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Taintrunner posted:American here, is there any reason I don't want Corbyn to win? he's got weird foreign policy hobbyhorses that the United States domestic politics also tends to be also involved in, not necessarily on the same side - you can be sure that at least someone in the Irish National Caucus wishes they were relevant again. conversely there's an undying faith on the part of British leftists that makes them think that they are automatically invited to comment on Latin American affairs by virtue of international solidarity. This plays for their audiences but starts totally unnecessary piles of diplomatic paperwork for yours. the popularity of "smart" sanctions instead of blunt hammers or more aggressive approaches is contingent on a certain degree of consensus, particularly amongst financial centers, as to who or what belongs on the target list. You can be drat well sure nobody in Belgium paid any price for unanimously cheering the withdrawal from UNAMIR in 1994. Dehaenes at least has the excuse that it was Rwandans or the Euro, and he'd rather have the Euro - he plausibly didn't do it just to score points at home, although he was certainly awarded those points. e: alternate post: because this card works much better for the USSR player 
ronya fucked around with this message at 06:07 on May 1, 2017 |
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May 1, 2017 05:46
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it makes a perverse sense if one knows that the meeting will be leaked anyway, so one plays to the actual intended audience, i.e. the headlines after a summary, transcript, or even whole audio recording is leaked this, we tell ourselves, is Democratic Government. I blame Tony Benn.
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May 1, 2017 08:48
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LemonDrizzle posted:https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/renters-on-housing-benefit-barred-from-buy-to-let-homes-cw0qcw9cq in idealised mortgage-to-let, the bank puts up the capital. the landlord puts up the collateral. the tenant puts up the rent. It would normally make no sense for landlords to, other things equal, want to take on more risk, since they're the ones paying for the risk. for some proportion of BTLs, i'm guessing, the landlord puts up the capital, the bank makes the gains tax-deductible, and the tenancy is a pure cost to obtain the tax-deductibility: the landlord intends to liquidate the moment the mortgage expires and then re-enter the cycle again. The collateral is actually not sufficient to cover the costs of default; any additional risk of default, therefore, does not fall on the landlord.
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May 1, 2017 11:39
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quote:Mr Farron told the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1 that he had “resigned from the Liberal Democrat frontbench about ten years ago because I am a bit of a Eurosceptic.” wow, is there a clumsier way to posture at anti-establishmentarianism
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May 1, 2017 11:41
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In another world, the Sun prints yet another photograph of Prime Minister Miliband masticating a sarnie, and no one cares.
ronya fucked around with this message at 16:12 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 16:10
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forkboy84 posted:Talking of guff newspapers, went to Glasgow on Monday for a gig & picked up a Morning Star to read on the train. I like a lot of things about it, the focus on industrial news is good and a nice change from gushing over Kim Kardashian or whatever, but they get really embarrassing when they started chatting about the protests in Venezuela. The insistence of a large section of the left in refusing to accept that ostensibly left wing regimes can go bad and do lovely things is an eternal frustration. poo poo is hosed in Venezuela, Maduro has been a bad leader, poverty has increased in the country, you don't have to instinctively defend him. But I suppose old habits die hard when you're from the party that split off from the CPGB because they were too reformist. my entirely anecdotal impression is that the Western left news coverage of Venezuela was thawing for a bit, and then immediately froze over again after the narrow Ecuador election there's something sexy about Latin America that holds the imagination, even though Kerala is right there
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May 3, 2017 14:13
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It's a distribution pattern to keep in mind - the middle class is where the tax revenue is, because that's where the millions of people are. The ultra-rich are very, very rich, but there are terribly few of them. In that vein, here's an interesting 2016 essay by Daniel Davies, presenting a theory of postwar history that is basically reverse Marxism: the dog that didn't bark is the absence of class struggle of the rich, and the entire neoliberal era is simply capital bothering to make itself felt. The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, but Marx merely misapprehended the direction. ronya fucked around with this message at 16:22 on May 3, 2017 |
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May 3, 2017 16:19
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Be careful of that one. It inexorably leads you down the merry garden path of Workfare.
