Will we see our Prime Minister resign in the very near future?

[Mikhail Liebenstein]

Something has to hold the Conservative Party (and property market) up!

[Blobsy]

1 hour ago, zugzwang said:

The Establishment pygmies are still preoccupied with Jeremy Corbyn, even as they attempt to exile him.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/the-tories-are-obsessed-with-jeremy-corbyn-because-they-know-how-popular-his-ideas-are/ar-AAZjNs3

From his prison cell in 1930, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote, “the old is dying but the new cannot be born”. But it wasn’t watching Boris Johnson cling on to power in recent days that caused me to remember that quote.

Instead it was when Sajid Javid resigned and told the disgraced soon-to-be former Prime Minister, “You will be forever credited with seeing off the threat of Corbynism”.

What threat was that? Decent wages? Council housing? Public ownership? Scrapping tuition fees? Oh the horror!

There is still a weird fascination with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn that scars the Westminster psyche, two years since he resigned. Johnson referenced the now backbench MP from the dispatch box in what might have been his final PMQs on Wednesday. Nadhim Zahawi also mentioned him in his not-quite-a-resignation letter, and even Labour frontbencher felt Jess Phillips felt compelled to reference her opposition to him on BBC’s Politics Live yesterday.

Corbyn threatened the post-Thatcher economic consensus (of privatised services, weak trade unions and low taxes for the corporations and super-rich), and the consensus in Westminster that believes politics is a convivial parlour game for politicians to play, rather than a real-life battle of ideas drawn across class lines.

As the UK is halfway through its second decade of wage stagnation and low growth, following the banking crash of 2007/08, it’s really time to evaluate where we are as a nation. Our country’s leaders could learn a thing or two from the former Labour leader.

Compared with 15 years ago, we have longer waiting lists in our NHS, more children in poverty, more pensioners in poverty, more homelessness – and our wages are lower in real terms.

We’ve had sustained campaigns from politicians telling us our nation’s woes are because of scroungers, skivers, migrants, failed asylum seekers, Brussels bureaucrats, the wokerati – anyone but politicians or the multinational corporations that have profiteered from our increasingly privatised economy.

Since the banking crash we have been stuck at a juncture where we need to shift, but lacking politicians of the calibre to deliver it. We’ve had no answers just slogans: “Big Society”, “we’re all in it together”, “Get Brexit Done”, “Levelling Up”. But they can only distract so long before reality intrudes.

After the Second World War and again in the late 1970s Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher were capable of leading a fundamental shift in our politics and economics. You can debate the merits of either, but their legacies still exist today. They created fundamental shifts and institutional change that endured.

Our leading politicians today are, as Keir Starmer said in Wednesday’s PMQs, “the charge of the lightweight brigade”. Unfortunately, that description applies equally to the Labour frontbench, which appears utterly bereft of ideas too or even a memorable slogan (it’s currently “security, prosperity, respect”, but even I had to look that up).

Gramsci was writing in 1930 in the immediate aftermath of the Wall Street Crash and global recession and as a fundamental battle of ideas between democracy and fascism was ravaging a discordant Europe.

He commented that “in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. Boris Johnson, a moral degenerate populist, was one such morbid symptom. But there have been others. The riots of 2011 were the outpouring of dissent against racist policing, and growing poverty – with no political leadership to channel those concerns into positive action.

Corbynism or “Corbynomics” was an attempt to end the morbid symptoms and birth a new order – a fundamental shift in the economy: ending austerity, with redistributive taxation and public ownership. That was a chance to reset the state and the economy. And that is why Corbyn was so feared and despised by his opponents. He offered solutions not scapegoats.

The reason the now backbench MP is rarely out of political discourse, despite barely doing or saying much of note for the last couple of years, is because what they know and fear is that the material basis for Corbynism is still there: it can be suppressed on the Labour frontbench but reality cannot be shut out so easily.

From the Black Lives Matter movement to the growing spate of strike action, from the rise of renters’ unions to collective action from Glasgow to Peckham to stop immigration deportations, people are resisting a failing political order without any formal political leadership.

