The following essay was written by Locust Review comrade Adam Marks in the spring and early summer of 2024, and recorded as a podcast essay for Locust Radio Episode 23, also titled “Escape from Normal Island.” All this was before the purged Labour Party won the 2024 UK election — with fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn lost previous elections — as the Tories imploded in on themselves. Comrade Marks has written two follow up essays on “Normal Island.” One or both of which will appear in the forthcoming print issue of Locust Review, “Lucky 13,” so we are posting the initial written essay here on our website. It’s a prequel. Also, because the traumas and absurdities of “Normal Island” seem to continue unabated…
Escape from Normal Island
Twenty-Twenty was a golden age of gallows humour. Every day was normal [1]. Absurdity piled up on absurdity. It was all very, very funny. Unless you happened to live on Normal Island, then it probably meant something different to you.
Wiktionary defines Normal Island as a term:
“Generally used in left-wing commentary, highlighting everyday behaviour seen by the commentator as unacceptable [2].”
This is a half-truth. Normal Island is not just everyday. Normal Island is the British Army running out of ammunition because the government has sent so much of it to Ukraine [3]. It is 16,000 Covid cases being lost because the people employed to keep track used an out-of-date Excel spreadsheet instead of a database [4]. It is a north-south high speed rail project, currently under construction, not reaching Central London until the 2040s, mostly because some damn fool put a city in the way [5].
Normal Island is also a system of statecraft that ensures nothing ever works except the system that ensures nothing ever works. So, when did the United Kingdom become Normal Island?
You could argue that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (as it’s currently known) has been on an extended sabbatical from history. Before 1848, when William Cuffay attempted to lead the Chartists across the Thames [6], England (in particular) had been an exceptionally turbulent; a backward country on the edge of Renaissance Europe. The monarchy survived through luck and the frequent dispersal of subaltern forces. Eleven years prior to Cuffay’s march, the monarchy almost died of natural causes. William the Fourth had left no legitimate heirs [7] and a Hessian Princess called Victoria was brought in off the subs bench.
By the time the working class got back in the game, 1889 with New Unionism, once the challenge had been met, the British state had a solution to the first Great Depression, in the form of the British Empire, exporting labour and capital. Whenever you say it ended, and the British Empire has been gone for sometime, the perpetual displacement of class struggle has got harder and harder for the ruling class to pull off and we’ve been slowly sucked back into history ever since.
Normal Island is, in this sense, part of the five stages of grief, expressions of denial, anger, bargaining and depression depending on who you are and what your starting outlook has been, sometimes all four rolled into one. Once acceptance comes the United Kingdom is done for. How do I know this? Hard cut to…
The 2017 General Election
No, wait before that…
Speedrun 2010-2015
The Conservative Party won the 2010 election. No, correction, it was the largest party in the House of Commons after May 2010. Before the election, it was expected to hold a majority of seats but fell short. After days of inertia, the civil service ground into action and bullied the Liberal Democrats [8] into entering a formal coalition [9]. The Coalition Government used a series of speciously connected events, most notoriously a note left by former minister Liam Byrne to his successor David Laws, cheerfully telling him “there’s no money left” [10], to argue excessive government spending [11] had caused the 2008 recession.
The only proper remedy was austerity. By cutting government budgets, the Coalition withdrew gigantic amounts of effective demand from the economy, plunging it back into recession and ripping the social fabric of the United Kingdom to shreds. The headline figure is the estimated 300,000 mostly poor, often disabled or sick people hounded to their deaths by the Department of Work and Pensions [12]. There are so many tragic examples. The one I particularly remember is the death of David Clapson [13]. A diabetic veteran, David died, three weeks after being sanctioned his Jobseeker’s Allowance, of acute lack of insulin. His flat was dark. His stomach was literally empty. He had £3.44 remaining in his bank account.
We’re mostly interested in culture here (though the culture of social sadism is very relevant [14]). From 2010 to 2020 a fifth of all libraries in Britain were closed. Museums and galleries that could not find private owners or patrons either closed or reduced their opening hours, also typically by around a fifth. There was a 44% cut in funding to playgrounds across the decade, leading to a net decline of 350 playgrounds in England. A great number that remained were bought by private companies, charging for use [15].
Can you guess what this trend is going to do to people by the time Covid hits in 2020?
On February the 22nd 2012, then Labour MP (and not yet convicted sex-offender) Eric Joyce was arrested in a House of Commons Bar [16] after attacking six people present, including other MPs. Joyce decided not to seek reelection as an MP for Falkirk. In 2013, Falkirk Constituency Labour Party attempted to find a replacement candidate. Stephen Deans, a local shop steward for Unite the Union, a Labour affiliate, started recruiting members to Falkirk CLP [17]. He doubled membership of the branch. Unite proposed Karie Murphy as the candidate [18]. A Unite internal document was leaked to the press describing this process as “exemplary.” The CLP was placed into direct administration. Deans and Murphy were briefly suspended as members.
To quash this ‘scandal’ Labour Leader Ed Miliband started the process leading to non-members being allowed to buy ‘supporter’ status within the party. Before all the unintended consequences could be felt, Ed was driven by loyalty to the British state, to demolish Labour’s credibility in Scotland, particularly in Glasgow, by rushing his MPs north to defeat the Independence campaign that, in September 2014, briefly looked like succeeding. By May 2015 Labour was left with a lone MP in Scotland, Ian Murray, a man whose chief talent is wearing Union Jack suits.
Other highlights of this period: October 2013 - BBC News can only seem to find one Labour MP willing to speak in defence of Ralph Miliband, Marxist theoretician, refugee from the Nazis and Ed Miliband’s father. He was attacked in a hit piece by the Daily Mail as “The Man Who Hated Britain19.” The MP defending Miliband on the news was Jeremy Corbyn [20]. Also October 2013, off the back of his combative interview with Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight [21], comedian, aspiring filmstar (and not yet accused sex offender) Russell Brand launched his Youtube channel, Trews. His idiosyncratic but articulate version of socialism briefly captured the imagination of people still yearning for a fightback against government austerity. He was undone by an apparently convincing appeal from Labour HQ that his personal intervention could swing the 2015 election. He abandoned his don’t-vote-it-only-encourages-them POV to absolutely no avail [22]. Years later, Russell has become an alt-right adjacent wellness influencer, dogged by chilling and credible accusations of sexual assault [23].
