You'd think Mr Chair A Meeting Draft A Memo Across His Brief would have mentioned *one* of these facts by now.
"Research fellow" (i.e. retired) at MMU; still writing. Interests: international law, jurisprudence (mainly Kelsen). Other interests: folksong, real ale, the Left, cinema, Bowie, Aickman. Blogs at gapingsilence.wordpress.com and ohgoodale.wordpress.com .
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You'd think Mr Chair A Meeting Draft A Memo Across His Brief would have mentioned *one* of these facts by now.
Britain has legal obligations to asylum seekers. Attempts to stop illegal immigration at source will never work. (And it's only as visible as it is because of earlier, failed attempts to stop it at source.) It's a trivial proportion of immigration. Immigration itself is (at worst) neutral, not bad.
Why is it central? What's got into the man? Asylum seekers - framed as a problem - are in the 2024 manifesto, but it takes up a grand total of two pages, most of which is about creating a new Border Command and hiring more asylum caseworkers to clear the backlog (we don't hear a lot about that).
Got to say, "my father was a toolmaker" isn't sounding so bad now.
I guess it's asking a lot of a party that doesn't even have a name yet to exercise more internal discipline, but... yeah, that one needs addressing.
Yes - which is why I think there's potential for a productive alliance, formal or informal, between the Greens and YP. (There always was, really, but ZP being elected makes it a lot easier.) Many flowers can bloom (even in this electoral system!).
I'm sure we'll discuss this in one of the two (geographically distinct) "your party" groups in my area. 800,000 is a lot of socialists, relatively few of whom would consider themselves Green first and socialist second.
I think what you're overlooking is that there's a lot of mutual goodwill among partisans of both ZP and JC, as well as a lot of determination to make votes count. I don't think any partition of seats will be as mechanical or as high-level as you suggest - more "who's got more activists round here?".
I think a) it's hilarious b) it doesn't discredit him nearly as much as having been a Lib Dem c) he seems pretty sound now, let's roll the dice
"I just had the most peculiar dream. Keir Starmer was sitting in front of a flag - no, a whole row of flags, right along his mantelpiece. And someone said, why are you sitting in front of flags, and he said, I always sit in front of the flag! As if that was a thing. And then I wo... oh, wait."
So yes, a bit of In All My Years As A Conservative outrage from some credible Tory backbencher (get me a David Gauke type) would do the world of good in surfacing the issue, but really, Labour should be all over this stuff. Not joining in and doing 'innocent face' when called on it.
I agree with approximately 97.5% of that, which will do for now. The question is, where's the beef going to come from? In 2017-19 the BBC weren't only listening to Tom Watson & co; they were happy to amplify Tory talking-points about Corbynite thuggery & bigotry.
"User wants to see something similar," the AI said to itself, and promptly served up... a series of birthday messages by the same people whose messages I'd just seen, which they'd written to other people. Made me feel really special.
Got to love AI. Looked at FB for birthday messages, as you do. FB does this weird thing of squirrelling away notifications and springing them on you just when you've decided everyone's finally forgotten about you (or, um, so I've heard), so I thought I'd speed it up and refreshed the TL.
Magnetic Fields
I'd been on the point of leaving for some time - it was just the last straw.
And if it turns out that what they said is in fact what they want to do, where do you go from there?
But there's a problem with that system, which is: how do you know what the people you voted for (out of what you assume are your shared ideals) are going to do in office? How do you know what they want to do? You don't. All you know is what they're willing to say to get elected.
Not everyone went along with it, of course, and I think some people were happy to get back to the old "you vote for us because of your ideals, we do whatever it takes to get elected" system.
Then there was Corbynism, and suddenly none of this applied. Suddenly the reasons why we voted for Labour were actually reflected in Labour Party policy. It was intoxicating.
Once in power, they would deliver on the deal by making the world a slightly better place. It wasn't a very good bargain, but hey, it was the best one available.
There always used to be a bargain that we made with the Labour Party. On one hand, we would vote for them because we believed in certain values. On the other, they would occasionally pay lip service to those values while they did whatever was necessary to get elected.
