The Perfect Element posted:

OwlFancier, do you write about this sort of stuff in any sort of professional capacity, or even for non professional publications? You consistently deliver the most lucid explanation and defence of left wing ideology that I've come across, and I think if more people read your posts than just those in this dead forum, we (well, you) could convert more people to the cause.

Tarnop posted:

I agree with this post. The UKMT as a whole has been a place of great education for me (and I appreciate you all, even the folks I always end up arguing with), but Owl's technique (explained earlier in this thread) for making information understandable and digestible really does produce some valuable posts. That plus the whole cloak, staff, and beard thing has given me a mental image of a sort of political Gandalf striding about the land, imparting wisdom.

Ash Crimson posted:

lets not go too far here

Jedit posted:

I'm presuming that's sarcastic.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that the COVID-19 safety net spending is going to be paid for by ending local council services. Not scaling back or even slashing; councils are just going to cease offering them. I expect the first thing to go will be all branch libraries, but social work is right behind because it's already nearly bankrupt.

Jedit posted:

I'm presuming that's sarcastic.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that the COVID-19 safety net spending is going to be paid for by ending local council services. Not scaling back or even slashing; councils are just going to cease offering them. I expect the first thing to go will be all branch libraries, but social work is right behind because it's already nearly bankrupt.

OwlFancier posted:

Illuminti posted:

I have the guardian, the atlantic, the ny times and the conversation all bookmarked in my browser. I find all of them at times illuminating and frustrating. I realise you all think I've just listed some kind of fascistic reading list.

I wouldn't read any of them because they're all written by middle class journos giving tepid as poo poo takes. You can read what you want but I would suggest trying to be aware that tepid middle class journo takes are likely to influence your politics.

XMNN posted:

like obviously the "but my white British heritage " people were never interested in history, but this is actually a really good time for finding out about things you never knew about

e.g. did you know Henry Morton Stanley was a slave trader who ran the Congo for Leopold? I didn't, but now I do

https://twitter.com/ranja_d/status/1270420575161389058?s=20

rip down his statue and replace it with one of Alice Seeley Harris, who I'd never heard of but seems like a decent person to memorialise in his place

https://twitter.com/tinekepauw/status/1270438808794869761?s=20

XMNN posted:

like obviously the "but my white British heritage " people were never interested in history, but this is actually a really good time for finding out about things you never knew about

e.g. did you know Henry Morton Stanley was a slave trader who ran the Congo for Leopold? I didn't, but now I do

https://twitter.com/ranja_d/status/1270420575161389058?s=20

rip down his statue and replace it with one of Alice Seeley Harris, who I'd never heard of but seems like a decent person to memorialise in his place

https://twitter.com/tinekepauw/status/1270438808794869761?s=20

yaffle posted:

Just make a 30 foot tall statue of that guy and his daughters hands.

Tarnop posted:

Are you speculating here or has the work already begun in manufacturing consent for this?

quote:

https://www.ft.com/content/ef6b2633-5d74-413b-86c9-956fbfabac72
The reinvention of Ed Miliband
Labour’s former leader is back and still convinced it’s time for capitalism to change. Can he make an impact?

5 hours ago

Ed Miliband is back, but he admits some people will be wondering: why? The man who beat his elder brother in the most famous episode of political fratricide in British history, then led the Labour party to catastrophic election defeat, helpfully suggests how our interview to discuss his return to the frontline might be framed: “Relic or relevant? That could be your headline!”

Five years in the political wilderness have sharpened Miliband’s appetite. Restored to Labour’s top team, the man dubbed “Red Ed” by the tabloids has been handed the job of designing the party’s future for a post-Covid British economy, with a brief covering business and climate change. Miliband, 50, insists that the world is a very different place from that harrowing night in 2015 when he left the political stage in despair. “Reforming capitalism is tough and there is big resistance to it,” he says. “But I think the mood has changed.”

