If you think about it, Russell Brand is what happens when you expose a hippie to the internet. What used to be your friendly neighbourhood 'spirit astronaut' 15 years ago has moved on from psychedelics, rent control protests and maybe a bit of carpet-baggerry to right-wing American puritanism.
I've always wondered if some of it is permanent damage from being a cokehead in his younger years. And who knows what he's taking these days, except nobody gives a toss anymore because he's already pretty fringe as it is.
I hope he ends up in prison for all the - at this time still alleged - sexual assault. I find him more insufferable with every day. Just an aggravatingly annoying alt-right edgelad. A cautionary tale of what happens when you let your conspiracy theories go to your head.
If you read his autobiography, it's pretty obvious why he's a mess. Not to excuse him responsibility or anything, but he ticks most of the boxes on an Adverse Childhood Experiences questionnaire. The conspiracy stuff is just another manifestation of his desperate need for validation from strangers.
Yeah, he was taking everything, wasn't he. Almost indiscriminately.
>The conspiracy stuff is just another manifestation of his desperate need for validation from strangers.
I don't think that's really hitting the nail on the head. Yes, he's a bit of an attention whore and always has been. But to me, the more decisive thing is that long-term excessive drug users are known to develop chronic psychotic and delusional traits. Which goes a long way explaining the kind of person he is today.
Musk's a right-wing crank too, that's certainly a factor, so it's not all about government subsidies.
Also, fuck off, you fucking tourist. There's already a massive thread about this twat on /news/, which you'd know if you hadn't just washed up here like an oil spill.
>>463649 Without wanting to sound too much like a Sceptical Steven, if you open your mind to everything a lot of dreadful crap will fall in as well. You know what though? I take that back, I am a Sceptical Steven. I hate all this make believe bullshit. It's learning for people who couldn't find China on a map and don't understand how tax bands work; lazy, useless, idiocy. I can't say this out loud too often because many of the people I know are religious or "spritual" and I don't want to be a complete bastard to them, but it drives me mental when people tell me they can't eat sausages because God said not to, or that their Granddad's ghost appeared in their bedroom to say ta-ta. Then if you do say this kind of thing they act like you're deficient somehow, inspite my wonderous feelings for orcas and belief, regardless of everything, in the possibilities of a peaceful and loving humankind, running deeper than any of their mystical guff. And to come back on topic, the stuff I have faith in doesn't give me paranoid schizophrenia so hard I subscribe to Russell-shiting-Brand.
I wouldn't say that's a fair representation of the kinds of things he moved onto.
He was a sort of vaguely kind of lefty (before he was unpersoned, I mean), but I've always found it interesting how there's a big overlap in the uneducated left and the conspiracist tinfoil hat crowd. Because really when you think about it, that's all being a lefty really is in the grander scheme of things- Where most people read the papers and they say "Fuck off, vaccine? I don't trust it." being a lefty is just going "Fuck off, hierarchical society where power and influence is based solely on wealth and inherited privilege? I don't trust it."
But that's where you get the neo-hippy cliff edge that plunges off into a pool of absolutely barmy science denier nonsense- They are skeptical of everything, but they don't know where to draw the line. Before long nothing is trustworthy.
Drugs have always gone hand in hand with the hippy movement but as someone who has taken more drugs than the vast majority of people (and by now is old enough not to say it to brag but as something I am partly ashamed of), I don't really think it affects your mind like that. People who were predisposed to end up nutters will have their issues exacerbated by heavy drug abuse, but if you were right in the head to begin with I don't think you get sucked into crack and opiates to begin with. I've been addicted to coke and speed but those are chemically highly addictive and it creeps up on you- If I wasn't a semi-functional, sort of switched on person I would have fallen down that rabbit hole properly, but I am, so I didn't.
People like Russel Brand were simply not adequately prepared for the kind of lifestyle they found themselves leading, and really, the way things went was quite inevitable. Something something society.
> but I've always found it interesting how there's a big overlap in the uneducated left and the conspiracist tinfoil hat crowd.
You're not wrong. One of my mum's friends was an ardent Labour party member for decades. She left school after her GCSEs and mainly worked unskilled jobs in the elderly care sector for most of her working life. A typical working class person with low educational background. But in recent years, she has drifted towards Drunken Racists and even cancelled her Labour membership. And she has been talking a lot about too many foreigners and immigrants being in the country and that Covid regulations were a deliberate government job to test people's tolerance for repression.
