General Election 2019

[Scooby Dudek]

1 hour ago, Bobby Hundreds said:

 

 

Sums Boris up

That is why they want it to be all about Brexit. 

 

I notice every time the SNP and being interviewed they talk about their record in government in Scotland. However, whenever the Tories are on they never seem to quiz them over their record, or whenever Johnson is asked, he just says I have only been PM for 120 days and they just move on. 

 

It is subtle but when people call the media biased, this is what some mean, no scrutiny of their policies or recent history. 

 

 

[aRdja]

6 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Well....at least he is not divisive.

I genuinely don’t understand why you keep trotting that line out. It’s meaningless. Boris Johnson is divisive and he’s probably going to win an election in a week. The most powerful man in the world (Donald Trump) is divisive.

[Bjornebye]

14 minutes ago, viRdjil said:

I genuinely don’t understand why you keep trotting that line out. It’s meaningless. Boris Johnson is divisive and he’s probably going to win an election in a week. The most powerful man in the world (Donald Trump) is divisive.

A bit like Marmite. You either love it or you eat an egg that looks like a Klingon. 

[Captain Turdseye]

4 hours ago, Scooby Dudek said:

That is why they want it to be all about Brexit. 

 

I notice every time the SNP and being interviewed they talk about their record in government in Scotland. However, whenever the Tories are on they never seem to quiz them over their record, or whenever Johnson is asked, he just says I have only been PM for 120 days and they just move on. 

 

It is subtle but when people call the media biased, this is what some mean, no scrutiny of their policies or recent history. 

 

 

 

The Tories are allowed to lie to the media almost without reproach and large parts of the media are similarly allowed to lie about the opposition parties. It’s a stitch up. How can it be changed?

[Stickman]

Multi-millionaire Alex James from Blur (the talentless one) has made a shock announcement that he can't vote for Corbyn or Labour at this election....

 

I'm shocked I tell thee

 

[Mudface]

13 minutes ago, Stickman said:

Multi-millionaire Alex James from Blur (the talentless one) has made a shock announcement that he can't vote for Corbyn or Labour at this election....

 

I'm shocked I tell thee

 

To be fair, Corbyn resolutely refuses to put cheesemakers front and centre in his policies.

[Trumo]

26 minutes ago, Mudface said:

To be fair, Corbyn resolutely refuses to put cheesemakers front and centre in his policies.

 

The other JC said they were blessed.

[Mudface]

Just now, Trumo said:

 

The other JC said they were blessed.

Must make Corbyn the anti Christ.

[Red Phoenix]

 

[cloggypop]

2 hours ago, Stickman said:

Multi-millionaire Alex James from Blur (the talentless one) has made a shock announcement that he can't vote for Corbyn or Labour at this election....

 

I'm shocked I tell thee

 

@Reverend_Makers: Cos ur a massive Tory fucker who shags gigantic wheels of Brie https://twitter.com/alexjameshq/status/1203064037619183616
Shared via TweetCaster

[Bjornebye]

 

 

 

 

[Harry Squatter]

My brother in law has outed himself on faceaids as a Tory. Despite coming from a deprived area of Liverpool and supporting liverpool. 

 

He has moved back here after years away in the army. I think it has rotted his brain. Likes Nigel Farage and hates the EU despite not being able to say what he hates about the EU. 

 

I'm contemplating never speaking to him again and if he ever asks me to help him buy Liverpool tickets he can fuck off.

[Denny Crane]

Worth a read obviously I don't agree Labour has a significant antisemitism problem but besides that some excellent points. How did we get to a situation where the current government whores us to the Saudis and take all sorts of funding from oligarchs and the committed anti racist is tagged as the racist and a threat. A lot of people who have participated in this should hang their heads in shame for this blatant deception. 

 

Saturday, 7 December 2019

The othering of Jeremy Corbyn

 

 

By othering I mean treating Corbyn (or more generally the Labour left) as beyond the pale in terms of conventional politics. Othering implies that because of his past or current beliefs, associations and actions Corbyn should not be even considered as fit to be an MP, let alone a Prime Minister. Other politicians can be evaluated in conventional ways, but this does not apply to those who are othered. Othering has a number of distinctive, and potentially useful, features. Let me list two.

 

First, those who associate in any way with those othered are themselves regarded as questionable. I discovered this myself when I joined Labour’s short-lived Economic Advisory Committee, as I discuss here. This can be a potent threat. Second, those who are othered can be discussed in terms that would not normally be used to discuss politicians. After Johnson compared Corbyn to Stalin, Andrew Neill asked a Tory MP if he thought Corbyn would have the wealthy shot. “I do not know”, the MP replied.

 

Sometimes othering may be a valid position to take. I still remember the days when the far right was othered by the mainstream media, rather than being invited on Newsnight to discuss the latest bit of far right terrorism. I think that othering was helpful in ostracising racism, and its absence today is reflected in the rise of hate crime. But no such justification applies to the leader of the opposition, elected by hundreds of thousands of people, who is the only alternative to our current Prime Minister.

 

For othering to be justified those being othered have to have some attribute, or have done some things that are uniquely bad compared to their fellow citizens. The BNP were racist, and it is quite right that racism is ostracised. If we are talking about politicians, the same has to be applied to individuals. Is there something these politicians have done that is uniquely bad compared to other politicians.

