"we'll change the things that need changing and that's all we'll change": the paSUKification of post-brexit politics 2021

It's more about a new variant that beats the vaccine, but that can be imported from elsewhere anyway, like Delta

I'm not sure either just what level of disruption there will be from hundreds of thousands of cases – it's not like you're either dead or fine, even with vaccination an awful lot of people are surely going to be sick enough to need to stay off work. The risk of that affecting entire teams/floors will also make halfway sensible companies want to continue WFH etc

Reckless reopenings seem to be a trend p much everywhere I have connections to - Portugal, Germany, Belgium (not France yet I don't think?). Portuguese govt falling over itself to reopen everything to avoid another year without much tourism revenue, results are that Porto and Lisbon are already back under some lockdown measures. Of course most places don't have our vaccine count so the chaos springs forth quicker.

Been seeing VISIT KOREA all over London buses, like, surely the amount of potential tourists who can afford a trip like that yet are ok w/ quarantines is vanishingly small? And why would South Korea want them right now anyway?

Did they specify it was S. Korea?

A new, vaccine-resistant variant would radically change things but that’s always going to be a risk.

If you want to guarantee cases get down below the rate they currently are, idk how that can be done without closing schools and reimposing a strict lockdown and there is zero political (or likely public) will to do that in a country close to 100% vaccinated at 18+.

WFH where possible will likely continue for the foreseeable though.

Trying to separate bits of the economy:

- Loads of companies will continue to work from home or part-working (as stet says there are continued risks), which will be more permanent or to be used to extract cheaper rents on office space. In any case, think there will be less ppl in the City.

- Do think international travel will be reduced for the foreseeable, yes. Too much of a risk unless you can afford, as Daniel says.

- Staying away from shops. Perhaps, there has been a switch to online anyway. Retail has been fucked for a while even before the pandemic. This will radically change the look of our streets, perhaps.

None of these trends will be changed by the government's announcements this week apart from:

- Entertainment. This is what we'll find out.

Brady's re-election is also a reminder of why Johnson is dropping masks and nearly all other Covid restrictions on July 19: ministers privately say the government no longer had the Tory votes to keep the measures in place. Relying on Labour would have been v difficult for the PM.

— Sebastian Payne (@SebastianEPayne) July 7, 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/07/keir-starmer-labour-muslim-voters-red-wall-islamophobia

this is the best Chakrabortty piece I've read in a long time on the hollow opposition playing racially divisive games or as some idiots would have it "voting for hope" sad lol

It is a good piece. It could also have thrown Labour's new 'Buy British' procurement strategy into that mix....

After the banking crash of 2008, David Cameron and George Osborne pretended that the fault lay with Labour’s “pile of debt” – its spending on Sure Start centres and the like. It was politically cynical and economically illiterate, yet Ed Miliband’s team felt they had to go along with it, and never made a convincing case for the transformation that state investment can bring. The result has been over a decade of destruction of our public services, flatlining wages and the sour, angry, zero-sum politics we have today.

Can’t be repeated often enough.

I'd have also added that they got twice the number of votes in B+S in GE 19 with unambiguous anti-austerity messaging and without pandering to racists. And how austerity does disproportionately affect ethnic minority communities in the UK. But Kieth isn't interested in these voters anymore.

Once may be a gaffe; twice is becoming a habit. The comments to the Times reappeared in the Guardian and all over social media, except this time the party made no apology. To the best of my knowledge, it was only when I raised the remarks with Labour that it officially condemned them. Just a few years after Jeremy Corbyn so disastrously dealt with Jewish complaints about antisemitism, his successor is fast developing a new race problem.

It’s the same race problem. You can’t berate cynical right-wing Labour members for painting Muslim voters as bigoted and dispensable without acknowledging that a substantial chunk of the antisemitism allegations directed towards members were little more than the targeted harassment of Muslims and an attempt to dislodge a leader perceived as too sympathetic to them.

