Always a good day for a new entry in the DISPATCHES FROM LESSER BREXITANIA:
It’s been a rum few days (weeks/months/years) on the Juice, has it not? I don’t know about you, but when l took The Cole’s Shilling and settled in here for some long term lurking, I was promised three-day weeks, inspirational political commentary and all the mustard I could find crevices for, but recently it feels like it’s been one bag of salted dicks after another and, frankly, I’m concerned about where my sodium levels are at. Politics can drive you bonkers. You’re up, you’re down, you’re happy, you’re sad, you’re united, you’re divided, it’s a big old mad Hokey Cokey that drains every last drop of vim from your reservoir of pip and sends you racing for the darkened room where you can watch the good guys punch the bad guys and that nice Mr Deadpool can remind you how much fun a guy can have with twelve bullets and maximum effort.
I get it, people can be exhausting. Bad people, stupid people, wilfully deluded people who actively choose to vote for evil wankers, they harsh the mellowest mellow, especially when you have to share a country with them. It does your head in and greys the soul. With that in mind there is one service I’m happy to provide, and that is to open up time, space and opportunity for all y’all to look beyond your borders and goggle in disinterested horror at the bowl-circling wankastrophe that is British Politics. Why worry about your own travails when other people are doing even worse things on a daily basis?
So, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson isn’t a happy chappie these days.
All he ever wanted out of this jolly romp we call life was for everyone around him to play Renfield to his glaringly obvious abandonment issues by saying how spiffily wonderful he is and just, you know, give him things. Lots and lots of things. Ideally, all of the things, but without being so gauche as to raise any difficult questions about why he of all people should have them or (shudder) ask him to do any actual work for it.
While less well-educated peons such as ourselves might find this attitude at trifle… onanistic, it was most fortunate for our Ministerio Primo that he was raised far away from the banal normalcy of ‘family’ in the soul-destroyingly predatory habitat of Eton, that tumorous enclave of accumulated bastardy where the barely-weaned spawn of our betters are abandoned by their Nannies in the shadow of the school gates and ‘informed how things are now’ by the looming presence of a 50 ft monolith of Rhodesian granite called The Statue of Privilege (modelled, so they say, on that great protector of the status quo Lieutenant-Colonel Guy L’Estrange) with its famous bowl of mouldy gruel held tantalisingly aloft so that the three emaciated waifs reaching for it (christened ‘Plebs’, ‘Brownies’ and ‘Uptight Fems’ in school vernacular) are all denied so much as a taste until they agree to sign the rolled charter nestled in the statue’s other arm, itself inscribed in flowing Gothic text with the school’s unofficial credo “Give me your lazy, your wealthy, your inbred elites yearning for unearned authority, the entitled graspers who still demand more…”.
Everything a future Peer of the Realm and non-Executive Director of a major lobbying firm needs to know about the realities of life are hammered into them at that School for Scoundrels, and boy, did young Flobalob learn his lessons well. Not his academic lessons, naturally, since he’s a disorganised fungal spore who can’t concentrate on one topic for longer than a few minutes, but the real ones. Lie, cheat, punch down, suck up and always, always, ALWAYS remember that without money and the status it buys, you are very much minus quam nihil with a side order of sub calcaneo to boot [Ed – I see what you did there, stop it]. Unity in the face of Equality has always been the fighting chant of the British upper classes, back-scratching and nose-tapping their way into the executive corner suites of all the important Establishment bodies with barely a ripple of dissent from the Fourth Estate who, after all, play by exactly the same rules for exactly the same reasons. Why change your tactics when they’ve won you all the battles? Eh? Haven’t you heard of the playing fields of Eton?
Flobalob’s problem is that he achieved the first of his lifetime aims (World King and Galactic Majestor require him to wait on events) without overmuch effort. He’s Prime Minister now, just like he always expected to be. Sitting in the same chair as his supposed hero, Winston ‘The Boy’s Own Bumbler’ Churchill and his schoolboy pal/rival David ‘Forget the lipstick, just give me the pig’ Cameron, which is about as big a boo-sucks to you to the world as you can hope to achieve in the British goldfish bowl. True to his mantra, Flobalob didn’t have to work very hard to get here, either. A career of uninspired bullshittery as a right-wing ‘journalist’ won him the hearts and minds of what passes in the Shires for the Tory Party intelligencia, telling them lurid tales of how that dreadfully foreign European Union was oppressing Great White Britain while enjoying the Brussels highlife on someone else’s credit card. It also earned him the sack for lying and fabricating quotes, but that’s all just part of his winsome charm, so we’re told, just like the numerous affairs (which he also lied about and got sacked for) and the unnumbered offspring. People love a rogue, runs the simplistic narrative, especially one who doesn’t take himself very seriously.
Except, of course, Flobalob does take himself seriously. He, himself, the one, true centre of the Universe around which the wispy shades of other people’s wants and needs revolve but never come into focus, that he’s always been superüberdeadly serious about. ‘Boris’ is the stage-act, the comical, dishevelled Everyman character straight out of an Edwardian farce upon whom the punters can project whatever storyline suits their mood. Alexander ‘Al’ Johnson, on the other hand, he’s a cold fish and a merciless operator, the very model of a modern Tory politico. It was ‘Boris’s’ connections and flattery that got him on TV (playing that funny, floppy haired Tory with the funny, flobalobby accent) which got him a safe Tory seat, which got him into the Cabinet, which got him important posts, which got him more Media exposure, which got him the London Mayoralty, which got him back in the Cabinet, which got him yet more exposure, which got him the platform from which he was able to project his bullshit far and wide. But it was the entirely ruthless and self-serving Al who chose to cast in his lot with the far-Right Brexit project and its even further-Right éminences grises, then went on to ride the greased bull of Brexit right through the china-shop of British politics and across Theresa May’s trampled corpse straight into the top job. It’s Jekyll and Hyde, except with this blert the deformed and uncontrollable Hyde is the comparatively nicer personae.
In a situation you might all find dreadfully familiar, Flobalob’s great good fortune has been that decades of ‘consolidation’ have produced an Infotainment industry that’s ideologically geared towards humanising the Nasty Party even as it systematically dismantles and flogs off the nation’s infrastructure, one that is always happy to popularise a fully-committed frontman who can sell the Tory brand to Joe and Beryl Bloggs, which is why ‘Boris’ still gets all the Media love, the slightly outraged giggles and the “What’s he like, eh?” shrugs from the guardians of our national narrative, but the dirty little secret behind the magic is that he only gets them because the ‘savvy’ people who know what the score is have belatedly come to understand that Al Johnson is actually the current figurehead for a much larger, more sinister and frighteningly well-funded operation than the Conservative Party he leads, one that can and will eviscerate the lives, reputations and careers of anyone naïve enough to get in its way.
What once was a bit of a joke usefully employed around the light-entertainment circuit has morphed into a Trojan Horse for a torrential barrage of lunatic Libertarian bollocks and Kulturkampf Anglo-Nationalism that threatens to turn the UK into a catastrophically failed state, all because the people and institutions that were supposed to quietly step in and ensure that ‘this kind of thing can’t possibly happen here’ were too busy lining their pockets with oligarch cash and turning a blind eye to the damage inflicted by generations of hand-cranked monopoly capitalism to notice that the ‘Populist Right’ they were applauding as the death-knell of traditional ‘working-class Labour support’ were actually well-funded neo-fascists who have become the bedrock of the ‘Blue-Kip’ movement.
No one in the upper echelons of the British Establishment seems to want to be the first to stick their necks out and call a spade a spade, seemingly for fear that said spade will quickly separate their empty heads from their soft, white bodies. When the Party of the well-heeled Establishment and their upwardly-mobile outriders has been allowed to become a vehicle for frothing mad racism and open corruption on a previously unimaginable scale, who is left to save the day?
