This evening, Blyth Valley CLP has passed the following two motions: firstly, a motion against the restriction of the rights of Party members freedom of speech; secondly, calling to reinstate the parliamentary whip to Jeremy Corbyn
Proud of my CLP today 🌹
The neoclassical style of Oxford is perfectly counterposed to the brutalism of Leeds. The former embodies the aristocratic privilege it is set up to reproduce. Leeds embodies the postwar social democratic spirit of the cradle-to-grave welfare state providing education for all
I yearn for the days when radicals would have their texts translated into as many languages as possible by Progress Publishers in the USSR, back when the notion that oppressed people across the world have shared internationalist interests undivided by bourgeois identities
Readers, especially white readers, are *not* entitled to footnotes / explanations / direct translations of non-English words that a BIPOC author chooses to use in their books with intentions of not translating.
I really should go to bed but I have to rewatch Pyramids of Mars now cause RTD went and brought back Sutekh (and still voiced by none other than Gabriel Woolf)
Sophy Ridge is not doing journalism here. The questions she asks, the way she asks them, and the decontextualised quotes she presents as evidence of Loach's supposed antisemitism is essentially a McCarthyite inquisition on behalf of the Labour right
1/6
.
@SophyRidgeSky
: Can you see why sharing a platform with Ken Loach could be problematic?
@MayorJD
Jamie Driscoll says "what the public want from the politicians is to get on with the job, not to engage in culture wars".
#Ridge
📺 Sky 501
The idea that wanting to be able to understand other people’s experiences of the world in their historical, material, social and cultural specificities is ‘entitlement’ is wildly reactionary
Noteworthy personal news: I finally passed a job interview after 6 months of unemployment.
Gonna be a trainee bus driver in Glasgow, starting in 2-3 weeks (however long it takes for the DVLA to send me my license back)
This is pretty grim. Even if the left can prevent a majority for the far-right, the centrists absolutely will hand them power before ever aligning themselves with us
In Durham today campaigning for
@MayorJD
, also featuring the iconic Mick Lynch of the
@RMTunion
. North East friends, vote for Jamie, a proper independent socialist candidate who advances the interests of the working classes in our region! ✊🏼
🚨 BREAKING: Labour has suspended the following MPs after they voted for the SNP amendment to scrap the two-child benefit cap
- Apsana Begum
- Imran Hussain
- Rebecca Long Bailey
- Ian Byrne
- Richard Burgon
- Zarah Sultana
- John McDonnell
@unknownlady_s
@SkyNews
If you had written 'A black person came in and I felt very uncomfortable for myself and my child' would you recognise that as racism or would you defend it as a 'safeguarding' issue?
Prejudice and fear of others is not a valid basis to exclude people from access to public space
Another morning campaigning for
@MayorJD
in North Tyneside, as well as the pro-Driscoll independents
@icecreambutty
for St Mary’s council ward and Mustaque Rahman for Northumbria Police & Crime Commissioner
The current transphobic moral panic in the UK is being propagated by the worst collection of arch-reactionaries; conservatives, religious fundamentalists, anti-abortion activists, and self-described fascists. And yet some on the left think they can give a feminist veneer to it
Violence against women is wrong, full stop. Encouraging people to punch “terfs” in the face, esp when cheered by hundreds (as happened at Trans Pride) should worry us all. That many on the left look away is indicative of a fearful culture,silencing many basic feminist principles.
Stood here waiting for a bus that is now 18 minutes late, feeling especially bitter about Jamie Driscoll’s defeat knowing we won’t be getting a fully integrated, publicly owned public transport system in the NE anytime soon now 😑
[On the future of politics]
“This isn’t about values it’s about interests. It’s in young people’s interests to find a solution to climate change. It’s in young people’s interests to find a solution to the housing crisis”
Really excellent stuff from Grace this evening 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
The fact that Labour Party Conference is supposedly the sovereign body of the Party, yet no matter what it decides it is basically entirely ignored by the parliamentary Party, is a longstanding problem, and clear evidence that we do not live in a democratic society
1/
🚨 BREAKING: Labour has ruled out introducing free school meals for all children.