The earthquake of Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing policies gaining over 40 per cent of the vote and denying the Tories a majority in 2017 still has them traumatised. It should traumatise them. Life is getting harder for many people – work has become more insecure, living standards have fallen (as the proliferation of food banks attest), and even life expectancy is stalling and going backwards for some groups.

The UK needs a reset. The economic system is not working for most people. As a report by the Unite union showed last month, profit margins for the UK’s biggest listed companies were 73 per cent higher in 2021 than pre-pandemic levels in 2019.

The money is there. We are a rich country. Our workers are producing huge wealth but it’s being creamed off by those at the top. The country is being run for the few not the many.

But we as voters must take responsibility too. If we keep getting duped into believing our enemy is the migrant, the benefit claimant, the “woke metropolitan elite”, or human rights lawyers, then we deserve our penury.

Celebrate Johnson going, but let the demise of this morbid symptom be a wake-up call: the system needs to change. Jeremy Corbyn had that right.

 

 

'No army can stop an idea whose time has come'

The purple rinse brigade are dying off and being replaced by more and more disenfranchised young folk.

[Timm]

4 minutes ago, Mikhail Liebenstein said:

Something has to hold the Conservative Party (and property market) up!

Very clever, but be careful what you meme.

[Timm]

Just now, Dogsy said:

'No army can stop an idea whose time has come'

The purple rinse brigade are dying off and being replaced by more and more disenfranchised young folk.

That is interesting - I've been trying hard to remember a quote.

It's something like "When steam time comes, steam engines come"

[pig]

1 hour ago, zugzwang said:

The Establishment pygmies are still preoccupied with Jeremy Corbyn, even as they attempt to exile him.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/the-tories-are-obsessed-with-jeremy-corbyn-because-they-know-how-popular-his-ideas-are/ar-AAZjNs3

From his prison cell in 1930, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote, “the old is dying but the new cannot be born”. But it wasn’t watching Boris Johnson cling on to power in recent days that caused me to remember that quote.

Instead it was when Sajid Javid resigned and told the disgraced soon-to-be former Prime Minister, “You will be forever credited with seeing off the threat of Corbynism”.

What threat was that? Decent wages? Council housing? Public ownership? Scrapping tuition fees? Oh the horror!

There is still a weird fascination with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn that scars the Westminster psyche, two years since he resigned. Johnson referenced the now backbench MP from the dispatch box in what might have been his final PMQs on Wednesday. Nadhim Zahawi also mentioned him in his not-quite-a-resignation letter, and even Labour frontbencher felt Jess Phillips felt compelled to reference her opposition to him on BBC’s Politics Live yesterday.

Corbyn threatened the post-Thatcher economic consensus (of privatised services, weak trade unions and low taxes for the corporations and super-rich), and the consensus in Westminster that believes politics is a convivial parlour game for politicians to play, rather than a real-life battle of ideas drawn across class lines.

As the UK is halfway through its second decade of wage stagnation and low growth, following the banking crash of 2007/08, it’s really time to evaluate where we are as a nation. Our country’s leaders could learn a thing or two from the former Labour leader.

Compared with 15 years ago, we have longer waiting lists in our NHS, more children in poverty, more pensioners in poverty, more homelessness – and our wages are lower in real terms.

We’ve had sustained campaigns from politicians telling us our nation’s woes are because of scroungers, skivers, migrants, failed asylum seekers, Brussels bureaucrats, the wokerati – anyone but politicians or the multinational corporations that have profiteered from our increasingly privatised economy.

Since the banking crash we have been stuck at a juncture where we need to shift, but lacking politicians of the calibre to deliver it. We’ve had no answers just slogans: “Big Society”, “we’re all in it together”, “Get Brexit Done”, “Levelling Up”. But they can only distract so long before reality intrudes.

After the Second World War and again in the late 1970s Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher were capable of leading a fundamental shift in our politics and economics. You can debate the merits of either, but their legacies still exist today. They created fundamental shifts and institutional change that endured.

Our leading politicians today are, as Keir Starmer said in Wednesday’s PMQs, “the charge of the lightweight brigade”. Unfortunately, that description applies equally to the Labour frontbench, which appears utterly bereft of ideas too or even a memorable slogan (it’s currently “security, prosperity, respect”, but even I had to look that up).

Gramsci was writing in 1930 in the immediate aftermath of the Wall Street Crash and global recession and as a fundamental battle of ideas between democracy and fascism was ravaging a discordant Europe.

He commented that “in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. Boris Johnson, a moral degenerate populist, was one such morbid symptom. But there have been others. The riots of 2011 were the outpouring of dissent against racist policing, and growing poverty – with no political leadership to channel those concerns into positive action.

Corbynism or “Corbynomics” was an attempt to end the morbid symptoms and birth a new order – a fundamental shift in the economy: ending austerity, with redistributive taxation and public ownership. That was a chance to reset the state and the economy. And that is why Corbyn was so feared and despised by his opponents. He offered solutions not scapegoats.

The reason the now backbench MP is rarely out of political discourse, despite barely doing or saying much of note for the last couple of years, is because what they know and fear is that the material basis for Corbynism is still there: it can be suppressed on the Labour frontbench but reality cannot be shut out so easily.

From the Black Lives Matter movement to the growing spate of strike action, from the rise of renters’ unions to collective action from Glasgow to Peckham to stop immigration deportations, people are resisting a failing political order without any formal political leadership.

The earthquake of Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing policies gaining over 40 per cent of the vote and denying the Tories a majority in 2017 still has them traumatised. It should traumatise them. Life is getting harder for many people – work has become more insecure, living standards have fallen (as the proliferation of food banks attest), and even life expectancy is stalling and going backwards for some groups.

The UK needs a reset. The economic system is not working for most people. As a report by the Unite union showed last month, profit margins for the UK’s biggest listed companies were 73 per cent higher in 2021 than pre-pandemic levels in 2019.

The money is there. We are a rich country. Our workers are producing huge wealth but it’s being creamed off by those at the top. The country is being run for the few not the many.

But we as voters must take responsibility too. If we keep getting duped into believing our enemy is the migrant, the benefit claimant, the “woke metropolitan elite”, or human rights lawyers, then we deserve our penury.

Celebrate Johnson going, but let the demise of this morbid symptom be a wake-up call: the system needs to change. Jeremy Corbyn had that right.

 

 

The agenda was worthy of debate but imho he wasn’t made to lead a country. Also going by the fact I thought BJ was bad and then turned out to be worse, it might be a blessing n disguise Corbyns agenda gets to survive him.

 

[nothernsoul]

I have always though that Gramsci quote " the old is dying but the new cannot be born" as an excellent description of what has happened since the financial crisis. Just look at the previously unimaginable efforts taken by those in power to keep the plates spinning.

[highcontrast]

As ever, Pie absolueltly nails it in under 5min:

 

[DarkHorseWaits-NoMore]

Bang on ;}

[rantnrave]

So what was Boris' big new economic policy that was planned for today, which we have now missed? Will we ever know?

[TheCountOfNowhere]

 

[pig]

The thing about Johnson is that he does tend to tell people want they want to hear so he can carry on fecking around the way he wants.

[TheCountOfNowhere]

30 minutes ago, rantnrave said:

So what was Boris' big new economic policy that was planned for today, which we have now missed? Will we ever know?

50 year mortgages, £2tn qe, -5% tax payer backed mortgages... Its all about his bubble 

[MonsieurCopperCrutch]

3 hours ago, highcontrast said:

As ever, Pie absolueltly nails it in under 5min:

 

Brilliant and so true. The clowns voted for this. Just how stupid you’d have to feel tonight if you vote for this clowns and his Brex_hit _hitshow. 

[skinnylattej]

5 hours ago, zugzwang said:

The Establishment pygmies are still preoccupied with Jeremy Corbyn, even as they attempt to exile him.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/the-tories-are-obsessed-with-jeremy-corbyn-because-they-know-how-popular-his-ideas-are/ar-AAZjNs3

From his prison cell in 1930, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote, “the old is dying but the new cannot be born”. But it wasn’t watching Boris Johnson cling on to power in recent days that caused me to remember that quote.

Instead it was when Sajid Javid resigned and told the disgraced soon-to-be former Prime Minister, “You will be forever credited with seeing off the threat of Corbynism”.

What threat was that? Decent wages? Council housing? Public ownership? Scrapping tuition fees? Oh the horror!

There is still a weird fascination with former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn that scars the Westminster psyche, two years since he resigned. Johnson referenced the now backbench MP from the dispatch box in what might have been his final PMQs on Wednesday. Nadhim Zahawi also mentioned him in his not-quite-a-resignation letter, and even Labour frontbencher felt Jess Phillips felt compelled to reference her opposition to him on BBC’s Politics Live yesterday.

Corbyn threatened the post-Thatcher economic consensus (of privatised services, weak trade unions and low taxes for the corporations and super-rich), and the consensus in Westminster that believes politics is a convivial parlour game for politicians to play, rather than a real-life battle of ideas drawn across class lines.

As the UK is halfway through its second decade of wage stagnation and low growth, following the banking crash of 2007/08, it’s really time to evaluate where we are as a nation. Our country’s leaders could learn a thing or two from the former Labour leader.

Compared with 15 years ago, we have longer waiting lists in our NHS, more children in poverty, more pensioners in poverty, more homelessness – and our wages are lower in real terms.

We’ve had sustained campaigns from politicians telling us our nation’s woes are because of scroungers, skivers, migrants, failed asylum seekers, Brussels bureaucrats, the wokerati – anyone but politicians or the multinational corporations that have profiteered from our increasingly privatised economy.

Since the banking crash we have been stuck at a juncture where we need to shift, but lacking politicians of the calibre to deliver it. We’ve had no answers just slogans: “Big Society”, “we’re all in it together”, “Get Brexit Done”, “Levelling Up”. But they can only distract so long before reality intrudes.

After the Second World War and again in the late 1970s Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher were capable of leading a fundamental shift in our politics and economics. You can debate the merits of either, but their legacies still exist today. They created fundamental shifts and institutional change that endured.

Our leading politicians today are, as Keir Starmer said in Wednesday’s PMQs, “the charge of the lightweight brigade”. Unfortunately, that description applies equally to the Labour frontbench, which appears utterly bereft of ideas too or even a memorable slogan (it’s currently “security, prosperity, respect”, but even I had to look that up).

Gramsci was writing in 1930 in the immediate aftermath of the Wall Street Crash and global recession and as a fundamental battle of ideas between democracy and fascism was ravaging a discordant Europe.

He commented that “in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. Boris Johnson, a moral degenerate populist, was one such morbid symptom. But there have been others. The riots of 2011 were the outpouring of dissent against racist policing, and growing poverty – with no political leadership to channel those concerns into positive action.

Corbynism or “Corbynomics” was an attempt to end the morbid symptoms and birth a new order – a fundamental shift in the economy: ending austerity, with redistributive taxation and public ownership. That was a chance to reset the state and the economy. And that is why Corbyn was so feared and despised by his opponents. He offered solutions not scapegoats.

The reason the now backbench MP is rarely out of political discourse, despite barely doing or saying much of note for the last couple of years, is because what they know and fear is that the material basis for Corbynism is still there: it can be suppressed on the Labour frontbench but reality cannot be shut out so easily.

From the Black Lives Matter movement to the growing spate of strike action, from the rise of renters’ unions to collective action from Glasgow to Peckham to stop immigration deportations, people are resisting a failing political order without any formal political leadership.

The earthquake of Jeremy Corbyn and his left-wing policies gaining over 40 per cent of the vote and denying the Tories a majority in 2017 still has them traumatised. It should traumatise them. Life is getting harder for many people – work has become more insecure, living standards have fallen (as the proliferation of food banks attest), and even life expectancy is stalling and going backwards for some groups.

The UK needs a reset. The economic system is not working for most people. As a report by the Unite union showed last month, profit margins for the UK’s biggest listed companies were 73 per cent higher in 2021 than pre-pandemic levels in 2019.

The money is there. We are a rich country. Our workers are producing huge wealth but it’s being creamed off by those at the top. The country is being run for the few not the many.

But we as voters must take responsibility too. If we keep getting duped into believing our enemy is the migrant, the benefit claimant, the “woke metropolitan elite”, or human rights lawyers, then we deserve our penury.

Celebrate Johnson going, but let the demise of this morbid symptom be a wake-up call: the system needs to change. Jeremy Corbyn had that right.

 

 

Nice reference to Gramsci, who is under-appreciated.

While I do not entirely agree with all that you have written, it is a truly wonderful post.

[Bob8]

12 hours ago, Data Dave said:

To repeat my disclaimer: I do not support BJ and im not political.

But I do want to ask a question. 

Is the total sum of Boris's wrong doing, worse than Blairs' Iraq war dossier and subsequent invasion of Iraq?

 

My suspicion of statements like this, and excuse me if this is misplaced, is that these are typically offered by people who were for the war at the time. 

I would say the damage done by Johnson is trivial compared to that caused by Thatcher. To prevent our own bias, it is perhaps better to compare him to other Tory PMs. I think he did a better job for the country that Thatcher or Cameron and possibly worse than May.

[MonsieurCopperCrutch]

A man of the people. Nothing elitist about this clown at all. Jesus wept and some of you voted for him. Little wonder why house prices are UP 30% under his 3 year tenure. 🤡🤡🤡🤡

 

“Johnson jointly owns a £1.3 million townhouse in Camberwell, southeast London, with his wife Carrie, although the property is being rented out for at least £10,000 a year, according to Johnson’s declaration of interests. The house was undergoing renovation in May this year when a car crashed into its front garden, causing minor damage.

The prime minister also has a 20 per cent share in his family farm in Somerset, which is also rented out, and owns a grade II listed house in North Weston, Oxfordshire, which has a tennis court and a pool. This is also rented out, for as much as £4,250 a month, according to a listing placed last year in Strutt & Parker estate agents.

”

[MarkG]

10 hours ago, Timm said:

That is interesting - I've been trying hard to remember a quote.

It's something like "When steam time comes, steam engines come"

"It steam engines at steam engine time" is the version I've heard.

[Timm]

3 hours ago, MarkG said:

"It steam engines at steam engine time" is the version I've heard.

Thanks - I think that is it! Or maybe "steam engines come at steam engine time"?

[winkie]

If you listen carefully he let slip one of the reasons why he might not want to leave until after the recess.....thanking the staff of checkers, still got some more partying to do over the holidays?

[miguel]

5 hours ago, MonsieurCopperCrutch said:

A man of the people. Nothing elitist about this clown at all. Jesus wept and some of you voted for him. Little wonder why house prices are UP 30% under his 3 year tenure. 🤡🤡🤡🤡

 

“Johnson jointly owns a £1.3 million townhouse in Camberwell, southeast London, with his wife Carrie, although the property is being rented out for at least £10,000 a year, according to Johnson’s declaration of interests. The house was undergoing renovation in May this year when a car crashed into its front garden, causing minor damage.

The prime minister also has a 20 per cent share in his family farm in Somerset, which is also rented out, and owns a grade II listed house in North Weston, Oxfordshire, which has a tennis court and a pool. This is also rented out, for as much as £4,250 a month, according to a listing placed last year in Strutt & Parker estate agents.

”

 

He's staying on coz he ain't got nowhere to live and he doesn't want to become a clown tramp. In other words he's freeloading. Maybe his old buddy Lebedev will come to his aid again. 

 

[Bruce Banner]

He hasn't actually resigned so he's probably hoping something will crop up that would give him the option of staying. I doubt anything will but you never know.

[Bruce Banner]

Putin is upping the ante re Ukraine... hmmm.

[Trampa501]

Interesting to see the paper headlines in Scotland, most of them mellow. The most aggressive appears to be a publication called "The Daily Star of Scotland".

Scotland's papers: Going, going, but not gone and Johnson: The end - BBC News

 

[msi]

BoJo - Fined by Police - didn't resign til he was forced

 

Starmer - Said He'd resign if fined - Police clear him Link

 

The next PMQs is going to be hilarious - Vindicated Starmer vs Lame Duck Boris

[Bruce Banner]

1 hour ago, msi said:

BoJo - Fined by Police - didn't resign til he was forced

 

Starmer - Said He'd resign if fined - Police clear him Link

 

The next PMQs is going to be hilarious - Vindicated Starmer vs Lame Duck Boris

Tories are not happy, squealing like stuck pigs. 

They should have transferred Dick up to Durham when what's his name kicked her out of the met.