He contends that while the financial crash was an insufficient trigger for fundamental change, the social angst exposed by Brexit and the fragility of a global system laid bare by the coronavirus crisis have transformed the political landscape. He is convinced that Britain is now ready to embrace his vision of an active state working in “partnership” with the private sector and driving a green revolution. “The notion that the state just gets out of the way and that will then make for success — that has been buried by this crisis,” he says. “We’ve seen the state and business working together necessarily.”

Perceptions of Miliband have also undergone a transformation in the past few years. He admits the pressures of the Labour leadership turned him into something of an automaton. He was widely portrayed as a hapless figure apparently unable to eat a bacon sandwich and whose idea of a good stunt was to carve a series of pledges on to a 9ft slab of lime, gleefully dubbed the “EdStone” by the media.

But today, in a video interview from his north London home, he is all animation — his arms appear to be in permanent motion — self-deprecating and jokey, sprinkling our conversation with expletives. “What kind of loving question is that?” he expostulates at one point.

“It feels strange how much everything has changed,” says Abby Tomlinson, who started the ­“Milifandom” movement to counter his portrayal in the media in 2015, when she was a sixth-form student (fittingly, she now works in communications). “Now people see him as someone who is up for a laugh, who can make a joke. He’s got good, intelligent ideas and has a wealth of knowledge and experience.”

But is that really enough for Miliband’s second coming to have a significant impact?

A Miliband renaissance of any kind seemed highly improbable in May 2015, when he resigned as Labour leader after taking the party to a disastrous defeat that incurred a net loss of seats on just 30 per cent of the vote. “I was mildly disappointed,” he says with an ironic smile. “OK, I was pretty devastated. It was also, I felt, devastating for the country.”

In his place the party picked the far-left rank outsider Jeremy Corbyn, a consequence in part of a decision Miliband made to allow grassroots members more say over the choice of leader. As Labour headed deeper into its ideological — and electorally barren — comfort zone, Miliband went off to see friends in Australia, growing a beard and reflecting on his failure.

He takes little comfort from the fact that after he stepped down, Conservative leaders Theresa May and Boris Johnson moved on to Labour’s turf to adopt some of his policies, including an energy price cap and more active state intervention, higher public spending and regional activism. “Vindication doesn’t do much for me,” he says.

Corbyn famously responded to his decisive election defeat last year by claiming he had “won the argument” but Miliband is not about to follow suit. “I take responsibility for having lost that [2015] election,” he says. “The notion that the show was great but the audience was poor is not one that I subscribe to. I think that I wasn’t bold enough . . . [that] there was more of an appetite for change than I perhaps realised.”

Instead, he pursued a soft-left agenda promising to take on economic “predators”, to rein in privatised monopolies and to undertake some limited redistribution. He was unable to dent the central message of David Cameron’s Conservative party that the country needed more austerity to sort out the mess left by the financial crash, or to expose the danger posed to the economy by Cameron’s pledge of a Brexit referendum, a policy opposed by Labour.

“There was modest social democratic reform, which is essentially what I was offering, versus the gamble of the European referendum,” he says. “A paper like the FT preferred the gamble and I think quite a lot of business preferred the gamble. They underestimated the gamble, I think.”

He admits there were aspects of the top job he didn’t handle well. “I think there’s something about being the leader of the Labour party which imposes big pressures and I think I probably succumbed too much.” He says he was “robotic” at times, desperately trying to look like a prime-minister-in-waiting, warily viewing every bacon sandwich as a disaster waiting to happen.

Yet, even in the aftermath of defeat, Miliband “never really thought about leaving politics”. He decided not to follow his father Ralph Miliband, the renowned Marxist academic, into an ivory tower and instead returned to the back benches as MP for Doncaster North. And then, rather against everybody’s expectations, something remarkable happened. “The public discovered I had a personality,” he smiles, his hands pushing deep into his slightly greying hair.