ENJOY
Labour won two of the five in 2024, by majorities of 1.4% and 0.1%.
John Harris said in 2017 that Labour needed to have a message for the "UKIP-voting Fens". It turned out he was referring to five constituencies, only one of which had *ever* been Labour - and that was only 1997-2001. gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2017/04/09/c...
My daughter gave me a DVD, with a note saying "hope you enjoy this collection of still images arranged to create the illusion of movement". Which was already pretty good, but: the film was _La Jetée_. Now that's class. @kermodemovie.bsky.social
I read your manifestoes and your strange religious tracts You took me to your library and kissed me in the stacks And I can only apologise for suggesting Laser Quest.
Labour going hard right to try and beat Reform is half the story. The other half is that Labour is under the control of right-wingers with right-wing politics who want Labour to be *the* centre-right party and believe they can achieve this because they’re the smartest guys in the room.
"In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the "Rule Britannia" stuff, is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious." (George Orwell - "England Your England" (1941)
I think he does have to say something along the lines of "having been born in the normal way 60 years ago rather than falling down in the last shower of rain, I do not believe that people painting on roundabouts are expressing spontaneous love of their country and they should knock it off"
I'm seeing a lot of people on LinkedIn and local Facebook who are feeling really distressed and upset because they feel like the flag graffiti is aimed at intimidating them (despite in many cases being proud British citizens with normal fondness for the flag). This isn't just Discourse.
[shrugs] I've got a Ukrainian flag in my ID on X. Never in a thousand years would I put up a physical Ukrainian flag outside my house.
What I'm hearing is "we can fly it too - it's ours to identify with as well as theirs!". What I'd like to hear is "we can carry on not flying it and not having any strong feelings about it, without that being a problem for anyone".
I'm saying nothing about flags in online profiles, nothing about flags put up by commercial ventures, nothing about flags put up by local councils, and nothing about flags put up to mark a major patriotic occasion or sporting tournament.
The initiative that started the current conversation about flags consisted of ordinary people displaying flags in residential streets. That's what I've been talking about, and it isn't normal (by which, I stress once more, I don't mean that it's weird or censurable).
In my lifetime at least, demonstrative patriotism - outside of special occasions - has never been normal (unexceptional, ordinary, exciting no comment) in this country. That's the history that's being ignored by Starmer, Cooper et al.
As it goes, I wouldn't want to be pressured into hanging a Pride flag, and if I were I'd be glad when the chance came to take it down. Which is also how I feel about England flags - with the exception that I'm dubious about the motives of anyone hanging England flags outside of special occasions.
You're interpreting 'not normal' as 'weird and not OK', which (as I've already stressed) isn't how I'm using it. In terms of whether it's an ordinary thing to do outside of special occasions, something that would excite no comment if you saw it, hanging Pride flags isn't normal either.
[bangs gavel] OBJECTION!
Don't want to be around when they finish the rest of him.
The flag on the membership card was one of the reasons I left! Just no brakes on these people when it comes to drifting to the Right.
Yes, but my point was about whether hanging flags outside/on/in your house is 'normal' full stop. There's a carnivalesque atmosphere during international football tournaments (when England's competing!), during which a lot of things temporarily become normal. That's not where we are now.
Something that happens for four weeks every two years isn't 'normal', any more than the TV schedule during the Euros/WC is normal. Besides, I wouldn't expect to see flags on lamp-posts during a WC - not unless England were in the Final, at the very least.
Also, saying 'us' over and over again sounds very warm and inclusive, but who's included in 'us'? Not everyone I count as part of my community is British or in Britain - and rather a large proportion has loyalties outside England, myself included.
Keir Starmer: the fulfilment of David Owen's dream. Maybe.
they're (a) managerialists rather than democrats, believers in having the right people, or person, in charge (b) wouldbe custodians of state power, i.e. patriotic (c) to the Right of *you*, if you're on the Left and nothing in that list puts any limits on how far Right they can go.
In the SDP's heyday Tony Benn said he thought they were quite a dangerous far-Right party, not centrist at all. I think this was based partly on personal dislike of David Owen, but it also says something about centrists generally -
In all the well-meaning talk about how the flag belongs to all of us, I think something very important gets lost: the flag belongs to us *as something you ignore and forget about most, if not all, of the time*. Certainly not as something it's normal to hang down your street, let alone in your house.