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May 3, 2017 16:25
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the problem with an inevitable Labour loss is that everyone who is someone is going to be hunkering down for the post-GE battle for the party
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May 5, 2017 17:28
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andy burnham's decision to bide his time in manchester looks better and better, really
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May 5, 2017 17:40
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The time to raise council taxes is now, when even Tory councils in wealthy neighbourhoods are having to do it too. But still, Labour can't run on raising council taxes higher than the Tories - a large amount of very slow, steady work has gone into engineering a tax revolt politics.
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May 5, 2017 18:58
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running as British Obama will probably buy him a lot of leeway from Blairites
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May 5, 2017 19:20
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Blairites and Blue Labour did not get along very well.
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May 5, 2017 19:28
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the boldest of bold predictions: he'd pledge party unification and healing divides, then use Brexit as hammer to keep a stable of Momentum and Blairite and Fabian endorsements on side. the act of doing so will trigger battles within Momentum and Progress types, which will present opportunities for the new Labour leader to engineer a factional coalition in his own favour. whether or not Leader Lewis pulls it off is anyone's guess. he won't have premiership to distract him for a while, certainly. he has the advantage that Bremaining is popular amongst party members and committee machinery, even if it's not very (ahem) Electable at large - however, the Labour right is willing to forgive such unelectability if it means waving the banner of liberal internationalism (no surprise there).
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May 5, 2017 19:49
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Darth Walrus posted:Yeah, there's two ways ex-soldiers can go - authoritarian hard-right lunatic or pacifist, socially-conscious lefty. He seems to be the latter variety. He did say this and that.
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May 5, 2017 19:57
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OwlFancier posted:Trident I don't entirely count as militarist because it's not like you can actually use it to invade people. It's stupid, but it's stupid in a different way and kind of a non-issue kind of stupid as well in a lot of ways. It's more of a time-and-place positioning on the Labour pacifist spectrum. Note the dates.
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May 5, 2017 20:06
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I feel like you are perhaps too charitable here - it reads like a politician politicking to me which is not, you know, in itself bad this is not the first time that we've disagreed over how honestly politicians hold a belief, I note
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May 5, 2017 20:13
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hakimashou posted:... a politician complaining about the press is as absurd as a sailor complaining about the sea. Navigating a way through is simply what they have to do. focused-grouped, headline-guided triangulation is a major ideological point of contention, not a minor side issue, surely we don't describe it in terms of "false consciousness" any more but there is still a broad assumption amongst the Labour left that 1) the people at large are left-wing, but 2) are not yet consciously organised as such, and 3) await only a movement that can awaken this latent tendency the iron logic of triangulation is terminally limiting for the ideological imagination. it implies that the space of the possible is very, very small. it implies the death of radical change. it implies that the degree to which a government can pursue an agenda to the left is not set by the conviction and passion of one's supporters - who, after all, still only count for one vote each, however passionately they mark their ballot - but by the relative indiscipline of the right, and vice versa.
