A nice explanation of Labours problems. https://youtu.be/r1cCgOwMeQs
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That’s fucking brilliant, and right on the money.
Nice to meet you today by the way, SOS.
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Had my ear until “leaving child refugees to starve in Calais”.
Ffs do we really have to spoon-feed lefties the definitions of “child” and “refugee” again? 
Please do @mrtrampoline
I went on age assessment training for asylum seeking children last week. Let me know what you know about it.
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Ah, the contest of passionate youth versus tempered experience.
Not saying you’re old, like, @intiniki - 107 isn’t old. Apparently, Joe Louis was 137 years old when he got sparked by Joe Louis*.
* If one treats the words of the barber in Coming to America as gospel, which tbf, not everyone in the barbers does.
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A huge thumbs up for the Pie video.
It is something of a sad indictment when we’re getting better news from comic character creations on YouTube than we manage to get off the actual news. While I accept that comedians have always had a part to play in saying the unsayable, this isn’t exactly sizzling stuff. It’s fucking obvious to anyone with a brain, and was discussed at length during the chicken coup.
There seem to be two modes of Corbyn coverage. If he’s not in one of the many existential crises to his leadership, the media simply turns the volume down. Otherwise, they turn it up.
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We had to “age assess” our colleagues by just looking at them. Of course we were being kind and didn’t go for really old but both of us in our 40s and my colleague thought I was 28. I thought she was early 30s. So going on what people look like and with no idea how people may age in other countries where life is harsh is ridiculous. Or considering the harrowing journey, threats from traffickers etc. But that’s what everyone is doing when they see a photo in papers or TV. I remmeber being in Italy when I was 13 and thinking the 13 year olds around me looked way older and sophisticated. It’s not an easy science. 50% of the world’s population don’t have birth certificates. 2/3 of trafficked children (under 18s - just to remind people that 16 and 17 year old are children) go missing the following day.
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Particularly Nigerian footballers
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A big part of the problem is that people only see bits of the picture, often pre-selecting those bits to back up a pre-existing point of view. We can all agree that we know there are people, living in tented squalor, on the other side of the Channel that would like to get into the UK.
We start to diverge wildly after. The right claims that these are economic migrants, because they didn’t stop moving in the first safe country they arrived in. The left might argue that France can’t be too safe for incoming migrants, given ye olde tent squalor and the impending jump to the right in the French elections. Everyone expects a swing to Le Pen even if she doesn’t win. Personally, I think she’ll end up winning.
The right also nurses a conceit that these refugees appeared from nowhere, ably assisted by the right wing Labour hawks that also helped to create the situation, ignoring centuries of pertinent history. Those centuries all tell us one thing about mass migrations, that they usually happen when the place a refugee is from becomes unlivable. There are plenty of examples to pick from in antiquity and relative modernity alike. You don’t, for example, need to go back to the time of the Mongols to see huge westward rushes. You could just look at the denouement of the second world war, and the forced relocation of ethnic Germans in countries that wanted nowt to do with Germany anymore.
We bear a tremendous amount of responsibility for creating those unlivable situations.
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Yes, anyone that thinks they can tell age just from looking is a massive fool. Had a friend at school, that by age of 15, could grow a full thick beard and was naturally huge. Could get in any pub or club without question. No ID cards then. Why do they demand ID if it’s so easy to tell just by looking.
@mrtrampoline must be on a wind up.
Thank God. Hopefully we won’t see fiascos like this one in future. (Spoiler Alert; Benson, who claims to be 15, actually gets allowed into the country to wait until the results of his age test come back purely on the basis that they can’t disprove his claim).
Now apparently, this has no influence whatsoever on those seeking to migrate to Western Europe and picking out Britain’s soft border as an easy target.
Oh well. It does serve as some small justice for the brutalities of the Anglo-Nigerian war of '73.
Did Benson come from the Calais?
Has it been proven that he is an adult?
You haven’t answered @intiniki question. Is this clip all you know about it?
If you think abuse of a system is a reason to close it, the banks would all shut tomorrow. I can guarantee they have committed more abuse of the rules and cost us more than the whole of Europes refugees put together.
Give me some figures. 2016 would be good, if available. Total immigration. Percentage that are refugees. Percentage of refugees that are children. Percentage of refugee children that are lying.
As you have probably worked out, i’m struggling to understand your apparent anger at what i perceive as a small problem. I believe it’s a small number, that would be even smaller if funding was sufficient for the required task. Do you complain as much about funding cuts?