 

Corbyn fails this test. There is nothing Corbyn has done that is uniquely bad compared to the obvious person to compare him with, his opponent Boris Johnson. Corbyn is not racist, which is not surprising as he has a lifelong history of fighting racism. Yet the media, almost without exception, has done its best to suggest otherwise.

 

The most obvious example of othering is the way the media have handled antisemitism within Labour. Labour has a real problem with antisemitism, but the media have acted as if Labour are the only party with a racism problem. In contrast Johnson is not constantly asked why he called Muslim women letterboxes and bankrobbers, and whether he will apologise for the increase in hate crime that followed that article.

 

As a result of this media othering of Corbyn, there are plenty of voters who say they cannot vote tactically because of Labour’s antisemitism, seemingly without any thought that they are therefore keeping in power someone who has actually made racist statements, and was part of a government that instituted some of the most discriminatory pieces of legislation of recent times that goes by the collective term hostile environment. Any outside observer would conclude that for UK society as a whole, including its media, Islamophobia is considered acceptable.

 

When I make these points some people accuse me of whataboutery, or in trying to minimise the problem of antisemitism in Labour. Both claims are false. The whole point about othering someone is that their alleged behaviour must be unusually bad compared to their comparators, so othering is all about whataboutery. And of course none of this is minimising Labour’s very real problem of antisemitism. Yes antisemitism exists in all parties, but there are reasons (like support for the Palestinians) why antisemitism many be worse in the Labour party, although the evidence is still that this is a problem among a very small proportion of Labour members. But equally there are also good reasons why Islamophobia and racist views will be relatively worse in the Tory party.

 

Then we come to terrorism. Corbyn is said to be too friendly towards terrorists, and therefore a unique threat to the UK as Prime Minister. I’m not going to defend Corbyn’s foreign policy views, some of which are dubious in my opinion, but are they uniquely bad? To say so is a hard position to defend when the UK participated with its closest ally in a pointless war in Iraq which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, a war which Corbyn opposed.

 

In terms of current threats, we recently had an act of terrorism in Salisbury committed by Russian agents. You would think, in response, that the Conservative party would be particularly keen to publish a select committee report on Russian interference in UK politics. Why Johnson has decided to delay the report we can only speculate on, but what we do know about is the links, sometimes financial, between the Tory party and Russians with close links to the Kremlin. Or maybe it is because Johnson does not want people to know about the extent of Russian interference in our elections.

 

Corbyn shares a left view of foreign policy which rarely gets much space in the media, but given the failures of past UK foreign policy and the very dubious situation of the Conservative party on Russia (again, just like their Republican counterparts in the US), there is no case for othering that view or a party leader who proposes it. The idea that a Corbyn minority government would somehow make the UK a less safe place is ludicrous when a former Tory Prime Minister is advocating people vote for just such an outcome.

 

Of course there is every reason for the Tory press to try and other Corbyn. Once you regard him as a perfectly normal and respectable politician, the arguments against voting for him are slim indeed. The Tory record on the economy is terrible. All they have to trumpet is employment growth, but that just reflects an appallingly (and unprecedentedly) bad record on productivity, and therefore living standards for workers. Labour’s policies for the next five years are mostly popular with the public, and even though it will cost a lot of money the cost is much less than the Brexit that will happen if Johnson sticks to his commitments.

 

On an individual level Corbyn seems far more preferable to Johnson as a Prime Minister, for the simple reason that Corbyn clearly cares about other people whereas Johnson cares only for himself. Corbyn shows real empathy for others, which we saw clearly after the Grenfell fire, whereas Johnson has the attitudes typical of the worst of his class. The way of hiding all that from people is to other Corbyn and his party, which virtually the entire mainstream media has done.

 

I understand why our current government and their supporters in the press would do that, and I have respect for those MPs (past and present) who have got out of that boat. I find it much more difficult to respect some of those in the centre, who normally pride themselves in taking a balanced and reasoned view, that are prepared to see the most right wing UK government in living memory continue to destroy the economy through Brexit, continue to cause misery for many decent people and threaten our constitution by proposing to give the executive complete control over parliament.

 

The othering of Corbyn will probably win the election for Johnson. But we should never give up hope, so please vote tactically on Thursday to keep Johnson out and allow a second referendum on Brexit

 

https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-othering-of-jeremy-corbyn.html?m=1

[sir roger]

Takes a lot to have me smiling at the moment but certainly picked the wrong time to have a cup of tea before reading this. Some of the one-liners and descriptions of politicians are immense.

 

Frankie Boyle’s election countdown: 'You’ll be praying they prorogue the next parliament'

 

From a Dickensian Tory cabinet to the ghosts of Brexit promises past, the comedian brings you his take on the election

As the body politic convulses, as the abyss avoids our gaze, we near the end of another election at the behest of a political class that has paid as much attention to David Cameron’s fixed terms as he did to people with emphysema slowly dying over a wood lathe. Christmas seems a strange time for a Tory government to call an election; possibly they guessed that it would be hard for Labour to sell hope in winter; possibly they judged that goodwill to all men would be at its lowest after people had endured a December of accidentally answering the door to a canvasser because they thought it was an Amazon package. Then again, Conservatives would say that the story of Christmas chimes with their values, as it involves a pregnant refugee being treated quite badly.

