The Positive Brexit Thread

[KiwiScot 1,436]

I went to the tatical voting website curious to see the advice it would give and entered every postcode I've ever lived it and it said for everyone of them "don't bother". Could be a Scottish thing.

[Surfer 1,547]

For a party with such a large lead in the polls the Tories sure seem to be panicked - essentially calling their Labour opponents Communists, Quislings and Anti-Semites.

People want to know what you will do if you form the government, not hear you rabbit on about parliament, judges and press being the enemy of the people. 
 

The slogan “just get it done” does beg the question of what “it” really is, and “how” ??? 

Edited November 12, 2019 by Surfer

[Surfer 1,547]

Well there you go - Richard Tice wants the Brexit Party to be like the DUP. What a vision. 😞 

“I think I’ve got a really good chance of winning and if I can win, and a reasonable number of other Brexit party candidates can win, then we can hold them [the Conservatives] to account and then be like the DUP.”

[PurpleCanary 5,554]

8 hours ago, Jools said:

Good God, Purple, it's a good thing I'm here to put people straight 😎

Around 70 Remainiac MPs have already stepped down and most still in their Parties will be deselected or get the boot --- The next government will be majority Brexiteer allowing Boris to radically revise the WA or scrap it altogether.

You're welcome 😀

The EU will not renegotiate the Withdrawal Deal with Johnson. If he wants to scrap it unilaterally he is welcome to try to do that. I would not advise it, given the likely future consequences, but that hardly means he would not go ahead.

 

 

 

[Herman 9,713]

The Conservatives have nothing really. They can promise some nonsensical economics but while they still have a destructive Brexit in their sights it will all come to nought. Vote tactically and GTTO. 

[Van wink 2,994]

9 hours ago, Rock The Boat said:

Lady Nugee shrugs shoulders, doesn't give sh!t Labour can't be trusted with our security - or the economy

 

Similar interview on radio 4 yesterday. 

[Herman 9,713]

Conservatives and GMB videos?! Are you sure it's not doctored? 

[Van wink 2,994]

12 hours ago, PurpleCanary said:

The only serious change from May’s deal that Johnson managed to ‘negotiate’ out of the EU was one the EU wanted all along. Absolute genius. As to the future relationship/trade deal with the EU, it is likely to be even further removed and more economically damaging than the one you wanted.

From the perspective of someone who wanted closer ties post Brexit the opportunity was lost by opposition MPs belligerently voting Mays deal down contributing to her inevitable departure. We could have been out by now with a PM at the helm who was not prepared to deliver a very hard line Brexit. The ERG were never going to get behind her but if more opposition MP’s had been prepared to compromise we would be out and heading for a softer exit than the one Boris will undoubtedly deliver. I’m not looking to allocate blame here,  it’s just a statement of fact imo. Labour will now get the election JC craved but may well end up going backward in terms of seats.

[canarydan23 4,060]

9 minutes ago, Van wink said:

From the perspective of someone who wanted closer ties post Brexit the opportunity was lost by opposition MPs belligerently voting Mays deal down contributing to her inevitable departure. We could have been out by now with a PM at the helm who was not prepared to deliver a very hard line Brexit. The ERG were never going to get behind her but if more opposition MP’s had been prepared to compromise we would be out and heading for a softer exit than the one Boris will undoubtedly deliver. I’m not looking to allocate blame here,  it’s just a statement of fact imo. Labour will now get the election JC craved but may well end up going backward in terms of seats.

I blame the opposition MPs!

But I'm not allocating blame. No sir.

[canarydan23 4,060]

"C4 News: Will you debate John McDonnell?

Sajid Javid: It's always good to have a robust discussion and I am happy to discuss with John McDonnell at any time.

C4 News: After that interview... Downing Street has said Sajid the Chancellor will not be debating Mr McDonnnell."
 

We've got some brave people in charge haven't we. And their supporters cry snowflake at every opportunity whilst advocating voting for cowards.

[Van wink 2,994]

3 minutes ago, canarydan23 said:

I blame the opposition MPs!

But I'm not allocating blame. No sir.

Not at all, the ERG carry the same responsibility. No not blaming Dan, it’s just a matter of arithmetic. 

[Van wink 2,994]

1 hour ago, Van wink said:

Similar interview on radio 4 yesterday. 

“Conservatives and GMB videos?! Are you sure it's not doctored?”

