theangelofhistory.bsky.social
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If you want total control of your family you can’t have 500 kids in any era. Even Genghis Khan didn’t have total control of his progeny.
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Wasn’t it Keith Joseph who derailed his leadership by going on about family values after getting divorced?
I wonder how much this phenomenon is linked to men who valorise their fathers but sense that in the present day, their mothers would have left their fathers: hence hatred of the present day…
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As in he sired them in one bedroom?
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Kathleen Stock coming face to face with the corporate hospitality sector
m.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gsz...
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People like Starbucks and Leon and Costa have a lot of legal spend and a lot of estate. They know what they’re doing and they’re the future. Unisex rooms for everyone. Stock can’t defeat this. I expects lots of entitled upper middle class TERFs are going to spend the next 2 years shouting at staff.
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You’re legally required to provide something specified for disabled access. So you just build two loos that are almost entirely the same but you mark one as disabled, ensure its toilet suite is appropriate but leave both open to everyone.
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We have a chat group and take shifts outside of his flat
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I think it’s more “legacy”. As Starbucks show in all their new units, the most space & cost efficient approach is to have 1-3 closed door units, one of which is marked for “disabled”. Starbucks used to have “men’s” and “women’s” in their units developed 25 years ago.
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Of course the government could pass primary legislation to impose the TERF view. And as you’ve said elsewhere this government is open to imposing costs on business. But the cost of moving all UK estate into triple bathroom facilities is so high, the pushback from business will be severe. end
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Which isn’t going to happen. Because this will cost so much money they won’t do it and will say (in legal terms) “come at me bro”. And if the EHRC do, they’ll lose. I think this ruling ushers in a new era of unisex in all post 18 & non educational settings.
We are all Ally McBeal now.
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I don’t disagree at all!
But it’s exactly the kind of policy where the party could & would land on “oppose” after hours of internal debates with people citing John Stuart Mill & arguing whether “hearing” is your body being affected. Davey is just going “is it popular? does it fix a problem? Do it”.
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I don’t see the OBR surviving in its current form. It’s remote & role will be reduced & it’s become closer to a model where it basically provides information to Parliament alongside the Budget, ie it’ll score the Budget as hitting narrow fiscal targets not economic ones.
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…the kind of policy targeting middle England, but which the Lib Dems of yesteryear would oppose on the grounds of it being ideologically “illiberal”. In effect Davey is no longer trying to make an offering to liberals, but an offering to “educated & non-elderly middle England voters”. 2/2
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1/2 Semi seriously what this reflects is Davey pursuing an interesting shift in Lib Dem vibes. LDs were the party where positions would emerge driven by ideology to a far greater degree than Tories or Labour, sometimes with principled outcomes, sometimes bizarre. But banning speaker use is exactly
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Why would you do that when you can just be unisex for everything, outside of educational settings?
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20 per cent fewer people
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And we went to CenterParcs where the changing areas are 1. unisex 2. entirely locked cubicles. Dividing families up by sex, gender, whatever, is just obsolete. Falkner is finished. end
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Well, your husband has never had to clean up after me!
I’m sure in reality things really vary rather than being “men awful” but for some reason if a toilet is a pub, a certain % of men just piss on the floor. But pubs are old buildings with separate gender loos anyway. But the future is unisex.
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If you want a picture of the future, imagine three Starbucks unisex closed bathrooms, & a TERF crying at the sight of the seats covered in piss because men use them, forever. And know that it is forever.
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…or domestic production
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It seems very obvious that many journalists, reflecting broader elite attitudes, share far right opinions or find them particularly thrilling through a sort of contrarian transgression (“I’m willing to think what the sheeple/bien pessants won’t”). The far right isn’t a working class thing.
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The EHRC will end up before the ECHR (court) arguing about the ECHR (convention)
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Let’s just say, there are lawyers out there a lot smarter than Baroness Falkner and they’re advise the private sector on how to navigate the case law- not the EHRC - cost effectively which to me looks like “everything is unisex or a closed cubicle”.
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The goal was always to drive trans people from public life - because it was so very obvious that the women driving this issue weren’t primarily motivated by self protection but hatred of others (which they might genuinely interpret as an act of self protection). Hence Stock now alighting on IVF.
