"Investment bankers about the financial crisis: “It was an easy game for us to earn a lot of money”
Asked about his political position: "I support the British people. I do not want these people to fall into poverty. If I believe, for example, that the Labour Party can help me to prevent that, then I support them. The party leadership insists that it will not tax the rich. If so, then I cannot."
@JimmyB I've got his book in my pile - I've heard it's superb and if what I've seen of him over the last few years is any indicator, it will be.
Did you know he's got a YT channel? https://www.youtube.com/@garyseconomics
@JimmyB Eugh, I've got zero patience with O'Brien these days - if you want to talk about blind spots, he's got so many planks in his eye he could open a branch of B&Q.
You can rest assured I will never recommend anything of his to you 😂
@fkamiah17 I didn't know him at all until very recently. He feels like someone who wants a bit of equality and opoportunity for all but hasn't bothered investing themselves in the hard yards of actually educating themselves.
Hating the #Tories is one thing. Actually getting into some basic progressive politics is other. As #KeirStarmer and his gang of monstrous thugs show us daily.
@JimmyB Don't get me started about O'Brien. He's a weathervane who got a big following on the back of being anti-Brexit. In reality he's much the same as the rest of the centrist commentariat - privately educated, and his dad was at the Telegraph.
Before his damascene conversion he was as bad as anyone else on LBC and did the celebrity column at the Scum.
He and others have made their beds with Starmer and seem quite happy to be lying in them. For now.
@fkamiah17 Right - didn't know that. It's a piece I jsut don't understand about the journalistic world: why doesn't a spell with Murdoch or the Mail make you 100% persona non-grata in decent circles?
I remember having the argument with an ex-friend - Blairite politico doing whatever those folks do in Westminster - about David Blunket writing a column for the Mail. The argument that 'how else will you reach that audience' always smelled very bad then and I don't think it's got any better.
@JimmyB It's a closed system - also, people can change 😂
To some extent they're obliged to write more widely - your Blairite politico friend is right. What's not necessary is to so completely abandon the fundamental tenets of your party in order to win power at all costs. That's even more true this time - Starmer had no need to do it. The Tories are literally unelectable. All he's doing is eroding his natural voter base.
@fkamiah17 Well - we'll have to agree to disagree on this one. I think she was completely wrong - as she has been about pretty much everything tbh, in her political life, believing that markets can save us. There are some lines folks should not step over and writing for the Mail is one of them. If them, then who not? Breitbart? Fox News? No - that's just not OK for me and no nose peg is big enough to allow that.
Sure - people can change. They need to demonstrate it though.
@JimmyB Sorry, she who?? I've no idea what you're talking about.
Breitbart and Fox News are US outlets, so irrelevant. It's a little politically naive to think that Labour et al should only write for the Guardian and the i, but the right wing can disseminate and broaden its bullshit message with the (vastly more popular) tabloids. A couple of articles does not a sellout make. The only one I'd draw the line at is the Scum.
@fkamiah17 As I say - we can disagree on this one. It's funny how one side of the argument is always 'politically naive' and the other is dangerously pragmatic, or worse...
@JimmyB Only if you're determined to be dogmatic about it. I don't like them writing for the red tops either and in a more equitable world they wouldn't (or would suffer at the polls for it. However, it should be clear to anyone who's ever been on Xitter that echo chambers are pointless, and this is magnified a thousand fold when you're trying to get elected in a voting system that already disadvantages you.
@fkamiah17 Isn't that the nature of a red line though? We all have them. And you can call my red line dogmatic but presumably we all have some. And crossing them always can be described as dogmatic by those whose line is in a different place.
I think the failure to be 'dogmatic' (I'd call it principled) about these things has been an utter disaster and we need a lot more a lot more of it.
The 'you have to be in their system' to get elected hasn't really worked too well for us...
@JimmyB Ideological purity is pointless - it just confines you to an echo-chamber and is ultimately counterproductive, as we're starting to see in Keith's Brave New Labour now.
If there's no room for discussion, you're basically a dictator.
@fkamiah17 Agreed. I've been stunned actually that the folks who charged JC with intolerance in the party, have physically purged the party of dissenters! It would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic.
But again though: one person's ideological purity is another's red line that they cannot cross. But discussion is essential - at least with those who have some interest in listening, and who might occasionally change their mind. Key life test for me: when did I last change my mind?
@JimmyB I think there's a definite distinction between ideological purity and having red lines, in that the latter usually applies to one particular (or a set of discrete but not necessarily related) policy or topic. The former is closed mindedness of the worst kind.
I don't think it's even a matter of changing one's mind - more of incorporating new (and perhaps conflicting) information into your view and adapting it accordingly.