Not Flobalob, that’s for sure. The Bullingdon Bunter didn’t get where he is by worrying one whit about consequences. That’s what underlings are for.
But I mentioned he had a problem, and it is this.
While safely ensconced on home soil he can slob around in his undies all day watching various Party drones spew unchallenged bullshit on TV, secure in the knowledge that the people asking the questions have instructions from the top to steer well clear of anything too ‘partisan’ and wouldn’t dream of constructing a more honest counter-narrative out of the daily (hourly) fuck-ups Johnson’s Government seems to birth faster than the frequently horizontal harem of Sultan Blue-Pill the Priapic. There’s no Opposition worth the name (don’t get me started), the Press has his back, and thanks to the eternally online trollic legions of the ‘Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’ he knows that his legions of fans will be getting their daily dose of “Good Old Boris, he’s on our side and have you heard how FILL IN THE BLANK is not really happening or is actually someone else’s fault?” bread and circuses on social media.
It doesn’t matter how bad it gets here, and believe me, it’s pretty bad (but I’ll come to that), he’s got the playing field so heavily slanted in his favour that it would take a suspension of the observed laws of physics and a cannon bigger than Long Dong Silver’s for anyone to land so much as a single pebble on the roof of his Teflon-coated glass house. Nothing sticks because nothing is allowed to stick. Britain is the current world leader in the excavation of memory-holes because our News Media have employed and filled so many of them in service to Flobalob and the Tory Party. Half of the municipal bowling greens in the country have had to be shut down because of the bulging hillocks of mislaid facts and uncomfortable truths stuffed beneath them, it’s that bad.
However, there’s one place that the normal rules don’t apply, a tiny patch of soil that will be forever Not England, and that’s Everywhere Else. In the spirit of that old headline about “Fog in the Channel, Europe cut off”, the scripted faux-reality that reigns here in Lesser Brexitania simply doesn’t translate to foreign markets. As observed during the recent G7 punishment beating where Flobalob’s tired shtick cut zero ice with the other participants, and we caught brief glimpses of how badly an unprepared and incompetent conman can be exposed by a few simple questions from non-intimidated journalists. When he has to step outside the ‘Boris Bubble’ and perform as an adult in the real world, Flobalob bombs harder than Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend at a ‘Survivors of Testicular Cancer’ support group.
But the UN Climate Week shindig was going to be going off big-time in New York, New York, and Flobalob never met a free lunch he wasn’t duty bound to stuff his muzzle into. Granted, there was always the possibility that exporting his rotund, pointy-beaked bulk with its ashen complexion and ill-fitting suit to the streets of Gotham might lead to a dramatic case of mistaken identity, but that was a risk he was more than willing to take in order to rub shoulders with the real movers and shakers of the world and get his photograph taken cosplaying at ‘Britain’s Prime Minister’. So, nervously clutching his Brexit Blue passport in one sweaty palm, Maximus Decietus Verbius, father of uncounted kids, husband of unloved wives, waster of unnumbered lives, hoisted himself up the steps of BritFarce One and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to bring the good news of Global Britain to the Temporarily Mislaid Colonies of Yankia.
Surely, he no doubt reasoned, everyone else would see the humour in the situation and play along with his lark? This time everyone would be too busy with their own problems to mind if funny old Boris told a few porky pies to burnish his reputation at home, yes? This time it would be different, a proper jolly jamboree where the Clown Prince of Solipsistia could get well and truly wankered on someone else’s wine and maybe lay the groundwork for a few of those juicy post-political sinecures he’d heard about while helping the Brazilian Ambassador’s nephew and a line of NDA’d models through the various stages of a ‘Madagascan Carwash’ or two. Surely, this time…
Nah.
If there’s one thing you can guarantee, it’s that, thanks to the enormous tissue of lies that surround and support the delusion of Brexit, any British representative trying to discuss the topic in a positive way in front of a foreign audience might as well start emitting guttural barks and rolling around on the floor catching anchovies in their mouth, because they’re certainly not going to be telling the truth, and in this Flobalob is no different. It’s predictable and entirely unavoidable that any question lobbed at him will come back with a lie attached, either a barefaced lie in support of whatever confabulated bullshit the Brextremists are currently pushing (the Northern Ireland Protocol was always a short-term bridging document that the EU are trying to pretend has legal force) or an equally barefaced lie telling the questioner whatever he thinks they want to hear (now that Britain is free to decide its own rules we will be pressing on faster and further towards a Green future than any of our rivals) all in the hope that they just file the copy and fuck the hell off to bother someone else.
Flobalob’s big problem in New York and Washington, however, was that he was lying about it in real time while the people he was lying about were RIGHT THERE and available for questioning too. It was always a recipe for disaster, and it cooked up a storm.
Just a few examples of how badly this shockingly out-of-his-depth mammal performed while on the world stage.
Claim – Johnson told journalists on the plane before even leaving for New York that he had spoken to the Dutch PM (Mark Rutte) the previous night and Rutte had offered to mediate between the EU and UK over the issue of implementation of the Withdrawal Agreement Johnson signed in order to claim he had ‘Got Brexit Done’.
Truth – The Dutch PM told Johnson to be pragmatic, meaning stop fucking about generating tabloid headlines and enforce the terms you asked for and agreed to in the WA before the European Commission loses all patience. No offer of mediation was or could be made, because the entire EU 27 have given the European Commission the task of ensuring the UK lives up to its side of the deal and the Netherlands is one of the 27.
Claim – Brexit will allow the UK to negotiate a great Trade Deal with the US that will more than replace the loss of trade with the EU
Truth – That’s not going to happen any time soon (if ever), and to be bluntly honest the UK is not just at the back of the queue to sign anything like that, it’s not even staying at the same hotel as the convention where the US will be signing things. We’re in a motel 40 miles away and there’s not even Wi Fi.
Claim – Johnson and Biden didn’t discuss the Northern Ireland Agreement in their White House chat.
Truth – Biden told Johnson very clearly that the US was committed to the Northern Ireland Agreement and would not countenance any fucking about with it, which is about the only thing Democrats and Republicans agree on these days, so you’re welcome for that.
Then the man who only last year went to the UN to display his sneering contempt for environmental activists (“hair-shirt-wearing, tree-hugging, mung bean-munching eco-freaks” was I believe the phrase the lard-arsed gobshite used) had the barefaced cheek to get up in front of the entire UN General Assembly and demand that everybody else “grow up” and take the climate crisis seriously.
As you’d expect, this went down harder than a traditionalist Cardinal at a Vatican sex-party with the assembled audience of notables, all of whom have staffers efficient enough to have made them aware that, far from speaking from his cholesterol clogged heart, St Tubby of Chequers has happily stripped away Britain’s environmental regulations in order to let companies dump their toxins in our rivers [Ed – Surely there must be some mistake? Checks notes. Fuuuuuck].
Johnson, who is constitutionally incapable of keeping his cool if people aren’t smiling at him, then shifted gear in a vain attempt to win over his audience by lying about the Tory Party’s commitment to Green Energy, lying some more about his own, personal record as a champion of environmental causes, and then concluding with a section… breathes deeply… chastising Kermit the Frog for being wrong about the difficulty of being green and for his abusive attitude to Ms Piggy.
