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Sekenr posted:As an outsider to UK politics, what struck me the most about pre election polls was that Boris is more prime ministerial. I was like "wtf does it even mean". On one hand you have an honest man with an uncompromised 20 year record of plain utilising power of government for the good of the people. And the other is lying cheating coward who hides in the fridge. How the gently caress is that prime ministerial? The answer is simple, british people are so thoroughly conditioned that they plain see honesty and benevolence is anti prime ministerial it scares them, and screwing you by your betters as right and proper British approach. It's one of those things where our horrific press just unilaterally declare someone 'prime ministerial' or not, and thus is becomes reality. And the criteria as to whether you're 'prime ministerial' or not has nothing to do with your record, your acheivements, your personality or your conduct but whether you maintain suitably right-wing (and friendly-to-billionaires-who-own-newspapers) policies. So Jeremy Corbyn was never going to be 'prime ministerial' despite, as you say, a near-perfect record as a campaigner, politician and MP. So he was criticised for being 'scruffy' because he had a beard and because they took pictures of him when he was 'off duty' and had just been working on his allotment. He 'disrespected the memory of our war heroes' by wearing a slightly padded (and perfectly smart) jacket on Remembrance Sunday, despite being entirely appropriately dapper and well-presented. Meanwhile Johnson shows up with a Saville Row overcoat strained over his beer gut, looking generally pasty-faced and flabby-cheeked, with his hair askew and he lays his wreath upside down and...silence. The press always take a side and work backwards from there. Corbyn talked intelligently and with nuance and thus was 'arrogant' or an 'intellectual'. Johnson shambles around an interview and flings out lies, errors and racial slurs and is 'a straight-talker'. Had their personal styles been reversed the soft-spoken, considered Johnson would be 'an intellectual titan able to present complicated issues in a straightforward way' while slurry, hesitant, bumbling Corbyn would be a dumb leftie who can't even tie his own shoes (although they tried that attack line too, in between casting him as an ivory-towered North London intellectual elitist). Same with one of the press' most pressing concerns - a fash-like 'strong leader'. Corbyn was never going to satisfy them because his policies weren't suitable (for the press barons), so if he enforced the party whip, kept his MPs strictly on line with agreed policy and punished dissent he was a petty tyrant who was the reincarnation of Stalin, Mao and Hoxha simultaneously. If he allowed a multiplicity of viewpoints and divergence of opinion he was a weak, hopeless doddery old grandad. Meanwhile Boris sacks so many of his own MPs that he loses is parliamentary majority and he's Our New Churchill Taking The Tough Decisions And Ruling With a Rod of Iron. So a huge part of electorate has spent the last three years that Jeremy Corbyn is Not Prime Ministerial, and Boris has years, even before he became Tory leader, of being presented as some powerful everyman political giant. And round the circle goes - "Corbyn would be a terrible PM because I read in The Sun that he's a scruffy, shambolic, arrogant, stupid man. It must be true, it was in the papers".
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Feb 2, 2020 01:31
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Doc Hawkins posted:this i did not know Because, as the past few days have made clear, a large portion of the population - when made aware of this fact for the first time - take it as a good thing. "  Grate Britane nobly indebted itself for centuries to end slavery! This is probably why the Germans have a better economy than us! "Not "we paid slave owners £billions to not make a fuss, thus funding large parts of our current economy with bribes to lovely people who stood to lose profits while giving zero fucks to the people who were actually enslaved." But of course, it's apparently BAME people who have a victim complex...
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Jun 11, 2020 13:34
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https://twitter.com/SloughForEU/status/1344051320861433858?s=19 And here's Sad Eels Man getting a lot of money from the EU to rebuild his factory. But what did the EU ever do for us? Private Speech posted:While that's largely true it's worth remembering that Section 28 was only abolished in England and Wales in 2003. I don't know which is worse - that it wasn't repealed until 2003 or that it was implemented as late as 1988! There was a 20 year period when homosexuality was legal and it wasn't forbidden to talk about gay people in a positive way in schools (it may have been vanishingly rare but it wasn't literally illegal) and then we decided to regress from that.
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Dec 30, 2020 03:28
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oliwan posted:i know, that's what I mean. It gives them the excuse they need to turn against an actual left-wing party when it had a real chance at power. The Guardian-reading demographic is - whether they actually recognise it themselves or not - deeply scared of actual socialism that would change the status quo, raise their taxes, make owning a holiday home in Cornwall socially unacceptable, smash the independent education sector and generally burst their cosy affluent Home Counties upper-middle-class white-collar professional bubble. They forge a social, political and professional identity in hand-wringing about how nasty and uncouth the Tories are, how stupid and base you'd have to be to vote for them, and how appalling the effects of their policies are...and how they themselves are against everything the Conservatives stand for and would never consider voting for them. And they may even talk up how great and fair social democracy would be, usually safe in the knowledge that no party with any potential to actually change things actually exists. Labour under Corbyn presented The Guardian and a lot of its readership with everything they've supposedly been clamouring for since Thatcher was in No.10. And when faced with the actual prospect of a genuinely radical leftward shift to British politics and society they had to come up with an acceptable reason as to why they couldn't vote for it. So they went fully on the Labour Antisemitism Crisis angle, and how Corbyn himself personally lusted to renew the Holocaust because he said something against removing a questionable mural. Against all the other evidence to the contrary. It let them tell themselves "Of course I liked much of what Labour was offering in 2019, but I couldn't have accepted Corbyn as Prime Minister because he was such a horrible racist." That's why The Guardian was one of the most vehemently anti-Corbyn papers of all. And then they had the gall to still come out and officially support Labour...about two days before the election when it would make no difference after two years of printing angsty think-pieces about how he was an unelectable racist and Labour's policies Just Aren't Credible. Never forget that The Guardian was founded to be the voice of Manchester cotton mill owners who were all old-school Liberals of the hyper-capitalist rugged-individual sort. It was strong against organised labour. It ran a campaign against the laws that would lead to a 10 hour working day and, though it took a strong anti-slavery and Abolitionist stance, then served up some classic early centrist pearl-clutching about how slavery was Bad and the Confederacy was Evil but a Civil War wasn't the right way to solve such problems. The Guardian instead argued that Britain should trade with the CSA and use that economic leverage to end slavery with the power of the free market. In the 1940s The Guardian opposed the formation of the NHS on eugenics grounds (free healthcare would let weak people ruin the nation's gene pool) and it urged readers to vote Churchill and remove the Attlee government in 1951, supposedly because Labour's rhetoric was divisive and not  enough. Sound familiar?
