Inverted

Dissidents are purged from the party, their former colleagues are pushed to denounce them, and there reigns a pervasive atmosphere of dread about speaking simple, observable facts. For all the hysteria of Corbynism being Stalinism - it has taken a return to "sensible" politics for a an actual Stalinist mentality to creep into a party which was previously rife with dissent and debate at all levels. There's a valuable lesson to be learned from Biden and Starmer. The centre might be ideologically at sea but their cunning and ruthlessness are not gone. They know that the left cares more about beating the right wing than they do. They can count on the left falling into line when the going gets tough, even when they themselves do not reciprocate. So the next time the left ever gets within an inch of power in any developed country, they will have to be twice as ruthless if they want to make the final step into office. It turns out there are people who would rather sink the ship than let someone else steer it, and if you want to survive you need to throw them overboard at the first opportunity.

They would have done it earlier if not for Labour asking for it first. They were willing to sacrifice lives to try and score a political win. The moment Labour advocated it, it went from being the most obvious solution to an urgent situation, to being a last resort, because it meant admitting Labour were right. And they would rather let a sizeable number of people die before they would ever admit that. It is entirely lost on people just how callous and actually, outright murderous the modern Tory party is. It's not just laziness or ignorance.

I still can't wrap my head around it. A finding of an institutional issue arises, and one man is made the subject of the entire conversation. On what grounds? That he did not intervene sufficiently in the process. What was the basis of the institutional issue? Members intervening in disciplinary processes. So one man is blamed for not partaking in the kind of behaviour which created the issue. Meanwhile, the people who did intervene and tamper with the disciplinary process are literally rewarded, with court settlements - cash in hand - by the party. I can accept that the party may be doing the politically prudent thing. There's no point being stubborn or naive about this. But I cannot accept that on the leadership level this is being driven out of good faith or out of any sincere concern for Jewish people in Britain. The current leadership won its place, fair and square. And it did that with a clear idea, of pandering to the current petty prejudices and hysteria of large parts of the population, and pivoting away from a generational pro-left swell of political engagement. From a political perspective, this is not entirely illogical. All I would say is that it better work, because if we have another disaster 5 years down the line, and we are looking at Tory government until 2030, it's going to take a hell of a lot more than a Jeremy Corbyn to get the next generation excited about electoral politics. They are not going to be as civil, or as patient.

This government is truly insane.

They've obviously not figured out the American wisdom that if you don't test, you don't get new cases.

Just started reading this.

The government strolled out triumphantly with this 3-Tier shite as a way of clearing up the mishmash of different regional measures. And within barely a day it has collapsed back into the same thing as before, but now with more official-sounding terminology.

The government is sending infected test kits to people all the while blaming them for the virus spreading.

And when the government has decided it has run out of cash after throwing a few more dozens of billions to their pals in non-tendered contracts, watch them go back on their word and set to work on finally dismantling public healthcare, too. Britain's population is eventually going to get the brutal, dismal life it has been voting for so desperately for decades. At this rate we will become another America, if not worse. And people are going to be dumbfounded as to how it happened - we are like one big stupid frog sitting in a pot of water, slowly coming to the boil.

Love that private sector efficiency. Why invest a little more in your existing publicly-owned national health infrastructure, when you can siphon off tens of millions of pounds to your chums who don't even know how to use Excel?

My local MP, ladies and gentlemen. Also known from a previous campaign where she didn't know what "fiscal" meant. She's thick as shit in the neck of a bottle. I can say with some pride that I didn't vote for her - even if I was an SNP supporter I think I would struggle to vote for her.

I love being able to watch the death throes of a degenerate civilisation live on TV.

A whole generation of young people are getting a very brutal crash course in how pervasive rentierism and the commodification of public services has become in Britian.

"Nobody is making any good arguments about Britons not loving freedom" The government: How about we make ANOTHER border INSIDE England as well as strengthening the one between us and France?

I don't think it's completely wrong to play the game to a degree and take into account the current prejudices of the population. But I think the Labour party lacks the vision (and the resources) to totally change the conversation like the Tories do. 5 years ago the EU was a side issue, and since then it has been the dominating issue of our politics, and almost half of the country who previously didn't care, are now frantically certain that we must leave. They're so certain that they will forgive failing in all other areas they previously cared most about - crime, jobs, healthcare etc. Yes, people do have values and biases which you need to be mindful of in your messaging. But, given the right kinds of suggestion, delivered often enough, you can reorder their priorities in basically any way you like. The Tories know that the electorate is putty, and Labour tiptoes around them like they're concrete.