At an obscure independent film festival somewhere in rural West Australia, down in the Modern Auteur tent the organisers set up next to the portaloos, a flickering screen emits images of baby calves being fed into a giant mincer interspersed with footage culled from ‘A Serbian Movie’ and ‘Carry On Up The Khyber’. Grainy reflections of horror dance in the eyes of the writer-director-producer of this 10-minute piece of black-and-white drivel as he sits, alone, abandoned by even the most committed fan of ‘experimental non-linear drama’. Tears flow down his scarred face as he recognises, far too late, how badly he’s wasted whatever meagre talent he once possessed if this… dreck… is the best he can produce. And yet, as his heart flutters and the blood oozing from his slashed wrists slows to a crawl, one thought gives him solace as the great, dark forever expands to claim his soul.
“At least I never badmouthed the Muppets.”
I can’t express how humiliating it is to have Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson representing this country. Millions of my fellow countrymen voted to put that feckless ballgag in charge of absolutely everything and it’s shameful that the millions who weren’t that wilfully blind still have to explain exactly why that was such an unforgivably stupid thing to do. With our News Media it’s hardly surprising that the vast majority of people remain blissfully unaware of how Flobalob comes across to a global audience. Consider, if you will, this nugget of other-dimensional whitewashing from none other than Laura Kuenssberg, the BBC’s Political Editor.
“And of course, Mr Johnson himself is not exactly a stranger to a gaffe or a glitch. But as I write, shortly before he and the press pack fly back there hasn’t been any major slips or surprises – at least not that we know about yet.”
He lied about the Dutch, lied about the US President, got fact-checked virtually instantly for both examples, then stood in front of the UN and picked a fight with a fucking puppet, but as far as that bought and paid for hack is concerned her ‘good friend’ (if you know what I mean and I think you do) didn’t make any major slips. There’s grading on a curve, and there’s… whatever that is, but it’s not journalism, it’s not even opinion, it’s just straight up misinformation and State Propaganda beamed straight into the homes of every British family on a daily basis.
It’s also not surprising. The Right to Hard Right bias of the British Press is one of those well-known but never explored facts of national life that somehow exists in a Schrodinger state whereby the talking-heads will sort of acknowledge it, but will never, ever accept that it could have any negative effect on the quality of their news output or the opinions held by their readers. It’s getting the same way with TV News, since the upper ranks of the BBC have been stuffed full of Tory Party donors and apparatchiks from the far-Right broadsheets, while the powers and influence of the bodies tasked with overseeing them have been reduced and their budgets slashed, then stuffed full of Tory placemen to make sure no one complains too loudly.
When a news outlet forgets its place (as with Channel 4, the publicly owned but privately funded channel) and asks the Government difficult questions they are immediately threatened with being sold off, and this is all apparently fine and dandy with the rest of the Media. “Some (actual experts and everyone involved in the matter) might say” that the Tories are out to silence any contrary voices through brute force and bullying, but look, here’s random Government junior-Minister Digby Butterballs MP in his overstuffed blue velour three-piece suit and gaudy Union Jack cufflinks to tell us that nothing could be further from the truth and, indeed, blah-blah, take the shackles off, waffle-waffle, wasting Public money on Woke issues, burble-burble, exciting future ahead, so that’s ‘both sides’ heard from and let’s just leave it to the general public to make their own minds up about who is really bullying who. Then a couple of weeks later, when the Government is once again revealed to be exerting undue influence over supposedly independent bodies via funding or exploiting the appointment process, we go through the whole “well, this is new” charade again, except this time they don’t bother interviewing anyone other than junior-Minister Butina Balldigger MP so that she can tell us to move on, nothing to see here, just some partisan Lefties whining because they hate the flag and British fairness. This happens over and over and over again until everyone just tunes it out and pisses off to watch TGBBO or MasterChef or whatever.
Have I ever mentioned that I fucking hate these people?
It’s against this background of wall-to-wall gaslighting that the UK is facing the inevitable fallout from electing a bunch of posh-boy gangsters and ball-licking middle managers to office on a platform of xenophobia and economic auto-asphyxiation. Covid rates are steadily rising, with about a thousand people a week joining the ranks of the Silent Chorus, the NHS is creaking again as beds fill up and Staff face the prospect of another winter under the cosh, but that’s okay, everything is fine and dandy. Covid as a problem that anyone needs to worry about is O.V.E.R. in the UK since The Government’s Vaccine Rollout ™ saved the day and it’s rare to hear it mentioned on the News as anything other than something lingering in the background like one of Granny’s post-cheese salad farts.
You wouldn’t really know that this Government is being slowly dragged through the Courts by the wonderful Good Law Project to expose the wholesale and blatant corruption surrounding the issuing of contracts for Covid testing and PPE back when Johnson and Co were under pressure to look engaged and focussed after their earlier insouciance had left tens of thousands of elderly people exposed to the virus. The existence of a special V.I.P. lane for expedited contracts was initially denied, then proven to be a fact, followed by accusations that this V.I.P. lane was being used to shove contracts towards Tory party donors, family members and just any casual acquaintance who fancied a turn at the public-money teat being loudly poo-poo’d, until evidence came out that that was totally true too. The Good Law People have just won a case to get access to former Health Secretary and very naughty boy Matt ‘Lying T#&t’ Hancock’s WhatsApp messages from that period, so that’s a ticking time bomb right there. All of these cases continue, but 99.9% of people don’t know about it because the News Media simply doesn’t tell them about it.
There’s just so much going wrong here that’s directly attributable to this shower of guano-sniffers, all of it being made skin-peelingly worse by the ‘solutions’ they’ve cribbed from hand-scribbled notes in margins of The Fountainhead. The Brexit Project continues to devastate the economy, with even the most Establishment of financial institutions shitting bricks over the hundreds of millions of pounds being lost in trade and services every day, all because Flobalob and his rouble-roped army of Brextremist Incels can’t admit that the ‘oven ready deal’ they signed to drag us out of the EU was a hastily cobbled together Media prop that none of them even read.
So we’ve got the worst of both worlds. British goods going out are getting treated – obviously – as if we’re no longer an EU member (tariffs, red-tape, checks, etc) but EU goods coming in are being waved through unchecked, because the infrastructure to check things properly was never set up and the Government are terrified of the blowback if they tried playing funny buggers at the border. We’re still getting it in the neck anyway, since the Government has gone out of its way to make Fortress Magna Anglia a hostile environment for EU workers, so hundreds of thousands of them have gone to seek better pay and conditions elsewhere in the world’s largest free-movement community, leaving the UK suffering from massive staff shortfalls in hospitality, care homes, the NHS, food distribution and, most pertinently, Heavy Goods Vehicle drivers.
Shop shelves are empty and prices are rising because there’s no one around to drive the goods from warehouse to warehouse, and since that’s how fuel is shipped to the pump we’re also seeing petrol stations run out, which leads to panic buying, which leads to enormous traffic jams, which leads to using too much fuel, which leads to, well, you get the drift. Flobalob is now talking about using the Army to get the fuel moved around (because what else are they for if not for Emergency ‘being seen to be doing something’ situations?
Meanwhile we’re told that the Cabinet was split between panicked corporate frontmen and hard-Right ausländerfrei maniacs over doing a screeching U-turn on the issue of giving work visas to dirty foreign types until Flobby himself stamped his feet and insisted that he was so sick of all the bad headlines this was causing that another U-turn was the only recourse.
Of course, with Priti Patel the cosplay Cardassian at the Home Office, the execution of this policy 180 has been somewhat lacking in the necessary j’nai sais quoi, with the Government phrasing their desperate need for EU drivers to come to Blighty’s rescue as, and I almost quote, “You lot, we’ll let you back in, but only for a very limited time, and while you’re here we’ll watch you like hawks because we know what you dirty dagos are like, and if any of you try and hang around in our Unicorn Playground a second past the arbitrary deadline we’ve set for this problem to be kaput, we’ll set La Migra on your dirty, brown arses.”
