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.

Not sure joining the Lib Dems would have been the route I’d have taken after that, tbh.

oh I know, that was a major red flag, lol!

Not a very red flag though.

Hate to say it but Polanski and the Greens (and some of their supporters on twitter) give me Clegg-era Lib Dem vibes but I hope I'm wrong.

Agreed but party politics, maybe all politics, does involve working with or gaining the cooperation of some complete idiots

I say this as a complete idiot

Is he not of an age to have joined the Kennedy iteration of Lib Dems?

Joined under Farron and left two years later when they wouldn’t let him stand as an MP, iirc.

I should say i am pretty sceptical of Polanski and his agenda (wealth tax proposal is weaker than Elizabeth Warren’s one, etc) but it matters much less with the Greens than it would with a party that has a more top-down decision structure.

Jus incredible to me that the single USP this government claimed from the beginning was that it would make the Labour Party electable again by pivoting hard from left-populist Corbynism into a centrist politics of managerial competence and fiscal responsibility so they created all these rules for themselves to prove it and ran a million miles away from anything even vaguely controversial except it turns out that nobody gives a shit about managerial competence they just want an affordable life but that would require difficult choices and political courage and anybody capable of that has been expunged from the party in a ruthless flopsweat about the aforementioned respectability and competence so the upshot is that they have now made themselves toxically unelectable!!! THE OHHHH THE IRONING

I think if it were just that, it would be easier to come back from. But so many of those with power in the party (mcsweeney, reeves) seem driven less by pragmatism or a sense of 'what the public really wants' and more by their fantasies of 'being in charge' and 'smiting their enemies'. Streeting and Mahmood seem, at least to some extent, opportunistic chancers. On this front, Starmer is still comparatively enigmatic to me. It's really hard to tell whether he believes in any of this.

imo he's a wet-brained simp who enjoys the trappings of power and has learnt how to attain this position from basically from just doing everything the opposite way to Corbyn. i.e. starve kids, be an unquestioning kneejerk pro Nato Atlanticist, bend your knee for the King (while you suck his crusty bollox), be ready to launch trident nukes (even though they don't even work) if Corbyn said breathing was good he'd be asking for some anti-oxygen policies. Problem is McSweeney is quite braindead and seems to have been running the show, he's just some weird right-wing geek drunk on power and who thinks he's Rasputin. There is no economically literate people in the party, hence the magic belief that they could grow the economy just because they are not Tories on a minor technicality.

Also conversely I think Corbyn has a similar instinct for paying bullshit lip service to the democratic processes of the party while sneakily centralising all power. More of a Labour Party thing than a uniquely Starmer/Corbyn thing.

I think Stephen Bush recently described the Tories as acting like a government - putting out complex 30-point budget proposals, etc, years ahead of an election they won’t win, and Labour as acting like an opposition - lots of strongly-worded statements, condemnations, agenda-setting, etc, but little actual governing.

It does look like Labour has little faith in the idea that government can proactively change anything in practice.

Owen Jones being sued for libel over BBC Gaza article
https://www.thenational.scot/news/25600664.owen-jones-sued-libel-bbc-gaza-article/

JOURNALIST Owen Jones is being sued for libel after an article about the BBC's coverage of the genocide in Gaza allegedly led to an editor receiving death threats.

Raffi Berg

context: includes a link to the original article

Raffi Berg: BBC Middle East Editor Exposed as CIA, Mossad Collaborator
https://www.mintpressnews.com/bbc-israel-coverage-raffi-berg-cia-mossad-links/288909/

He'll have to have strong crowdfunding game if the BBC are going in two feet like this

looks like it's Berg who's suing rather than the BBC

maybe OJ's MI5 paymasters will help him out (joeks). Actually I have not trusted OJ since 2015 and at vital moments he has pivoted towards the establishment and against the left, like during early Corbyn and then during the cooked up Labour antisemitism *crisis*. Like the Novara lot, there is something palpably just not trustworthy or genuine about him. Yeah I know I'm breaking crank here, but just do not trust the fucker. And the fucking Novara lot, they have like a thousand live YT viewers and they can afford to pay for production staff and an expanding team of presenters and pay themselves (and a useless thick twat like Michael Walker) decent wages. Who funds these grifters!

there was that scandal in the US where it came out that the Dems were pumping dark money into politics influencers and paying them $8k a month as long as they kept stum about it and towed the line. The UK version of this will be exposed and it will turn out the dark money in this case was like £20 per week and a few crates of sprite.

I'm really getting obsessed with how insidious and evil Bastani is. Because there are some decent people who contribute towards NM. And I imagine it's a vital revenue stream for them. So then they are in hock to Bastani and whoever the fuck is funding his project. So he could potentially monopolise all left-wing content in the UK and they will never be able to criticise all the horrible racist, transphobic or conservative positions Bastani has taken in the name of clicks or whatever other reason over the years.

I mean Tommy Robinson thinks Bastani is a good guy and has praised him publicly

I'm not saying you're wronng because i didn't really follow him too much before the last couple of years so i'm not so clued up on all that baggage, but Owen Jones' content on Gaza has seemed pretty spot on to me. Not enough voices in the media saying what he's saying at the moment.

Anyway, come on villa, let's have some goals against these grim fucks

It's pretty hard not to be spot on a genocide if you are a putatively left-wing commentariat person, not any other options! But he did also write a pro-Zionist book on Israel. It's common part of his M.O. First launder your left-wing rep in some manageable way and then slyly punch right. He's just got no fucking principles.

calzino's impassioned defense of Raffi Berg has won me over

i dunno, i'm happy to hear dissent about some of this stuff to counterbalance the echochamber of my instagram feed. raffi berg can do one though

I'd defend Paul Mason before I'd defend that cunt! Sorry anyway I'm tired and ranting like crazy here. But everything stands!

I meant to say punch left, of course!

It's never been that OJ was particularly excellent, he just wasn't a complete shithead, it's easy to look good when the bar is so low. We live in a timeline where "LGBT people should have rights" and "genocide is bad" are seen as extremist positions.

the bar is so fucking low I actually started watching Novara Media for coverage on the genocide because the BBC was so sickmakingly murder compliant as the horror started. Never forget that some of these putatively left people are also dodgy as fuck. The UK secret services have mostly never bothered with infiltrating neo-fascist (or even o.g, Mosley fascists in the 30's) because they were, or still are perceived as pro-royalty/pro unionist/anti-insurgent political activists and therefore a necessary and more welcome thing than commies and socialists. So just never think it's too conspiratorial to doubt the intentions of people who have the political consistency of bad faith actors... imo

thank fuck for my internet radio so I can get Al Jazeera news on the morning in the kitchen now. Radio 4 was destroying my mental health.

Like there is a Scottish account I follow on twitter called MSM monitor (terrible name but good account) that kind of just logs all the pro Unionist/anti SNP media activity by BBC Scotland and other branches of Scottish media. It's just a good reminder that the BBC is a fucking deep state op these days, and little else!

Novara (Michael Walker at least) did the first decent vid I saw on the MTA ultras in Amsterdam so will give them that.

Sami Hamdi's wife (he's the UK journalist that has been arrested and detained by ICE agents in the US) was not very happy with him making judgemental comments on her husband after playing an obviously AI or Edit Suite manipulated video designed to make her husband look as bad as possible because he is pro-Palestine. If he wants to call himself a journalist, he's deffo UK standard.

And yet my sister-in-law, who grew up in Israel, recently was ranting on Facebook about the BBC being heinously anti-Israel and lots of her friends and relations chimed in to say they've stopped watching BBC News and even stopped paying the licence fee!

lool, it's enough to drive you insane at times!

another Michael Walker classic was that Starmer referencing Enoch Powell in the "Island of Starngers" speech was remotely racist at all. He's so fucking thick he's not fit to analyse tiddlywinks tournaments, never mind fucking politics.

*was not^

fucking typing going nuts here

Well done Lucy Powell, the PM’s newly elected Deputy Leader. Advising government to keep its Manifesto promises on tax is good advice.

— John Redwood (@johnredwood) November 7, 2025

Not sure what Powell is up to as it’s hard to see any ‘left’ challenge to Starmer being able to promise ‘more money in people’s pockets’ rather than tax increases.

thank fuck for my internet radio so I can get Al Jazeera news on the morning in the kitchen now. Radio 4 was destroying my mental health.

― vodkaitamin effrtvescent (calzino), Thursday, November 6, 2025 9:09 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I've never been able to bear radio 4 for a minute. I had a housemate who loved to play it in the kitchen and it drove me insane. i would always change the dial to a local pirate radio station that was just this guy, who had been up all night, interrupting drum and bass tracks for shoutouts every 15 seconds. my housemate would change it back.

I was a bit surprised by the recent characterisation of Powell as 'to the left' and 'an ally of Burnham.' In part because I sometimes feel like I'm the only person who remembers pre-Corbyn Burnham. But also because I remember Powell being heavily present in the Starmer team pre-general election. I guess that was gesturing to the 'soft left' or whatever. I cant picture her as a credible one-woman wrecking show. If that's the biggest threat they have internally i can't imagine mcsweeney is quaking.

I've got to that stage to be not able to bear R4 for ten seconds. There is no way back from that!

Powell has never seemed like someone who even knows what day it is never mind internal party plotting! It's even hard to pin her to the soft left. I can't even remember what she did to get sacked by Starmer. But some good old fashioned Norwegian style tax and spend should be a normal soft left position. Fuck knows what she is on about here.

Reeves being an economically illiterate moron making stupid unviable Tory style election pledges and slavishly sticking to Osborne's OBR bullshit is the problem here. Any other answer means you are fiscally right wing.

at the very least im glad powell seems to have forced a couple of awkward questions on the anti-trans stuff, though i am not suggesting those wont be easily dismissed

Bizarrely Yaxley-Lennon just passed our picket in the back of a black cab.

I mean we're just alongside St Pancras so maybe it isn't bizarre but nonetheless.

Solidarity can come from the most unlikely places.

it could be all time in his youth that he spent in libraries

Apologies for my ignorance but what are you picketing?

British Library.

PCS comrades solidarity

does being GB homesec turn you into a rw shithead or is it only rw shitheads that are qualified to be GB homesec

Mahmood was already a member of Labour Together before attaining high office so fair to say she has been a right-wing twat for some time