>>92976

This was really the worst effect of Corbynmania. in 2014, most people at most CLP meetings were fairly dull local government types. Outside of an election campaign, most of the discussion was about mundane local issues - bins, dog fouling, flytipping, that sort of thing. They were doing precisely the thing that the grassroots are supposed to do, addressing minor but easily fixable quality-of-life issues and building trust with the wider community.

Party membership more than doubled in 2015, but these new members were of a fundamentally different stripe. They hadn't previously been involved in local politics which is ostensibly a good thing, but they weren't interested in working for or with the CLP, they wanted to take it over. My own CLP (in a safe northern seat) was completely transformed in a matter of months, entirely for the worse.

Those of us who had been doing the dog-work of canvassing and running parish councils for years or decades found ourselves massively outnumbered by SWP and CND members, pro-Palestine and anti-Israel campaigners, people who hadn't been involved in the Labour movement since Militant got booted out, people who saw the party as a vehicle for their own hobby-horse. They were always there when someone tabled an irrelevant motion about international geopolitics, but they were never there when the call went out for volunteers to do some actual work.

I know it might sound bitter, but it was just utterly heartbreaking to be part of. We were an effective team who gave up huge amounts of our own time for the party, but we were being castigated as traitors by people who had only just joined the party. The breaking point for me was the Brexit referendum - the newbies outnumbered the old guard by four or five to one, but precisely zero of them ever came out leafleting and canvassing. We were out talking to pensioners about the benefits of EU membership, they were bickering among themselves on Facebook, but we were just Blairite scum who were holding back the movement. Unsurprisingly, a lot of us decided that we had better things to do with our spare time than be insulted by people who were supposed to be on the same side.

This is the absolutely critical factor for Labour that the statistics and opinion polls fail to capture. The effectiveness of the grassroots of the party was utterly devastated by Corbynmania. A generation of experience, skills and goodwill was completely squandered and will take many years to rebuild. People who were well-known and well-liked in their local communities were pushed out of the party by absolute arseholes, the infrastructure needed to run an effective campaign was left to rot and in many parts of the country we're now basically starting from scratch.

>>92977
The Blair-Brown years were full of cringeworthy attempts at this sort of thing. Remember when Gordon Brown was going to give us a national day and force kids to do volunteering to celebrate Britishness? Or how about Labour's decision to introduce "Australian style points based immigration system" to our national consciousness with the 2001 and 2005 manifestos? That definitely marked Labour out as the party of sensible controls on immigration in the long term... Then there was the regular emphasis to "British values" (all of which were, naturally, inoffensive non-values like "fair play" and "tolerance") of the sort which the current government still makes, but which somehow seem more pathetic and more liberal when now-opposition Labour trots out the exact same thing.
The upshot of it all was that Labour was in government and it's hard to moan about their stupid PR stunts or their tedious phrasemongering when staring down the much more pressing issues of NHS reform, an ongoing war, ID Cards and + day detention, and a global recession.

I mean give Blair his due. His PR team was much better and he, personally, is not an awkward ex public servant. He's a slippery barrister descended from a literal Tory. Keir Starmer is only one of those things, so instead of getting Blair's question-diffusing smile you're going to get a mug that says "Controls on Immigration".
Also, whether it helped or not I'd like to say that Blair was willing to put unpopular ideas out there because he believed they were good for the country, like Euro membership or closer ties to Europe in general. He'd even make the case that it was unpatriotic to be anti-Europe and patriotic to be pro-Europe because that was the national interest. The party had utterly dreadful mixed messaging on a lot of this, but give Blair his due - when he advocated a stupid, wrong policy he genuinely believed in it. When Keir Starmer advocates austerity it'll be because Mandelson has told him to act like a Tory.

>>92984
Am I too much a cynic for thinking that if Labour doesn't collapse, perhaps some CLPs starting from scratch might not be the worst thing?
I find myself disliking both groups you describe. The 20-something foreign policy wanker squad who'd turn down a re-run of Atlee because it'd mean swallowing the existence of Israel and the team of older people who fair enough go around doorknocking and can get your bins fixed for the council, but who vote for the worst kind of bastards for the NEC, MP selection, and leadership backing because they're a self-selected crew of people who could stomach the worst of the Blair years and old enough to remember Militant from the last time and think that gives them the right to conflate every vaguely left-wing student type they find with an actual Trotskyist. (Let's not forget there are people in the party who think Ed Miliband is-was "a Trot")

All I want is a man who'll fix my bins when he's a friend of the local Councillor and who'll bring back British Rail when he's the minister for transport. I don't see why I have to pick between nutters who can't make a phone call about my bins because they've got to vandalize Israel's wikipedia page and nutters who'll fix my bins right after they're done submitting a CLP motion proposing a law requiring balanced national budgets or saying we should invade Syria or god knows what else.