Surprisingly enough, not a lot of EU drivers are taking them up on their generous offer, I guess that’s because Those People are so lazy they’d prefer to storm our pristine beaches in fleets of leaking dinghies or something [Ed – This might be a Daily Mail headline, I haven’t checked].
And while the natural Party of Government presides over the jerky stop-motion collapse of the country, their plans to pay for all of the mess they’ve caused places the entire burden on, you guessed it, the least well-off and the lowest earners. They want to cut the extra £20 a week uplift they were forced to add to the already miserly Universal Credit allowance (think Welfare, but designed by Kafka and overseen by Count Orlok) while Covid still existed as a problem, even though everyone and his dog and his dog’s veteran accountant has pointed out that this will plunge hundreds of thousands of people into suicidal levels of abject poverty (unfortunately that’s dirty talk to your average Randian übermench and gets them stiffer than one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s dates) with predictable knock-on effects for the economy and society.
They’ve tried to sell a raise in the National Insurance levy as being vital to ‘solve the Social Care conundrum’, which didn’t fly because it was quickly apparent that Social Care wouldn’t see a penny for years as they were really intending to use the tax raise to ‘solve the NHS waiting list conundrum’, for which read ‘shovel billions into the pockets of private Healthcare corporations to provide zero-contract staff but otherwise just make things worse’, and anyway the real genius plan behind it was to ensure that the savings and properties of wealthy Tory voters were left mostly intact to be passed on to little Hyacinth and Jasper once Mah’mah and Pah’pah had relocated to the Sunny Uplands Residential Care Estate for a little end-of-life partying.
Meanwhile they’re snorting orphan’s tears through rolled up £50 notes at the thought of getting rid of the Furlough system of taxpayer wage-support that has allowed millions of said taxpayers to just about manage while Tory-enabled Covid ripped through the country and shut down their workplaces. The fact that this will lead to a truly cataclysmic wave of job losses as those jobs may not even really exist anymore is airily dismissed as another ‘Project Fear’. They can all just retrain as Heavy Good Drivers and Care Home workers, can’t they? Two birds, one stone, back of the net.
All this, you might think, should be a Rock and Rolling Christmas every live-long day for the ‘Opposition’. I’ve barely scratched the surface of how disastrous Tory rule has been for the UK but you get the point, it should be like shooting very big fish in miniature barrels for a functional opposition Party. One teeny tiny problem. We haven’t got one.
All I’ll say is this.
A’la Cole I can no longer rationally discuss the travesty that is the current Labour Party leadership. It’s not just the vindictive brutality they show towards anyone outside their closed circle, or the flagrant hypocrisy of their demands for loyalty after years of daily backstabbing, or the infantile whining they indulge in whenever it becomes obvious even to them that their prior status as media-friendly Kool Kidz was an entirely transactional affair reliant on them sabotaging and badmouthing their own Party, or all the other failures of character that make them completely unsuited to the roles they’ve been appointed to. It’s the wholesale, undeniable, unteachable incompetence they display at every single turn. Politically and organisationally speaking they really are the biggest fucking idiots on the planet. Total, spring-propelled failurenauts who can’t manage the simplest political task without punching themselves, the Party and everyone within range right in the plump-danglers.
These are supposed to be the experienced adults come to tidy up the mess created by the “sixth-form anarchists” but all they’ve done since seizing power is fuck up the simplest tasks while stubbornly learning absolutely nothing from each debacle. Groundhog Day Gobshites with entirely unearned superiority complexes who can’t arrange a half-hour visit to a pub without dropping their leader in a PR cowpat. Their one and only skill, honed over years of backroom scheming and ratfucking, is in deploying Right wing smears against the vast majority of the Party membership and exploiting their control of the disciplinary mechanism to expel or hound out anyone deemed insufficiently dedicated to their warmed-up grot of mid-90’s ‘Business-friendly Centrism’.
While the Tories have been eviscerating the country with their greed and cruelty, the very best that Labour’s damp cardboard cut-out of a ‘leader’ can manage has been eighteen months of barely audible, mealy-mouthed tut-tutting about how the Government has failed to meet its ephemeral targets, while in the background executing a series of tremendously ill-timed 180s on everything from Brexit to Social Justice in (failed) pursuit of the same aging, white, ex-Labour converts to Race Realism who he and his crew spent years attacking the previous leadership for trying to keep onboard so they could, oh, I don’t know, win an election or something.
It takes a special kind of contraflow imbecility (or a deliberate intention to stir up factional outrage, or both) to wait until the day before your Party Conference to casually announce that you’re gambling every granule of your already shaky authority on changing the Party’s election rules so that MPs (selected by the Party leadership, natch) can overrule any unfortunate outbursts of democratic sentiment in the choice of Party leader, and, very important this, can’t be deselected by their local constituency Parties no matter how badly they perform. It takes an absolutely monolithic grade A+ qualification in Anal Earmuff contortionism to do it without talking to the Trade Unions (whose support you need) first or laying any groundwork at all, other than drawing up a Shit-list of Conference delegates who Security are instructed to deny entry to because your Beria-lite and widely hated General Secretary has once again violated disciplinary procedures by secretly suspending them from the Party on bullshit charges of retrospective thought-crimes.
Then, when it quickly becomes apparent that your genius move is going to crash and burn in humiliating defeat, it takes a kind of ostrich-egged shamelessness to whittle your Absolutely Vital Reforms down to a squirming nubbin of nothingness and, once you’ve jammed that through with a surprise last-minute defection of one Union delegation in a pretty shady move, to claim Total Victory and “this was, of course, what we always wanted”.
Pathetic. This was about nothing more than the realisation that Starmer is a dead-man walking, and gerrymandering the leadership election rules to ensure only centre-Right breadsticks need apply for the role of Figurehead when he’s told to bite the bullet and move aside. Policy? Opposition? Democracy? Fuck that noise. It’s just clear the Party of dirty hippies and bankrupt the coffers with pay-offs to ratfuckers so that a handful of Islamophobic donors can come riding in on their white steeds to save the day, with conditions. Fuck them. They’ve no intention of fighting the next Election to win it, preferring to plump up the cushions on the VIP decks for when Johnson’s chaotic reign has rendered the Tories toxic to enough for the Powers That Be to look for another comfortable berth. Fat chance of that happening, but as I said, they’re uneducatable.
Rant over.
Anyway, so that’s us. Growing poorer, colder and less relevant by the day, chained to a failed system by a rancid Media culture and the ugly, insular revanchism it’s bred. Cruel, dirty, dumber than a sack of severed ears, trained to the yoke and quick to the whip, y’know, Murdoch Country.
Makes the American grass look a little bit greener, doesn’t it?
JanieM
I’m only a quarter of the way into it. I’m not sure I should exceed my laugh out loud quota for the day by reading the rest.
Frank Wilhoit
Asquith should have had [what was later called] MI-5 arrange a Very British Accident for Northcliffe.
gvg
Oh. I thought we had it bad. Wow, just wow.
I don’t understand how your representatives get elected by a party, not voters? That seems problematic to me?
scav
We do however suffer from a devastatingly apparent deficit in sustained innovative invective when measured against what’s left of the old country.
Zelma
Most destructive person since Hitler? Rupert Murdoch. He’s destroyed three countries. God bless the Canadians for keeping him out. And the Kiwis.
Ksmiami
@Zelma: the entire clan needs to be torched in one epic bonfire
VeniceRiley
Tony, do you think the EU would have you back? A friend in Spain seems to think “no.” would be the answer.
Getting married in Nov. Be there by March… Can’t wait. Sounds lovely.
