ForenSix Opposition - Politics in the Soon To Be Former UK in Autumn 2020

It’s hard being PM.

As a backbench MP, with his Daily Telegraph column netting him £275,000 and lucrative speaking engagements, he was earning well in excess of £350,000 a year. His prime ministerial salary of about £150,000 might seem perfectly sufficient — but that is not what he actually receives. His use of the flat that he shares with his fiancée, Carrie Symonds, above Number 11 is taxed as a benefit in kind. Any food sent up from the Downing Street kitchen has to be paid for and if they want to have friends to stay at Chequers — Covid restrictions permitting — they receive a bill from the government.
As one friend put it: “Boris, like other prime ministers, is very, very badly served. He doesn’t have a housekeeper — he has a single cleaner and they’re worried about being able to afford a nanny. He’s stuck in the flat and Downing Street is not a nice place to live. It’s not like the Élysée or the White House where you can get away from it all because they’re so big. Even if he or Carrie want to go into the rose garden they have to go through the office.”

It’s the uselessness of the shower. Hancock alone. And Cummings clearly has the smirk etched into him. Whitty is possibly the only one who doesn’t look like a spud xp

Obviously the tiny violin stuff is hilarious but they've really buried the lede with "PM can't remember what he was told yesterday".

Oh gosh I hope he's alright

preaching to the choir for ilxukpol readers obv (and w.my usual caveat at somewhat lumpish NS prose):

A Biden victory cannot bring normal back | Tom Blackburn https://t.co/fy4SnriRvX

— Guardian Opinion (@guardianopinion) September 19, 2020

= a grown-up far leftist expanding in his own careful terms what every v minor weird-twitter shitposter (me) wd frame as "fact one of the landscape we all live in now: the grown-ups are never coming back"

not often the Graun publises a Tom malaiseforever opinion piece. Someone must have pissed the bed.

a lot people seem to saying New Labour were actually quite radical and dynamic compared to the dismal inertia of Starmer Labour

initially I should have said

"Without far-reaching change, it may be that another shift to the hard right is at best delayed by a few years"

probably getting a bit too ahead there, it won't be delayed at all.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EiRjfanXgAEFXYF?format=jpg&name=medium

lol, some of these sycophantic Marina Hyde fans are quite deranged!

"preaching to the choir for ilxukpol readers obv (and w.my usual caveat at somewhat lumpish NS prose)"

One day I will finish that NS piece on Chinese Trotskyist poetry.

Been reading this piece on how covid has further weakened the union.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n18/neal-ascherson/bye-bye-britain

The Blair Shadow Cabinet was full of experienced political battler types like Robin Cook and Mo Mowlam and Claire Short, people who knew how to do Opposition properly and knew what they were doing in front of a camera. In government Blair gradually replaced them and the likes of Glenda Jackson with loyalists and technocratic wonkish types.

Fast forward to to 2010 and the Miliband Shadow Cabinet was full of people with experience at the highest level of everything *except* Opposition and as a result they were terrible at it. With one or two exceptions I'm sure the current Shadow Cabinet are basically well meaning people but they're wonks and inexperienced wonks with it, which is why you basically never see Anneliese Dodds despite her being the Shadow Chancellor. Ed Miliband is kind of a special case, so we'll leave him to once side, but it's only really Angela Rayner, Lammy and maybe Nandy who can do that kind of oppositional politics. (The other one who can is Thornberry and I'm sure she'd been told to keep herself hidden in case it annoys the Nick Ferrari crowd).

I heard a very disappointing interview with Glenda Jackson last week in which she made quite sweeping statements about the working classes and their apparently inherent socially conservative attitudes and how Starmer is a better leader than Corbyn because he understands this. It wasn't good.

the production and reproduction of yr own project (the creation, stablisation and maintenance of the conditions of the possibility of the realisation yr own ideas abt good in the world, to put it in a wanky way) (wanky yet correct but still wanky) is SO basic to politics, and the blair machine was SO bad at it

the neverending victory lap as the whole of praxis (see also RBG sito)

how did you rate the Blair regime for their period in opposition though, mark? I can't remember much tbh. Prescott making the stupendous comment that he was Thumper and Blair was Bambi sticks in my mind from the leadership contest!

Clearly not conspiracy theory nuts with those signs

Photos from Trafalgar square protest.
Unlike what media would have you believing, those are not conspiracy theory nuts.

The focus is on freedom and civil liberties.
No to masks, social distancing, lockdown and forced vaccines.

1/2 pic.twitter.com/aUzzP5IpDr

— Pishpish Cat (@PishPishCat) September 19, 2020

they were scornfully aggressive in opposition!

and also they had a concrete project to set out complete with plans (mostly neoliberal third-way plans to be sure, but also the GFA)

xp thanks you for yr passionate insight pish pish cat

Team Starmzy is now using the slogan "A New Leadership" to replace "Under New Management" well of course he lied to the guileless apolitical left members that voted for him, he's a politician!