I'm not making any accusation of being a Blairite or right-wing or whatever against you personally, mind. I've simplified for effect: the average Labour person I've met is usually "soft left" and perfectly nice. It's just that in practice the squishy soft left seem to let themselves break rightwards in a crisis, since they're the only wing of the party actually willing to compromise and the right still has some lingering intellectual and organisational strength to win them over with. It's no use being a bleeding heart lefty deep down if Lyle Lanley can still talk you around to voting David Miliband for leader...

>>92988

The question is where those people would come from to reboot Labour. Universities? The unions? "Civil society", whatever that means in the 21st century? The broader left-wing movement is so intellectually and institutionally denuded that I don't think anyone but the Labour party is in a position to bring people from the left together and cultivate a class of savvy left-wing activists and leaders.

I think there's a dichotomy between too much and too little ideology. The Momentumites only care about ideological purity and don't really give a toss about people; the old Labour grassroots mean well and do a lot of good locally but don't really stand for anything in a broader political sense. Blair was able to mobilise the latter so effectively (and bring a lot of politically apathetic people into the fold) because he had the charisma to unite people around an optimistic vision for the future, even if that vision was at odds with traditional Labour values. Labour needs people who can guide the party between those extremes - people who are ideological enough to know what should be done, but pragmatic enough to actually get things done.

It's a shite situation, I fear we're in for another decade of Tory domination, but the only thing I can suggest is that people like you get involved in the party to the greatest extent possible. If sensible people hold their nose, get behind Starmer and do the unglamorous work required to get the Tories out and rebuild the Labour movement, we might stand a half a chance of delivering some meaningful outcomes for ordinary people.

>>92984
>the newbies outnumbered the old guard by four or five to one, but precisely zero of them ever came out leafleting and canvassing.
Or voting, for that matter.

It's a terrible idea to base your politics around ideological purity, because there's no way that doesn't lead to extremism. Everyone has to do bad things occasionally, and a political party that can never, ever do anything bad is a party that is frankly hamstrung. I still think a banterous communist would have been better than the avuncular geography teacher you all had last time. But then, I'm never going to vote Labour anyway because I oppose the two-party system and believe everyone should vote for nutters exclusively.

>>92979

I don't see why you want to carry this on, I already said I haven't made up my mind and won't until we see the report and the other lad has said he won't believe the report unless the person who had a bias to never support the report if it didn't match agenda says it is true.
So there is an impasse. He won't ever change his mind and the report hasn't been released yet.

As a hypothetical imagine there was a report into domestic violence in the UK and it invited various fisherpersons onto the committee and it concluded (as the science does) that women are more likely to be the perpetrators of domestic violence, any fisherpersons on that committee would be washing their hands of it claiming it was distorted stats, cherry picked evidence, unfounded and sexist, and imply hidden agenda and abuse behind the scenes. Would that make the report invalid? How is that any different from this? It isn’t and until the report is public that we can know the truth about those claims. So how about we all just wait for the report quietly, since I already know what the other lad thinks and his insistence that anyone who hasn't made their mind up to be the same as his yet is working against him is an absurd argument I am tired of him repeating.

It doesn't matter if it was 100% written by Dominic Cummings after sniffing a rail of pro-plus, >>92983 will still believe it.

>>92983
Clearly you don't have any actual interest in waiting to see the report since it came out two weeks ago, so you can take your disingenuous bollocks and get in the sea.

>>92987

Well then you'll be able to link me to the report so I can read it then won't you.

>>92989
https://lmgtfy.app/?q=race+report

>>92825
Banks are insufferable too, though. "Ooh, look at me, I make millions just from holding onto money that isn't even mine. Ooh, no, don't come to me on a Saturday when you have free time; I'll be closed then. Look at me, I'm so big, I'm too big to fail." Wankers. Fuck their windows.

>>92835
I know what I said. Don't try and gaslight me on who I would have sexual relations with. And that goes double for insufferable hippy chicks. How I suffer the curse of wanting to bone that which I cannot stand.

>>92839

I'm pretty sure there are photos in circulation of her baps from the Shire Hall protest, but I think you might be disappointed.

Feels weird to have been on .gs/Britchan for the best part of a decade and only now has my quaint home county of Gloucestershire come up because of some angry hippies

>>92829
That looks like a Knog Frog, they're decent enough as "be seen" lights. The more concerning part is:
> Stroud

It's a lovely place where the stink of champagne socialism almost covers up the smell of no-poo soap free natural body care.