I think there's a wider problem here, and that is that Labour have long abandoned their traditional working class, blue collar voter base in favour of thinly veiled market radicalism. It probably all started with New Labour's job market reforms. There's an entire demographic of people at the lower end of society who feel disillusioned and no longer represented by Labour, and because of their low education and reduced capacity for critical thought, they fall victim to right-wing populists.
It's all happened before. There's no real danger of us adopting Nazism, but the Nazi party and Hitler, who, let's not forget, were put in power by democratic vote, had some of their strongest following among workers and labourers that we would today call the working poor. And they're also the ones who are disproportionally gravitating towards right-wing populist parties and entities in our time.
It's difficult to see what immigration means when you work in an office job with Mr. do-the-needful who has a degree and middle class family.
The working class experience is going to be weird drama between people speaking one of tens of different languages, endlessly rotating staff from god-knows-where, trying to communicate with people that hardly speak English and make your shit job an even bigger pain in the arse, people cliquing into mobs of their own nationality, hectic children that don't mingle well with the local population, health services breaking down because the population growth isn't sustainable versus the natural growth in the area.
>It probably all started with New Labour's job market reforms.
I broadly agree with your post, but I think you're being slightly unfair to New Labour here. It's true that they did open the floodgates to the Eastern Europeans, but they did so in the context of a really healthy labour market. The introduction of the minimum wage and Working Family Tax Credits - along with sustained economic growth - meant that most people felt generally very positive about their prospects. Immigration only really became a high-salience issue after the 2008 crash.
In terms of the last 14 years, I think the Tories have knowingly sacrificed low-paid workers on the altar of reducing unemployment. The slide towards wage stagnation and insecure work were really a deliberate strategy; when combined with an increasingly punitive welfare system that doesn't pay enough to survive on, people were forced to take whatever work they were offered under whatever conditions their employer found advantageous.
That's the problem with leading politicians; none of them, not Labour and certainly not Tory, have had that experience. Most of them were either born posh or had some way of attaining a public school education. I can't think of anybody who spent a meaningful part of their working life behind the fish counter in Asda.
In that sense, I've almost got more respect for Conservative politicians than for Labour ones. Nobody can be in doubt that Conservatives mainly look after their own. They usually come from a middle to upper class upbringing, and that's who they represent. While Labour still pretend to be advocates of the poor, while very few of them actually have an idea what poor means.
>I broadly agree with your post, but I think you're being slightly unfair to New Labour here.
Labour's job reforms didn't just let more foreigners into the country. New Labour did away with a lot of the job security and the welfare state as people knew it. Yes, in the end, the goal must always be to get people working so that they don't rely on the system, but loads of people with lower qualifications found themselves job-hopping from temp position to temp position without any more prospect of long-term employment. It was all in the name of job market "flexibility", and Britain wasn't alone at the time. Most European countries, even newly market-economy eastern European countries saw similar changes. But that flexibility wasn't about giving workers and employees more options and flexibility on the job market, but about letting employers fuck with you almost any way they please.
>>463675 Keir Starmer grew up in poverty. His dad was a mere toolmaker and his mum a mere nurse. Even now when he goes to the pub with his sister who is a nurse, she has to bring homemade sandwiches because she's too poor to buy pub food. Keir understands the working class experience.
> His dad was a mere toolmaker and his mum a mere nurse
I'm sure toolmakers and nurses earned a living in the 1960s and 70s. Not riches, but enough for their kids to grow up in relative stability, with both parents working, no less. That's not really the kind of poverty we're on about here. Two parents having manual jobs isn't necessarily the same as being working poor.
>>463673 >Immigration only really became a high-salience issue after the 2008 crash
Bendy bananas or not I think anti-immigrant sentiment was a growing issue long before the Financial Crisis and never really went away from the days of race riots. The Labour government was itself always looking over it's shoulder that immigration posed their biggest threat and it influenced policy making from '97 on.
People treat anti-immigrant sentiment as a given for the Tories but they were banging their drum about it at the 2005 election. It's not all economics is I guess what I'm saying and the effective collapse of the Social Democratic movement in the 00s-10s was by no means unique to the UK.
>>463675 Is there any empirical evidence that growing up poor makes you more amiable to giving poor people bennies? Does it positively impact competence?
John Major is the classic example as was Liz Truss. On Labour's side, Brown was a preachers lad (and ruining a princess no less) and I don't think anyone would suggest that Wes Streeting is liable to help criminals because he shares the gene.