By 2015 there existed a large milieu of entirely unrepresented people who, at various stages, learned how to organise marches against war, learned how to expunge the BNP [24] from multicultural towns and cities, learned how to occupy the stock exchange, were either on strike in November 2011 [25] or knew someone who was. They were all networked to some degree through social media. Word got round that, for the low, low price of £3, you could swing the Labour Party leadership in favour of a man who was present on all these occasions.
The momentum the movement gathered that summer was exhilarating. No surprise that the legacy organisation from 2015 was called just that.
OK, the 2017 General Election
On the 20th of May, 2017, the general election campaign is well underway. It’s going well for Corbyn’s Labour but there is still a long way to go. Jeremy Corbyn is invited by Jon McClure, bandleader of Reverend and the Makers [26] to speak onstage at the Wirral Live festival.
Corbyn’s advisors and allies are not happy. This is not a Labour Party event. There’s no telling how people will react to someone coming onstage to talk politics when they have come to listen to music. The Special Branch police officers usually assigned to protect the Leader of the Opposition refuse to take the job. Private security has to be arranged.
McClure introduces Corbyn in the middle of his set. The crowd, not hipsters, not musos, but outwardly working class punters, erupts with cheers. Corbyn begins to speak. The event is being held at Tranmere Rovers football stadium. He has simplified his message for the occasion. “We’ve got football and music in the same place!” The crowd does not stop cheering. “I love football! And I love sport! I want it for everybody!” He makes reference to Labour’s newly unveiled policy, creating funds to allow football supporters to buy a controlling stake in their clubs. He moves on to music, but a chant is emerging from the crowd:
“Oh, Jeremy Corbyn.”
Corbyn, his staff and everyone on stage are stunned. The mood is elated [27]. It is the mood that is rapidly taking over Britain’s working class, it's young and it’s BAME [28] population. The millions of people held at bay by Business As Usual have suddenly found themselves centre stage. This was later brilliantly captured in Labour’s day-before-election-day party broadcast, directed by Simon Baker, an exceptionally talented man, sadly no longer with us. It’s still on Youtube. Watch it [29] and know bliss was that dawn to be alive.
The campaign
Much of the election campaign was carried out on the fly. I remember, as the deadline to register to vote approached [30] posters going up around train stations in London, particularly Highbury and Islington, explaining how to register and (imploringly) why you should do it. The posters were sellotaped to lampposts, probably to sidestep fly posting laws [31]. Whoever did this was acting on their own initiative.
Similarly, the media company, Novara Media made the editorial decision to act as if it was the Labour Party [32] communications unit, putting out daily news and talking heads, explaining events, a good job too as the actual Labour apparatus was making potemkin Facebook adverts to fool the leadership [33] into thinking they were busy. Novara Media grew rapidly in these months and deserved to.
The official Labour canvassing effort was sluggish. Like the fake adverts, it didn’t matter too much as Momentum and, to a lesser extent, the unions strove to bypass it, getting people to where they needed to be. I remember helping to leaflet a train station with my family on the afternoon of election day. By that stage people were putting on badges and rosettes and just taking themselves to wherever they thought they needed to be. No one needed to strategise for them. Labour won a clear, absolute majority of votes across Greater London.
A cultural campaign also coalesced out of, seemingly, thin air. The Wirral Live appearance was an improvisation. The bands and acts that got behind Corbynism were heterogeneous to say the least. Clean Bandit (a dance-pop with some contemporary hits) the Libertines, the Farm and the Coral (indie heritage acts) Reverend and the Makers (the journeyman almost-Clash) Wolf Alice (international touring act, probably undone by Covid-19 landing where their third album should have). None of these made a ‘scene’ however. The lack of a distinct, overriding youth culture by this point was indicative of capitalist culture. There was one subculture that did exist and was very much part of the rebellion.
Grime4Corbyn
If you search ‘Grime4Corbyn’ now you will probably be offered articles featuring interviews where people feel angry and betrayed, and the interviewer is very glad to express that for them [34]. The half-apparatus that Corbyn’s Labour managed to assemble after 2017 certainly wasted opportunity after opportunity. It's also the case that the Continuity Regime during and before this state of dual power, regarded Labour’s BAME voters as a given, they didn’t even need persuading, let alone a substantive offer.
But, I think, there is also cause to suspect that between 2017-19, figures in culture were given every reason to turn their back on Corbyn. People, such as sort-of-comedian Ricky Gervais or musician Brian May, who said Vote Labour in 2017, by 2019 could only bring themselves to say Just Vote [35]. Actor, Hugh Grant was pivotal to the Hacked Off Campaign, formed in 2011 to keep the issue of the British Press mafia activities alive while the Leveson Inquiry was in session [36]. In 2019 though he couldn’t bring himself to back the strongest challenge ever mustered to the Murdoch–ocracy and was much more concerned with tactical voting37 and Britain’s status with the European Union.
There is also the curious case of mainstream TV comedy, which went notoriously off the rails in this period [38]. The heel-turn across the whole of light entertainment make me wonder if a much later revelation from Richard Osman [39], was a limited hangout. Until the British secret services go the way of the Okhrana and the Stasi, one can only guess.
Back to the topic, the British state has a weirdly hostile relationship to music. Some of the hostility is formal, like the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, which outlawed ‘repetitive beats in a field’ meaning the free rave scene. Rave was enclosed and became club music. Some hostility is less formal.
In 2005, a police risk assessment form used to assess licences for live events, was amended to include questions about musical genre and, critically, the ethnic makeup of the audience the event was likely to attract. People soon began to notice that no one could put on a hip hop or grime night in London. Grime [40], the younger brother of UK Garage, disappeared from venues at the whim of the London Metropolitan Police [41].
As genres went, it already had strong roots in the urban working class. It was the only thing the 2010s had to call a proper ‘scene’. It also had an enemy in the state. After being kept very much as a subculture, it began to emerge overground, coincidentally around the same time as social democracy suddenly had to be taken seriously. Kanye West made an appearance at the Britannia Music Awards in 2015, inviting several grime artists on stage with him. While Dizzy Rascal had a number of crossover hit singles in the 2000s. Grime albums started to make an impact in the mid-2010s. The peak of this being when Gangsigns and Prayer by Stormzy topped the UK album charts.
