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James B Profile picture
James B
@piercepenniless
Everything for everyone・nothing human is alien to me・contributing editor @LRB・co-founded @novaramedia・radical homo
Mar 27 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Perversely helpful. Leave aside the absurdity of a columnist pronouncing on 'making no difference', funny though it is. Anyone with a basic grasp of Labour politics knows that people like Owen are about as disposed to leave the party as they are to discover their inner Hayekian. Imagining otherwise reveals that you don't really know anything about Jones himself, nor the kind of people who broadly share his politics. It is a substantive decision, and should be thought about seriously – if, that is, you have the ability to think seriously.
Mar 3, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
A puzzle. In his press round designed to ease his way back in to Labour, Neil Coyle takes full responsibility for his racist comments. But in his appeal to the independent panel, he (or whoever acted for him) complains that the witnesses were not asked if they had misheard. That seems an odd way to me to take full responsibility, but perhaps those words have a special meaning in this context.
Feb 18, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
So, I wondered where this quotation – which does not sound like Gramsci, and is not what he argued for –came from. The thread, and the article, do not evince any familiarity with (or, frankly, cursory reading of) Gramsci's work. Probably its immediate source is culture war grifter and all-round crank Chris Rufo, who uses it here: city-journal.org/laying-siege-t…
Jan 24, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
So much of British political discourse involves politely avoiding the obvious fact that the Conservative Party is a vehicle for the organisation, efficient running and generation of new forms of corruption. 'We' rediscover this fact every few decades. It is not its sole function, but sits alongside the preservation of class privilege and retention of passive income streams through rent or inherited portfolios as a primary aim. Nor is it always illegal, as their duration in power has retained or created plenty of avenues.
Dec 18, 2022 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
This @_ryanruby_ piece on The Waste Land's centenary is superb, & in its range, variety, attention and bridging of then and now also an implicit defence of literary criticism. (Thanks to @chrisbrooke for drawing my attention to it.) Some thoughts…poetryfoundation.org/articles/15931… I appreciate Ruby’s awareness of the irony of a centenary essay on a pile of fragments which has become a towering, pristine monument, & especially the weirdness of historical-critical attention to writers whose watchword was ‘make it new’.
Jul 6, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
I have written for the @LRB on Johnson's fall, why it's curious that the Pincher affair is the proximate cause, the clean hands routine from those vying to replace him – & whether those still in cabinet will try a 'Johnsonism without Johnson' routine.

lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/july… On the face of it, it isn't obvious that the Pincher affair would be the thing to collapse Boris Johnson's government, given its long record of serious scandals. So why has it?

lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/july…
Oct 20, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is one of the things I really struggle with when listening to world leaders pledge their sincerity about climate change. At least Trump was honest about coal. The first qualification for seriousness about climate change is to keep fossil fuels in the ground. That's it. People do pick up on this hypocrisy: the gap between rhetoric and action is tremendously politically dangerous, not least because it offers a talking point for the far right. It also has wider debilitating effects.
Oct 18, 2021 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Hadn't kept up to date with this, but predictable that 'sovereign citizen' legal conspiracy theory (aka 'freeman on the land' claptrap in its UK guise) reared its head among defendants in the Capitol riot trials. This one is particularly free from contact with reality. The people pushing this stuff in the UK – presented as legal cheat codes or similar – are often very predatory, and the people they exploit can end up in a great deal of trouble. But on some occasions it would take a heart of stone not to laugh.
Dec 9, 2020 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
A decade ago I was standing in a freezing parliament square, not long before the police swept it and - stupidly and very dangerously - crushed us all in a kettle on Westminster bridge. With ten years to reflect, I can say only this: we were absolutely right. While I was standing on that bridge, I realised that my hat was stuck to my hair, matted with blood. I still have the half-moon scar from the police baton on the back of my head. From horse charges to baton strikes, the policing that day was violent and vengeful.