 

Brexit supporters are surely among the most likely to get out and vote, especially now Jeremy Kyle isn’t on in the daytime any more. It was impossible to predict that the whole country would be thrown into crisis by middle-aged men outraged about Europe making decisions for them (these are people whose wives buy their socks), but I can understand their subsequent disillusionment. If 434 MPs vote for a general election, we instantly get one; if 0.14% of the populace vote for Boris Johnson, we instantly get him; but if 52% of the electorate vote for Brexit, they get three years of what feels like trying to shit out a pool table. Essentially, Brexit has proved impossible to deliver: turns out it’s tricky for English voters to take back control of their borders when one of them is in someone else’s country. Many people wish David Cameron had never called the referendum in the first place. It says a lot about how badly the last couple of years have gone, that there’s a guy who destroyed Libya, presided over needless austerity and fucked a pig, and we wish that he’d just used his own judgment.

 

Let’s begin with the Tories. The cabinet is Dickensian in the purest sense: the sort of people who would need more than two ghosts to change their behaviour. After an uncertain start, Jacob Rees-Mogg has had a pretty good campaign, onboard an Arctic clipper ship, nailed into a coffin of earth from his constituency. It’s interesting that someone who thinks ordinary people lack common sense is so heavily invested in upholding the result of a referendum, but like so many lesser ironies in this election, we simply don’t have the time. When people say “The mask has slipped!” after various cabinet gaffes, there must be a moment when the minister wonders whether they have accidentally come out wearing one of the actual masks they wear to the various Eyes Wide Shut-style parties that dot their social calendar at this time of year; their fingers moving reflexively towards their face to see if they’ve worn the head of a golden ibis to talk to Phillip Schofield.

 

The Conservatives seem to have focused on the phrase “Get Brexit Done”, which has all the conviction of your dad hitting the arms of his chair and saying, “Right…” We also seem to be hearing a lot about “Unleashing Britain’s potential”, despite most of our potential being for food riots, and perhaps some kind of race war. The Conservative manifesto contains elements of both Thatcherism and Reaganism, in that it seems to have been written by someone with dementia. There was probably a discussion about whether to release a manifesto at all or simply airdrop scratchcards over key marginals.

 

Boris Johnson, who looks like something you’d keep your pyjamas in, and who no reasonable person would choose to lead them into a chorus, has a strangely hunched demeanour; perhaps from all the time he spends crammed inside married women’s wardrobes, like a randy jack-in-the-box. This confused sex yeti has been booed by nurses: people who can remove a dressing, examine a festering wound, and still look up at you with a smile. Has any party ever elected a new leader so tired and dated? With a delivery best approximated as a living checklist of stroke warnings, his bumbling posho shtick almost resembles buffering, a kind of 3G Wodehouse. He doesn’t even seem to enjoy it; throughout the campaign he’s sported a face that looks as if it’s been kneaded by a baker going through a particularly bitter divorce, and the irony that comes into his eyes every time he crowbars in a catchphrase means that he breaks the fourth wall more than Deadpool. We thought the office of prime minister was what he lived for, his consuming ambition. It’s all been a bit like hearing Tony The Tiger talk about his diabetes.

 

Johnson’s deep investment in democracy is highlighted by the fact that his government has been dominated by an unelected special adviser. Usually people with levels of mental activity as low as Johnson’s aren’t surrounded by advisers, but their weeping parents and a member of their favourite boy band. Dominic Cummings looks like he works in television (which I think might be the worst thing you can say about anyone), has the air of a startled testicle, and the name of a character in a porn parody of The Talented Mr Ripley (“The Talentless Fister Ripped Me”). Everyone who’s bored with Johnson pretending to be an idiot should look at Cummings and realise these people are far more dangerous when they pretend to be clever.

 

It’s perfectly obvious why Johnson has been able to take power: he has an instinctive grasp on Brexit as rightwing eschatology, and he’s used to getting his own way, be it in the halls of Westminster or elbowing siblings off of nanny’s nipples. It’s only when you look at the hideous Tarot formed by his cabinet that you get a true picture of the depravity into which we are sinking. Take Michael Gove, a revanchist endorsement of the science of physiognomy. In any other era Gove would be seen as a uniquely unctuous, unlikable and profoundly talentless figure. Now he’s hardly even remarkable. Gove – looking like someone took all the flesh out of a serial killer’s drains and forced it into some brogues; like Davros fell out of his Dalek; like a rushed cartoon of a horny snail – is somehow not the worst person in cabinet, or even his own marriage. Against pushback from Sajid Javid and Priti Patel, Dominic Raab is attempting to get up to 60 British children back from camps in northern Syria before they freeze to death over the winter. That Raab, the flesh suit of a sentient virus with a forehead vein like a B&B kettle-cord, is somehow the moral heart of this enterprise tells you all you need to know. In all likelihood, you’ll be praying that they prorogue the next parliament.

 

Someone else who will still be here after the Rapture is the Brexit party’s Nigel Farage. I thought one of the advantages of the Brexit vote was that he might disappear; having him back in public life is a bit like watching a suicide bomber doing a comeback tour. Of course, it would have been nice to see him actually running in the election, particularly from a pack of wild dogs.

 

As for the Lib Dems – well, I thought we’d really miss Tim Farron, bumping around the country on a deserted coach and performing Blue Peter tasks in front of people terrified that he might start talking about gay sex. Jo Swinson has grown on me, and seems to exist as a satisfying, subtle and damning satire of humanity. Swinson’s election started out relatively positively, possibly because people hadn’t heard her speak yet. It quickly became clear that she had the gravitas of a re-education camp supply teacher, and was launching a kind of charm retreat that seemed to involve loans for renting flats and permanent austerity. Some might see misogyny in this reaction to her, but I’m fairly sure I just hate her for being from Milngavie.