It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine someone wanted Grime recuperated but also broken apart [42]. Speaking of which, it’s time to get really normal.
Follow Back Pro Brainworms
The Labour Party manifesto was leaked in May 2017, the leaker [43] intended it to generate headlines and talking points about how the manifesto was electoral suicide. Turned out it wasn’t. The trick then became how to get Labour to commit actual electoral suicide.
According to the New Statesman [44], the hashtag FBPE, Follow Back Pro EU, was first minted in October 2017. It became an online rallying point [45] for Remain dead-enders. Remain really was a dead-end cause though. Every major party took part in the 2016 referendum and the eventual result wasn’t even close. But that wasn’t the aim of the hashtag, or the eventual movement that rose out of it.
The various constellation of interests it assembled, demands it generated, culminating in some quite large public rallies, overwhelmingly attracted the portion of Labour you could fairly call the Liberal Salariat [46]. The rallies were specifically set against Corbyn’s Labour [47]. There were frequent lamentations about Labour’s EU referendum campaign, which had kept a fair distance from the official campaign. The lesson of 2014 in Scotland seemed to have been learned by Corbyn’s team. This complaint was usually combined with wailing over a well known quote, where Corbyn had the audacity to only award the European Union 7/10 in his estimation [48].
As you can tell, it was all exceptionally Internet-Brained. As were the complaints also cropping up, that Labour should be Twenty Points Ahead of the Worst Government in Living Memory [49].
Most attempts to put Remain on an economic/social basis betrayed its own roots. One case I specifically remember was the loss of the Erasmus Scheme [50], an EU programme that allowed university-goers to study abroad. As much as foreign study is a noble and mind expanding endeavour, it means very little to most students, already a small portion of the population. It was important to the craft interests of university lecturers though, an even smaller, even less well-rooted demographic. International students account for around a fifth of the income received by UK universities [51], higher education being at this point almost openly a rent-farming enterprise [52]. If the UK did not send a portion of its students abroad, how many countries would send theirs in return?
Things came to a head in the summer of 2019, when Keir Starmer, later the hero of Twenty Points Ahead, then Shadow Brexit Secretary, after months of wild polling and a final, completely pointless election to the European Parliament, announced, without apparent approval from LOTO, let alone the national executive or party conference, that Labour was the Party of Remain [53]. He was headed off at that year’s conference, which endorsed a compromise motion to support a second referendum on the results of exit negotiations with the EU, but the damage was done. Labour had avoided the Establishment Remain in 2016. Now it all but tied itself to the establishment, just as Boris Johnson, essentially the face of the Exit campaign, was made Tory leader and Prime Minister, and Labour was willing to go against the democratically expressed will to do so.
Here Lies Madness
In September 2012 a street artist called Mear One [54] painted a mural, called Freedom for Humanity, on Hanbury Street, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The mural depicted men wearing suits playing a monopoly-like game, set on a table made of hunched up, naked figures. A local Conservative councillor55 complained to the borough administration, likening the mural to pre-war antisemitic propaganda. The admin agreed.
The mural was removed by October 2012 and condemned by the elected mayor, Lutfur Rahman.
Around that time, Jeremy Corbyn responded to a message from Mear One sent via Facebook, containing a thumbnail image of the mural. Corbyn made a short comment, objecting to the removal on the ground of free speech, comparing it to the effacement of a Diego Rivera mural removed at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller, because it depicted Vladimir Lenin.
If this sounds like a mistake, it was. Corbyn later repudiated the defence, saying he regretted not spending more time and attention on what the mural actually contained [56]. If it also seems incredibly petty and small-time as rows go it was that also.
The story was dug up in 2018 by then Labour MP Luciana Berger, who demanded explanations/apologies for what happened briefly on social media six years earlier. Corbyn and his staff did what any normal people would do in the circumstances, apologise, learn lessons and so on. But they were normal people on Normal Island. This was the start of a full-blown moral panic [57].
The mural incident was emblematic of the avalanche of accusations, meant to bury the Labour Party. The accusations were ephemeral or tendentious. For example, Labour MP Margaret Hodge, after doing her undoubtedly sterling work on the back benches representing her constituents in Barking, had enough time on her hands to personally file over 200 complaints to the General Secretary. Of those complaints, only twenty instants referred to actual members of the Labour Party [58]. Of those complaints only two were ever upheld. If the complaints, such as the ones made by Hodge were substantial, with distinct actions leading to meaningful consequences, they could be dismissed or upheld. The point of the panic however was to keep going. The panic worked for the ruling class and its advocates in two ways.
Context
Antisemitism undoubtedly exists in British society, but that’s not really saying anything. Racism is an ideology. It serves the capitalist class to stratify the workforce and prevent counter hegemony from emerging, divide and rule.
In 1905, the British government passed the Aliens Act, the first legislation formally restricting immigration, ostensibly to crack down on ‘vagabonds’ but absolutely understood as applying to people from the Jewish Pale fleeing the Russian Empire. This legislation had a knock on effect before World War Two. Everyone knows the story of Paddington Bear was a plea for sympathy and understanding, based on the plight of children travelling alone on Kindertransport. What gets forgotten is why they were alone. Since World War Two, the ruling class has not actively practised antisemitism, certainly not as it has practised racism toward Afro-caribbean or Muslim citizens. While we’re on delayed consequences, by the 21st century, this fact led to an outbreak of…
White Guy Solidarity
Whiteness in a core capitalist country, is the attribute of full, unchallenged citizenship and rights accruing therein. A Chinese cocklepicker can be left to drown [59], a Brazilian electrician can be shot in the head seven times [60], a black athlete can be stopped in their car, manhandled and abused by the police [61]. Even if justice is eventually served, Normal Island keeps on being normal. Slave labour is still used in agriculture [62]. The police are still armed [63] and they certainly keep harassing black people through invasive searches [64].