Tony Jay
@gvg:
MPs have to stand for election in their constituencies, but to become an MP you have to be selected by the Party as its candidate. We don’t have Primaries for MPs, and a lot of the current Parliamentary Labour Party were handpicked during the Blair/Brown years for their, shall we say, willingness to toe a certain ideological line. That’s why there was such a concentrated outburst of screaming outrage when the previous leadership changed the rules a bit to make it easier for constituency Labour parties to challenge and, if they were able to muster the votes, deselect MPs who were out of step with what the local membership wanted. Can’t have the hoi polloi having any influence over the blue-blood Party aristocracy, can we? That’s what corporate donors are for.
mali muso
Phew! Righteous rant. I need a cigarette, and I don’t even smoke.
Tony Jay
@VeniceRiley:
Nope. Not a chance.
Membership of the Single Market and Customs Union, maybe, if we ditch the Conservatives and do something to rein in the bastard Press, but since that’s vanishingly unlikely under any of the current Party leaderships…
You’re moving to Britain? Are you… ahem… sure you want to do that? Can’t you negotiate a sensible compromise with your intended to split the difference and live on an upturned VW Beetle somewhere south of the Azores? Good fishing, I hear.
JanieM
I have to admit, it gets less funny as it goes along. But I’m in awe of the writing.
Ruckus
Tony Jay
We don’t have centuries of Old Guard Rule to hone the righteous theft of, well everything, but we seem to have a similar conflict between the “How Much Can We Steal” party and the “You Can’t Stop Us From Our Stupidity” party, seeing as they are one and the same and have veered ever harder rightward in the oh so very young republic across the waters. Sorry that in your case the press seems to be in their death grip, but it really isn’t a lot better here, as the owners of most of the press seems to be on the same side of the aisle and for similar reasons. But we do seem to have a reasonably large number of actual citizens, who have seen the light.
Thank you for your informative diatribe.
Kent
I have no idea what you just said. But it certainly sounds good!
eclare
Great essay, as always! What is the Blue-Kip movement?
Bard the Grim
What?! We’re running out of ivermectin?!! Noooooo!
Tony Jay
@JanieM:
I was going to warn you. I front-load the funnies because I know it’s going to get bleak as fuck and I’d like you to have some happy memories.
SpaceUnit
As a battered and beleaguered American, I find it perversely comforting to watch another country step on the rake.
PsiFighter37
Bit of a shame that Keir Starmer has proven to be less competent than hoped, and the usual backbiting and backstabbing that has been a hallmark of Labour over the past decade is alive and well. There is no way for Labour to win another election IMO – they have lost their Scotland power base for a generation, and they simply won’t win enough seats in England to gain power in a majority, much less as part of a coalition.
Tony Jay
@eclare:
When the Tories (who wear blue rosettes come election time and are associated with that colour) moved hard Right and swallowed up the UKIP* vote, people started calling them the Blue Kip or BluKip Party.
*United Kingdom Independence Party, Farage’s old fascist mob.
Litlebritdifrnt
Tony did you see the news this evening. Evidently pig farmers are going to have to cull their pigs because the meat processing plants lost all their workers thanks to Brexit and they can’t process the pigs. I hope all of the Brexiteers don’t rely on their full english breakfast every morning because that will be gone, as well as ham, gammon etc and their beloved pork roast for Sunday dinner. Apparently the workers have no intention of coming back to blighty because they are working very nice jobs at home thank you. Flobalob was on the news yammering incoherently about how he and his government has “programmes” in place to replace all the workers without saying in the word salad what those “programmes” entailed. Seeing as there are no workers to employ one would assume that Boris plans to put house elves in all the empty positions.
Again Tony your updates are Gold and I live over here now.
Tony Jay
@Kent:
At it’s heart, it’s a searing review of the upcoming Salem’s Lot remake. I just tart it up with anti-Tory invective because this is a politics blog and I like to fit in.
Ruckus
@SpaceUnit:
It is possible that the concept needs to step it up a notch, I believe that they didn’t just step on the rake, they purposely jumped on it with both feet.
Tony Jay
@Litlebritdifrnt:
I saw. Even now millions of Leave voters are rubbing scrunched up copies of the Daily Mail and Daily Express into their bleeding eye sockets and playing Farage blathering away on GB News at ear melting volumes, yearning for that moment of euphoric clarity when they ‘remember’, yes, this is what I voted for. I wanted all the pigs killed.
This is why I stocked up my freezer ages ago. And Brexit hasn’t even really hit yet.
SpaceUnit
@Ruckus: Perhaps some sort of grievous mishap at the rake factory.
eclare
@Tony Jay: Gotcha! Thanks for the explanation.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
L’Estrange was the guy who lead the massacre of a bunch people malicious penititing for the Right to vote and found out, much to his horror, the kind of vicious buffoons he unleashed by using the local militia.
VeniceRiley
@Tony Jay: Not until she retires. At that point, I don’t think they let us move to the EU anymore. But we shall see what the future holds!
Tony Jay
@PsiFighter37:
That’s an understatement. 2017 will go down as the last time Labour seriously challenged the Tories. Starmer’s cynical 90s tribute act will fail to pick up much of the Tory vote on the Right (they’ll go Lib-Dem for a bit) and will shed millions of Left votes to the Greens and general young person apathy. Scotland won’t be coming back, Wales might join it, and we’ll be condemned to Tory minority rule for a generation.
Luckily we’ll all have starved to death by then, so it’s not all doom and gloom.
Nutmeg again
I need a cigarette!
Betty Cracker
I like to believe I can occasionally turn a phrase to comedic effect, but dude, you spin those fuckers around like a thousand majorettes juggling a dozen flaming batons apiece! There are so many keepers, but “failurenauts” has been squirreled away for future deployment.
Also, I’d like to learn more about “cheese salad.”
Ruckus
@SpaceUnit:
I don’t believe the rakes or the rake factory have any part in this debacle. Other than being in the way and unseen by the foolish.
Tony Jay
@VeniceRiley:
Give it a few years. If you survive the food riots and avoid being sentenced to the Compulsory Cheering For The Queen gangs you should be able to steal a coracle and seek asylum in Ireland. The accent will probably swing it for you.
Fingers crossed.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Perhaps the strangest, random while yet the most awesome sentence ever posted to Balloon Juice.
Tony Jay
@Betty Cracker:
Not from my Granny you wouldn’t.
Also, high praise. You know I’m only mimicking your inimitable stylings, don’t you?
BC in Illinois
What I want to know is “Where have you gone, Nicola Sturgeon? Scotland turns its lonely eyes to you.”
How soon can the Scottish National Party — now in alliance with the Greens — maneuver its way to INDYREF-2 ? Seven years ago, the line from Westminster was that if Scotland went independent, it would lose membership in the EU. So they (barely) voted against independence . . . and have lost membership in the EU.
Now, my Scottish news comes filtered by way of SNP tweets, but it seems from what I read that my ancestral homeland pines for the EU, more than the UK.
According to Wikipedia (from which all knowledge flows),
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
Are you sure?
BC in Illinois
@BC in Illinois:
There is also the more recent song of “We’re so sorry Scotland,” by Fascinating Aida:
Tony Jay
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I had to set up the Muppet line.
Geoduck
If the media is so thoroughly in the tank for the Tories, where do you go to get any real information on what’s going on?
Ruckus
@Geoduck:
As BC in Illinois stated “According to Wikipedia (from which all knowledge flows),”
Tony Jay
@Geoduck:
People send me a lot of stuff from Social Media. There is some useful stuff in the Press, once you completely ignore the contextual framing they put around the naked details. The Guardian and the Independent aren’t pro-Tory, they’re just anti-anyone who could actually unseat them and mess with their market share.
Plus, things are so terrible and getting even worse that even the Hard Right Press occasionally acknowledges that bad things are happening… they just posit solutions that would make things insanely worse, sooner.