Let's face it though, Britain is a very affluent country overall. Being working class- emphasis on working, not benefit reliant lumpen prole- for most of the last half a century means you have been really pretty okay. Which in itself is because of the hard work of unions and the old Labour party/movement.
When people say all this it just makes me think they're guilty Waitrose shopping wankers who hate having any kind of class oriented discussion, so they want to constantly push this wierd Four Yorkshireman no true Scotsman thing, where if you weren't living in a broken down shanty house on a coal pit slag heap, you weren't proper working class. Oh you even had hot and cold running water did you? You were hardly living in the Gaza strip were you! It's daft.
My mam and dad both grew up in deepest Yorkshire in the 60s and 70s, and the mad thing is that still makes them old enough to remember outdoor toilets and the family getting collective baths in a brass tub. Growing up we were alright, I had a playstation and we got a family PC relatively early. They worked hard and that's exactly the standard of living you should get for working hard. I still went to a rough as fuck school and ended up in more fights than most of you cunts have ever been in just because of the area we lived in. I spent most of my weekends with my nan in a smoky WMC and half my cousins have been to jail.
Really I suspect it's more that if you spend long enough working behind the fish counter at Morrissons, you're actively losing out on the kind of choices you need to make to end up in politics. If you're a working class person and want to get into that world, you have to be dedicated to it from an early age and know it's exactly where you want to end up.
Got a bit side tracked and forgot my point there. But anyway- The thing is working class =/= poor, that's not how working class voters see or want to identify themselves, and Labour representing the working class doesn't necessarily equate to "looking out for the poor". Attacking somebody like Kier Starmer because he wasn't "poor" misses the point- The voters don't want him to look out for the poor, they want him to look out for hard working people like them. That's how they see themselves.
It's Graun reading hand wringers who want to "look out for the poor", in a paternal, "oh goodness they don't know how to save themselves, we must care for them!" kind of way, and that doesn't resonate at all with working class people.
I'm not articulate enough to get across what I am saying but hopefully you lot are clever enough to grasp it.
>Let's face it though, Britain is a very affluent country overall. Being working class- emphasis on working, not benefit reliant lumpen prole- for most of the last half a century means you have been really pretty okay.
True in 2004, not true in 2024. 65% of people living in poverty are in a household where at least one person is in work. There is a large and growing group of people who just can't make ends meet, despite being in work. The main drivers of this are high rents, precarious work ("flexible" and zero-hours contracts), a lack of childcare and the recent cost of living crisis.
At the very bottom, the lumpenproletariat are falling deeper and deeper into destitution. Benefits haven't kept pace with the true cost of living, Universal Credit forces people into debt because it's paid a month in arrears, the complex and punitive nature of UC means that huge numbers of people are losing their benefits due to innocent mistakes, and the benefits cap and two-child limit has had a devastating effect on children in large families.
More people are falling into the lumpenproletariat. We've got a million more people who are too sick to work, seven million on an NHS waiting list and a government that pretends that those two numbers are unrelated.
Britain isn't a rich country. It's a middle-income country that happens to have a rich bit in the south-east. Poor people - including poor people in work - are much better off in Western Europe and even parts of Eastern Europe than in Britain. In countries with similar levels of GDP per capita, working people enjoy much more affordable rents, better childcare, better rights at work and more affordable education for both school-leavers and adults. The majority of the population think that we should have higher taxes to fund better public services, but we're currently stuck with a government that disagrees with the electorate.
This stuff isn't rocket science, we've just spent 14 years digging ourselves into a hole. Rather than investing in the future, we've slashed funding for the services and infrastructure that help people to get out and stay out of poverty. Rather than making society more equal, we've seen a multi-trillion pound transfer of wealth from working people to the retired. We can't fix this overnight, but we can fix it and we know how to fix it.
You're missing the point though, and contending a lot of stuff I didn't even say, and if I had said you'd have found I agree with. That's even why I said "MOST of the last half a century."
All of that may be true, but it doesn't change the way people see themselves and the way they want to be seen, their ideal for society, and therefore what works when you are trying to appeal to them. They don't want a hand out, they want the hard work they do to be valued properly. They want the dignity of being taken seriously, not patronised and pitied. It might seem a subtle and academic distinction but it's huge.