If a Jewish person is denied their rights we are far more likely to be outraged because, under the prevailing ideology, they are white. If you’ve been online in recent months anywhere near the Anglosphere 1) that’s your own fault but 2) you would have noticed a panic developing about the ‘desecration’ of war memorials in Central London. The government is actually considering legislation to stop this blasphemy [65], though it mostly consists of Muslims being near sculpted bronze while they call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
This weird, unarticulated conflation happens because the Loyal Ulster in the Middle East [66] is an outpost of an undeclared empire. They are fighting against Us. Why wouldn’t ‘they’ desecrate ‘our’ war memorials at a time like this? It’s not actually a mystery why the modern far-right supports Israeli military actions. To them, Israel is an Actually Existing Ethnostate, battling the hordes in the way they should be battled.
To take it back to 2019 however, there is an additional reason for the panic, beside supplementing white guy solidarity. It is deploying the Karl Rove strategy of attacking your opponent where they are strongest, to neutralise their strength. Jeremy Corbyn is one of the few parliamentarians ever arrested in the cause of antiracism [67]. How better to neutralise this by having people like Margaret Hodge bellow that he’s a ‘fucking antisemite’ to his face non-stop for nearly two years [68]?
2019, Oh Dear
A lot of effort went into framing the election in 2019 as “The Brexit Election.” Could Corbyn’s Labour have avoided the trap? Maybe, but they didn’t and we were, essentially, back to 2016, dominated by the same argument between two wings of the middle class, the provincial petty bourgeoisie and the liberal salariat [69]. Only now institutionalised lying had become the open norm in politics and political media [70]. Wild incitement, like the claim made by Simon Heffer that Corbyn wanted to reopen the gates of Auschwitz [71] was starting to take its toll on Labour canvassers, who were regularly attacked [72]. Beyond this, ludicrous, derailing questioning [73] over Labour policy was also thoroughly Normal for the media.
In order to defeat Social Democracy in Britain, public life was reduced to rigorously enforced unintelligence. A treasured example, for me, is when Chris Mason, BBC News Correspondent wondered out loud on Twitter, how it was possible to plant 2 billion trees [74]?
Amid this mise en scene of mandatory stupidity, both wings of the middle class were given ample reason to shut the door on Labour. For the liberal salariat, Labour had rejected the Remain cause, even after essentially adopting it, since Keir Starmer’s conference speech. There were marches in 2019 demanding everything, including a second referendum and, who knows, maybe best of three? A referendum on leaving terms wasn’t enough. The provincial middle classes, especially any who had their fortunes tied up with land or house prices, would have found a second referendum profoundly offensive, antidemocratic, bordering on traitorous [75].
In both cases the charge of antisemitism was just further grist to the mill. For liberals it meant Corbynism was indecent, beyond the pale. For conservatives it meant it was racist toward white people. To them, Corbyn was not only in with the black and
Asian working classes, he was one of the very few MPs who’d get a warm welcome with the London-Irish [76]. Sympathy for the IRA does not play well in the West Midlands, for example, which bore the brunt of a bombing campaign a little over 40 years ago.
It’s almost a shock, perhaps, that Labour polled over ten million votes in 2019 [77]. What votes the Awful Communist and his Followers did attract came from people who were younger, had lower incomes and, critically, far more likely to rent private property. Conservative votes and MPs piled up in areas not just dominated by homeowners but affluent ones [78]. This is the story of our time, the basis of class in neoliberal capitalism in all core countries. Because class also means control and/or access to surplus, it is the basis of our culture as well.
Boomerbook
Despite winning the 2019 election, the Conservative Party barely existed as a membership organisation. It’s impossible to know how many people are actually in it. In the 1950s it had an estimated 3 million members. Back then, all you had to do to be a member, practically, was have a tab at your local Conservative Club bar. Today we know the average Tory is probably in their early seventies, fifty-seven at the absolute lowest [79]. If this cohort is not off the the pub one place they definitely love hanging out is social media80. That’s where the Tory election campaign happened, particularly Facebook [81].
Facebook is not just defined by its older demographic but also by its closed structure. A lot of action happens in private groups. The greater intimacy of connection on Facebook lends substance to just-so-stories like, the whole genre of urban legends, that absolutely took hold in 2019, about Gordon Brown Selling Our Gold and the Calamitous Consequences it brought. Labour canvassers had this pitched at them time and again that year. You could explain how the sale happened between 1999 and 2002 [82] and had absolutely no bearing on government finances in 2008 and never could have because (apart from a lot of things) world currency went off the Gold Standard in 1971 and, anyway, the global recession was caused by the subprime mortgage market, by this point your Uncle Brian would be shaking his head before confidently telling you how his friend [83], who used to work at the Royal Mint said there was a plan to drive up inflation so Britain would be forced to adopt the Euro. He heard it on Facebook.
Twenty-Nineteen was the year balls-out, unashamed lying became the norm in public life [84]. There was a growing understanding that it didn’t matter anymore if you got caught. This was predicated on internet culture. Internet culture depends upon access, which costs money. Twenty-Nineteen was also the year when publicly-owned internet was denounced as Broadband Communism despite it being a very normal feature of life around the world [85], with the BBC rebroadcasting the denunciations as if they bore any weight. It also depends upon time, which also costs. These are things the working class has precious little of.
The Alt-Right Playbook [86]
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past [87].
Jean Paul Sartre in ‘Anti-Semite and Jew’ talks about a very specific, 1940s problem. It is apt for today’s far right though. The only difference, significant for us, is the internet means there is no space that can be closed and no weight that can be made to bear. You can’t press the Online Right at all, not through reasoned argument at least.
After the left was defeated in 2019 for ever and ever, amen, reaction in Britain did not stop [88]. Liberals and Centrists etc are still coming to terms with the fact the toothpaste will not go back in the tube [89]. Social Democracy turned out to be Communism, Actually. In 2020 the Right got busy finding even more communism, actually. Basic public safety during a pandemic was often communism [90]. Black Lives Matter was communism [91], Antifascism as well [92]. Effective town planning is communism [93]. If you really want to cook your brain, you can listen to how Twenty-mile-an-hour speed limits in residential areas are communism too [94].