 

Labour’s idea to run an election campaign on policy in the middle of all this is a little bit like reciting your poetry at an orgy. Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps weighing up whether he could have more influence by simply dying and haunting his successor, has benefitted from becoming slightly calmer over the course of the campaign. Aggression isn’t a good look for him, shifting Corbyn from Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh towards the territory where you’d expect his face to be captioned with “police suspect the real figure may be much higher”. Labour’s campaign initially struggled to find the right note of warmth or optimism. Normally in a general election, there’s so little mention of Scotland it’s like watching coverage of a major football tournament, but Labour seemed pointlessly determined to get across the message that they would deny a second independence referendum. The Corbyn project started out as a piece of moralising – a token candidate standing in a Labour leadership election to remind the party of its principles – and his Labour is at its weakest when these roots show: it can come across as patronising and entitled. I think Labour presents itself better during elections because it is forced to be more practical. The whole Corbyn thing, at its best, is a sort of Ealing comedy about some old bloke who gets called off his allotment to try to form a government, but it needs to promise a third act where something actually happens. Labour’s campaign also demonstrates the limits of social media compared with establishment media power. If polls at the time of writing are to be believed, owning several TV stations and newspapers still seems to be more important than the democratisation of the ability to troll celebrity Jews.

 

Before the campaign, there seemed to be a belief among Labour party members that it fared better in elections because of rules about electoral media balance, perhaps because they misconstrued the establishment complacency at the last election. Of course, Labour has been monstered in the media throughout the campaign, and largely been judged by different standards than the Conservatives. Even the gold standard of scrutiny that Johnson dodged was just being interviewed by his former boss at the Spectator.

 

Media plurality is an issue we need to address in this country: the alternative is living in a timeline where, because Corbyn has wonky glasses, in a couple of years you’ll be living in a tent city outside an Amazon warehouse trying to GoFund a tonsillectomy. The Tories calling Corbyn a communist and a threat to national security after handing nuclear power plants to the Chinese is a bit like getting a bollocking off Charles Manson for putting down slug pellets. Perhaps in a few years our troops will reflect on what a harmless enemy Corbyn actually was, as they stare up at an AI minotaur, pinning them to the floor with a stainless steel hoof and holding their extracted vascular system aloft like a Ford Focus wiring-loom.

 

You won’t be surprised to learn that I won’t be voting Tory on Thursday, for much the same reasons that I won’t be spending the day kicking children and pensioners into traffic. It’s depressing to think how many polling stations are in schools, and how many people will vote Conservative after walking past a motivational rainbow. As we saw in Stanley Johnson’s Pinocchio gaffe, there is a problem with our elites programming their traumatised children with the idea that they are born to rule. It becomes almost impossible, as a class, to hide your contempt. It’s difficult to keep lying convincingly about things you’ve convinced yourself your audience are too stupid to notice. This current iteration of Conservatism, a kind of mutant nationalism that insists all our infrastructure has to be owned by other countries, has nowhere to go but into an asset-stripped, deregulated wasteland. I don’t know how anyone votes for that, or what happens after they do. British people don’t get on well enough to form militia.

 

I don’t want to end on a note of pessimism. Instead, I’d like to share with you my two favourite quotes. The first, is a really famous one. Kurt Vonnegut asked his adult son what he thought the meaning of life was, and his son replied: “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” The second is what David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, said about the ending of the final episode:

 

“Well, what Tony should have been thinking, I guess, and what we all should be thinking – although we can’t live that way – is that life is really short. And there are good times in it and there are bad times in it. And that we don’t know why we’re here, but we do know that 20 miles up it’s freezing cold, it’s a freezing cold universe, but here we have this thing called love, which is our only defence, really, against all that cold, and that it’s a very brief interval and that, when it’s over, I think you’re probably always blindsided by it.”

 

Twenty miles up, it’s a freezing cold universe, we only have the human connections we make here, nothing is permanent, and love is our only defence. I suggest we all vote accordingly, and try to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.

 

 

[Mudface]

45 minutes ago, sir roger said:

Takes a lot to have me smiling at the moment but certainly picked the wrong time to have a cup of tea before reading this. Some of the one-liners and descriptions of politicians are immense.

 

Frankie Boyle’s election countdown: 'You’ll be praying they prorogue the next parliament'

 

From a Dickensian Tory cabinet to the ghosts of Brexit promises past, the comedian brings you his take on the election

As the body politic convulses, as the abyss avoids our gaze, we near the end of another election at the behest of a political class that has paid as much attention to David Cameron’s fixed terms as he did to people with emphysema slowly dying over a wood lathe. Christmas seems a strange time for a Tory government to call an election; possibly they guessed that it would be hard for Labour to sell hope in winter; possibly they judged that goodwill to all men would be at its lowest after people had endured a December of accidentally answering the door to a canvasser because they thought it was an Amazon package. Then again, Conservatives would say that the story of Christmas chimes with their values, as it involves a pregnant refugee being treated quite badly.