Labour's party conference passed a motion in 2022 committing the party to introduce free school meals, but the leadership has now firmly ruled it out, saying: "We have no plans to implement it."
Transatlantic solidarity to comrade
@NomikiKonst
, whom I hope wins the race for New York City’s Public Advocate, so we (the international left) can take on property speculation, the key engine of accumulation for neoliberal capitalism, in one of the world’s centres of finance 🌹
So I finally got feedback on my rejected PhD application from a few months ago, which for context was 8487 words and 41 pages long. Wanna guess how much they sent me in reply?
...
...
2 sentences.
2. Fucking. Sentences.
And they aren't even especially clear feedback either
@IanDunt
@cjayanetti
“Distressingly”? I’m gathering you didn’t enjoy the summer of night clubs spontaneously breaking into chants of “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” for about 6 months then Ian
@c_h_e_m
@saothair
This is wildly unscientific. This graph only shows the Global North, and doesn’t make any comparison with precapitalist periods of history where people worked fewer hours. Plus, this graph does not even show what you think it does, because it is the organised labour movement...
@ColouredView
@AaronBastani
What on earth? It’s the Corbynite wing of the Party that have the most thorough forward thinking and strategic planning. The ‘centrists’ have said we want power for decades with no goal other than to do neoliberalism slightly less badly than the Conservatives.
Frankly, Britain is not a free or democratic country, and the structure and conduct of the Labour Party is a key part of why that is the case. Likewise with the bourgeois press, who lack any kind of basic journalistic integrity in this country
6/6
@c_h_e_m
@saothair
...that fought and won the 8 hour day, and socialist/social democratic governments that codified it in law. It was not benevolently given to us by capital.
This is a terrible decision. The need for an independent, trade union supported research organisation has always existed and will always exist. CLASS did excellent work and it’s bizarre to wind it up (and/or not replace it)
Now we have them barring Jamie Driscoll for failing to condemn someone who was expelled for failing to condemn others. This is pure House Un-American Activities Committee shit
5/6
@AmmarKazmi_
‘He attends anti-Netanyahu rallies’ - ok but you can attend anti-Trump rallies and still be in favour of US imperialism? The same applies equally for Israel. Netanyahu isn’t the problem, he’s just a particular expression of the underlying issue. The problem is settler colonialism
Announcing the launch of
@AWorldtoWinPod
- a podcast from
@tribunemagazine
!
Our first episode will be out tomorrow - I’m joined by
@jeremycorbyn
to discuss the pandemic, the Labour Party and the future of socialism ✊
And for any nerds out there, the voting breakdown was as follows:
Motion 1 - 21 for, 2 against, 3 abstentions
Motion 2 - 15 for, 9 against, 2 abstentions
Journalism would be to take the smears and second order guilt by association coming from the likes of Luke Akehurst et al, and actually scrutinise whether they can be substantiated with evidence
2/6
But instead she simply accepts them wholesale and asks Driscoll to say whether he also accepts the framing, thus setting him up to appear guilty in the eyes of those who already accept the framing if he doesn't
3/6
@heardougtweet
@RPCorpIntl
The safe space thing is so strangely applied here. The function of safe spaces as I understood them was to keep vulnerable people from possible harm, i.e. survivors of sexual violence from possibly traumatic discourse, etc. They aren't to prevent people from being 'uncomfortable'
@ColouredView
@AaronBastani
The plan is:
Bring in 100,000s of new members ✅
Organise them locally as a campaigning force that can reach every community ✅
Create a transformative policy agenda that presents solutions to the material problems of today ✅ (this can be improved)
Video 2. After his 1988 trip to the Soviet Union,
@BernieSanders
praises their (communist) youth programs and his wife Jane praises their (communist) system of not separating personal life and work.
Histórico das eleições na Venezuela.
🇻🇪 1998 - Hugo Chávez
🇻🇪 2000 - Hugo Chávez
🇻🇪 2006 - Hugo Chávez
🇻🇪 2012 - Hugo Chávez
🇻🇪 2013 - Nicolás Maduro
🇻🇪 2018 - Nicolás Maduro
🇻🇪 2020 - Nicolás Maduro
E há quem diga que a Venezuela não é uma ditadura.