These cases are all passing and all from very heterogeneous sources [95]. The connecting link is the weightless atmosphere of modern, digital media. Arguments can only be asserted, never falsified. Even if they, somehow are, LOL, don’t care. You might get deplatformed, demonetised or shadowbanned, you can disappear off to Rumble, Telegram, Gab or any number of platforms where they respect frozen peaches. You could even have any number of angel investors, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs [96], Integrity Initiative [97] or Seventy-Seventh Brigade [98] give you money and/or find you work. You are free to repeat your arguments, over and over again, until you find one that takes hold.
Typically theories are floated on the fringe and then brought into the institutional right. For example, when Mark Harper, Minister for Transport and, presumably, a man with some considerable power, promised to crack down on the sinister scourge of Fifteen Minute Cities, he was compiling from work done by the far right. He was ridiculed, he was fact-checked [99], he may have even been rebuked. He certainly hasn’t taken any action against this ‘scourge’. What he has done is carve out space for this theory to be discussed as if it were meaningful. It cannot be dispelled on its own terms because it has no basis in fact.
Grounding in Reality
The Housing Act 1980 [100] was the big bang, the origin story for Normal Island. After World War Two Britain was desperately short of housing stock. State action, by both Tory as well as Labour governments, got homes built. Even in the 1970s work was ongoing, bomb sites were still being cleared. The 1980 Act, however, promised council tenants the right to buy their homes. In time a gigantic amount of equity was released. By 1986, financial markets were deregulated [101] and this equity could be traded with greater ease and velocity.
The United Kingdom fully transitioned from an economy where things might get made to one where money was simply put into a magic box called ‘property’, the box was shaken up and more money poured out of it. This shakedown created an ersatz peasantry. Of course, the people benefiting from this boom, at the smaller end of the scale, weren’t working the land. Their wealth was still absolutely tied up in private property. There were a lot of these people and they would fanatically defend this set up.
The demographic breakdown of elections in the 2010s are often put down to age. This, of course, isn’t literally true, though it does bring to mind how millennials are frequently infantilised in public debate, despite the fact many of them are now pushing forty [102]. It is a function of the fact that large numbers of people who were old enough to receive the benefits of the Attlee society were also able to cash them in for the benefits of the Thatcher society. They have access to either revenue or equity based on the property they own, the value of which has gone up as well as up across the neoliberal era. No matter how working class they might feel, small property owners have something to lose other than their chains… Some of them are also landlords.
Normal Island is, in this last definition, a weightless culture raised atop an unreal economy.
Two Responses: 1) Hegemony, innit?
Let’s escape from Normal Island, shall we?
First, we must take some tips from the ruling class’s tactics. We first of all work with the class we have, not the class we want to have. The working class is heterogeneous. There isn’t presently a single, obvious vanguard that can dictate the pace, not even one like the post-war, fordist factory worker. We have to keep everyone on board. This means no concession to bigotry, even as we may try to work it out of our ranks. We build our side’s strength. We also work on depleting our enemies of their allies.
While we might not take many retired homeowners or small time landlords with us, land and rent is the right place to start.
All economic, cultural and social activity happens in a space. Someone owns that space. They extract a price from anyone using that space. Remembering that Brexit was an argument amongst fractions of the middle class, what unites the urban working class, the downwardly mobile middle class, the small business owner, the community activist, the fledgling rock band, the film club organiser and the writers and poets group, is a pressing lack of space and the demands of the landlord. The good news is it's easy to get rid of landlords and free up space.
Nationalising the land is easy, especially in the UK, where it’s already technically nationalised. The ‘nation’ here is the crown. The monarch owns all the land and grants freeholds, leaseholds and tenancies. Transferring land from the crown to a commission that acts on behalf of the public yields tremendous possibilities.
First of all we can know who owns what? Around 15% of land in Britain is unregistered [103]. Ninety-seven percent of land has no public right of way [104]. Roughly 50% of private, off-limits territory is owned by 1% of the population [105]. Though only 0.7% of registered titles are held abroad106, that still amounts to more than ninety billion pounds worth of assets [107].
The second benefit flowing from nationalised land from this is the commission, acting on behalf of the people, who might not like the current arrangement, can change who owns what titles and what they use their titles for. Hello rent caps. Hello environmental legislation with teeth.
Finally, because land is ultimately a resource that should belong to everyone and no-one, if anyone wants to alienate the land from the people, either by freeholding or leaseholding, they have to pay a fee to the people.
Hello universal basic income.
The Freedom to Win Freedom
Universal Basic Income will underpin any success humanity has in the 21st century, even making it in one piece to the 22nd century [108]. It already exists in a sense. It’s known as passive income. There are actually many types of passive income [109]. All of them are wretched and parasitic, but we are specifically concerned with landlordism.
By making everyone and no-one the ‘landlord’ we restore basic freedoms to millions of people. The freedom of security of income, security of housing. There is also freedom of enterprise, and not just whoopee-lets-all-start-a-pop-up, though petty entrepreneurs are welcome, so long as they behave. Rehearsal space becomes affordable to musicians, more galleries can open, you may actually find a restaurant at the end of your road and it may stay open for more than eighteen months, your young children might be able to attend a nursery that doesn’t drain half your household income.
Doing this would also free people from the perspective of the parasite. I’ve seen it argued, I’m sure you’ve seen it too, that wage disputes are futile, anything we earn will go straight to the landlord. There’s a degree of truth about that, but it’s still a variety of capitalist realism, exactly what we must break with. The perspective of the rentier filters throughout society, from home makeover shows, to investment expos, to celebrity landlords like Samuel Leeds, who flits from evicting tenants with a chainsaw [110], to railing against the Great Reset [111], to shouting to camera about how work/life balance is weak or gay or something [112]. Yes, he’s also an ‘author’ [113]. He also, if you check his Twitter feed [114], he gives shoutouts to Andrew Tate and Russell Brand. He’s also the reason why YouTube is going to continuously recommend I watch his videos now [115]. This Slug in Ben Sherman lives right in the middle of our cultural cabbage patch. Of course he shouts at men who want a work/life balance, their thankless toil feeds his passive income. Landlordism is the gaping maw at the end of the Treat Conveyor Belt. It is a hunger that’s never sated. It shapes our culture. Speaking of which:
2) Shitposting is Communism, but Silly [116]
While universal basic income jams the Treat Conveyor Belt, freeing us from putting CO2 in the sky to sate rentiers, our cultural response has to be, in a way, the reverse. The magic box/treat conveyor belt economy is absurd, the culture it gives rise to is absurd. If we’re going to make politically engaged and engaging art [117] it has to be full steam ahead. A great man once said the only antidote to a zany scheme is an even zanier scheme. That’s why I want to briefly talk about squirrels.