 

Brexit supporters are surely among the most likely to get out and vote, especially now Jeremy Kyle isn’t on in the daytime any more. It was impossible to predict that the whole country would be thrown into crisis by middle-aged men outraged about Europe making decisions for them (these are people whose wives buy their socks), but I can understand their subsequent disillusionment. If 434 MPs vote for a general election, we instantly get one; if 0.14% of the populace vote for Boris Johnson, we instantly get him; but if 52% of the electorate vote for Brexit, they get three years of what feels like trying to shit out a pool table. Essentially, Brexit has proved impossible to deliver: turns out it’s tricky for English voters to take back control of their borders when one of them is in someone else’s country. Many people wish David Cameron had never called the referendum in the first place. It says a lot about how badly the last couple of years have gone, that there’s a guy who destroyed Libya, presided over needless austerity and fucked a pig, and we wish that he’d just used his own judgment.

 

Let’s begin with the Tories. The cabinet is Dickensian in the purest sense: the sort of people who would need more than two ghosts to change their behaviour. After an uncertain start, Jacob Rees-Mogg has had a pretty good campaign, onboard an Arctic clipper ship, nailed into a coffin of earth from his constituency. It’s interesting that someone who thinks ordinary people lack common sense is so heavily invested in upholding the result of a referendum, but like so many lesser ironies in this election, we simply don’t have the time. When people say “The mask has slipped!” after various cabinet gaffes, there must be a moment when the minister wonders whether they have accidentally come out wearing one of the actual masks they wear to the various Eyes Wide Shut-style parties that dot their social calendar at this time of year; their fingers moving reflexively towards their face to see if they’ve worn the head of a golden ibis to talk to Phillip Schofield.

 

The Conservatives seem to have focused on the phrase “Get Brexit Done”, which has all the conviction of your dad hitting the arms of his chair and saying, “Right…” We also seem to be hearing a lot about “Unleashing Britain’s potential”, despite most of our potential being for food riots, and perhaps some kind of race war. The Conservative manifesto contains elements of both Thatcherism and Reaganism, in that it seems to have been written by someone with dementia. There was probably a discussion about whether to release a manifesto at all or simply airdrop scratchcards over key marginals.

 

Boris Johnson, who looks like something you’d keep your pyjamas in, and who no reasonable person would choose to lead them into a chorus, has a strangely hunched demeanour; perhaps from all the time he spends crammed inside married women’s wardrobes, like a randy jack-in-the-box. This confused sex yeti has been booed by nurses: people who can remove a dressing, examine a festering wound, and still look up at you with a smile. Has any party ever elected a new leader so tired and dated? With a delivery best approximated as a living checklist of stroke warnings, his bumbling posho shtick almost resembles buffering, a kind of 3G Wodehouse. He doesn’t even seem to enjoy it; throughout the campaign he’s sported a face that looks as if it’s been kneaded by a baker going through a particularly bitter divorce, and the irony that comes into his eyes every time he crowbars in a catchphrase means that he breaks the fourth wall more than Deadpool. We thought the office of prime minister was what he lived for, his consuming ambition. It’s all been a bit like hearing Tony The Tiger talk about his diabetes.

 

Johnson’s deep investment in democracy is highlighted by the fact that his government has been dominated by an unelected special adviser. Usually people with levels of mental activity as low as Johnson’s aren’t surrounded by advisers, but their weeping parents and a member of their favourite boy band. Dominic Cummings looks like he works in television (which I think might be the worst thing you can say about anyone), has the air of a startled testicle, and the name of a character in a porn parody of The Talented Mr Ripley (“The Talentless Fister Ripped Me”). Everyone who’s bored with Johnson pretending to be an idiot should look at Cummings and realise these people are far more dangerous when they pretend to be clever.

 

It’s perfectly obvious why Johnson has been able to take power: he has an instinctive grasp on Brexit as rightwing eschatology, and he’s used to getting his own way, be it in the halls of Westminster or elbowing siblings off of nanny’s nipples. It’s only when you look at the hideous Tarot formed by his cabinet that you get a true picture of the depravity into which we are sinking. Take Michael Gove, a revanchist endorsement of the science of physiognomy. In any other era Gove would be seen as a uniquely unctuous, unlikable and profoundly talentless figure. Now he’s hardly even remarkable. Gove – looking like someone took all the flesh out of a serial killer’s drains and forced it into some brogues; like Davros fell out of his Dalek; like a rushed cartoon of a horny snail – is somehow not the worst person in cabinet, or even his own marriage. Against pushback from Sajid Javid and Priti Patel, Dominic Raab is attempting to get up to 60 British children back from camps in northern Syria before they freeze to death over the winter. That Raab, the flesh suit of a sentient virus with a forehead vein like a B&B kettle-cord, is somehow the moral heart of this enterprise tells you all you need to know. In all likelihood, you’ll be praying that they prorogue the next parliament.

 

Someone else who will still be here after the Rapture is the Brexit party’s Nigel Farage. I thought one of the advantages of the Brexit vote was that he might disappear; having him back in public life is a bit like watching a suicide bomber doing a comeback tour. Of course, it would have been nice to see him actually running in the election, particularly from a pack of wild dogs.

 

As for the Lib Dems – well, I thought we’d really miss Tim Farron, bumping around the country on a deserted coach and performing Blue Peter tasks in front of people terrified that he might start talking about gay sex. Jo Swinson has grown on me, and seems to exist as a satisfying, subtle and damning satire of humanity. Swinson’s election started out relatively positively, possibly because people hadn’t heard her speak yet. It quickly became clear that she had the gravitas of a re-education camp supply teacher, and was launching a kind of charm retreat that seemed to involve loans for renting flats and permanent austerity. Some might see misogyny in this reaction to her, but I’m fairly sure I just hate her for being from Milngavie.