It's nice that people who probably don't think "my body my choice" is a good argument for abortion are sure it's a good argument for crawling and huffing all over people trying to make their own choice to socially distance while going for a walk or buying groceries

*bristles gently*

pish pish cat is no Dr Fuck!

it's almost like it's more effective to administer urgent public health procedures from a central governing body rather than outsourcing them to a private company.

Test Appointment Lottery (via The Times) pic.twitter.com/pnmLhJZpu0

— r/Sheffield (@sheffieldreddit) September 19, 2020

I liked Blair & co in opposition - because I was young and easily led.

I was young and much more easily led to a pub than a polling station and never voted Blair, but tbh I'm not even sure I'd have voted for anyone better than Blair either!

did the young pinefox still get a hot flush at the sight of Hilary Clinton?

https://www.expressandstar.com/news/politics/2020/09/19/starmer-takes-the-gloves-off-and-goes-on-the-attack/

Kieth's mad as hell and he's not gonna take it any more

Starmer ain't taking no shorts, after so far mainly pressuring the UK govt to do exactly what they were going to do.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EiS2cErXkAI8m5c?format=jpg&name=small

it's gone long past the stage where the emperor even wears a string vest

😬

I'm sure I had read marina Hyde bits quite a few times over several years not knowing or guessing they were considered to be impressive in any way. They seem to be mostly 'well written' which might be enough to warrant praise compared to something like that incoherent Hadley Freeman thing someone posted on the guardian thread today (?) that read like a group office email from a coworker experiencing issues.

They seem to be mostly 'well written'

I would be interested in your definition of well written because on a sentence by sentence level Marina Hyde is absolutely terrible. There is usually one half-decent joke in each of her columns but that isn't enough to justify the slavering blue tick adoration she receives.

I might be missing some *history* but Hyde has definitely been worth reading, recently.

The Marina Hyde article is trying so hard to be funny, she can't settle on making a joke, she has to add a bunch of (middle aged / middle class) pop culture references and OTT adjectives, then do the same joke again just in case you didn't get it the first time. I was wondering why these blue ticks like it so much, but it fits their privileged POV and has references they will get immediately, so no mystery there I guess.

She’s a very useful idiot. The jokes are an acceptable valve for very tame railing against the status quo which does nothing whatsoever to change it.

I have smiled at a Marina Hyde article before, I'd say there are worse generators of "content" in the employ of national newspapers.

Go off lad

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/19/owen-jones-a-lot-of-people-in-the-parliamentary-labour-party-are-horrible

The parliamentary Labour party meetings were just brutal and gruesome. A lot of those people in the parliamentary Labour party – I’m just going to say it – are jumped-up thugs. Vicious, horrible people. They would sanctimoniously stand up and talk about the authoritarianism of Corbynism as they screeched like disturbed teenagers, spraying spittle at anyone with the temerity to support the elected leadership of the party of which they were members. I really don’t know what they are driven by.

"I would be interested in your definition of well written"

I only meant that they make grammatical sense and have at least some sense of argumentative or expositive development where things have a sequential meaning: Basic stuff you'd hope an undergrad could master by the second year but seemingly beyond a good deal of published writing I see in places where you would presume they could employ competent writers.

Do we have any ideas on when London (or all of the country?) will be under a lockdown again?

Health secretary overarching message this morning: if there’s another national lockdown the public will only have themselves to blame #Covid19UK

— Kay Burley (@KayBurley) September 20, 2020

Reports are saying restrictions will tighten further this week in household mixing but if pubs are not fully closed? Yes, if it sounds incoherent..

That's funny, deranged dude shouting at a couple of pigs near the bus stop yesterday said they were going to close the pubs. Also suggsted we wake up iirc.

I think they'll cave on the pubs shortly.

It would be madness not to close the pubs but looking at what they’ve done in Newcastle a part of me wouldn’t be surprised if it were lockdown 2 brought to you by Wetherspoon

In March all the talk was of “a series of phased lockdowns” and the point that got repeated over and over was that the most important thing was to time the lockdowns and relaxations so that a second spike didn’t coincide with flu season too much, so I’m sort of boggling that we’re now at that point and it’s all this vague we might fuck around and try another lockdown, see how we feel on the day eh. You’ve had six months you cunts!

Someone was saying that this spike correlated with the august bank holiday. So is it as bad in Scotland where the bank holiday was at the start of the month?

It would be madness not to close the pubs but looking at what they’ve done in Newcastle a part of me wouldn’t be surprised if it were lockdown 2 brought to you by Wetherspoon

― Gab B. Nebsit (wins), Sunday, 20 September 2020 11:10 (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

national lock-in

https://i.imgur.com/MMDOaWm.jpg

that onion is always in her hankie