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

mark s arises after slumber and starts a new thread as requested

shake your chains to earth like dew
which in sleep had fallen on you
we are many -- they are few

^^^this may feel wildly wrong right now but it's still the correct baseline

I should have gone to bed like you!

anvil
Posted: 13 December 2019 at 10:26:57
The age breakdown of voters really gives the best indication of how 2024 might be. Though landscape in 2024 is of course likely to be substantially different


Where are you seeing this?

lol we're all gonna die

I feel it's worth noting that the only Northern seat I could find where Tory vote share decreased and the Brexit Party was the nearest challenger was one where the Tory candidate was called Iftikhar Ahmed. Though obviously you all understand the dynamics by now - a white working-class radicalised into a zero-sum culture war. It was still striking

Though landscape in 2024 is of course likely to be substantially different

yeah that'll be because of the widespread flooding caused by climate change

Climate change is good because it only affects Labour constituencies iirc.

Hate to think what the starting point for trying to make the country more egalitarian would be by 2024.
So could do with a working opposition and hoping its not going to fracture like the Labour party did in the immediate aftermath of the original Brexit vote.
Really am hoping that the Boris lead Tories are enough of a monolithically bad thing to catalyse a lot more grassroots level organisation.
Also wondering if there is anything that would prevent the new term from lasting 5 years.

c&ping from the other thread to avoid the wrath of mark s

I don't think anyone on here is denying the real implications Daniel, it's not so much lols either. It's more that a lot of people are thinking "a big majority of the people voted for their own people to suffer."

Well yeah, they did, and it's fair to be angry at that, but it's also true that there are few European countries that haven't recently had considerable portions of their populace vote for things that are worth getting angry over. And on another level, while I understand that in practical terms you have to use shorthand to talk about countries in these terms and it's not a judgement on everyone who lives there, it still always makes me uncomfortable as soon as someone suggests an entire country can be dismissed or made to pay for its mistakes. It's the first step towards very ugly things.

I know I'm perhaps overanalysing off the cuff remarks here but if there's one day I can forgive myself for being oversensitive I feel like today is surely it.

We're all gonna die.

― Matt DC, Friday, December 13, 2019 10:57 AM (one minute ago)

Best possible conclusion to the previous thread.

(Emphasis on 'all'.)

if there's one day I can forgive myself for being oversensitive I feel like today is surely it.

I certainly don't blame you!

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

The most likely thing that would end the government prematurely is probably Scotland voting Yes to independence in a referendum organised without Johnson's consent. It'll probably happen.

if it does, we can look forward to the apparatus of the state being used to violently repress it, i guess

Boris won't last 5 years, I'd put money on it.

Ok, go on..

Obligatory:

Congratulations to Boris Johnson on his great WIN! Britain and the United States will now be free to strike a massive new Trade Deal after BREXIT. This deal has the potential to be far bigger and more lucrative than any deal that could be made with the E.U. Celebrate Boris!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2019

i wonder what odds william hill would give me on him being assassinated by a rejuvenated ira xp

Loyalists are more likely.

Don't know if it's already been discussed, but here is one Graun postmortem of many:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/13/five-reasons-why-labour-lost-the-election

solidly dispiriting #content in this thread

I was talking to a guy on the doorstep in a really nice part of town. He was against but up for a chat. We spoke about all the things he cared about: mainly the environment, about the future. He didn't know anything about the Green New Deal but seemed interested. But then.

— Senior Tory Source (@Mc_Heckin_Duff) December 13, 2019

Turnout listed as 67.3% - down 1.6 on 2017 - not a big deal in the grand scheme of things especially for a short notice election in December but ffs

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"

— Siobhán Fenton (@SiobhanFenton) December 13, 2019

Mike Nesbitt has just said the biggest threat to Union is English Nationalism If they weren’t prepared to pay £89 billion into EU. they may now look at the six counties and decide they are not value for money and cut them loose

— J_J@52 (@J_J52) December 13, 2019

Saw so many reports of queues at polling stations, and anecdotes about them seeming busier than usual, that a bigger turnout seemed probable.

I'd love to know a demographic breakdown of who didn't vote.

Re: that Senior Tory Source Twitter thread:

Blair did it and it didn't work and everyone called him an SJW liberal anyway. It doesn't work. Not doing it doesn't work. People want the hardest racism they can get.

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.

handy off-the-cuff 7-part breakdown of ways forward* (sadly all bad but it is analysis and we have to start somewhere):

*local ways forward but actually (per pom) ways foward genuinely have to be global now

Ok in the knowledge that it is is way too early, my thoughts on what next. Here are some options...

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) December 13, 2019

it's not labour or europe that drove our economy off a cliff, it was bankers selling derivatives. the response? slash funding to councils and appoint a deutsche bank managing director as chancellor of the exchequer

brb just going to drink myself to death

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

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/13/brexit-party-nigel-farage-boris-johnson-labour-leavers

This is pretty much what I saw on the night. What it leaves out is how the Remain votes were squeezed by both Greens and Lib Dems too.

Boris would probably be on a small majority.

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?

Guardian:

Starmer? Phillips? Who will be the next Labour leader?

Lol it won't be Starmer after the leave vote won.

if it’s starmer then god help our souls

Tired lol at the notion Mr Remain will get those Northern seats back in this universe

When I saw the exit poll, I thought of the reports of high turnout in the referendum. Turnout high enough to get people who’ve never voted or who are alienated to come out. That’s where the Tory surge is from. I’d put money on it.

The turnout was pretty mediocre in this election though? Especially in Leave areas?

Yeah poss just not making sense. My point is that surge came from the same kind of voter.

There is hope: Boris Johnson’s big majority could unleash the social liberal within | Simon Jenkins https://t.co/ltsGksBNbC

— The Guardian (@guardian) December 13, 2019

Simon Jenkins apparently agrees with my mother. This is potentially the implication in the Times endorsement too - not that Johnson is too right-wing to admit what his policies are to the electorate (which was my read of it) but he’s too liberal to let on. Chris Hope’s Telegraph piece is already talking about a major shift to the centre and comparisons with Blair. It seems completely mad but I have long suspected that a lot of the people who voted for him in the mayoral election have basically convinced themselves that it’s true.

Yes because Boris is a consistent political beast who has just been concealing his true colours to win the election.

I don't think Pidcock would have been the best idea for leadership candidate tbh. Not saying the pics/tweets of her endorsing Chris Williamson are the complete measure of her but others definitely would.

He doesn’t believe in anything. He’ll do what he has to regardless of whether it’s consistent or not.

I'm sure I'm not the first to point this out, but at national vote share level, this is *not* a Labour to Tory swing. It's Labour to Lib-Dem and Brexit Party. The *Green* vote increased in absolute numbers by almost as much as the Tory vote. pic.twitter.com/0JaDPE4jMY

— Jo Michell (@JoMicheII) December 13, 2019

Precisely. Belief in anything else about his character is… misguided, to say the least.

xp

No, I wouldn't have had Pidcock either and she couldn't hold on to her seat anyway.

I think that kind of helps him, tbh. Spend a whole campaign making claims about the beliefs of a man who quite openly has none and you’re arguing with smoke.

Xp

Should have gone harder on the character stuff but it’s too late now.

For sure. It's just that voting for the flesh-and-blood avatar of a Rorschach test doesn't strike me as a brilliant democratic move but what do I know?

xp

Cameron didn't believe in anything either fwiw.

Just read that Gary Younge piece. Good stuff.

It is absolutely wild that the Tory vote only went up 1.2%. That's a figure worth remembering.

FPTP ftw, that most venerable of cultural exports to the Empire's ex-colonies.

So we're still waiting for St. Ives right? Seeing as the LDs were useless everywhere I assume this stays blue too.

There are many things that need to change in the Labour Party. Let’s start with something simple: there are no ‘right wingers’, ‘neo cons’, or ‘Tories’ in the Labour Party. Nor are there ‘slugs’ or ‘melts’. Let’s deliver kinder, gentler politics for real this time.

— Wes Streeting MP (@wesstreeting) December 13, 2019

*hard stare*

Interesting on how the hatred of Corbyn took a while to take hold.

How did the demonization of Corbyn have such a strong effect in 2019 but not in 2017? Although on the face of it that demonization has been raw and relentless, actually it has only circled around the key charge, never making it explicit,... 4/

— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019

this feels crushingly otm

... so it has taken four years for low engagement voters to absorb it fully. The real charge against Corbyn is that he fundamentally believes that British/white lives are of equal value with the lives of others. 5/

— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019

The cenotaph. Gerry Adams. Prosecutions of historic crimes in N.I. Laying wreaths in foreign cemeteries. Poppies. Diane Abbott. Pushing the button. Watching the Queen at Christmas. 7/

— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019

it's a good thread, by which i mean it's extremely depressing

Boris had people at his count chanting “no surrender”

It is absolutely wild that the Tory vote only went up 1.2%. That's a figure worth remembering.

The party that made the biggest advance, percentage-wise, was ... the Lib Dems!

jo swindon we need u now more than ever

https://images.991.com/large_image/Jimmy+Shand+Will+Ye+No+Come+Back+Again-644479.jpg

uh-oh

I can this morning announce that as government advisor on antisemitism that I will be instigating an investigation this January into the role of the Canary and other websites in the growth of antisemitism in the United Kingdom. https://t.co/e76OcSydZm

— John Mann (@LordJohnMann) December 13, 2019

How can one pick a side between Lord Mann and the fucking Canary!! Fuck!

I was thinking perhaps the seeing the end of the trying-to-lie-more-than-tories Swinson LibDems might cheer me up a bit if the result was absolutely terrible. But it is has only delivered a wee morsel of grim satisfaction. Still pretty much winded from that gut punch of the exit poll last night. The weather is fucking horrible as well.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELrOa__XUAE8ME8?format=png&name=large

The issue is distribution as much as that breakdown

by the time the cohort has aged away from power it'll be too late for the climate, fuck everything.

The world itself will change, and the people in it will need to adapt to survive. The result of this election doesn't change that. Even if Labour had won it.

Something tells me a lot of you need cheering up, so here you go (even though I can already feel the stick I'm going to get!)...

Six reasons for the left to be cheerful https://t.co/Zh8LHchmQz

— Tom Clark (@prospect_clark) December 13, 2019

sorry everyone :(

The world itself will change, and the people in it will need to adapt to survive. The result of this election doesn't change that. Even if Labour had won it.

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/six-reasons-why-the-left-need-not-despair-labour-conservative-election

straight into the veins

huh that was meant to quote the previous post, sorry

I dread to think - but what's the tory's climate change plan?

it got one mention on page 72 of the manifesto, so I think the real answer is "frack till it hurts then salve the wounds with coal"

What Tory climate change plan?

Priorities priorities but also who's the Commons Daddio now that Clarke and Skinner are gone?

If it’s not Bill Cash, it should be.

I dread to think - but what's the tory's climate change plan?

Tory climate change plan = do whatever sinister shadowy interests want, cover up with meaningless bluster. Same as their plan for everything else.

I did around 120 hours of canvassing in London, Bedford and Milton Keynes. I didn’t expect this result but here’s how I can make sense of it from what I encountered on the doorstep. 1/

— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019

oh sorry I see some of this was posted earlier

Xps, Peter Bottomley apparently.

climate change will basically be ethnic cleansing on a global scale and i do not expect the tories to give one single fuck about it

Mr. Personality himself. (xp)

I dread to think - but what's the tory's climate change plan?

machine-gun climate refugees at dover iirc

More realistically, take a look at what the US are doing - a network of concentration camps already being set up to detain climate change refugees, for example - and do the same. Remember that scene at Dover near the end of Children Of Men? That kind of thing. While scrapping over the spoils of newly-uncovered fossil fuels in the arctic, uncovered by climate change no less. Plus fracking. And blaming the resultant Armageddon on refugees.

climate change will basically be ethnic cleansing on a global scale and i do not expect the tories to give one single fuck about it

― one nation under a gloom (NickB), Friday, 13 December 2019 bookmarkflaglink

Australia RIP

More realistically, take a look at what the US are doing - a network of concentration camps already being set up to detain climate change refugees, for example - and do the same.

Britain already has this btw

A 32 per cent vote share is 9 points down on Tony Blair’s second landslide, and indeed eight down on Corbyn’s own splendid defeat in 2017. But it is appreciably more than the 28 per cent score the party had in its 1983 Waterloo, and also up on the 29 per cent Gordon Brown scored in 2010, Ed Miliband’s 30 per cent in 2015, and Neil Kinnock’s 31 per cent in 1987. And it is only three points less than the 35 per cent share which produced the third Blair government in 2005.

This is... a parody?

It's facts, or don't your feelings care for it?

Is that a Ben Shapiro riff?

I'm grateful for people posting articles and tweet threads that put this in context, or provide any sort of grounds for optimism, for the record. Also all the canvassers.

It feels like the only option right now is to try to switch off and not give this more power than necessary while there's little to be achieved, but we will of course all be angrily refreshing screens like an inverse Male Online screaming "they're doing what?!" for the best part of ten years

We were young, once

a comprehensive green new deal, like the one labour was offering, would have put the country in a much better position to adapt, though
― Receive Your Simulated Fluids Before The End of The Year! (bizarro gazzara), Friday, 13 December 2019 bookmarkflaglink

I know what you mean but given the reports of what's already happening it will need heavy coordination between many countries at a time. Green new deal is definitely a template for things that still can be done at some point.

