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    This all sounds a bit good for Starmer.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics...-customs-union

    Corbyn and allies try, apparently for no better reasons than to piss Chuka Umunna off, resist Starmer's customs policy. Starmer does a "you should have seen me in there" and the policy is adopted sometime later.

    I'm sceptical it all happened like this.

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      John McDonnell meeting with the Westboro Baptist Church A Woman's Place UK is it?

      Course this will get fuck all attention cos the media classes are by and large hand in glove with that transmisogynist hate group.

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        https://twitter.com/AbiWilks/status/1043972705182273536

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          https://twitter.com/AngelaRayner/status/1043974573820182530

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            [url]https://twitter.com/davcon73/status/1043932684366622723[/url]
            Last edited by Nefertiti2; 23-09-2018, 21:32.

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              Tough talking on Universal Credit

              A lot of 'could', but promising. And this - "She also said Labour would ban all benefit sanctions for people who turn up late to a JobCentre" - seems a concrete commitment to end egregious abuse that has been happening since well into the New Labour govt.

              John McDonnell meeting with the Westboro Baptist Church A Woman's Place UK is it?

              And people wonder why I find it hard to trust cis people, however 'progressive' they seem. Caroline Lucas was going to meet them too. I liked her, so follow her on Twitter, which exposed me to Julie Bindel reply to Lucas' announcement by echoing antisemitic tropes and raving about a "trans cabal", to which CL responded with legitimate concerns stuff. Never voting for them again.

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                Anybody can say that boilerplate stuff, Nef. This is what they actually put in the manifesto. It wasn't very good.

                https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/9235

                Both the Liberal Democrats and Labour propose increasing income tax. While the Liberal Democrat proposal would affect the highest-income half of adults, Labour’s proposal would only affect the highest-income 2%. But the revenue from Labour’s plans is vastly more uncertain, and highly likely to be lower than under the Liberal Democrats.

                Both the Liberal Democrats and Labour propose increases to benefits. But those proposed by the Liberal Democrats are much larger – reversing nearly all of the cuts planned for the next few years.

                But the Education stuff sounds good. Rayner had been a bit quiet, but looks like she's been doing plenty of work.

                Labour said that, shortly after taking power, it would allow local authorities to build schools again, whilst halting the free school programme, a flagship initiative of Michael Gove, when he was education secretary under the coalition government.


                Local authorities will also be allowed to take control of failing academies or what it calls “zombie academies” without a sponsor if they wanted to. The party says that there are 124 academies which have been earmarked for transfer to another trust, usually because of performance concerns.

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                  new manifesto coming up for.a new election, Tubbs.

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                    Fair point.

                    The holiday homes charge (to raise £560m) looks a good idea. I don't know if it'll raise that money, but it's one of those things where the way you'd avoid it (presumably by some sort of Air BnB thing some of the time) would be positive too.

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                      `the Financial Times has splashed on the "boilerplate" stuff, Tubbs,

                      thw only paper to treat labour with any degree of seriousness

                      https://twitter.com/MattZeitlin/status/1043980459540131841

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                        I was talking about the other tweet.

                        The stuff on the front of the FT sounds very interesting.

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                          Originally posted by delicatemoth View Post

                          John McDonnell meeting with the Westboro Baptist Church A Woman's Place UK is it?

                          And people wonder why I find it hard to trust cis people, however 'progressive' they seem. Caroline Lucas was going to meet them too. I liked her, so follow her on Twitter, which exposed me to Julie Bindel reply to Lucas' announcement by echoing antisemitic tropes and raving about a "trans cabal", to which CL responded with legitimate concerns stuff. Never voting for them again.
                          The last year or so have been eye-opening (to me) how riddled with this sort of transphobic conspiracy theorising is within the wider left. The anarchist left have seemingly done ok - we've lost a load of infrastructure - either binned because it was too tolerant of terfs or harassed out of existence by terfs - but mostly we've cauterized the movement and the main openly terf sympathetic orgs are a marginal Anarchist Federation splinter group and a few tiny organisations linked to one specific person.