I heard “white van man” on the Today program.  Can’t vouch for the video but as for the live radio broadcast she could offer no assurance that JC would be prepared to defend this country. It’s the primary objective of government and JC fails at the first hurdle.

Edited November 12, 2019 by Van wink

[ron obvious 1,499]

Bigger picture article:

Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

University-educated millennials have absorbed elite values but will never enjoy the lifestyle

BY MARY HARRINGTON

Credit: Richard Baker / Getty

Mary Harrington is a writer and political blogger

 

November 11, 2019

---

Filed under:

Flyover country

Brexithousing shortageMillennialsUniversity

---

Of all the dire warnings issued in the run-up to the referendum, perhaps the least effective was George Osborne’s threat that house prices could crash by 18% in the event of Brexit.

For young people, home ownership is now an unattainable dream for all but a few, and so in 2017 when Aussie millionaire Tim Gurner said that millennials would be better able to buy homes if they spent less on avocado toast, the BBC calculated that it would take 67 years of renouncing avocado toast on a daily basis to save enough for a property in London at today’s prices. Why, then, would young people be so grimly devoted to the EU when a house price crash would benefit them at the expense of all those selfish Brexit-voting oldies?

Countless articles have rehearsed the class insecurities of the “left behind” Brexiters. Generally these unfortunates are depicted fulminating over pasties and ale in shabby market towns and grim post-industrial cities outside the London area. The object of their antipathy is the shiny “elite”, plugged into a promise-filled, multicultural urban life and the knowledge economy, seemingly buoyant in the new, frictionless modern world.

Leaving aside its substantive, real-world pros and cons, Europhilia has become a mark of devotion to the culture and worldview associated with this “elite” and the modern world it navigates. It is a value set strongly correlated with tertiary education and that has come to be called “openness”.

Steve Bullock@GuitarMoog

 · 3 Jul 2019

 

Replying to @velvetsilk

Because his influence is a malign one that damages us all, and I don’t believe you have to be a women to call out misogyny, gay to call out homophobia, a foreigner to call out xenophobia, or BAME to call out racism.

Steve Bullock@GuitarMoog

 

Brexit is not really about the UK’s constitutional relationship with the EU. It’s a fight for the values of equality, tolerance, openness, solidarity, internationalism, rationality and truth. You don’t defend values by ignoring them being stamped on.

 

 

 

 

 

The first election in which I was old enough to vote saw the election of Tony Blair, which makes me just middle-aged enough to remember this Britain arriving. Coffee not tea (and not instant coffee either); cities not towns; low-cost flights, not Butlins; multiculture not monoculture; Jamie Oliver, avocados, broadband, the restyled Mini Cooper; mass customisation; 50% of young people going to universities; everything done on a mountain of debt, especially that 50% graduate rate.

If Thatcherism opened the country economically, Blair’s Britain did so culturally. This double “openness” is the heart of “cultural Remain”.

 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

BY MARY HARRINGTON

There are many desirable things about this “open” world and lifestyle. I am a big fan of avocados and European minibreaks, but even leaving aside these caricature “left behind” curmudgeons in the stagnant provinces, openness is a double-edged sword. One of its side effects has been a boom in the cost of living and, with it, a rising inequality (that began under Thatcher) and continued — particularly in the South — under Blair, only to get worse in the 2008 crash.

Meanwhile, the boom in openness-promoting tertiary education produced not so much a boom in graduate jobs as inflation in the qualification levels required to do the jobs we already had. This has left many young people struggling to service a mountain of debt on salaries that are never likely to show much of the “graduate premium” they were promised.

Today, thanks in part to the “open” economy whose values form the foundation of the “cultural Remain” identity, the cost of living — and especially home ownership — has rocketed. Simple aspirations that were within the reach of the working class in the 20th century are an unattainable dream today for millions of young people far higher up the sociocultural pile. And yet those young graduates have all, in the course of moving away to get their degree, absorbed the “open” value set now explicitly taught in tertiary education.

The result is an Everywhere precariat, that has absorbed the values of a world that has little to offer it in terms of concrete benefits, and resolves this conflict by renting the heavily-subsidised and internet-enabled perks of a smarter lifestyle than it can afford to buy. Where once rentals might have just been housing and cars, today that can even include clothing.

 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Social mobility won't bring social justice

BY MARY HARRINGTON

The ferocious pro-EU rearguard action does not just represent the anger of an incumbent ruling class defending its perks. It also expresses the class anxieties of the lower echelons of those supposedly elite “open” classes, provisionally accepted as such via their graduate status, whose access to the perks of the open culture is at best precarious but whose cultural identity depends on it.