How can one meaningfully engage with the proposition that Britons are more freedom loving? It's a meaningless piece of bluster - to engage with it, even if you could somehow empirically refute it, would be to show it respect that it doesn't merit. And in any case, the electorate does not respond to measured responses and to argument. They respond to visceral feeling and to emotional responses. By this I mostly mean fear and hate. Labour's failing in the last ten years has been an obsession with constructive discussion and fact-based policy-making, and a marked failure to stoke anything like the hate which their opposition merits - and which their opposition stokes towards them. Yes you've got your young people online who hate Tories - that's small fry. The Tories have people out in the real world in such a frenzy that elderly Labour activists are attacked in the street and that its politicians are targets for assassination. Can you imagine hating and fearing a political party so much that you see their badge and you feel compelled to punch an elderly man on your doorstep? I hate the Tory party to a frightening degree, and even I can't imagine that. That is the kind of feeling that the Tories have managed to create. This is an enormous political achievement on their part, and you simply cannot achieve it by moderation or by appealing to people's intellect.

Labour having, rightly or wrongly, decided it was tired of a leader who had an opinion on everything, has decided to go for a leader who has no opinions at all. He also fails to realise that pandering to the right only makes sense if the other guys are pandering to the left. If the pandering only ever goes one way then we end up an insular, mollycoddled, smooth-brained electorate that votes us into the types of disasters like we've experienced for the last decade.

It's also bold to assume that anyone here is particularly attached to Starmer. I think Starmer has handled the crisis badly as well. The party is continually shitting itself over what the focus groups will think and thus it helped the Tories publically browbeat the teachers into submission, not to mention all this meaningless "patriotic" blue labour messaging it is pivoting to. And for all their spineless toing-and-froing, they still cant get a lead in the polls over the most blatantly corrupt and incompetent government in modern British history. There you go. Balance. I personally just prefer to focus most of my scrutiny on the people that control all the levers of power. I know that's an odd concept in this country, but I think it's valid nonetheless.

Lol, the British are the most servile and impressionable of the major nations in Europe. We have sheepishly sat back for years and took every kind of diplomatic disaster, drop in living standards and services, and political scandal thrown at us. If you dropped the French into our situation they would have half of Whitehall ablaze in days, and people hanging from lampposts within weeks. If you dropped the Germans in they would probably sit down for a month and come out with out a range of economic, political and diplomatic solutions which your typical Etonian would spend a lifetime trying to work out. The idea that the British are especially free spirited or free thinking in any sense is objective nonsense.

It's amazing how little he seems to have changed. You can find people from every stage of his career, in every facet of his life, who have come to the exact same conclusions about him. Compare the letter from Eton, to Max Hastings opinion of him, from being his superior at the Daily Telegraph decades later.

In The Mood For Love (2000) I have no idea what Hong Kong looked like in the 1960s but I'm willing to take this film's word for it. Such a visually beautiful movie, it just feels like so much passion and love went into making it, filming it, and finding the perfect actors for the roles. Even though I lost the thread of the plot a couple of times, it was so pleasant on the eye that you could watch it without any idea what's going and still enjoy it. 9/10

Just finished these two, currently close to finishing this off: Not usually big on poetry but I'm really enjoying Milton. There are lots of lines that really stick with you, even after just one or two reads. "The mind is its own realm, and in itself Can make a heav'n of hell, and a hell of heav'n" (Think that's how it goes, at least)

It's fucking mental. All of the UK governments are guilty of the same flaw of being shit scared of upsetting people, all the while introducing half-measures that blatantly insult people's common sense. Yes, people don't want restrictions on their life, but they'll much more readily accept being told "don't meet up with your mates indoors", than "don't meet them at home, but go see them in the pub so long as you pretend you all live within 3 households for our sham track-and-trace system". The mind grasps absolutes a lot more easily than half measures. And I can say for sure that a lot of people I know who were previously very observant, even paranoid, about the measures, have stopped taking them seriously for that reason.

Officially one week done as a trainee solicitor. My brain has felt pretty fried at times but overall my colleagues are pretty supportive and patient. I'm also going to be working from home mostly so I don't always need to get up at 5am for the Glasgow-Edinburgh commute.