But it's OK, you see, because if you read the whole article he says that sometimes the flag is used divisively and that's a shame. Strong pushback against the far Right there.
Confession: ever since posting those comments I've been thinking "actually that's quite obvious when you think about it". Still, Kemi Badenoch.
"Huh, there's a Baja California in Mexico... I guess the American bit used to be Alta California, wonder when they stopped calling it that..."
"We have to assume that the goal, in 2025 as in 1946, isn’t to win the argument but to ignore it" Final thoughts on a long-forgotten pro-Zionist intervention in the British press. gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2025/08/31/z...
If the socialists, feminists, Palestinian solidarity activists and people I know from different contexts who I follow over there were here, I'd drop X like a shot. Mostly they aren't, so I stay. I never look at 'For You'.
Don't give her ideas!
The quest for the subject area in which Kemi Badenoch *does* know what she's talking about continues.
Even if there weren't any climate concerns, "drill till it's all gone" would be terrible business practice - a good way to cash in if, and for as long as, demand is rising, but a good way to go broke in pretty much every other situation.
...and another sliding scale of how much oil is being traded vs the level of demand, translating into trading prices. You may stop drilling to cut your losses, you may stop drilling to keep next year's price high, but you will stop drilling.
I read something a bit back - probably in the @lrb.co.uk , which is my main source for sci/tech these days - that there's no such thing as extracting *all* the oil; there's just a sliding scale of how much oil you get out for how much effort/cost...
I literally just thought "well, these comebacks are all very entertaining, but why am I reading a thread from last week?" Timestamp: 1h Dear God. (They think they're being progressive, too, that's what blows my mind.)
Social media food discourse is like a Sunday roast, in that it comes round weekly and is basically the same every time. Americans dumping on Irish food would be like serving fish and Yorkshire puddings. Just not how it's done.
Labour telegraphed who they were very heavily for years before the election, but that didn't even scratch the surface of the evil they've been inflicting in power.
Labour is a far right political party now. Racist, transphobic, anti-migrant, anti-worker and opposed to human rights.
(David Bedford, not Tom Newman)
"and because of this the prince was afraid, and on waking found himself reconsidering his forthcoming marriage ceremony"
but I have a definite soft spot for Zelazny's approach, which is effectively to say "so there we were on a hostile alien planet - was it Venus? yeah, Venus, let's go with that" and then get on with doing something more interesting.
There's a place for the as-you-know-Bob type of skiffy adventure ("so there we were, sweating in our suits (specially adapted for an atmospheric pressure 92 times that of Earth and an atmosphere consisting almost entirely of CO2), when I realised that our guide had double-crossed us...")
"We have to assume that the goal, in 2025 as in 1946, isn’t to win the argument but to ignore it" Final thoughts on a long-forgotten pro-Zionist intervention in the British press. gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2025/08/31/z...
Ok, hear me out. A Lord of the Rings remake, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:
Unintentionally grim example: I remember seeing Paula Yates on a chat show talking about her new baby girl, Peaches. The interviewer challenged her on this. PY: It'll be great! [sultry voice] Hi, I'm Peaches... "Hi, I'm Peaches, your accountant", not so much.
(They were all a lot of fun, which some might say is the main thing.)
I read some Roger Zelazny shorts the other day. I'm saying that the one about the chained dragon being sacrificed to a ferocious maiden was fantasy, but the ones about deep-sea fishing on the oceans of Venus and investigative anthropology among the natives of Mars were sf. But don't ask me why.
When he did die there were stories that he'd been braindead and gangrenous for three weeks, and that they'd delayed the announcement until the fight over the succession was settled. Probably not true.
That's so Trump.
See also: Michael Caine, "It's Over"; Tom Newman, "Speak (Though You Only Say Farewell)".
I have a particular thing for people singing just slightly out of tune but really going for it anyway. I'm particularly fond of the track on the Barry Black album where EB puts in a j.s.o.o.t.b.r.g.f.i.a. harmony line, apparently singing from the other side of the studio a la Ying Tong Song.
