Alasdair

Worth remembering Macron refused to appoint a moderate left candidate and instead did a dirty deal with fascists to appoint Barnier last year.

Possibly the most Scotland way to win 3-1. We were rubbish, extremely stressful finish and Lyndon Dykes doing something mad at the end.

Ernst Thälmann’s wife is going to have a thing or two to say about this.

The wording is clumsy, but the US being able to spin up a huge manufacturing economy is one of the main reasons the Allies (east and west) won WWII. The SU and Britain would’ve had a very very hard time of it without US industry.

Yet again I am pointing out, you don’t “fight Reform’s rhetoric with everything we have” by…agreeing with them.

Nonsense. What hurts Labour is saying Reform are racist while agreeing with Reform’s points and aping their policies.

If Reform are racist for arguing it’s too easy to get ILR, why announce a policy to make it harder to get ILR? If Reform are racist for claiming Asylum seekers misuse human rights law, why say you’ll “look again” at human rights law? Actions have to match words or it’s not going to work.

Hasn’t he in that speech already rather contradict his is Home Secretary’s latest policy announcement from all of a day ago that essentially agrees with Reform that ILR is somehow too easy and needs reform?

I mean, you probably already have? Significant parts of most developers already involve LLM-generated code, and AI generated assets aren’t uncommon in games development already. It won’t do all that Trump and the Saudis hope for, but it’s here already…

Didn’t his Home Secretary just agree with Reform that Indefinite Leave to Remain was too easy to get and plans to make it harder to get?

What does that mean, though? So far “everything we have” seems to mean agreeing with Reform that Indefinite Leave to Remain should be harder to get, refusing to make tough decisions on raising public spending, and banging on about immigration constantly. It’s all just empty words, isn’t it?

Starmer making a shouty speech about Reform being racist is all well and good, but then why is his government enacting Reform-like policies? The clearly haven’t realised that the more they agree with Reform, the more salient they make Reform’s agenda and the worse it gets for them.

Rather suspect that arresting people for expressing support for historic paramilitary organisations might have some fairly serious repercussions for civil peace in the north of Ireland.

Cynics might also note that Theresa May was in some political trouble in March 2019, and giving the press something new to hit Jeremy Corbyn with might have been hoped to distract a bit from the government’s woes. I can’t find a specific trigger in the spring of 2019 at any rate.

Amazing how little talk of a leadership challenge there is within Labour, given Starmer is the least popular PM in half a century.

Saw a quote from an academic the other day “people are voting like they already had proportional representation”. Which strikes me as true, and a major problem.

The Jeremy Corbyn phenomenon was great because of what it represented as a movement, not because the man was in any way special. We sang “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” because it was catchier than “Oh a politics of social justice and equality and maybe a bit less capitalism”.

The whole Your Party thing reminds me again that the world might be very different if it had been John McDonnell’s “turn” to be the left’s candidate for Labour leader in 2015.

What’s Britain’s next major infrastructure project? Crossrail is a marvel, HS2 will likely end up a stunted rump of what could have been. Strikes me no government will be brave enough to invest like that again for a long time…

Those people are wrong, and things change - they changed before, they’ll change again. Immigration is a small part of that - and not a bad one. Without it, you wouldn’t have food and cultures I’m sure you enjoy (because the vast majority of people in Canada, the UK and elsewhere do enjoy them).

Thats a crisis caused by capitalism, not immigration. There’s enough for everyone in Canada, and the world. The rich are hoarding wealth and assets, not immigrants.

If they tried that here in Berlin, there’d essentially be a low-level civil war in that district for a day. Fascists need opposing on the streets, especially when they’re not opposed sufficiently in parliaments.

I lived in Whitechapel 12 years ago when Tommy Robinson and his fascists tried to march through there. They were 500, we were 5000.

Deeply, deeply concerned that 100,000 fascists marched essentially unopposed in London today.

And frankly straightforward prosecution. A lot of what he said is clearly Volksverhetzung.

German prosecutors - failing to prosecute war criminals since 1949.

A propos of nothing, Brumaire was genuinely one of the only good bits of Ridley Scott’s Napoleon film.

Nothing quite like a Domino’s when you’ve had a hard Bronze Age.

Yvette Cooper’s done such a good job repressing peaceful protest at home, she now gets to become an accessory to genocide abroad.

The Labour right finds nothing, nothing more important than stamping out anyone in the party suspected of leftism. Hence Rayner’s defenestration.

Fun fact - the DoD was never called the War Department (that was what is now the Department of the Army). This is like Britain imagining its black passports were blue. Administrative nostalgia for things that never were.