Stability is change: crossing the floor from potato to potahto in uk 2024

Get in here, loons

Very good

Oddly starting this with Mason news.

Breaking: ISLINGTON NORTH Labour shortlist Sem Moema . Praful Nargund

— lee harpin (@lmharpin) May 22, 2024

breaking: stoya cancelling travel plans

From The Guardian blog quoting a tweet by a pol analyst:

Was in Westminster all day. Understand there’s 5 major reasons for @RishiSunak July 4 election gamble

1/ Key aides told PM inflation is now at its “election sweet spot” - 2.3% was today’s print - & warned it may rise again by autumn

2/ No fiscal space for NI cuts in Sept 1/

3/ Concern legal challenges will further delay/block flights to Rwanda taking off

4/ Mess in the English Channel with small boats during the summer months

5/ Nigel Farage hasn’t yet decided whether to front Reform UK, so snap poll may boost Tory prospects

Praful Nargund?

if they won't accept Comrade Mason they should offer a spot to Dunty

https://x.com/IanDunt/status/1793343773667480015

truly the most perfect idiot in the whole world, a brain as smooth as his scalp

Nargund is a private IVF clinic chief executive, who really cares about healthcare inequities

Dunt isn't an idiot, he just plays one for money.

Mason the early Starmer adopter, most consistent apologist/obsequious toady towards him for almost 5 years and all he gets in return is one humiliating rejection after another - which is all he deserves tbf.

I am sorry Tom D you will not be able to vote for this man

I didn't make the shortlist in @IslingtonNorth . Thanks to all those in the CLP who signed up to campaign for me, and to SERA for endorsing me. It's vital that we get out the vote the selected candidate, and keep Islington North red! ✊

— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) May 23, 2024

No-one likes him he does care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtTdQm57_MU

100 empty spots to fill, keep on keeping on Paul

If he wasn't such a weirdo who likes making a shit ton of noise he would've got into one of those.

as well as being a foolish and deeply unlikable man I don't think he's ever been forgiven by the right for his supporting Corbyn years.

Yeah there's no place in today's Labour for people whose politics change with the wind to support their own personal aggrandisement

that's what they'll throw at Starmer, he can offer evidence that he helped finish off Corbyn by quoting the "People's Vote was a conspiracy" parts of the Eagleton book!

he's an embarrassment because he actually believes things, even if he has forced himself to believe them to fit in. I remember a kid like him at school.

No Rwanda flights till after the election. If Reform get their act together its even worse for the Tories.

It also means a very grim debate where Starmer has to promise deportations of sone kind.

Getting suicide-by-cop vibes from all of this, like Sunak is pleading with the election to put him out of his misery.

the guy just wants a long summer break in california so he can pick out a house, move there ASAP, and die horribly in the record-breaking wildfires of 2028 enjoy a long and happy life

maybe it was just a case of lose a suicide-election in the summertime or lose a confidence vote and resign

The calculations are that Rwanda flights will never get off the ground, that inflation might go up (so no interest rate cuts), and that they cannot offer anything but tax rises bcz of the state of public finances.

to gazzara's point, the domiciled tax status laws are getting changed next year yeah?

the way he brought up the furlough scheme yesterday seemed desperate, it was almost like he was inferring he paid it all out of his own pocket.

it was like in the manner of a slimy boss giving you a tiny inconsequential pay rise and then never letting you forget about it

The only time the guy was popular is when he gave lots of people money.

also when he gave us rona dinners

How soon we forget "dishy Rishi".

eat out to help out just a porn video name to most people now

a furlough scheme that was actually proposed and pushed for by McDonnell iirc and which sunak was originally dead set against…

and a furlough scheme which deliberately excluded hundreds of thousands of self-employed people, my wife being among them

xp
to me there's no question that if Corbyn and McDonnell hadn't been at the despatch box in early 2020 we would never have got the furlough measures we did get, flawed as they were

Quietly impressed by The Green Party response here. Has the right people crying about it.