Also, I have the pickled head of an Abyssinian warlock in the fridge. When I light the candles and say the right words he can pierce the void and tell me three truths. Which is well lucky, I think.
Ken
It’s probably my misunderstanding of the UK constitution, but I thought that millions of your fellow countrymen voted for the F.B.’s political party, and later a few thousand people who’d paid extra to join the party’s Platinum Club chose the F.B. as prime minister.
Eunicecycle
That. Was. Awesome.
Ken
@Tony Jay: I must admit I hadn’t heard about the Muppet kerfluffle. The top story in the US press was that the Brazilian delegation had to eat pizza outside.
Geminid
Ahh! Another scintillating and informative post from the Sagacious Sassenach. Thank you, Mr. Jay.
I wonder if the Labour Party’s control over their candidates is an impediment to voter mobilization. There are structural differences between the British and American systems that may make American-style primaries unsuitable. But I am very glad that voters here choose our candidates in closed or open primaries, and I would be appalled by the practice of leaving candidate selection in the hands of party officials.
Kalakal
Great rant and so fucking true.
For me the state of Britain was summed up by 2 things in the last few days
1) a tory minister being interviewed proudly braying that thanks to Brexit getting rid of all those rotten foreigners there would be more jobs and even pay rises for the loyal serfs as there were now more jobs than workers and in the following sentence ridiculing the suggestion that the shortage of HGV drivers had anything to do with Brexit
2) The announcement that part time PM and full time waste of skin Johnson was going to solve the problem of empty petrol stations by activatingtactivating the… wait for it… Reserve Tanker Fleet. The small but significant flaw with this cunning plan is there is no shortage of petrol tankers, there is however a shortage of people to drive on the grounds they were told to sod off for the crime of being forrin. We are however assured plucky civilians will leap into the breach to drive them, which certainly gives me a warm feeling as it will to those unfortunates who happen to be in the vicinity when 30 tons of accelerant hits the road when some poor inexperienced sod discovers that driving a petrol tanker is not like delivering a truck load of baked beans.
As a bonus the Great British Press have announced that “Boris will save Christmas”. Good luck with that, the pillock couldn’t save a pdf
Ken
If I sent you the candles, could you ask him for proofs (or disproofs) of P = NP, the Riemann hypothesis, and… oh, existence of a quantum Yang-Mills theory with a positive mass gap.
piratedan
sounds like its time for the creation of the Are You Serious party… but alas, that takes money and we all know that any Brit with that and any common sense has fled. Might have better luck with the Pointless party, fans of the show have been modestly educated and actually know a few things….
Ken
I found this recipe, which may not be what Tony Jay meant, but really… Fawlty Towers? I have to try it now.
EDIT: Hmm, perhaps a bit high on the cholesterol…
Tony Jay
@Ken:
Nearly. The Conservatives chose the humanoid venom sac as their leader after May stepped down, and since they were the largest Party in Parliament he became PM. Then 14+ million consumers of barely literate (black) magical thinking voted for him to do it for another five years.
I don’t understand why, and I’m glad about that.
bbleh
Makes the American grass look a little bit greener, doesn’t it?
It’s certainly been nice to be able to say, “we’re not the only ones.”
BUT …
The Tories — the “bunch of posh-boy gangsters and ball-licking middle managers” elected “to office on a platform of xenophobia and economic auto-asphyxiation” — is exactly what the leadership of the US Republican Party is and has been for decades (which for us is a long time), and is exactly what they yearn to return to, as soon as they can get rid of this pesky orange-white rash that seems to have developed in the past few years. And very importantly, this would be hailed not just by their plutocratic and media allies but by the entire mainstream universe of the Savvy as a return to sensible behavior.
Put another way, if Trump had half the brains of Johnson (which may not be saying much), he probably would have been re-elected with full hosannas, and if a Johnson-equivalent comes along, he (sorry not she, they are Republicans after all) will be not just a contender but possibly the favorite.
So yeah but also no.
Tony Jay
@Ken:
I offer you mystical knowledge culled from across the Fifteen Planes of Chaos and Order and the infinitely turning reflections of the Multiversal snowflake, and you ask for…. math?
I’ll ask him, but I think it’ll be a be a reach.
Ken
@Tony Jay: If it helps motivate you, that’s $3,000,000 of math problems. Plus, there’s another three after those. But note, we need actual proofs or disproofs. If all he’s going to do is say “the conjecture is correct”, save the candles so you can have tallow on toast for Christmas dinner.
Tony Jay
@bbleh:
I hear you, but when the chance to choose a brighter future came along you guys took it, and you still have the numbers and the organisation to take your country back from the rot that blights it.
We didn’t. From where I’m sitting your grass isn’t just greener, its bloody luminous.
Seriously though
Marina Hyde is funnier.
dp
I’m truly sorry for the mess that is UK politics, but Tony Jay’s commentary makes it sadly hilarious.
sab
I did the American junior year abroad to Durham (very far north in England, north of Yorkshire) in 1975-1976, a few years before Mrs Thatcher blew things up. Back then all the university kids were learning foreign languages so that they could get a job and emigrate since they were finally in the EU.
To say watching this all unfold is disheartening is putting it mildly. To say I suspected that it was much more dire than reported is also putting it mildly. Reading this :”YIKES!”
One of the UK’s problems in the 1970s is that the pound was no longer a reserve currency, so budgets had to be balanced in good times and bad. Over here we do have a recognized reserve currency that everyone still trusts. So our Republican bozos want to blow that up.
As an old with some legal training I get annoyed with some of our more excitable jackals wanting to blow things up. My year in England I took some law classes (in UK Law is an undergraduate major not a postgrad degree.) I vividly remember being horrified when I realized that y’all do not have a written constitution, just a bunch of historic norms. Our founding fathers grew up in your system and knew what the fuck they were doing when they established our clunky system. The clunkiness is a feature not a bug. It makes moving forward difficult, but it has taken the Republicans forty years of hard work to unwind the 1960s and 1970s and they still haven’t succeeded
ETA: I love the UK. This just makes me want to shriek or weep.
debbie
I apologize for the O/T, but I have not stopped crying since hearing Brett Kavanaugh has COVID.
trollhattan
@SpaceUnit:
If only the total number of rakes weren’t greater than one.
sab
@debbie: /// I know. It is so sad that I won’t even tell my dog.
Tony Jay
@Ken:
Here’s an accurate transcript of that part of the ‘speech’. Not the prepared text that some of the Press displayed as “what he said”, but the actual words.
“And when Kermit the frog… Kermit the frog”
[awkward pause for absent laughter]
“Sang It’s not easy being green… Do you remember that?”
[Longer awkward pause for laughter, nothing]
“I want you to know he was wrong he was wrong. It is easy. It is not only easy it is lucrative and it’s right to be green. Though he’s also unnecessarily rude to Miss Piggy”
[longest pause for laughter, silence].
“I thought. Kermit the frog.”
Absolute bellend with bells on. I’m ashamed for my country.
Tony Jay
@Kalakal:
All this.
Glad you’re not lurking anymore.
Kalakal
@debbie: XKCD neatly sums up how saddened I am
https://xkcd.com/2523/
BC in Illinois
If you want a non-Tory perspective, I recommend the Scottish National Party (www.snp.org). They come across as everything I would dream of the Democrats as being. Climate change. Safety net. Diversity. “No one should ever have to choose between eating and heating.”
[ For two years, a while back, I sent in my dues and had an SNP membership card, but then I thought better of it. It’s no more lawful for me to contribute to a Scottish party than for a citizen of Scotland to donate to our politics. ]
For a quick view on twitter, see @NicolaSturgeon or @theSNP.
What have the SNP ever done for us?
