Dan Hind Profile picture
Nov 29, 2019 3 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Less than two weeks to go before the GE and the Thanet South campaign is shaping up to be a classic; @RGordon_Nesbitt, a Labour socialist committed to building a vibrant local and national economy and a democratic public culture vs. a hard right, hard Brexit incumbent.
If you want to help paint another piece of the crumbling Tory South East definitively red, then come and join one or more of the daily canvassing sessions in Cliftonville, Broadstairs, Ramsgate and Sandwich. #margate #thanet
Regular high speed trains from London, bracing sea air, more Grade 2 listed doors to knock on than Bath, an inspiring manifesto, fish and chips to finish. What more do you people want?

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Dan Hind

Dan Hind Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @danhind

Jul 15
Politicians can say anything to a nodding journalist, no matter how insultingly stupid and misleading, as long as they use a mind-numbingly banal analogy from daily life to do it. Nation's credit card? Sure. Under the bonnet? Yeah, sounds about right.
A great deal of media culture consists of projecting their own inability to grasp basic concepts onto their audiences: rather than explain how parties interact with the state, which would require thought, they happily go along with framing that is simple, familiar and wrong.
Haha, the public don't care about x! (when x is something that's extremely important, that can only shore up oligarchic power in a formally democratic system when people have no idea what x is, and only have brain dead analogies to go on when they turn to the media to find out.)
Read 5 tweets
Jul 10
Labour's plans to use public-private partnerships for new infrastructure will create endless chokepoints for rent extraction for large investment funds, raising the cost of living for the rest of us, for no other reason than a reflexive desire to serve the rich. As in health ...
... if the workers and the materials exist, we can afford to do it: the means create the money and there is not reason to cede ownership of vital infrastructure. It's a political choice that the Greens, the Social Campaign Group and the rest of the left should loudly reject.
And anyone with an ounce of integrity who has railed against Conservative malfeasance and corruption should do the same. The question 'who owns Britain?' ought to be central to our politics for the next five years.
Read 8 tweets
Jul 8
Just thinking about servility in capitalism when I saw this. If you "dig under the surface" of "centrist dad" as a term of abuse, I'd say it's about having one's opinions shaped - unknowingly - so they're consistent with a relatively privileged place in the social order. Image
A "centrist dad" is a product of domination, inasmuch as he doesn't know why he believes what he believes. There are plenty of liberal capitalists (some with children!) who understand what they are, how it relates to their beliefs. But the centrist dad is made as if from outside.
If we fear the patriarch because he is a clear-eyed tyrant, we're tempted to despise the centrist dad because he doesn't know what he is, while managing to be incredibly smug about everything.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 2
A month ago I was wondering out loud why the British establishment converged on austerity after 2008 and whether it was part of a coherent class project to protect capital from a population that might have drawn dangerous conclusions from the collapse of economic orthodoxy.
While warbling about the role of the Treasury I was gently prompted by @aerondavis to read his book on the Treasury, and I did. It's well worth a look. I don't think we can yet say for sure whether the Treasury in the 2010s was as clear-eyed as it was in the 1920s.
(For one thing we won't have access to the files for 30 years, assuming nothing untoward happens. The kinds of eye-watering memoranda that Clara Mattei unearthed will be under wraps for a while yet.)
Read 5 tweets
Jun 28
We are drifting into another round of PFI boondoggles, in which energy and other essentials will generate rents for the world's laziest plutocrats. A movement for constitutional reform worth a damn would declare this illegitimate and campaign to stop it.

We *know* we need to invest heavily in renewable energy, in food security, and in all kinds of public infrastructure. There is no reason to rely on private rent seekers to finance it. To repeat, we should make it clear from the outset that any revival of PFI will be reversed.
Labour can give as much free money as it wants to its favoured partners in the private sector. But we must organise to expropriate them all at the earliest opportunity. Otherwise the shiny new economy will be a re-run of the old, and we'll all be working for the same reptiles.
Read 6 tweets
Jun 17
Interesting thread on the composition of panels on Question Time. Two points to note: 1. Lucas appeared more often than Farage because the study begins in 2014. An analysis of 2010-15 had a different result. theguardian.com/news/datablog/…
2. There's a startling absence of trade unionists among regular non-politicians, and an overwhelming preponderance of (right-wing) comment journalists. This results from the labour movement giving up its communicative assets after 1945, putting its trust impartial liberal media.
3. Because the labour movement doesn't have its own media it hasn't trained up nimble and appealing commentator/analysts of its own. This speaks to a profound degeneration of its capacity to protect its members' interests, let alone sponsor a broader social democracy.
Read 8 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(