 

Labour’s idea to run an election campaign on policy in the middle of all this is a little bit like reciting your poetry at an orgy. Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps weighing up whether he could have more influence by simply dying and haunting his successor, has benefitted from becoming slightly calmer over the course of the campaign. Aggression isn’t a good look for him, shifting Corbyn from Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh towards the territory where you’d expect his face to be captioned with “police suspect the real figure may be much higher”. Labour’s campaign initially struggled to find the right note of warmth or optimism. Normally in a general election, there’s so little mention of Scotland it’s like watching coverage of a major football tournament, but Labour seemed pointlessly determined to get across the message that they would deny a second independence referendum. The Corbyn project started out as a piece of moralising – a token candidate standing in a Labour leadership election to remind the party of its principles – and his Labour is at its weakest when these roots show: it can come across as patronising and entitled. I think Labour presents itself better during elections because it is forced to be more practical. The whole Corbyn thing, at its best, is a sort of Ealing comedy about some old bloke who gets called off his allotment to try to form a government, but it needs to promise a third act where something actually happens. Labour’s campaign also demonstrates the limits of social media compared with establishment media power. If polls at the time of writing are to be believed, owning several TV stations and newspapers still seems to be more important than the democratisation of the ability to troll celebrity Jews.

 

Before the campaign, there seemed to be a belief among Labour party members that it fared better in elections because of rules about electoral media balance, perhaps because they misconstrued the establishment complacency at the last election. Of course, Labour has been monstered in the media throughout the campaign, and largely been judged by different standards than the Conservatives. Even the gold standard of scrutiny that Johnson dodged was just being interviewed by his former boss at the Spectator.

 

Media plurality is an issue we need to address in this country: the alternative is living in a timeline where, because Corbyn has wonky glasses, in a couple of years you’ll be living in a tent city outside an Amazon warehouse trying to GoFund a tonsillectomy. The Tories calling Corbyn a communist and a threat to national security after handing nuclear power plants to the Chinese is a bit like getting a bollocking off Charles Manson for putting down slug pellets. Perhaps in a few years our troops will reflect on what a harmless enemy Corbyn actually was, as they stare up at an AI minotaur, pinning them to the floor with a stainless steel hoof and holding their extracted vascular system aloft like a Ford Focus wiring-loom.

 

You won’t be surprised to learn that I won’t be voting Tory on Thursday, for much the same reasons that I won’t be spending the day kicking children and pensioners into traffic. It’s depressing to think how many polling stations are in schools, and how many people will vote Conservative after walking past a motivational rainbow. As we saw in Stanley Johnson’s Pinocchio gaffe, there is a problem with our elites programming their traumatised children with the idea that they are born to rule. It becomes almost impossible, as a class, to hide your contempt. It’s difficult to keep lying convincingly about things you’ve convinced yourself your audience are too stupid to notice. This current iteration of Conservatism, a kind of mutant nationalism that insists all our infrastructure has to be owned by other countries, has nowhere to go but into an asset-stripped, deregulated wasteland. I don’t know how anyone votes for that, or what happens after they do. British people don’t get on well enough to form militia.

 

I don’t want to end on a note of pessimism. Instead, I’d like to share with you my two favourite quotes. The first, is a really famous one. Kurt Vonnegut asked his adult son what he thought the meaning of life was, and his son replied: “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” The second is what David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, said about the ending of the final episode:

 

“Well, what Tony should have been thinking, I guess, and what we all should be thinking – although we can’t live that way – is that life is really short. And there are good times in it and there are bad times in it. And that we don’t know why we’re here, but we do know that 20 miles up it’s freezing cold, it’s a freezing cold universe, but here we have this thing called love, which is our only defence, really, against all that cold, and that it’s a very brief interval and that, when it’s over, I think you’re probably always blindsided by it.”

 

Twenty miles up, it’s a freezing cold universe, we only have the human connections we make here, nothing is permanent, and love is our only defence. I suggest we all vote accordingly, and try to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.

 

 

Excellent stuff- do you have a link to the original article?

 

Edit: ah, it's OK, found in the Guardian- https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/07/frankie-boyle-election-countdown-praying-prorogue-next-parliament

[redinblack62]

1 hour ago, sir roger said:

Takes a lot to have me smiling at the moment but certainly picked the wrong time to have a cup of tea before reading this. Some of the one-liners and descriptions of politicians are immense.

 

Frankie Boyle’s election countdown: 'You’ll be praying they prorogue the next parliament'

 

From a Dickensian Tory cabinet to the ghosts of Brexit promises past, the comedian brings you his take on the election

As the body politic convulses, as the abyss avoids our gaze, we near the end of another election at the behest of a political class that has paid as much attention to David Cameron’s fixed terms as he did to people with emphysema slowly dying over a wood lathe. Christmas seems a strange time for a Tory government to call an election; possibly they guessed that it would be hard for Labour to sell hope in winter; possibly they judged that goodwill to all men would be at its lowest after people had endured a December of accidentally answering the door to a canvasser because they thought it was an Amazon package. Then again, Conservatives would say that the story of Christmas chimes with their values, as it involves a pregnant refugee being treated quite badly.

