Yes, Kensington. It’s not all billionaires.
I already feel a twinge of election fatigue.
Given that both the Tories and Labour are pro-Brexit, is there anything to stop May from forming the UK’s strongest majority in the history of the UK? Forming a strong pro-Brexit party was, after all, the goal. I think she might just have forgotten that the “other” party wasn’t really running against her on the topic of the day (which would be one cause of this result).
Believe me, I’m with you. The big, big thing though is that proper socialism got a foot in the door on Thursday - indeed, in London, it got 55% of the total vote - so the grassroots are energised and excited, and young. God, the youngsters are up for it.
On that, it’s difficult to not draw parallels with the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Reasons to Love the BBC, #xxx in an occasional series - Newsnight is a weekday political discussion show. Nice little 2-minute opening montage:
So the DUP don’t believe in global warming, oppose legal abortion and gay marriage, want to bring back the death penalty and were founded by a fundamentalist preacher whose son is now one of their MPs. It’s like being in Alabama or something, having this maniacs running the country.
However they’re for a soft Brexit and want to keep the triple lock and so on, making them rather less radical than the Conservative party.
Also, it’s now being claimed by Sinn Fein that the DUP coalition is breaching the Good Friday Agreement.
And the Stormont government has collapsed in Northern Ireland.
And a week before the election the leader of the DUP was meeting with the leader of the UDA terror group less than 48 hours after they publicly gunned a man down in front of his three year old child.
Meaning the terrorists have, quite unexpectedly, won.
Username/post combo!
… and they have 10 newly-minted, democratically elected MPs.
So maybe let the police get on with their business, social media memes with theirs, and perhaps we can continue to try and have a discussion.
A slight article of amusement by the sorry old New Statesman * anti-corbynite hitherto as it was **:
The result is objectively hilarious - but we should still be angry at the Tories for screwing things up, again
*Then again, set against all that, there was the moment around 2am where Nigel Farage – like a soldier who’s failed to adjust to life on civvy street, and wishes he could go back to the war – said the magic words, “We may be looking down the barrel of a second referendum.” This was obviously music to my Remainiac ears, but it did rather make him sound like he’s less concerned about delivering Brexit than he is about appearing on TV to talk about it a lot.
*
…
**The party has form on this. David Cameron recently defended his decision to hold last year’s referendum on the grounds that EU membership had been “poisoning British politics for years”. But it hadn’t: polls consistently showed that most people didn’t care. What he actually meant was that it had been poisoning the Conservative Party for years, and sorting that out doesn’t seem to me like a good enough reason to drive the country off the White cliffs of Dover.
**
We are led by preening popinjays.
- Co-founded with others of the same ilk by Arnold Bennett. Since less incisive.
** The website has a vile condition of lazy-load: jumping to the next article without mercy.
So anyway; I know you’ve all been sleepless waiting for the new Sankey, wait no more! Everything you’ll ever need to understand pre/post Brxit and a country trying to expel the giantest turd it’s ever likely to pass:
There is no fundamental reason that conservative parties need to be bigoted. It is just that every society has divisions which can be exploited to divide people to prevent them from uniting into an opposition. Once society has overcome this or that division, conservatives will abandon that division and seek another. Today there is gold to be mined in Islamophobia. Anti-communism, of course, is always available.
Based on this tweet of a May press conference, I have doubts about this coalition with the DUP. They seem a bit… retrograde.
Strong and stable. Well, apart from stairs.
Lol.
“The Daleks would like to distance themselves from the extreme views held by DUP.”
“BREAK: DUP has NOT yet reached any agreement with the Tories. Sky sources: Downing Street issued the wrong statement in error.”
I bet that guy with the beard was in charge of releasing statements.
I wonder if that’s the Tories being overeager or the DUP laying a trap to make the Tories look weak, somewhat like Trump doing his pulling handshake.
If the former, it’s in a long line of May overcompensating for insecurity (“Strong and stable”). She seems like someone who’s always very high strung and hardworking about executing her parents/pastors/teachers/bosses’ orders but has a very difficult time being PM because as PM, depending on how you see it, you either have no one telling you what to do or you have a multitude of contradictory voices telling you what to do.
What a shambles. It’s starting to look like Dunkirk, without the small boats.
An uplifting piece (if you voted Labour) with several good points and anecdotes of Thursday. It’s stiking me that not only did Labour get the synergy of manifesto, personalities and strategy correct but they did the strategy part for the first time in UK politics. One of the points well made:
dp
The pro-Labour spinning is incredible. A casual observer would think that Corbyn won. Of course, he lost by a huge margin in seats.
Sure, the UK media has always been so pro-Corbyn …
This collective Tory self-flagellation is a joy to observe. What can they do, they don’t have a leadership candidate and they can’t afford a second election (yet!) - YouGov have Labour at 45% this morning.