tommsabb.bsky.social
Music historian (19c theatre). Opinions my own, not my employer's. Pour le pain, la paix, la liberté.
Book: global.oup.com/academic/product/music-the-market-and-the-marvellous-9780197267738; https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/98059
162 posts
316 followers
1,130 following
Prolific Poster
Conversation Starter
comment in response to
post
Not at all, it bothers me if they don't schedule-send them for Monday or the next morning. 😉
comment in response to
post
The Labour vote collapsing in cities was a big story of the *2024* election, which got virtually no coverage (except for Bristol Central, I suppose). Here in Brum they literally halved their vote, even though they had no net loss in seats.
comment in response to
post
Of course not. Frontbenchers think they're going to be rewarded with private sector jobs, and backbenchers either have just realised that's the plan, or they've just realised there's not enough private sector jobs for everyone.
comment in response to
post
The division will now be between “the moderates” who are willing to vote the bill through with large concessions and “the hardliners” who want to throw the whole thing out. It’s hard to see what’s left of the bill once watered down. Making it harder to claim PIP rather than much harder? We’ll see.
comment in response to
post
Yup. Also, you know who was a big fan of denaturalisation? Pétain.
comment in response to
post
Also 👇🏻
bsky.app/profile/tomm...
comment in response to
post
I'm also so tired of hearing ‘it's working-class people who feel the nefarious effects of immigration’ presented as a ‘progressive’ argument. It's a classic rightwing argument: the late Jacques Chirac used it back in 1991, for goodness' sake. fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_brui...
comment in response to
post
Not sure he has, since he somehow manages to do some both-siding and left-blaming by denouncing ‘vanguardism’. If these were the 1920s, he'd say Lenin and Mussolini are both bad. As we are in the 2020s, he has no contemporary left example, but that's not going to stop him, apparently. 😩
comment in response to
post
Good piece, but please tell the Guardian to fix the caption to one of the pictures — mixing up racialised people with each other is not the best optics for a progressive paper, is it? 🙄
comment in response to
post
Don't have a subscription — by ‘the next Bevan’, does he mean the next Bevan, or the next Beeching?
comment in response to
post
I did know from sharing an office with the Havergal Brian papers and knowing someone who wrote about it, but yes, it's a bit niche! 🤣
comment in response to
post
Liz Truss was a utopian thinker in comparison!
comment in response to
post
This sounds like Italian pundits 2011–2021 arguing for technocratic cabinets because the voting public is unreliable, we need competent stewards, yadda yadda. And tbf, Starmer and technocracy appeal to the same tiny constituency of pro-establishment middle-class white boomers.
comment in response to
post
Are they? The UK is downsizing its higher education sector, France has made some noise but they're underfunding their universities too.
comment in response to
post
Peut-être que l'école ne sert plus à rien parce que les entreprises de la tech ont réussi à chasser la dernière famille pauvre du quartier? 😬
comment in response to
post
4️⃣ If Labour is truly the party for workers, how can this government be aiding and abetting these cuts and once again allowing workers and communities to pay the price? ⤵️
comment in response to
post
Plan B is probably to detoxify Reform the way Le Pen and Meloni have been laundered into great stateswomen. Especially if some Red Wall Caucus Labour MPs, fearing for their reelection, cross the floor to Reform, making the Reform parliamentary party look more presentable.
comment in response to
post
See, it's not that we hate working-class people, it's that the working-class people we've purged from our electoral coalition were not rich enough, not rightwing enough, not white enough, and lived in safe seats.