>>91392

Are you suggesting that being judgemental and feeling shame might be beneficial for society. And feeling pride should be about bettering yourself rather than being always comfortable with yourself. That doesn't sound very woke.

>>91393
People are just as judgemental as they were before, if not even worse. It's just that we're learning to tune it out. Shame was always a shitty way of getting people to do things.

>>91393
If it means people stop doing the school run in their pyjamas then yes.

>>91381
My mum has a proper go at me when I don't hold cutlery properly, but I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. I'm a left-handed abomination so I hold things like Quasimodo anyway, it's a form of discrimination I think.

>One in three UK teachers plan to quit the classroom within five years because of increased workload and diminishing respect for the profession, according to a major union survey.

>The poll by the National Education Union revealed an education workforce exhausted after a year of Covid disruption, with 70% reporting increased workload over the last 12 months and 95% worried about the impact on their wellbeing. Out of a poll of 10,000 members, 35% said they would “definitely” not be working in education by 2026, while two-thirds (66%) said the status of the profession has got worse and blamed government for failing to listen to or value teachers.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/apr/08/one-in-three-uk-teachers-plan-to-quit-says-national-education-union-survey

>>92906
That's how people describe their weekends on MS Teams meetings nowadays. Maybe not socialising with our peers, and only consuming American media is making us adopt these terms at an accelerated pace.

END LOCKDOWN!

>>92902

>Even if you want to be optimistic and say the tendency is for things to get better

If you do want to be that optimistic, I'd say you're naive and overall quite ignorant.

History has had its ups and downs many times over the years. Civilisations have risen and fallen, and the people left in the dark age after the collapse had only crumbling, mysterious precursor ruins to remind them that someone was once there before. Imagine what it must have been like to be a British peasant in 300AD, living in the shadow of these mysterious ghost towns left by some long lost precursors, while barbarian warlords fight for control over what's left. What was it like to be one of the ancient Babylonian, Mesopotamians or early Greeks, when those budding early civilisations were snuffed out by an invading force even today we can't identify, known only as "the sea peoples".

The Dark Ages were called the Dark Ages for a reason, they're the period of decline after the fall of a great empire, a world order which the people living under must have assumed would carry on forever. European history as we know it is pretty much just a chronicle of our climb back out of that period. There's no reason it couldn't happen again. What would Europe look like if Rome never fell? Would we be having this conversation about imperialism and slavery today, and who would we be pointing the finger at if we were? It's impossible to say, but that illustrates the point in a way.

Change is the only constant in the world.

>>92901
>Slavery was pretty chill

Yeah, you tend to chill out when they cut your dick and balls off.

>>92909
Oh Whiskers, are you still going on about that?

>>92910

>>92852

You are Big Clive and I claim my £5.

>>92853
Genuinely hope he is, I adore him with all my heart.

>>92854

I think he would be our best (quasi) celebrity claim to date. Sorry Charlie, but you lost your edge when you married Connie.

You mean Tony from Tile It All doesn't post here?

>>92856
What about Big John from Karelia Cars?

>>91799

I don't know how hard you'd work for under a tenner an hour, but my old boss had a phrase I've always rather liked.

"If you're paying peanuts, you'll only get monkeys."

>>91812

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/29/a-year-after-wuhan-alarm-china-seeks-to-change-covid-origin-story

>Nearly a year after doctors identified the first cases of a worrying new disease in the Chinese city of Wuhan, the country appears to be stepping up a campaign to question the origins of the global Covid-19 pandemic.

>State media has been reporting intensively on coronavirus discovered on packaging of frozen food imports, not considered a significant vector of infection elsewhere, and research into possible cases of the disease found outside China’s borders before December 2019.

>The official People’s Daily newspaper claimed in a Facebook post last week that “all available evidence suggests that the coronavirus did not start in central China’s Wuhan”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyK5EI38gis

>>92669
Her hair looks incredibly thick.

>>92565
It actually doesn't need the democratic element. A populist movement can also mean anything serving the community in general, in the United States this used to also be a term dominant for farmers organisations circumventing rent-seeking by the wealthy that only later evolved into a loose political party.

>>92567
You see what you're doing here is submitting that words are malleable to those in power who very much hold an interest in controlling language. Populism in a pejorative sense is a term I've seen uniquely used by the mass media who have created their own distorted image in the consumers mind and thereby shaping the confines of any debate and what is possible. If all modes of social improvement outside of those sanctioned by the powerful are viewed as dangerous threats to democracy then they can close meaningful resistance in the minds of the common people and stop the emerges of any rival power structures that truly pose a threat.

