[Boiler]

That was from a bloke who said

[Burnham] has as cavalier an approach to truth as Johnson, but without Johnson’s integrity or interest in facts.

His view of Burnham was

That a decade after he left office that one word [Stafford] still defines him is a huge drag to him; it will seriously undermine him and Labour the moment he seriously tries to get back on the national stage.

[Youngian]

McDonnell urges Labour leadership to promote Burgon and Long-Bailey

"Becky Long-Bailey was in my team and she was one of the sharpest I'd ever met," he said.

Of Richard Burgon, McDonnell said: "I think he was one of the sharpest shadow cabinet ministers that we had and he was good on his feet on the floor of the house.

"People underestimate him - a good, young lawyer, knows his stuff. I think held the government well to account." https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit ... io-7968854

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Aspiration being contradictory with equality is one of the dullest ideas around.

Indeed.

[Andy McDandy]

Equality of opportunity is such a simple concept, there's tons of evidence that it's dried up in recent years, and it beats the stereotype of the working class perpetuated by the government into a cocked hat. Both Starmer and Rayner can point to themselves as examples of it. Obvious really.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Starmer was a grammar school boy, which can be a bit awkward politics for Labour. Rayner, absolutely.

[Tubby Isaacs]

McDonnell urges Labour leadership to promote Burgon and Long-Bailey

"Becky Long-Bailey was in my team and she was one of the sharpest I'd ever met," he said.

Of Richard Burgon, McDonnell said: "I think he was one of the sharpest shadow cabinet ministers that we had and he was good on his feet on the floor of the house.

"People underestimate him - a good, young lawyer, knows his stuff. I think held the government well to account." https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/brexit ... io-7968854

That's Burgon who wanted Labour members to be able to veto Labour MPs on military action? The Baltics would have enjoyed that. So would the Tories. "Vote for us, we'll represent you even if you're not one of the tiny minority who aren't Labour members".

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Grammar school popularity.

Depends where you are. Plays well in Kent. And Sutton. (And many other places)
Depends who you are. Plays well with much of the non-party-member public.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Could Johnson revive grammar schools? May''s majority was too small to get past the sane Tories.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Doubt it. It's ideologically opposed to Academy chains. And outside of Kent, Sutton and, I believe Lincolnshire (and I'd believe anything about Lincolnshire) which are state grammar authorities they are dotted about, usually as grant-maintained schools with long histories, there doesn't seem to be much appetite.

[Boiler]

I believe Lincolnshire (and I'd believe anything about Lincolnshire)

Oi!

You have a point though.

Stamford in particular comes to mind.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Doubt it. It's ideologically opposed to Academy chains. And outside of Kent, Sutton and, I believe Lincolnshire (and I'd believe anything about Lincolnshire) which are state grammar authorities they are dotted about, usually as grant-maintained schools with long histories, there doesn't seem to be much appetite.

I wondered about academy chains before when May was going for it. Hey, Lord Carpetright, we're turning your school into a secondary modern. Amazing she got so far with it.

[Bones McCoy]

Grammar school popularity.

Depends where you are. Plays well in Kent. And Sutton. (And many other places)
Depends who you are. Plays well with much of the non-party-member public.

Until little Johnny doesn't get the eleven plus grade to get to the Grammar..

[Tubby Isaacs]

Funny that the government don't seem to be talking much about free schools and academies these days. Pandemic? Keeping Gavin Williamson off the telly? Policy not very popular?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Kate Hollern has resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in fall out from the Michael Hill accusations.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... harassment

Andrew Bridgen (yes, that one) has made a rather strong accusation.

Bridgen claimed that on 21 May 2019, he was approached by Hollern on the terrace of the House of Commons, and asked to move away from fellow MPs. He claimed she said: “Everyone is saying in the Labour party that you are having an affair with [Ms A] and if I were you I would keep away from her, because you have a wife and baby and you would not want to lose them if it got in the papers.”

Hollern agrees she spoke to him. I know nothing about her, but she'd have to be a pretty exceptional piece of work to be less trustworthy than Bridgen, What she's said here doesn't sound like the most direct denial. Very odd.

[Arrowhead]

Kate Hollern has resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in fall out from the Michael Hill accusations.

I don't think I'd ever even heard of her until just now. Glancing down the list of current Labour MP's, it's surprising how few familiar names there are at the moment.

[The Weeping Angel]

Kate Hollern has resigned from the Shadow Cabinet in fall out from the Michael Hill accusations.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/ ... harassment

Andrew Bridgen (yes, that one) has made a rather strong accusation.

Bridgen claimed that on 21 May 2019, he was approached by Hollern on the terrace of the House of Commons, and asked to move away from fellow MPs. He claimed she said: “Everyone is saying in the Labour party that you are having an affair with [Ms A] and if I were you I would keep away from her, because you have a wife and baby and you would not want to lose them if it got in the papers.”

Hollern agrees she spoke to him. I know nothing about her, but she'd have to be a pretty exceptional piece of work to be less trustworthy than Bridgen, What she's said here doesn't sound like the most direct denial. Very odd.

Oh shite.

[The Weeping Angel]

I read this piece in the NS


https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/u ... ur-succeed

The day before the 2005 election, in which Tony Blair emerged with his third, attenuated majority, Mark Fisher published a post on his blog, k-punk:

“There was a time when elections at least seemed to mean something… I admit that, emotionally and unthinkingly, I will find myself supporting the 'left' parties when the results come in tomorrow night… But only in exactly the same way that I want to see X contestant beat Y contestant in Big Brother; it really is only sentimentality to pretend that this spectacle has much consequence.”

