“I take my responsibilities seriously. I did not lie” - UK politics June 23 on

I had a greens sign in my garden last council elections, partially because my neighbour was standing for them (and won!) and he's a decent person, but mostly because the labour party (who I had quit YEARS before, and asked many times to stop emailing me) sent out a bulk email saying "send us photos of the signs in your front gardens!" and sending them a photo of it finally (& suddenly) managed to get me removed from all of their mailing lists.

Sad thing about all of this is that by the time of the election people (bar Muslims, which is why Jess Phillips had to vote against) will have long forgotten as you think there will be a ceasefire. That's ofc good, but people shouldn't forget how these scum vote at this time.

The reality is the people who will "bite the bullet" don't care about any of this. They will always perform their politics and "bite the bullet". At least Tories are capitalist racists, no pretence to "labour-moderate soi-disant-centre-left" word salad.

The "labour-moderate soi-disant-centre-left" like my MP will talk and 'debate' progressive wordings and then vote for racism no problem. Its even worse than an EDL supporter because they lied to people to get there and put in that vote.

The "labour-moderate soi-disant-centre-left"

I'd just like a white coffee please mate

No way I could vote for the Greens, their longtime local candidate is married to the incompetent freeloader who is CEO where I work.

... who got a knighthood from Boris.

Tbf Tom iirc you have an easy non-Labour option.

I can't deny it.

Tom D. and I are vastly different people, 'tis true, the only time I ever remember being in the same room as him I was far too scared to speak with him, but I find it hard to imagine ever using this criterion to determine where to plant my 'X' at the ballot box. You can't choose who you fall in love with. Once Cupid fires his little arrow, ain't a thing you can do about it!

I don't think love is just a power that randomly matches you to a person without values or worldview playing any part in it

more importantly though, spite towards your boss should absolutely take precedence over electoral concerns

btw I have talked to Tom D on several occasions and lived to tell the tale

that's what you think. we are all actually ghosts

Kieth is pro ghost-creation tbf

the state of that Kim Leadbeater video. Basically: "I support a ceasefire but am going to abstain because I don't want to vote with the SNP". She's extremely dumb and will deservedly lose her seat next year.

Can confirm Tom D is a darling

I don't think love is just a power that randomly matches you to a person without values or worldview playing any part in it
Interesting. I *do* think that; maybe I am just some sort of hopeless romantic.

Iirc the occasion that I was in the same room as Tom D. was 'ILX Has a Festival' at the Windmill in Brixton in 2007/8. He looked a mean f*cker who was going to kick my effing head in, but fair play, gyac, books/covers &c.

Well I think love demands kindness, empathy, understanding and other qualities that can't actually be neatly divorced from a person's worldview.

"Would smash" can be divorced from it, I'll give you that.

Daniel, don’t you know any Labour-wife Tory-husband (and vice versa) couples? I sure do.

I don't no, but there's surely a huge gap between "sometimes members of the two most mainstream political parties in the UK fall in love" and "falling in love is totally random and unrelated to one's values entirely"?

irrational but not random

the couple of labour/tory marriages I've known have been a nightmare and any pretence of keeping politics and personal life separate went out the window whenever there was a fight

maybe some people make it work but it's hard to imagine their values are particularly divergent in such cases

My in laws are complete political opposites. I myself couldn’t do it.

Multiple Xps!!!

This is all tricky. My missus & I met in an Oxford nightclub after being abandoned by our respective friends & being wallflowers on the edge of the dancefloor thinking "wtf do I do now?", got talking/dancing/snogging, so went from the "smash that" scenario Daniel describes to being husband & wife 3.5 years later. Political compatibility? Who the f*ck knows; her formilative years were spent in martial-law era Gdansk, mine in Thatcherite London, so she has a knee-jerk dislike of anything "tankie" and considers a lot of UK socialists to be somewhat naive. She is a Tusk supporter as are most of her (huge) family; she hates Jarosław Kaczyński and queued up around the block to vote the arsehole out at an Oxford community centre co-opted as a temporary Polish polling station Ridiculously early on a Sunday morning!

Well yeah ppl are infinitely diverse in their political leanings and how they navigate same! I don't think that then leads to a situation where these leanings are entirely irrelevant to a relationship.

