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Reposted by Nathan🌹

Caroline Dodds Pennock @carolinepennock.bsky.social · 1d

God bless The Church Times for their ongoing insistence on responding moderately but forcefully to the Reverend Canon Nigel Biggar’s nonsense. www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/202...

Even given all that Biggar writes about the universality of slavery and the complicity of Africans, three things might be said. First, Britain played a key part and, however others may want to respond to their own history, it is morally responsible to face up to our own heritage. Second, as a Tory, he might have made more of Burke’s view that society is a partnership not just between the living, but between the living, the dead, and those still to be born. Third, guilt is not the only spur to action. There are the obligations that we owe one another irrespective of any personal responsibility for atrocities in the past.

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 42m

If Mainstream can get its act together, it could gain ground in internal elections pretty quickly.

LtW is designed to do one thing – fight the hard left – and it does that well (as its overwhelming victories at Conference demonstrate). But it has no idea how to oppose moderate challengers.

Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 48m

Phillipson is an intelligent and capable politician, but with her being the de facto government candidate, her deputy leadership campaign is being run by the Labour to Win apparatus, with all the rhetorical tendencies that entails

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 55m

I think it's interesting just how badly Bridget Phillipson has misjudged the tone of her campaign, implying that Lucy Powell (of all people) is some sort of radical and divisive threat to the party and suggesting that action on child poverty is somehow conditional on members voting the right way

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 14h

Out of interest, how good do your other credentials typically have to be to get work via the graduate entry route?

Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 16h

Just seen One Battle After Another, and can confirm that it's as good as everyone is saying it is

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 22h

I'm not saying it's the full story, but I do think it's the necessary condition for reaping the rewards of the global economic conditions of the time.

For an insight into how things could have gone had we not liberalised, look at how France performed over the same period (or even worse, Italy).

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 22h

As for liberalisation of planning and development, my basic theory is that policies that lead to lots of building are right-coded in societies with lower rates of home ownership, but become left-coded in societies with high rates of home ownership.

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 22h

You're not alone among Labour members in not wanting to acknowledge the role of economic liberalism in 1990s and 2000s growth. Indeed this is one of our party's biggest blindspots and why we so often get our economic thinking terribly wrong.

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 22h

The further tragedy is that the economic stance hasn't really won over anyone further left.

And instead of articulating a progressive agenda based on economic openness, the remaining Blairites are obsessed with an illiberal 'tech corporatism' which isolates them within the broader party.

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 22h

I mean, the period you're talking about is included in what I said.

The 2010s is the period where most of the big wins have been had, and the further stuff that could be done – higher immigration and deeper European integration – is colliding with broader conservative principles.

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 22h

And until 2016, if you go by actual individual consumption rather than GDP (thereby removing tax haven distortions), we were still one of the richest countries in Europe.

Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 22h

I disagree, it absolutely did deliver those results. Once monetary policy stability had been established under Major, the free market reforms paid huge dividends over the next 15 years. We had one of the longest continuous expansionary periods in our history!

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 22h

But as you say, the think tanks are so deeply integrated with the Tory party that instead of trying to find a different vehicle for free market policy, they absorbed much of the Tories' policy direction.

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 22h

Yeah, where I disagree with James is that I don't think the free market agenda failed. Quite the opposite – it was such a success that there aren't really many big wins left, and the ones that remain are too left-coded to find an audience within a party of the right.
bsky.app/profile/jame...

James Austin @jamesdaustin.bsky.social · 1d

This is my basic theory for a lot of what is going on with the centre right atm

The ideas failed utterly and now there is a total crisis of intellectual confidence

Indy @indy.bsky.social · 2d

It nags at me that people are dancing around the fact that one reason centre-right think-tanks are in an intellectual crisis moment is because we've spent over a decade where lots of their ideas were tried out and didn't pan out as advertised.

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Reposted by Nathan🌹

John C @badsocialism.bsky.social · 1d

It's really important to understand that anyone who says we should be like the UAE fundamentally hates every principle western society has held or attempted to uphold since the French Revolution.

And at a less ideological level, they also just hate Britain.

Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 1d

Party donor Nick Candy says "I cherish the values we grew up with here in the West. But today you are more likely to find the values we grew up with in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.’

Via Sam Leith in the Spectator
www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-...

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 2d

I mean, Alastair Campbell would have been all over this had it happened when he was Downing Street Press Secretary

James Ball @jamesrball.com · 2d

It both the US and the UK, the political right teaches institutions not to mess with it – a small slip up with be ruthlessly and publicly exploited.

The left, meanwhile, teaches the same institutions it can be repeatedly and easily messed with, and there will barely be a squeak.

Chaminda Jayanetti @cjayanetti.bsky.social · 2d

if that HIGNFY Euan Blair fuckup had been about a right-winger it'd have had full front-page scandal coverage in the Mail followed by frontpage coverage across the board for the next week, days of "BBC in crisis" headline coverage by the BBC, and parliamentary questions about Tim Davie's future

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 2d

Just been to see Harris Dickinson's directorial debut "Urchin".

Thought it was very good; it makes some interesting creative choices. It starts off as what you think is going to be a standard kitchen sink drama and turns into something rather different.

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 2d

Many such cases, myself included

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 3d

The worst of all worlds IMO would be the Democrats moving hard to the right on LGBT rights and climate change, and alienating swathes of their base in the process, while doing nothing to repair the party's reputation on fiscal discipline and inflation control.

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 3d

This is very good. I would add that I think the economic aspect is much more important here than the social aspect, but Democrats are talking about social stuff because it allows them to avoid admitting the Biden theory of economic governance was wrong.

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 3d

She can't be in two places at once though lmao

Zack Polanski @zackpolanski.bsky.social · 3d

I'm Jewish. I'm also Mancunian.

Every other national party leader was interviewed by Laura Kunesberg during their conference.

Maybe the BBC thought as someone who also supports Palestine - I had nothing to say?

Let's keep growing: join.greenparty.org.uk

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 3d

'We just must' is a very characteristically Thatcher phrase

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 3d

The Conference exhaustion is really hitting me today. Interesting that it took about three days to kick in!

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Nathan🌹 @nathanwylabour.bsky.social · 3d

Most of those with backbones have long since left for the Lib Dems or elsewhere. Caroline Nokes has taken refuge in the deputy speakership. Mel Stride seems determined to do absolutely nothing as Shadow Chancellor.

Anand Menon @anandmenon.bsky.social · 3d

I suppose I’m too old and cynical to expect ‘one nation Tories’ to stand up and be counted yet?

Robert Hutton @roberthutton.co.uk · 4d

"I see gangs of masked thugs roaming the streets rounding up anyone the wrong colour, and I think: *this* is what Britain needs."

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