Agreed. Shout out to all the canvassers, including comrade alphabet. Mad props.

I remember when "the government has announced ..." wasn't immediately met with dread or suspicion.

Xp

Children of Men was Bexhill, not Dover, not important but interesting to me as my mum lived there at the time.

thanks pom.

So many canvassers on twitter saying how 'they failed' but we were doing the little we could, too late. It turned to be a bit too much to turn around what was in front of us. Stuff that was building for two decades.

i'm so sorry you all, this is very grim. solidarity.

The only comfort I can offer is that without all that incredible mobilization it would certainly have turned out even worse.

Righteous fury from the guy in the neighbouring constituency

Re-elected Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle pledges to fight Conservatives in the street in fiery acceptance speech @lloyd_rm #GeneralElection #GeneralElection19 #generalelections2019 read full report 👉👉 https://t.co/ilKUjhMncU pic.twitter.com/hNBFnUZJ6d

— Jody Doherty-Cove (@JodyyDC) December 13, 2019

Same lad who grabbed the mace in parliament btw

take the lols where you can imo

TV gold here from @adamboultonSKY 😂pic.twitter.com/UblhRsxRfP

— Nick Jones (@resophonick) December 13, 2019

Our leader in waiting.

pic.twitter.com/nfQg9hsv21

— Zack Breslin (@zack_breslin) December 13, 2019

If this morning everything seems too dark to face, just remember that if it comes to the worst, the USA always welcomes immigrants with open, no wait, strike that.

I was thinking earlier there must be some right wing shitholes with better weather than here, but they don't tend to do mutual citizen exchange schemes for people that fancy a change!

Australia is the go-to.

(takes a glance at recent ILX posts about Australian politics, then reads recent news reports coming from Australia)

ffs

Combining anti-PC nationalism with leftist economics ... intriguing idea ... but the phrase is awkward and unwieldy ... I wonder if we can't coin one word to sum up this program. https://t.co/cnhHAuGCOu

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) December 13, 2019

lol I'm in a chat right now with a friend who's angrily dissecting that joke because fascist economics wasn't actually leftist

yeah that occurred to me as well. I strongly suspect Jeet knows that but couldn't resist the obvious joke.

you can forgive him for clowning someone with a good joke, even if it is built on the wrongness of what the other eejit is saying imo!

-First backbencher in history to get a budget amended in campaign to abolish Tampon Tax
-Got WHSmiths to cut exploitative prices in their hospital shops
-Secured U-turn on cuts to Dewsbury Hospital beds
-First person to say the word ‘vagina’ in House of Commons

Paula, we Stan 👏🏻 https://t.co/uSt9fERnk2

— Susie Beever (@SusieMayJourno) December 13, 2019

I feel bad for poor Paula, (I know it is a cliche) but she is a brilliant and tireless constituency MP and the incoming Tory nob who beat her by a mere thousand or so is a complete shitheel who will only represent the wealthier and white side of the constituency.

Calz, Australia will welcome you with open arms. You’ll get lots of immigration points if you’re a qualified concentration camp guard, are white and are prepared to live somewhere that catches on fire. A southern cross tattoo on one shoulder, and a eureka flag on the other should tip you over the line. Don’t forget the Aussie flag budgie smugglers for the visa interview.

lol , many years ago when i was getting my electrical qualifications there was lots of talk of sparkies being needed in Australia and great rates of pay etc and even cheap houses are big with swimming pools. I thought it about it for about 10 seconds and then realised my lack of a driving license and inability to even deal with British summers could be a serious handicap out there for me. But I'd guess being white would help me ace the points system!

xp was devastated when I saw that result, she is so hard working and so brave and she stood up when it counted. If you have a line of communication to her, please say something

Seconded. I can’t believe she lost.

I was pulling out my mail this morning and there was a vote Paula leaflet amongst the mail and was ready to cry foul, but then figured (quite sadly) it was probably just trapped behind the windshield of the letterbox since yesterday :(

i'm playing a drinking game tonight except instead of taking a drink whenever rose says st olaf i'm taking a drink whenever I feel a pang of abject misery

Every major A&E unit in England has failed to hit its four-hour waiting time target for the first time, NHS figures show.

All 118 units fell below the 95% threshold in November as the NHS posted its worst performance since targets were introduced more than a decade ago.

Alongside the growing waits in A&E, the data showed there were record delays finding beds for the sickest patients.

The numbers on waiting lists for routine care also hit an all-time high.

xp same

https://novaramedia.com/2019/12/13/no-false-consolations/

"the damage has been done. The catastrophe is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart."

Labour might have done better if Labour had run with a simple snappy punch packing slogan like Disaster Nationalism or Ug! Ug! (Ug! Ug! Ug!) was a bit too nebulous and long-winded for beetroot faced angry man in Blyth Valley, Wales.

lolz but sad lolz tbh

That's not in Wales, you're thinking of Don Valley.

Isn’t Don Valley the North?

yes

just joined the labour party. who should i vote for?

https://www.theweek.co.uk/91412/labour-leader-odds-who-will-replace-jeremy-corbyn

would love to see angela rayner tear strips off johnson every week in parliament so her

I don't get the suggestion that the next government is inevitably going to stumble from crisis to crisis and fall apart. Having obtained power, Johnson's only real priority will be to keep hold of it (until he gets bored I guess); having no other convictions will serve him well. I'm sure some ERGers will complain about whatever deal goes through, but the symbolism of withdrawal will end the Tory civil war that ended most previous PM's careers. I can see him handing out presents to all the various factions: flag waving and fox hunting for the dinosaurs, a bit of deregulation and tax cuts for the capitalists, more nurses for whatever's left of the centrists. That should keep him safe from internal discontent for a while.

“For you to blame Jeremy Corbyn, particularly after your colleagues on the right of the party pushed him to adopt that position of a second referendum, is absolutely abhorrent”
This #bbcqt audience member criticises parts of the Labour Party for their treatment of Jeremy Corbyn. pic.twitter.com/zRYHH8W5Eo

— BBC Question Time (@bbcquestiontime) December 13, 2019

johnson is in a position to have an easy ride for years, yes. he is also someone who somehow manages to fuck up things which appear to be unfuckupable, not all the time, but on a very regular basis. so who knows?

I think Rayner will win, even if I prefer RLB.

I don’t think anything is inevitable wrt Johnson but he does need to find a balance between the Atlanticist wing of the party and those who want a functioning relationship with Europe, will have to negotiate the economic fallout of Brexit - and hope that the ridiculous Brexit Bounce actually comes off, figure out how to implement an immigration policy that keeps business happy while persuading white racists that the doors are closed, etc, etc. None of this stuff is going to be easy, even on cheat mode with the press.

Cameron had the press against him in 2016 for the referendum a year after winning the first majority in 13 years. The press and party roll turn on Johnson too.

Anyway, I'm joining the party to be sure I can have a say in the next leader. Fuck off Yvette cooper or skinnock or whatever nobody thinks they can ride some racist mug wave back to the top of the party

idk what would happen if you polled the PCP and asked them to pick either a functional, relatively stable post-Brexit relationship with Europe that won’t substantially disrupt the economy more than necessary or a trade deal with the US - I don’t think you can have both.

Love Rayner but would rather have RLB too, she's got a kind of icy unflappable quality that I'm, possibly too easily, impressed by.

we need to avoid a neil kinnock at all fucking costs

"That's not in Wales, you're thinking of Don Valley."

that was what passes for cutting humour with me. I'm here for the next five years :P :( :(

Thank god for that

Not sarcastic

likewise alas xp

watching bbc news for some fucking reason, there is a clip of alan johnson being a prick to jon lansman, and they cut to george osborne grinning like a vampire sex pest, fucking sickening sight.

Jon L been more influential for good in this country than Alan fucking Johnson.

Don is, of course, one of the oldest place names in the British Isles *pushes glasses on bridge of nose*

I really don't get why so many people seem to think think that Keir Starmer is the person to save the Labour party, why him and not any number of other Labour centrists? is it something to do with wanting a 'serious figure' to be the next leader, and his status as a former Director of Public Prosecutions makes him one?

otm soref.

xxxps
well hopefully willl still be here, I should have added! but this is no place for suspicion of grim gallows humour. Hopefully it is still a safe space for burning melts! and for me to annoy the fuck out of mark s with my proliferate message board warrior style overuse of exclamation marks!!!

Asked what it was in particular that she disliked about Corbyn, she replied: “There’s something about his mannerisms.”

Asked if he liked Johnson, Evans sighed. “I think he’s the best of a bad bunch but it’s brilliant that the town has turned blue. It’s been Labour for too long. We need a change. Things can’t get worse.”

sorry but just look at him

Jesus f christ, this guy, feel physically sick looking at him pic.twitter.com/JdXXhpSoZl

— Wicked Wilf (@weejay) December 13, 2019

Honestly there is not another centrist in the same league as Starmer.

That’s true. I think he would get slaughtered by the press for his human rights work but there isn’t anyone on the centre/right who isn’t already a busted flush within the party.

The calz exclamation marks will be tempered by the sensible punctuation centrist Tom D. full stops, the system works

After Yvette Cooper, who isn’t up to it, and Phillips, who is loathed, you’re in to Nandy and Miliband territory. xps to myself.

bbc were suggesting jess phillips and lisa nandy

The only way either could win is if about another half a million people joined Labour to vote for them.

i think some people just can't vote for a party unless they fancy the leader

my mum likes jess philips and i generally agree with her on most things, but think she has this one seriously wrong

In my memory Starmer hasn't undermined the leadership or come out with legit concerns hatespeak, but don't want someone who has knelt for the Queen as LOTO - ever.

Come on jc is more of a snack than bj xxp

I sorta expect a Johnson government to mire in Major-type sleaze and incompetence (and some fighting from powerless minority factions in the party) but for it not to matter this time because a) media and b) no institutional ability to stop him. Millions xp

hopefully the queen will be gone by next election, people will surely not get so fucking misty eyed over charles

He lied to the Queen >:|

i think some people just can't vote for a party unless they fancy the leader

I knew a girl who had the hots for Michael Howard

I mean I had a thing for young Gordon Brown for about five minutes, but fuck that.

I believe Gordon broke a lot of hearts in his day... Michael, not so much.

I know GBro has kids but I refuse to believe he’s ever had sex in his life. His advisors had to explain porn sites to him ffs.

Things can’t get worse.

The battle cry of the deluded.

btw, did I hear right that the Tory Party proclaimed this to be "David Cameron Appreciation Day"?

Michael Howard’s wife was stunning so he may have something going for him.

I remember reading a Julie Burchill piece (for my sins) in the late 90 's where she waxes lyrical on how much she'd love to fuck Blair and the proof in the pudding that he sure knew how to fuck was that Cherie was preggers at the time!

probably got contracters in to do it under a pfi

i'm never going to able hear the acronym PFI now, without experiencing truly horrific imagery and ensuing panic attacks!

is this Graham Jones tweet real? he's protected his twitter account

Graham Jones here descending into pure racism on losing his seat, absolutely good riddance to the bombfucking prick pic.twitter.com/Jsswv3LNxk

— Jimatron (@JP_Maybe) December 13, 2019

one day into a boris majority gov and this is what you get already

I know GBro has kids but I refuse to believe he’s ever had sex in his life. His advisors had to explain porn sites to him ffs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZbLG-adYlA

#BackBurgon trending on twitter, so not gonna happen

It’s a right-wing parody account afaik.

who the heck knows what's real anyone

it would certainly have to be. At this point it is probably safe to rule out any Labour shadow cabineter who was idiotic/naively dumb/antisemitic enough to have taken a selfie with "fellow socialist" Chris Williamson.

is this Graham Jones tweet real? he's protected his twitter account

🐦[Graham Jones here descending into pure racism on losing his seat, absolutely good riddance to the bombfucking prick pic.twitter.com/Jsswv3LNxk🕸
— Jimatron (@JP_Maybe) December 13, 2019🕸]🐦

It frightens me that I'm feeling pity and empathy with a complete tory prick like baroness Warsi

The Hopkins attack on Warsi is a sign of things to come

I've been drinking since midday and now I'm listening to Asian Dub Foundation. It's got that bad.

be the [cans in the park after Thatcher's death] you wish to see in the world

Sorry for trespassing - I know this is not ILM, but this might be just what you all need and deserve right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TFqhCvLuTg

:D (the only good moments I’ve had today have been listening to music)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELs-JUBX0AARJbD?format=jpg&name=large

(xp) Bizarrely, I've spent the entire day listening to the Beach Boys.

is it...something we love to see? Today? Yes it is https://t.co/j3pbEwM5qS

— Jess (@jessmeacham) December 13, 2019

the specials
wynton kelly
eddie rabbit
marshmello (thanks kids)
samim - heater
alex gopher - the child (kenny dope bonus beat)

phone calls
bread
work from home

Spoke with an Irish bloke at the pub. Came to England to work in construction, loves Led Zeppelin, Chick Corea and playing the drums. Used to be a metalhead, was into Celtic Frost. Is not a UK citizen. Wholeheartedly supports Brexit and the Tories because too many Somalian refugees are taking advantage of the NHS. The EU fucked us all over by pumping our money, imposing a single currency and overriding border control. Doesn't think a Tory majority will affect him. Loathes his ex-wife who prevented him from joining a new band. Is in his 40s and dating a teenage girl. Thinks his family back in Dublin just doesn't get it.

loves...Chick Corea

Tells you all you need to know

Change - The Glow of Love
Twinkie Clark - Awake O Zion
Sharon Brown - I Specialize in Love
Sandee - Notice Me (Notice the House Remix)

cleaning the fridge
marinating a chicken

Return to Forever's first album isn't half bad tbf.

xp

Xps Thing is, people in pubs who want brexit where it's so insanely against their interests were only activated by Cameron calling the ref in the first place

that pagarini thread which comrade a posted up thread is easily the best analysis of the doorstep defeat i’ve read so far. so i’m posting it again

I did around 120 hours of canvassing in London, Bedford and Milton Keynes. I didn’t expect this result but here’s how I can make sense of it from what I encountered on the doorstep. 1/

— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019

I’m still heartbroken and reeling from the juvenile centrist post-mortem poison of certain colleagues and peers; a friend who grew up in Wakefield came over for breakfast and discussed the silent killer for Labour in ‘red wall’ areas: the Islamophobia amongst white voters that led them to vote for Conservatives or Brexit Party candidates, even if (as in Wakefield) those PPCs were British Pakistani.