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Jan 16, 2021 22:43
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genericnick posted:That poo poo was like a fever dream. Did the People's Vote campaign argue to vote against Labour in 2019, where their official policy was a "People's Vote", and for a LibDem Green Alliance? Did the LibDems not actually promise to cancel Brexit? Can it really have been that dumb? And when Labour stitched together a proposal for a cross-party parliamentary majority to form a temporary government and stop a no-deal Brexit, the Lib Dems backed out because Corbyn (leader of the official opposition...) would have been in charge. So the LDs had the choice between stopping a no-deal Brexit - which they were adamant was the most important issue of our time and crucial to prevent national catastrophe - or thwarting a Corbyn-led Labour...and they chose the latter. And then campaigned as the only true anti-Brexit party and on how Corbyn was actually a die-hard Brexiter who didn't want to stop it. And when the LDs threw out the deal Centrist FBPE twitter went crazy as they heard the West Wing theme in their heads and began breathlessly putting together their fantasy crossbench cabinet - Ken Clarke! Harriet Harman! Hillary Benn! Rory Stewart! David Milliband! Vince Cable! No Corbyns Allowed! Relevant Tangent posted:Rees-Mogg seems like the most hosed up person in your political system right now. If it turned out he was an actual vampire no one would be surprised. Naming his kid Sixtus is some insane poo poo. There's plenty of competition but I think you're right. Priti Patel just exists on fear, hate and a love of suffering but doesn't even try to hide it - she outright says that she wants to hang prisoners, sink refugee boats in the Channel with gunfire, cut human rights legislation and stop pesky lawyers holding her to account as she does so. She's an avatar of the base bile and spite that drives much of the Tory voter base and proud of being so. JRM has equally abhorrent opinions but couches them in this oily, monotone, vampiric calm as he oozes moral platitudes about how it's obviously right that the unemployed have to crush rocks on a treadmill before they receive their free gruel and stale bread - in fact it's for their own good. That he's a living caricature of a Victorian aristocratic villain from a melodramatic light opera just adds to it.
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Jan 18, 2021 15:16
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namesake posted:Tbf that happens all over the place here, it's just that the Lib Dems basically lie on their leaflets in hilarious ways to give that impression that they should get your vote. Including gems such as: 1) Printing bar graphs on their election leaflets showing results from a constituency's local council elections to 'prove' that they're running the Conservatives a close second in the Westminster vote, when in fact Labour were the second-placed party in 2017. 2) In Rees-Mogg's constituency the Lib Dem leaflet carried a graph showing the LDs close behind the Tories. It wasn't the last GE results. It wasn't the last council election. It wasn't even a current opinion poll. It was the results of a commissioned poll where the question asked was "Who would you vote for if the only viable options were Conservative or Lib Dem?"
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Jan 18, 2021 22:38
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V. Illych L. posted:it is hard to overstate how precisely brexit hit the most damaging fault line of the corbynite project. i remember back when the vote happened people were thinking it'd kill off the tory party, and i was always skeptical of that, but i didn't see at the time the profound damage it would do to the last best hope for some form of political alternative in the west Yeah, I sometimes get a bit too  and wonder if the whole Brexit project was intended to blow apart the British left after Corbyn became Labour leader. Of course the timeline doesn't stack up - before 2016 UKIP was nibbling away at the Tories from the right, the referendum commitment was in the 2015 Conservative manifesto before Corbyn was in post, Corbyn winning the Labour leadership was pretty much a fluke (certainly as far as any reasonable political forecast went)...and it would require a level of foresight, long-term thinking and competence from the modern Tory party that simply doesn't exist. But you couldn't have devised a better way to hobble a resurgent social-democratic left wing Labour Party. Labour is divided between its pro-Europe urban/professional/young/immigrant/culturally progressive base and anti-Europe/provincial/blue collar/old/ /culturally conservative bases to an extent that dwarfs the pro-business/free trade and nationalism/culture war bits of the Tory party. Unless handled to perfection, Brexit was always going to strain the Labour vote. Nothing was going to make the 'old Labour' base think twice about a soc-dem platform more than appeals to patriotism, sovereignty, the Good 'Ol Days, No Immigrants and sticking two fingers up at foreigners, and nothing would repel the 'new Labour' base than the party embracing any aspect of that. It's infuriating how things just didn't quite line up for Corbyn-led Labour: 1) Great Recessions, austerity, suffering and widespread reversal of living standards create a space for genuine left-wing politics of the sort not seen since the 1970s. 2) A 1970s-style socialist wins the 2015 Labour leadership election. He's allowed into the running mostly by chance, tradition and huge hubris on the part of the Labour right and the newly altered leadership election rules. He generates a groundswell of support and enthusiasm not seen by any British party leader since...? 3) The Brexit referendum is called, and Leave wins. As said, an issue uniquely poised to cause trouble for Labour. Even the new leader is torn between his personal anti-EU beliefs and the overwhelmingly pro-EU wishes of the membership. 4) Labour steers a course of being 'pro-Brexit in theory, but anti the Brexit that we're getting so far'. A solidly left-wing manifesto in 2017 nets Labour the largest vote swing since 1945, closes a 20-point gap in the polls, sees some deep-Conservative seats turn red and removes the Conservative's narrow majority. 5) Two years of in-fighting, back- (and front-) stabbing within Labour, negativity, fearmongering and smears in the media, the antisemitism scandal and botched handling of Labour's Brexit position follow. 6) Labour settles on a Brexit position seemingly precision-engineered to piss off everyone on all sides (policy devised by one Sir Keir Starmer, QC). 