Back in the spring of 2019, the Liberal Democrats briefly made the political running. ‘Winning’ the utterly meaningless elections to the European Parliament. The party, led by Jo Swinson, embarked on a strategy informally called ‘bicep kissing’. It became Remain maximalist, refusing any deal through parliament to soften the effect of Brexit. All possible variations of deals were rejected by parliament, including a customs union, which lost by three votes [118]. An election was eventually called and the Liberal Democrats campaigned to win it outright.
But then word got round that Jo Swinson spent her childhood persecuting squirrels. The evidence was undeniable. People passed round a screenshot of a Daily Mirror article where she admitted as such in an interview. The fact that the byline was someone called ‘Wurrence Telephene’ might have alerted some people to the joke. Nonetheless, Swinson was forced to deny in actual interviews she ever had it in for arboreal rodents [119]. A few weeks after this her party was not only not in government, Swinson was not even in parliament.
Of course Fake News is Bad and, of course, the squirrel joke did not, in itself lead to her downfall… but it gave it a name. It revealed an ecstatic truth, Jo Swinson was a ridiculous character.
But we’re just getting started.
In April 2020, Keir Starmer was elected leader of the Labour Party on a platform of Continuity Corbynism, Corbynism But Wearing a Suit. People, especially people who liked to make jokes in the comment sections under polling company posts, were wondering what this all meant. There was a bit of fun, gaining momentum, taking the copypasta bots and sock puppets tried when Corbyn was leader: “I’ve been a supporter of [add name] for [add period of time] but even I have to admit that any other leader would be twenty points ahead. Time to go.” and making variations. It was funny (to me at least) because it was entirely ridiculous and, yet, got a reaction, especially if you kept a straight face and repeated the line.
The trouble was people have had ‘I Before E’ so drummed into their heads they often couldn’t spell Keir.
“If you were a lifelong supporter you’d know it’s spelled K.E.I.R.”
“Actually” the person following in would add, “it’s K.E.I.T.H.” And, a legend was born. Then the spelling was corrected to K.I.E.T.H [120]. Then, it turned out, he was born Keith but changed his name to Keir at the age of eighteen to become more electable. Then the birth certificate with “Kieth Rodney Starmer '' was found. Then Comrade Photographer kept snapping him in the weirdest poses [121].
Absurdity seemed to stick to Starmer. Publicans would fight him on camera [122]. He’d fail a mock lorry driving test, also on camera [123]. He would call for alpacas diagnosed with TB to be put down…[124] on camera. Interviews would turn into streams of managerial gibberish [125]. A Guardian puff-piece put the phrase ‘Stonger Together [126]’ into the world. Suddenly Kieth had a surname.
Kiethposting did eventually tail off. He did, eventually, get twenty points ahead [127]. The current Tory government is fantastically untenable. The Parliamentary Labour Party will very likely reap the rewards. It’s worth noticing though, especially round the issue of the Gaza conflict/genocide, Stamer is already getting the Tony Blair treatment, and he isn’t even in power [128]. When the contradictions of a Starmer government eventually do unravel, they too will have a name. Keith.
This really is the point to wind up. Myths aren’t dispelled by logical critique. Myths amplify and rationalise features of humanity. They are only supplanted by practical critique. Universal Basic Income is the practical critique of Normal Island’s economy. Kiethposting, at least here, is the practical critique of its culture. If we’re talking about higher, more elaborate or ennobling artforms [129], to fight their myths we create our own, better, even more normal ones.
London Palestine solidarity demonstration in 2023.
Endnotes
‘Normal’ is probably well on the way to almost fully inverted meaning. The famous example of this type of inversion is nice which, according to Merriam Webster, five hundred years ago, first meant “foolish or stupid,” by the 16th century meant “particular” or “finicky” but by the 19th century came to mean “pleasant or agreeable.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nice
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Normal_Island
https://news.sky.com/story/treasury-signals-no-new-money-for-defence-despite-recognising-need-to-rear m-amid-ukraine-war-defence-sources-say-12804037
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988
https://www.itv.com/news/london/2023-03-10/hs2-high-speed-rail-line-may-not-reach-central-london-until 2040s
Cuffay was the paramount leader of the Physical Force Chartists. A hunchback, descended from slaves on St Kitts, a tailor, an active trade unionist living and working in Medway, Kent, he would have made a superb 1st president of a Free England. https://phm.org.uk/blogposts/william-cuffay-black-chartism-and-a-treasured-object/
Though the Sailor King managed to have ten children with his consort, Dorothea Jordan, going on to spawn whole new branches of the aristocracy in the process. Former Prime Minister and pig-botherer David Cameron is one of his descendants.
In the kayfabe of Westminster politics, the Liberal Democrats are the centrist party.
As opposed to entering what’s called a Confidence and Supply arrangement, basically a bill-by-bill alliance that might have given them any room to escape electoral annihilation. By chance I was on a bus going through Whitehall the very afternoon the deal was concluded. About two dozen people, my kind of ne'er-do-wells, were gathered outside the Cabinet Office. I got off and had a look. That moment the Liberal Democrat negotiators came out, looking sheepish and beaten, to a chorus of “Yellow Tories!”
https://www.dumptheguardian.com/politics/2010/may/17/liam-byrne-note-successor
As opposed to debt trading and the subprime mortgage market.
https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/mortality-rates-among-men-and-women-impact-of-austerity/#:~:text=A%2 0recent%20study%20argued%20there,policies%20pursued%20by%20the%20government.
https://www.disabilitynewsservice.com/sister-launches-judicial-review-claim-in-bid-for-sanctions-death-inquest/#:~:text=David%20Clapson%20(pictured)%2C%20who,having%20his%20jobseeker's%20allowance %20sanctioned.
14 British TV had spent the previous decade lubricating people’s minds to accept ritual sadism by importing the Jerry Springer chat show format with programmes like Kilroy and the Jeremy Kyle Show, where inarticulate scallywags from the class dubbed Chavs (Council Housed And Violent) were baited by the host and audience for an hour every morning after the news.
