I like how he says “Labour MPs put their careers on the line to stop (Old Jezza) becoming Prime Minister”, a thing that up until last year was an absolutely deranged conspiracy theory, but has somehow become an obvious fact, without anyone having been wrong about it at any point

https://twitter.com/restispolitics/status/1959661989686648957

Are MPs supposed to conspire with media outlets against their own parties on wild hate Jihads, trying as hard as they can to ensure their own side loses elections? Are there any other examples of this happening in British history, and indeed in electoral history anywhere on earth

New bullshit buzzwords just dropped archive.ph/2025.08.14-182… Wonderful to hear from the lads that the government have no ideas, never had any and were always flailing, spouting meaningless fashionable phrases and announcing stupid crackdowns. Particularly since this is exactly what we have been saying about them for twenty years at least.

Sure, but it’s also a whole system thing, and the abject shitshow that has been the period 2001-2024 really does feel quite a lot worse and more enduring than, say, some bins going unemptied and the three day week. Which we have all been told justified an elite-led revolution. Again, I suspect the core of the problem is that none of these people can ever admit they were wrong about anything except maybe being too nice and left wing, because admitting you were wrong about something opens up the idea that you might have been wrong about almost everything

I’m not going to post excerpts here but I will say a couple of things, starting with: Our learned historian friend here would be well advised to decline any interview requests from Mr Chotiner of the New Yorker he receives. I’ll also say that you couldn’t vat-grow a person less capable of accurately describing what’s happening, than Simon is. The idea that what you can see is exactly what it looks like is not only offensive but utterly unthinkable to him, blasphemous even.

These absolutely ludicrous shitehawks. Try harder, I am begging you to at least try a bit harder than this. Make it look at least somewhat credible. Marr says that Sir Keir taking tens of thousands in free suits looks bad, and proposes that MPs should have to declare all the donations they take. Nobody says But Andrew, that is the existing system, that’s exactly how we know about this. We move swiftly on.

Look, Tory members don’t think they need to change or apologise because their experience 2010-2024 was being constantly sucked off and praised as sensible, rational and statesmanlike by a national press that inexplicably turned on them in 2021. They don’t think they were wrong. It might be better now if there had been some candour about what happened: the entire political/media class decreed austerity was essential and then, when the scale of this unnecessary disaster became clear, united as one to fend off The Crazies (people who said we should fix it)

Remember that book with Labour backroom staffers bragging about how they manufactured a vexatious, years-long mass media panic about some racist Facebook posts, and how their bullshit handed victory to Boris Johnson? Wait til you see who reviews it here amp.theguardian.com/books/2024/sep… Absolutely incredible stuff there, proper Patrick Bateman losing it at the end of the book, confessing to murders, severed limbs in his fridge and so on. Just a total inability to hide it any more.

Let me translate here: having moved heaven and earth to reinstall these appalling people, entirely heedless of obviously disastrous consequences, the lads are now perturbed to see Labour have no ideas and they suck like a Dyson. But they would do the same tomorrow, if required.

There was great “intellectual vigour” in the nineties because parties of the left embracing neoliberalism then cajoling, shitehousing and excluding their one-time supporters was a major task requiring industrial quantities of professional bullshit. The results are all around us.

The movie In The Loop ends with the minister, having played along with the horrible war scam all along, announcing he’s resigning. Tucker immediately fires him over a trivial constituency sub-plot then says he’ll tell the hacks to burn him alive if he doesn’t keep his mouth shut. I raise this because that’s exactly what’s playing out today: a once-useful jackass who has long outstayed his welcome, now being ceremonially burned to protect the good name of the firm, which will survive and endure by pretending he was never their creature at all.

I really would like to hear more from Marr about what he means about the SNP being “purged by law”; what form the “pushback by the police” is taking and whether he feels it’s appropriate for “the system pushing back” in this manner. We have joked in the past about how a certain kind of Sensible Moderate has nothing but screeching and appealing to the ref, but even I am a bit stunned to see open celebration at the cops “pushing back” against their over-mighty elected representatives by searching their houses.

Helps to understand the proposition “Voting for the BNP doesn’t make you racist” has been Sensible Moderate common sense for almost 20 years, and “Voting for the BNP does not make you racist but supporting the Labour left is extreme racism that must be destroyed” for at least 5.

https://twitter.com/jrc1921/status/1668997232111042562

When I say these things are “common sense” I mean they are simply accepted as obviously true, to the point where pointing out that they are plainly fucking deranged would mark you out as a troublemaker and a weirdo.

