>The shadow education secretary, speaking at a Labour party conference event, said social media firms should take greater responsibility for their users and noted in particular that Facebook seemed to have indicated that politicians should accept a higher level of abuse.
>Rayner, at a fringe event organised by the Guardian, conceded that insisting on real names wouldn’t stop abuse, but “it would certainly help a little bit. I think they should do more – they do have a responsibility for online.”
I... kind of like Angela Rayner, but this is a truly awful idea that seems to have had absolutely no thought put into its implementation or wider affects on freedom of expression. Technically almost every single account commenting on The Guardian is an "anonymous" social media account because why would you use a real name for such a thing.
I really hope this doesn't gain any kind of traction.
>>92160 >if you see the world as a bunch of graphs and levers where, if you pull the lever that says "right-wing" the graph for "right-wing votes" goes up.
>I don't think it helps that we never distinguish between the economic and social right/left spectrum, when I feel that in reality and in the minds of many voters they are very much distinct.
100% this. Labour voters in the north didn't abandon Labour because they disliked Corbyn's economic policies, they abandoned Labour because they saw Corbyn as weak, out-of-touch and unpatriotic. We talk about being in a "post truth" era, but feelings have always trumped facts at the ballot box.
I'd also add that voters are generally quite flexible about what policies they'll accept, but they want those policies to fit into a coherent narrative. "Cut public services to the bone" is a deeply unpopular policy, but voters largely believed in the concept of austerity. You don't win an election by having the most popular policies, you win an election by having the most believable story about how we got here and where we're headed.
>>92163 I never felt that Labour had a coherent message about austerity. The word itself doesn't really resonate with people and there's millions of people who've not being tangibly affected by it so the message never connected with them and it was easily countered by the Tories with a glib "austerity is living within your means".
>>92164 It might not connect with the voters, but I wish just once Labour would go into a "He's had too many pints" style campaign-a-rant about how this country is being run into the ground.
Just drive home: We've had the longest wage stagnation since the Napoleonic wars, for a while we were the only country in Europe to combine wage contraction with economic growth, if CANZUK was real we'd be the poorest people in it. depending on your measures. sometimes it's New Zealand. Our poorer regions are the poorest in Northern Europe despite the fact that inner London is the richest region in Europe. We struck oil and have nothing to show for it - but only the Scots realise they should be upset about that. The trains are bad, the care homes are in crisis, we haven't had a positive balance of trade since Britpop was a thing, the government only recently noticed that the NHS has been mismanaged for 30 years, we've got a housing shortage that nobody's got any intention of fixing, the unemployment figures are fake, and on, and on, and Ariston.
Just a campaign built around getting the electorate as angry as possible. No "our carefully costed manifesto of decline is a message of hope and optimism" nonsense, just anger. You don't even really need a particularly coherent set of policies to fix the problems: Just lay them out, make people angry that they're not being solved, and viciously mock any solution the government puts forward. Anger, anger and spite. Just one campaign to say: Vote for us, don't vote for us, but if you re-elect this government then the only thing we ask is that you don't say we didn't tell you so, and the only advice we can offer you is to go to college, learn hairdressing, and move to Australia on a skills shortage visa because this nation truly has no future.
I am not myself an angry person. It would just be a nice change of pace from conventional campaigns, which are boring, carefully stage managed, disingenuous and short termist.
Now of course, you can argue that the ONS isn't actually faking the numbers since they are what the ONS defines them to be, the ONS just doesn't define "Unemployment" the same way normal people do - but when politicians come out using those figures to pretend that we're back to the heady days of the 1970s where 1 million unemployed was considered politically untenable, those politicians are lying fakers.
We've been fiddling the numbers for decades. Previous governments made it very easy to claim incapacity benefit, which shifted millions of people from the unemployment figures because they were ostensibly "too sick to work". Their main medical complaint seemed to be that they were middle-aged men living in ex-industrial towns in the north. Mass unemployment never went away, we just got better at hiding it.
This government has salami-sliced the labour market, pushing millions of people from unemployment benefits into zero-hours, part-time and self-employed work that doesn't pay enough to live on. Instead of having one unemployed person on the dole, we've now got three people who are nominally working but rely on benefits to survive. They call it the "gig economy" to make it sound exciting and modern, but really it's just disguised unemployment. The huge increase in in-work poverty was knowingly created by this government, because they want low unemployment numbers while refusing to admit the reality that there just isn't enough work to go around.
Right I haven't thought this through so you'll have to bear with me.
What if all of the people without a job formed one massive company and they all employed each other? They could do it so that they win all the contracts from the DWP to get people into work and at the end just hire the person to work for them so there'd be a 100% success rate. Something like that.