For more extensive detail read Plunder of the Commons, by Guy Standing, Pelican 2019.
I say “a bar” there are 30 licenced outlets for alcohol in the Houses of Parliament, all of which are publicly subsidised. Very normal.
Which, at the time, only had 100 people on its lists.
Murphy was, and sadly still is, an anomaly in the upper levels of the Labour Party, a trade unionist that had actually once performed wage labour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karie_Murphy
It was a dry run for the treatment Jeremy Corbyn would get from the press. It works, first of all, because the average Mail reader (let alone journalist) regards socialism and something that simply shouldn’t exist let alone be understood. Miliband Jr was always the softest of the softest left. He nonetheless campaigned within the Labour Party to ‘turn the page’ on Blairism. Whatever that truly meant to him, this was unacceptable to the Daily Mail. He was basically a communist. You want more proof? Look at his father. Also, being the Mail, it was never stated but always understood, Ralph Miliband was not just a Marxist, he was a (((Marxist))).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQIiK31Rmdc
A late-night in-depth news programme that ran on BBC Two. Jeremy Paxman, a much vaunted hardball interviewer, could only bark with incredulity as Brand effortlessly ran rings around him. This high-pitched incredulity was another sign of things to come.
The Conservatives won an outright majority of seats this time, the first time since 1992.
His jolly-pervert stage persona now seems like him hiding behind a smokescreen of the truth.
A fascist organisation that broke away from the National Front in the 1980s. It enjoyed something like salad days in the 2000s, worming its way into various deindustrialised parts of Britain. Its closest run at glory was in Barking. The London Left put in a huge effort to keep them at bay after the local MP, Margaret Hodge, who will feature later, made public statements about housing and race that were, at absolute best, amazingly guileless and stupid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_public_sector_strikes
And Grand Old Man of the Sheffield indie scene.
I am paraphrasing hugely from this article, but I remember event this so well: https://thequietus.com/articles/24349-oh-jeremy-corbyn-chant-origin-alex-nunn-the-candidate-extract?fbcli d=IwAR1oW1UnR-mneUunRQM2bajNNYPIurrtUY08zWpS8dI6OZm92oOmDzRL1OE
Black Asian and Minority Ethnic.
By this stage, everybody knew what Corbyn’s Labour stood for. This clip showed who stood with it, and it was the working class. https://youtu.be/xOqS5hbafw8?si=sJj_pqfJLYrXzRFF
22nd of May, 2017.
London (like most other cities in England) used to have a culture of flyposting. Working for a socialist organisation that had a printing plant, we used to get regular calls from the production company making the soap opera Eastenders, asking for up-to-date seditious materials, because you couldn’t have a believable East London backdrop without SWP telling the world What Socialists Say. This flyposting culture was closely aligned with club nights and record labels' similar guerilla advertising methods. Both phenomena were expunged around 2007. I remember that year thoroughly covering Holloway Road, several miles long, in anti war posters with some comrades. It was a couple of hours of work. We went to a pub for a swift drink. Half-an-hour later, walking back down the road, every single poster was gone, removed by council agents.
https://novaramedia.com/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/labour-hq-jeremy-corbyn-targeted-facebook-ads-201 7-election-a8448036.html
https://www.nme.com/news/music/aj-tracey-grime-4-corbyn-labour-tories-priti-patel-sadiq-kahn-politics-29 08987
I hate the phrase so fucking much. I can’t be too angry with Brian May. However good their music was, Queen were all tax-dodging Tories, even before they played Sun City. Brian seemed to be taken on a leftward journey in later years by hanging out with Hunting Saboteurs. Around the turn of the decade May was leading an animal welfare lobby to Parliament around the same time as the English Defence League turned up. Most of the lobby’s supporters went to bolster an antifascist counter demonstration that had been outnumbered and in trouble.
The inciting incident was the murder of a teenage girl, Milly Dowler, in 2002. Her phone was hacked by News of the World journalists in the hope of gaining some sort of scoop. In the end they caused a great deal of distress to the victim’s family and alerted the world to what was then a common journalistic practice. Though the News of the World, a Murdoch-owned paper was eventually closed, absolutely no meaningful reform arose from the inquiry into the incident.
Another tenacious brainworm.
Brilliantly conveyed in this article: https://www.redpepper.org.uk/culture-media/media/corbyns-impact-on-comedy/
https://www.dumptheguardian.com/culture/2023/sep/09/richard-osman-tapped-on-the-shoulder-at-cambri dge-by-m16-but-failed-the-test
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grime_music
I saw one of the more heartening and memorable gestures toward breaking the ban. Lethal Bizzle was invited onstage by the rock band Gallows at the 100 Club on Oxford Street. There wasn’t much they could do together, so they performed a cover of Staring at the Rude Boys, by The Ruts, which they later recorded: https://youtu.be/YfLz4nzrLQs?si=YKrX5ryJ75ofxeZk.
Hence, amongst other things, why Gentleman’s Quarterly, a preeminent mens fashion magazine has a Stormzy tag: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/tags/stormzy.
Whose name may or may not rhyme with Wom Totson.
Which you shouldn’t read. It also doesn’t want you to read it because you have to surrender data to it to get three whole free articles a month. Its politics are also dreadful. Even so: https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2018/02/what-does-fbpe-mean-and-could-it-stop-brexit-histo ry-hashtag
And like all such nodes, a means by which powerful interests can harvest data.
This is leaving aside, for the time being, the arguments put by Guy Standing in The Precariat: the new, dangerous class: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/precariat-9781849664561/.
https://portfolio-adviser.com/gina-miller-i-was-more-worried-about-corbyn-than-brexit/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36506163
Though it did lead, in 2020, to one of the most splendid episodes of shitposting and meme culture.
https://erasmus-plus.ec.europa.eu/
https://www.dumptheguardian.com/education/2023/jul/14/overseas-students-uk-universities-income#:~:te xt=Tuition%20fees%20from%20overseas%20students,15.6%25%20in%202016%2D17.
The question of rent will become crucial not too far down the line.
https://www.dumptheguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/27/labour-is-the-party-of-remain-says-keir-starmer-br exit
Real all about this illustrious character here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mear_One
They do exist. Tower Hamlets has long been fairly politically divided, with the upscale part of the borough, near Canary Wharf regularly electing conservatives as councillors.