Here as well is something that speaks well of Corbyn, the open letter from his sons:

From the three proudest sons on the planet pic.twitter.com/0IVLmcw0kD

— Tommy Corbyn (@TommyCorbyn) December 13, 2019

<3

Spoke with an Irish bloke at the pub. Came to England to work in construction, loves Led Zeppelin, Chick Corea and playing the drums. Used to be a metalhead, was into Celtic Frost. Is not a UK citizen. Wholeheartedly supports Brexit and the Tories because too many Somalian refugees are taking advantage of the NHS. The EU fucked us all over by pumping our money, imposing a single currency and overriding border control. Doesn't think a Tory majority will affect him. Loathes his ex-wife who prevented him from joining a new band. Is in his 40s and dating a teenage girl. Thinks his family back in Dublin just doesn't get it.

― pomenitul, Saturday, 14 December 2019 bookmarkflaglink

If you take out the "dating teen" bit it's perfect for The Guardian.

People who lost two elections trying discredit what was the best manifesto in decades. I'm not in the mood for voting for any melt candidates as long as I'm still a breathing and still have party membership. These moral midgets who always belonged on the other side of parliament can have their moment to gloat for the next few weeks, but there isn't enough of them to vote in some piece of shit establishment shill they fancy as the next leader.

The point about right-wing bigots adopting British Jews as an avatar for ‘the opposite of anyone we dislike’ has been clear for a while and gets clearer every day.

So now all the Jews are staying who do we nominate to leave?

— Allison Pearson (@allisonpearson) December 13, 2019

"the Jews"

I don’t know any of them! Where are you from?

Mine’s uses just very basic stuff, “cute”, “amadán”, “

that pagarini thread which comrade a posted up thread is easily the best analysis of the doorstep defeat i’ve read so far. so i’m posting it again

🐦[I did around 120 hours of canvassing in London, Bedford and Milton Keynes. I didn’t expect this result but here’s how I can make sense of it from what I encountered on the doorstep. 1/
— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019🕸]🐦

this is a misleading picture. the leadership came up a lot on the doorstep, but most of it was utter nonsense. it was a combination of anger at objectively correct stances that corbyn and others have, and pure fake news. how do you fight this? https://t.co/T93Jgjfd6W

— ryan 🚩 (@ryxnf) December 13, 2019

My kinder politics stopped when the Tories killed 100,000 people.

— Lloyd Russell-Moyle🌹🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈 (@lloyd_rm) December 13, 2019

otm

a ragbag of good things:

just gone out to get milk, saying hello to a couple of people out and about, talking to a woman buying charcoal and firelighters - 'yeah, i'm doing catering today - jerk pork, jerk chicken' - Lambeth has something of the feel of an enclave. feel v warmly to it rn.

getting totally shitfaced with my lovely colleagues last night.

and as i said on twitter one of the few silver linings from the last three years is finding journalistic voices i *do* trust:
Faisal Islam at the BBC, Jennifer Williams at the MEN, Sarah O'Connor at the FT, Stephen Bush and the team at the NS (not you Jason Cowley), Lewis Goodall at Sky soon to be BBC.

i don’t always agree with their stance and observations. but they do the work of thinking, asking and explaining. it's been a v information poor GE, and much journalism has been rightly condemned, but these are serious people doing serious work and we'll need them more than ever in the years ahead.

also the work that the team at eater london have done to open up the restaurants of london's amazing and diverse communities.

listening to The NWRA last night. breastcrawl's post up thread, ilx UK politics people and threads generally. thank fucking god for these things.

idk. The Photoshop stuff is there but I think what Luke's thread talks about is that it really speaks to the +50 demographic that have already been talked to by the right-wing press for 20 years. They are very much distributed around those leave towns that never stopped wanting to see the ref result being fulfilled. Hence the majority.

It's very interesting how this really hadn't come up in 2017 when Corbyn was respecting the referendum result. And by that point there was a good two years of demonisation.

The left could use a lot of the same tactics, however if the vast majority of those leave voters share the racism and deference it would probably get a nod xp 👍

And this is v good and links in nicely with Luke's thread:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/14/labour-meltdown-decades-govern-votes

I mean I don't think Boris' campaign was well run compared to Labour. That is neither here nor there. Corbyn was really fighting the Blair/Brown legacy.

And this is vital.

"In the 2017 election I wrote that a party that grew out of social institutions needed to turn itself into a social institution in precisely those areas it historically took for granted. That remains the key task: providing advice to those whose benefits are being slashed, legal support to tenants under the cosh from their landlords, haggling with the utilities to provide cheaper and better deals. Add to that: teaching political and economic literacy to voters, not just activists, and consulting constituents on what issues Labour should be battling on."

Second calz on people (assume, like me, you are thinking of ex-Miliband adviser Ay3shs Har1z1ka?). The amount of sheer bile directed at Owen Jones, Ash Sarkar and (to a lesser extent, Aaron Bastani who is a clown) is really revealing. The media colleagues who said nothing as they were named in a doc sourced from Neo-Nazis? Grim. Who said nothing about OJ being assaulted, or worse tried to argue that it didn’t count as he wasn’t actually a journalist? Bleak. Those same people tee-hee-heeing away with the likes of Tom Newton-Dunn today and tomorrow? Awful. And sorry to my bin Chinese king, but Jennifer W was sneering that she was right and that Corbyn had “made her scared to do her job” bc there’s nothing to be concerned about the government’s treatment of journalists that called it out during the campaign.

Funny to see people annoyed at Gary Lineker congratulating Johnson - this is Ellen all over again and underlines the point that class solidarity is not understood at all among too many people.

But on a positive note, this has been a real scales from the eyes moment for a lot of people, including some I know irl, and that’s a comfort in itself.

oh, as I say, I didn't always agree with those people in that list, but they are doing serious journalism and in Jennifer W, has done so much excellent work to highlight poverty and social circumstances of people living in Manchester. The absence of that sort of journalism more generally in the GE was a serious problem imo.

The point about right-wing bigots adopting British Jews as an avatar for ‘the opposite of anyone we dislike’ has been clear for a while and gets clearer every day.

🐦[So now all the Jews are staying who do we nominate to leave?
— Allison Pearson (@allisonpearson) December 13, 2019🕸]🐦

underlines the point that class solidarity is not understood at all among too many people.

it is an amazing thing about this country that it has for so long until recently sought legitimacy for its leaders in large part through economic arguments while economic literacy is so low. I sometimes wonder if there's an element of neoliberal governance that is little talked about of mystification. This goes beyond the "pure means" argument wherein neoliberalism converts every question of policy into a set of technical problem and derives economically grounded 'solutions' that bypass any political argument about how we want a country to actually be run and what values underwrite this. But again and again we witness politicians talking about national budets as if they were household budgets (and even then never mentioning, say mortgages). The 'realism' that supports these arguments is obviously illusory and distorting but to a population where economic illiteracy is near total this can never be properly argued within the public sphere. And it is near total, it drives me crazy. Labour's spending plans were stoic and realistic but it was so easy to paint it like a spending spree and I think this was accepted by people across the political spectrum, even on the left probably. I suspect that even for a lot of people who were in favour of those spending plans there was a giddy nihilism in the hope of splashing the cash.

How can you counter these assumptions that sideline the effect of fiscal stimulous and recognise the hobbling effects of stagnation? These assumptions that simplify how fiscal policy works to the point of inverting its most basic principles? Its so easy for any right-wing think tank question time guest to make these arguments to easy nodding along and I have no idea how to counter this. This is the basis of the "disinformation" that the right peddles and in many ways its more insidious than any corbyn loves the ra t-shirts as it seems to form the background of the way we think about everything.

I realise that one could make similar arguments similarly about all kinds of things, and that these are linked to fiscal policy health and say social care or social inequality or properly funding other measures that are much cheaper than the subsequent strain on healthcare system for eg.

However I recognise that its far more complex than this, and the example of immigration policy shows us how people's prejudices and resentments make certain simplistic arguments the only credible one. Another example being the Sarah Champion framing of Rotherham as being about how Asian men are treated with kid-gloves by the policing system rather than girls in care being treated with contempt.

Anyway sorry for directionless rant, but increasingly frustrated by the sliding walls of other people's ignorance, especially after being treated to a blow-by-blow account by my bf of his dinner with tory-voting sister last night. Its impossible to even start. How can you canvass that?

booming post

So is the pathway absolutely clear to just 'do Brexit now' or are there any other obstacles that could allow it all to blow up in Boris's face before it can be passed rather than in the long aftermath?

http://www.edmundgriffiths.com/greatleap.html

and

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/14/labour-meltdown-decades-govern-votes

both good on the boring unspectacular* necessary long-slog element of politics

*debord sense also

Was as much time ever spent on why Labour lost all those seats in Scotland - which really cut them off at the knees in terms of forming a majority government - or was it just assumed “Scottish people hate England lol ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ “

certainly what i’ve heard from former labour voters in scotland who turned towards the snp is that they dutifully voted for labour for decades and saw no real improvement in their quality of life, so they became disillusioned and started seriously considering independence

also ‘fuck the english’ obv

I’ll have to ask my Larkhall pal - his uncle was huge in Scottish (new) Labour.

Also people saying Labour needs to be more “culturally conservative” need to get fucked, now and forever.

Labour has always had to appeal to different groups of people. The notion that Labour somehow doesn’t care about “the working class” and needs to discard progressive policy is out there and spread with spite by people paid by the word to launder propaganda for the breakfast table. Of course, there’s nothing wrong in their assumptions about working class people; that they are only receptacles for food, water and reactionary beliefs.

They’re not LGBT, they’re not disabled, they’re not precariously employed, they’re certainly never immigrants or BAME or trans or exhausted single parents trying to navigate the remains of infrastructure outside the cities. As Jude said a couple of weeks back, lots of groups who are culturally conservative do vote Labour, because it has something for them outside those parameters.

certainly what i’ve heard from former labour voters in scotland who turned towards the snp is that they dutifully voted for labour for decades and saw no real improvement in their quality of life, so they became disillusioned and started seriously considering independence

also ‘fuck the english’ obv

The optics of all my middle-aged peers in the media roaring about activists and voters half their age has a real ‘get off my lawn’ energy about it, too.

I met more Liberal Democrats yesterday (from Wokingham, and Paisley)

The one from Wokingham was perfectly pleasant and 'decent' but told me she had never met a Labour voter with a decent job before, and she was genuinely fascinated. She couldn't wrap her head around the fact someone "not on benefits" would vote Labour. I thought about how to answer, and said something like "Mostly for structural reasons, I think its economically advantageous to invest in things to counter the effects of wealth concentration, which is inherently unstable. Basically we need to loosen our belt in order to grow the economy"

Different worlds

but Jennifer W was sneering that she was right and that Corbyn had “made her scared to do her job”

Corbyn's fans, not Corbyn - obviously some Corbyn fans are fucking horrific, particularly when given a target painted on a woman.

/but Jennifer W was sneering that she was right and that Corbyn had “made her scared to do her job”/

Corbyn's fans, not Corbyn - obviously some Corbyn fans are fucking horrific, particularly when given a target painted on a woman.

I met more Liberal Democrats yesterday (from Wokingham, and Paisley)

The one from Wokingham was perfectly pleasant and 'decent' but told me she had never met a Labour voter with a decent job before, and she was genuinely fascinated. She couldn't wrap her head around the fact someone "not on benefits" would vote Labour. I thought about how to answer, and said something like "Mostly for structural reasons, I think its economically advantageous to invest in things to counter the effects of wealth concentration, which is inherently unstable. Basically we need to loosen our belt in order to grow the economy"

Different worlds

https://lordashcroftpolls.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Q2.-Party-by-demogs-no-location.jpg

Mate, the woman you’re talking about is Laura Kuenssberg

The woman I'm talking about is Jennifer Williams, and this is the tweet I'm talking about

V tired and more happy that this is over. But I WILL end it on my own terms.