All of this stuff is what cunts like Cameron understood and pandered to. He was full of shit and everything he said was a pack of lies, but he understood Hard Working FamiliesTM was more appealing than the idea of a party who gives more to benefits recipients than to nurses who are pulling 12 hour night shifts every other week (which is the other primary lie his party pushed for years until people believed it). That's what Labour has to fight against and retake.
What worked for Cameron in 2010 won't work for Sunak or Starmer in 2025, because we're not living in the same country any more. A decade ago, the talk in Westminster was about the "just about managing", the "squeezed middle", the broad mass of people who are neither poor nor financially comfortable. Those people were traditional Labour voters, but they were persuaded to vote Tory with promises of a society built for strivers rather than scroungers. All of those people are now poor and they know it; all the Tory promises of upward mobility amounted to nothing. They're all one bad month away from being a scrounger and they know it; many of them have had to claim Universal Credit or visit a food bank, because their wages just won't cover their bills.
After two decades of stagnant earnings and declining living standards, most people don't believe that hard work will ever be valued properly, or at least don't trust either party to actually make that happen. After furlough and the energy support scheme, most people feel too vulnerable to turn their nose up at a handout, even if they're too proud to admit it.
Labour will win the election on the back of desperation, not aspiration. People have no faith that Starmer can actually make things better, but they hope that he might stop things from getting even worse. That's the bitter reality of politics in a country in deep decline.
>They're all one bad month away from being a scrounger and they know it
Cost of living crisis and the end of zero percent financing, innit. It's not just inflation. During the cheap money glut, they all took on silly amounts of debt to finance five-bedroom homes and £60K cars. And now with interest rates back up again, it's coming back to bite them. As you said, all it takes to topple that Jenga tower is one or two months of being out of work. Few will have savings meaningfully beyond that before they'll have to trim back their standard of living.
The problem is that the kind of standard of living where you can drivre a nice car and comfortably afford to live in your own house has become increasingly unattainable under New Labour and then the Conservatives. True, they didn't single handedly raise house prices, the market pretty much did that on its own. But it's now very difficult for young people to get on the property ladder at all. In the mid-1970s, the average family home cost about a four- to five time multiple of the average person's annual income. In many parts of the country, it can now be up to ten times.
I don't think most voters are under the illusion that an incoming Labour government will change all that. But they do feel that the Conservatives have had a hand in things getting as bad as they are now. And that will be the noose around Sunak's neck in this election.
>Labour will win the election on the back of desperation, not aspiration.
Sure, but if they want to stay in power for more than one cycle, they will have to find a way of turning things around such that people can afford some measure of self respect again, they won't be able to stay in on bread and circuses.
> but if they want to stay in power for more than one cycle, they will have to find a way of turning things around
They'll spend half of their first term blaming everything on the preceding government. As every new government has always done. Five years is barely enough to bring current trends to a halt. The question will not be if a majority are better off in 2030, but if the median voter is. There needs to be a sense that things are at least beginning to turn around. People will need to be optimistic enough about the near future to want to give Labour another go.
It's the bit in Planes, Trains and Automobiles where she says "... you're fucked" to Steve Martin. Why is that "age-restricted" but the mad ramblings of the Noughties carpet-bagger are a-okay for all the family?
>>463753 >But yeah, Labour will be fucked unless they seriously turn things around.
At the same time though, by the looks of it the Cconservatives really will be fucked out of existence for a generation, if not forever. Maybe it's all exaggeration but it is true to say we have not just one, but two generations who have grown up having to deal with the ramifications of Tory economics. Even the millennials who have carved out a decent life for themselves are under no illusions that this sequence of Conservative governments have done them any favours.
So who is going to fill the gap? Are we going to see a real shift in the political landscape? It's common pessimism that we won't and we'll just be stuck in the two party stalemate forever, but I believe if it's happened before it will happen again. Nothing lasts forever.
I have a feeling what we'll see is Labour essentially becoming the status quo party in place of the Conservatives (and our generation will be the pensioners controlling the vote just like the boomers have been for the Tories), but I really don't see parties like the Greens, and least of all Lid Dems or Reform, rising up to take the role of main opposition.
>>463755 >Are we going to see a real shift in the political landscape?
Labour are doing so well in the polls by pretending to be the Conservatives, so I doubt it.
>At the same time though, by the looks of it the Cconservatives really will be fucked out of existence for a generation, if not forever.