@fkamiah17 I do think changing my mind is critical. I was brought up in a fundamentalist RC cult and the process of deconversion showed me how completely wrong I could be about pretty much everything.
That's left me with a very different approach to establishing how I know what is true (basically principles based). And the chances that I am right are vanishingly small - so what am I learning, and if I don't ever move then probably I'm not looking hard enough.
@JimmyB I did mean to add that myself - changing one's mind is important. To clarify, it's not always necessary to completely alter a position, reevaluating and adjusting your approach can be sufficient. It's a process, in some situations.
I can understand how your particular situation would give you a different perspective but I was lucky enough to be raised by an atheist hippy activist 😂
If you're not learning, you're not living.
@fkamiah17 Yeah - that sounds nice! I hope that's how my now adult kids would describe their upbringing (I'lll ask them!).
The process of deconversion, specially if you were as deep as me (I very nearly became an RC priest), is devastatingly difficult. It's like coming out. Or discovering that the Matrix is a documentary. Habits of 'knowinging you're right just because' have to be challenged constantly, alongside a nagging knowledge that generally you're actually wrong. Hmmm.
@JimmyB Oh, I dunno - she had a penchant for printing political tshirts for us at a tender age which didn't exactly accord with my burgeoning fashion sense 🤣 Easy way to spot me and my brother in the primary school playground? We're the ones in the bright yellow "Free Nelson Mandela" tshirts. Seems cool now - in 1981, not so much 😆
I guess you could say one thing I'm pretty dogmatic about is the dangers of religion.
@fkamiah17 But don't you find you have some topics where there just isn't scope for wiggle room? I was an aid-worker for years and it's led me to having some views which are fairly inflexible.
The Murdoch press, the Mail, Express I see as tools of deep oppression. And I hear the arguments as to why folks deal with them - and I find them bad, short-term, convenient arguments. I find them arguments which have carried heavy weight for the infliction of serious suffering. Happy to hear otherwise.
@fkamiah17 Yeah - for sure! I'm avoiding some fairly boring work - so crack on... but the sun is sort of coming out so might go and plants something in the greenhouse instead.
@JimmyB Hehehe ... you've caught me on the one day of the last couple of weeks where I'm doing some legitimate adulting 😁
I don't want to rush an answer and be unclear or give space for misunderstanding.
Go, outside! I managed to find 10 minutes when it wasn't blowing a hoolie to pot up the tomato plants and shove them into the cold frame before it started raining again.
I did but it seems like a statement of screamingly obvious... When they are attacking the 'leftie middle class' publicly for objecting to the privatisation of the NHS, I think we know what we are dealing with.
An issue for #Starmer now is that he has lied so regularly - almost everytime he promises anything in fact (no exageration) he cannot now be redeemed. You'd have to be truly stupid to believe this crowd. About anything except their self interest.
@fkamiah17 His book is excellent. It has tho, a really weirdly bad chapter, where his personal stupid prejudices scream at the reader. He hates Jeremy C - and his reasons are steeped in prejudice. It's odd. So the young people who swarmed to the party are naive. The PLP who stood shoulder to shoulder against him were experienced statesmen and women. Etc.
It fucked me off no end - and I'm no Corbynista.. Weird how folks have such blind spots. Spose we all do eh?
@JimmyB I'm no Corbynista either but I have to say my view on him has been changing over the last few months. Not to the extent that I think he's the misunderstood saviour of the country like some of his supporters but the case of how he was brought down by the party and how differently he was treated than Keith by the media is pretty compelling. Doesn't excuse his absolutely dire performance when he was actually leader though.
@fkamiah17 His dire performance as leader is really hard for me to assess. I would love him to have been more vocally pro-Europe buit he also wasn't the Brexiteer he is presented at by the Blairites.
I'd love him to have been a better despatch box orator - but that doesn't actually make for good decisions.
In reality he was fatally undermined by the PLP - against the will of the party, in lockstep with the Tories.
He was also the most personally decent politican for years. That's something.
@JimmyB He completely wasted the hung parliament and was crap at the dispatch box. He thought refusing to answer questions from other politicians and the public alike was some kind of display of morality.
So basically, we hold the same position and on your last point, I couldn't agree more. When you do a side by side with Keith, the falling off is marked.
@fkamiah17 And we have the Forde report now so anyone throwing the anti-semitism slander around now at him can just fuck right off. We have the receipts.
@JimmyB I've yet to read that but one day I'll get round to it. In the interim, I'm willing to acknowledge that I was wrong about the whole thing for a while. It could yet turn out to be one of the worst political turn of events for many years.
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