[Kreuzberger]

Nurse, nurse, the pigeon is playing chess again!

[Winegums]

The O'Brien defenders have logged on.

e: the Blairite one and the racist one.

[Andy McDandy]

Thing is, he's right. They are all cults.

[Winegums]

"All these people are cults" I scream as I tattoo #FBPE onto my arm.

[crabcakes_windermere]

Health - fully supports NHS. Wants greater investment in NHS, removal of obstructions such as internal market, PFI.

Housing - supports significant council house building projects. Supports legislation limiting # of homes anyone can own (no more professional landlords). Supports better legislation protecting tenants

Jobs - Wants to improve employee rights and strengthen trade unionism

Education - close gap between wealthy and poor. End creeping privatisation of schooling

Justice - ensure timely access to legal system and justice for the accused and victims. Have community policing fully integrated to communities. Destroy the London Met and salt the earth so that nothing can ever grow there again.

Defense - Stop Western imperialism.

I'm for all of those things (though a question mark over the last one - stopping Western imperialism isn't synonymous with defence. You can stop needless adventures for oil without giving Putin free rein to do what the fuck he wants, for example).

Thus, I'm left wing by any reasonable definition of left wing - something I'm sure Winegums would find laughable, but then we're all well versed on how the only people Corbyn fans consider 'proper' leftwingers are themselves. But regardless I also think Corbyn is awful and wouldn't deliver a lot of these even if in power as he'd be too distracted by (for want of a better phrase) 'socialist vanity projects' that chew up time and energy and capital. For example renationalisation of everything, even if it's a sector doing well.

It's that simplistic black-and-white absolutism that still sees him clinging to lexit, because the EU is vaguely capitalist and so *must* be the worse option. It's incomprehensible it couldn't be. It's also what's doing for him on antisemitism - Israel is bad, therefore all criticism *must* be allowed, even if it's clumsy or badly worded, and the most generous, optimistic take *must* be made every time because these people just want a free Palestine, so how could they *possibly* be bigoted? How could Jeremy be a bad person, look at all these good things he has done? And so on.

I also think there are plenty of examples of his behaviour matching Johnson in awfulness, in no small part due to this absolutism. Sure, he protested against apartheid (and through his arrogance and need to be seen doing 'the right thing', famously made things worse, of course:

But he also turned a blind eye to atrocities if his chum in Moscow was involved (https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/comme ... pocritical) because it was against the hated USA, so how could he be wrong?

So sure, you could make a sound case he's not as big a dangerous, arrogant wanker as Johnson - but he's still a dangerous, arrogant wanker, and not fit to be PM.

[Tubby Isaacs]

The internal NHS market has been abolished in Wales and Scotland. How much difference does it actually make? Isn't a lot of that sort of stuff going to be done as management accounting anyway?

[Tubby Isaacs]

We need a political heavyweight to get on the case.

https://fullfact.org/health/cost-creati ... arket-nhs/

“The internal market that was originally created by the Conservatives, I think back in the late 1980s is currently costing in the order of £10 billion a year.”

Chris Williamson MP, 25 January 2018

In brief

Claim
The NHS internal market, created in the 1990s, costs around £10 billion a year.

Conclusion
There’s no evidence to prove this. Research that arrives at this figure just estimates increases in admin costs over time, rather than trying to single out what impact the internal market has had.

“The internal market that was originally created by the Conservatives, I think back in the late 1980s is currently costing in the order of £10 billion a year.”

Chris Williamson MP, 25 January 2018

This claim has been circulating for years, and there’s no good evidence we’ve seen that supports it.

None of the research that has been used to reach this figure actually tries to estimate the cost of the ‘internal market’ in England that was introduced to the NHS in 1991.

The figures behind it are estimates of the changing cost of administration to the NHS in England. The sources of those figures are either untraceable, subject to a lot of uncertainty, or no longer relevant to the way the NHS works today.

We don’t know the answer to this question, whether it turns out to be £10 billion or something very different.

[youngian]

Before 2016 I was OK with a few slippery figures bolstering your cause if it helps you win (illustrative figures as Rory Stewart calls them). But no never again.

[Boiler]

Just listening to British Troll Farm on BBC Sounds; "a new sitcom set in a secret British military unit dedicated to fighting the social media cyberwar. Badly."

If nothing else, it features my favourite actress from Derry Girls - Nicola Coughlan.

[Abernathy]

The Kindle reader edition of James O'Brien's book How to be Right (In a World Gone Wrong) is available on Amazon - apparently today only for just 99p.

If you'e not read it, it's well worth a quid of your cash.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Be-Right-w ... e_0&sr=8-1

[Boiler]

Listening to The Reunion (partly) on Radio 4 whilst driving into town today: it concerned the fallout around the broadcast of Death On The Rock.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0007wrv

[oboogie]

Listening to The Reunion (partly) on Radio 4 whilst driving into town today: it concerned the fallout around the broadcast of Death On The Rock.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0007wrv

I heard a little of that too, I've made a mental note to listen to it properly on iplayer.

[Abernathy]

LBC are running an ad/trailer for a podcast by Floella Benjamin, the lass notable, as far as I can tell, only for once having been a kids TV presenter on Playschool. h

It opens with La Benjamin herself, intoning "Hello. I'm Baroness Floella Benjamin..."

Now, maybe it's only me that thinks this, but when I hear that sort of pish I immediately think "How up her own arse is she ? Yes, she was elevated to the Lords by the Lib Dems, but really? Introducing yourself in that way doesn't make me, at least, want to hear what she has to say in a podcast (I just might have done if she'd just said "I'm Floella Benjamin") is a "yuck" moment for me.

Got me thinking and I realise that I know personally one member of the house of lords, and one bloke with a knighthood.
They never EVER refer to themselves as "sir" or "lord" - they're just Phil and Albert - as I've known them as for several years.

[youngian]

I had a neighbour who was in the House of Lords. It was Floella Benjamin who could be seen out leafleting for the Streatham Hill Lib Dems. I think she’s worked in educational charity type stuff for years.

[Abernathy]

You mean Baroness Floella Benjamin ?