What almost always happens when one party has been in power for a long time is that they just exhaust themselves. They will have used up all the talent and all the fresh new ideas of the generation that originally came to power, in the sense that everything just becomes tried-and-true, and structures and channels of communication and administration become inflexible and unable to respond to changes in the political landscape. Simply put, what kills a long-time government is complacency and ignorance about the idea and the possibility that the good times could end. And the belief that either their winning formula that has secured them the last few elections will never fail, or that the opposition's weakness and inability to source capable candidates to take over power won't end.
>>463765 I continue to maintain that the current Conservative shitshow is all Brexit’s fault. The 2019 election was fought with a three-word manifesto: “Get Brexit Done.” Just keep repeating that, MPs were told, and you will win the election. And they did. It was so popular that probably 100 candidates who never expected to win also won their seats. And they loved it, and they want to do what’s right for their traditionally Labour-voting, Tory-hating voters. Sure, perhaps the Conservative Party had a real manifesto with other policies, but when a third of your government now consists of people who hate every single one of your policies except getting Brexit done, you’re going to struggle to pass any legislation post-Brexit-doing. And getting Brexit done, of course, took about two months of their five-year term. The remaining 58 months have just been awkward confusion as nobody can agree on any other policies at all. The Liz Truss fans have always been there, and they’re still there now, but the party isn’t a whole party of Liz Truss fans and it showed. “Get Brexit Done” was so successful as a slogan, that every possible political faction is now represented by a Conservative MP. And that’s why they’ve been fighting since early 2020, and achieving absolutely nothing.
>>463767 In a way I think it's indicative of what happens in our FPTP voting system where these factions can't knife each other at the ballot box and you end up with small minded extremists holding disproportionate power that the public can't hold to account. During the paralysis of Brexit there were even calls to split the parties and create 6-7. But the public don't vote for ChangeUK just as they didn't vote for the SDP.
>And getting Brexit done, of course, took about two months of their five-year term. The remaining 58 months have just been awkward confusion as nobody can agree on any other policies at all.
I think you might be neglecting the reference what Boris Johnson did on the road to Brexit including kicking longstanding MPs from the party and agreeing what it turned out was a completely bollocks plan for Northern Ireland that he just left for other people to deal with.
>I continue to maintain that the current Conservative shitshow is all Brexit’s fault.
Agreed, in a way. The problem is that while democracy and the will of the people are good concepts that don't do much harm in and of themselves, you've got to be careful about what you ask the people specifically, and how you ask it and what consequences it will have. I guess that's the real lesson.
You could do all manner of statistically significant opinion polls that will tell you who is in favour of contentious issue X or Y. For example, according to the latest polls, 60 percent of Brits would back a reintroduction of the death penalty. The question is if the country will be better off if you put very fundamental and consequential questions to the people in that kind of way, so that their vote on the matter will actually either cause Britain to leave the EU or to readopt capital punishment.
For a democracy to function, as counterintuitive as it seems, sometimes you have to ignore the will of the people. Otherwise, you could end up derailing your democratic system in and of itself.
I largely agree, although I don't think it's even as complicated as that. It's just that Brexit was the only reason people were voting for them in the first place, and either way they would have been fucked once they'd actually gone and done it.
All of our politics of the last 20 years has been dominated by that gut instinct bellyfeel emotional impulse that tells ordinary northern working class Red Wall type voters who know they should be voting Labour that they can't vote Labour, because immigrants. Well now that we did Brexit and immigration stayed at record levels, it's made two things staggeringly obvious even to the most ignorant Baz down the pub type.
Firstly, that the Conservatives are complete frauds who always secretly wanted massive immigration no matter how hard they posture against it.
Secondly, that the Conservatives really did have nothing else. Brexit was the only thing they had and they even cocked that up.
The Red Wall voters who surged over to Bozza weren't under any illusion that the Conservatives were suddenly going to look after them. They weren't even under any impression that Brexit was going to meaningfully improve things. But actually doing it made the point. It lanced the boil. It's done and it's over with and going forward we only have ourselves to account for what happens in our country. In all likelihood, I reckon we'd have seen them all flip back over to Labour even if the Conservatives hadn't had disaster after disaster for the last five years; Liz Truss and all the scandals were just the final nail in the coffin of a party that were already done for.
>>463958 His original audience got bored of him so he started doing the Alex Jones thing in an English accent for a different audience then people remembered he did a cheeky bit of rape back in the day so now he can market himself to a more hardcore version of his new audience because they sympathise it's just like in Jorjor Wells.
