituency voting in a Conservative MP.#GE2019 | #BBCElection pic.twitter.com/jpoIURzJ8N

— BBC Radio 5 Live (@bbc5live) December 13, 2019

solidarity with shaun in consett

can't help finding this hilarious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AS4kaxRJYqU

That Shaun from Consett needs to get out from his metropolitan bubble and try talking to some real people for a change.

We should rejig the Union Flag to look like this bar chart - at least until Scotland goes

I'm telling you: democratic socialism has a generational momentum of its own. Corbyn's main achievement was to pry open the Labour Party, reinvigorate its young membership, and expand the political horizon. A new generation of activists will now have to take the struggle forward. pic.twitter.com/bl8HCfIijK

— Jerome Roos 🌹 (@JeromeRoos) December 13, 2019

rip big man

BREAKING: Jeremy Corbyn says he will stand down “in the early part of next year”. That leaves a out of wriggle room to help install a successor in his image.

— Paul Brand (@PaulBrandITV) December 13, 2019

From that Independent article:

Similar patterns emerge in Stockton South, Bishop Auckland, Bolton North East, North West Durham, and many other places: the story is one of a Tory surge, often sustained from an initial one in 2017, rather than a complete Labour collapse of anything other than extra voters gained in 2017.

this sounds more like Jon Stone doesn't know what words mean?

That's pretty much the state of play all over in one handy bar chart, huh

With Pidcock gone I guess I'd go for Long-Bailey. Labour now have more women than men in the Commons after all.

Absolutely devastated. In hindsight, the moment Corbyn got jeered for mentioning poor people in one of the debates was when I should of realised what this country had become.

— Darren (@nsno_83) December 13, 2019

democratic socialism has a generational momentum of its own

real talk: my genuine, paralysing terror today - as it has been for a while now - is that we're going to run out of time to install anything close to a democratic socialist government before ecofascism swamps the opposition once and for all and we just dig in and wait for irreversible global collapse

not a helpful contribution to the thread but i need to put it down somewhere

so against every single impulse in johnson's body, it would be fucking hilarious if he was forced to approve that (if we weren't currently powerboating up shit creek)

God I wish we were in the world where labour got in and had by now instituted emergency measures to house the homeless and stop evictions, freeze mortgages &c and the emma kennedy piss diamonds were screaming at them about it

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf

This is the modelling paper. It's a good and pretty clear read, but it's bloody sobering. You can absolutely see why they started with trying to mitigate the epidemic (have a small manageable spike) because the alternative we're looking at is, at best, up to 2 years of this sort of suppression. But, the paper says, with the latest data the death count is just too high under the mitigation strategy (250k+)

I'm not sure I can imagine what the next year or two look like with this level of suppression, though. And if it doesn't hold, the paper suggests we risk a larger epidemic than we would have had in the first place.

We really need either to actually build those 40 hospitals we were promised and/or a good treatment to be found.

Macron is simultaneously better and worse than he seems. Keep in mind that the French centre-right would scan as socialist to most ‘Muricans (and many Britons).

when you start playing that silly bugger relativism game Theresa May is more of a socialist than Trump etc..

just because we are going through a global crisis right now I'm not going to start forgetting who the fucking scum of the earth are.

https://t.co/iCqOK1NgA9 pic.twitter.com/eTXUi0ghQg

— ryan 🚩 (@ryxnf) March 16, 2020

Now *that* is some mighty big spin. https://t.co/vm7GTxfnMG

— James Meadway (@meadwaj) March 17, 2020

When this is all over, remember how landlords behaved - and let's build a society without them. pic.twitter.com/SOhb2RSfy0

— Gordon Maloney (@gordonmaloney) March 17, 2020

If we are doing tweets have we done this?

Tweeted my MP @Pauline_Latham about abysmal level of the statutory sick pay that families are going to be forced to live on if they get ill (if they’re lucky). Her reply?

“Get a life.”

This is my MP who will NOT have to live on £94 a week if she gets ill. pic.twitter.com/RpdVBdfLu5

— MHughes #Environment #Wildlife #RSPB (@ML1Hughes) March 15, 2020

Calmly doing tweets.

It would be remiss of me to imply, however, that Labour MPs were conducting themselves with grace, humanity & dignity. https://t.co/7eOe13pUMf pic.twitter.com/S2f6Tn0dag

— Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) March 17, 2020

buried in that thread somewhere:

the people who keep trying to invoke blitz spirit seem to think the lesson of the blitz was to “carry on as normal” and not “coordinate a rapid and serious response on every level to prevent unnecessary deaths”

— jonathan nunn (@demarionunn) March 16, 2020

Credit where credit's due, those Macron measures are excellent - one of the things about making no ideology your defining personal brand is that enables you to get away with things like this. Johnson may have to do them in time as well because he has few firmly held convictions in any case. The fed cutting interest rates to zero is basically asking for intervention like this. If there's a big rally on the French stock market then the right will be on board anyway - it's better to help businesses and individuals now then let everyone fail and have to spend big to deal with the fallout later.

Everyone concerned - governments, economists, creditors - will have to change their attitude to money over the next few months.

More to the point if he didn't then there would almost certainly be widespread rioting across French cities.

how much credit do we give the rioters

Can’t wait for a grudging Johnson to nationalise everything and get tonguebathed by the same bootlickers screaming about communism and sneering “are you going to nationalise sausages” at Labour.

I know we're very day-to-day right now, but I'm wondering what/when restrictions easing will look like. This is going to turn into the Boxing Day that never ended soon.

not to be that guy, but maybe a new thread makes sense? bojo is still king sorta kinda but is brexit still on? and obviously stuff is fucked except we found new levels

new level new thread :|

The Politics of D(ist)ancing

altho tbf the world is on hold so it's not like there's gonna be much in the way of non-Covid politics or apparently non-Covid discussion of anything else for a while

Reminds me of a thread I need to make though, the important thing wrt this thread is that we’re still all gonna die

Macron measures are good yes but also just common sense in avoiding total societal collapse. The idea of somehow keeping the economy going via keeping pubs, shops, etc. open will seem like a sick joke pretty quickly as the deaths start piling up.

I mean I know right-wing ideologues have been getting away with encouraging total societal collapse for ages, but not at this speed.

Just common sense yes but it's not as if other leaders have done it.

how much credit do we give the rioters

100% but crowds on that scale probably not the best idea right now.

suggested new thread: love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)