To give an extreme example, as a foreigner who moved to the UK I'd probably not have a very successful relationship with an EDL supporter.

i do wonder how much genuine ideological difference two people could sustain and still love each other

interesting GG, I'm from a socialist Catholic family background, but there isn't really the same vocab to describe my wife's politics, she is from China and straight up despises the CCP and everything they do, however she has also found that the other anti-CCP Chinese are either right-wing Trump lovers or members of (essentially) cults or (even worse) both of those things, whereas she is very strongly anti-capitalist and completely incapable of taking organised religion seriously.
It's probably not a coincidence that I agree with her on all of this, either we have converged or it was fate. The one place we don't really meet is intersectionality, but we're working it out.

these kinds of thing (different political priors reflecting very different backgrounds) is much more understandable to me (and my family) than when it's people from pretty much the same background who have opposite takes on the issues that affect them

(I'm thinking especially of an older couple I used to know quite well - both dead now- he thought toryism was their way out of the working class while she thought it was a betrayal of her and her family - which he somehow turned into a betrayal of him and the one reason they didn't have more money - it managed to work its way into every little disagreement they had - that's probably a fairly common scenario esp for a certain generation but maybe some are better at just ignoring it - I really appreciated her tenacity and came to dislike him more over time)

this makes me think of an uncle of mine who was a bit of a freewheeling womaniser type who was sort of a musician who lived in squats and busked for beer money outside tube stations. He was in a long term relationship with a woman who was apparently heavily politicised and a member of the CPoB. She used to mock him for being politically incoherent and basically just repeating hackneyed variations of "they're all corrupt arseholes". By the early 80's they had split up and she was loudly advocating and voting for Thatcher and had become conservative in every sense of the word. He became slightly more politically coherent, by this point he'd been homeless a few times and was living in a rougharse tenement block in Kings Cross that's probably posh flats now. They were never going to last as a couple, even though both of them didn't really find their true political bearings until after they'd split.

"I don't think love is just a power that randomly matches you to a person without values or worldview playing any part in it"

Also if you become radicalised to a worldview that can destroy a relationship that might have been perfectly fine at the start. Most publicly seen that with Glinner recently.

Anagram never did bother explaining what about the current Labour Party draws his support huh

Daniel, don’t you know any Labour-wife Tory-husband (and vice versa) couples? I sure do.

People know Tories?

xp

to repeat what they posted: I want to see Sir Kier Starmer in no. 10 because I'm a moderate Labour Party supporter the type of uncritical low information voter that believes in vibes rather than policies.

How Kier Starmer could win a vibe check with anything but a three day old crusty grey dog turd, I’ll never know

my actual you'd have thought uncontroversial point being that most of the political spectrum exists left of starmer's labour, so it's surprising that no major or even semi-major party (yes party politics is bad and hated yes) is making moves to claim any position substantially within that space

i am kinda impressed that the lib dems are so useless they've been completely unable to capitalise on the tory collapse + starmer not even pretending to have any sort of positive vision

after throwing it all on reversing the outcome of a referendum and getting skinned, they are scared of doing any bold policies now. Just keep a low profile and mop up the odd Tory byelection seat, lol, and skills wallets.

According to the Guardian, it seems like some of the ceasefire advocates in Labour held back voting for the SNP amendment so they could have the rolling resignations option still in the tank. Which is sauce for the goose for anyone who remembers summer 2016.

tbh I find that very hard to believe, and it's pretty clear a lot of Labour MPs will say literally anything to try to appeal to both sides

I'd be happy to be proved wrong tho, they can start the resignations as soon as they're ready

Also to Calz, those tenement blocks in King’s Cross you mention are still run by a housing association. They were affiliated with the Clerkenwell tenement block where I used to live, which is now council-run.

were those the ones you could see when leaving st pancras by train that had "120 people live here" painted on the side in huge letters?

(probably more than 120)

xp

blimey!

No, the ones I’m thinking of were all on Cromer Street by McGlynn’s and The Boot. Also Derby Lodge on Britannia Street, just south of the station. There’s a fab documentary where Kenneth Williams tours the area in the 1970s because he was brought up there. The short life/ex-squat flats north of Euston Road were in Battle Bridge Road and Stanley Buildings (which I think was the one with ‘120 people live here’ because it’s on St Pancras Way.

i do wonder how much genuine ideological difference two people could sustain and still love each other

Well first you'd need genuine ideological views, which I think most people don't?

kinda what i was getting at Andrew, i'm sure there's plenty of "Tory"/"Labour" couples who don't really disagree about much at all

i'm about the furthest thing from a model for relationship advice but i cannot imagine sustaining love for somebody espousing the casual cruelty at the core of a lot of those parties' politics

Yeah, not disagreeing, sorry!

Suzy - is that Battle Bridge Place? I'm only roused to pedantry because I'm familiar with Battle Bridge Lane, which I know from being near another big station-adjacent regeneration by London Bridge.

i'm sure there's plenty of "Tory"/"Labour" couples who don't really disagree about much at all

I used to have a morbid fascination with Guardian columnbot Lucy Mangan, who got much mileage and column inches from fake exasperated stories of her Toryboy partner. Turned out her husband was former Director of Vote Leave and former DUP Chief of Staff, national conservative ghoul Chris Montgomery.

"Our relationship has never been built on raw physical attraction, but on a kind of sick, intellectual curiosity and an emotional masochism on both our parts that neither of us had hitherto suspected. Your expanding girth will hardly change that."

👀

Lucy Mangan is a terf.

bizarre that she is paid actual money to write that shit