“Cultural Remain” should be understood less as a reasoned-through position and more as a highly emotional proxy for a faltering but still enticing lifestyle promise. As well as a howl of rage by a middle class unused to being balked, it is a wail of terror from young people terrified at the prospect of falling through the ever-thinning economic ice that separates the slick, happy modern “us” from the miserable, stagnant “them”. It is in this context that we should understand Corbynism.

Because the truth is that for many young people there is barely a fag paper between the urban twenty- and thirtysomething aspirational lifestyles rented via subscription services such as WeWork amid the coffee-shops and short-term rental markets of London, and those less fortunate ‘left-behind’ ones scraping by in the fulfilment hellscape of an Amazon depot.

No savings, no spare time, certainly no capacity to make long-term plans or get married or have kids. The only difference is that one lot get to enjoy their rented lifestyle along with avocado on toast and a “connected fitness experience” instead of ready meals and sanctions for taking time off sick.

Seen this way, one can understand better the totemic power of “freedom of movement”. You might not be able to afford to buy a house where you want to, but at least, says the optimism of youth, with freedom of movement we still have the limitless potential to try something new. To start afresh, somewhere else. Not to mention that same freedom means people with lifestyles even more precarious than our own can come here to staff coffee shops and warehouses, which reassures us we’ve got it better than them. That we’re still us.

 

SUGGESTED READING

How to make Britain One Nation again

BY DAVID SKELTON

But even that party may be drawing to an end. As Janan Ganesh recently noted, the days of the middle-class “world traveller” may be numbered. Graduate starting salaries in the UK are some of the lowest in northern Europe, especially in the creative sectors. Since the crash of 2008, wages for young people have been hit the hardest even as the burden of student debt rises.

The cost of living is rising faster for those in rental accommodation than for homeowners, and with it the cost of those ancillary lifestyle services that console young Everywheres for the way twentieth-century aspirations have moved beyond their grasp. WeWork, Uber and Peloton all posted staggering losses in 2019; how long before the price of their services goes up under investor pressure on the bottom line? Even the price of avocados tripled between 2013 and 2018. The urban Everywhere precariat is heading for a crunch.

They may have bought into the “open” cultural values disseminated by debt-fuelled universities. They may have flocked to London in search of a job in the media, and painted their faces blue to attend People’s Vote rallies.

But millions of young Everywheres are on their way to realising they are not counted among the elite any more. That, in fact, they never were, except on a subscription basis — and even the cost of those subscriptions is slipping from their grasp. We can expect a political reckoning to follow.

[canarydan23 4,060]

Just now, ron obvious said:

Bigger picture article:

Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

University-educated millennials have absorbed elite values but will never enjoy the lifestyle

BY MARY HARRINGTON

Credit: Richard Baker / Getty

Mary Harrington is a writer and political blogger

 

 

November 11, 2019

---

Filed under:

Flyover country

Brexithousing shortageMillennialsUniversity

---

Of all the dire warnings issued in the run-up to the referendum, perhaps the least effective was George Osborne’s threat that house prices could crash by 18% in the event of Brexit.

For young people, home ownership is now an unattainable dream for all but a few, and so in 2017 when Aussie millionaire Tim Gurner said that millennials would be better able to buy homes if they spent less on avocado toast, the BBC calculated that it would take 67 years of renouncing avocado toast on a daily basis to save enough for a property in London at today’s prices. Why, then, would young people be so grimly devoted to the EU when a house price crash would benefit them at the expense of all those selfish Brexit-voting oldies?

Countless articles have rehearsed the class insecurities of the “left behind” Brexiters. Generally these unfortunates are depicted fulminating over pasties and ale in shabby market towns and grim post-industrial cities outside the London area. The object of their antipathy is the shiny “elite”, plugged into a promise-filled, multicultural urban life and the knowledge economy, seemingly buoyant in the new, frictionless modern world.

Leaving aside its substantive, real-world pros and cons, Europhilia has become a mark of devotion to the culture and worldview associated with this “elite” and the modern world it navigates. It is a value set strongly correlated with tertiary education and that has come to be called “openness”.

Steve Bullock@GuitarMoog

 · 3 Jul 2019

 

Replying to @velvetsilk

Because his influence is a malign one that damages us all, and I don’t believe you have to be a women to call out misogyny, gay to call out homophobia, a foreigner to call out xenophobia, or BAME to call out racism.

