The virus is out of control. Countries are closing their borders with the UK. 18m Brits have Xmas cancelled. No Deal Brexit chaos is 10 days away. Whose job was it to avoid this? Your Conservative MP ... 1/
2/ ... is there a political aspect to the border closures? You bet. Johnson squandered all goodwill with Europe with "gunboats in the channel" threat ... but it's just par for the course, as with the PPE scramble ... governments will protect the ppl who elect them
3/ Also to blame... BXP numbskulls. Destroying cross border solidarity in Europe has been their life's work. They wanted "control" ... now we know the consequences...
4/ Putting an incompetent narcissist in charge of the country has consequences. Ditto purging a major party of competent, prudent politicians. Ditto a propaganda press and courtier broadcast journalism... today's payback time for all of it...
5/ The values that will get us thru this are the ones the Tory xenophobes despise: solidarity, openness, calmness, diplomacy, professionalism, expertise... thank **** Cummings is nowhere near Downing St today! Thank God for Nye Bevan's NHS!
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1/ Liz Truss speech signals Tories planning a sustained onslaught on anti-racism, feminism, LGBTQ+ ... but I'm not going to resist it by defending Foucault. Postmodernism was a dead end for the left, as I said in #ClearBrightFuture...
2/ Truss claims modern anti-racism/feminism and therefore socialism has "no space for evidence" as truth and morality are relative... she's wrong because we didn't need pomo to be anti-racists... here's Lewisham 1977...
3/ I entered left politics in 1976 and I can tell you that the dominant rationale for feminism, black liberation politics and gay liberation had nothing to do with pomo... it was the Marxism of CLR James, Fanon, Rowbotham, Thompson, Berger...
The genius of Le Carré's writing came from the tightly compressed class world he depicted: almost no proletariat (yet the entire ruling class in the 70s feared us); almost no sex; but the post-war middle class shown in fine-grained layers... 1/
2/ So as in private school staff room, every character framed within strict limits... and all characters defined by actions and voice... hence two great actors come up with very similar landing places, decades apart... (Rikki Tarr)
3/ As in Balzac and Dickens, all the characters are recognisable types - that's why we should drop the "spy novel" label - from a specific class formation and historical period, and yet become so real they never leave you...
It's Brexit revisionism day... 1/ I pushed for Labour to adopt a Norway style deal a) after the Referendum and b) again from July 2018. Leadership said no both times... then in early 2019 came the research showing Labour was losing more Remain votes than Leave votes...
2/ Theresa May's deal was an *attack on the working class*. No Labour MP or trade union leader could have supported it. The options were Norway or Johnson's hard Brexit...
3/ For as long as possible many on Labour left held out for a Norway solution: single market, free movement - and there were signs the SNP would have gone for it...
"Lee Cain - a Marxist Analysis" 1/ Vote Leave won, took over the Tory party and govt and then a) Covid b) Biden cancelled their essential project ... plus...
2/ Johnson is not stupid but lazy and has a short attention span ... he can't lead and has no vision so outsources everything to cronies ... but the "thin deal" creates a fork in the road ... meanwhile ...
3/ Everyone in govt knows that when the public reckoning happens over the late lockdown, Johnson and Cummings are toast... but there's a deeper problem of fiscal strategy ...
Boris Johnson's presser was a shameful moment in British governance. Under-prepared, insincere, apologetic - he revealed the NHS is about 6 weeks from collapse, thanks to his refusal to lock down in early October 1/
2/ I've seen a prime minister rattled - Brown and Darling during the second RBS bailout in 2008 - but even they were in control of the timetable. Johnson has lost control of this crisis...
3/ With the entire machinery of government of what is still the 5th most powerful country in the world, Johnson could not stage a coherent briefing to the British people, nor even get the Powerpoint to fit on screen...
The Great Reset is a half-assed but well intentioned idea by the WEF to design a sustainable version of neoliberalism-lite. But the Covid conspiraloons think it's an actual "global elite plan to take over the world" because the graphic looks like a Freemasonic eye 1/
2/ Here's the Mises Institute and a Vatican conspiraloon spreading the same basic idea... it maps perfectly onto QAnon and plays on the ultimate fear of the disoriented neoliberal self: that society exists after all...
3/ It's totally consistent with Arendt's observation that, before they take power the authoritarian right have to conjure up "a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself" newstatesman.com/world/2020/09/…