7) Labour gets trounced at the 2019 election. Despite the media narrative that untold thousands of voters turned Conservative to personally register their hatred for socialism and Corbyn personally, all the following polling and research suggests that many would-be Labour voters simply didn't vote or voted Brexit Party, handing the Conservatives a large majority on a tiny increase in their actual vote. Same research also shows that the broad direction of Labour's 2019 platform, and many of the individual policies, are popular when shown in isolation. 8) The election result is taken as clear evidence that social-democracy will never win elections, and many on the Labour left fall for Starmer's progressive policy pledges and the idea that he can have the same ideas as Corbyn but without the controversial personal history. Starmer wins the leadership. 9) Weeks before Corbyn hands over to Starmer, the pandemic hits causing the biggest crisis in modern capitalism since the Wall Street Crash. The government moves to blatantly protect the economy over people. Corbyn offers a left-wing alternative. 10) Just as the pandemic is getting its grip into the UK, Starmer takes over and immediately begins meekly agreeing with the government on everything. Just as modern neoliberalism's flaws and failings are laid bare, there's no one in a prominent position to point them out and offer an alternative. Without Brexit to provide pretty much the one issue that Labour could never agree on, we'd quite possibly have a socdem Labour government now. At the very least we'd have an opposition willing and ready to stick the boot in to the whole system that's brought us to this mess and provide a progressive alternative for where we go from here. As it is we've got the shadow chancellor setting out a stall of "the Tories can't be trusted with the economy, we'll take the tough decisions and cut spending" while the Conservatives are at least having a low-key internal war between the 'Levelling Up/Britain Strong/Singapore-On-Thames' big spenders and the 'National Credit Card/Super-Austerity/Cut Taxes Cut Benefits' types. Corbyn having to leave as LOTO just as the pandemic gets rolling, and not being replaced by someone of the same stance, is the most galling to me. A real...whatever the opposite of dodging a bullet by a few thous of an inch is.
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Jan 19, 2021 16:34
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Pryor on Fire posted:The early history of the EEC/EU was all about economic deregulation and unlocking cheap labor pools to compete better with the US. It was initially a right wing initiative. This is the thing - the EEC (as it was) was a decidedly capitalist/free trade/unchain your economy sort of venture. It was the Conservative Party that was continually trying to get into it throughout the 1960s (being blocked several times by de Gaulle who feared that it would allow too much American influence due to our tight ties with the US already and saw - preciently - that our national vision of Europe, the European project and our place in the world was very different to the rest of the continent) and the Labour Party which was the most sceptical, although both parties broadly supported EEC entry as the solution to our economic woes and a way of gaining a 'fresh start' for the UK in the post-imperial world. It was those sceptical elements in the Labour Party which promted Harold Wilson to offer a confirmatory referendum on EEC membership, a few years after Edward Heath (Conservative) actually took us in. In the 1980s the left-wing anti-capitalist left of the Labour Party gained prominence and made withdrawing from the EEC a formal party policy which appeared in several general election manifestos in a row. Meanwhile the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher were generally pro-Europe from a pro-business, trying-to-copy-the-West-German-economic-miracle way as well as seeing the national power value in being the bridge between the US and Europe politically, culturally, economically and militarily. There had always been anti-EEC voices in the Conservatives, who disliked it from a national prestige/sovereignty/why can't we go back to exploiting India for the trade benefits/we didn't fight the war to cooperate with the Germans perspective, but they were a fringe that was largely excluded from actual power. When the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992 which created the EU, that signalled the shift from an economic trade organisation to a more political union. The Conservative Party's shift right-wards throughout the 1980s meant that the Eurosceptic/phobic voices within it had gained prominence and the weakening of Margaret Thatcher's leadership left the party in a civil war which mostly split along the pro-business, pro-Europe neoliberal wing and the culturally conservative, nationalist anti-Europe wing. John Major - basically a Thatcherite - won the leadership but was faced with continual rebellions within his party over Europe and all the talking points now familiar to Brexit. Resignations and rebellions meant that by 1997 Major had no reliable parliamentary majority despite a 20-seat electoral majority. Meanwhile Labour was reforming and moving to the centre under Blair, which involved ditching all the anti-capitalist rhetoric of before going all-in on modernising the UK with the other social democratic countries of northern Europe as the model. We were going to become 'a modern European country' culturally, economically and politically. Being pro-EU was a big part of that, as was encouraging maximum immigration from the new eastern members of the EU (immigration is good because it shows how open and tolerant and Eurocentric we are now...and Polish people make for a great workforce that can be exploited cheaply which is good for the bottom line of Labour's major corporate donors...) So for the 2000s the divide had shifted and it was now a case of the pro-European Labour Party and the Eurosceptic Conservatives. Cameron was able to keep a lid on the divisions within the party enough to scrape into No.10 in 2010, but by then the failure of New Labour's domestic programme (which left large swathes of Britain utterly disconnected from and disaffected with the status quo), the fallout from the Financial Crisis and 20+ years of xenophobic fash-adjacent fearmongering about immigrants and Brussels and Their Bendy Bananas - a journalistic genre founded and perfected by one Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson) led to the rise of the UK Independence Party* which began threatening the Tory vote. Cameron promised a referendum on EU membership during the 2015 election, unexpectedly found himself having to deliver on it, did a poo poo job of putting the case for Remain and here we are! * UKIP actually started as a left-wing party trying to keep alive the Labour-aligned anti-EU agenda as it was abandoned by the party during the reforms of the early 90s. Then loads of Conservative members, donors and activists joined it in the aftermath of the Maastricht fallout and turned it into the far-right crapfest that it became.