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I will preface this point by admitting up-front, that I am using Coming to America quotes far too liberally.
Clarence Oh there they go. There they go, every time I start talkin 'bout boxing, a white man got to pull Rocky Marciano out their ass. That’s their one, that’s their one. Rocky Marciano. Rocky Marciano. Let me tell you something once and for all. Rocky Marciano was good, but compared to Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano ain’t shit.
Why the fuck is this relevant?
Well, @mrtrampoline 's Benson is Rocky Marciano, there to perpetuate the idea that white dudes weren’t absolutely mullered by black fighters in the ring, except in a stunning race reversal, Benson is there to perpetuate the idea that migrants are economic opportunists playing with our sympathies and tax money.
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A good mate of mine shared this article. He’s from Whitehaven, which forms part of the constituency.
I’ve not really arrived at a view yet. Part of me thinks it a rather grasping way to try to validate the Copeland result. Another part remembers the furore surrounding election spending in key marginals during the 2015 General Election, particularly South Thanet.
The key matter in the preliminary instance is the count of issued, rejected and cast votes, as the rules say that rejected and valid votes must add up to the number of issued votes (minus, in the case of postal votes, any postal votes sent out but not returned. According to Applied IF, figures for all of these must be published.
In the case of the Copeland by-election, this appears not to have been fulfilled in any respect. Here is Applied IF’s ‘Simplified Voting Count Model’ Crux report:
The picture appears clear: the absence of key information on the number of ballots issued (by post or in person), the number of postal votes not returned and the number of rejected (which is not the same as ‘spoiled) ballots means that a prima facie case exists that the election was not conducted lawfully.
This means that there is significant scope for the count not to have been conducted correctly or fairly.
Anyone that saw last weeks’ Question Time saw Dimbleby announce that Labour had held the seat.
I’m not sure Corbyn and crew are going to be getting any positive coverage from The Sun or The Times anytime soon 
Coup 2.0. Or something. Do we count the little coups that failed?
WE HAVE TO ALERT PARTY MEMBERS and supporters that the soft coup is underway. It’s planned, co-ordinated and fully resourced. It is being perpetrated by an alliance between elements in the Labour Party and the Murdoch media empire, both intent on destroying Jeremy Corbyn and all that he stands for.
The coup is not being waged up front in public but strictly behind the scenes. Having learned the lesson of the last coup attempt – that a direct attack on Jeremy and his policies will provoke a backlash from many party members – the coup perpetrators are this time round pursuing a covert strategy.
The aim of these covert coup plotters is to undermine the support Jeremy has secured among Labour Party members, and also importantly to undermine support from Labour voters. Undermining support for Jeremy from Labour voters is important to the plotters because their objective is to ensure Jeremy trails in the polls and can’t win elections. In this way they can destroy morale among party members and their confidence in him.
The tactics include daily and constant behind-the-scenes non-attributable briefings against Jeremy and his Shadow Cabinet every time he or his shadow ministers make a statement, intervene in Parliament or launch a policy. The plotters use every opportunity to chip away at Jeremy’s standing to seek to demean him and undermine support for him in the Labour Party and among Labour supporters. This constant barrage of negative briefings also crowds out any positive initiatives or narrative from Jeremy and his team. It also feeds and confirms in the public’s mind that the Labour Party is split. The plotters are effective in distorting the media coverage because they have extensive contacts and allies in the media, many inherited from Mandelson’s days. The professional planning of interventions in which attacks to undermine Jeremy are framed evidences an exceptionally well resourced ‘dark arts’ operation of the old spin school. The coup plotters are willing to sacrifice the Party at elections just to topple Jeremy and prevent a socialist leading the Party. It is more important to them that they regain control of the Party than it is to win elections.
The irony is that they are willing to go so far in denigrating Jeremy that they endanger their own parliamentary seats and endanger the very existence of the party they want to use to get into power. We saw the methods they use with the leaking of the Party’s internal polling. This was a carefully planned and executed operation. Let’s use it as a case example.
Both quantitative and qualitative polling is undertaken by the Party regularly under the direction of Jon Trickett, the Party’s National Campaign Co-ordinator. Jon arranged for one focus group to be carried out by the Party’s polling agency in Manchester to assess how our frontbench members appearing on television programmes at the time were being perceived in the north west. This polling took place back in November and its results were only accessible to a small number of party officials, Jon Trickett and the polling agency. To this day I have still not seen the results. The polling was leaked by someone to James Lyons, a Times journalist who has regularly received leaks from within the Labour Party – usually used to attack Jeremy and his team.