So. To the Corbyn fans who managed to make me nervous about doing my job

Guess what

I knew what I was talking about.

BYE

— Jennifer Williams (@JenWilliamsMEN) December 13, 2019

And if you want to seriously make the argument that Corbyn fans are misogynistic

I think you should probably have a go at that one again.

(and just to say, could you stop sticking graphics in here 5 times the size of the screen?)

Jennifer Williams was referring to repeated incidents where Laura Kuenssberg has been booed at Labour conferences & Corbyn’s frequent attacks on the media. That’s what she’s been saying she feels threatened over for quite some time. So don’t try citing that devoid of context.

I think you should probably have a go at that one again.

Also people saying Labour needs to be more “culturally conservative” need to get fucked, now and forever.

We're presented with these two axes of 'cultural/social' and 'economic' but I think there's a an equally important axis - Psychological, or action/discussion. Maybe it's semantics and you could roll that under the social axis. Action vs inaction. The person trying to 'do a thing' plays better than the person 'wanting to talk about a thing'. Its message discipline, it wasn't there on Brexit and it wasn't there on Anti-semitism

My mum said she knew the anti-semitism was cooked up by the press, she knew it was nonsense, but it was still an issue for her. Why? Because "why can't he put this obvious nonsense to bed? why is he vague and defensive". She wanted smash it in the back of the net clarity, route one football, bam, answered, job done. This isn't cultural, it's not social, its psychological, just put this Neil cunt on the floor how hard can it be? Short answers. message discipline, clarity

Prevarication, waffling, meetings, this is all bullshit dreamed up by the managerial class to justify their jobs. The managerial class are scum and the minute they start waffling we know they're not going to deliver. And if you're not going to deliver on Brexit well looks like the same old same old all talk no action. "I don't want to do the guttering or weed the garden but I just get on with it. I don't really want Brexit either but its going to happen why delay it? what's the point in all these meetings, I don't have a meeting about doing the guttering just get it over with"

Labour was right in betting that Brexit wasn't really an issue for these voters. But if its not an issue why not just get it out of the way. Its this as much as the needing to overturn the 'they never listen to us anyway' narrative

No more meetings, meetings are obfuscations for people planning to make you redundant. No apologies just winning, eating skittles and scoring goals, like you know who

Blue ticks being snide to the little people on Twitter again, is it?

Honestly, what part of ‘be the better person’ does this woman not understand, considering she communicates for a living? The people who heckle her have their own agency, and pretending that a missive came out from Corbyn Towers to heckle journalists is a bit rich considering pretty much the opposite happened.

Thats to say it itself wasn't an issue (any particular outcome) but having it hang around like undone washing up was

So it turns out the graffitti-proof paint on the rail bridge opposite my house isn't that effective - someone has sprayed the '-er' version of the n-bomb in large gold capitals.

Contacted national rail to get it removed and about to head out with a sheet to cover it up. People don't need to be seeing that shit and it saddens me that people think this is more acceptable after Thursdays result :/

xp considering the actual physical threats to the very few left wing representatives out there, considering what a hate figure Owen Jones is for all these people, considering how easily they mix with the worst people in the name of civility

Yeah, not nearly enough was made out of Tories dithering over Brexit for 3.5 years and not giving Parliament a deal potentially close to EEA to cancel out the ERG. That’s on them, not the opposition.

Shorter version: fuck David Cameron forever.

anvil's been watching jreg lol

otm of course

Whats jreg? Don't you mean jvardy?

Re: Scotland

When I moved to Glasgow about fifteen years ago, Glasgow Council, run by Scottish Labour, was a fucking disgrace - lazy, complacent, indifferent. And I think the same was true nationally - Labour had been the unopposed majority for too long, and they totally took their eye off the ball - they looked away from the needs and problems of their constituents safe in the knowledge that there was nowhere else for voters to go. (It actually brought home to me the value of oppositional politics, even when the opposition is from a side I despise.) When a revitalised SNP showed themselves to be more in touch and passionate about Scotland and the needs and wants of its people, the Labour Party in Scotland floundered, had no response or explanation, and of course they played IndieRef very badly (a real harbinger of the way that English Labour handled Brexit) - they 'won' the union but lost everything in the process. Now they are down to a single MP in Scotland, and the SNP have the whole of Glasgow. The SNP have made mistakes, and Scotland has many, many problems, but they have also done a number of very good things for the country, and by and large (the Lord Provost excepted!) have remained engaged with the people. Sturgeon, of course, is an extremely effective leader and Scottish Labour haven't had a leader to match her for a long, long time - they couldn't even compete with Ruth Davidson, ffs. I really cannot see how they can come back from where they are now because they just haven't addressed who they are, what they stand for, and what they can DO for people that isn't just a pale echo of London/Westminster politics, and business as usual.

https://bylinetimes.com/2019/12/13/how-my-punjabi-immigrant-new-labour-supporting-parents-were-charmed-by-boris-johnson/

The rightward drift everywhere is partly this, action vs talking. Fighting the bureaucrats, the managers, the team leads, the inspectors, the traffic wardens, the pencil pushers, the safety protection officers, the people on three times your salary and you've no idea what they do, the people who pause and look at you before deciding if you're clever enough to understand what they're going to say.

Bernie is able to connect on this level but who else?

it is an amazing thing about this country that it has for so long until recently sought legitimacy for its leaders in large part through economic arguments while economic literacy is so low. I sometimes wonder if there's an element of neoliberal governance that is little talked about of mystification. This goes beyond the "pure means" argument wherein neoliberalism converts every question of policy into a set of technical problem and derives economically grounded 'solutions' that bypass any political argument about how we want a country to actually be run and what values underwrite this. But again and again we witness politicians talking about national budets as if they were household budgets (and even then never mentioning, say mortgages). The 'realism' that supports these arguments is obviously illusory and distorting but to a population where economic illiteracy is near total this can never be properly argued within the public sphere. And it is near total, it drives me crazy. Labour's spending plans were stoic and realistic but it was so easy to paint it like a spending spree and I think this was accepted by people across the political spectrum, even on the left probably. I suspect that even for a lot of people who were in favour of those spending plans there was a giddy nihilism in the hope of splashing the cash.

This is true all over. In Portugal at the height of EU enforced austerity I had so many conversations with people as to why it doesn't work as an economic strategy and it would always go back to the "if you did this as a household..." line of argument. Also a widespread misconception that economics is numbers therefore maths therefore hard science.

That labour canvasser group I found through this thread: a lot of sharing of links for charities and food banks, which is important and essential work at this juncture but also of course a retreat, cleaning up after the tories and doing the govt's job for them. Also a post saying we should all support Bernie Sanders, which I guess solidarity is nice and all but we're not living in the US and cannot accompany its political process as anything other than spectacle. Most of the people in there are very young.

i was struck and a bit shaken by that canvasser's post-mortem thread (posted above maybe, or on the old thread) which described talking to young people on estates who had simply never imagined they deserved anything better than they had -- one of those moments when someone describes something in a way that clarifies and solidifies something you've half-assumed as a potential threat, but also perhaps rationalised away or waved away as something always challenged (i mean i just helped edit a book -- on sound-system culture 70s-present -- which firmed up the continuity of exactly the opposite dynamic)

the main project i've been working on these last few years is exactly about young working-class people stepping into history and making their futures (as buzzcocks manager richard book once put it): one of the things i'm gloomily realising is how much that success back then masked that many never caught up in were being left out of the reckoning: the older ones angry, the mid-age ones despairing, the young -- apparently -- without even a hint that this kind of story could apply to them, culturally or politically or whatever

Mr. Ward Fowler OTM.

Too many Scottish Labour MPs were either cynical careerists who couldn't wait to hop on the first train to London and find themselves a cushy position in Westminster or horrific socially conservative Old Labour dinosaurs, many of whom could barely string a coherent sentence together but could fill in an expenses sheet with aplomb.

Of course, but it’s better than feeling hopeless and doing nothing.

Thinking about the appeal of get Brexit done:

Prevarication, waffling, meetings, this is all bullshit dreamed up by the managerial class to justify their jobs. The managerial class are scum and the minute they start waffling we know they're not going to deliver. And if you're not going to deliver on Brexit well looks like the same old same old all talk no action. "I don't want to do the guttering or weed the garden but I just get on with it. I don't really want Brexit either but its going to happen why delay it? what's the point in all these meetings, I don't have a meeting about doing the guttering just get it over with"

FBPE fools with their flags and face paint as the modern workplace putting up cheery posters for mental health awareness week while they relentlessly run their employees into the ground.

i was struck and a bit shaken by that canvasser's post-mortem thread (posted above maybe, or on the old thread) which described talking to young people on estates who had simply never imagined they deserved anything better than they had

McDonnell leaves shadow cabinet:-((

Dilly-dallying will always be worse than outright lying. Outright lying is honest, dilly-dallying isn't even honest about its dishonesty. Meanwhile the washing up still isn't done

Richard Burgon is standing, in a campaign that is almost guaranteed to attract no support whatsoever.

fuck no to Burgon. He's another halfwit who stuck up for Chris Williamson

Just looked up at the TV to find secret ILXor John McTernan doing a jig on Corbyn's grave.

Burgon’s not standing, that account is fake.

Boris in Sedgefield, that's the funniest thing he's done in a while.

Turning the TV off now though.

Just looked up at the TV to find secret ILXor John McTernan doing a jig on Corbyn's grave.

Just looked up at the TV to find secret ILXor John McTernan doing a jig on Corbyn's grave.

OK that got me. It had genuinely never occurred to me that anyone might bother to set up a Richard Burgon parody campaign account.

One of the unfunniest cunts on twitter is behind it, because that’s what people need in this time apparently.

Certain celebrities are quite helpful because they are stupid enough to say out loud what smarter media types have just enough savvy to keep to themselves . pic.twitter.com/M9cHbsNKYp

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) December 13, 2019

Many of these celebs are horrible reefs, including her, so she can fuck off back to the toilet police.

UK comedians are such dregs, every last one of them.

Was ist a reef?

I assumed autocorrect of terf

Preston, which voted 53% Leave in 2016 but where a local Labour council is committed to reversing austerity and empowering the local community, returned a Labour MP this week. Tory/BXP vote hardly shifted. Would love to know more about this.

— Daniel Trilling (@trillingual) December 14, 2019

now that is interesting

roll out the preston model

we'll have a barrel of fun

the main project i've been working on these last few years is exactly about young working-class people stepping into history and making their futures (as buzzcocks manager richard book once put it): one of the things i'm gloomily realising is how much that success back then masked that many never caught up in were being left out of the reckoning: the older ones angry, the mid-age ones despairing, the young -- apparently -- without even a hint that this kind of story could apply to them, culturally or politically or whatever

― mark s, Saturday, 14 December 2019 bookmarkflaglink

Yeah but the bit at the end where the Lab canvasser says that another world is possible and this young voter fraud immediately connects with it was a good ending (maybe too good)...its like the canvasser is performing the role of the music press #backintheday

the rodent on the nand:

The thing here is, Nandy isn’t even wrong - there is a huge disconnect. The problem with it is that she has no ideas that can repair it or even any actual demands that could be met even if we wanted to try, except for “Put me and my mates in charge”. https://t.co/AH7KF98Xpi

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) December 14, 2019

plus a good owen hatherley glossing same:

exactly: you can't do this by 'being more racist and patriotic on TV' because even aside of it being immoral it will be incredibly shallow and collapse again, you can only do this by rebuilding an entire infrastructure of unions and clubs and chapels https://t.co/BWVuXxpVHm

— Owen Hatherley (@owenhatherley) December 14, 2019

("glossing same" -- hark at my facility with the vernacular of the back-to-backs eh)

How do you even begin that process with the Tories in charge, is the question. Local government has been hacked to the bone already and other institutions that might enable that kind of grassroots engagement have withered.

Preston and Blackburn both went Labour, Burnley Conservative - but neither Preston or Blackburn have 'surrounding areas' within their borders. Burnley does

Also Preston is super connected, and not a 'left behind' town like Blackpool. Blackpool South went Tory and has 8 of the 10 most deprived locales in England within its borders. Preston is a bit like a mini city rather than a big town

My sole experience of Burnley was when I was in a pub there once, waiting for a train, and a bunch of guys asked one of the guys I was with which football team he supported and he stupidly replied, Celtic (ironically as he wasn't even a football fan) and next thing it was, "Fenian bastards" etc. We made our excuses and left.

Burnley is the quintessential last stop on the line town!

Time to look to the lol 19th century.

This is an ok at times reflection on Wales. Similarly to Ward Fowler's post it speaks of the long term failures from Welsh Lab.

https://medium.com/@DrDanEvans/reflections-from-the-doorstep-e4337513d909

"With Ford soon to close, the last vestiges of traditional industry will leave Bridgend, and the world of work will increasingly soon look exclusively like this- couriers, callcentres, warehouse workers. Zero hours contracts, unsociable shift work, no trade union presence, no camaraderie with work colleagues."

"We have to strive to find ways to connect to workers in industries in which they are encouraged to act like ‘self-employed’ entrepreneurs, with all the ideological baggage that comes with that pernicious term, and articulate a language of class conflict which overcomes these atomized working conditions."

19th century for lessons on what people in isolated areas might have done to build a community/class consciousness for places smaller than Preston.