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And it’s entirely the fault of the Labour Party that have refused to clean house and remove tory appointees from roles like the EHRC which should be beyond politics. Because the senior Labour leadership seem to have mostly settled on “let’s be honest hardworking Tories”.
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The key is to have a basis for mobilising individuals into active politics, with both a commitment to activity & a structure for it. Since class consciousness & class based politics/organisation is dead (hence socialism being non-viable), perhaps models like yours can provide an alternative…
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I’m not all pessimistic but history shows that liberals just won’t fight. Their primary goal is to operate within the established system but they won’t fight to protect the system. The US Democrats graphically demonstrate this: they failed to protect the system & now they’re just acquiescing.
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The core problem is the one identified by Orwell: liberals won’t fight fascists, only socialists will. In Britain liberals were co-opted by socialists but without socialist leadership they’d have acquiesced to fascists as they did elsewhere. But socialism is no longer viable as a political movement.
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PS I did a course called “the Nazi Voter”. Unemployed people didn’t vote Nazi, employed people did. Poor people didn’t vote Nazi, middle class people did. You couldn’t use economic betterment to stop the Nazis because their voters weren’t poor; they were hostile to “communists” (real or imagined).
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All Western European democracies bar France have meaningfully had the far right since the 1960s. France is unusual in that it took them as long as 1982. The far right is a feature of European political life (& soon England too) & it’s not about economics. So there’s no economic solution.
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Because the far right isn’t really an economic problem or a linear reaction to economic problems. Too many people for too long look at the far right through a “they told me the Nazis won because Weimar had a bad economy” lens. We should do good economic policy but it won’t stop the far right! 2/2
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1/2 Well no because they had Le Pen Pere as a player since the late 70s (& he had his big breakthrough in 1982)! I think it’s clear to see French economic success had no impact one way or the other on the far right. And correspondingly the UK didn’t get the far right even in darkest 1980s period.
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(PS but I agree we can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube, not that I think that’s what Glasman really wants, what he cares about is demographic change)
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…but just by income but geographically, has maintained much more sectorally diversity, is a bit less unequal & has a bit more manufacturing. And consequently those choices have really paid off since 2009 (& even more now with Trump). 2/2
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Tbf there’s a lot of historical analysis comparing Thatcher both leaning in to deindustrialising & using it as a device to destroy organised Labour while Mitterrand rages against the dying of the light &…it worked. Tho France & the UK are overall in the same place in 1995, France is less unequal 1/2
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Not that you asked but thinking about this more, if we want to delve into what we mean by “liberal-illiberal” more, the fault lines in Labour track “moralist vs hedonist”, “active citizens vs passive” & “individual vs the majority”, as much as anything else…
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I’m pretty sure he’s not as clever as he thinks he is!
But you’re right and the proof of the pudding is in the eating and Glasman is smart enough to understand that communitarian politics isn’t an alternative to state power; it relies on state power for it must be imposed on us against our will
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The extremism and extreme negativity about others that this kind of politics relies on (& it IS extreme for it is authoritarian) is painting enemies as monstrous, unnatural, in some way opposed to life itself.
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All those cars !
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Personal and social liberalism is culturally dominant. In the case of the former because it can segue with self satisfaction & even hedonism. But political liberalism is not triumphant: the same Young finance guy who opposes DEI can enjoy dancing to cool music & creeping on non white girls.
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I think people are far too much wedded on the “where from?” question and not enough on the “what’s going on now?” question because the latter breaks down barriers while the former helps put them up & people are very keen on both barriers & primordialism. Probably due to the death of religion.
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(I would add - & this is a point frequently misunderstood by both older politicians & religious ones - social liberalism isn’t a “conscience matter” because it tracks both left vs right ideology & partisanship far too much for it work that way, as it did in 80s/90s: Labour can’t really be illiberal)
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And Clare Short from the left and Michael Meacher from the old left in New Labour ! But notably both out by 2003.
Where did Cook and Hain belong you think?
On the current government Starmer has got himself into a pickle both professional & personal: what’s it all for? He’s not an economy guy.
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Wasn’t everyone ?
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Arguably everyone in new Labour was “party right” so I’m of the view that the old “right-soft left-hard left” distinction broke down anyway. Just as now the divide is between “illiberal right-liberal right-left” (I think the Bevanite-Croslandite-Blairite distinction theory has collapsed)