Alison Rose
I know it’s not an OT but I just saw this glorious news
Someone might have already dropped the link, but it’s worth more than one. Take him for everything he has, folks! That fucking monster.
Noah Brand
Starts as P.G. Wodehouse, ends as Spider Jerusalem. Love it.
SiubhanDuinne
@BC in Illinois:
Just for you (and all other True Scotsmen):
https://youtu.be/EETgBeD5KDo
prostratedragon
@Tony Jay: Having read a fair amount of your wit, I am forced to conclude that this is not an example of it, but is indeed the real thing.
God! God!
Kalakal
@Tony Jay: Thanks, I’m with you on those useless twats in the Labour party as well. I’ve known some great Labour party members but far too many gits that seem to think the most important thing is to win either a prolier than thou contest or that if only they were all nice and didn’t scare the horses the media and the money would love them.
It’s like the bastard offspring of Leon Trotsky and Big Bird. How can you sodding well be losing to the Tories after the last few years?
SpaceUnit
@trollhattan:
I’m imagining a Far Side cartoon that shows a large number of clowns with big floppy shoes heading towards the entrance of a store whose sign reads ‘World O’ Rakes’.
Tony Jay
@prostratedragon:
He stood in front of the United Nations General Assembly and said… that.
If he’d pulled out a Kermit puppet and started slapping it around it would have been worse, but that’s the only saving grace I can think of.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or spit nails.
Burnspbesq
Not hardly. I would respectfully submit that the only English-speaking country whose polity has its shit remotely together is New Zealand. Or did you not notice our immediate past Vice President in Budapest hanging out with Bosnian Serb war criminals?
SpaceUnit
@Alison Rose:
Yes! That SOB deserves to lose every penny. Actually, he deserves way worse than that, but this is a good start.
Another Scott
Thanks very much for your great essay.
You have my sympathy and best wishes.
:-(
I saw this Twitter thread on Starmer’s embarrassing and weak manifesto:
It’s just incompetence. Or not caring. Either way, things won’t get better without better Labour leadership.
Hang in there, and thanks again.
Cheers,
Scott.
The Pale Scot
Oh Fuck, is this going to be good
SiubhanDuinne
@Tony Jay:
Sometimes I think the Queen must feel profoundly and cringingly
embarrassedappalled by the rubbish that is spewed in the name of “Her Government.”Paul T
“Mislaid Colonies!” LOL……
Tony Jay
@Kalakal:
Determination. And a ruthless dedication to a brand of unmoored, focus-grouped vacuity that went out of style around the time of the Iraq War. But mostly determination.
It takes hard work to be this awful.
Ksmiami
@bbleh: except they had that in Mitt Romney and he lost bigly… Hoping that Biden’s budget stuff gets passed and that the Dems hire some high quality ad agencies to message tf out of the improvements
Tony Jay
@Burnspbesq:
Well yeah, but the stroke-faced sycophant isn’t your Vice-President anymore because you voted those fuckers out.
We didn’t do that. You win. Get on that lawn, it’s lovely.
Burnspbesq
@BC in Illinois:
As does mine. Irish reunification is coming; it’s just a matter of time (waiting for DUP supporters to die off).
Splitting Image
@Burnspbesq:
I don’t think that is entirely fair. Canada’s Conservative party went full-bore Nazi this summer, right down to basing their campaign slogan on the “14 words”, and Canadian voters successfully did the absolute minimum necessary to keep them out of power.
Another Scott
@Another Scott: Here’s the actual thread of the deconstruction of Starmer’s manifesto:
Bah. One still has to do a bunch of clicking to read the whole thing – maybe a reflection of the transient nature of twitter.
Cheers,
Scott.
oatler
Such a parcel of rogues in a nation.
Tony Jay
@Another Scott:
There’s a reason the main thing Starmer was instructed to get out of this Party Conference was the changes in the leadership election rules to make it harder for the membership to oust the ever-bitter Right from their comfy seats at the main table.
They know full well that the purge they’ve unleashed on the Party is going to end in a bloody civil-war, and in a democratic vote there’s no way the membership would back them because they’ve proven we can’t believe a single solitary word coming out of any of them.
Hence, democracy gets an icepick in the noggin and the Tories are handed another election victory by default.
Fucking wonderful.
prostratedragon
@Tony Jay: Thank heaven for British restraint.
Frank Wilhoit
@gvg: <i>Scrutin de liste</i>. Actually not a bad idea, in principle. France uses it, also Israel, and Germany partially. As those examples indicate, it works less well with an increasing number of parties. (If it could be proven that it <b><i>causes</i></b> an excess of parties, then that would discredit it.)
mrmoshpotato
LOL! Well done.
chopper
i feel you, G. we all do. we know what it’s like.
chopper
@Tony Jay:
did he then run off stage waving his arms like noodles, yelling YAAAAAYYYYY
sab
@Tony Jay: Jesus Fucking Christ!
I am Christian, so excuse my language. But I love your countries.
At this point, murdering Murdochs wouldn’t even help.
sab
Tony Jay. Am I right? In America every Rep and every Senator can propose legislation. They have to scramble around to get support but if they are good at politics they can do this.
UK Parliament everyone but leadership is frozen out of legislation. Everyone is a backbencher.
Parliamentary systems are flawed
Another Scott
@Frank Wilhoit: (Balloon-Juice’s FYWP doesn’t recognize [i] [/i] for italics. One has to use [em] [/em].
If you didn’t already know this, HTH!)
Cheers,
Scott.
Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride
@Tony Jay: A few naive but serious questions:
(1) With the possible exception of Attlee (who may have governed as a lefty but didn’t look or sound like one), isn’t it the case that every Labour leader who became PM was identified with the center or right-center of the party?
(2) Hasn’t every election in which the Labour leader was identified with the left of the party (with the doubtful exception of 2017, where it looks in hindsight as though Labour just lost a little less badly than usual) led to a disastrous defeat?
(3) If these generalizations are even mostly true, doesn’t that suggest that there not only isn’t now, but never has been, a constituency large enough or well enough situated electorally to put a genuinely left-wing government in power and keep it there (unless the alternative was a clapped-out Churchill–and even he got back into power shortly)?
Kalakal
As if his imbecilic performance in New York wasn’t enough the wazzock Johnson returned home to
demonstrate his laser sharp focus on curing what ails Britainlaunch his latest diversion. Here it is along with the appropriate responses. The toerag can’t even be original in his “Oh look! A squirrel!”https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2021/09/28/boris-johnson-wants-to-take-galactic-britain-into-space/
debbie
I don’t remember the name of the last great Labour leader, but I miss him.
Tony Jay
@sab:
MPs can propose legislation, called Private Members Bills, but it’s not easy and there’s no guarantee it will ever get to a vote. My own MP has put forward a Bill to enshrine the Right to Food in law and make it a Ministerial responsibility to ensure everyone has access to three full meals a day. The Labour Conference also voted to make it part of any future Labour manifesto.
So not that different.
Geminid
@Frank Wilhoit: Israel seems to allow some latitude for parties to have primaries. The once mighty Labor Party did this before the last election, and then won 6 Knesset seats. This was considered a very good showing for a party that some said needed to run a joint list with the more liberal Meretz just to clear the 3.25% electoral threshold.
Meretz ended up with 5 seats, and joined Labor and six other parties to form a 61 member government from the 120 member Knesset. The coalition parties span a wide ideological spectrum, but share a common animus towards Benjamin Netanyahu. The leaders of the two centrist and three right wing parties had all worked with Netanyahu in various governments. None of them trusted Netanyahu, and some like former Russian bouncer Avigdor Lieberman simply hate his guts.