The absolute best you can say about it is that it’s quite obviously a grotesque depiction. Mear One insists the mural was not meant as antisemitic incitement. It’s up to him to defend his own work.
The following year, another election year, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, declared with a straight face that Jeremy Corbyn wanted to ‘reopen the gates of Auschwitz’. He said this without challenge.
58 https://skwawkbox.org/2019/02/12/excl-hodges-200-labour-complaints-90-were-not-labour-members/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-25986388
https://news.sky.com/story/jean-charles-de-menezes-we-will-never-get-justice-the-day-police-shot-dead-a n-innocent-man-on-the-london-underground-12485281
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/25/two-british-police-officers-fired-after-stop-and-search-of-blac k-athletes
https://farmwell.org.uk/seasonal-workers-and-modern-slavery/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Mark_Duggan
https://news.hackney.gov.uk/child-q-update-report-hackney-council-responds/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67442917
The phrase was coined by Raymond Storrs, the governor of Jerusalem from 1917 to 1926: https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/david-cronin/watch-how-britain-wanted-jewish-ulster-palestine
https://inews.co.uk/culture/jeremy-corbyn-photo-apartheid-arrest-rachel-riley-t-shirt-photographer-370371
Also, I wonder what searching ‘Hodge, shares, Barclays, Apartheid’ produces?
Read. The. Footnotes.
One of my favourite examples is found here, it’s an especially ironic one, given what I’m about to refer to shortly: https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/bbc-and-itv-political-editors-apologise-for-false-hospital-punch-claim-in-tw eets/
Foot-notes.
Just one example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50560366
Search ‘will Labour nationalise sausages?’ for dubious fun.
https://twitter.com/ChrisMasonBBC/status/1199939534282248194
Given a little more time on Facebook and the rhetoric would amp up.
Corbyn was very much involved in the preliminary diplomacy that led to the IRA ceasefire in 1994 and the eventual Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Though still down from 13 million two and a half years prior.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/ge2019-how-did-demographics-affect-the-result/
https://fullfact.org/news/how-old-average-conservative-party-member/
https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/04/facebook_now_boomerbook_as_oldies_outnumber_uk_teens/
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/conservative-party-social-media-facebook-general-election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999%E2%80%932002_sale_of_United_Kingdom_gold_reserves
Unlike, say, Twitter, which combines the relations of bulletin boards with comment boxes, Facebook explicitly invokes friendship and intimacy between users. Intimacy enhances narrative credibility.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52366099
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/broadband-communism-outside-the-uk-public-broadband -is-a-raving-success/
Is the name of an excellent YouTube series about the very problem we’re going to look at next, to be found at: https://www.youtube.com/@InnuendoStudios
https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/sartre/section4/
There has only been pause for thought with the BLM solidarity protests in 2020 and the small wave of strikes in 2022, while neither was exactly defeated but both street protests and industrial disputes have been circumscribed by even more restrictive laws, passed in 2023.
Even conservatives are finding out. As I go over this, Ben Wallace MP is being given the Corbyn treatment by the Jewish Chronicle for suggesting that the IDF might have gone too far in Gaza: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67745408
https://www.dumptheguardian.com/australia-news/2022/sep/05/dai-le-likens-covid-lockdowns-in-western sydney-to-communist-dictatorship-in-first-speech
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/marxism-underpins-black-lives-matter-agenda
https://digitaledition.orlandosentinel.com/tribune/article_popover.aspx?guid=39427b4c-6add-4b4c-ade6-f9 899dd81812
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2023/10/02/rishi-sunaks-attack-on-15-minute-cities-is-baffling-an d-concerning-says-originator-of--concept/?sh=d2b189c7dc03
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oufkIFyg_s4
I wonder if gender-affirming care is communism? Let’s ask Quora: https://www.quora.com/Why-do-liberals-use-newspeak-communist-terms-like-gender-affirming-care-to-ref er-to-attempts-to-alter-ones-sex-which-is-supposedly-completely-different-from-gender
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Economic_Affairs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Statecraft
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/77th_Brigade_(United_Kingdom)
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/conservative-party-conference-15-minute-cities-mark-harper-conspira cy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_Act_1980
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets)
Labour won consistent majorities among voters up to the age of 44 throughout the decade.
https://express-conveyancing.co.uk/unregistered-property-what-to-consider
https://defrafarming.blog.gov.uk/2022/08/08/common-land-findings-from-the-field/
https://www.dumptheguardian.com/money/2019/apr/17/who-owns-england-thousand-secret-landowners-a uthor
https://www.centreforpublicdata.org/property-data-overseas-individuals
https://propertyindustryeye.com/foreign-owners-hold-90-7bn-worth-of-property-in-the-uk/
Don’t believe me? Let Massive Attack, Young Fathers and Guy Standing explain in this video: https://youtu.be/a-1YI-neupU?si=ecjKPoYJPTQtGTkQ
https://time.com/personal-finance/article/passive-income-ideas/
https://twitter.com/samuel_leeds/status/1735004669703819598
No, the video wasn’t taken down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQk0Ze4oDiI
https://youtube.com/shorts/dqHdrrdy4zw?si=cDpLeoaBfRPf21sX
‘Buy Low, Rent High’, an innovative strategy! Give this man some more money, please. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Buy-Low-Rent-High-financially/dp/1542445981
Twitter is the only thing you have not just a right but a duty to Deadname.
It’s like prosperity gospel without the gospel, and you’re a fool if you think it will lead you to prosperity either.
The good kind of silly.
After giving due recognition that all art must stand on its own, regardless of how morally wholesome it might be.
https://votes.parliament.uk/Votes/Commons/Division/666
https://www.dumptheguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/nov/21/jo-swinson-squirrel-twitter
I saw this unfold in real time on Twitter (the only thing you’re allowed to deadname).
Why is he like this?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGuLJvY9ApE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8fgSt0mx1A
We remember Geronimo, the People’s Alpaca!
“And that is the change I will bring.”
https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1405280153949720579
Though isn’t at the time of writing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXi4TCCc-pA
And I should hope we are.