Nothing to see here. Just @TheGreenParty⁩ leader on Radio 4 failing to condemn one of her fellow Green candidates for liking a post which said "we have to destroy Zionism". And she has the chutzpah to refer to the EHRC report into Labour's antisemitism to boot. What a state. pic.twitter.com/QrAo4fynZz

— Mike Katz (@mikekatz) May 23, 2024

From a locked acc:

"On Politics Weekly, Kiran explains that Sunak would rather get drenched than be compared to noted brolly loser Steve McLaren. Optics discourse is incredible"

Union Jack gazebos are a thing:

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/165496541979

behold, the Racism Cube

Don't let Starmer know or he'll be doing his press conferences from inside one.

he already is, psychically

dismal

Keir Starmer needs you to vote for Reform on July 4th.

A vote for Reform is a vote to put Keir Starmer into power. pic.twitter.com/CGVoo5snGc

— Conservatives (@Conservatives) May 23, 2024

in fairness his politics are more or less identical to theirs

And I would have got away with it if it hadn't been for you meddling Conservative Party Central Office political advisers.

A more abstract approach would be better: "vote Labour, you get Starmer as pm" with Starmer getting a Starmer mask yanked off, revealing that this confirms that he is indeed Starmer.

^^
I'm giving this one for free, if my name was saatchi & saatchi I could charge millions for this shit!

I like that, you'll go far in this game

Still an opportunity for Paul Mason

NEW
 
Conservative HQ have emailed asking for candidates in almost 100 seats
 
When candidates ask when the deadline is, they have been told it’s 48 hours, according to 2 I’ve spoken to
 
Some Tory associations are pretty livid at having been left in such an unprepared situation pic.twitter.com/baBLr6TiMK

— Paul McNamara (@PGMcNamara) May 23, 2024

lol, only a matter of time before serial carpetbagger Mason declares that the only way to advance the class struggle is by running as a Tory candidate.

Islington North too, he could run against Corbyn after all!

It’s official!

https://www.islingtontribune.co.uk/article/jeremy-corbyn-why-i-am-standing-as-an-independent-candidate-at-the-general-election

Excited for the Lab right focusing a proportionate amount of time and attention on this.

...though the picture of blair & trump halfway down the article will give me nightmares

just finding time from his busy roles on the Gaza board of peace and advocating for Larry Ellison to turn the UK into a stasi surveillance state, another rare intervention, etc.. etc.. which begs the question, why is this cunt still breathing, and never got executed for war his crimes.

what would they call a Russian disgraced politician (in UK commentariat parlance) who has made megabucks since leaving the government and is still trying to influence a government they are no part of? perhaps an oligarch?

there's a certain irony in Blair claiming we should "abandon net zero" when we've just had the two hottest May days on record. Data centres leeching the water table and polluting the atmosphere all round!

Yeah I swear he wakes up every day worried that he's not the least popular (ex-)politician in the country.

he's always been a fucking psychopath of zero empathy or remorse even by his former friend Rupert Murdoch's standards.

tonybler has clearly had a hair transplant

Richard Murphy's response to Tony Blair

Blair is claiming TINA. I am sure there is TIARA
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2026/05/27/blair-is-claiming-tina-i-am-sure-there-is-tiara/

i've seen at least 3 separate journos use the phrase "rare intervention" this morning, it's like they're just cut and pasting off the press release and assume their readers have sub-goldfish memories. either that or they're just laughing right in our faces at this point.

Seems plausible.

Someone just pointed out to me, Blair's article is actually a classic example of "Client Laundering". He has a number of major AI clients, and if you read the "essay", it's peppered with AI references. So he writes an article ostensibly about Labour, gets a huge response, then…

— (((Dan Hodges))) (@DPJHodges) May 27, 2026

I enjoy how Hodges has been in the ukpolcow trenches so long he's sort of vaguely an asset these days

Skeletor tells labour: erect a statue of jimmy savile in every town and rename the nhs “fuck you”

Real England

Tucked away in a Bob Stanley patreon piece on the Four Seasons, the info that in 2019 MPs were asked their favourite records as part of a National Albums Day:

Tom Watson chose Solid Air, DUP leader Arlene Foster went for Go West's debut, and Nigel Adams went the full Partridge with Queen's Greatest Hits: "Whilst it’s not an actual studio album, it’s the only album I know that has 17 brilliant and incredibly catchy, sing-a-long pop rock songs."