Litlebritdifrnt
@Betty Cracker: Betty a bit of lost in translation here. In the UK “a salad” is a plate of lettuce, tomato, cucumber, onion etc, to which something is added ie a chunk of cheese at the side of the plate. You then add dressing, usually in the UK “Heinz Salad Cream” which I love. Same with a “ham salad” which has a lovely bit of roasted ham added to the plate (also, tuna, salmon, cold chicken). Anyway you get the idea. In the US a “salad” (ie egg salad) is whatever smashed up and smothered in mayo and stuffed between two slices of bread. (tuna, ham, chicken) I admit when I was in the US I never heard of cheese salad unless it was that yellow pimento stuff. Anyway this was something that confused the hell out of my hubby (and still does to be honest)
Hope that helps. :)
Kalakal
@Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride: you could probably put Callaghan in the left of center bracket, I’ve never been sure where to put Wilson who won more general elections than any other 20th century British politician
sab
@Tony Jay: That is hopeful.
Geminid
@Kalakal: “Sunny Jim” Callahan!
Omnes Omnibus
@Litlebritdifrnt: Where do you get the idea that Americans do not have lettuce and fresh vegetable based salads? I would say that far more than 90% of things sold and consumed as salads in the US are fresh vegetables based.
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: I thought Brits hate salads. Americans are obsessed with salads.
ThresherK
I’m a bit embarrassed that I haven’t been referring to BoJo as Flobalob for ~2 years.
Omnes Omnibus
@sab: I think lbf may be blotto. Just saying.
The Pale Scot
@VeniceRiley:
Nope, Nada, Not for decades.
The Uk will have to crash to the point of Greece AND have a Goldman Sacks around to massage the numbers
The Pale Scot
@VeniceRiley:
Bloody stupid idea unless you’re getting married to an EU banker still working in London.
DON”T give up your US passport for dogs sake
Another Scott
Seems like a bit of misdirected energy on Labour’s part… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@The Pale Scot: You seem quite romantic.
Kalakal
@VeniceRiley: Not a chance, Northern Ireland will get there by merging with the Republic of Ireland and thry’ll probably accept Scotland when it goes independent ( at which point I get a Scottish passport)
bbleh
@Ksmiami: yabbut Romney was then, against a charismatic incumbent. Romney NOW — had he not lost before — would be a much stronger candidate IMO, unless as you say, things work out for Biden, which they may well do regardless of the current kerfuffle. COVID will end, the economy likely will improve sharply (unless the Republicans manage to tank it), and he will get the political credit.
But I still think the media would fall all over themselves to shower a Romney with love.
bbleh
@Tony Jay: we did, and much credit to the difference between the Dems and Labour, with your characterization (sorry, characterisation) of whom I certainly can’t argue.
(and then the yobs stormed Westminster…)
Also, we don’t have Brexit. I used to observe that we eventually would be rid of TFG, but Brexit is a gift that won’t stop giving for a long while.
Ken
“I made a posting on NextDoor asking if anyone saw anything suspicious but it, it just kind of turned into an orgy of racism.” — Colin Robinson, What We Do in the Shadows (S3.E6)
Tony Jay
@Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride:
It’s very difficult for Labour to win a General Election, always has been. The entire political and media establishment doesn’t want it, works very hard to prevent it, and so it tends to only happen when the Tories fuck up so royally that they drive a wedge between themselves and the mushy centre and the Press splits its resources.
A lot is made about Blair being the most successful Labour leader of all time, and he was a man of the Right, but it’s worth remembering that the grinning shitbird shed votes like dandruff from the moment he got in and was only sustained in power by the choleric awfulness of the Tory Opposition and the number of votes the Lib-Dems sucked up in marginal constituencies. The longer Blair was in power the further Right his Government moved and the more votes it lost, culminating in the 2005 election when Labour only returned to office because the public had been offered more left-wing policy under Brown (a lie, but a convincingly offered one) and Blair himself promised to piss off sooner rather than later, and they still squeaked in with the smallest percentage of the vote of any Governing Party.
Brown self destructed, the Tories learned how to ape Blair’s style in a blue rosette, the SNP successfully merged Left Wing socialism with Right Wing patriotism to become Scotland’s main Party and take dozens of seats from Labour, and Milliband (who had won as the Left Wing candidate but was ‘managed’ by his advisors into a lukewarm trimmer afraid of his own shadow, lost badly.
Then in 2017, despite internal sabotage and open revolt on a scale Blair never suffered, the most Left Wing Labour leader since Foot (who, to be clear, was consistently posting poll leads over the Tories until the Labour Right spilt away to form the Social Democrats and Thatcher got turned into a modern Glorianna by the Press over the Falklands War) managed to win back millions of votes, reversing the Blairite trend, and clawed back a 20 point poll deficit to almost win.
If Scotland’ hadn’t been driven away, if Blairism hadn’t convinced millions not to trust Labour, if the Labour Right hadn’t spent two years telling everyone in the centre that the Party they were part of was a Communist lunatic asylum…
But all that happened, and then we saw another two years of concentrated bile unleashed across the entire media, fully supported by the now completely desperate Labour Right, an outpouring of unhinged hate and misinformation unique in British political history. That’s not even remotely hyperbole. It was Clinton x 1000 and it was absolutely relentless, plus the Brexit disaster, and 2019 happened.
My point, when Labour goes Left, its Right wing goes feral and helps turn off the centre. The last Labour leader to suffer that was too conciliatory, too trusting, too eager to keep them in the tent. That was a mistake I hope the next Labour leader doesn’t make.
WaterGirl
@debbie: I am having unkind thoughts. Growing up catholic, you had to confess ‘impure thoughts’. I wonder if unkind thoughts are in the same category.
Tony Jay
And with that, it’s way gone midnight and I’ve got a weekend of vigorous lounging to look forward to. Thanks everyone for letting me rant away, it really does make me feel a tiny bit better about the whole ‘national collapse into barbarism’ thing.
zhena gogolia
@Tony Jay: You are a great asset to the blog!
Uncle Omar
@tonyJay118 After seeing the 4 headed pig decorating Loomis’ cut and paste of a FTFNYT piece at LGM I was hoping that you would take up the cudgel and explain the insanity. Thank you and stop by again soon.
Origuy
I follow several UK historians and archaeologists on Twitter. They’ve been up in arms about the closures of several archaeology departments, notably at Sheffield, which has done a lot of important work at Stonehenge. It’s ironic considering that the UK’s greatest tourist attraction is Heritage. People aren’t going to cross the Atlantic to marvel at the empty shelves at Tesco’s.
Ksmiami
@bbleh: but the mobbed up toothless masses don’t want RMoney- they want blood and soil and barn raising hate fests…
El-Man
So, in short, Boris is a brainless twit and Brexit is a clusterf##k. Yep.
In local news, 2K people gathered at the Auckland Domain today to protest COVID lockdown measures, possibly creating a super-spreader event. Just when you think stupidity isn’t contagious…
Tehanu
Another great rant … but I’m so sorry to see Britain, or at least England, going down this road.
J R in WV
Well, yesterday’s finest commentary by Tony Jay. Thanks T J for the great screed — you do it better than anyone else around these parts.
Salad — can be a blend of meat/poultry/seafood/cheese with flavourful veggies like onions and celery, but way more often a plate of lettuce and fresh tomato from a local garden, with flavourful veggies and a little bit of meats and cheeses. And any one of a wide variety of salad dressings, or oil and vinegar with Italian or Spanish herb blends. Or just olive oil and fresh lemon juice.
Hope G Britain’s Tory party doesn’t starve the poor working class and retirees… would be sad! Would love to see Scotland declare independence, some of my ancestors were Scots.
Austin Loomis
@mali muso: The only thing that could make it better is if the late actor whose name Tony carries were still around to do a dramatic reading in his mellifluous tones.