The Murdoch media had already run earlier in the week fake news stories in The Times and Sun alleging that Jeremy was planning to stand down as leader of the Party. No matter how many times it was explained that this story was completely untrue and absolute fiction, the The Times and Sun continued to run it – and the BBC and other broadcast media took it up and reported it extensively. The media then invented the story that the polling on the perception of Shadow Cabinet members in the north west was the Party testing the perceptions of potential successors to Jeremy.
This was a classic negative story framing and transmission exercise. It is just one example of what we confront on a weekly and at times almost daily basis. It is vitally important that our supporters understand and appreciate what we are facing. What we are experiencing is completely predictable and expected. Spreading that understanding of what we are up against enables us all to organise how we can fight back and overcome the soft coup strategy.
We all have an important role to play in explaining what we are facing and how, by standing together, we can defeat the plotters again. This is the testing time for the Corbyn transformation. The challenges are great and the times are tough – but we all know that this is the socialist opportunity of a lifetime.
McDonnell says his views have changed
Sources close to McDonnell have since claimed he wrote the piece a week before, in response to interventions by Peter Mandelson and other Blairites ahead of by-elections in Stoke and Copeland. The source claims McDonnell’s views have since changed. Whatever games are being played behind the scenes at Labour HQ, it can only detract from providing opposition to a government pushing through an austerity agenda at breakneck speed.
In 1983 , Foot led the Labour party to its lowest election results since 1918 with a loss of 50 seats on the previous, 1979 election. I think the similarities are ominous.
I was at a Momentum meeting last night. Weird experience, leaving me with a few lingering doubts about the organisation’s viability and left me wondering whether there might be more effective ways to organise. The people at the meeting were great, raising some very decent points. The meeting followed recent acrimony in the CLP, where we were done up by the right wingers who’d magicked people out of the air that no-one had ever seen before to win a vote members thought would be fairly contested.
I had a little rant afterward, frustrated because many were still being collegiate about it. I referred to our political opponents as cornered animals, revealed that the chief stitcher-upper had told me he feared being purged, and implored them to recognise what sort of fight we were in.
The problem with the left is that it’s too soft for its own bloody good, and splinters too easily over differences of opinion in some areas while having consensus in others. I’m not sure that having a broad interest group like Momentum is the best way of achieving political change, especially as there are all sorts of restrictions on organising at a CLP level, the party within a party fear.
It would seem to me that activists would be much better focusing their energies into single issue campaigns they do agree on, creating them if they don’t exist. I’ve got two big worries about Momentum. The first is that like the party it backs, it’s a broad church and political action will just dissipate into internal dissent, largely unheard outside the church walls.
The second is that it isn’t members-run, and it’ll only take someone at the top to declare “ta-da! it’s all a load of shit and they’re extremists” to cause tremendous damage to anyone seeking the implementation of left wing policies.
The Labour leadership team have done the up-front work. They’ve produced a set of pledges. I reckon the party faithful need to organise pressure groups to achieve those objectives. It’d shift the focus onto policy, wouldn’t attract the accusations of cultism that Momentum does (bollocks, imo) and most of all, would be positive. Momentum, Progress, whatever - if you want more houses built, join a policy-centric group, extol the virtues of Labour policy and highlight the failings of the current government.
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Interesting, pap.
Looking at Labour party more broadly at the minute, it seems pretty apparent there’s some pretty big splits. It’s certainly a tough spot for the leadership to tackle.
I’ve just read this article, which was particularly interesting to me as half of my family are from Doncaster, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time there. The stark contrast in views, and the specific views on display here I’ve seen first hand in my own family.
How one goes about bridging those divides I really don’t know. I’d like JC to manage it, but I’m really not sure if he will.
Anyway, thought it was worth a read.
Looks like this may not be quite what it seemed. One of the folk involved aren’t too happy about it. Have responded here:
Interesting to see the different take on that.
I certainly don’t think John was painted in a particularly bad light, nor was Donnie.
Can certainly understand a lot of the frustrations he is expressing though, having heard similar first hand.
Are we still taking Owen Jones seriously?
The nipper was a decent writer when he was doing books. Like most people taking a coin from the Guardian, utterly compromised by the experience.
Contrast with Frankie Boyle, who also writes for the Guardian, yet publishes his work for free on Facebook when the Guardian finds it too hot to handle, and lets everybody know that they refused to publish.
I take Frankie Boyle more seriously than Owen Jones these days, and the former is a comedian, not nearly as political, but not nearly as compromised either.