While television was becoming more participatory, politics was increasingly becoming – as the political scientist Peter Mair noted the following year – a “spectator sport”, “part of an external world which people watch from the outside” rather than belong to and engage in. Across Western democracies, citizens were withdrawing from the political arena: turnout fell, voting became more volatile, party memberships declined. Party democracy, Mair argued, was turning into “audience democracy”.

Between 2015 and 2019, Jeremy Corbyn effected an abrupt reversal of this transformation of electoral politics into spectacle. For those, like me, swept up in the political enthusiasm Corbynism generated, audience democracy became party democracy once more. Hundreds of thousands flooded into the Labour Party, and electoral politics, in however shallow a way, became something we did rather than something we watched.

Corbynism was a rapidly assembled electoral mobilisation that lacked organisational depth. But the practical and emotional engagement the movement engendered – especially among younger age groups like mine, who came of age post-2008 and have never voted in an election that Labour has won – dispersed the aura of meaninglessness that shrouded parliamentary politics. If elections then, and for the first time, at least seemed to mean something, last week marked the return, after that fragile interlude, of their undissembled meaninglessness.

One of the refrains among commentators after Labour’s defeat in the 2019 election was that Corbyn and his supporters didn’t want to win. Their quixotic radicalism was an unforgiveable self-indulgence, a betrayal of the ordinary people whose interests they had sacrificed on the altar of ideological purity. As Jonathan Freedland chided in the Guardian the day after the 2019 vote: a political party “is not a hobby… it’s not an association for making friends… It is either a plausible vehicle for government or it is nothing.”

The notion that a party’s exclusive purpose is to win elections – and that its self-involved membership is an obstacle to doing so – is a powerful statement of a kind of common sense. It is also an indication of how far the degeneration of party democracy into trivial spectacle has advanced. Parties, Mair explained in 2006, do not just govern, they also represent and give voice. They are social institutions – traditionally embedded in a wider network of trade unions, cooperatives, churches and so on – which connect civil society to the state: they “mobilise the citizenry… articulate and aggregate interests, and translate these into public policy”.

This opposition between the electorate at large and a party’s cumbersome “base” has a kind of plausibility, especially when members are caricatured as metropolitan elites whose luxury activism is dragging the party away from the centre-ground – that coveted terrain on which every winning electoral pitch, we are told, must be based. But the dichotomy doesn’t account for the fact that a party’s expressive and governing functions are related. If its representative power diminishes, as the party renounces rather than seeks to deepen and expand its social basis in civil society, then its claim to govern will also be weakened – since it is a party’s ability to represent citizens through building a relevant presence in their everyday lives that legitimises its claim to rule on their behalf.

In recent weeks of tentative socialising, occasionally a friend whom I haven’t seen since before the 2019 election will ask me what I make of Starmer. I find myself virtually speechless – or, rather, thoughtless. One could call it disillusionment or disaffection, but both of these imply some inner wrench, whereas the blankness I experience is entirely without emotional charge. That I don’t know if my peers feel (or rather don’t feel) similarly – we don’t talk about politics any more – suggests to me they probably do.

But why would we have thoughts or feelings about Starmer? As James Butler recently put it in the London Review of Books, the “enthusiasm young people on the left may have felt over the past few years” has been the object of “implacable hostility from the party machine”. “You get the feeling,” Tom Blackburn wrote in Tribune in March, that Labour’s leadership “would prefer to dissolve its current support base and assemble another.” Preoccupied with posing with pints and flags, Starmer, as Blackburn pointed out, “has barely addressed” us. The facile symbolism is nothing if not politics as spectacle, but spectacle that can’t command my attention, let alone my allegiance. This may be part of the strategy: not just to antagonise, but to bore the membership away.

Sometime in 2019, discussing the impending election, a friend described herself as “apolitical”. The comment disturbed me, not because indifference was unimaginable, but because it struck me as a perpetual possibility. The speed and ease of my detachment from electoral politics since then suggest the original attachment was as brittle as I had half-feared.

Elections are contentless spectacles once more. But the conditions that so recently endowed them with consequence – stagnant wages, poor employment prospects, unaffordable housing, systemic racism, the climate crisis – are all too real, and persist.

My problem with this is it proves what I've long suspected about Generation Left that they're shallow and their support for Labour was limited to support of Corbyn.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Grammar school popularity.

Depends where you are. Plays well in Kent. And Sutton. (And many other places)
Depends who you are. Plays well with much of the non-party-member public.

Until little Johnny doesn't get the eleven plus grade to get to the Grammar..

That was always the case...

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Funny that the government don't seem to be talking much about free schools and academies these days. Pandemic? Keeping Gavin Williamson off the telly? Policy not very popular?

Williamson has committed to making all schools academies. But I don't think he's done any more than that. Free Schools seem to have been kicked into the long grass.

[Bones McCoy]

Funny that the government don't seem to be talking much about free schools and academies these days. Pandemic? Keeping Gavin Williamson off the telly? Policy not very popular?

I can't say, but we have reached the point where the original free schools will now be running 5 years of pupils.
So those playgrounds with 1.6 m^2 space per pupil will start to feel a little crowded.
I suspect the same applies to many other shared facilities where they saved a wad by providing a minimal service a few years back.