Freeland wouldn't have been happy if Aditya dropped too much truth in one Graun opinion piece

for me the most important point aditya makes in that article is insisting on the larger repercussions of starmerism, not just within the labour party but beyond. i think there's a lot of discussion that narrows its focus to the labour party itself, from a kindof 'forget it jake' exasperation from the left (im sure every single one of us in this thread have espoused this position in the starmer years) to the the salt-the-earth realpolitik of the labour right. Often, even in discussing how drearily internecine this all is, what gets weirdly lost (though we all know it) is that the front line of left v right in this country is not between labour and the tories but something that runs through the labour party itself. I'm not saying that this will always be the case but the pasokification is frustratingly drawn out, seemingly precluding the emergence of any alternative, something that seems like a real pipe dream now (but then who would have anticipated the corbyn-led opposition in 2014?).

I think this is the frustration you see everywhere, or at least its a frustration I feel so I might be simply projecting, that its somehow impossible to abandon obsessing about what Starmer is doing. Particularly given how 'bipartisan' norms (to the extent they are adhered to) are largely structured around tory v labour, to relinquish the party to the radical centrists is to abandon to 'consensus' all the overton-chasing dogwhistles (and worse) that this coalition of wingnuts and cynical opportunists will insist with various degrees of sincerity makes them electable.

The depressing record of the labour right in matching the tories in racism and authoritarianism seems already to be in full swing as evidenced in b&s and this has I think really dangerous implications for where the 'consensus view' is going. Idk, this is all very circular and I feel very hopeless about a lot of things right now, but Labour's response to the mishandling of covid by the government shows how disastrously consequential it is for all of us to have such an inconsequential opposition and it is deeply frustrating to be pulled back, again and again, into a mainstream discourse bounded to the left by this man:

Let's call the Delta variant what it is: the Johnson variant.

The Prime Minister left our borders open and hasn't fixed test & trace.#PMQs #JohnsonVariant pic.twitter.com/Domv8E5IF3

— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) July 7, 2021

Labour's response to the mishandling of covid by the government shows how disastrously consequential it is for all of us to have such an inconsequential opposition

even big Duncy the self-styled consummate Lib of our times has twigged onto this 15 months too late.

(but then who would have anticipated the corbyn-led opposition in 2014?)

true but everyone seems to thinks the next move will be a switch back to the electoral college and no more one member one vote. At this point even beating Starmer black and blue with a baseball bat or tactically voting for the LibDems to owns the Labs will make little difference to the direction of the party nor even offer any easy catharsis!

no i agree totally. im not saying that we all need to cling to the labour party and its bullshit and its wreckers, but its sortof impossible to totally escape the black hole as well. its relentlessly depressing!

yes!

I can't even be arsed joining the communist party for lols because I don't do meetings and they would probably be extremely grim. The Greens are a bunch of posturing melts. I don't even give a shit about the Tories quietly planning for total hegemony till the death via voter ID and boundary reforms even though I should really. It's almost comforting that there are much bigger problems like runaway global warming that puts this little shitshow into perspective.

Despite the historic rivalries between the #PubsAPPG and #BeerAPPG groups we respectively chair, and between our parties, @mikejwood and I both agree it's definitely coming home tonight! 🦁🦁🦁 pic.twitter.com/SkRLgSmimS

— Charlotte Nichols (@charlotte2153) July 7, 2021

compare this with when McD said he wanted an atmosphere so hostile to Tories that they'd be scared to even walk the streets.

Wow, seems like everyone is being very unfair to her. She was hanging out with him because a corporate sponsor gave them free tickets in order to curry favour with the APPG chairs overseeing the alcohol industry, not because they’re friends.

I see I'm getting dunked on for having a photo with a Conservative MP yesterday at Wembley, where we were kindly hosted given our APPG roles by one of the sponsors of the tournament.

An APPG is an "All Party Parliamentary Group". The clue is in the "all party" bit 🙃

— Charlotte Nichols (@charlotte2153) July 8, 2021

lol good to know both the alcohol and betting lobbies have Labour in their pocket and she's not even slightly embarrassed by this.

this is how politics works in the real world guys

if i accepted free tickets to a sporting event because of my nothing-to-do-with-sports job i’d be sacked. ok probably not sacked but disciplined.

maybe even dunked on on social media

one can dream!