Steve Bullock@GuitarMoog

 

Brexit is not really about the UK’s constitutional relationship with the EU. It’s a fight for the values of equality, tolerance, openness, solidarity, internationalism, rationality and truth. You don’t defend values by ignoring them being stamped on.

 

 

 

 

 

The first election in which I was old enough to vote saw the election of Tony Blair, which makes me just middle-aged enough to remember this Britain arriving. Coffee not tea (and not instant coffee either); cities not towns; low-cost flights, not Butlins; multiculture not monoculture; Jamie Oliver, avocados, broadband, the restyled Mini Cooper; mass customisation; 50% of young people going to universities; everything done on a mountain of debt, especially that 50% graduate rate.

If Thatcherism opened the country economically, Blair’s Britain did so culturally. This double “openness” is the heart of “cultural Remain”.

 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

BY MARY HARRINGTON

There are many desirable things about this “open” world and lifestyle. I am a big fan of avocados and European minibreaks, but even leaving aside these caricature “left behind” curmudgeons in the stagnant provinces, openness is a double-edged sword. One of its side effects has been a boom in the cost of living and, with it, a rising inequality (that began under Thatcher) and continued — particularly in the South — under Blair, only to get worse in the 2008 crash.

Meanwhile, the boom in openness-promoting tertiary education produced not so much a boom in graduate jobs as inflation in the qualification levels required to do the jobs we already had. This has left many young people struggling to service a mountain of debt on salaries that are never likely to show much of the “graduate premium” they were promised.

Today, thanks in part to the “open” economy whose values form the foundation of the “cultural Remain” identity, the cost of living — and especially home ownership — has rocketed. Simple aspirations that were within the reach of the working class in the 20th century are an unattainable dream today for millions of young people far higher up the sociocultural pile. And yet those young graduates have all, in the course of moving away to get their degree, absorbed the “open” value set now explicitly taught in tertiary education.

The result is an Everywhere precariat, that has absorbed the values of a world that has little to offer it in terms of concrete benefits, and resolves this conflict by renting the heavily-subsidised and internet-enabled perks of a smarter lifestyle than it can afford to buy. Where once rentals might have just been housing and cars, today that can even include clothing.

 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Social mobility won't bring social justice

BY MARY HARRINGTON

The ferocious pro-EU rearguard action does not just represent the anger of an incumbent ruling class defending its perks. It also expresses the class anxieties of the lower echelons of those supposedly elite “open” classes, provisionally accepted as such via their graduate status, whose access to the perks of the open culture is at best precarious but whose cultural identity depends on it.

“Cultural Remain” should be understood less as a reasoned-through position and more as a highly emotional proxy for a faltering but still enticing lifestyle promise. As well as a howl of rage by a middle class unused to being balked, it is a wail of terror from young people terrified at the prospect of falling through the ever-thinning economic ice that separates the slick, happy modern “us” from the miserable, stagnant “them”. It is in this context that we should understand Corbynism.

Because the truth is that for many young people there is barely a fag paper between the urban twenty- and thirtysomething aspirational lifestyles rented via subscription services such as WeWork amid the coffee-shops and short-term rental markets of London, and those less fortunate ‘left-behind’ ones scraping by in the fulfilment hellscape of an Amazon depot.

No savings, no spare time, certainly no capacity to make long-term plans or get married or have kids. The only difference is that one lot get to enjoy their rented lifestyle along with avocado on toast and a “connected fitness experience” instead of ready meals and sanctions for taking time off sick.

Seen this way, one can understand better the totemic power of “freedom of movement”. You might not be able to afford to buy a house where you want to, but at least, says the optimism of youth, with freedom of movement we still have the limitless potential to try something new. To start afresh, somewhere else. Not to mention that same freedom means people with lifestyles even more precarious than our own can come here to staff coffee shops and warehouses, which reassures us we’ve got it better than them. That we’re still us.

 

SUGGESTED READING

How to make Britain One Nation again

BY DAVID SKELTON

But even that party may be drawing to an end. As Janan Ganesh recently noted, the days of the middle-class “world traveller” may be numbered. Graduate starting salaries in the UK are some of the lowest in northern Europe, especially in the creative sectors. Since the crash of 2008, wages for young people have been hit the hardest even as the burden of student debt rises.

