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

UK HE can survive the pandemic and Brexit, though it may be damaged by both. What it can't survive intact is the malign policies and actions of the corrupt UK government. These are quite separable from, and considerably prior to, those other crises, and are also ongoing now.

my fave Cambridge alumni were lads like Maclean and Burgess, who by most accounts were pretty fucked up and dislikeable people. But at least they hated the system that gave them an easy life enough to actively work against it.

I'm right here!

xp the rumour is that the Cambridge spy ring is the reason London-Cambridge transport links have been worse than London-Oxford. More plausibly this is why we've had eight Oxford-educated PMs since then, and exactly zero from Cambridge.

I think Oxford was always the politics place, Cambridge was more dead parrots and silly walks.

Baldwin is the last Cambridge-educated PM, going back more than a century you find that plenty (Bonar Law, Lloyd George) did not go to university at all, otherwise there's a fairly even split.

noodle v says:

on a very fundamental level the ruling class in the UK isn't different now than it was in 1800 except in trivial presentational ways

unless you simply mean it's still the few vs the many as it always was i'm not sure that i agree with this? in 1800 the ruling class in the UK was organised round the ownership of land, rather than industry or commerce or capital as it is today -- and companies and corporations as we understand them today didn't exist (or they kind of did in proto-form but the individuals owning them were entirely liable, so the org had not been severed from the wealth of its founder or owner or whatever blah blah).

the land-owning aristocracy does still exist (as major london-centred landlords the grosvenors and the cadogans still get into the top 15 uk billionaires) but as a class it is absolutely no longer the mover and shaker it was throughout the the 19th century. meanwhile what gives the newspaper barons their modern power is not that they are barons but that they run newspapers (and now other media).

a secondary point is that the UK just isn't very important any more: its ruling forces today are very much more outside and multinational forces than they were in 1800 -- the murdochs (from a relatively lowly background if you start at 1800) have far more oligarchical heft as a family than the duke of westminster does, and for all the fuss round the windsors today elizabeth ii has much less political power than george iii had: they function as spectacle and lightning rod and have little agency except defensively)

that's all fair and I picked 1800 to stretch my rhetorical point - it probably isn't far enough into the industrial revolution, tho i think you can argue that it was starting to be felt in the landscape of rulership by then, and i'd certainly argue that by 1850 it was dominant if not total. Murdoch and other press barons are new and different but idk if they're in the ruling class of the UK so much as powerful outside forces whose patronage is sometimes needed and who sometimes themselves seek patronage? royal family's relationship to politics looks different but mostly nominally so i'd say, and tho Elizabeth doesn't form parliaments in the way George III did this is as much about the face that the monarchy has chosen to wear to survive as it is about the mechanics of power imo

i am stretching my despair to prove a point but i'll stick by the feeling that the opening up of suffrage through the long 19th century hasn't made much more than hypothetical difference to the rulership of the UK. but that stretch maybe looks thin around the world wars and the post WWII settlement

anyway, i am exaggerating but not that much imo

agree that the UK isn't that important any more but always quote what Vaneigem said about Wile E Coyote not realising he's run off the end of the cliff yet

Is there a chance that Cambridge could surpass Oxford, if anyone cares, on account of its strengths in the sciences?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FTV4fmTXwAAkPGG?format=jpg&name=medium

Ian Austin says the current LOTO is way too soft on those totally evil and unpatriotic train union Trots!

former member of the Face Down the Unions Party

Kieth would be more than happy to condemn any union that takes strike action during jubilee events. He's just going through a bit of a quiet period whilst the guy who wrote his conference speech is talking up a rival for his job. Couldn't happen to a nicer person.

What the fuck

Tweet on Tory local election candidate’s account says teenage girls smell ‘buttery and creamy’ https://t.co/DBt5o2LjS2

— The Guardian (@guardian) May 22, 2022

well that's another good thing about the continuing success of The Preston Model, it's keeping out another repulsive paedophile from Parliament

well not from Parliament, I should have said it's blocking another paedo-councillor!

there is this councillor who lives down the road from me. He's a likable bullshit merchant but probably never going to anything good, and he's running for Kirklees Mayor now. He won't be able stand next to Kieth for photos. I'm about 6 feet tall or just short of it and he looked like a giant to me!

https://www.dewsburyreporter.co.uk/webimg/QVNIMTI1NzY0MzY5.jpg?width=2048&enable=upscale

oh he's becoming Kirklees Mayor. This is the guy who wanted me to vote on some local bollox about some newbuild homes project when I was a Labour member. When I told him I didn't have time and only joined to support the Corbyn project he tried to win me over by saying Gordon Brown and Ken Livingstone were his political heroes! I felt a bit bad the next day for knocking him back when there was a serious arson attack at his home.

my fave local councillor is Nosheen Dad. I once saw her pick up a decaying dead rat and put it in a litter bin. That was very brave and she didn't do a photo of herself pointing at the dead rat.

is the kirklees mayor taller than daniel kawczynski, is what i want to know

if he is i support him too

oh no I don't think he's that tall, he's probably about 6"3 really, but I think his big head/big shoulder pad combo makes look much taller or something like that. But while Kieth is leader I offer critical support to all tall people!