As Miliband was about to be reminded, there is nothing the British public loves more than a loser. Where previously his academic air and occasionally goofy looks had proved an electoral liability, now they combined with a waspish and hitherto-suppressed sense of humour to create a more intriguing package. One of the earliest signs of this reinvention came in 2017 when, with the broadcaster Geoff Lloyd, Miliband launched the Reasons to be Cheerful podcast, an affable look at political ideas, on which he owns a made-up dog called “Chutney”, and even burst into a rendition of “We All Stand Together” by Paul McCartney & The Frog Chorus. According to Miliband, the podcast pulls in 60,000-80,000 listeners a week.

Other offers started to come in from unlikely places, Miliband recalls, including a proposed reality-TV show where “you had to get fit and then show your fit bod”. He turned that down, along with opportunities to appear on other shows such as Drive, Dancing on Ice and — he archly notes — the “after-show” party on I’m a Celebrity. “Oh, and Celebrity Bake Off.” As he reels off the list, Miliband sounds relieved that the public eventually got to see another side of him. The demands of leading Labour had, he says tactfully, put him “in a certain space with a certain persona, which can be problematic”.

Miliband’s spell in charge of Labour ended badly, but it began in the bitterest of circumstances too. It was the fag end of the New Labour era, as the party’s 13-year dominance of British politics came to an end, when he succeeded Gordon Brown on September 25 2010. On a day of agonising drama, he unexpectedly beat his elder brother David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, to take the party crown.

As Miliband was about to be reminded, there is nothing the British public loves more than a loser. Where previously his academic air and occasionally goofy looks had proved an electoral liability, now they combined with a waspish and hitherto-suppressed sense of humour to create a more intriguing package. One of the earliest signs of this reinvention came in 2017 when, with the broadcaster Geoff Lloyd, Miliband launched the Reasons to be Cheerful podcast, an affable look at political ideas, on which he owns a made-up dog called “Chutney”, and even burst into a rendition of “We All Stand Together” by Paul McCartney & The Frog Chorus. According to Miliband, the podcast pulls in 60,000-80,000 listeners a week.

Other offers started to come in from unlikely places, Miliband recalls, including a proposed reality-TV show where “you had to get fit and then show your fit bod”. He turned that down, along with opportunities to appear on other shows such as Drive, Dancing on Ice and — he archly notes — the “after-show” party on I’m a Celebrity. “Oh, and Celebrity Bake Off.” As he reels off the list, Miliband sounds relieved that the public eventually got to see another side of him. The demands of leading Labour had, he says tactfully, put him “in a certain space with a certain persona, which can be problematic”.

Miliband’s spell in charge of Labour ended badly, but it began in the bitterest of circumstances too. It was the fag end of the New Labour era, as the party’s 13-year dominance of British politics came to an end, when he succeeded Gordon Brown on September 25 2010. On a day of agonising drama, he unexpectedly beat his elder brother David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, to take the party crown.

His decision to return to the front bench in April, when new Labour leader Keir Starmer offered him the post of shadow business, energy and industrial strategy secretary, reflects this belief that Britain is on the cusp of great change. He argues that the cumulative effect of the 2008 financial crash, the public dissatisfaction with the status quo expressed in the 2016 Brexit referendum, and the convulsions caused by Covid-19 make profound reform unavoidable, and says the state has a key role to play. He cites the example of retraining laid-off Rolls-Royce aircraft engine-makers: “They could be incredibly useful to the future of our renewables industry.”

Miliband is also an admirer of Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions whom he encouraged to stand for parliament back in 2015 and whom he describes as “an incredibly decent bloke with incredibly good values”. And yet he admits, “I had to think hard about coming back now, in truth, because my last experience of the frontline was pretty full-on”.

He adds that his wife, high-court judge Justine Thornton, “might agree with that description”. Their sons Sam and Daniel are aged nine and 11 respectively. “These are pretty critical years. I wouldn’t recommend losing an election but one of the virtues for me was that it allowed me to be a proper father and husband. So these are difficult dilemmas. But I’m glad I decided to come back.”

So Ed Miliband is back. Whether he can help Labour overhaul an 80-seat Tory majority at the next election to implement any of the above ideas remains a huge question. “I think it’s a big mountain to climb, we shouldn’t be under any illusions about that,” he says. “But I think this is a moment of reassessment. You’ve got to go out and make your arguments and see where we are.”

