Politics

Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield, agreed that the result risked leaving Birmingham “ungovernable”, adding: “There was the hope that there might be a chance for strong and sensible leadership. But I’m afraid that is not the result that the electorate has delivered.

Perhaps the electorate prefers not to have strong leadership?

Now, if I had just been elected there I would have one and only the one constant refrain. Abolish the Equality Act. That binmen’s strike is cause by the insane insistence that the dinner ladies and classroom assistants must be paid the same amounts as the binmen. Work of equal value, see?

So just hammer away at that. We cannot solve this problem while national politics insists upon this. Thus this is something that has to be solved by national politics. And just keep shouting that. Just say it to local newspaper reporters, the local TV station, interviews with anyone, every speech in the council chamber. Go all very boring and Cato on them. Delenda est equalitas.

Sure, it doesn’t help much with everything else but politics is about using the issues available to make the point.

Sir Keir therefore had a 45-minute warning that his premiership was being formally challenged – by an MP almost no one outside Westminster or her north London constituency has ever heard of.
Ms West told the BBC that she already had 10 backers for her “stalking horse” bid, which is designed to trigger a leadership election that another contender would win.

After all, the impossible does happen, sometimes twice before breakfast.

Reform UK came second, pushing Labour into a distant third place. Plaid won 43 seats, Reform 34, Labour nine, the Conservatives seven, Greens two and Liberal Democrats one.

49 needed for a majority. PC plus L or C? How else can one be cobbled together?

Not only is deep canvassing persuasive but, by contrast to almost all other approaches, the change appears to be durable, at least over the course of months. It seems to have been a decisive factor in the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York.

What makes the difference is the listening. There’s a solid rule in life: if you don’t listen to other people, they won’t listen to you. I’m often told that people are “too exhausted” to engage in politics. That can mean they’re overwhelmed by work and family life. But it can also refer to the exhaustion of being unheard. The sense that no one is listening is alienating and demoralising.

Another benefit is that deep canvassing allows people to change their minds without losing face. A study in the journal Political Communication found that when someone is heard attentively and without judgment, “they are more likely to become more open-minded and process information in a less defensive manner”. Active listening creates “a sense of shared social identity”, which can build “faith in wider democratic processes”.

The way to change politics is to talk to your neighbours.

Imagine a technique that can heal Britain of division and keep out the hard right. I call it ‘radical listening’
George Monbiot

But the more you talk to your neighbours then the more you will find out that some to more than you thought of your neighbours are, in fact, hard right.

After all, there’s no guarantee at all that the actual culture itself agrees with George now, is there?

Whoever wins today’s elections, democracy is the loser under first past the post
Polly Toynbee

That it is possible to throw the bsatards out is rather the point of an electoral system, no?

Former China defence ministers convicted of corruption in latest purge of military leaders
Ex-defence ministers, Li Shangfu and Wei Fenghe both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve, among the most severe sentences in a years-long purge

If you are the authoritarian, dictatorial, type, then you’d quite like all your underlings to be corrupt. For when you do want to get rid of them you’ve got the mechanism right there. Plus, hanging a few scares all.

The idea just doesn’t work so well if all are honest.

On one side are millions of left-leaning Britons – many of them young – whose economic prospects are worsening, whose anxieties about the climate crisis are rising, whose horror at Israel and the US’s wars is absolute, and whose alienation from the compromises of conventional Labour politics is deep. This is the large minority of the electorate attracted by Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt to radicalise Labour between 2015 and 2019, and now increasingly drawn to Zack Polanski’s leftwing, populist reshaping of the Greens. For both leaders, the ultimate, hugely ambitious aim was or is to create a much more equal, environmentally sustainable country with a much more ethical foreign policy.

OK.

Yet fundamentally opposed to this project is another coalition of interests, including the rightwing media, the right of the Labour party, the Conservative party, corporate lobbyists, defenders of Israel and the Anglo-American “special relationship”, and supposedly realistic centrists from the opinion pages of the Financial Times to the deep-state recesses of Whitehall.

Otherwise known as “everyone else”.