The cost of living is rising faster for those in rental accommodation than for homeowners, and with it the cost of those ancillary lifestyle services that console young Everywheres for the way twentieth-century aspirations have moved beyond their grasp. WeWork, Uber and Peloton all posted staggering losses in 2019; how long before the price of their services goes up under investor pressure on the bottom line? Even the price of avocados tripled between 2013 and 2018. The urban Everywhere precariat is heading for a crunch.

They may have bought into the “open” cultural values disseminated by debt-fuelled universities. They may have flocked to London in search of a job in the media, and painted their faces blue to attend People’s Vote rallies.

But millions of young Everywheres are on their way to realising they are not counted among the elite any more. That, in fact, they never were, except on a subscription basis — and even the cost of those subscriptions is slipping from their grasp. We can expect a political reckoning to follow.

Ok boomer.

[ron obvious 1,499]

1 minute ago, canarydan23 said:

Ok boomer.

OK snowflake/traitor/cheese eating surrender monkey. Whatever.

 

[TCCANARY 263]

Wayne BayIey @Wayne_BayIey

....and the rest. I employed a full time campaign coordinator last week on a 2 month contract which has cost me thousands. I also have an outbuilding FULL of Brexit Party leaflets and signs ready for next weeks launch.

Nigel owes me over TEN GRAND.

 

"Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" - John Lydon

 

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

Marvellous how the agencies have been hired to promote the parties. Farage in the "checked" flat hat and country gentleman's coat, not plain flat hat and white scarf.

And where is Paul to tell us that his party will win the election when they are only going to stand in half of them. A lot of £25's not going to be used. Or have they already been spent.

Tory plan is to just rubbish Labour whose policies have seen them improve in the polls. I wonder how much the treacherous idea to release the Russian document after the election when if it was good news it would have been on the front page of the Mail/Express.

[Herman 9,713]

52 minutes ago, Van wink said:

“Conservatives and GMB videos?! Are you sure it's not doctored?”

I heard “white van man” on the Today program.  Can’t vouch for the video but as for the live radio broadcast she could offer no assurance that JC would be prepared to defend this country. It’s the primary objective of government and JC fails at the first hurdle.

If you genuinely cared about the defence and safety of this country you'd be asking why the ACTUAL government is hiding a report about foreign interference in OUR democracy. 

As it is, the silence from you Plastic Patriots is deafening. 

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

Cyber attack against Labour. Wonder if Donald and his very good friend have managed to get in touch with Putin, another one of their very good friends and told him to cover his tracks.

[TCCANARY 263]

6 minutes ago, Herman said:

If you genuinely cared about the defence and safety of this country you'd be asking why the ACTUAL government is hiding a report about foreign interference in OUR democracy. 

As it is, the silence from you Plastic Patriots is deafening. 

Johnson would expect a game of tennis, "that'll be £170,000, payable to CCHQ".

Supper with Gove anyone?

 

[keelansgrandad 6,679]

Supper with Gove anyone?

I think I would willingly hang just to shut that annoying terwat up. The most annoying rodent face that is backed up by that stupid posh Edddinbru/Westmisnter/Oxford/Nasal accent.

[Yellow Fever 3,747]

It really is a dreadful choice the two main parties offer.

Vote Tory / Brexit because the world owes us a living because we're British (or rather English). 

Vote Labour because the world owes us a living ....

 

Bah humbug to both of them.

It really is a race to the bottom.

Edited November 12, 2019 by Yellow Fever

[canarydan23 4,060]

""A compulsive liar who has betrayed every single person he has ever had dealings with: every woman who has ever loved him, every member of his family, every friend, every colleague, every employee, every constituent."

Courtesy of Nick Boles, formed Tory MP and Minister.

Will we be seeing him invited onto the BBC, LBC and Sky to eviscerate Johnson as Ian Austin was?

[TCCANARY 263]

What every candidate will be wearing this campaign, other colours are available. 😀

[PurpleCanary 5,554]

1 hour ago, Van wink said:

From the perspective of someone who wanted closer ties post Brexit the opportunity was lost by opposition MPs belligerently voting Mays deal down contributing to her inevitable departure. We could have been out by now with a PM at the helm who was not prepared to deliver a very hard line Brexit. The ERG were never going to get behind her but if more opposition MP’s had been prepared to compromise we would be out and heading for a softer exit than the one Boris will undoubtedly deliver. I’m not looking to allocate blame here,  it’s just a statement of fact imo. Labour will now get the election JC craved but may well end up going backward in terms of seats.