He believes that under Starmer’s leadership, there is at least a prospect of the party presenting a united front at the next election after five years of “incredibly damaging factionalism”. “Most people say, ‘Let’s bury our differences,’” he adds. “We’re good at burying our similarities.”

So far Starmer has made it his mission to appear statesmanlike and to sideline the Corbynites without trumpeting the fact. The new Labour leader, like Miliband, believes soft-left social democracy will strike a chord with voters who can see the state coming to their rescue in the face of a pandemic.

Peter Mandelson, a leading Blairite, fears that Labour may be about to make a huge strategic mistake. “People can see the difference between emergency measures and normal times,” he says. “We would be fooling ourselves if we thought the country, as a result of the Covid experience, is now ready for some ideological project to usher in state control of the economy.”

But Stewart Wood, who was Miliband’s consigliere during his leadership, says his former boss has come through the “brutal” experience of election defeat and his moment has now arrived. “Ed spent his time as leader of the opposition trying to get rewriting the rules of our economy up in lights . . . It wasn’t enough for us to win in 2015. But the Covid crisis has made the question of rebuilding our economy the central question of the next few years.”

As for the most famous sibling rivalry in British politics, Miliband says that relations with his elder brother are healing. “He’s in New York — we talk quite a lot. We talk about my mum, we talk about the world, we talk about the pandemic. It happened a long time ago.”

Indeed, it is easy to see Ed Miliband’s own time in the furnace of British politics as ancient history. The pre-Brexit, pre-Covid era seems a lifetime ago; contemporaries such as Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg are long gone.

But he insists that he is still relevant, not a relic. “There’s this Milton Friedman line about when a crisis hits, it’s the ideas that are lying around that get picked up”. Miliband’s gamble is that his career, like his ideas, can yet be retrieved from the floor.

George Parker is the FT’s political editor. Jim Pickard is the FT’s chief political correspondent

Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Listen to our podcast, Culture Call, where FT editors and special guests discuss life and art in the time of coronavirus. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Jedit posted:

I'm speculating about the libraries, but they were already on the front line in the last round of cuts so that's not an unreasonable assumption to make.

And there is no manufacturing of anything. Local authorities have simply been informed that they will receive no additional funding to compensate for the extra expenses and loss of income incurred from the present crisis. Everything else is privileged information, but it's valid. File an FOI request with your local authority if you want it.

Jedit posted:

Oh, and unemployment is up to 13%. So it's probably going to hit 25% after No Deal Brexit.

The Perfect Element posted:

OwlFancier, do you write about this sort of stuff in any sort of professional capacity, or even for non professional publications? You consistently deliver the most lucid explanation and defence of left wing ideology that I've come across, and I think if more people read your posts than just those in this dead forum, we (well, you) could convert more people to the cause.

Jose posted:

https://twitter.com/jdpoc/status/1270391835047976961?s=20

sinky posted:

I think you'll find that the UK economy is number 1


x

Jose posted:

https://twitter.com/jdpoc/status/1270391835047976961?s=20

XMNN posted:

like obviously the "but my white British heritage " people were never interested in history, but this is actually a really good time for finding out about things you never knew about

e.g. did you know Henry Morton Stanley was a slave trader who ran the Congo for Leopold? I didn't, but now I do

https://twitter.com/ranja_d/status/1270420575161389058?s=20

rip down his statue and replace it with one of Alice Seeley Harris, who I'd never heard of but seems like a decent person to memorialise in his place

https://twitter.com/tinekepauw/status/1270438808794869761?s=20

Tarnop posted:

It's following the Osborne austerity template, so I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone


Next couple of weeks is the deadline for getting in redundancy notices before companies start paying for furlough, so I'd expect we're going to hit 25% well before Brexit

josh04 posted:

DNEG, one of the big vfx firms in Soho, just announced 200 redundancies.

quote:

I suspect this has been the agenda all along. The neoliberal extremists who populate the front benches have long sought to rip down our public protections, rip down our public services, rip down everything that stands in the way of the most vicious form of capitalism. A trade deal with the US allows them to do so while disclaiming responsibility for the consequences. Once they have signed it, they can claim that, sadly, their hands are tied. They could say that unfortunately, the rules don’t allow us to maintain food standards and force us to open the NHS to competition. Perhaps mistakes were made during the negotiations but it’s a done deal now, enforced by legal instruments, and there’s nothing we can do. They know they could never obtain public consent for these policies. A US trade deal would impose them without consent.