To answer Matt I think a lot of Lab councils are just utter garbage. I don't think they attempt to do a thing that is outside of the council, and in Lambeth they are totally coasting new Lab types that don't even try to do anything for people who need it the most. I don't have the answers but I know this won't do.

Any serious approach to turning this situation around has to begin with questions like how you go about creating decent jobs in places like Bolsover. It's a hugely challenging question but one Labour needs to be seen to be engaging with. The Tory majorities in a lot of these new seats are slender and they can be won back but there needs to be engagement in good faith.

How do you even begin that process with the Tories in charge, is the question. Local government has been hacked to the bone already and other institutions that might enable that kind of grassroots engagement have withered.

― Matt DC, Saturday, 14 December 2019 13:43 (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is something I've thought about for a long time now, but I look at the approach of say Lambeth council where I lived for years which, despite having infinitely more wiggle room than other more marginal councils, had given prominent roles to blank blairite careerists and seemed determined in its pursuit of a 'realism' that in effect simply pitted it against residents. I'm not sure how much of this can be attributed to the fallout of lefties crushed by the aftermath of Foot, but a comparison of the kinds of opposition put up by Lambeth in the 1980s compared with its current incarnation leaves me with enough unease on this question to make me genuinely concerned about what the fallout of this might end up being.

One thing is clear from this vote and many others is that what people embrace in the aftermath of a crisis has little to do with a good clear analysis of what went wrong and what could counter this, it is easy to imagine the bromides of a Nandyish approach of draping everything in st george's flags will be accepted by more people than many of us are willing to accept now. I couldn't have easily accepted how many people would have accepted what they've embraced in this election until it actually happened. Its not obvious to me that the immigration mug approach which was burgeoning prior to Corbyn's election as leader will definitely not be allowed to fully flower as it threatened to when championed by say cooper, kinnock and director of the v&a.

James Butler in one of his LRB blogs, which I think have been one of the more readable commentaries throughout the last few months, made a point that really alarmed me when I read it. He pointed out how demands such as the minimum wage and 5 day working week had come from below and forced their way up from grassroots support and organising into mainstream politics. By contrast, nobody believes in change anymore and idealism has become something that central party cooks up with think tanks, fully costs and then has to sell to an already bruised electorate that no longer believes it even deserves something better or what that might look like. I know these points have been made elsewhere in this thread but I think inversion of this model as intimated in this argument really does get at what the terrible challenge to grassroots organising that the party faces.

lol everyone hates lambeth council

Local government has been hacked to the bone already and other institutions that might enable that kind of grassroots engagement have withered.

Shit anecdote time: got invited to a kid's birthday party recently, held in a largely forgotten local bowling club hidden behind rows of houses. The place was amazing - had its own bar, its own dancefloor, loads of outside space. It was utterly 1970s and unwelcoming for anybody below 50, mind — you could tell it was the place where the committee meets monthly and people raise points of order that are duly minuted etc etc, but I was still quite taken at the possibility of a space and environment like that, if properly aimed at millennial purposes.

It's like said upthread, there's a third generation here now that hasn't really had contact with third-space social spaces and institutions, and so the older ones are withering and nothing new is coming along. But the same needs of community, connection and support exist, so the opportunity seems pretty ripe for modern versions of some of these institutions.

The conditions have never been better (in the depressing sense): lots of very cheap high street and local property is on the market for buttons, people are looking for new centres of gravity, demand for social help is high, oppressive government is rising — this is fertile ground for organising.

(Many XPs — and the other thing about institutions like this is they become the feeder routes for local councillors; that's how you start to tackle that shitshow)

xp to matt way up re "what is to be done?" (©lenin lol):

as owen hatherley says, nobody knows how to do this. it's one of the big things the left has been wrestling with since at least the 70s (the era of the so-called "great downturn" viz of the class struggle as then understood). the trot solution was (literally) to turn to students (and young ppl generally) to bulk up the falling rolls, but this only exacerbated the gulf to be honest (tho if even recognised at the time this effect was largely waved away). and trhen a significant sector of the youth semi-recruited at that point -- via rock against racism or whatever -- have ended up comfortably self-gentrified and a long way distant from the (cultural or economic) straits some of them genuinely battled their way out of. nu-lab's approach coincided with many of these same ppl achieving mid-level footholds in the relevant reaches of the media, which seems to have operated since as the worst echo chamber in terms of belief in a personal change that isn't actually a general change, quite the opposite.

(this was roughly my argt when hatherley did a Q&A with me abt the book and point-blank asked "why did so many of yr old pals end up the worst centrist-dad melts?" -- that it's extremely hard to adapt to the realisation that it's the partial success of yr well meant utopian project that can end up working hardest against the next step… )

momentum feels like it tripled down on the "mobilise the kids" approach in 2017 and 2019, meaning students and the young urban precariat -- but by its nature GOTV is (kliche klaxon) a sprint not a marathon and the entire geography everything is playing out on is now punishingly tough. hence i think the backlash right now (from melt twerps but also, more thoughtfully, from ppl who actually themselves put the work in: http://www.edmundgriffiths.com/greatleap.html): it's the beginning of an acknowledgment of how much else was needed, that was skimped, that there genuinely wasn't time or headspace for, that the corbz faction were never in fact in a position even to begin to think abt thinking abt -- but that (given how the 80s version turned out in the 90s, which several senior figures lived thru) there was nevertheless not so much excuse for not thinking abt…

i mean in a sense the concluding advice of the outgoing leadership shd be echoing david steel in 1981 and saying "go back to your constituencies, and prepare for government!" -- but beyond boiling centrist piss one last time this merely puts a colossal interpretive weight on what the word "prepare" entails. it means "build a world from scratch (ps time is running out)" but it also requires the details to be filled in, and it turns out we need them to have been filled already

(the "rock" bit of "rock against racism" had already priced in a generational divide -- which in retrospect was exactly the issue that needed addressing, but was instead being end-run)

Any serious approach to turning this situation around has to begin with questions like how you go about creating decent jobs in places like Bolsover. It's a hugely challenging question but one Labour needs to be seen to be engaging with. The Tory majorities in a lot of these new seats are slender and they can be won back but there needs to be engagement in good faith.

Its worth pointing out however that getting misty-eyed about "grassroots" purity also misrecognises the more complex social and institutional factors that fed into say setting up the NHS, getting overly sentimental in this way is another red-herring.

Anyway, its incredibly disheartening to wake up to "the long slog" narrative of virtuous ascension to power having so recently witnessed firsthand how successful dishonest opportunism works. Why can we be sure in the end that the thing we'll have been striving for will still exists, such is the future that has just been written for us. I'll stop posting, I don't want to spread this negativity. I haven't walked the dog.

Every now and again it feels like my brain refreshes on the bbc news front page to see the exit poll headline again for the first time.

The dishonest opportunism works because it has the ground already prepared for it and a receptive media, is the horrifying thing. Hence the return of the long slog, I guess.

Yep, the idea that Labour should become more like Hamas build from the ground up by filling the gaps in community / social services may be true, as far as it’s possible, but it also feels like an abdication, in certain quarters, of the need to set out a coherent national agenda and international outlook. You can maybe win trust and gratitude at a local level but you’re still going to need to take a position on the environment, foreign policy, taxation, spending, etc, etc, and if Aditya et al are so down on the last manifesto, they’re going to need to outline what they would change,

right, there's a big difference between eg local communities commandeering employee benefits and a national program of universal healthcare. Not least the fact that one establishes a single market and almost total monopoly market which is hugely consequential as should be evident when one considers the implications of the monopoly busting that the US trade deal would bring about. Local networks and institutions have a more complex relationship to national politics than a parent-child flowchart and this is mangled by splitting it into false binaries between local and national politics that come to fetishise one or the other.

Is anybody saying that, though? The point I hear most is you need both. Especially from Mark’s link, which is saying that Corbynism vaulted over the local work to create a national agenda that in the end turned out to have insufficient local support.

Yup agree. The work in local communities should feed up to the agenda that can be set at national level too.

Former lab MP staff thinking he is entitled to a job.

I don't want your pride @jeremycorbyn. Because of you I'm unemployed and, worse than that, the country now has at least five years of a right wing government pushing through a reckless Brexit. So well done. Now just go. pic.twitter.com/v0oTdg7bRo

— Jordan Hall (@jordanBhall) December 14, 2019

i’ve heard of people running food banks thinking about voting tory. we struggled to convince some nhs workers, it’s unbelievable how big the disconnect is, so yeah i think it’s essential it’s party affiliated

— don’t give up (@multiplebears) December 14, 2019

He knows..

"I've done my bit, we need to move on"

Labour's John McDonnell confirms he won't be part of the next shadow cabinet, following the party's defeat at #GE2019https://t.co/pdSgd90ZUL pic.twitter.com/ghQmUDOj8m

— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) December 14, 2019

fuck it mask off

Damian Green Tory MP saying on @lbc that we all need to start paying towards an insurance type system to pay for our care.

And there it is.

That is what we are going to get.#GeneralElection

— Dr. Mike (@EmergMedDr) December 13, 2019

mask off, but Green hasn't taken his latex wanking gloves off yet

Social care. Important distinction. They just didn’t put it in their manifesto like May did.

Former work and pensions minister Damian Green has called for an insurance-based system of social care.

— Adam S. Business Owner,Anti-Brexit Campaigner#FBPE (@Adam_SH69) December 14, 2019

probably a wise move! I thought Green was supposed to be one of the moderates - not heard him ripping into the NHS before.

"moderates" I meant

Yep, the tories will be waving the Labour manifesto and saying "Here's what the people voted against! Here's what they don't want!"

Social care is just so bleakly on the nose considering it’s going to affect their voters.

tory boy Bamford on for a hattrick for Leeds Utd today.

Social care is just so bleakly on the nose considering it’s going to affect their voters.

some fine long posting on this thread today folks.

yeah, great work folks, as much as i wish it wasn’t required - a lot of stuff to think about

I wish Yorkshire could be more like Merseyside who are a credit to the North, but alas it is a hive of fucking beetroot faced bigots and inbred tory/farage loving scum. So fucking depressing when these muppets vote for the cunts that annihilated their industries and then spent decades demonising them as lazy feckless scroungers.

Didn't Liverpool have quite a militant council in the 80s though?

well yes, in Yorkshire we just had the standard rotten councils

someone was making the point earlier that in these northern marginals that went blue, there is a common theme of rotten Labour councils that are silent about "difficult decisions" imposed by austerity and just generally being useless/corrupt + corroding trust in Labour

as led by derek hatton, liverpool's council was famously a militant stronghold, impishly refusing to knuckle down under tory budgetary strictures until -- eventually -- broken. tho i don't think all the councillors were militant, and actually vaguely recall it was a coalition of various flavours of labour?

neil kinnock's much-overquoted "grotesque chaos of a labour council -- a LABOUR council" speech was NK refusing to line up behind them: a moment still emblematic of whatever anyone citing it wants it to be emblematic of, great or terrible (my unhelpful two cents: the council played an impossible hand quite badly, not least bcz a little hatton went a very long way, bastani-style; none of kinnock's refusals of solidarity did him the slightest good electorally)

i've been wondering though if this turmoil did actually shake things up enough that -- in having to rebuild afterwards -- they were able to end-run the pervasive rotten borough problem elsewhere? or was it an effect of the reneneration after the riots?

the more I read the more those councils have a lot to answer for. It's like a delayed version of what happened with Scotland

xp not liverpool, the shit ones

Trying to think of high profile fights between labour councils and MPs in recent years. Only Lammy and Kober comes to mind....

Two other factors: Hillsborough probably kick-started a deep seated hatred of the establishment (and police) and sections of the right-wing press. And the other one is that it's more of a city.

Sheffield Hallam elected a (very good by the sounds of it) candidate to replace O'Mara. But that's a uni area..

But yes it's that kind of resistance -- with all its faults -- that I think will be part of what's needed. Showing people you care.

Reading about Northampton, Barnet, and there is room for it..

sheffield council* was also excellently bolshy in the 80s, refusing for a long time to set a rate for the council: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_South_Yorkshire

*(interestingly its leader was david blunkett, subsequently a notoriously authoritarian home secretary under blair)

handily dan davies just retweeted his 2016 "rotten boroughs" thread:

How did Labour lose the Valleys? (And Sunderland, Glasgow etc). A short tweetstorm follows, the precis of which might be....(1/n)

— Dan Davies (@dsquareddigest) September 6, 2016

(enragingly one of its first respondents uses my least favourite reply-guy phrase: "spot on")

Got an email inviting me to a “celebration of the results” sadlol

I mean our mp did get re-elected but that wording is funny, it’ll probably feel like a funeral. The later email from Zeichner himself framed it more tactfully as a party to thank us for all our hard work blah blah

Central London bleak as fuck today. Passed around CHX and it’s just tents as far as the eye can see on the back streets. All the crowds rushing past without a sideways look as well. Just the absolute worst. Know it’s always like that but just the lights, the sparkle, and endless flimsy tents - it’s obscene.

this is good, a left sociologist door-knocking: https://medium.com/@DrDanEvans/reflections-from-the-doorstep-e4337513d909

@dai_alectic -- good work there lol

Not going to link but I see a centrist music writer formerly On Here has shat out A Take On Why Corbyn Lost. Don’t bother reading it, you’ll only annoy yourself.

v disappointed in geir tbh

FYI that was probably mostly written before the results were known!