I don’t buy this argument at all. May was determined to deliver a hard Brexit because she was scared stiff of the ERG. As said on numerous occasions, if she had faced them down at the outset, when they were not powerful, and proposed staying in a customs union, she could have got Brexit through (and this is not just my view but one generally held by most sane political commentators).

But having given into them from the start, ruling out the single market AND a CU, she just made them stronger and stronger, so she could not change tack. The blame lies entirely with her, not just for failing to deliver Brexit, but for unwittingly paving the way for someone she apparently believes (though she will not say this publicly,  which is yet another example of her cowardice) is morally unfit to be prime minister. Since he is unfit to be PM in every other way that is some legacy of hers.

[Rock The Boat 1,325]

1 hour ago, ron obvious said:

Bigger picture article:

Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

University-educated millennials have absorbed elite values but will never enjoy the lifestyle

BY MARY HARRINGTON

Credit: Richard Baker / Getty

Mary Harrington is a writer and political blogger

 

 

November 11, 2019

---

Filed under:

Flyover country

Brexithousing shortageMillennialsUniversity

---

Of all the dire warnings issued in the run-up to the referendum, perhaps the least effective was George Osborne’s threat that house prices could crash by 18% in the event of Brexit.

For young people, home ownership is now an unattainable dream for all but a few, and so in 2017 when Aussie millionaire Tim Gurner said that millennials would be better able to buy homes if they spent less on avocado toast, the BBC calculated that it would take 67 years of renouncing avocado toast on a daily basis to save enough for a property in London at today’s prices. Why, then, would young people be so grimly devoted to the EU when a house price crash would benefit them at the expense of all those selfish Brexit-voting oldies?

Countless articles have rehearsed the class insecurities of the “left behind” Brexiters. Generally these unfortunates are depicted fulminating over pasties and ale in shabby market towns and grim post-industrial cities outside the London area. The object of their antipathy is the shiny “elite”, plugged into a promise-filled, multicultural urban life and the knowledge economy, seemingly buoyant in the new, frictionless modern world.

Leaving aside its substantive, real-world pros and cons, Europhilia has become a mark of devotion to the culture and worldview associated with this “elite” and the modern world it navigates. It is a value set strongly correlated with tertiary education and that has come to be called “openness”.

Steve Bullock@GuitarMoog

 · 3 Jul 2019

 

Replying to @velvetsilk

Because his influence is a malign one that damages us all, and I don’t believe you have to be a women to call out misogyny, gay to call out homophobia, a foreigner to call out xenophobia, or BAME to call out racism.

Steve Bullock@GuitarMoog

 

Brexit is not really about the UK’s constitutional relationship with the EU. It’s a fight for the values of equality, tolerance, openness, solidarity, internationalism, rationality and truth. You don’t defend values by ignoring them being stamped on.

 

 

 

 

 

The first election in which I was old enough to vote saw the election of Tony Blair, which makes me just middle-aged enough to remember this Britain arriving. Coffee not tea (and not instant coffee either); cities not towns; low-cost flights, not Butlins; multiculture not monoculture; Jamie Oliver, avocados, broadband, the restyled Mini Cooper; mass customisation; 50% of young people going to universities; everything done on a mountain of debt, especially that 50% graduate rate.

If Thatcherism opened the country economically, Blair’s Britain did so culturally. This double “openness” is the heart of “cultural Remain”.

 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

How motherhood put an end to my liberalism

BY MARY HARRINGTON

There are many desirable things about this “open” world and lifestyle. I am a big fan of avocados and European minibreaks, but even leaving aside these caricature “left behind” curmudgeons in the stagnant provinces, openness is a double-edged sword. One of its side effects has been a boom in the cost of living and, with it, a rising inequality (that began under Thatcher) and continued — particularly in the South — under Blair, only to get worse in the 2008 crash.

Meanwhile, the boom in openness-promoting tertiary education produced not so much a boom in graduate jobs as inflation in the qualification levels required to do the jobs we already had. This has left many young people struggling to service a mountain of debt on salaries that are never likely to show much of the “graduate premium” they were promised.

Today, thanks in part to the “open” economy whose values form the foundation of the “cultural Remain” identity, the cost of living — and especially home ownership — has rocketed. Simple aspirations that were within the reach of the working class in the 20th century are an unattainable dream today for millions of young people far higher up the sociocultural pile. And yet those young graduates have all, in the course of moving away to get their degree, absorbed the “open” value set now explicitly taught in tertiary education.