 

Brexit supporters are surely among the most likely to get out and vote, especially now Jeremy Kyle isn’t on in the daytime any more. It was impossible to predict that the whole country would be thrown into crisis by middle-aged men outraged about Europe making decisions for them (these are people whose wives buy their socks), but I can understand their subsequent disillusionment. If 434 MPs vote for a general election, we instantly get one; if 0.14% of the populace vote for Boris Johnson, we instantly get him; but if 52% of the electorate vote for Brexit, they get three years of what feels like trying to shit out a pool table. Essentially, Brexit has proved impossible to deliver: turns out it’s tricky for English voters to take back control of their borders when one of them is in someone else’s country. Many people wish David Cameron had never called the referendum in the first place. It says a lot about how badly the last couple of years have gone, that there’s a guy who destroyed Libya, presided over needless austerity and fucked a pig, and we wish that he’d just used his own judgment.

 

Let’s begin with the Tories. The cabinet is Dickensian in the purest sense: the sort of people who would need more than two ghosts to change their behaviour. After an uncertain start, Jacob Rees-Mogg has had a pretty good campaign, onboard an Arctic clipper ship, nailed into a coffin of earth from his constituency. It’s interesting that someone who thinks ordinary people lack common sense is so heavily invested in upholding the result of a referendum, but like so many lesser ironies in this election, we simply don’t have the time. When people say “The mask has slipped!” after various cabinet gaffes, there must be a moment when the minister wonders whether they have accidentally come out wearing one of the actual masks they wear to the various Eyes Wide Shut-style parties that dot their social calendar at this time of year; their fingers moving reflexively towards their face to see if they’ve worn the head of a golden ibis to talk to Phillip Schofield.

 

The Conservatives seem to have focused on the phrase “Get Brexit Done”, which has all the conviction of your dad hitting the arms of his chair and saying, “Right…” We also seem to be hearing a lot about “Unleashing Britain’s potential”, despite most of our potential being for food riots, and perhaps some kind of race war. The Conservative manifesto contains elements of both Thatcherism and Reaganism, in that it seems to have been written by someone with dementia. There was probably a discussion about whether to release a manifesto at all or simply airdrop scratchcards over key marginals.

 

Boris Johnson, who looks like something you’d keep your pyjamas in, and who no reasonable person would choose to lead them into a chorus, has a strangely hunched demeanour; perhaps from all the time he spends crammed inside married women’s wardrobes, like a randy jack-in-the-box. This confused sex yeti has been booed by nurses: people who can remove a dressing, examine a festering wound, and still look up at you with a smile. Has any party ever elected a new leader so tired and dated? With a delivery best approximated as a living checklist of stroke warnings, his bumbling posho shtick almost resembles buffering, a kind of 3G Wodehouse. He doesn’t even seem to enjoy it; throughout the campaign he’s sported a face that looks as if it’s been kneaded by a baker going through a particularly bitter divorce, and the irony that comes into his eyes every time he crowbars in a catchphrase means that he breaks the fourth wall more than Deadpool. We thought the office of prime minister was what he lived for, his consuming ambition. It’s all been a bit like hearing Tony The Tiger talk about his diabetes.

 

Johnson’s deep investment in democracy is highlighted by the fact that his government has been dominated by an unelected special adviser. Usually people with levels of mental activity as low as Johnson’s aren’t surrounded by advisers, but their weeping parents and a member of their favourite boy band. Dominic Cummings looks like he works in television (which I think might be the worst thing you can say about anyone), has the air of a startled testicle, and the name of a character in a porn parody of The Talented Mr Ripley (“The Talentless Fister Ripped Me”). Everyone who’s bored with Johnson pretending to be an idiot should look at Cummings and realise these people are far more dangerous when they pretend to be clever.

 

It’s perfectly obvious why Johnson has been able to take power: he has an instinctive grasp on Brexit as rightwing eschatology, and he’s used to getting his own way, be it in the halls of Westminster or elbowing siblings off of nanny’s nipples. It’s only when you look at the hideous Tarot formed by his cabinet that you get a true picture of the depravity into which we are sinking. Take Michael Gove, a revanchist endorsement of the science of physiognomy. In any other era Gove would be seen as a uniquely unctuous, unlikable and profoundly talentless figure. Now he’s hardly even remarkable. Gove – looking like someone took all the flesh out of a serial killer’s drains and forced it into some brogues; like Davros fell out of his Dalek; like a rushed cartoon of a horny snail – is somehow not the worst person in cabinet, or even his own marriage. Against pushback from Sajid Javid and Priti Patel, Dominic Raab is attempting to get up to 60 British children back from camps in northern Syria before they freeze to death over the winter. That Raab, the flesh suit of a sentient virus with a forehead vein like a B&B kettle-cord, is somehow the moral heart of this enterprise tells you all you need to know. In all likelihood, you’ll be praying that they prorogue the next parliament.

 

Someone else who will still be here after the Rapture is the Brexit party’s Nigel Farage. I thought one of the advantages of the Brexit vote was that he might disappear; having him back in public life is a bit like watching a suicide bomber doing a comeback tour. Of course, it would have been nice to see him actually running in the election, particularly from a pack of wild dogs.

 

As for the Lib Dems – well, I thought we’d really miss Tim Farron, bumping around the country on a deserted coach and performing Blue Peter tasks in front of people terrified that he might start talking about gay sex. Jo Swinson has grown on me, and seems to exist as a satisfying, subtle and damning satire of humanity. Swinson’s election started out relatively positively, possibly because people hadn’t heard her speak yet. It quickly became clear that she had the gravitas of a re-education camp supply teacher, and was launching a kind of charm retreat that seemed to involve loans for renting flats and permanent austerity. Some might see misogyny in this reaction to her, but I’m fairly sure I just hate her for being from Milngavie.