Can really do without London writers takes on places they know nothing about and will never go to, never mind live

'Pregnant women died after fears Tory crackdown on mythical health tourism would bankrupt them, report delayed until after election reveals'#BorisJohnsonPMhttps://t.co/3fDku0KoxT

— potluck miscreant 🍲🍀👺 (@BinAnimals) December 14, 2019

That Dan Evans piece is great and crushing

Full text of the Conservative Party's plan for economic migration to the UK after Brexit, as privately circulated to journalists last week https://t.co/NUBnv6XgYb

— Free Movement (@freemovementlaw) December 13, 2019

Another one on shit Lab councils councils:

Final thoughts - before I walk into the sea - about Labour councils and councillors. The huge Corbyn inspired revival of socialism has been heartening, and there are too many of us not to triumph eventually. But some of our focus has been in the wrong direction 1/14

— Jimmy Byrne (@nomatestype) December 13, 2019

Dan Evans piece was good and tbh...there is work to be done there so not all crushing

FYI that was probably mostly written before the results were known!

Love too simultaneously bang on about The Cult of the Leader and insist that the majority of Labour’s problems could be solved with the right hardman.

Now I’m afraid of my kidneys failing

My knowledge of it being ‘hot take written before the results were known’ is DEFINITELY a criticism, let’s just be clear. Zing from Vice published a parody of instant election hot takes before the result, and it’s worth a look.

I’m at the “party”, there are about 5 ppl here so far and nobody is talking lol. I went straight for the free booze

I got the invite for that too but I won't be joining sorry :(

xp that’s what I thought, sorry if snappy (I just hate these brain dead takes)

On this theme of rotten Labour councils etc.. A couple of years ago I went to a meeting at my son's special school about cuts to transport funding and disabled services. The local Labour council guy was sat right in front of me and ended up moving a few seats away cos he knew I was planning to garrote him. There was a woman whose husband had recently died and her autistic grandson would refuse to get on a bus without him and have a meltdown if she tried to bring him on the bus, and she was being told perhaps her transport provision was "non-essential". This cunt from the council didn't once say that their hand is forced by central government spending cuts and I kept pressing this matter with him and all he could say is "this is what we have to work with, deal" basically. Such an arrogant, cold, condescending piece of shit and the lady I was talking about was in tears. I would wager this Labour council fellow hadn't probably voted Labour since at least 2005. His attitude was glaringly Tory to the core. I fucking despise these people.

I got the invite for that too but I won't be joining sorry :(

A lot of representatives at local/national level are not there for honest reasons and doing a job they’re blatantly not suited for. A lot of the MPs parachuted into areas they had no connection with the people who actually lived there were a colossal waste of time and you have to look back at the selection decisions and think, why? So many people in the party where you do see, why are you in Labour?!

John Woodcock in Barrow and Furness is a prime example- straight from university into politics, spent his time in office gladhanding with various dodgy regimes. Spent the last few years lashing out in the press. What did he have to say to a constituency with the 44th most deprived wards in the country? Just treating the electorate with utter contempt.

_I got the invite for that too but I won't be joining sorry :(_


Ah would’ve been nice to see you again 🙂 it livened up once more ppl arrived and I’m feeling a lot more positive, ppl are energetic and focused and have a good sense of what we got wrong nationally. I guess I must have a chip on my shoulder about my hometown cause I always expect a smug complacence to be the baseline. Only potential yikes moment was when I was having a nice chat with a woman and she said “the manifesto fudged certain women’s issues” in such a way as to make me nervous and just go “mmm” and change the subject but again might just be me being a cunt

interesting abt the Labour councils thing

obviously the plight of Oxford is a long way from what we're talking about but I've def had conversations along the lines of "you're telling me a Labour govt will be less moneygrubbing and corrupt than a Tory one, but <long list of things the city council has done which are bad>"

(the bugbears I hear mainly centre around a lot of ill-thought-through transport redesigns or high commercial rents squeezing out anything other than identikit tourist shops, but they did knock down a block of accommodation for the homeless to get cash from developers to build flats instead and haven't got round to building the promised replacement accommodation yet iirc, so that's not a very good advert, esp when the flats haven't been built yet either and there was just a gaping hole and some rubble last time I went past)

Lol: ‘The Liberal Democrat message that “Jo Swinson could be the next prime minister” was one of the worst performing messages we have tested anywhere in Europe.’

— Richard Ensor (@richardjensor) December 14, 2019

This is a good thread, there's also an issue of ppl getting treated really badly by the council, and also councillors & council leaders have a massive reputation for lining their pockets

— ESOLallstars (@ESOLallstars) December 14, 2019

The comments at the bottom of a good-ish thread on councils. I think Lab could make a start on stopping the rot by going after these shitty councillors.

I am feeling more hopeless now than I did on Thursday night, just going to the guardian and seeing all the articles from told-you-so pricks, the ones which are supposed to be hopeful are the worst.

Tony Blair won because he was charismatic and he had murdoch behind him, at least at first. Think that is literally all it takes to win an election.

Those guys have had those takes sitting on ice for two years.

So basically we're going to have a Brit version of ICE

New department for borders and immigration, separate from the Home Office, is mooted in Sunday Times splash, among other machinery of government changes pic.twitter.com/42S2VgE2Q8

— Sunder Katwala (@sundersays) December 14, 2019

The Tory government post-Black Wednesday was quite astonishingly despised as well, headline after headline was disastrous for them.

I'm not sure any of Blair's rivals at the time would have won a landslide but it was unquestionably the most fortunate time to be leading the Labour Party in my lifetime.

John Smith if he’d lived surely?

smh @guardian pic.twitter.com/6xLJLlOx4K

— thom (@thwphipps) December 14, 2019

A few years ago I suggested a CLP exchange programme where leave CLPs visited remain ones & vive versa, each getting to see the other’s communities and daily reality, as a way to create commonality in a moment of division, and do some myth busting to boot. Nobody took it up. Sigh

— No-one (@judeinlondon2) November 16, 2019

How much attention does Momentum give to councillors?

A massive push by momentum to get as many activists as possible standing for council seats would seem like a good thing to me.

How do councillors get selected?

Nm, reading a v long-winded guide

This is classic, good on you @BorisJohnson

All the propaganda created by Momentum and still the public saw through the lies.#leftietossers pic.twitter.com/QPWtCcnrRC

— James Deegan MC (@jamesdeeganMC) December 14, 2019

So basically we're going to have a Brit version of ICE

We already have one - Immigration Enforcement. This just looks like spinning off them, UKVI and Border Force to a new minister and letting the Home Sec focus on crime or whatever.

Got it.

When I was given indefinite leave to remain the department in charge was Immigration and Nationality.

How do councillors get selected?

― plax (ico), Sunday, 15 December 2019 bookmarkflaglink

I think it's open selection

We have politicised a lot of ppl in the last few years. I think some have actually become MPs, but building it from further below. How could versions of Preston (which I know it's different from Grimsby) be applied? Momentum's activist base doesn't reach these places but via councils it could.

I first noticed the overreach as the small events/gatherings about policy & politics started to fall by the wayside. The conversations where ordinary people were making connections with each other and learning together about the basis of our plight dwindled. 3/8

— Metatone (@Metatone2) December 15, 2019

And this is really good, picking on the decline of gatherings.

And this is where merely rewriting the terms of the debate (as Corbyn puts it) doesn't feel like enough and if this is right we double down on migrants and the EU. Always someone to blame...and forget the Green New Deal.

Given that the ruling party is likely gonna have to take responsibility for a big, self-inflicted economic crisis over the next few years, might be worth holding fire on what will be "electable" in 2024...

— Jack Saundrs ❤🖤 (@jack_saundrs) December 14, 2019

this *tweet* is right.

Also of course further demonization of the left.

When I was given indefinite leave to remain the department in charge was Immigration and Nationality.

Immigration and Nationality became the Border and Immigration Agency, which became the U.K. Border Agency, which became U.K. Visas and Immigration which will become something TBC.

They change the name and remit every two to three years to give the Mail the impression they’re doing something.

Idle thought, does the fixed term mean that the next election will also be a December?

No, and they’re meant to scrap FTPA - both main parties had it in the manifesto.

If they scrap FTPA does that leave them open to go as long as they want?
Still trying to work out ways that this is all going to blow up in their faces in the short term like hopefully before the end of next month.
Going to find out the atmosphere over Xmas and I guess things won't have fully changed by then. Possibly my last trip for a long time.

On the immigration stuff, there are some likely positives - Johnson has never shared May’s monomania on the subject, the move to open up the post-study work visa route will have a big impact, the government is going to need to suck up to India, China, and so on, a lot over the next few years and a lot of May’s barriers are not conducive to that, etc. It’ll probably get easier and cheaper for people overseas to get visas for travel as the government shows it is open for business and the route to citizenship, etc, for people already here will likely be streamlined and made more efficient, if not easier, per se.

The gigantic negative is obviously that hundreds of thousands/ millions of EU migrants are going to have to be drawn into that system when they shouldn’t.

I'm not convinced that a left candidate exists who would be able to get the requisite number of Parliamentary nominations, carry enough of the membership and also - and this bit is crucial - want to put themselves through everything that Corbyn has been through over the past few years.

Obviously no one else has the gigantic amount of baggage that Corbyn had - no one is going to be able to get away with calling Rebecca Long-Bailey a friend of Hamas - but the charge of continuity Corbyn could be tough to shift and I wouldn't blame her for deciding not to stand. Everyone else who is likely to stand looks either too factional or too right-wing to carry the membership.

The only likely candidates who look like they could credibly position themselves as unity candidates are Starmer and maybe Angela Rayner. I don't think anyone has the slightest clue what sort of programme Starmer would pursue as leader - he's a political Rorschach rest, a blank canvas for people to project things onto - which might turn out to be a political asset but he's already got the millstone of association with Labour's Brexit policy. Then again, Brexit won't be an issue in 2024 although Europe inevitably will be. Rayner is the more interesting candidate but once again I wouldn't blame her for not wanting the job.

Rebecca Long-Bailey would probably get enough nominations?

But yes, would any of these people want the job?

Keir Starmer surely can't win Burnley back? Though does it really matter? next leader surely interim anyway, having someone thats been opposition leader for 5 years is going to be stale af

Very pleased that this suggests Long-Bailey is standing & that we will definitely have a good left candidate. https://t.co/KUkkIa607F

— Tom Gann (@Tom_Gann) December 15, 2019

I'm not convinced that a left candidate exists who would be able to get the requisite number of Parliamentary nominations, carry enough of the membership and also - and this bit is crucial - want to put themselves through everything that Corbyn has been through over the past few years.

We have politicised a lot of ppl in the last few years. I think some have actually become MPs, but building it from further below. How could versions of Preston (which I know it's different from Grimsby) be applied? Momentum's activist base doesn't reach these places but via councils it could.

Thinking about AOC a bit here, she didn't just magically appear. Justice Democrats were only formed in 2017, but Kyle Kulinski and Cenk Uygur already both had big media platforms which they were able to use to kickstart that

(in terms of getting the right people in at other levels)

I don't know - who knows what will and won't work in Burnley in four or five years? The Tory lead in a lot of these seats is very frothy and could go pretty quickly, especially if Johnson presides over a disaster. The worst outcome would be for Labour to panic about former Red Wall seats and elect some Blue Labour type but I don't think the membership votes exist for that.

But in general Starmer doesn't really project anything beyond 'competent legal type' which has made it easy for him to keep his head down and work his way into this position, whereas other centrists have peacocked or thrown tantrums from the sidelines. But he's also technocratic and very dull.

Ridiculous watching people who thought it was outrageous that Labour plumped for a backbencher with no front bench experience four years ago suddenly going wild for Jess Phillips though.

I have seen talk of encouraging "moderates" to join in order to "take back the party" but don't think that's going to happen.

my mum (a party member) likes jess philips, any advice on how to dissuade her at xmas?

my mum (a party member) likes jess philips, any advice on how to dissuade her at xmas?

Agree with her, but with 'concerns'

"I like her too but it worries me the way she always seemed to be fighting our own side. I'm sure she had good reasons on occasion but I'm not sure she's particularly solid, she just worries me - I worry she'll flip flop when it really matters and I think we need someone who's a little stronger"

I've really found offering nothing myself at all but playing this bullshit "Im not sure I just don't know" game is really quite effective.

People have mostly already decided what you're going to say, and "I don't know" cuts through that. Possession based conversation really doesn't work, counter attack is much more effective.

Let them have the ball, let them do the work, find the weak spot and press whatever it is

Turns out you need the support of 20 or so MPs to stand, plus a couple of affiliated societies like the unions or the Fabians or the Jewish Labour Movement or whoever. RLB will presumably get that unless she isn't the only left candidate in the running (ie if Clive Lewis or someone decides to bundle in there and split the vote).

i seem to recall stephen bush patiently explaining how clive lewis couldn't possibly get there in practical terms and so wouldn't try

(but this was c.150,000 million years = like 18 months ago so maybe the ground is now very different)

I think RLB is more a deputy type.

Jess Phillips does not catch enough shit for lying about black colleagues. She’s the type in your office who’d complain about a black colleague being rude or intimidating or uppity, and then doing white tears when called on it.