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Feb 4, 2021 13:36
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Virtual Russian posted:It continues to blow my mind that the Brits have voluntarily reconstructed the continental system and then are also surprised to find out that it is really bad for them. Like I'm pretty sure the economic lesson of the Napoleonic wars was that Britain must trade freely with the continent to survive, and that blocking that trade off is basically such an existential threat to Britain that war would be a necessity to re-assert British influence and trade into Europe. Uh, excuse me I'll think you'll find that being embargoed from the whole of Europe just spurred the Great Men of Great British History to swashbuckle and disrupt their way to wealth through their innovative jams and world-renowned cheeses. We went and traded freely with the rest of the world (on entirely free terms and with no coersion whatsoever, which is why the British are so beloved all over globe to this present day). Napoleon did as a loving favour by showing that we don't need Europe for anything and can be entirely aloof from anything that those weird continental types do in their funny languages. We can just bask in our exceptionality for ever and nothing bad can happen Can we have another crack at a trade deal so our ports aren't full of rotting fish, pretty please?
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Feb 9, 2021 22:38
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Dr Pepper posted:Brexit is entirely about a nostslgic aesthetic where boomers demand that everything look like. it did when the Empire ruled the world while completely ignoring actual material needs This is pretty much how Brexity Boomers see the world: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGw5DKX6U6w This was all intended as an exaggerated parody of jingoistic Victoriana but you could run this today and at least half the population would take it seriously...or think that it wasn't nationalistic enough. I think this is the sort of thing Boris Johnson sees when he closes his eyes.   
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Feb 18, 2021 01:46
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Clyde Radcliffe posted:Spain is to English boomers what Florida is to American boomers. And because of this a lot of Leave-voters (in the UK and those actually living in the rest of the EU) had little to no idea what the EU actually did or was responsible for. They thought that the EU was just about enforcing the metric system, giving us straight bananas and forcing us to give 'hooman rights' to criminals and 'illegals'. A bunch of them just weren't aware that it was the EU that also allowed them to move to Spain as easily as moving to a different county in Inger-land, and was responsible for them being able to receive Sky and make phone calls and get Jameson's sausages and so on and on and on. And of the ones that were aware that the EU was actually behind these sorts of thing, a good portion fell for (or enthusiastically embraced...) the rhetoric about how we were going to get the Best Deal Ever and They Need Us More Than We Need Them and all that poo poo, so none of this Project Fear stuff would actually happen It builds on the usual dangerous mix of British exceptionalism crossed with Boomerism where nothing bad can ever happen to you and all your life the system has basically worked to fulfill your every whim. Related anecdote: Last year I got a gig putting my sailing skills to good use when someone needed a couple of crew to help get his sailing yacht from Malta to Gibraltar (he had spent years living on the boat drifting around the Med and was now essentially fleeing to a British port before Brexit and national lockdowns took effect). The guy was a platonic ideal gammon - from Yorkshire, in his 60s, ex military, had set himself up in the building and landlord business, made a small fortune and had this boat and a house in Spain. From the times when conversation skirted into the subject he was very, very keen on Brexit. The plan was to do the trip non-stop, but the forecast wind never arrived so we had to make two unplanned calls in ports along the way for food and fuel. The first was in Algeria, and the owner/skipper got really angry at the very notion that Algeria would require customs and immigration checks on a foreign boat randomly turning up in one of its major ports. The harbour master looked like Alexei Sayle and was friendliness personified (we weren't allowed to leave the port but he went across the road to a bakery to buy us spicy pastries) and the customs, police and navy guys who came aboard to do the paperwork were officious but perfect polite, especially given the language barrier (Captain Gammon of course didn't speak any French or Spanish and had gently mocked me for attempting to learn a few words of Maltese so we had to make do with my C-grade-at-GCSE French and the Algerians' adequate English). Cpt. Gammon went on and on about how it was outrageous that they were treating him like some sort of criminal and that it proved that Algeria was just 'an inherently hostile country'. I did diplomatically try pointing out that if an Algerian-registered boat with three Algerian guys on it turned up unannounced in Felixstowe you can bet the Border Force, HM Coastguard etc. would at best give them exactly the same treatment we'd had. I also thought (but didn't say) that he was almost certainly the sort of person to want Very Strong Controls On Immigration and people pitching up in boats on British shores. A week later when we stopped in Spain there were no customs checks, just a quick look at the passports and taking down the boat's name on the harbour register...because Spain is in the EU and at the time the UK was still in the transition period. "See, that's how it should be, no fuss, no hostility, just a welcome" beamed Cpt. Gammon. I did try and point out that it was because of the EU and not because the Hispanic Peoples are inherently more friendly than whatever slur he'd chosen for the Algerians that day but didn't press the point as I still had to spend another four days afloat in a 46-foot plastic box with him Anyway, he was already climbing over the railing and making a beeline for a British pub bedecked with Union Jacks so he could watch Sky and have a Full English...
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Mar 15, 2021 14:40
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JoylessJester posted:It wasn't even having nukes, they wanted a committment to use them in a preemptive first strike. madness. Yeah, iirc their puce-inducing rage was because Corbyn said that a) he wouldn't launch a first strike (seriously, what even half-sane leader of a major world power would actually say on national TV that yes, they would launch the nukes first??) and that b) he didn't see the point in launching a retaliatory strike once the UK had been turned to glass, everyone was dead, the British state had ceased to exist and the deterrent effect of the UK's nukes had demonstrably failed. The gammon men were still angrily badgering him to commit to adding millions more to the death toll in that situation. Of course, Corbyn's underlying point was that if you're not going to launch first and you're not actually going to launch second (but you none the less have to maintain the fiction that you definitely will launch second to maintain the MAD balance) then that makes the whole idea of nuclear weapons pointless as well as horrifying. Like most of JC's nuanced and logical positions on things, the gammon men didn't like them because it gave them bad feelings in their tummies and made the idea that they might have been wrong at some point in their life briefly flash through their brain, and self-reflection cannot be permitted.