Her response does seem to be heavy on "it's outrageous that people feel free to say this kind of thing about people like me" and light on "this thing they said about me is untrue".
So why have I never sought out AoL, you might say. Possibly because of the stupid name, possibly I didn't want to jinx it, possibly I'm just lazy. Probably not #1, though, as I've also never sought out the *second* Barry Black album.
Irrelevant data point: I've never heard a note of AoL, but the first album by Eric Bachman's solo/mostly-instrumental project Barry Black is one of my favourite albums in the world.
There's a whole range of variously awful versions of "that" which Starmer's leapfrogged, to go straight for "adopt Reform UK agenda so as to set up a GE contest between Reform UK (they promise but can't deliver!) and Labour in government (we deliver what Reform voters want!)".
So I can sort of understand the centrist chorus of "well obviously they're not trying to achieve *that*, so why on earth are they doing *this*?"
To be fair, while we all expected Starmer in power to do this kind of thing, I don't think anyone thought he'd do *this*, let alone commit to it so wholeheartedly. "I'm never voting Labour again until they endorse rounding up the foreigns and sending them to Afghanistan"... said no focus group ever.
Polite middle-class racism tends to differentiate itself fairly firmly from the "give me an N!" variety, if only so as not to blow the gaff.
This is where the empty headed Flag shagging leads. Race hate.
If that is him he's lost a lot of weight, which - unless he's on a diet(!) - is not good.
[Compiles and circulates accounts of overheard phone calls between party leaders] [Calls for a clear and unambiguous position on divisive policy areas that the leadership has carelessly left vague]
There is an Oly Durose, and I guess he can't help what his name's an anagram of. But it was a very weird conjuncture. (Might appeal to @raynewman.bsky.social .)
This happened in my Notifications today: a couple of people replied to threads from 2024 in which I'd argued with a centre-leftist about flags. One of them went by "Del Usory" (geddit?). This also happened: someone I follow RTed someone I don't, denouncing somebody else - someone called Oly Durose.
Same! I think we've been having two different arguments some of this time, and I can see how some stuff I said would have made me sound like an utter twat. Peace out.
Never said you shouldn't.
A bit of beer nerdery for the weekend? Certainly! Here are some thoughts on whether the NBSS, CAMRA's draught beer scoring system, is fit for purpose. ohgoodale.wordpress.com/2025/08/29/5...
I thought you were saying you did precisely what Renton suggested and it didn't work - didn't have any purchase at all. Which is a shitty experience. All I'm saying - and I know it's no help - is that Renton wasn't saying This Will Definitely Work; he was saying "expose the Fascists!" *won't* work.
I'm muting this thread. Consider yourself victorious over whatever the hell it is you're arguing with, because it's not me.
Again, you're talking about (and against) a whole bunch of stuff, most of which has got literally nothing to do with a blog post by a socialist which is about good and bad ways for leftists to organise physical resistance to a racist mob.
If it was just about saying what you see and not worrying about who you offend, "racist c**ts" would probably work better than "Fascists"; "fat nonces" would be better still.
The point of calling people Fascists *was* to demoralise less committed sympathisers etc etc - that's how it was (and is) sold, "ordinary people get sucked in because they don't know who the organisers are" etc etc. It worked at one time. The conditions to make it work don't exist any more.
You're reading a whole lot of other stuff into it, and honestly if I thought all that other stuff was there I'd agree with you.
As far as I can see, Dave's argument is purely tactical: he's suggesting that calling people Fascists is bad tactics, because it may encourage less committed sympathisers to become more committed ("we stood up for our women and they called us names").
I also think "how do we demoralise and otherwise peel off people from the edges of the anti-migrant coalition?" is quite ann important tactical Q.
Tactics that might make some less committed "protesters" think "what am I actually doing here?", as compared to tactics that are likely to make them think "the Reds hate us, we must be doing something right!". I think that's all it's about - nothing about Being Nice To Fascists or whatever.
Dave's a freelance writer who's been involved in anti-fascist activism for decades & written books about fascism, but apart from that.