Language is organic but that doesn't mean that a pedantic anorak wielder with a dictionary can't confound our current slide deeper into an aristocracy.

>>92574
>You see what you're doing here is submitting that ...
No, I was talking about slang. I am aware that various parties in the media have been doing some rather unpleasant things with terms like "do-gooder" and "violence". "Woke" arguably too but that one's a kettle of eels I can't be bothered with.

>>92576
>No, I was talking about slang.

We're not talking about slang and the inherent premise of my reply was that the current use is artificial and therefore illegitimate. If as otherlad suggest the term is used by losers then it is quite correct to say 'no actually you're talking bollocks' or to resist it falling into a common definition.

>>92577
>We're not talking about slang
I was. Slang is words. Go have a conversation with yourself if you want to be in complete control of where it goes.

>>92565
This is an inherent flaw of democracy, isn't it? Tyranny of the majority?

>>92279
A more likely scenario is kids bombing their school from orbit using a hacked satellite because their homework was late.

>>92274

Interestingly, someone hacked (a system on) the ISS using AX.25 and a fucking bash command injection bug and posted it on twitter so I'm fairly sure that properly weaponised autism is fully capable of hijacking a satellite or two.

>>92280
This is exactly why I should have got a commodore amiga instead of a SNES when I was nine.

>>92272
Life, in general, will get broadly nicer. Crime rates will go down, incomes will go up, diseases will be cured and life expectancy will increase. The only downside is the utter moral outrage against the excesses of the elites will also need to increase, because they're only going to wreck shit harder. And most people won't care, which will be infuriating, same as it is now.

Potentially, possibly, we might see the big technology FAANG companies take a bumming. I'd like to see that happen, and Joe Biden has said he wants to do it. The companies will also fight extremely hard to stop this from happening, so it could be seriously exciting, when Google starts telling you Joe Biden is a paedo and Amazon refuses to deliver to Democratic states. But that's a real best-case scenario; things that awesome tend not to happen.

>>92274
Do those satellites still have functioning engines? Anyone can grab the steering wheel on an old satellite whenever they want, and it won't do anything if they can't actually steer it. I would imagine those satellites are just drifting aimlessly.

>>92571
A lot of them will have small amounts of fuel left which is kept there for position changes and such and they're designed to stay on standby for a very long time. It wont do you much good though, if you were dead set on causing destruction you could probably steer a few old satellites to cross paths with others that'd give you maybe a 0.001% chance of a collision in the next decade if no one spotted it and moved the other satellites out of the way. Space is just that big.

>>91875
Just had a mate piss off to Dubai for a couple weeks. Said no one seemed to give a shit at the airports.

Another mate is fucking off to Mexico tomorrow.

I've been thinking a lot about Sphere Starmer, so I present Mitt Rombus.

>>91907
Meant to go in the American thread. Fuck's sake.

>>91876

Don't blame them, there are some bargains about at the momeny. Got a cracking deal on New York for the end of the year.

Jimmy saville: I want my life back after three decades of Brexit campaigning - and this time I mean it

https://www.If I post a link to this website again I will be banned.co.uk/news/article-9335577/Jimmy-saville-want-life-three-decades-Brexit-battle.html

Have we really seen the last of Are Nige?

(A good day to you Sir!)

>>92429

I appreciate that America is a bit of an easy target now with Biden in charge, but I wouldn't wish this much misery on them.

The racism here seems a little less casual than our usual. Are you sure you two are here legally?

>>92431

It's not racism, we hate her because ACAB.

>>92421

BREXIT MEANS BREXIT.

>>92418
>What's your point?
A mixture of a desire to see if anyone agrees/disagrees with that version of events because I might learn something, suspicion it might be of interest to some, and perhaps a little bit of the view that Britain has been a barrier to a unified Europe more generally.

>>92419
>The point we are discussing is that there was no elucidation over what Brexit, to the Tories, actually meant
We do however know what it didn't mean: Stay in the EU or de-facto stay in the EU via the EEA. Labour screwed up massively by their pro-remain elements trying to fudge the issue in a way that would get them back into Europe, instead of keeping their 2017 position of negotiating the least bad Brexit possible with no second referendum. Labour's 2019 platform managed to be the opposite of all things to all men: Remainers saw a party prepared to negotiate Brexit, Leavers saw a party trying to claw it away with a second referendum, and the indifferent knew they were split like a fat lad's jeans.

Had pro-EU types been more subtle and competent they could just possibly have nudged us back into the EEA, but they blew it and once everything went up in the air the Tory Brexiteers got a blank cheque.
(Full disclosure: Voted Labour, Remain.)