Contra what the media landscape would suggest, football fans do not say "It's coming home", to mean "England will win".

For one thing, most England fans, most of the time, don't think that England will win.

For another, "It's coming home" does not really mean "England will win". What it originally meant, I think, was: "a major soccer tournament is going to be held in a nation that claims to have invented soccer".

TBH my first sentence is sadly false. The kind of football fans who ring 606 with Robbie Savage *do* say it. But maybe they do this because they think it's the kind of thing Robbie Savage would say.

People should not say it.

They especially should not say it to mean: "England will win".

i always just assumed "it" was "a latter-day proxy for global hegemony"

Is Robbie Savage likely to say 'it's coming home'? Ypu might have noticed he is somewhat Welsh.

👀 Is football come home?
🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England's standout performers
🦁 Why Southgate has got it right@RobbieSavage8 joins @eljonesuk to talk all things England in this week's Three of the Best. pic.twitter.com/PIOUt4mPI5

— Robbie Savage (@RobbieSavage8) July 2, 2021

I turned on the radio yesterday and Baddiel was talking about "Englishness" with Justin Webb and that was enough of that. I remember about 12 years ago listening to 606 and it was probably Savage's radio debut and he was co-hosting the show with Neil Warnock. And I thought he was so completely terrible that the BBC wouldn't be asking him back in a hurry, but that was when I still erroneously thought that BBC radio had higher standards than commercial stations like Talk Sport.

Well, seeing as this has become the defacto Euro thread...

The level of expectation running out there right now, I sense there'll be a lot of fans/media crying like German schoolgirls if it doesn't happen, along with Bojo and Starmzy running away from the postmatch team meet..

Hope I'm wrong, but.

I think it will be more a case of the PM and Kieth trying to outdo each other with performative displays of how "gutted" for the lads they are. Boris really won't give a shit and Kieth will attempt some fake magnanimity through gritted teeth and mention that he's an Arsenal fan.

I will love it if Kieth does a "well done Italy" tweet, absolutely love it

Oh he will, won’t he…

St Neots East (Huntingdonshire), council by-election result:

IND: 42.5% (+42.5)
GRN: 33.4% (+33.4)
LDEM: 11.6% (-15.9)
CON: 8.0% (-24.0)
LAB: 4.4% (-36.0)

Independent GAIN from Labour.

— Britain Elects (@BritainElects) July 9, 2021

St Neots is weird, that local group won everything there in the May elections too, same happened in Herefordshire, suppose this will likely be a trend until there is an actual opposition.

Unbelievable but we've seen these given all season

Honiton St Michael's (East Devon), council by-election result:

LAB: 58.0% (+58.0)
CON: 37.5% (-15.5)
LDEM: 4.5% (-42.5)

Labour GAIN from Liberal Democrat.

— Britain Elects (@BritainElects) July 9, 2021

So, Labour didn't stand last time?

Too busy pandering to lacists

A1 Honiton knowledge, my brother was on local telly with some lace in the 1970s.

This ward is the west end of Honiton of course, a mix of the leafy and the not so leafy. We were strictly Eastside when we lived there.

It's basically a gap year seat; Lib Dem incumbent stood down "to focus on his university studies" and the Labour winner is 19. He says he wants to "thank every single person who voted for me" which given that it's Honiton will take him most of the morning. https://t.co/j9JmzGO8jK

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) July 9, 2021

he looks like a tory tbf

That's the look of electability you luddite

They don't care much for the two party system in Honiton, they'll vote for any nice young clean cut looking chap, as long as he doesn't cuss or smoke weed.

And is sound on the jam and cream question

lol!

I like this though is Batley similar to Hartlepool? The differences would explain why, despite Lab's vote being similarly suppressed, it still retained the seat.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/09/labour-red-wall-working-class-brexit-conservatives

The end of the piece is pissing in the wind. I'll be surprised if Lab break 30% at the next election.

The 'vote for us and we'll keep your hospital open, vote for them and we'll close it' approach from the Tories can work pretty much anywhere.