                          But in the institutional left - especially the trade union bureaucracy - a small group of transphobes seem to exert a lot of influence. I'm not that surprised John McDonnell is meeting with A Woman's Place because many of the main organisers are also longstanding trade union comrades of McDonnell.

                          It's really frightening the amount of influence a tiny number of fascists and their media allies can end up wielding.

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                            Graham Linehan has revealed himself to be a monstrously unpleasant bastard over the whole affair as well, I’d have expected it from a professional nasty bastard like Wings over Scotland

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                              The amount of people who seem to dedicate their lives to being incredibly angry online about transwomen seems to be out of proportion to the number of transwomen in the world.

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                                Originally posted by Lang Spoon View Post
                                Graham Linehan has revealed himself to be a monstrously unpleasant bastard over the whole affair as well, I’d have expected it from a professional nasty bastard like Wings over Scotland
                                Yeah, it's incredibly weird. Like, he's not just a transmisogynistic bigot, but a transmisogynistic bigot with missionary zeal.

                                There's a lot to be written about online radicalisation in terf circles, cos it's fascinating and terrifying. In many senses it resembles the growth of the alt-right, just with mumsnet and the New Statesman instead of 4-chan.

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                                  It is bizarre and strikingly more of a thing in Britain than elsewhere

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                                    It has become a thing here recently because of concerns that proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act may ultimately lead to the replacement of "sex" with "gender" as a protected category for the purposes of the Equalities Act. If some people appear to be incredibly angry, it is probably not unrelated to the repeated threats of violence some of them have been subjected to for daring to suggest that female biology is a thing.

                                    It is not a straightforward issue, no matter what many people would like to think. Ridiculous comments about "fascists" are not helpful.

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                                      Indeed, the left in the US has largely looked on TERFmania with amusement and horror. I've seen the odd US TERF but it's nowhere near the mainstream thing it is here.

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                                        On reflection, I don't think the shares policy is going to last very long. As I understand it the company has to issue new shares to staff. Doesn't that mean that existing shareholdings (held by lots of pension funds) are diluted and therefore worth less?

                                        The points also been made that many of the staff for these big companies are well paid already- not all of them, by any means- but even 20 years ago, my firm (not the most hardnosed in its field) had already outsourced a lot of lower paying jobs. Is it much of a problem that this staff aren't getting dividends? McDonnell's made a fair bit of that.

                                        It's a sort of updated "commanding heights" thing. But how much difference does 10% shareholding make in industrial democracy terms? Is it worth the bother?

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                                          UK companies generally have pre-emptive rights, which would afford existing shareholders the opportunity to prevent themselves from being diluted.

                                          I think that you over-estimate both the degree of outsourcing in public companies (certainly industrial companies) and the magnitude of the pay gaps.

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                                            Alphaville has a post up pointing out that for most companies the majority of the employee dividends will actually end up going to the Treasury (even before income tax), so it's as much a convoluted tax measure as anything.

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                                              Originally posted by Central Rain View Post
                                              It has become a thing here recently because of concerns that proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act may ultimately lead to the replacement of "sex" with "gender" as a protected category for the purposes of the Equalities Act. If some people appear to be incredibly angry, it is probably not unrelated to the repeated threats of violence some of them have been subjected to for daring to suggest that female biology is a thing.

                                              It is not a straightforward issue, no matter what many people would like to think. Ridiculous comments about "fascists" are not helpful.
                                              1) the changes to the GRA aren't going to do that. They're going to enable trans women to legally change their gender without getting a medical diagnosis. Other countries have gender self-ID without any of the problems terfs envisage.
                                              2) "female biology" isn't a well-defined thing.
                                              3) terfism extends far beyond organising against the GRA to conspiracy theories around "big pharma", "brainwashing" of trans men and afab nonbinary people to "erase lesbians", and trying to prevent trans women having access to any sort of public life (e.g. public swimming pools etc), to harassing, doxing and abusing prominent trans women. if people call them fascists, it's because the shoe fits.