I voted for brexit when I was in a kind of aburdist-nihilistic phase, so I wanted my news to be more entertaining. Recently, my nan left me a sizeable inheritance and I think it'd be nice to live somewhere sunny and warm, so I would now vote remain.

I remember watching an interview with Jacob Rees-Mogg where he said that Britain would only start feeling the economic benefits from leaving the EU fifty years from now. As a member of the gentry, he's insulated from regular concerns and can obviously think along long-term lines (no shortage of willing suitors to carry forward that noble weak chin), but if I had voted leave for a legitimate reason, I would've been pretty pissed off at only being able to reap the benefits of brexit around the time when I can scarcely remember my own name and might need a diaper.

>>92427

You assert that poor people are too stupid to think long-term, while simultaneously proving that.

>>92427
Might need a what, definitely-not-a-yanklad?

>>92145

FINALLY, THE BRITISH PEOPLE HAVE SECURED THEIR GOD-GIVEN RIGHT TO BE RIPPED OFF BY MASTERCARD!

>>92145
VISA have apparently not yet got any plans to increase their fees yet, but wouldnt be surprising if they did the same next financial year.

https://twitter.com/cstross/status/1356960430699257856

Boris Making the case for being in the EU today.

Oh goodie, it looks like Brexiters are pushing to bring back brexit.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-restart-boris-johnson-conservative-b1803583.html
>Talks to rebuild security cooperation with the EU must restart now after the Brexit deal left the UK “less safe and less secure”, a Conservative group says.

>>92338
By 'the Brexiters', are you referring to the parliamentary group of Europhilic Conservatives?

>>92234
There is a strong electoral case for this though: One recognised tendency in British politics has always been that when people are sick of the Tories, nice middle class Tory types will vote Liberal and help Labour get in that way. At every election where Labour has taken power except 1997 the Liberals have also gained votes. (Up 0.9% in 1923, 5.8% in 1929, 2.3% in 1945, 5.3% in 1964, 11.8% in 1974, and down 1% in 1997.)
1997 leaves the question: Did Labour win Liberals, or Tories? Was there a "Tories go Liberal, Liberals go Labour" effect, or did Labour win over Tories while Liberals stuck to Ashdown?

But then in 2001 and 2005 things go all weirdy wobbly with the Lib Dems running to the left of Labour on all sorts of issues and even the Conservatives having a pop at it on tuition fees (opportunism, but they still did it!). Then 2010 happened and we all know how that went.

Anyway, it's a shame our Labour party didn't follow the trajectory of New Zealand: Labour there did Thatcherism from 1984-90, got it all out of their system and caused untold social harm in the process, sold off the trains and the planes despite promising they wouldn't. People were sufficiently upset (about the social harm, not the vehicles) that Labour feared coming third in the 1990 election, so were overjoyed when they merely went down to the biggest defeat of a sitting government in their nation's history.
Then in they came back to power in 1999 and mixed the electorally useful parts of Blairism (mostly late-TV era campaign techniques) with policies like renationalising the trains and the planes, creating a state owned bank, abolishing workfare, creating tax credits but branding them properly so people actually know what on earth they are, calling the Iraq war illegal, and more.
In part as a result of delivering a government that most people can basically agree was alright within living memory, NZ Labour returned to govt in 2017. Unlike UK Labour, which is spiraling the plughole like a discount Lloyd George Liberal.

>>92226
>Why were Deloitte offered untendered contracts to provide services that the NHS could have easily provided?

Because the idea the NHS is set up to do any of thesr things is wrong in the first place.

>>92258

>The NHS isn't set up to do medical testing or medical surveillance on the British Public but some rando consulting firm is.

u wot 8?

>>92235
>at you fully think it is 100% okay to hate specific groups of people, as long as they're the groups you've been told deserve it because of their privilege rank according to identity politics. That is your brain on liberalism.


That sounds so completely bonkers to me, I hate to go full no true scotsman, but that violates the very core pricipals of liberalism.

I accept that the term liberal has probably been co-opted by a paticular type of arsehole, and that arsehole considers classical liberals to be closet racists and sexists but usually those people self identify as left first rather than liberal.

>>92266

Yeah, this one was all those things you usually associate with a radical twitter leftie, except socialism was the bit she objected to.

That's what was so vexing and why I found her so repulsive. I can tolerate and to some extent understand those sorts when they eanestly believe it's all part of one big package to make society fairer overall, but this one specifically and consciously wanted neo-liberal capitalism as it exists today to carry on as normal, just with more women and minorities in the 1%.