Arlene Foster went for Go West's debut

she's good now

speaking of 2019 what a glorious week for those revenants Blair and Milburn, if not architects of the fucked state of the UK than at least caretakers of the project, being granted a willing audience to tell us that we just need to do more of the same shit that wrecked the social contract in the first place

Nigel Adams went the full Partridge with Queen's Greatest Hits

choosing a greatest hits is surely the correct poptimist position to take on the favourite album question though, unite with tory MP Nigel Adams and support the anti-rockist popular front

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HJZyMssaoAAABLJ?format=png&name=small

a rare Sting intervention on UK politics. This guy who used to boast that he fucks for 18 hours non-stop weighs in on toxic masculinity with seemingly some old fashioned genderised labour ideals that were actually a load of patriarchal toxic macho bullshit back in the day. Tbh didn't read it, just lolled at pic - which is funny as fuck.

Once a school teacher always a school teacher.

I’m sure none of his kids wound up doing manual labour!

If i had money and no social awkwardness dressing up as a Bond villain might be fun

the silly bastards have printed a picture of joss ackland in bill and ted's bogus journey there instead of sting

https://southwarknews.co.uk/news/new-council-leaders-confirmed-after-green-party-and-lib-dem-form-coalition-pact/

Let's see what the Greens will do. It's basically a lab left takeover there with Lib Dem support.

Neil Coyle absolutely losing his shit which means they've already done plenty

Sting, Eno, Gabriel all looking very similar these days

Eno has never looked that ugly tbf.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n10/stefan-collini/squadrons-of-pigs

Always good, but Collini seems to have been writing this piece for the last decade.

xposts He's doing promo for his upcoming musical about the Tyneside (Wallsend) shipyards.

xpost there’s a kind of bookend to that article in the NLR

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/irreversible

there's a lot to read here - https://ukindex.democracycollaborative.org/

Hasan Piker banned from the U.K. for unspecified reasons.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jun/01/us-political-commentators-say-banned-entering-uk-cenk-uygur-hasan-piker

we're past the "thin veneer of a public explanation" phase

yikes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Henry_Nowak

Been blowing up on X and Reddit for a week, horrible in itself of course, but the backlash already looks bad and the worst fucking ghouls are already using it to incite race hate, dread to think what the consequences might be.

Very familiar with The Hobbit, must have been there 20 times in my Southampton days, this also happened there soon after I left - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Hannah_Foster

Feel like there is really some detail missing between Nowak filming and berating Digwa (the reasons for which also seem unclear) and the result.

Yeah I do have to wonder what else Nowak said, not to excuse anything but for all the filmed evidence we still don't have a coherent story.

Matt Goodwin on the BBC, feels like a step up in what is considered acceptable rhetoric

https://bsky.app/profile/huwcdavies.bsky.social/post/3mnckwelchc2o

They would have loved this guy to be a Muslim of course, they'd have been in 7th heaven.

Lol Matt Goodwin you schmuck. Wake me up when a gang of black police officers chokes a white man to death you absolute moron.

Goodwin is a (would-be) professional fascist. Bigger question is why the BBC continues to gleefully platform fascists.

Fascist rioting in Southampton now, fucking hell

Two arrests - sounds like two tier policing to me.

Starmer and Burnham both immediately conceding the point that police are simply too anti-racist, great

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/cocaine-drugs-uk-deaths-police-south-america-b2975580.html

"There has been a 40 per cent cut in real-time spending on adult drug and alcohol services from 2014 to 2022"

Let's invade Colombia instead

Wouldn't want any of the fascist skinheads chucking lit wheelie bins down the street at police to be arrested because that would be racist

get it on, wang a bin, get it on!

(xp) Many of them coked out of their nuts of course!

apparently some quite pure coke is flooding UK working class districts these days. Obv an Mi6 op to encourage deranged racist gammons to start white supremacy riots and inscribe: this wheelie bin kills wokeness on the flying wheelie bin of ouch!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HJ16iMxW8AErjKZ?format=jpg&name=small

this Victorian era cosplaying nazi arsehole not only looks a very stupid cunt, but is stylistically a mess. It's more like charity shop disaster mix up rather than *classic Englishness* or whatever Bryan Ferry was going for on Roxy Music album covers.