Great TyskySour this evening on financialisation with
@michaeljswalker
and
@graceblakeley
I'm so glad we have a platform like
@novaramedia
that allows for these kinds of substantive discussions. If we want win socialism, we gonna need more of this:
The fact of the matter is, Ken Loach is not an antisemite or a Holocaust denier. He was not expelled from the Labour Party for either of these claims, but rather for failing to denounce others who had been expelled for being in organisations then newly proscribed
4/6
Just got
@sorenmau
’s new book ‘Mute Compulsion’, spent three hours reading it last night, and not even two chapters in I’m already convinced this is an enormously important theoretical work that comrades ought to read
@soup_jihad
The ironic thing is that actual nonpolitical working class people are broadly the most accepting of people looking and dressing differently. It's the petit bourgeoisie, a class of which Dan is self-describedly a member, that ties itself in knots over 'respectability'
I know this is because everyone in the HE sector in the UK is massively overworked, but come on. If you expect thousands of words of detail in proposals you should at least do the courtesy of a proper critical reflection. If not, don't ask for such elaborate applications
@heardougtweet
@RPCorpIntl
If it were to stop people being 'uncomfortabl ', then surely that would preclude any political debate whatsoever since any kind of disagreement could make someone uncomfortable.
It's deeply unserious politics
@ColouredView
@AaronBastani
Mobilise to win the election ➡️
Democratise the state apparatuses ➡️
Use the state to alleviate the immediate problems and foster conditions in which we can begin to build a different, socialist economy from the bottom up ➡️
@IslingtonNorth
They are gonna rig the selection, at which point the whole CLP should disaffiliate from Labour and run outside the control of the party bureaucracy
Sir Keir Rodney Starmer KCB QC, a.k.a. Miguel Sanchez, a.k.a. Dr. Nguyen van Phuoc, was paid £122,898 for his 18 months of Partysitting. He was glad to get it.
@WIRED
@ZUPAGRAFIKA
Funny how brutalism always gets called grey by people who only
@show
pictures of it on cloudy days (in which it still looks incredible mind). But also:
@subarustevenz
Having been a canvasser in the past, back when I in the Labour Party, as both a door knocker and a board runner, people are absolutely told which houses to go to specifically and given the name(s) of the people who live there from the electoral register. They knew
This is pure neoliberal ideology. Introducing pseudo-market mechanisms in order to change people’s subjective relationship with the NHS into one that more closely resembles a consumer transaction is not only ridiculous, it’s repulsive
The public pay for the NHS. It belongs to them.
Patient choice should be for the many, not just the well-informed few.
Transparent data and league tables will give patients the choice to go where waiting times are lower and performance is better.
@FreddieBailey96
I appreciate and value your work in Preston comrade - but this really, really ain't it. Socialism is not 'anything the state does', especially in the context of western bourgeois nation-states.
Transphobia is really good case study in how Britain is a not a democracy. It’s a basically elite politics. The majority of the population doesn’t hold such backward and reactionary views, yet transphobes have completely set the agenda among the state, media and political elite
Should schools teach about gender identity?
The government says they shouldn’t, but 60-61% of people say sex education should teach that people can be transgender or non-binary (including 66-67% of parents)
Penultimate day of leafleting for
@MayorJD
in Blyth before the election tomorrow, and it’s also International Workers’ Day, so wearing thematically appropriate attire 🌹✊🏼
Happy Valentines Day to all the comrades who make life truly worthwhile. Though I’m not romantically involved with anyone, I value and appreciate all my friends in the socialist movement deeply, and I don’t think there’s a better word to sum that up than love 🌹🥰🚩
Going on private for a bit cause I have to submit a background check for the new job and it specifically mentions they'll search your social media (something something Foucauldian panopticism)
Excited to read
@PennyRed
’s new book, her recent podcast with
@graceblakeley
was outstanding and a very good advert for the book. You should listen to it:
@helensclegel
This guy’s account is literally just retweets of Tory MPs and the editor of the Sun, i.e. the someone who should never be judging whether someone is fit to be in the Labour Party
Comrade
@graceblakeley
’s book launch in Edinburgh, also ft.
@L__Macfarlane
Having already read five chapters of the book, I can recommend. Go buy a copy now: