joedevola posted:

I just got interviewed by Newsnight on the street. Due to the wind I think the reporter misheard me, she seemed to think I had a "unionist background".

I'll never be allowed back into West Belfast.

kecske posted:

this confused me initially as Bozza used to be a guy who posted here about trains a lot

JeremoudCorbynejad posted:

They rent. Oh, and they're on zero hour contracts in retirement lol

They're not poor though. Firmly middle class in many respects, dad has a decent pension (retired cop lmao) and at the moment they still own a wood

quote:

Jeremy Corbyn is speaking at a Labour event in Carlisle.

He talks about the report about the UK from the UN special rapporteur on poverty. That is shaming, he says.

He says he is glad the press highlighted the problems with the NHS yesterday. And he says it is extraordinary that, when Boris Johnson was asked about this, he chose to put the phone showing the picture in his pocket.

The dossier from the UK-US trade talks showed that the NHS is on the table in those negotiations, he says. He says people have a right to know what was going on, he says, and that is why Labour published it.

He says people accuse him of politicising the NHS. But setting up the NHS was a political choice, he says. And he says Aneurin Bevan said it would last as long as there were folk around to fight for it. Well, we are folk, and we will fight for it, he says.

Azza Bamboo posted:

Saros posted:

Who is in London thursday night and would be up for a pub meet to watch the election and toast Boris and Raab losing their seats.

Azza Bamboo posted:

JeremoudCorbynejad posted:

Did you ask the interviewer why the government can't just get their heads together and sort it ahhhhhhhht

E

Azza Bamboo posted:

https://twitter.com/AzzaBamboo/status/1204436382883729413

quote:

One wholesaler, 39-year-old Adam Leggett, says he did not used to vote but he is now backing Johnson. He argues that “Boris seems like a normal working class guy, he’ll get my vote”. Undeterred when reminded of the prime minister’s background, he says: “Like you say he went to Eton. But have any prime ministers not been to public school? They’re all from chosen stock aren’t they?”

Jack the Lad posted:

From this - bolding mine.

Tesseraction posted:

Let slip the memes of war!

Jack the Lad posted:

From this - bolding mine.

quote:

“Like you say he went to Eton. But have any prime ministers not been to public school? They’re all from chosen stock aren’t they?”

quote:

If you were to go by British political programming, there’s only one kind of battleground that matters in this general election. Forget about Liberal Democrat/Conservative marginals in the south-west (snoozefest), don’t worry your pretty little head about the SNP, and who gives a stuff about Northern Ireland when their MPs aren’t propping up an English prime minister? All eyes are turned to the “red wall” – a phrase absolutely no one was using a month ago. It’s a collection of Labour-held leave-voting seats in the north and Midlands, populated solely by Workington man. Or so believes a certain breed of Westminster journalist who loves an opportunity to airily homogenise those bits of the country which aren’t yet served by the Victoria line.

Call me a vulgar Marxist if you must, but a quick look at the economic status of the UK’s yoof tells you why it’s so absurd to treat “young” and “working class” as mutually exclusive categories: 81% of graduates will spend 30 years of their working lives with tuition debt hanging over their heads; half of 18- to 24-year-olds believe they’ll be in debt all their lives; one-fifth of all workers under 30 (going up to a quarter for young black people) are illegally paid less than the minimum wage. Young people are more likely to be on a zero-hours contract, and far less likely than previous generations to own their home. Don’t let the avocado toast fool you – young people make up the majority of the UK’s income- and asset-poor.

The assumption that “working class” and “young people” are two irreconcilable brackets can’t be blamed on one psephologist though. It comes from the National Readership Society’s (NRS) system of social grading. You might have heard the categories ABC1 and C2DE referred to gnomically by pollsters and pundits as bywords for “middle class” and “working class” respectively. Developed more than 50 years ago, and unchanged since, the NRS model has its origins in market research, and works by classifying according to the occupation of “the head of the household”. So ABC1 includes everyone from senior management to the temp in admin. C2DE contains skilled and unskilled manual workers, the unemployed, and some pensioners. Do you see the problem?

Britain’s done a lot of changing in the past 50 years. The decline of manufacturing and heavy industry under Margaret Thatcher ripped the economic heart out of huge swathes of the country, and dramatically transformed class composition. It created what Prof Guy Standing calls “the precariat”: a class of low-paid and precariously employed white-collar workers, whose income is so insecure that they cannot be thought of as holding a traditional occupation in any meaningful sense. So the manual v non-manual labour divide is no longer a meaningful way to think about class. It’s absurd to categorise someone on a rubbish wage in retail, hospitality or the service industry as being part of the same class bracket (ABC1) as a banker.

But most importantly, the NRS social grade doesn’t measure wealth. Which is why putting pensioners in the same bracket as the unemployed is an utterly ridiculous way to think about how class works in this country. Pensioners are not a homogenous group when it comes to money: 16% of pensioners live in poverty, rising to 36% among private renters. Those on fixed incomes are disproportionately hurt by Britain’s cost of living crisis, and one in six are forced to choose between food and heating come the winter.

But it’s also the case that there is a clear generational gap in wealth between Britain’s older and younger people, and one which doesn’t seem set to close anytime soon. One in six baby boomers in the UK owns a second home, and a whopping one in five is a millionaire. Those who are able to capitalise on access to credit and the low cost of housing in decades past have been able to benefit from, and indeed exacerbate, the same overheated housing market which has locked out young people. It’s possible then, for a pensioner who lives off wealth to be classed as a C2DE, while a debt-laden millennial just about surviving on low wages gets classed as ABC1.

The NRS social grade can’t be trusted to measure class at all. And so using it as a basis on which to decry Labour’s loss of the working class is completely and utterly flawed. In fact, mobilising the vote of working-class young people in “red wall” seats might be the key to frustrating Boris Johnson in this general election. Millennials in both the east and west Midlands, as well as Yorkshire and the Humber, have endured some of the sharpest falls in living standards out of anywhere in the UK.

Braggart posted:

Trickjaw posted:

Our boys are kicking it with hijacking Tory memes. Who thought we would end up on this particular battleground?

The Times posted:

Labour has gained a “flying start” on the Conservatives in its social media campaign as aggressive, anti-establishment messages appear to be beating clever Tory memes.

Bundy posted:

The bodying of the Love Actually and JCB memes is just

Also that Facebook account wasn't "hacked" her Tory troll of a progeny used her account, obviously.

Puntification posted:

I don't want to suggest another poster kill their own mother but I will anyway, it's time to smother her with a pillow.

Ora Tzo posted:

Tesseraction posted:

At least the term 'frape' has gone out of common vernacular.

sinky posted:

Do you seriously think I would explain my master stroke to you if there were even the slightest possibility you could affect the outcome? I nationalised them 35 minutes ago.

Bobby Deluxe posted:

BizarroAzrael posted:

I thought about making exactly this regarding May's prospects but was concerned about it being read as approving of violence against women.

Barry Foster posted:

Noice keep us updated.

Also, last call for brizzles for canvassing. I've skipped my bus so I'm committed now

Failed Imagineer posted:

Begun, the Meme Wars have