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Mar 17, 2021 21:04
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SMILLENNIALSMILLEN posted:which episode was that https://twitter.com/WDTATW_Podcast/status/1235251578636029954?s=19
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Mar 30, 2021 13:12
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Quoting myself but: Because I had this link cued up I listened to this episode while I went for a run and, my my, it's weird listening to current affairs from exactly a year ago. Just passed 50 confirmed coronavirus cases in the UK with 12 people who have had the virus but recovered, and the guys accurately nailing the government's response (in the early stages as it has been throughout) as being plotted perfectly to both kill lots of people and destroy a large chunk of the economy. They talk about Starmer (just pre the end of the leadership race) and while their expectations are low they agree that he's probably a malleable, weathervane entity who will just do whatever's popular and won't want to chuck away Labour's existing voter base by just making GBS threads on the left because what would be the point in chasing votes from the right when a popular and populist Tory government is in No.10 with a completely sycophantic press to prop it up? Why indeed. You'd have to be a massive dummy who's poo poo at basic politics to do that.
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Mar 30, 2021 18:07
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Atrocious Joe posted:didn't you all fight a whole civil war about that That was the English Civil War  And after we chopped off the King's head the alternative turned out to be a puritanical religious zealot who made having fun illegal, so we went back to the last saved checkpoint and got the monarchy back. Then a bit later Glorious Britain was created. So the British People have never even done anything as cool as regicide.
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Apr 13, 2021 08:38
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90s Cringe Rock posted:cop train Already done:  bedpan posted:Setting brexit and antisemitism aside, here is the updated list of jezza's many crimes. According to the press at the time, he has been an energetic wrongdoer. You can also add:
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May 6, 2021 14:00
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Shear Modulus posted:what i heard was that the report said it was all overblown and corbyn said "yeah this report says it was all overblown" and keir suspended him from the party because he knew the press would print headlines that said "corbyn suspended from party after damning antisemitism report released" The report's main criticism of the leadership was that it interfered in the complaints process (mostly by accelerating the suspension of prominent people who said antisemitic things). The report also specifically said in its recommendations that future discussion or questioning of the scale of antisemitism in the party should not be considered antisemitism. Starmer immediately accused Corbyn of antisemitism for questioning the scale of antisemitism in the party (in relation to how it was reported in the media) and bypassed the usual process to swiftly suspend him.
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May 13, 2021 20:57
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forkboy84 posted:Oh my god. It's the most boring front of the Culture Wars yet And just like the BLUE PASSPORTS it's an entirely fake victory because the crown was never 'banned' in the first place - the EU just required that the glasses had the CE mark on them. It was quite possible to have the crown and the CE mark at the same time.
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Sep 13, 2021 12:39
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Darth Walrus posted:lmao if the Tories announce it at their conference. I'd put money on them doing just that. Some of them are at least canny enough to realise that their continued wealth relies on people at the bottom having enough money to afford poo poo, that their business chums would see most of that extra cash flow to them in increased spending and that higher pay generally improves productivity. Then you have the 'Blue Wall' MPs who want a headline policy to cling to come the next election and can point to this as a literal example of 'levelling up - raising the bottom up not cutting the top down like those envious Marxist'. It can be spun as a Brexit Bonus and proof that we're entering the sunlit uplands and the end of wage repression. If that poll is remotely accurate it's a highly popular policy and even the most ghoulish Tories will see it as a brilliant stick to beat Starmer's Labour with and keep hammering the "out of touch London lawyer who just wants to keep you down" narrative. Frankly Labour and Starmer deserve it, just for displaying such a complete lack of political nous, let alone any sort of principles.
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Sep 30, 2021 15:42
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Jose posted:Lol not sure I'd heard her speak and she's dire st it too. What is it with the Labour right all sounding weird] I think it's because (deleted as appropriate) they don't have any firm beliefs/are never being honest. Everything they say is the result of focus groups, prepared scripts and soundbites, targeting a specific part of the (imaged) voter base, serving part of a broader message or trying to work an angle that will get clipped out and played on the news. They're like kids dealing with their first crush, desperately pretending to like the same music, TV shows and games so they'll be noticed. Except they're not only adults but self-professed Sensible Grown Ups. Remember how Corbyn caused a political earthquake during the original Labour leadership election in 2015 by the bold, unheard of tactics of 'speaking sincerely' and 'behaving like a normal person'. And this was an old man who has spent his life in left wing politics and studies drain covers in his spare time - he still came across as more relatable than these NPC-like weirdos.