There's a haunting quality to politics from the 90s - the aesthetics are totally foreign, but the issues are all the same. It's like we never really figured out how to move past Thatcher and we've just been replaying the dying years of the Major government on an infinite loop.
Blair was, in a sense, too good at politics - his unifying charisma smoothed over a whole array of deep political problems that were never really addressed and roared back with a vengeance when he left office.
>Sir Keir Starmer has said he was "wrong" to describe Boris Johnson's claims he backed the European Medicines Agency as "complete nonsense". Mr Johnson accused the Labour leader of wanting to stay in the agency after Brexit, at Prime Minister's Questions.
>This was angrily denied by Sir Keir. Reports the two men continued the row afterwards were played down by Labour. But the party has now issued a statement to say Sir Keir had "misheard" the prime minister.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-55924153
Every time Starmer opens his mouth he will be attacked for wanting a European-style vaccine programme while Boris will be able to claim the UK's success as a government victory. His reaction shows there's blood in the water which every reporter is going to press him on.
>>92160 >What sodding brain genius at Labour HQ thinks they can out right-wing the Tories, let alone these Tories?
The same one in the Tories that has been coming out with public spending and building back better commitments? You can actually do policy because it makes sense to do so. Hence that generally right and left have converged towards the centre.
>>92167 Angry campaigns usually fail, it's not just that nobody will leave the house for it but you start to lose credibility. The Scottish Referendum and Brexit are both campaigns where negativity failed.
I want to see a minimalist campaign a 'Vote Labour: We'll put a bit more money into the schools and that'. Keep it simple and coached in terms of reasonable investment rather than screeching about a genocide of the working class.
What I see are rises to corporation and capital gains on the next budget which would be a strange turn on affairs. Labour becomes the party of the aspirational middle class and fat cats.
Your kind of describing a worker's co-op funded by government subsidies which is totally a thing that works in progressive European nations like Netherlands. I think they had a bunch of deros reconstruct a tall ship in Amsterdam, but I can't find a source so may be mistaken. They definitely do have initiatives like Brouwerij De Prael which is a brewery that employs people who struggle to find work in elsewhere.
The UK government is ideologically opposed to such initiatives.
If disgusted by such obviously commie initiatives, the UK could look to Germany which has laws which make it necessary to have workers sit on Corporate Boards to ensure that the labour class has representation in the business and that shareholders don't threaten the long-term stability of an operation for short-term capital gains.
Again, the UK government is ideologically opposed to such things and the 50-or-so donor oligarchs who really call the shots are vehemently opposed to such things.
>>92174 In a way Blair was the precursor for Obama, except Obama had much more appealing IDpol credentials and was a more effective agent for the manufacture of consent.
The function of Government is to curtail the rabblement and condition them to think they want what Global Corporations are going to do regardless.
>>92175 >right and left have converged towards the centre.
Kind of, except due to long-term sustained capitulation from the Labour to the Tories and capitulation from the Tories to the lunatic fringe of their party, the center is way further right than what it once was. Prevailing trends mean that it will only continue to shift further right.
The whole left/right dichotomy is a hangover from post-revolution French politics and is kind of a moronic heuristic for judging contemporary politics especially since every mainstream politician with any significant influence is a Neoliberal pisspig.
>>92175 There's a big difference between a negative campaign and an angry campaign. Better Together and Stronger In were both dire, boring, stage managed affairs incapable of any genuine emotion. If anything I'd say Leave captured more of the energy of an angry campaign than Stronger In did, having tapped into the sense of decline that many people had and successfully associated it with Europe.
Fundamentally you can tell the difference because a failed angry campaign would still be interesting to watch. Imagine it, a Labour leader doing a cross between a Stewart Lee style contrived breakdown and the world's most jaded history lecturer, giving off the sense he's more interested in having you hate the Prime Minister than he is in becoming Prime Minister. Even if they only got 150 seats it would be more than worth the price of admission. Lloyd George never did anything so interesting as that when he was running his party into the ground.
Meanwhile something like Better Together or Stronger In is only interesting to the kind of people who like to read academic papers about smug identikit rent-a-suits step on rakes repeatedly while going "Christ, I could've done a better job than that and I'm just some guy". Their actual messaging inspires a sort of disgust that they felt such contempt for the electorate.
In the purest sense the left is a belief in Dialectical philosophy (the idea of a dominant position is overthrown in revolution) applies to people and not just ideas. This is often meant to mean dialectical materialism (ie Marxism) but also applies to other systems that don't consider class (a perfect example of modern times would be identity politics that disregard wealth and upbringing as a factor as long as the people who control the corrupt system are black women or gay, who mysteriously are predominately black women or gay.)