Thus, Corbyn’s leadership was steadily undermined by claims that he was a dangerous extremist who threatened national security and economic prosperity and tolerated antisemitism, terrorism and Muslim sectarianism. A lifelong anti-racist, peace campaigner and assiduously inclusive constituency MP ended up being seen by too many voters as a promoter of division and prejudice.

Polanski is, in some ways, a very different leader: younger, less set in his ways and a better communicator. The Greens are less weighed down than the Labour left by negative perceptions. Yet it’s striking that only about eight months into his leadership,

And what if everyone else is actually correct here? Say, the economic proposals are populist nonsense and nothing more?

The fact that the Greens are attracting many ex-Corbynistas

As Caroline Lucas is so painfully finding out, the New Greens basically are the Corbies. They were ready for somewhere, Your Party so obviously failed and….

Today’s task is also to reclaim and reassert democratic control over the economic, digital and geopolitical system that nationalists are challenging.

Near complete list of the things I’m against. “Democratic control” means the lanyards get to tell everyone what to do. This is lovely for the lanyards and a disaster for everyone else.

In short, I insist that the fuckers don’t control the economy, digital…..

There is a close relationship between the Trump era and violence – not just the attempts on his life but also the violence his administration has unleashed on the world, the violence his ICE and border patrol agents have caused inside America, the violence he has incited among his followers. (A few of Saturday night’s guests at the correspondents’ dinner were in Congress on 6 January 2021 when Trump’s supporters attacked the US Capitol.)

The violence of the Trump administration has resulted in thousands of deaths and injuries. That is no justification for Saturday night’s attack, of course, but it is part of what he has wrought in America. He has changed the script in Washington. He has ushered in an America that is more divided, distrustful and hostile; an America where political opponents are enemies to be overcome and destroyed instead of debated and challenged at the ballot box.

Andreas Laake, the head of a victims’ association for “stolen children in the GDR”, estimates the total number of forced adoptions over the state’s 40-year existence to be as high as 8,000, and has recorded 2,000 infant deaths that his organisation suspects could be disguising forced adoptions. In five of these cases, the association has been able to confirm that the deaths were falsely reported. But a state-commissioned report published at the start of this year insists that they were isolated incidents: “A systematic, planned and explicitly politically motivated endeavour on behalf of the state within the adoption procedures could not be proven,” it says. Proof of the opposite would probably oblige the German state to pay compensation to thousands of victims.

The Good Socialists would never have done something like that.

A gunman stormed a security checkpoint armed with “multiple weapons” in an apparent attempt to assassinate Donald Trump at a major event in Washington.

The US president was rushed off stage by his security detail after several gunshots rang out at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday.

Grainy footage released by Mr Trump showed the gunman, Cole Thomas Allen, from California, charging through a Secret Service checkpoint.

Agents drew their guns and managed to stop the suspect from reaching the ballroom entrance. One law enforcement officer was shot but was in “great shape”, Mr Trump said

Of course, it could have been the press he was after…..

Rightwing populism is littered with broken promises. Its opponents need to make those failures count
Andy Beckett

Of course this is trivia as compared to left wing populism. Those extravagant promises of the 1940s have left us saddled, 80 years later, with one of the worst health care services in Western Europe for example….

And, despite the outcome of the election in Hungary, far-right nationalist populism is still on the rise, threatening democracy as well as principled, far-sighted policies on climate, energy, trade, technology and migration.

The people who disagree with The Guardian’s progressives are unprincipled, eh?

So what is the answer? Most of the thinkers we spoke to believe it lies in a stronger Europe.

Kick policy up to where it’s controlled by Guardian-type progressives and so immune from democracy, eh?

But when it comes to Europe’s future, optimism on its own is not enough to kickstart change. It must give way to activism – grounded in the conviction that a stronger Europe not only can, but must, be built.

Yep, that’s the plan.

Democracy is under mounting threat from the climate crisis, with new analysis documenting how elections are increasingly shaped not only by political forces but also by floods, wildfires and extreme weather.