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Jan 20, 2022 19:20
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RandolphCarter posted:Jesus Christ  One of the first things that started jolting me out of my cosy middle class upbringing and realising that I had it loving easy was when I got a weekend job at the local Co-op and first encountered these PayPoint pre-paid 'sticks'. This would have been 2003, so before it could be done online. And then came the frazzled-looking people dumping small piles of loose change on the counter or rifling through coat pockets to try and make up the minimum payment, and getting the closing shift on Saturday evening guaranteed that at least one person would be frantically trying to top up their account before closing time...sometimes with bonus 'fun' of having to tell them that their card had been declined, the PayPoint network was down or something and watching them fight back the tears. I remember looking through the PayPoint instructions, noticing how expensive it was and then realising "huh, so the people who don't have enough credit to just set up an account with the provider have to pay significantly more for their electricity than the well-off...and this makes sense how?" BalloonFish has issued a correction as of 17:03 on Feb 4, 2022 |
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Feb 4, 2022 17:01
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Quote isn't edit, sorry
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Feb 4, 2022 17:02
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Relevant Tangent posted:Re: the electrical boxes is that something Labour could campaign on fixing or am I simply being impossibly naive? Also are there not laws about when the electricity can be shut off? In a lot of states they can't legally shut off the electricity in the winter. As said, Labour could easily campaign on reforming the energy sector, of which getting rid of prepayment meters would be an obvious and popular part. But Labour in its current form is never going to do that and if it did it would be torn to shreds by the press and the commentating class as 'basically communism, really'. There are rules and practices about when people's electricity can actually be shut off: https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/information-consumers/energy-advice-households/check-prepayment-meter-rules It's unusual for people to literally be disconnected, and it's not like if your prepaid meter runs out the lights go out, but that's only because the providers are required to give customers credit which is then added to their future costs, leading to people continually making the minimum payments on their meters (which, as mentioned, cost more per kW than people who can pay quarterly/annually through a direct debit account) and never paying off the extra. There are ways of getting your provider to either agree to a grace period or to wipe out your debt, but they all require the customer to a) know that those options exist, b) be proactive about pursuing those options and c) be able to navigate the bureaucratic system to prove they qualify for the relief. Take a wild guess at how many people on prepaid meters have the knowledge, time and energy to do that? That's a common thread in much of the workings of the British state - there are ways to get out of its most punishing and dehumanising aspects, but the people who need them the most are the least likely to be able to use them.
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Feb 5, 2022 16:16
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Lol at the replies from people with Union Jacks in their username saying "When the enemy insults you it proves that they take you seriously!"
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Feb 10, 2022 17:01
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New Found Power posted:Totally normal for the Attorney General to go on tv and put forward a completely feeble, potentially libellous, argument with all the debating finesse of a stroppy 14 year old. Just for the avoidance of all doubt, here's a pic of my own copy of the Labour manifesto, reiterating the commitment to NATO, Trident and the 2% GDP defence spending.  I am increasingly glad that I ordered a physical copy of the manifesto, because 2 years later I do sometimes feel increasingly gaslighted - mostly by the Labour Party itself - about what was actually proposed back in 2019. And it's nice to have a constant reminder of a) why I voted Labour then and b) what a massive pile of poo poo the party has become since.
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Mar 18, 2022 16:53
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bitmap posted:but this is the point, right? nobody thinks any of this poo poo is an electoral slam dunk- the entire point is the alienation of another generation from politics. Alienation from progressive politics. I was listening to some ghoul on the radio today talking about how Le Pen has scored a surge of votes from young people in France, how this shows that the young generation are excluded from the prospects and prosperity that older people take for granted, how this could be the basis of a long-term resurgence in the hard-right and how it should be a wakeup call to the establishment. And the interviewer just hmm-ed and umm-ed along  No mention that Melenchon, the populist socialist, also rode a wave of youth support and actually placed top of votes for those under 35. And of course here in the UK when we had our own left-wing outsider unexpectedly sweep to power in one of our main political parties, we never heard how the centre and right needed to take this onboard and accept or adapt to this new landscape or court this newly-invigorated voter base. That only applies to right wingers. Great to see the Legitimate Concerns train get rolling again, and hear the Right Wing Politics Ratchet do another 'click'.
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Apr 18, 2022 21:24
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Zoran posted:don’t rich people in Britain solve this problem by shipping all their kids off to boarding schools to get raped Fun fact: Sunak's parents sent him to a boarding school 12 miles (and a 20-minute drive) away from where they lived. Now that's responsible Conservative parenting... i say swear online posted:what happened in '51 There was an element of that - Labour had built a far-reaching and functional welfare state, nationalised huge swathes of the industrial economy and infrastructure and started a transformative home-building and urban planning programme. All in six years. Crucially, unlike in 1945, the Tories basically accepted the post-war settlement as a new consensus but promised to reduce the Labour government's penchant for monolithic central planning, reversing some of the more swingeing tax changes and focusing more on raising the quality of life and material conditions for the British people - especially the middle classes who were getting back to normality after the war and were chafing at imposed greyscale austerity when you weren't allowed to buy a car, had to get permission to go on a foreign holiday and had to buy cheap standardised 'utility' house furniture. As opposed to Labour which was seen as preferring to do big-scale economic and state policies that failed to do much for the average person's living standards. The Conservatives fought on a platform of personal freedom - no more nationalisation (but no privatisation), no more price controls...and no more rationing. Pretty much everyone in Britain was fed up with rationing but the Labour governments had no firm plan to end it, citing that it had eliminated food poverty and raised the health of the population. Which it had, but everyone was itching to turn in their ration books. Labour ran on what amounted to 'more of the same'....and it sort of worked because Labour won more votes by number and by share than the Conservatives in 1951 (numbers that remain an all-time high for Labour and only the Conservatives in 1992 have ever earned more votes), they were thwarted by FPTP - Labour's vote increased in its safe seats but dropped in the lower-middle class suburban constituencies that had tilted strongly for Labour in 1945 to kick out Churchill and get a new deal after the war...but were now returning to their more usual tastes. It's interesting to think how things might have shaken out if Attlee had been PM for 11 years and Labour had been in power to ride the surge in living standards in the 1950s (which was mostly down to the groundwork done by the 45-50 Labour government). But then they'd have been around to gently caress up Suez, so who knows 
BalloonFish has issued a correction as of 20:23 on Jul 9, 2022 |
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Jul 9, 2022 20:20
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Quotey posted:Can imagine rationing getting a bit unpopular by 51, yeah. And a lot of items were actually more tightly rationed after the war than during it - bread went on ration in 1946 and potatoes in 1947. Fish was never rationed but the supply dropped post-war. This was because the UK was no longer receiving food materials from the USA and was having to support the ruined territories of occupied Europe. Plus the harvests in 1946 and 1947 were bad and there was a wave of dock and transport strikes once restrictions on industrial action were eased. It was easy to portray the 'Labour project' as a big, impersonal, bureaucratic, totalitarian system where your basic needs were all provided but you had no fun, no prospects and no individuality - you sat on standardised furniture in your standardised prefab house, eating rationed government-branded cheese on rationed government-branded bread, then took a nationalised train to a nationalised factory where the BBC piped in morale-raising music and chat, then you went for dinner in your government-run restaurant with a set menu and walked home dreaming of being able to buy a car that came in black or grey and ran on rationed government-issue unbranded petrol, or getting to the top of a nine-month waiting list for the GPO to install a phone in your house (only one design, one colour and you don't actually own the phone, the state does). That's a caricature of Britain in the early 50s (and a world where the government guaranteed healthcare, housing and employment, ran a restaurant chain selling heavily subsidised meals and implemented vast taxes on wealth and luxury goods can sound appealing in 2022...) but all those aspects were true. And the Conservatives leaned heavily on those sentiments to promise a less dreary and more comfortable and upwardly mobile world. Labour were aware of this image problem and that the British public was fed up with 12 years of shortages, 'make do and mend' and generally being told to knuckle down and put their lives on hold for some greater good payoff in the future. That's what the Festival of Britain was supposed to counteract - a big, nationwide party full of colour, novelty and optimism to show what future Labour could build on the foundations of 1945. That's in no small part why Labour called the 1951 in that autumn, right after the Festival.