Rayner is probably the only one who can get both wings of the party on board, partially because she isn’t particularly trusted by either.

RLB comes across well. Have doubts over everybody else aside from Dawn Butler but sadly she can't stand for leader because racism. A couple of new MPs from the new intake to get shadow cab jobs in a couple of years too.

The key thing is for the membership to hold. As a member now I am hoping I'll do what I can to be quietly ruthless with the Lab right. Stuff that broad church up your arse.

Ridiculous watching people who thought it was outrageous that Labour plumped for a backbencher with no front bench experience four years ago suddenly going wild for Jess Phillips though.

I'm trying to avoid watching or reading too much about politics right now but LOL at this clown's name coming up constantly - despite mfktz's mum, I can't believe me this as anything more than Westminster bubble stuff, she's a public school media intern's idea of a feisty prole.

... sentence garbled but you get the idea.

'Stuff that broad church up your arse' does not strike me as a good starting point to win or implement anything because that's what the rest of the electorate are going to hear as well and think 'fine, fuck you then'. Johnson won not just by going full ERG but by sprinkling the manifesto with just enough public spending sugar to convince waverers - it's a lie but it worked because of a nudge and a wink that convinced enough people that he might govern for people who aren't just Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Nevertheless, even if there is a surge in centrist registrations with Labour, the first step to any route to power is winning over a left-wing base - or at least enough of it. Any candidate who can't grasp that - or tries to pitch to the country before their party - is just proving that they lack the political skills or strategic intelligence to do the job.

Also, let’s be real, who do you want at the despatch box every Wednesday handing BJ his arse or provoking him into showing it?

Angela Rayner!

I mean, I prefer RLB but I think Angela Rayner would be better at getting on Tory tits.

The tidal wave of misogyny that will confront any female leader of the Labour Party is already making me wince and it hasn't even happened yet.

I am not sure how much those public spending pledges really worked. In the 47 seats that flipped to CON almost all were leave. I am still at this was 90% Brexit as an issue, with a decades long build up to it.

It's partly me reacting to some of the worst Lab right stuff I've seen. Very hard to see unity where Corbyn was only part of the problem, and where policy and treating non-white ppl with dignity as the much bigger problem.

I do see a lie being told to keep people onside as part of the solution though xpost to Matt.

I really don't care about PMQ performance in a leader, sorry.

Stuff that broad church up your arse

I don't think this is right! Its about taking ownership of what broad church is (whatever that really means)

RLB is a better choice for leader. In 2024

Rayner is a better choice for leader in 2020. Whoever it is should be keeping the seat warm

Johnson won not just by going full ERG but by sprinkling the manifesto with just enough public spending sugar to convince waverers

He also correctly surmised many remainers weren't really that bothered about remaining, whereas leavers actually meant what they said. And could take the risk he wouldn't lose that many of them, without actually offering them anything. Stuff like this doesn't really come back to bite you for years (even decades as we just found it)

I am not sure how much those public spending pledges really worked. In the 47 seats that flipped to CON almost all were leave. I am still at this was 90% Brexit as an issue, with a decades long build up to it.

Brexit was the washing up and someone was trying to put off doing it. Nobody gaf about the spending pledges, they didn't really believe them, he doesn't need to deliver on them ,and he probably won't bother. A lot of people think councils are responsible anyway, do the Tories even really 'own' austerity?

But if we couldn't do the washing up then our spending pledges weren't believable either so what's the difference and at least Boris wasn't in Hamas

this is my own professional bad-not-good bubble but much of the hastings & brighton 80s rockwrite massive -- who are largely *not* public school -- luuurves jess p

(partly i suspect bcz one julie b once announced she wd v happily bang JP and, well, you join the dots) (i take no pleasure in reporting this)

Downing Street is putting out the word that it is boycotting @Radio4Today because of its, and the BBC’s, ‘bias’ against Boris Johnson & the Conservatives during the campaign.

— John Simpson (@JohnSimpsonNews) December 15, 2019

I take no pleasure in reading it so we're even

to be clear #notallrockwrite

Exactly as it was after the referendum result all BAME people are going to feel that customary vacillation between feeling looked at/ barely tolerated and wondering about our own sensitivities and paranoia in coming weeks.

— ⚫ Chilli Kulkarni (@KaptainKulk) December 15, 2019

Well it's not that people didn't believe in the manifesto because the marginal losses tell me that.

As per yesterday's discussion councils turned out to be a gigantic weakness. And indeed Labour making no gains, and having no offer, at council level proved to be fatal in the north XP to anvil

this is my own professional bad-not-good bubble but much of the hastings & brighton 80s rockwrite massive -- who are largely *not* public school -- luuurves jess p

A vital constituency, shame on Corbyn for neglecting them >:(

"I don't think this is right! Its about taking ownership of what broad church is (whatever that really means)"

No idea what this means either. The factional war will carry on in one form or another. The Tories did in the end purge their remainers and I think some form of this is something the left should not be afraid of doing. It's hardly show trials lol.

"RLB is a better choice for leader. In 2024"

We don't have the luxury of time. There might be a major economic crisis by the end, and further climate events. Be serious.

I would certainly not vote for Starmer as a leadership candidate nor in a GE (I still hate myself for voting for Miliband Labour + will never do that again) and if he was the most lefty candidate on the slate that would be the point where I say fuck this bullshit game and throw my card in the bin and sulk off to the communist party!

It doesn't do anyone any good pretending that this wasn't at heart down to a combination of Brexit and Corbyn and any candidate who succeeds him has to be able to adequately differentiate themselves from him while keeping the policies that are attractive to the electorate.

The harder bit is finding someone who is harder for the right wing press to monster or who the mud won't stick to. That bit might be impossible but I share Tom's horror at what might happen to a female Labour leader.

Nandy making the right noises on the bit of Marr I saw, about local organising etc

It is going to be a tough gig, but like Corbyn used to often say it isn't as hard as being homeless or queuing outside foodbanks to survive. Lets not get too carried away with compromise for the sake of placating the shitty right wing media - who will even find eays to demonise sir brylcreem boy - don't pretend just cos someone is from the moderate wing that they will be immune to that.

Also the Boris narrative is not going to be one of austerity and hardship and tightening our belts. He wants to be a PM for good times, Britain Bouncing Back etc and his record as Mayor shows that he will throw money at gimmicks and anything else that gives the impression that we're heading into a golden age. Labour has to be able to counter that without looking like dour miserablists.

Obviously if there's an economic crisis then that will really test a government which isn't overburdened with competent technical minds and that will do a lot of Labour's work for it. But voters still need to believe that a Labour victory isn't just pouring oil on the fire.

Is there any possibility of setting up any network of alternative media that could combat the prevailing right wing message being the only thing that a lot of people see? Or would that just take way too long and not be able to compete with the existing monopoly.

I'm just trying to keep some hope taht the country I grew up in might have some hope of surviving this mistake.
& if there are a lot of the population who will be devastated by this surely there must be some recognition of tehir continued existence. Or is the plan taht this will make them waste away and disappear or transform themselves? IN which case getting rid of any opportuntity for them to do so would seem to be counterintuitive.
I can't help hoping there is till some room for optimism but maybe that's defunct already. & without optimism you just give up.

I think I left for a reason a couple of decades ago, and not sure how badly this effects me in the longterm. So still hoping the longtermdoes see some correction of what at the moment just seems calamitous.

I'm a RLB fan to the death at the moment, but Burgon as deputy - no way!

I'll be binning RLB if she comes with Burgon attached.

"It doesn't do anyone any good pretending that this wasn't at heart down to a combination of Brexit and Corbyn and any candidate who succeeds him has to be able to adequately differentiate themselves from him while keeping the policies that are attractive to the electorate."

Depends on how this works in practice. "Continuity Corbyn" is going to be thrown around at whoever succeeds him that also took part in the Shadow cab (bar perhaps Starmer) and is from the Labour left. RLB or Rayner will be called Marxists if they keep a lot of the policies (which as you say are popular, the same ones the membership will go out to bat for too). That's the reality.

How big a deal is Deputy? As long as that person has their heart in the right place and isn't a fucking wrecker. Burgon isn't that experienced but we've just lived through Tom Watson.

He's hopeless, get him to fuck.

I'm having this batch of tomato soup I made before election day and it feels like that lasagne Bobby Baccalieri's wife made before she died in The Sopranos and he doesn't want to eat it, because it was made before all hope had died!

He wouldn't be a wrecker but he'd be liability and anyone who repped for Chris Williamson at some point might need the Yezhov treatment!

With Burgon as Deputy Leader all your tomato soup will taste like hope had just died.

lol!

As for his heart being in the right place, his heart belongs to Williamson, dear old Chris Williamson.

now more than ever the left must focus on its ultimate objective: prime minister brian eno

Taking Blyth Valley By Strategy.

Chris Williamson is history now. I wouldn't have Burgon either but Lab did stop CW from standing. It is true he just isn't quite sharp enough.

He will probably be in the Shadow cab if RLB/Lab left get in.

:-(

Keep asking myself why so many people would vote for such an awful man that has hurt so many people with his cruel welfare policies, as well as a racist prime minister. Don’t want to lose faith in humanity, but trying to be honest with myself. https://t.co/WVmdiwdQSH

— Faiza Shaheen (@faizashaheen) December 15, 2019

RLB or Rayner will be called Marxists if they keep a lot of the policies (which as you say are popular, the same ones the membership will go out to bat for too). That's the reality.

This is inevitably true though it might be harder to make it stick to someone who has never identified as part of the Socialist campaign group, is a member of the LFI, etc. A lot of people on the left will make a fuss if it’s Rayner, which will likely help her distance herself from ‘continuity Corbyn’ to some degree.

I and others had to deal with exactly this type of idiot throughout the 80s. Now he's back and I'll have to spend the next decade dealing with him all over again. https://t.co/Kix5uweNw5

— Aditya Chakrabortty (@chakrabortty) December 15, 2019

Rachel Riley might have to postpone her defeat of anti-Semiticism in the UK celebrations, because it appears that fascists are completely emboldened by an openly racist PM

Rayner also came through UNISON's leadership scheme, although "in the pockets of the unions" seems like it wasn't as big a talking point recently

"This is inevitably true though it might be harder to make it stick to someone who has never identified as part of the Socialist campaign group, is a member of the LFI, etc."

Think it will be easy enough if you are batting for social housing and rent controls and anything that threatens property rights, nationalisation and so on. Easy enough to make slippery slope arguments too.

But as I said, that's the reality but the media didn't entirely win it for Johnson.

Poor Faiza, robbed of her seat by north Chingford golf Nazis.

unsurprised to see John McD and Jeremy behaving with infinitely more class than their critics

Not difficult tbh.

Faiza increases C& WG’s vote to its highest ever level, and she bucked the national trend by her % of the vote not going up. She wasn’t the problem, people not wanting to vote Labour nationally was the problem. JC, DA, John McD all lost big chunks off their votes

Their critics are wasting their time calling RL-B thick - view entirely shared and disseminated by Guidi, btw - and every activist and member devastated without losing sees this. They’ve learned nothing from 2015.

Indeed, just been out shopping came back, turned the telly on to Andrew Adonis going on about the cancer in the Labour Party, rooting out Corbynism and making the Labour Party attractive (again) to Lib Dem supporters and moderate Conservatives.

I'm surprised he didn't call for Corbyn to be hung from a lamppost.

Oh, and first name out of his mouth when asked about a new leader? Jess Phillips. wtf is up with these fools?

Centrists are sticking the boot in because they’ve got nothing else to offer. They keep pointing at Blair, but Blair on the cusp of power hadn’t abandoned the regions for decades while taking their vote and doing nothing for them. Also ignores the not insignificant effect of Blair himself on Labour voters - “ they’re all the same” is poisonous and created the headspace for people to stay at home or switch. Mandelson saying of Northern voters “they’ve got nowhere else to go” looks like a fucking epitaph. His seat is Conservative today.

None of the “ideas” centrists are hoiking make any sense electorally or internally. Be more racist? Yeah, see how safe those remaining safe seats stay. See how many young people turn out to campaign and get involved and pay into the party. See how badly you’ll lose when people look at the Tories and don’t want a diet version of that. Be more centrist? Don’t know if you realise but it’s not 1997 and the world has moved on somewhat and your boy Tony is about as electorally popular as scurvy.

Oh, and first name out of his mouth when asked about a new leader? Jess Phillips. wtf is up with these fools?

I don't why they keep entertaining jess as a candidate - it simply is not happening unless half a million members suddenly disappear

I thought the main point of having a labour party was to contrast massively with teh more bourgeois ruling class ones. Hopefully show how outdated they were too. NOt focus on trying to create swing voters to come out to join your ersatz them.
Sounds like a really good way of creating mass apathy and not getting more of the vote really, just getting people feeling severly unrepresented and staying home cos voting isn't worth anything.

They know there is zero chance of pressuring the members to vote for her, the objective is to be able to say ‘I told you so’ after it all goes wrong next time. Xp

He wouldn't be a wrecker but he'd be liability and anyone who repped for Chris Williamson at some point might need the Yezhov treatment!

http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-news/jeremy-corbyn-2492585
"Chris Williamson is a very good, very effective Labour MP. He’s a very strong anti-racist campaigner. He is not anti-semitic in any way."

