The Josh Simons story isn't just about one minister commissioning smears on journalists. It's about a toxic political culture that was built to destroy Corbyn — and then walked straight into government.
My piece for @tribunemagazine 🧵 1/4 For years, Labour Together operated as an internal machine: donor-funded, factional, and ruthless.

Smears, briefings, disinformation — all justified as necessary to “save the party”.

But once you normalise that kind of politics, it doesn’t just switch off when you win.
🧵2/4

On #VotingTactically - a Tale of Five Constituencies, where the #RemainAlliance between the Lib Dems, Plaid, and the Greens @unitetoremain is going to make a Tory government and Johnson's hard Brexit *more* likely rather than less likely. #GE19 #GE2019 (1) #Stroud: a Lab-Con marginal held by @DavidEDrew for Labour. The Lib Dems are standing down for @MollyMEP (@TheGreenParty), BUT if you want to stop the Tories and their hard Brexit in Stroud, the only reasonable option is to vote for @UKLabour. Any other vote helps the Tories.

On the newly-renationalized (✊😊💯👍!) East Coast rail, heading home to York after a very stimulating day at the @UKLabour #StateOfTheEconomy conference, it seemed like a good moment to reflect on this week's @TheEconomist piece on 'Corbynomics' (THREAD)
economist.com/britain/2018/0… The first thing to say is that @duncanrobinson & @econcallum are to be congratulated on a serious piece of analysis, which avoids the parade of dismal, lazy clichés that we see in so many other publications. Serious political journalism shouldn't be so rare, but it's good to see!

Here's a THREAD on the #USS Trustees, powerful individuals whose role has been insufficiently examined, and who have been operating without the full benefits of public scrutiny.

#USSstrikes #USSstrike #WeAreTheUniversity #StrikeForUSS #DemocratiseUSS #DemocratizeUSS

👇👇👇 As the #USS dispute goes on, it's clearer than ever that the institutions that govern our pensions have been failing us in multiple ways. They are secretive, non-transparent, marked by conflicts of interest and revolving doors. We need to open up and #DemocratizeUSS.

This looks like good news from @TPRgovuk, opening the door to a #USS deal on the basis of the Sept 2017 valuation involved in the initial @UCU recovery plan, if only the remaining hold-out VCs will accept this. 1/x

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But we should in any case beware one kind of mistake which comes from treating @TPRgovuk as some unmovable exogenous constraint on a #USS deal. (1) The #tPR view itself is in part a function of VC’s avowed positions on risk levels. 2/x

The #USSstrike has got many people thinking for the first time about pension governance, and about the agenda for overhauling the pension system that the left is going to have to pursue in the years ahead. Here's a thread with some useful reading.

#USS #StrikeforUSS #USSstrikes Great post by @ewanmcg on @LSEpoliticsblog on the context of the #USS strike, issues in #USS governance, and the rent-extraction of financial intermediaries.

blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpol…