i think it’s part of the discredited horseshoe theory narrative the media, especially centrist media, has been peddling for a couple of years now. i’m thinking of how the corbyn = trump thing is something they’ve been trying to get off the ground for a couple of years now. but the top article is completely ahistorical and the bottom article is them unwittingly reenacting what really happened, albeit updated for 2018.
i’m sure their beloved orwell considered dishonest historical revisionism a sign of totalitarian impulses…
Which would’ve been a shout even before the bar had sunk as low as claiming that Labour’s risible showing in Wales counts. If that’s _“mildly socialist”, the minority SNP gov with Green support must surely be fully autonomous luxury communism.
Seriously, though. Many key stats for, say, NHS performance are pretty pisspoor. Labour likes to give it the big one, in particular when taunting the SNP, but the Labour gov showing in Wales is fairly miserable in many respects. So they’d do well to haud their wheesht on that front and concentrate on actually doing at least a half decent job where they have something resembling power.
Ireland’s two largest parties are centre-right and pro-austerity and they have swapped power since the foundation of the state. They trace their origins back to being on two different sides of the Civil War but ideologically they’re almost identical these days. Labour basically did a Lib Dems and enforced austerity as a junior coalition partner from 2011 and rightly got decimated in 2016. There’s no Corbyn/Momentum-like movement there really, the party leadership are all old and out-of-touch Blairites.
Having said that, the social movements of the last few years - same-sex marriage, abortion rights, anti-austerity and now housing rights - have been hugely positive and there is definitely a large activist core, particularly among young people. It will be interesting to see how that translates to electoral politics.
It’s quite funny seeing the Evening Standard trying to gloss over all this, and paint Bailey’s statements as being down to those of youth. He was in his late-30s when he made most of them, ffs.
Not entirely sure about Welsh Labour. They’re a bit useless. Also they waved through the dumping of 300,000 tons of radioactive mud from Hinkley point in Cardiff bay, which for some reason people seem to be a bit miffed about.
It’s not news that Angela Smith is a terrible Labour MP, but I’m very surprised (or not) that the Guardian have published this piece without declaring the financial contributions and stakes that she and her family have in the privatised water companies.
Might make a complaint to Ipso about that headline. “Labour” and “targeted” are incredibly inaccurate, also at least one of them was posted by a person of colour and the ethnicity of the rest is unclear so the “race hate” part is pretty tenuous too.
Ctrl F Brexit: 0 results.
No mention of the risks that a bonfire of regulations style Brexit would pose to future water quality. Thought it was a strange article but reading your post I understand the angle now.
“Nationalising our water could make us the dirty man of Europe again - We should resist simplistic calls in England and Wales for state ownership that wouldn’t automatically clean up our water.”
Regional clarification relegated to subheading but the emotive Our!!! and We!! still in the headline.
While we’re on a housing tip… the Scottish government has neutralised the bedroom tax, while not having the formal powers to actually abolish it.
°Also stark is the first response to that tweet noting that from 1999, Labour had managed to under-spend the Scottish block grant by £1.5bn because, apparently, Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish and Jack McConnell just couldn’t think of anything to spend it on - so the money was returned to the Treasury at Westminster. The SNP managed to negotiate the release of these funds that were abandoned by Scottish Labour (see paragraph 19 on page 9 here) - unfortunately much of this needed to be spent on PFI debts accumulated by Labour in the first place.