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May 6, 2017 06:14
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in TYOOL 2017 it's a wee late to complain that the New Left came to claim the term 'left'
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May 6, 2017 15:43
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icantfindaname posted:What was Blair/New Labour's relationship with the New Left? I assume he was tough-on-crime/minorities/women in the same way Clinton was? The whole idea of the third way was that it explicitly rejected the label of left. That's totally different from vulgar materialists complaining that black and women's issues are polluting their Marxism Rocky. In 1993 there was enthusiasm; by 1998 there was backlash (Marxism Today got a special resurrected issue just to denounce its widely-reckoned brainchild).  The particular problem was that New Labour was only too successful at absorbing the lessons of Hall's 1979 The Great Moving Right Show essay - that the "New Right" Thatcherism was a real ideological movement, not a mere rebranding, and was not going to be Heath redux and be undone by manning the barricades once again, - that the welfare state had come to be seen with resentment by ordinary working people, rather than a benevolent triumph, - that the battle over education had been pre-emptively lost by a Labour serially obsessed with eradicating the remnants of classism, when instead the popular eye had utterly turned toward skills and standards, and this was not going to diminish, - that the crime and race focus of Powellism was successful, amazingly so, amongst ordinary working people; that it touched on real and concrete experiences of crime and theft and violence and job loss, - that "this is exactly the terrain on which the forces of opposition must organize, if we are to transform it" You might sense that the UK New Left, or at least those who still wore the label by the 1980s, were not exactly coming to different conclusions on responding to Thatcherism. ronya fucked around with this message at 16:37 on May 6, 2017 |
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May 6, 2017 16:34
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Aliquid posted:What did they accomplish with such gusto that it bordered on fanaticism? As an American, off the top of my head hereditary titles and the existence of the monarchy go a ways toward cementing a classist society; has Labour ever been explicitly against these things, or have they tried to abolish them in the past? My Cold War-era UK history sucks, I really don't know much about post-Atlee Labour successes. the big fight over grammar schools by the late 1970s most had already been closed. Cue a problem: the few survivors are still standing to thumb their nose at those who fighting to abolish them, but because they're few in number, widespread popular and establishment anxiety over their social impact has largely evaporated that wasn't the big problem. the big problem was the degree of fury ignited by the argument meant that the party did not really have any intellectual flexibility to adapt when the anxiety du jour turned toward the quality of urban comprehensives, which partisans took to be about a stealth battle over reviving grammars when, no, most of England had actually accepted the new comprehensives and it really was anxiety over the quality of urban comprehensives
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May 6, 2017 17:03
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Scikar posted:Honestly, the shittest bit about the whole Corbyn era isn't the fact that he's scored a disappointing amount of own goals since taking over, it's the fact that years from now people will still be blaming him for Labour's bad poll ratings and Brexit, even though literally nobody can imagine the situation being better under Burnham or Cooper or Kendall or Eagle or Smith. It's telling that through the whole time he's been leader the centrist solution has never been "he should resign so X can take over", just "he should resign so we can have another crippling slapfight over whether socialists and union members are allowed to have a say in who leads their own party". yea, more or less it was always going to suck; better that it suck under the Labour left, who will at least stay in the party rather than pointlessly trying to Melenchon it in a far more hostile electorate
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May 6, 2017 17:51
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nopantsjack posted:The One Crazy Trick that the Tories are effortlessly managing and labour never can is you don't publically fight each other and don't badmouth your leader. It's electoral cyanide EVERY time. *cough*  the reason why all that attempted undermining wasn't successful is perhaps related, one might surmise, to their continuing difficulties working the media, even with all the power of the Leader's office
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May 6, 2017 18:04
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some leaders are more resistant to intraparty badmouthing and public party fighting than others! it works especially well if the side which loses that intraparty fight is widely held in contempt by the electorate, ofc
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May 6, 2017 18:08
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yes people don't care about the actual statistically-expected effect of your policies, they can't care about the numbers because they're innumerate in the extreme they care about affiliations and credibility. This element is not unique to Britain; what is the unique is the cultural landscape of institutions and symbols to affiliate with one can go all Die Losung on this, but I think the reasonable course is to acknowledge that this is the case regardless I should point out that certain pundits have been calling for a Labour leader to move the zeitgeist leftward. well - we have done it. this is what it looks like. it looks like this: a Tory government adopting the same headline policies, but modified to benefit the middle class over the rock bottom, and tax the upper middle less; socialism-by-class thus cheaply buying the political capital to be much, much more right-wing in other areas (are soverinty!). ronya fucked around with this message at 03:33 on May 9, 2017 |
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May 9, 2017 03:26
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European law is more hostile to closed shops due to the historical prevalence of sectarian trade unions on the continent. Catholic and Protestant differences are a thing. note that in the EU a union can negotiate a collective bargaining agreement that binds nonmember terms of remuneration, minimum wages, safety, etc. it merely cannot require membership or fees. EU countries can be quite hot on granting unions statutory powers over employer-backed funds or otherwise codeterminatory statutory bodies and yes, leftists have been battling with liberals over whether this has an intrinsically corrupting tendency on labour radicalism for over a century now...