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                                                That Alphaville piece is interesting. I hadn't realised that the shares weren't tradeable and find the "Trojan Horse" idea intriguing.

                                                If we understand the math of Labour's proposal to give stock to employees of UK companies, it goes something like this:

                                                10 per cent of the stock goes to the staff, over course of a decade.
                                                Employees can't buy or sell the special stock, but share a dividend of up to £500 a year each.
                                                Any dividend above that amount goes to the treasury.
                                                Let's assume that this dividend-paying stock will be a form of preferred stock, meaning dividends must at least match those paid on ordinary shares.

                                                We'll also assume it gets held in trust on behalf of all the employees, with the dividend distributed annually, to deal with any problems of hiring and firing. And we'll jump straight to the 10 per cent ownership figure on the back of our figurative envelope.

                                                So, take Vodafone, the telecoms group which paid out £3.9bn in equity dividends last year. It has 104,000 employees. Obviously a large proportion are not based in the UK, but even if we assume everyone gets £500, that only comes to £52m. (It is entirely possible this exercise is a Trojan horse to illustrate that pay rises for employees would not be that expensive.)

                                                The government would then take £338m out of the employee trust's dividend income of £390m, an effective tax rate of 87 per cent. (That's before income tax and national insurance contributions, and on the higher global employee number). Whose bonus is this again?

                                                A board might restrict dividends to the £500 per head level, to avoid paying the tax, and distribute cash to investors through share buy-backs instead. In Vodafone's case, given its shareholders are pro-dividend, they might want to swallow the levy. The company's tax affairs are complicated, but in its most recent financial year the company declared an effective tax rate of 20.5 per cent on adjusted profits before tax of £4bn. Paying an extra £338m to the Treasury would have taken the effective tax rate to 29 per cent.

                                                There could be other weird situations. Land Securities, the property group with a £6.6bn market capitalisation, only employees 612 people. So those staff would earn dividends of £0.3m a year, on a stake supposedly worth £660m? The government would have taken £33m, or 99 per cent of the dividend.

                                                At the other extreme is Compass, the catering group which employs more than 550,000 people worldwide, 60,000 of them in the UK & Ireland. Last year it paid £1.5bn in dividends, including a £1bn special dividend. A tenth of normal dividend payouts could cover £30m for staff in the UK & Ireland, but would not stretch to the £250m cost of giving everyone worldwide £500. International worker solidarity could be tricky.

                                                There are other questions, such as how to deal with part-time staff, those who do overtime, and who counts as an employee for these purposes anyway. Will the dividend payment contribute towards minimum wage calculations? What happens when a UK business is sold to a foreign company? Will there be a plan to tax share buy backs as well?

                                                Maybe it would be simpler just to put up the taxes on corporate profits, or dividends.

                                                Comment


                                                  Originally posted by Bizarre Löw Triangle View Post
                                                  1) the changes to the GRA aren't going to do that. They're going to enable trans women to legally change their gender without getting a medical diagnosis. Other countries have gender self-ID without any of the problems terfs envisage.
                                                  2) "female biology" isn't a well-defined thing.
                                                  3) terfism extends far beyond organising against the GRA to conspiracy theories around "big pharma", "brainwashing" of trans men and afab nonbinary people to "erase lesbians", and trying to prevent trans women having access to any sort of public life (e.g. public swimming pools etc), to harassing, doxing and abusing prominent trans women. if people call them fascists, it's because the shoe fits.
                                                  Yeah, no one in Ireland in the feminist community seems to give two fucks about self-id that’s already law here. Yet cos the SNP are bringing it in for Scotland very soon, a misogynist fuck like Wings over Scotland is now a staunch ally of loads of TERF twitter accounts. They are finding every piece about a self ID-ing sex offender to argue against trans in womans’ prisons, even against gender neutral bathrooms.

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