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

She is laughing at all of us.

"Only £360,000 of a compensation pot meant to pay out £500m has been distributed"

there are other ways to apologise for such a crime against humanity other than more worthless fucking lip service from the dead eyed psychotic daughter of a former UKIP candidate

"face the full force of the law" is a statement implying and encouraging police brutality so of course Johnson ended his statement with it

Meesa surely Jar Jar Binks wish yess. Weesa say nosa

— Layla Moran 🔶 (@LaylaMoran) June 8, 2020

Keir Starmer you are finished! please make way for our next leader

lol, was just about to post that.

Genuinely impressed how quickly politicians and the press have managed to pivot to making analysis of racism in the UK, at a time thousands of BAME people are dying needlessly of an avoidable disease, an argument about whether statues need to be reviewed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/09/sadiq-khan-orders-review-of-all-london-statues-for-slavery-links

cursed tweet. mods ban user alphabet pls

Top story on the Guardian website - statues, next story, Boris Johnson's statement on BLM and statues, next story, Sadiq commits to reviewing statues...

Bronze Racists Matter

There's a huge amount of great, positive energy out there but you'd be forgiven for thinking that racism ended 200 years ago and the debate should be about how we memorialise it.

instead of getting stuck on statues, let's move on to this

If we’re gonna talk about the UK’s history with slavery, how about we talk about the MPs whose money + power comes from slavery?

Thread:

— Griff Ferris (@g__ferris) June 8, 2020

Putting on my mask for a day trip to the statue museum

that's excellent work xp

lol no shock that Drax is the first name in the thread.

a literal supervillain

And a power station to boot.

he definitely looks like an evil plantation boss

plantation but turns out it was in ulster

lol the plunketts predate the plantation, it's some proto-tudor shit

wikipedia sentence casting the shade here: "Debrett's single sourceless sentence on the subject describes the charter of 1439 as a writ, although Cokayne denies that Ireland recognised the creation of peerages by writ; some websites have copied Debrett"

cokayne: helluvadrug

I feel like an absolutely massive churl but i honestly care less about what Drax's ancestors did in the 1700s than what Priti Patel is doing now. I'm fully on board with the idea that fundamental change isn't going to happen until Britain properly understands and reckons with the legacy of colonialism but at a point where people in the US are looking at ways to think beyond policing, the UK government has just forced through a new immigration bill that will severely impact the rights of migrants, there are allegations of suppressed / ignored evidence in the BAME COVID report, the hostile environment policy still guides immigration strategy despite promises it wouldn't, etc, etc, it might as well be a psy-op.

Isn’t the point that many of the UK’s establishment got their wealth through slavery and many of those people are in positions of power today? But yes, agree on you being a colossal churl.

sv and gyac otm

❤️❤️❤️

these things are deeply connected and agitation that churns up the deep placid assumptions abt the eternal truths of the british is where genuine movement comes and can somewhat stick: this is norman-yoke shit

it absolutely needs the two seemingly difft things being fought for tho

https://media.giphy.com/media/3o85xIO33l7RlmLR4I/giphy.gif

cok-ay-ne knee's up.

(that's all i have)

the del-boy through the bar thing makes me think that maybe rolling a statue into the river in bristol should become a yearly event. there are worse. could be new statues, made especially, topical, like the effigies in lewes.

I was watching that Jane Elliott piece on racism that was done here and the levels of resistance and blindness to privilege were unreal. People here complaining about Trump’s birthright citizenship proposals while Thatcher passed that legislation before I was even born. So yeah the conversation here is really behind in many ways.

They're absolutely connected but shifting the focus of action back to Oxbridge and Rhodesia is territory the UK establishment is fundamentally comfortable with imo.

But yes, both,

highlighting the racism entrenched in the state now helps to spike the guns of all the "they've got nothing to complain about" scumbags to some extent

it's not at all comfy abt the issue of long-standing land ownership and predatory landlordism

when you think about the era when Britain was like the Saudi Arabia of coal and all these landowners also owned the "underground plantations" on their land and made huge profits from paying poverty wages in dangerous working conditions that also exploited child labour, they can't be comfortable with that part of their ancestral legacy.

I wouldn't put any amount of "we provided decent jobs by the standard of the times and weren't you lot all moaning about closing the mines wtf" past them

I admit I've never heard the phrase "Norman Yoke" before, but sure, blaming stuff on foreigners is as close to an eternal truth of England as you'll get.

Frequently, critics following the Norman yoke model would claim Alfred the Great or Edward the Confessor as models of justice. In this context, the Magna Carta is seen as an attempt to restore pre-Conquest English rights, if only for the gentry. When Sir Edward Coke reorganised the English legal system, he was keen to claim that the grounds of English common law were beyond the memory or register of any beginning and preexisted the Norman conquest, although he did not use the phrase "Norman yoke".

t/s: English coke vs Norman yokes

What did Layla Moran say about STAR WARS?

"Meesa surely Jar Jar Binks wish yess. Weesa say nosa"

" "

its tricky bc by the time things grow prominent enough in the discourse to be noticed by ppl who don't normally pay attention they are so simplified/symbolic/superficial that they are always going to be a distraction to some extent and can be dealt with in a similarly symbolic/superficial fashion. wider anger about those things doesn't transfer to the specific details of whatever the latest policy/govt action is unless you have some sort of actually functioning representative democracy or other strong representative institutions.

remember when it was clear cummings had to go and all the focus was on that

normans are just yr standard invaders that end up sitting atop society earning resentment, eternal mb but not particularly english

the constitutional reforms of the 1830s-40s plus the institutional of empire in its post-mutiny form took much of the sting out of "norman yoke" rhetoric as a rough guide to the shape of injustice as felt at the time, and it generally fell out of use except among crackpots (me)

oh lol can somebody trawl back thru the thread and see who had money on DomCum to be gone by now

Normans anglicized themselves eventually altho important not to lose sight of the fact that aristocrats are always transnational because not actually human

I'm puzzled why Moran posted that. Now unavailable?

Arguably the events of the past week are profoundly useful to the government - coronavirus is not the top story for the first time in months, any upcoming spike can be blamed on protests alone and not government policy, and it's fuel for the next stage of culture war on terms they are comfortable with.

the industrial revolution, massive migration and land reform and abolition of tangible ties to the feudal era in general obv make the norman yoke seem a less relevant concern as so many ppl's sense of identity changed, but ofc power tends to look after itself p well and despite a degree of social mobility strangely lots of those v old families that cummings' father in law gets misty eyed thinking about in his crypt seem to have made it through. i've made all the points about land ownership, life expectancy & norman surnames before, you all know the drill

I'm puzzled why Moran posted that. Now unavailable?

There was a news report about the actor who played Jar Jar Binks saying he'd be available to come back if wanted and Tim Farron, in his ongoing attempt to ensure that he's remembered as a self-aware tragic loser, rather than just a tragic loser quote-tweeted it with something like 'it's like me saying i'll come back to lead the Lib Dems', but in the broader sense, yes, we are all puzzled by Moran posted that.

Moran and Tim please join Labour we need more like you to provide forensics.

the norman yoke often pops up on the dark heart of middle england consumer program You and Yours where callers who thought they wholly owned their house have been diddled by some subtle form of leasehold feudalism.

channel islands = still full feudalism aiui

not that the channel islands belong to the uk anyway

isle of man too ofc, the most fucked up place in the world