The result is an Everywhere precariat, that has absorbed the values of a world that has little to offer it in terms of concrete benefits, and resolves this conflict by renting the heavily-subsidised and internet-enabled perks of a smarter lifestyle than it can afford to buy. Where once rentals might have just been housing and cars, today that can even include clothing.

 

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Social mobility won't bring social justice

BY MARY HARRINGTON

The ferocious pro-EU rearguard action does not just represent the anger of an incumbent ruling class defending its perks. It also expresses the class anxieties of the lower echelons of those supposedly elite “open” classes, provisionally accepted as such via their graduate status, whose access to the perks of the open culture is at best precarious but whose cultural identity depends on it.

“Cultural Remain” should be understood less as a reasoned-through position and more as a highly emotional proxy for a faltering but still enticing lifestyle promise. As well as a howl of rage by a middle class unused to being balked, it is a wail of terror from young people terrified at the prospect of falling through the ever-thinning economic ice that separates the slick, happy modern “us” from the miserable, stagnant “them”. It is in this context that we should understand Corbynism.

Because the truth is that for many young people there is barely a fag paper between the urban twenty- and thirtysomething aspirational lifestyles rented via subscription services such as WeWork amid the coffee-shops and short-term rental markets of London, and those less fortunate ‘left-behind’ ones scraping by in the fulfilment hellscape of an Amazon depot.

No savings, no spare time, certainly no capacity to make long-term plans or get married or have kids. The only difference is that one lot get to enjoy their rented lifestyle along with avocado on toast and a “connected fitness experience” instead of ready meals and sanctions for taking time off sick.

Seen this way, one can understand better the totemic power of “freedom of movement”. You might not be able to afford to buy a house where you want to, but at least, says the optimism of youth, with freedom of movement we still have the limitless potential to try something new. To start afresh, somewhere else. Not to mention that same freedom means people with lifestyles even more precarious than our own can come here to staff coffee shops and warehouses, which reassures us we’ve got it better than them. That we’re still us.

 

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BY DAVID SKELTON

But even that party may be drawing to an end. As Janan Ganesh recently noted, the days of the middle-class “world traveller” may be numbered. Graduate starting salaries in the UK are some of the lowest in northern Europe, especially in the creative sectors. Since the crash of 2008, wages for young people have been hit the hardest even as the burden of student debt rises.

The cost of living is rising faster for those in rental accommodation than for homeowners, and with it the cost of those ancillary lifestyle services that console young Everywheres for the way twentieth-century aspirations have moved beyond their grasp. WeWork, Uber and Peloton all posted staggering losses in 2019; how long before the price of their services goes up under investor pressure on the bottom line? Even the price of avocados tripled between 2013 and 2018. The urban Everywhere precariat is heading for a crunch.

They may have bought into the “open” cultural values disseminated by debt-fuelled universities. They may have flocked to London in search of a job in the media, and painted their faces blue to attend People’s Vote rallies.

But millions of young Everywheres are on their way to realising they are not counted among the elite any more. That, in fact, they never were, except on a subscription basis — and even the cost of those subscriptions is slipping from their grasp. We can expect a political reckoning to follow.

Describes a few on here

[TCCANARY 263]

[Van wink 2,994]

3 hours ago, Herman said:

If you genuinely cared about the defence and safety of this country you'd be asking why the ACTUAL government is hiding a report about foreign interference in OUR democracy. 

As it is, the silence from you Plastic Patriots is deafening. 

When have I said the report shouldn’t be released, unless there is a genuine reason not too, which I doubt other than political expediency, then it should be. From what I heard this morning from one of the guys that gave evidence, both main parties are implicated.

[BigFish 1,986]

1 hour ago, Rock The Boat said:

Describes a few on here

Really @Rock The Boat, I don't think so and the fact you think so says more about you than anything else. This is poorly written poorly reseached piece of prejudice. It plays only to a particular conservative mindset that does not like young people, optimism and forward thinking. Across the world those areas in which the young who this writer disparages gather are wealthier, happier and more interesting. The writer, and I suspect you, diesn't like this. I wonder why

[Jools 584]

2 hours ago, Rock The Boat said:

Describes a few on here

Certainly does...

This thread has got even more kindergarten like since Sir Nigel's announcement yesterday -- They know they're toast 🍞😀