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May 9, 2017 07:22
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icantfindaname posted:That applies to the UK as well? (For now at least) as zephro indicated, the ECHR constrains what the UK can do. the UK would prefer closed shops, but these are illegal under ECHR commitments statutory powers, OTOH, have to be actively granted by national law. the UK does not grant Ghent system monopolies on unemployment insurance, nor Germanic monopolies on minimum wage policy, but the point is that it could do so, if it wished collective bargaining for nonmembers is not a UK tradition. for one, see: preference for closed shops. for another, see: Tony Benn, Arthur Scargill, and the left's briefly-but-destructively successful campaign against corporatist, docile unionism dependent on statutory powers rather than confrontation. As a result the collective bargaining % closely tracks the unionisation rate, afaik
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May 9, 2017 13:12
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MikeCrotch posted:Plus, isn't the point of the media to hold the powerful to account and point out their lies and inconsistencies, which *clearly* isn't happening in the case of Tory policy escaping proper scrutiny on a regular basis, despite things like austerity having been shown to be completely terrible? there's a bit to unpack here for one, the mob does like to see the arrogant brought low. what fun! egg the snotty bastard. that's not quite the same thing as holding the powerful to account, however. you don't have to pry through one of chomsky's doorstoppers to realize this for another, "Labour rejects Austerity" is not, you know, news. it is already firmly embedded in the zeitgeist that Labour is profligate and loves spending. The Cruel Policies Of This Tory Government is a theme song that every British voter alive has heard more than once. would you like a brief interview with a family on benefits to go with your unhappy meal? this is not a message that is suffering mainly from a lack of exposure like the fact that People in Africa are Starving, it is quite possible to become completely inured to appeals to one's outrage. It's not even a very fun outrage! It's got all these complications in it. If you want really pure distilled outrage, any WHSmith's will probably have an expansive misery lit section, just waiting for your 3 for 2 purchase. ronya fucked around with this message at 13:11 on May 10, 2017 |
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May 10, 2017 13:06
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Alertrelic posted:It's not about exposure, though, its about framing. Austerity is framed as a difficult decision which must be taken for the good of the economy and future generations. The response to this, especially in the media, is to focus on the easy-to-see, immediate (and genuinely horrible) human stories of those on the sharp end. It's treated as if its a question of heart vs head, rather than a question of whether 'expansionary fiscal contraction' is bullshit and we should pursue an alternative set of economic policies. The key argument against austerity is that it has consistently failed to achieve its stated aims. This is hardly interrogated at all by the media. You hardly ever hear from, for example, Ann Pettifor or other prominent economics talking about the problems with the UK's current approach. I dislike that, too, but I have resigned myself to the fact that anti-austerity politics is wholly conquered by people who are themselves gleefully susceptible to a heart-vs-head framing
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May 10, 2017 14:08
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MikeCrotch posted:Well I mean people are literally dying because of austerity politics in entirely avoidable ways, so that doesn't seem necessarily like a bad thing the mistake is assuming that the median voter regards this (or, to be precise, the notion of a tough benefit cap) as an unfair outcome
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May 10, 2017 14:47
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the explicit and implicit rationale of fees was to increase intakes. globalstagery was a sideshow. foreigners pay full fare. one should define 'rich', in sense of a binary "should net fund, rather than net benefit from, public transfers". upper third? upper fifth? upper 1%? upper 0.1%?
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May 10, 2017 17:00
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higher taxes to buy tuition were and are not politically saleable, for the reason that kapparomeo put a finger on - it can only gain the political consent via a degree of control which, as OF has helpfully highlighted, is contrary to public sentiment but the same policy objectives can be achieved with income-contingent repayment for the broad upper-middle, and means-tested tax-funded grants to perform the redistribution for the minority of cases. this was not a realization limited to technocrats in the UK, as a note ronya fucked around with this message at 17:40 on May 10, 2017 |
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May 10, 2017 17:37
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grauniad: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/10/labour-party-manifesto-pledges-to-end-tuition-fees-and-nationalise-railways strategic leak to gauge reactions, or deliberate sabotage?
