[The Weeping Angel]

Anthony Seldon's qualification to talk like he's Robert Caro has always escaped me.

It's like he's following events through headlines.

He's also following a narrative that is being set by the media.

[Tubby Isaacs]

Rupert Lowe on to the issues that matter there. Who'd take what was said and done on stage as representing the BBC? They swiftly apologized, so did Glastonbury itself.

His whole schtick is "publicly funded". This is the Pat Buchanan bollocks about offensive artworks in shows that had received public funding.

[The Weeping Angel]

Well, according to Andrew Marr if Starmer doesn't get welfare reform, his government is toast.

[kreuzberger]

The Pistol's Nazi iconography has to be seen in the then contemporary context. The Swastika was Vivienne Westwood's articulation of chaos and artistic dissent in an era of pure turmoil. Her boyfriend, Malcolm McLaren, just so happened to be the manager of a nascent rock n roll band, having taken the New York Dolls from nowhere to obscurity in Chinese communist leathers. It was a symbolic shortcut to filthy lucre. Nothing more, nothing less, and certainly not the reason why the establishment lost its shit and tried to silence dangerous voices.

At the time, the only voice that was successfully silenced was that of Gerry Adams. We all thought that the wooden BBC voice-overs were a poor, wooden actor's take, only to find out that it was a pretty good representation. I am licking my lips and looking forward to BBC producer staff voicing Kneecap.

All things considered, I am more persuaded than ever that Kneecap is the most potent and most important artistic force from these islands in the last 40-odd years. Cultural and racially agnostic, fiercely observant, politically boundless, and seriously fucking good at what they do.

[Abernathy]

At the time, the only voice that was successfully silenced was that of Gerry Adams. We all thought that the wooden BBC voice-overs were a poor, wooden actor's take, only to find out that it was a pretty good representation.

By Stephen Rea, a very fine Irish actor. I just googled him, and astonishingly, he is now 78 years old.

[kreuzberger]

EDASD

[Abernathy]

EDASD

Que ?

[Tubby Isaacs]

Well, according to Andrew Marr if Starmer doesn't get welfare reform, his government is toast.

Just like David Cameron after losing the Syria vote?

[Malcolm Armsteen]

EDASD

Que ?

Every day’s a school day.

[The Weeping Angel]

Well, according to Andrew Marr if Starmer doesn't get welfare reform, his government is toast.

Just like David Cameron after losing the Syria vote?

Yeah, I mean it depends on the legislation they put forward, something like say inheritance tax reform isn't going to cause much disquiet on the backbenchers.

[The Weeping Angel]

Apparently, Starmer is a reactionary centrist who is appeasing the far right,

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/when-moder ... popup=true

Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, seems to offer an example of the “substantive moderation” strategy working. He took over the Labour party in 2020 after Jeremy Corbyn, a strongly left leader, led the party to its worst result in a century during the 2019 election. Starmer moderated both symbolically (almost literally wrapping himself in the flag) and substantively, hacking apart the party’s progressive platform piece by piece. And in 2024, he won—resoundingly. Labour more than doubled its parliamentary representation and secured a 174-seat majority, only a couple of seats short of the record majorities won by Tony Blair a generation earlier.

Starmer’s achievement is real, but this story needs context. To start with, it’s not clear that Labour won the election so much as the Tories lost it. The Conservative party had been in power for almost a decade and a half. Conservatives were on their fifth prime minister—all of them, in their own ways, failures. Liz Truss in particular did irrecoverable damage to the party’s brand—crashing the economy, vaporizing half a trillion pounds for no intelligible reason, and famously being outlasted by a supermarket lettuce. Her successor, Rishi Sunak, had, without exaggeration, the worst election campaign launch I have ever seen—he barely managed to get through his speech, drenched by rain and drowned out by noise. Starmer was able to appear positively statesmanlike throughout the campaign simply because he did not look like he was about to cry the entire time.

Toby Buckle has been quite willing to defend the Democrats but Starmer is beyond the pale for some reason.