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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 4h

Jim Murphy said no, then?

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 4h

Stop trying to make David Miliband happen.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 4h

Net effect is that Belfast is reckoned to be the priciest city for beer outside London, despite not having anything resembling London wages.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 4h

Since then there hasn't been much interest in competition reform from any party and the hospitality lobby has squashed any attempts at reform.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 4h

Most of them are tied houses and they also control the hospitality lobby, which makes some pretty laughable claims about how quality would drop with competition. There were consultations on dropping it in the mid 2000s, but it didn't get through before the St Andrews Agreement went through.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 4h

As I understand it, it started off on the 1920s as a temperance thing, so you could only get a licence if you surrendered two licences. It was reduced to a one for one swap in the 1970s. Temperance became sectarianism, then it became a cartel keeping new entrants out.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 4h

Yeah, I mean if the best case scenario is doing something via the NEC, that suggests you don't understand the concept of a best case scenario.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 4h

Am somewhat ashamed that I developed this theory when I learned that the very high price of beer in Northern Irish pubs is chiefly a consequence of the fact you can't get a new alcohol licence without paying a six figure sum to buy somebody else's, creating a cartel of crap, expensive pubs.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 4h

Am quite attached to the idea that we should deal with Stormont dysfunction by regularising the collapse of the Assembly and having it run by the SoS for one year out of 5, where they ram through all the legislation Stormont wants but doesn't want to be blamed for.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 4h

Ours moved. Started out at the Spoons until the bouncers arrived at 6:30, then the Castle tolerated it until about 9pm and then the Goat and Boot put up with you if you didn't get in the way of the darts players.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 4h

Less about your politics than your stage of life, I'm afraid.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 4h

And even then, one vote on the NEC is almost never decisive and the NEC is much less important in government than in opposition.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 4h

I mean I'm not sure how you assumed I was pinning any hopes on her when I explicitly said I was just voting to give the leadership a bad day.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 5h

And it's one where the solution is to kick harder for longer because the precondition for a change is the party feeling it has to be more attractive to social liberals.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 5h

I could see Powell picking somebody transphobic (although her relationship with LGBT Labour has always been better so it's not a slam dunk). But the double whammy of transphobic and demonstrably having no knowledge about anything else the EHRC does made Stephenson's appointment pretty radicalising.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 5h

There are five things on that list, you've got to get them to block you a few more times to tick them all off.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 5h

The arc of the Labour Party is long and frankly it bends towards mediocrity at the best of times, but I at least want that mediocre not to be actively evil.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 5h

Basically my continued membership of the Labour Party depends on believing that although we are frequently shit, we get to the right place eventually. That is not a position I can keep justifying to myself if I vote for somebody who chose to make life worse for trans people for no good reason.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 5h

More able and excellent are separate things. She can run a delivery department well enough but an excellent politician would have recognised the hospital pass and let somebody else catch it.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 5h

Appointing a transphobe was bad. Appointing a transphobe who is also incapable of running the organisation was worse. Appointing an incompetent transphobe when we're facing a new wave of increasingly public bigotry and our politicians aren't stepping up to oppose it is even worse.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 5h

The second is that whilst Philippson is in my view a more able politician than Powell, deputy leader is a non-job so I don't care about that. I do very much care that she appointed an appallingly incapable candidate at the EHRC though and feel obligated to vote against her on that basis.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 5h

I'm voting for Powell for two reasons. The first is to kick the leadership because a) they need to change course and b) they deserve a kicking anyway.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 7h

I was kind of expecting a persuasion call/message (and did it deliberately because I wanted to specifically explain why I would have voted for literally any alternative candidate) but I wasn't expecting it to be marked down as an expression of support.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 7h

They've killed a bunch of their operatives (along with huge numbers of civilians.) In the long term it's probably increased support for Hamas (or anybody else fighting Israel) but in the short term it will have degraded their operational capabilities.

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Edward @fornbirkibeinn.bsky.social · 7h

Bridget Phillipson's campaign now sending me reminders to vote after I responded to a text saying that I was not going to vote for her. Unsure if this is exactly the level of competence you'd expect or if she's as unenthused by the deputy leadership race as everybody else.

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