Democracy is good! So, if we can link climate change to ani-democracy then hugs all around! Except Xir who is non-tactile. We win!

Fans of Nicola Sturgeon will not be drawn to read Joanna Cherry’s new memoir. Which is a pity, for Keeping the Dream Alive reads like a much-needed antidote – or at least balance – to Sturgeon’s own autobiography, published last year, a book that painted her as a much-abused feminist saint whose only concern was for the welfare of others and, above all, for the project of Scottish independence.

Cherry is having none of that. Page after page of delicious details concerning the internal machinations at the highest levels of the Scottish National Party (SNP), in the decade that followed the independence referendum, are a godsend to Scottish-politics addicts.

It’s the ugly kids doing the entertainment bitchfest. Always has been, always will be:

Time and again, Cherry complains of being ignored or humiliated by seemingly trivial and spiteful acts by some of her Westminster colleagues. For example, she claims that the tradition of “prayer cards”, where members can use small green cards to reserve a specific seat in the chamber if they’re not present for prayers at the start of the session, was exploited by the party leadership, which would regularly ensure that every place on the front bench was reserved for other front-bench colleagues, forcing Cherry to ask questions and make statements and speeches from the more junior position of the back benches.

This is it, there is no other. This is how ag subsidies are decided, this is how the price of ‘leccie is decided. It’s all whinges over who gets two slices of glace cherry on their cake instead of only one.

It’s a wholly awful method of running a place. As we can observe…..

The former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan has added his name to growing calls for the president to be ousted on grounds that he is unfit for the job, arguing that the US constitution’s 25th amendment addressing involuntary removal from office was “written with Donald Trump in mind”.

An hour before Trump said he’d cause the death of a “whole civilization” if Iran didn’t open the strait of Hormuz, an Iranian official said the shipping channel would be reopened for two weeks if the United States stopped bombing Iran. The US has now stopped bombing Iran.

So we’re back to the status quo before Trump began his war. Only now, Iran can credibly threaten to close the strait if it doesn’t get what it wants from Trump – thereby causing havoc to the US and world economies. Trump’s only remaining bargaining chip is his threat of committing war crimes.

In other words, Tuesday’s showdown was a clear victory for Iran and a clear defeat for Trump (although he’ll frame it as a victory).
In addition to Iran, similar strategies have been used by China, Russia, Canada, Mexico and Greenland.

Of course, this is Robert Reich who would diagree if The D said “Good morning”. But – if you don’t then I’ll and then they do so you don’t have to – the tactic of people doing what you want is so obviously a defeat, right?

Labour scrambles for candidates to avoid local elections bloodbath
Emails implore party members to stand for office, telling them that ‘no experience is necessary’

More candidates might well mean a few more votes – picking up thoe of the candidate and their Mum in a seat you’d get no votes for no candidate for example – but more seats? Don’t see it, not really.

Traoré has won fans across Africa with anti-French and anti-western rhetoric that often invokes the legacy of the revolutionary Burkinabé leader Thomas Sankara. Sankara, a Marxist, was president of Burkina Faso, which he renamed from Upper Volta, from 1983 until his assassination in 1987.

Clearly, there will be fans. The usuals, but there we are:

“We’re not even talking about elections, first of all … People need to forget about the question of democracy … We must tell the truth, democracy isn’t for us,” Traoré said in an interview on Thursday with the state broadcaster Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina (RTB).

Democracy was “false”, the 37-year-old said, adding: “Democracy, we kill children. Democracy, we drop bombs, we kill women, we destroy hospitals, we kill civilian population. Is that democracy?”

My word that is a surprise, no?

It’s Trans Day of Visibility today, a day to celebrate trans people’s lives and raise awareness of discrimination. And like any other day, it’s a day when trans people continue to be invisible and powerless.

There are no trans people elected to any of the UK’s parliaments;

I once worked rather hard to get a trans person elected – for 10 months in fact. OK, it was the European Parliament but that counted at the time. Got her elected too.

Perhaps it’s that it was alongside Nigel Farage and Ukip that makes people forget this…..