Center is something of a mislabling, the ideas we consider socially liberal are central and the ideas we consider illiberal are 'far'. Neither the right nor the left ever has a hold on this concept even though both will claim to be more liberal when it suits them and the ends will justify the means when it doesn't. The centre feels like it creeps in Britain because there is such a unspoken consensus of liberalism good that to have a politician not be liberal would be unthinkable.
I don't think people are that clever. It is far more likely to be spearheaded Laurie Pennys complaining they didn't personally get everything they wanted even though they got far more than the rest of us and expecting everyone else to champion the fight (there is a reason female CEOs get brought up so much in the rhetoric (the feel they should be a CEO) even though being a CEO is about as detached concept of being male for 999,999 out of a million men as living on the moon. The politics of entitlement dresses it self as power balancing because that is better rhetoric. All it wants to do is change the rules. For the rest of us we should have no stake in it.
If the women's only issue is not the system but the fact that they aren't in charge then yes, they are exactly the problem, and I have no tears for them.
>>92186 If your issue is the system then your issue is that it's not what you want, meaning you can't change the system, which is to say your issue is that you're not in charge. You're complaining about the exact same thing.
Women CEOS would be a legitimate goal if said Women implemented policies that made working environments less hostile and more nurturing to female interests.
Having childcare facilities in the workplace for instance being a major one.
If a special identitarian interest group gets recruited to the upper enchelons of an organization for reasons of diversity, inclusion and intersectionality and proceeds to behave in exactly the manner that the 'old white man' they are replacing would do, it's meaningless. This is what happens in practice.
Speaking to fisherperson friends who bring up the patriarchy I mention to them that Theresa May was PM and she was a shit, likewise Thatcher, and Queen Victoria did Imperialism in Africa.
Gramsci has this thing about Hegemony, basically the social institutions have a structure and only those who conform to the purpose of the organization can end up in the hot seat but the catch 22 is that you can't get so close to power unless you compromise your ideals enough to be moulded by the system you seek to change. People don't wield power so much as power wields them. Therefore we should aim to have a system which doesn't empower individuals (like Caesar or whatever) but rewards integrity and behaviours deemed to be conducive to the good function of society as a whole, or something.
No I am bloody not. Just because you don't have the imagination to picture anything different from a changing of the guard. Just having a woman in charge because they are a woman is the equivalent of "Don't blame me I voted for Kodos". You'd Support Hitler if he had tits.
>>92189 >>92190 You're both arguing at a right angle to what I said. Distinguish between "What women want is for positions of power to be taken by women in general" and "What any given woman wants is for herself to be in power". I was talking about the latter. To want something to change is to want the power to make that change.
But as >>92188 points out, in the former case, those women often replicate the same patriarchal system or whatever you want to call it. People know that. Ranting about how all women are stupid because they don't know that is just you being ignorant of the women who aren't.
>>92191 >Distinguish between "What women want is for positions of power to be taken by women in general" and "What any given woman wants is for herself to be in power
Those things are immaterially different. I don't care about arguing the difference between big titted trump, and merely being someone voting for big titted trump.
You are arguing the false equivalence that being a woman leads to a specific ideological stance, as if it were the be all and end all of charter traits, if anyone has an underdeveloped view of the sexes it is you.
which brings us to...
>Ranting about how all women are stupid because they don't know that is just you being ignorant of the women who aren't.
No one said that, but I guess you need to shape things to make your position seem correct. Of course there are a lot of stupid women, there are a lot of stupid men and having an unfetishized view of women means recognising that.
>>92192 >Those things are immaterially different. I don't care about arguing the difference between big titted trump, and merely being someone voting for big titted trump.
No you fucking idiot it's the difference between there being a big titted Trump and you being the big titted Trump.
>>92195 >>92196 I reckon a lot of this is down to the post box being much narrower than the displayed posts -- it looks like you're writing full paragraphs that need spacing between, but when it's displayed on a wide desktop monitor it's just one or two lines.
>>92194 >Be honest though you'd support them just because they had tits. And that is precisesly my point.
No, I wouldn't. I'm criticising your logic, not arguing the opposite.
>'if', IF, as in distiguishing a sub class
Holy shit you're stolid.
>>92206 Fuck me this is even more disappointing than the whole Keith Starmer premiership.
I saw her kneeling in her New Rock boots and tights though. Very sexy. I'm not saying I want her to literally stand on my testicles and smash them into oblivion, but I'm in the same postcode.
