Meanwile- PM To Birmingham: “Drop Dead”
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Oh hey, it’s Tony Blair only without the charisma or sense of moral purpose.
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It’s easy to underestimate how much that is a deliberate choice on behalf of the party leadership. Unless you believe in the party as a movement (which they don’t) or value the door knocking (which they don’t) then all members bring is money and trouble. If they can find one Lord Sainsbury to provide a few million (not hard given the value of influence in government) the rest of us are a hindrance to their control of policy and narrative.
I met Tony Benn once (2001, campaigning for Hilary in the bar at Leeds University Union). He argued that socialists should remain in the party, despite Blair’s leadership, because at some point he would leave and those still there would choose a successor. I wonder if ‘the bastards want you to leave, so you stay’ isn’t a simpler algorithm, membership fees notwithstanding.
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BBS turns out to be a small world - I’ve had H Benn as my MP while studying at Leeds.
Right now in the public sector, in one of the unions that’s been striking for pay, conditions, and to get what we’re legally owed dammit.
Taking unions/workplace bargaining as a microcosm: Thatcher hamstrung the unions, New Labour failed to undo the damage, then the Tories pressed on with more damage.
The choice I face at the next GE is for a party actively making things worse, or a party not making things better.
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At this rate he is going to undo one of Tony Blair’s better moments, assuming the Conservatives don’t do it first.
I tried, but it was destroying my mental health. No one in the leadership was listening to what I or other trans people were saying, including my local MP. They have plenty of time to talk to TERs though.
This being the second time in my life that I have felt completely betrayed by the Labour party probably means that I will never go back. I’m still never voting Tory though.
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You can only do what you’re called to, and your mental health would be a very poor trade for a small potential of future improvement in the Labour party.
If the party can’t successfully renew itself it will eventually be replaced. That would be unfortunate - in a FPTP world it’s still the best electoral vehicle for progressive change in England - but nobody owes it relevance. And it would serve certain people right.
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Housing policy in the UK is a series of absurdity piled high
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I’m sure that this is totally coincidental.
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The barbarism continues.
Slightly lighter note
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Punch down harder Brits*, for surely it is the weight of the poors clinging on to you which is dragging you back from those sunlit uplands of your dreams.
_* /s relating to the recent Scottish conservative whine.
ETA I shouldn’t have opened the Grauniad or I wouldn’t have seen this shite:
Responding to another conservative telling refugees to fuck off back to France and whether this was bigotry rather than the open and welcoming country post Brexit Britain, allegedly, is supposed to be some Tory fuck responded “This country, lest we forget, has offered its home to 400,000 people since 2015: Ukrainians, people from Hong Kong, Afghans. We are an open and warm and outward-facing country.”
400,000 in eight years? Including from a country you invaded and devastated to force them to take opium and then occupied and administered for a century and a half before allowing them to vote a few years before returning it to China? They’re your responsibility. That would be the equivalent from an Irish perspective of boasting that we took in fewer than 30,000 in eight years. We took in 80,000 Ukrainians alone last I checked. Make no mistake by the way, we are on the crappier end of the European spectrum (well middle maybe) but the conservative fantasy about England and those plucky people in small boats in the channel is utterly unmoored from the facts.
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Short-term memory going at No 10 (and facts went long before).
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home to twice as many AI companies
I’m not sure that’s something to be proud of…
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It is Sunak’s “vision”. And probably the only way of generating sunlit uplands.
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The Home Office being incapable of competent cruelty
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