Again, I notice that the target of Margaret’s displeasure is a) weird internet racists and b) internet randoms pissed off that she went on ITV News and compared her own party to the Third Reich because she got a letter of complaint for shouting at her boss.

https://twitter.com/thesinankose/status/1668993601416593410

This website is rammed full with all kinds of incredibly nasty and bizarre people who could be anyone, anywhere, and it always seemed very dubious indeed to me, to be dropping a tactical nuke on your own party for the press because at-Wallopers4Jezza called you a knob-jockey.

I again note that it is *extremely* fucking weird that the national equality body intervened against the two largest opposition parties in deeply suspect circumstances, then got into a public fight about their senior managers’ bigotry with staff, all of it roared on by the press.

https://twitter.com/flying_rodent/status/1668975660721664001

It IMO does not get more suspect than the equality body sticking its nose into a devolved administration’s legislation with weird vexatious complaints that are then endorsed and enforced by the government, then attacking its own staff as lying bastards to the press.

Sure Andrew, it fucking *has to* show democracy working because if it doesn’t - if it instead looks like some extremely weird shit has now been going on for a very long time, and you lot have very enthusiastically cheered it on - then that raises some pretty unpleasant questions. Again, three of the 2019 election leaders being ejected from politics in deeply bizarre circumstances while the two main parties are led by odd little men that nobody appears to actually like, who were elected via a very fishy process, does not shout “democracy is working” to me.

All true but they do believe they have created freedom: freedom to choose products, services, holidays, cars and so on. That most have little of it while a very few have special Freedom-Plus is simply outside their remit, and not for politics to consider. stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_… And they believe they’re delivering great Freedoms From: maybe not freedom from poverty or low-quality lives or ill-health, but freedom from things the themselves don’t like or think you hate: chavvy teens, greenie protestors, noisy drunks and so on. This is the great work.

I’d say the very bare minimum you should demand from politicians is that a) they don’t go out of their way to repeatedly insult and denigrate you and your views and b) they make at least some effort to deliver something their supporters want and not LOL Fuck You over and over As I’ve said before, I am never going to vote for anyone whose core, repeatedly stated position is that I am scum who must be ruthlessly excluded, but even if they weren’t doing that I wouldn’t reward them for delivering little except stuff I absolutely detest.

Well, what if they are absolutely choking to win, entirely bent upon it, *but also* want to do it in the most spirit-crushing PFI-and-crackdowns manner they can, believing this will forever crush any hope that things could be better than the way they are now. If they saw our present moment not as a terrible crisis showing the assumptions of forty years had been terribly, disastrously wrong, but as a golden opportunity to seize their rightful place as the party of the Thatcherite consensus, then they would behave exactly like this.

It’d be wise here to offer an explanation of why the lion Johnson was the embodiment of Britain’s Brexit will and the man to unite the nation just a few years ago, but a hated and reviled imbecile now. If the hacks don’t, other people will have more exciting explanations. I’m being serious when I say it’d be handy to have a bit of a push on even something as feeble as a few of the lads admitting they fucked up under pressure, because they were so mad keen to fend off the Islamo-communist terror of old Jezza and his plans for genocidal broadband.

Listened to the first two episodes of this and the top-line summary is: the far right are using Covid conspiracies as a vector to derange the brain of your auntie Janice, with a side order of “look at this fucked up far right newspaper we found”. Stuff big smart brains like us have been talking about for years On Here basically, minus the part where slicker versions of the same shit is in the daily papers. But it is helpful to have someone like the Beeb investigating to get the precise style and figures involved…

Does it feel better lads. Does it feel like things are great again and a bright new dawn is right around the corner. Text is here archive.fo/c0uYf May come back to this later because, Oof.

The Coyle example shows it’s basically impossible to get any of these awful people into any kind of serious trouble, if you wanted to. At this point, all there is to remember what has happened and say it, so it isn’t entirely swept away forever on a grim tide of media horseshit. If you’ve got senior Labour right figures working out how to not expel a crazed racist because that might impact on someone within the Circle Of Trust, *in their own words*, and nobody acknowledges it or gives a fuck: you just have to admit the whole thing is bollocks and shrug.