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May 10, 2017 21:21
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LemonDrizzle posted:More like full "clueless chancers who've never heard of the tragedy of the commons or thought through their business model" in that particular case, I think. various acts over time have empowered parish councils to spend money on crime prevention - in particular, the localism act flung open the gates. the language of the ad makes me think that it's intended for people to bring up at parish meetings at the present time a real approach is to allocate funds to underfunded local police (e.g. http://www.leightonlinslade-tc.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Crime-Disorder.pdf - essentially treating the county police as a auxiliary police force). at that point, there's not much of a leap to privatised auxiliary security, who might be able to provide the same sense of presence, but cheaper
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May 10, 2017 22:07
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https://twitter.com/MichaelPDeacon/status/862781770466545667 politics is not policy not to diss policy. One should have policies. But pushing policies have their effect via 'the sense of the possible' held by bureaucrats - they are maximally effective precisely when voters are uninterested and quite willing to calmly submit to whatever three-hundred-page white paper. The curious result of consistently beating the drum on policy is shaping what governments actually do - but this well might be a Tory government conceding to new establishment wisdoms, at least as far as these wisdoms do not directly conflict with main ideological planks.
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May 12, 2017 11:44
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MikeCrotch posted:People have had their minds loving poisoned by the whole 'the sense of the possible' idea in liberal politics. Anybody with an ounce of sense knows you start high and negotiate to someone you want, forcing the other side to either refute your position or come to an agreement. It's not rocket science. It might stun, stun, absolutely shock you to learn this, but establishment neoliberal wisdom really is neoliberal and doesn't quite like the principle of free healthcare at the point of use. The NHS survives only because of the dynamic I described: voters care passionately about it. In any case I was defending the Corbynesque strategy of pushing tons of policy points when, as LemonDrizzle correctly pointed out, this has a remarkably reliable pattern of losing elections relative to boring-but-effective sloganeering and image control.
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May 12, 2017 15:27
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JFairfax posted:Also look at the difference between North Sea Oil and what the British Govt did with that and what the Norwegians did with their oil money, started a Sovereign Wealth Fund instead of letting shareholders of private companies extract all the profits. what happened was that the British govt (i.e., Thatcher) did take the revenues, but it used it mainly to pursue deficit reduction. Both (non-oil, non-privatisation-asset-sale) revenue and spending (defense and non-defense both) as a percentage of GDP increased over the period 1979-1990. this was, if you prefer, the use of windfall revenues to buy macroeconomic peace, instead of enduring the rocky realities faced by Callaghan and Wilson. Thatcher did not have to have an incomes policy. one left-leaning perspective, emphasising the distributive impact.
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May 12, 2017 15:54
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East Timor strikes me as one of the less defensible interventions, oddly enough, because so much of it is transparently about Australia's regional imperialism vs Indonesia's regional imperialism. The former has the notable benefit of being less genocidal than the latter, but Good Leftists don't normally approve of armed intervention merely on that basis. the main difference between Indonesia's armed annexation of Netherlands New Guinea in 1962 and Indonesia's armed annexation of East Timor in 1975 is that Indonesia annexed the former as a Soviet-aligned state and annexed the latter as a American-aligned state; thus the former is anticolonial liberation and the latter is imperialism masquerading as anticolonial liberation ronya fucked around with this message at 14:44 on May 13, 2017 |
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May 13, 2017 14:41
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not really I just have Opinions on South East Asian cold war politics that I like to witter on about
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May 13, 2017 14:45
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the fact that whatshisname made a stand approving of Australian warships steaming into East Timor whilst loudly condemning Bosnia also annoys me a lot not so much that I can place his name offhand, but still
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May 13, 2017 14:47
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