Oct 30, 2020 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
It might well be that a new national lockdown is needed: given the abject failure of government to coordinate and communicate its response & its myopic policy instinct that's not a surprise. But a winter lockdown requires more serious economic & policy support than spring/summer. So serious a policy measure should not be dribbled out of Downing Street to its favoured press mouthpieces. It needs to be clearly presented in parliament and then to the media in a forum which allows for questioning.
Oct 23, 2020 • 41 tweets • 8 min read
Today's show - an in-depth conversation with the brilliant @harikunzru - is now online. Come for the deranged opening, stay for an odyssey through violence, surveillance, and breakdown -- both personal and political. And some bonus political speculation in this podcast edition. I loved the novel: will be tweeting some more thoughts on it later. In the meanwhile, go listen!
Sep 3, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It was such a joy to do this interview with David: I think you can hear that. We'd not seen each other in a while, & after the recording we sat in the old NM office just talking - about ideas, politics, states, as much as about mutual friends - suddenly 2.5 hours had zipped by. I've a lot to say about David, but I think this will do: he was an optimist, who believed in human emancipation, and who took political positions because he believed in them, and tried to live by them. He neither dogmatised them nor resiled from them if they were unpopular.
Jul 29, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
One day @tnewtondunn will reveal exactly how connecting Jacques Derrida and Stanley Fish to Jeremy Corbyn in a lunatic conspiracy theory sourced from far-right bloggers (& riddled with far right conspiracy thinking) was the copper-bottomed scoop he maintains it to be. The parenthetical point is important btw: it's not just that some of the datapoints were sourced from Nazis, but that the kind of connections made – sinister literary theorists in a web of evil with Channel 4 journalists & paramilitary organisations – are conspiracy theories.
Jun 30, 2020 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
I didn’t say this yesterday, because fulminating on Twitter is exactly the opposite of cathartic, but since it rankles: late last week we saw news that two police officers had been arrested for taking and sharing selfies next to the bodies of two murdered black women, sisters. Yesterday, Keir Starmer went on TV & bounced back a question about defunding police by stressing his record as a prosecutor, ‘bringing thousands to court’, & his closeness to police. There wasn’t any indication there might be *anything* wrong with the police or CJS, as he saw it.
Jun 12, 2020 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Bad news. The fast-track, 24 hour sittings in 2011 led to wide-ranging and profound miscarriages of justice, young people in court with no or wildly inadequate representation - many of which were never rectified. Can't see how it will be any better in period of Covid-19 either. (I wrote at the time - I think rightly - that the then DPP's rather preening and stunt-like 4 a.m. visit to Highbury Mags & praise for the 24 hour sittings was shameful, given the obvious sentencing risks, near abandonment of due process & effective suspension of the Bail Act.)
Nov 25, 2019 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
LOL, hastily and silently deleted after that. Still, never let unfamiliarity with the most crashingly basic parts of intellectual history keep you from making a snide remark about the left. Truly, the spirit of @ProfBritPol_PhD lives. @ProfBritPol_PhD Actually, this has really irritated me. That Gramscian formulation is a good lesson for anyone engaged in political thought and struggle, among other things about the difficulties and importance of charting the scope of political action in incredibly dark situations.
Oct 8, 2019 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
As was the case last time they took action, I both admire Extinction Rebellion's activism and have qualms about its strategic nous. I wrote about it here last time: lrb.co.uk/blog/2019/apri… As a finicky pointy-head I have my reservations about their demands – is 'telling the truth' sufficient? isn't action the problem? – but the one that really sets my teeth on edge is the claim it's 'beyond politics' or 'beyond left and right'.
May 24, 2018 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
Today is the 30th anniversary of the enactment of section 28, a law banning the promotion of homosexuality passed by Thatcher’s government, which blighted my adolescence & that of many young gay people. S.28 was a nasty bit of legislative queer-bashing, but it is sometimes forgotten that its origins were in the commendable efforts of local authorities, especially those ('loony left') in London, to provide non-homophobic education materials.