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Jul 9, 2022 21:31
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Clyde Radcliffe posted:Has she ever even been on a Royal Navy vessel? Her twitter has posts from early 2014 about her completing her final assessed training exercises as an Acting Sub-Lieutenant (the rank that graduates joining the RNR as would-be officers started with back then), which means that she was near the end of the first phase of training (still some assessed examinations to go at that stage). Her register of interests says she took part in no training with the RNR from May 2015, so even if she made to the second phase of training as a Sub-Lieutenant, that's still a training rank - you won't have done all the specific training that makes you useful in a particular role for the RN. Of course now she's been made an honorary Captain, which usually takes a good 15-20 years to achieve in the regular RN, and even longer as a reservist. So in all likelihood she has never deployed on active service with the navy. She will have spent a few weeks on a ship during initial training (you have to do sea time) and may have had other opportunities for times on a ship for training or experience, but not as a full member of the ship's company.
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Jul 13, 2022 20:18
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It's also probably worth mentioning that British national parks are quite different to ones elsewhere - especially in the USA and Canada. Whereas in most places a national park is an area of state-owned enforced natural wilderness with no residents and minimal human activity, and with controlled access, a national park in the UK is just a bit of the landscape that has been designated as important environmentally or culturally. They originally started as a means of protecting fairly ordinary bits of countryside trapped between industrial cities and promoting and protecting access to them by ordinary citizens. So that means that UK national parks have people living in them - there are villages and towns in them (sometimes quite large ones), farms, quarries and other commercial activity etc. The parks aren't owned by the nation - they're still a patchwork of individual owners.
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Aug 10, 2022 17:31
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gonadic io posted:This is gotta be a big boost to Scottish (and many others ofc) independence right? No way can Charles entice as many people as Liz did Many of the smaller Commonwealth realms specifically mention Queen Elizabeth II as the head of state in their constitution - not the monarch of the United Kingdom. So before Chaz can appoint new governor-generals those nations would have to amend their constitutions. I would not be surprised if many of those countries took the opportunity to become republics when the time came.
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Sep 11, 2022 13:02
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redleader posted:soon the commonwealth will just be england, canada, australia, and new zealand And a lot of people in those countries who claim to be the Commonwealth's greatest supporters and advocates would be very happy to see it that way. Because something colours their opinion of the other 52 members and 2.2 billion inhabitants... 
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Sep 11, 2022 13:39
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Clyde Radcliffe posted:Too late for that. Rolls Royce has been a German brand for a couple of decades. Rolls-Royce Motors (making the fancy cars) has been owned by BMW since the late 1990s, but has been separate from Rolls-Royce Holdings (the jet engine and nuclear reactor people) since 1971 when the original Rolls-Royce Limited went bust. R-R Holdings is still British. Although an amusing upshot of Brexit was they had to transfer all the certifications for their aero engines to their German subsidiary so they could be approved by EASA - thus all Rolls-Royce jet engines, even the ones built in Britain, are officially German. Brexit Bonus!
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Sep 23, 2022 11:44
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V. Illych L. posted:this is important, because his exclusion now has been justified by his minimising the extent of anti-semitism in the party by saying stuff like "while anti-semitism like any other form of racism has no place in the labour party and there have been incidents which are unacceptable, the issue was deliberately overblown to scare people and to discredit the party" which is demonstrably the most reasonable interpretation of the situation. Yep, and remember that the EHRC report* specifically said in its conclusions that discussing the scale and scope of antisemitism in the Labour Party was not in itself antisemitism. And that the thing the report criticised most strongly was the lack of official due process and interference in cases by the leadership - while acknowledging that all the proven cases of 'interference' were Corbyn (or, more accurately, Corbyn's office) speeding up the removal of people being antisemitic cranks. The EHRC simply felt that, even if the leadership is interfering for the right reasons, it meant the system wasn't impartial, showed that the Party's official processes were not adequate and those who were actually responsible for them were not doing their job. One of Starmer's first acts as leader was to intervene to suspend Corbyn's membership, after Corbyn said the issue, while real and serious, was overblown by the press. Which, by the recommendations of the report, is far more egregious than any of Corbs' supposed crimes. When JC says that 'the issue was deliberately overblown', remember that in the context of newspaper opeds stating that a Corbyn-led government would be an "existential threat" to Jewish people in Britain, and a big-name columnist and pundit went on LBC and said that Corbyn wanted to (direct quote) "reopen Auschwitz"...and when the host incredulously asked whether he really meant that and that it was absurd to suggest such a thing, he said "‘I’m sure, in 1933, they had similar conversations in Germany: “the Fuehrer’s never going to do that”". So, on that basis alone, it's a plain fact that the issue was overstated! *this may not be be deliberate, but the similarity in initials of the EHRC (Equalities and Human Rights Commission) and the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) played a part as well. I've lost track of the number of people who think that Corbyn/Labour were investigated by an international court specifically set up in the aftermath of the Holocaust and which usually deals with war crimes, genocides and homophobic quasi-dictatorships, rather than a Blair-era British QUANGO. Gato posted:Brexit was obviously a nightmare for Corbyn, but it's worth remembering that that was another thing the wreckers in the party weaponised against him. he went into the 2017 election with a vague, coherent, sensible position of "the people voted for Brexit so we have to do it, but we'll do it better than the Tories", with hints about looking to rejoin the common market. from what I remember it didn't come up much as an attack line against him. Uh-huh. Also note that, having campaigned vigorously for a second referendum Brexit policy (as a change from the 2017 one of "we'll do Brexit, but a better one"), with dire warnings about how not doing so would break apart the party, in his first weeks as leader Starmer decreed that Brexit was a "settled issue" and is sticking to that stance even as the damage it does becomes ever clearer and more and more public opinion turns against it. Almost like it was never a genuinely-held belief and more a piece of sabotage... Pistol_Pete posted:Yeah, same. I was like: "Sure, the Labour Right are going to sulk and grumble about the Left being in charge but sabotage their own party's election chances? Why would they ever do that!"  Here's a prime example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isr0F3bLA-M Stephen Kinnock on the campaign trail in the Welsh valleys in 2017, not only predicting a Labour loss but actively hoping for one because it would be the end of the Corbyn project. His mood visibly lightens when they discuss the sweepstake on the size of the Conservative's majority, and you can see it sagging again when people on the doorsteps actually respond positively to Corbyn rather than himself. And when the exit poll comes in he looks (in quick succession), shocked, disappointed and annoyed. To the extent that he has to have a good talking-to by his wife (a former prime minister of Denmark) who tells him to buck up and actually celebrate that they've had a really good result rather than be mealy-mouthed about it.
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Apr 4, 2023 11:20
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kecske posted:I liked the one where a days news cycle was spent saying his reasonably priced jacket that he wore to the cenotaph was an affront to Britain's war dead, unlike man of the people Boris who was so hungover there wasn't any usable footage and they had to reuse the previous years recording It's an utterly stupid thing to care about anyway, as if a) the exact choice of knee-length slate-grey jacket you wear dictates how much you respect Are Glorious Dead and b) that's a remotely relevant metric for how good a politician or person you are. But Corbyn - a 70-year old man - wore an insulated overcoat because he spent almost the whole of a November day outside. He was at Cenotaph ceremony, after which he was the only major political figure to actually meet and talk with any of the assembled veterans (rather than scurrying straight into the Banqueting House like the others) and then attended another service at the war memorial in his constituency. He was also criticised for wearing a poppy pin that was too small. And we all know that if he's worn a £1600 tailored MacAngus & Wainwright coat he'd be "so-called socialist Jeremy Corbyn uses Day of Remembrance to FLAUNT his expensive coat" and if he wore a standard-size poppy it would be "DISRESPECTFUL Corbyn upstages His Royal Highness with Large Poppy. WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS??" It was all utterly deranged and the depressing thing is how many people genuinely thought that Corbyn 'danced his way up Whitehall', was a Czech spy because he didn't like Viennese architecture and spent his days seething with hatred for everyone he encountered because he h8d Britane and everyone in it. The 'best' part has to be the 'Chairman Mao-style bicycle', though. It's incredible that a human being was able to commit that to print, and that other human beings took it remotely seriously.
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Apr 4, 2023 12:06
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forkboy84 posted:To be honest, Corbyn really wasn't much of anything in Scotland. Partly just because he took over right after the worst result for Scottish Labour since 1900 (a year where Labour had 1 MP in England & 1 in Wales & 0 in Scotland, and the Boer War was ongoing so there was loads of jingoism). Labour did better in Scotland in 3 or 4 elections before all of the working class even had the vote lol One really frustrating thing is that Corbyn's time came right after New Labour completely sank Labour's standing in Scotland - one of their traditional centres of support that was a foundation for national electoral success. In 2017 Labour had a swing to them not seen since the 1940s, had enough momentum to make up a 20-point polling gap in a matter of weeks and polled more votes in English constituencies than they did in any of the three elections under Blair. If they had even half of the number of seats that were traditionally 'theirs' in Scotland they'd have romped in with a clear majority, let alone if they had the 56 they'd had in 1997. Or even the 40-something they had for most of the post-war period. Instead they were starting from one seat and gained six while still dropping to third place. bedpan posted:oh totally. he had more than enough enemies inside the labour machine in England, Wales, and Scotland. I just find the SNP's offer, resign and we will enter into a coalition with your successor, was telling of how much the established political classes across all major parties and ideologies instantly unified around a single goal: corbyn has got to go. See also: The Lib Dems LDs: Brexit is a travesty and an existential threat to the UK and basic democratic decency. It must be avoided at all costs! JC: Vote with me to bring down the government set on a hard Brexit and install a temporary minority government. I'll lead it as head of HM's Loyal Opposition. LDs: No. BalloonFish has issued a correction as of 18:25 on Apr 5, 2023 |
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Apr 5, 2023 18:22
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