Even parliamentary consent is unnecessary. The trade bill, which has now reached the committee stage in the House of Commons, makes no provision for parliamentary scrutiny of any deal. Parliament has no legal right under this bill to debate or vote on a trade deal, or even to know what it contains. The bill also grants the government Henry VIII powers to change the law on trade agreements without parliamentary approval. The governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are granted no formal role in negotiating or approving trade treaties. In other words, nothing is being left to chance. This is not democracy. This is elective dictatorship.

To make matters worse, the US is likely to insist that the deal is enforced by an offshore tribunal, which allows corporations to sue governments if domestic law affects their “future anticipated profits”. This mechanism has been used all over the world to punish nations for laws their parliaments have passed. It ensures that, over time, legislation everywhere has to be tailored to the demands of corporate power. Far from taking back control, a trade deal on these lines with the US involves a massive renunciation of sovereign power.

peanut- posted:

This article from Monbiot on the implications of a US trade deal is just savagely depressing, in case you were wondering what the government's actual priorities are while we're distracted by all the other bullshit.

Recommend reading the whole thing, but:

Camrath posted:

Fudge Update

Fudge orders are being shipped out today!

This has been by far the busiest month for mailed out orders, and it’s all thanks to you lovely people. The vets bills that we were hit with last month have been covered completely, and I’ve also been able to put funds aside for future issues resulting from my cats being idiots.

Both the boys are fully healed up now, and are massively grateful (in as much as a cat can be) for the support and solidarity you’ve all shown. And their gratitude is only exceeded by that of myself and my wife.

I tried to get a picture of the two of them together for you all, but unfortunately that just was /not/ going to happen.



Edit: Khajiit has fudge if you have coin..

Camrath posted:

kecske posted:

name and shame the fatty who ordered the double size box

quote:

Sir Keir Starmer welcomes what Johnson said about newly-shielding people being covered by the furlough scheme.

Turning to Black Lives Matters, he says the recommendations from the Lammy report on the way BAME treated are treated by the criminal justice are yet to be implemented. And the Windrush report recommendations have not been implemented either. When will that happen?

Johnson says the government is implementing these. He says the number of BAME people in the prison service is being increased. Cameras are being rolled out for police officers.

But it is vital that we keep our streets safe, he says, and that we back the police.

...

Starmer says Labour will hold the government to that.

He turns to the PHE report on Covid and disparities. He says it said it was already clear policy should be changed to mitigate the risk. Why is that not happening?

Johnson says the government is acting. It is looking at the exposure of BAME groups to coronavirus. He says high-contact professions are getting expanded and targeted testing. That is the first and most practical step that can be taken, he says.

...

Maria Miller, a Conservative, says there have been many peaceful protests against racism. She commends the PM for recognising the significance of them. Will he look again at systemic racism in government?

Johnson says all political leaders should promote these issues. He is proud of what he did as mayor on BAME issues, he says.

...

Sir Ed Davey, the acting Lib Dem leader, says black people are 47 times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people.

Johnson says these powers are important for fighting violent crime. Knife crime is a problem. He says stop and search is not the whole answer, but it is part of the mix.

XMNN posted:

https://twitter.com/BellRibeiroAddy/status/1270404888757972993?s=20

it's quite lo res but there's someone who could be the absolute boy on the back left

Jaeluni Asjil posted:

Pretty sure it is, downloaded the photo and blew it up about 400%.

sinky posted:

I think you'll find that the UK economy is number 1


x