If I didn't want to be called a 'murderer' or 'Tory scum' I simply wouldn't be a Tory MP voting for cuts that killed tens of thousands of people https://t.co/Nw54oPdVKc pic.twitter.com/RscrqxybKv

— j (@jrc1921) May 23, 2022

when an MP get's murdered, an extremely rare lolccurrence - it's time for some sober reflection on how the toxic discourse in UK politics led to this tragic event. 140 000 + disabled people dying from the cross-party PIP project - that's just numbers you are making up m8 and this crude and inflammatory discourse will not do.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/24/energy-bills-likely-to-rise-by-800-in-october-says-ofgem-chief

This piece by Andrew Fisher is takes to task Eagleton's chapter on Brexit in his Starmer book:

https://labourhub.org.uk/2022/05/24/dont-play-the-blame-game/

AF otm. That aspect of Eagleton's book is indeed v bad and annoying; think Olly has absorbed the Lexity dogmas of his NLR forebears all too well.

See also https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2021/03/09/new-left-review-oliver-eagleton-attacks-owen-jones-tough-action-on-antisemitism-is-a-proxy-for-antisocialism/

The Starmer Project by Oliver Eagleton has, it seems, a side project to sow division in the left, attacking left stalwarts such as John McDonnell, Diane Abbott and Rebecca Long Bailey, while infantilising Jeremy Corbyn.

this is bollox imo and though perhaps some of his refutations of Eagleton's account might be right, does he think these people are above criticism? Because I believe Eagleton does get a lot of things correct about them. But perhaps he has got a point about infantilising Corbyn in parts of the book. Now we can see what a sharp operator Starmer it is hard to believe that he was conducting some long game plot as brexit minister, the way events folded out did work out fortuitously for his career. But he's too much of a muddled, indecisive kind of player for it to have been a cunning plan.

McD meeting with Campbell and inviting him back to the party and getting cosy with other Blairite debris, whatever was on his mind at the time? lol.

always delighted to read ill of an eagleton *whistling innocently*

I don't think Fisher is saying McDonnell is beyond criticism. It's just that his account of his role in changing Lab's policy on Brexit between 2017 and 2019 doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

"a side project to sow division in the left"

it's this kind of nonsense I meant

Fair enough, though if Fisher is right I wonder what Eagleton is playing at?

* Right about his criticisms of Eagleton's account.

I think would say he's upholding the family tradition of being bad

*mark s*

thats right

Lol

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/may/24/government-did-encourage-premier-league-to-approve-saudi-newcastle-takeover

https://t.co/Cey90aQfwg

— Oliver Eagleton (@EagletonOliver) May 25, 2022

https://labourhub.org.uk/2022/05/25/a-reply-to-andrew-fisher/

did you hear about the feight at the chippy? I heard a Fisher got battered.

Think this is pretty disingenuous bs from Eagleton jr tbh.

Relying on 'perception' and 'making no such claim' is it now?

I think both "The Eagle" and the Fish are unreliable for different reasons. Oliver can't back down because he's a got a book to plug and isn't going to put his hands up and say: perhaps my brexit chapter padded out with lots of spurious bollox and character slurs, but it's a cracking read. And as for Fisher he's a Labour Party guy - so quite possibly even more untrustworthy and full of shit. No actually, make that "certainly"!

Fisher was a pretty central figure in the Corbyn project, right? I'm pretty sure (don't follow him so could be wrong) he agrees that Starmer isn't worth shit but he'll blanket his criticisms from a policy direction. In the end he is as much of a Lab party guy as Corbyn. They will both tell us to vote Lab on election day.

anyone who tells you to vote Labour, I don't care who it is - Corbyn or Trickett or that big stupid Geordie doorman or OJ, well they all lack integrity imo.

They all lack integrity. But we all voted for them once upon a time because this rumbled left -- the fact that Starmer was in the cabinet at all is because of lack of left-wing alternatives -- is the best we had.

Don't really think lack of integrity is Corbyn's problem so much as a dogged conviction that this is the only hope going forward despite huge evidence to the contrary. Not that it matters in practical terms.

Oops:

gyac wrote this on thread "we'll change the things that need changing and that's all we'll change": the paSUKification of post-brexit politics 2021 on board I Love Everything on 10-May-2022

bier korma must resign

Boris Johnson calls the Labour leader: "Sir Beer Korma"

— John Stevens (@johnestevens) May 25, 2022

lol!

you got me, I’m running the country rn

and no, I do not accept constructive feedback on my role, thx