 

Labour’s idea to run an election campaign on policy in the middle of all this is a little bit like reciting your poetry at an orgy. Jeremy Corbyn, perhaps weighing up whether he could have more influence by simply dying and haunting his successor, has benefitted from becoming slightly calmer over the course of the campaign. Aggression isn’t a good look for him, shifting Corbyn from Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh towards the territory where you’d expect his face to be captioned with “police suspect the real figure may be much higher”. Labour’s campaign initially struggled to find the right note of warmth or optimism. Normally in a general election, there’s so little mention of Scotland it’s like watching coverage of a major football tournament, but Labour seemed pointlessly determined to get across the message that they would deny a second independence referendum. The Corbyn project started out as a piece of moralising – a token candidate standing in a Labour leadership election to remind the party of its principles – and his Labour is at its weakest when these roots show: it can come across as patronising and entitled. I think Labour presents itself better during elections because it is forced to be more practical. The whole Corbyn thing, at its best, is a sort of Ealing comedy about some old bloke who gets called off his allotment to try to form a government, but it needs to promise a third act where something actually happens. Labour’s campaign also demonstrates the limits of social media compared with establishment media power. If polls at the time of writing are to be believed, owning several TV stations and newspapers still seems to be more important than the democratisation of the ability to troll celebrity Jews.

 

Before the campaign, there seemed to be a belief among Labour party members that it fared better in elections because of rules about electoral media balance, perhaps because they misconstrued the establishment complacency at the last election. Of course, Labour has been monstered in the media throughout the campaign, and largely been judged by different standards than the Conservatives. Even the gold standard of scrutiny that Johnson dodged was just being interviewed by his former boss at the Spectator.

 

Media plurality is an issue we need to address in this country: the alternative is living in a timeline where, because Corbyn has wonky glasses, in a couple of years you’ll be living in a tent city outside an Amazon warehouse trying to GoFund a tonsillectomy. The Tories calling Corbyn a communist and a threat to national security after handing nuclear power plants to the Chinese is a bit like getting a bollocking off Charles Manson for putting down slug pellets. Perhaps in a few years our troops will reflect on what a harmless enemy Corbyn actually was, as they stare up at an AI minotaur, pinning them to the floor with a stainless steel hoof and holding their extracted vascular system aloft like a Ford Focus wiring-loom.

 

You won’t be surprised to learn that I won’t be voting Tory on Thursday, for much the same reasons that I won’t be spending the day kicking children and pensioners into traffic. It’s depressing to think how many polling stations are in schools, and how many people will vote Conservative after walking past a motivational rainbow. As we saw in Stanley Johnson’s Pinocchio gaffe, there is a problem with our elites programming their traumatised children with the idea that they are born to rule. It becomes almost impossible, as a class, to hide your contempt. It’s difficult to keep lying convincingly about things you’ve convinced yourself your audience are too stupid to notice. This current iteration of Conservatism, a kind of mutant nationalism that insists all our infrastructure has to be owned by other countries, has nowhere to go but into an asset-stripped, deregulated wasteland. I don’t know how anyone votes for that, or what happens after they do. British people don’t get on well enough to form militia.

 

I don’t want to end on a note of pessimism. Instead, I’d like to share with you my two favourite quotes. The first, is a really famous one. Kurt Vonnegut asked his adult son what he thought the meaning of life was, and his son replied: “We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” The second is what David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, said about the ending of the final episode:

 

“Well, what Tony should have been thinking, I guess, and what we all should be thinking – although we can’t live that way – is that life is really short. And there are good times in it and there are bad times in it. And that we don’t know why we’re here, but we do know that 20 miles up it’s freezing cold, it’s a freezing cold universe, but here we have this thing called love, which is our only defence, really, against all that cold, and that it’s a very brief interval and that, when it’s over, I think you’re probably always blindsided by it.”

 

Twenty miles up, it’s a freezing cold universe, we only have the human connections we make here, nothing is permanent, and love is our only defence. I suggest we all vote accordingly, and try to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.

 

 

Thats fucking brilliant

[sir roger]

I am definitely using the pyjamas gag and claiming it.

[sir roger]

1 hour ago, Mudface said:

Excellent stuff- do you have a link to the original article?

 

Edit: ah, it's OK, found in the Guardian- https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/07/frankie-boyle-election-countdown-praying-prorogue-next-parliament

Sorry Muddy , always think more people read it if you lay the whole piece out in plain sight.

[Mudface]

22 minutes ago, sir roger said:

Sorry Muddy , always think more people read it if you lay the whole piece out in plain sight.

No problem, mate, good of you to post it, otherwise I'd likely have missed it.

[redinblack62]

30 minutes ago, Mudface said:

No problem, mate, good of you to post it, otherwise I'd likely have missed it.

I don't think you will ever read a better summary of the shower of cunts who it would appear are about to form the next government.

[Mudface]

47 minutes ago, redinblack62 said:

I don't think you will ever read a better summary of the shower of cunts who it would appear are about to form the next government.

Promising-

 

 

[kop77]

CON: 42% (=)
LAB: 36% (+4)
LDM: 11% (-1)
BXP: 4% (+1)
GRN: 2% (=)


COME ON YOU REDS

[Bjornebye]

Excellent from Frankie Boyle that. 

[Red Phoenix]

39 minutes ago, Mudface said:

Promising-

 

 

 

 

[Red Phoenix]

Gap back at 8 points with a poll from same people :

 

 

 

Explained here :