Which is to say yes, it'd be good to have a leader that isn't specifically bound to anti-semitism, but it'll still be a stick used to beat Labour for a while - what steps have you taken to distance the party from this signature stain etc etc, only the second party to be investigated by the ECHR etc etc, we may have our problems but at least we're not Institutionally Racist etc etc.

As will everything - a lot of the mad spark of Labour over the last while seems to be seizing our strengths as weaknesses, but it turns out someone them are weaknesses, including selling transformative socialism to England (possibly including selling socialism to England full stop), and the Tories will not tire of using the massive failure to indicate that the Labour party shouldn't be listened to on anything. Boris has dodged questions so far - he won't suddenly feel the need to start answering them now.

Lol they’d throw their own activists under the bus for a slight chance that a few Lib Dem voters might peel off.

That Jess Phillips is a feisty working class lass, dontcha know? Kinda like a modern day Gracie Fields.

Anyway, they can get all Thermidorian in the TV studios as much as they like, they haven't got the numbers, the talent, the brains, you name it.

As will everything - a lot of the mad spark of Labour over the last while seems to be seizing our strengths as weaknesses, but it turns out someone them are weaknesses, including selling transformative socialism to England (possibly including selling socialism to England full stop),

This thread lol

Great scoop by Sky News to get Jess Phillips to appear on camera! https://t.co/2H0gpSnxGg

— Sketchaganda (@sketchaganda) March 27, 2019

It's funny, Labour MPs will do this kind of stuff, which at this point does nothing except hurt the party's chances of returning more MPs, then everyone will throw their hands up in horror if they end up facing a selection battle 🤷‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/3XigB4obLX

— Jack Saundrs ❤🖤 (@jack_saundrs) September 29, 2019

Horrific Woman keeps Opening her Mouth, Talking

Talking shite. Yes.

The Twitter thread didn't seem to mind much what she was talking, just that she was.

You'd be calling out misogyny if someone suggested that reni reifanstahl was a bit abhorrent, seriously Andrew

Please keep telling one of Ilx’s dwindling female voters that you know more about misogyny than her.

lol, members!

I'd be busy all day long if I was at all interested in defending her honour! But when it's literally "Gobby woman doesn't know her place", and it's a quiet Sunday...

It literally isn't "Gobby woman doesn't know her place".

Love getting talked over about this. Absolutely fuck this.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EL0bAuxWwAIwwt9?format=jpg&name=large nice choice of picture here too

big centrist-condescension energy

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ELwXzA8XYAEPEQE?format=jpg&name=large

It’ll be fascinating to see what policy platform she is going to campaign on.

Doesn’t the article photo make that plain?

Seems legit.

Oh my god lol Slate tried to use a Britishism and, well, pic.twitter.com/GLhoMFeizS

— Nate Bethea (@inthesedeserts) December 15, 2019

platform = "i am the living channel of the proletarian hivemind"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/3/36/Look_Up_and_Laugh_%281935_film%29.jpg/220px-Look_Up_and_Laugh_%281935_film%29.jpg

Phillips can’t just campaign on being a regular nonce, though, she has to take a position on Brexit, public spending, etc, that’s substantially different from RLB, etc, otherwise run the risk of tacitly endorsing the current policy set. We are going to have to get to a point where the cards are on the table eventually.

close observation of career centrists over the last 10 years indicates "not necessarily"

That’s true - but also partly why Yvette Cooper did so badly last time.

Yvette Cooper had nothing to offer in 2015. She impressed journalists but more of the same is a kick in the face for someone in a left behind area.

Booming post gyac, many xps

I’m with gyac, YMOF - when you have the women in the thread telling you why Jess Phillips is not impressive, and offering actual reasons (racism, the wrong kind of pugilistic instincts, all that ‘bab’ shite) maybe it’s not ‘misogyny’ that’s affecting our views?

Did everyone see that clip of her on election night laughing merrily until she realised she was on camera and then trying her best to switch to sombre “yes of course I’m devastated”

Unfortunately, the Monty Python "Timmy Williams" sketch is not on YouTube.

mine's just class chippiness, she's way more middle class than say Starmer and just fucking lies about it like everybody from Birmingham doesn't have her accent

More middle class than Starmer, McDonnell and Abbott.

it's like centrist DNA, career middle management in public/voluntary sector who apparently can mind read the people they patronisingly claim to serve

i'm not ready for this yet, was gonna try and cling to positivity, i'll shut up

I'm blocking out all melt commentariat twaterry for a few months for the sake of my mental health. Listened to lots of Radio 3 and WS yesterday and turning it off when any domestic politics are mentioned during the news.

yeah i've been doing that all weekend

Ditto but the cunts are everyhwere.

People who are looking for someone without the faults of Corbyn miss the extent to which these lines are shaped by the press. No, we wouldn’t have had the antisemitism stuff as much with Philips but we would have had other stuff. ‘She laughs at men’s suicides!’ - so it’s bullshit, that doesn’t matter.

I can't even watch the news at all

not being watching it but even on Radio 3 you get a bulletin every so often

I’m with gyac, YMOF - when you have the women in the thread telling you why Jess Phillips is not impressive, and offering actual reasons (racism, the wrong kind of pugilistic instincts, all that ‘bab’ shite) maybe it’s not ‘misogyny’ that’s affecting our views?

― santa clause four (suzy), Sunday, December 15, 2019 2:39 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I have no idea where this is coming from, though? I'm pointedly not defending Jess Phillips here.

I’m meant to be having dinner at my dads place, so it’s going to be a night of tiptoeing around politics or a blazing row.

(And I’m not mentally prepared for either)

(xxp) You are pointedly putting criticism of Jess Phillips down to misogyny. Though you know that already, so I don't know why I'm telling you.

had moments of weird - not quite relief, but y'know - the last couple of days that my dad's not around to fall out with over this

My brother was actually on FB today calling John McDonnell a class act and praising the Labour manifesto, so all is not lost!

I'm putting a thread that doesn't address anything that she says, just that she's saying it, down to misogyny, yeah.

I was going to ask - but I actually already know the answer so I won’t bother. Thank you Suzy and Tom.

My brother was actually on FB today calling John McDonnell a class act and praising the Labour manifesto, so all is not lost!

I'm putting it down to the fact that she's a shameless self-publicist who'd turn up at the opening of an envelope but, you know, whatever presses your buttons.

(xp) Well, his wife is Jewish and they both consider Corbyn anti-Semitic so any discussion of politics was off the agenda. Pretty sure they voted SNP, they were in a Tory seat that went SNP, neither of then support Independence though.

her whole phoney shtick has been ripped to pieces on these threads, does it suddenly become misogyny if you say she's a shameless twat without clearly repeating what has already been posted about her multiple times?

Let’s not pretend that a lot of the stuff directed against her isn’t misogyny.

I do worry that the centrist’s ‘got to appeal to the wider electorate’ concerns will mean that there’s less chance of a woman or person of colour taking the job.

Why are the views of men speaking out to say Jess Phillips gets slagged off because of misogyny so much more correct than those of women saying “there’s more to it than that?” An ilx mystery that in this essay I will

xp
I don't often disagree with you dowd, but I call bullshit there if you mean on this thread.

The idea that calling any woman a 'shameless twat' could somehow not be misogynistic is so complete fucked up to me as a foreigner. And I'm honestly beginning to think it's uk discourse that is wrong on this.

https://london-post.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/bingoooo.jpg

Oh go and celebrate Boris' victory, Fred, and leave us alone please.

erm.. fuck off and die Fred please.

i think i found jess’ reddit account btw

https://i.redd.it/04tpf3k4xs441.jpg

I absolutely don’t mean on this thread. I mean that because she’s the focus of misogyny in the wider electorate we have to be careful not to use gendered criticisms. I don’t think anyone here dislikes her because of misogyny, I was just talking about the media environment she works in.

Maybe it was misogyny when she was videoed laughing during the results then immediately switched to sombre when she realised she was on camera?

Maybe it was misogyny when she palled around with Jacob Rees-Mogg in the name of broadening the discussion?

Maybe it was misogyny when she repeatedly targeted Parliament’s first black woman, someone who is so subject to abuse that her staff have to make several trips to the police with death threats weekly?

Maybe it was misogyny when she appeared on tv time and time again slagging off Labour and offering no solutions to anything?

Maybe it was misogyny when she was soaking up praise on twitter from the same dingbats who got everything wrong while Paula Sherriff was quietly making an actual difference to the world?

Maybe it was misogyny when she was retweeting Tories saying she gets too hard a time of it?

Tl; dr

The main reason to oppose Jess PHILLIPS outside her antiblackness and TERF friendly affected working class persona is the fact she’s yet to figure out that your opponents don’t praise you when they consider you a threat to them.

— No-one (@judeinlondon2) December 15, 2019

The idea that calling any woman a 'shameless twat' could somehow not be misogynistic is so complete fucked up to me as a foreigner. And I'm honestly beginning to think it's uk discourse that is wrong on this.

i would like to point out that gyac has been otm in this thread

I absolutely don’t mean on this thread. I mean that because she’s the focus of misogyny in the wider electorate we have to be careful not to use gendered criticisms. I don’t think anyone here dislikes her because of misogyny, I was just talking about the media environment she works in.

Okaaaay Fred, she’s an asshole who will punch down at the first opportunity or say something about a marginalised person to get accepted by the kool kids. When she came down to London she was in to see publishers and agents before the paint was dry on her constituency office. She’s in a hurry and she has sharp elbows, There is nothing at all wrong with being ambitious, and an ambitious woman at that, but she ain’t exactly selfless with it.

twat isn't a gendered term of abuse where I come from and please kill yourself Fred, you worthless slimeball.

I am just as concerned. And it would be odd to say “was it misogyny to criticise Abbot for privately educating her kids?” when of course lots of the energy against her is motivated by misogyny etc.

Whereas JP seems to be celebrated as the genuine voice of the working class, among other things, by misogynists, hmmmmmm....

fyi fred et al - in the uk “twat” is not a gendered slur; if anything it’s said of men more than women

(And I don’t think Phillips should be anywhere near the leadership)

Like let me make it plain as fucking day because people are not getting it.

I don’t want a woman leader who throws people under the bus.
I don’t want a woman leader who associates with those who’d do me harm.
I don’t want a woman leader who takes actions that make the chances of a Labour government less likely.

Austerity disproportionately affects women and BAME communities more.

The Tories had a 16 point lead with men, and a leader who left his wife during cancer treatment for a woman he was later reported to the police for because the neighbours were worried for her.

Boris Johnson’s burqa remarks led to Muslim women experiencing violence and harassment on the streets of Britain.

Anyone handwringing over JP is not going to convince me they care about women or the wider problem of misogyny in this country.

We deserve better women leaders than this. I think of Mary Robinson talking about how poverty, and climate justice, and opposing in the 8th amendment in the 80s. That’s my idea of a female leader I’d be proud to stand behind.

Fred has his mind on higher matters, raising the tone of political discourse in the UK as a whole *thumbs up*

I'm trying to write this piece on this awful awful commentator in Denmark, who is constantly writing about 'identity politics' in the most awful way. She is calling everyone a nazi, defending convicted rapists, thinks being 'non-binary' is ipso facto being a radical fundamentalist identitarian and grounds for firing, basically. She thinks personal communication about potential abusers should be criminalized. She is one of the worst people I know. The idea that I could somehow call her a cunt or a twat or a bitch then, I just don't see where that happens. Still misogyny?

And I've been called cunt and twat enough times to know it's not exclusively aimed at women, lol. But of course it's a gendered insult, lol.

Then again, who cares, I'm just a stupid foreigner, right? Carry on.

I am just as concerned. And it would be odd to say “was it misogyny to criticise Abbot for privately educating her kids?” when of course lots of the energy against her is motivated by misogyny etc.

And I've been called cunt and twat enough times to know it's not exclusively aimed at women, lol. But of course it's a gendered insult, lol.

Then again, who cares, I'm just a stupid foreigner, right? Carry on.

You’re otm, and I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, I’m not sure where the disagreement is. Anyway, still a bit too raw for this, so enjoy yr evenings

I guess the question of what brexit strategy Labour should have adopted is academic now given that it will likely be a settled issue by the time of the net election, but this argument that it would have been better to accept the UK was leaving and focus on achieving a better deal seems plausible:

http://www.edmundgriffiths.com/brexitwqwa.html

Remain and Leave became politically significant identities between 2017 and 2019 purely because it did not seem that the referendum had finally settled whether Britain would be leaving the European Union or not.

If the Labour Party had instead made clear that it was irrevocably committed to seeing Brexit delivered, that it would fight for a soft Brexit but that there were no circumstances whatever under which Labour would support a second referendum or the revocation of the Article 50 notification, then it would have been exceedingly difficult for the idea of stopping Brexit to get off the ground.

or at least if Labour was going to back a second referendum it should have done so earlier and with a clear pro-remain message from the leadership, some kind of formal electoral pact with the Lib Dems and Greens. It wasn't plausible to agree that the remain option was a possibility while simultaneously positioning themselves as the consensus middle-way option on brexit.

Wrong crowd: I heard said crowd were actively trying to jump him into a gang and threatening him when he wouldn’t join in.