Blue Lines Revisited

This is a tumblr by Tom Ewing, who does Freaky Trigger. It's a scrapbook and public notebook of no particular theme. If there's anything you want to ask me, go ahead.

[allofthemarvels]

From “It Happened at Woodstock!” in My Love #14, 1971. Probably the most bluntly sexual thing I’ve seen in a Marvel romance comic… anyway, on the next page, her square boyfriend comes back, punches Flowers here in the jaw, and gets Jody back. They decide they’re going to skip the last day of the festival, and in the last panel of the story, they get married. Oh dear.

[brainstatic]

A look back on the times Republicans said Obama was disgracing the dignity of the presidency. 

[bioandroid]

This is incredible

[tomewing-blog]

What’s my take on the Babes of Suga? FIND OUT (at some length) HERE.

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As someone who did not expect this outcome I am in no position to advise him how best to proceed. He will be himself and we will all wonder at where this will take the country. The first thing to recognise, however, is what he and his team have achieved and how they have done it. The answer is simple, elemental and yes – just what Mandelson did not want – utterly twenty first century. They have turned Labour into a social movement. The commentariat, trapped by the limitations of its old media platforms and parliamentary expectations gossips about who Corbyn will promote into his shadow cabinet. This is not without its importance. But he is never asked about how Momentum is organising which is now much more significant. Corbyn's authority is not rooted in his House of Commons support but in his capacity to call millions onto the streets to save the NHS should he say the word.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/anthony-barnett/age-of-corbyn-i-most-powerful-person-in-land

Anthony Barnett of Open Democracy is usually worth reading. Here’s the key part from his Corbyn piece (first in a series). Do I agree? I don’t know. I know nothing. I discount nothing.

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Unshy Tories

There are two interesting groups of voters in the 2017 election. One is the 3.5 million people who voted Labour and didn’t last time. There’s been a lot of talk about these people - young voters, “progressive alliance” tactical voters, ex-UKIP voters, and so on.

The other interesting group is the 2.5 million people who voted Tory and didn’t last time. There’s been a lot less talk about them: they stubbornly fail to fit the narrative of Theresa May’s incompetence. But they are very important: if the 3.5 million resurrected Labour, the 2.5 million are what blocked it from coming to power.

So it’s worth asking who they are, what they want, and whether they will show up again next time. If they don’t, Labour’s job is a lot easier.

Who are they?

1. HARD BREXITEERS: The Conservatives made three linked but separate pitches to new voters in their campaign. For all the awfulness of their Manifesto and May’s performance, it seems reasonable to assume these pitches worked on some of the 2.5 million. The first was May’s original excuse for calling the election - with a mandate, she could better deliver Brexit. The people who bought this line and voted accordingly will mostly be the “lost tribe” of ex-UKIP voters ‘coming home’ to the Tories, though there are also some ex-Labour voters (enough for the Tories to oust a couple of Midlands Labour MPs). They voted to Leave, they want it to happen and were happy to vote Tory to make sure it did.

2. MAY-NIACS: The second pitch was that Theresa May was a personally “strong and stable” leader who would run the country better than anyone else (by implication, better than the previous set of Tories too). May was very popular at one point, and it’s entirely possible that plenty of low information voters never picked up on the assorted criticisms and U-Turns. A lot of these voters would have voted Tory anyway so the number who are 'new’ is probably small, but there will be some from both the right and centre who genuinely believed the hype. They want strong leadership.

3. ANTI-JEZ: In the final week the tone of the campaign shifted to panicked attacks on Corbyn, backed up by the tabloids. Some of the 2.5 million will be voters who believed that Marxist extremists were on the rampage and wanted to prevent the predicted disaster. These may be ex-UKIP, ex-Labour, lapsed or new voters…they could have come from a lot of different places.

4. SCOTTISH UNIONISTS: A special case - people voting Tory to either reduce SNP dominance or to save the Union from a second referendum. Labour picked up some of these votes too.

So the big question is - how soft are each of these groups? How likely are they to vote Tory next time?

Group 1 will be disappointed by the election - a hard Brexit looks in jeopardy and the Tories will go into negotiations weaker. If the Tories seem to be compromising or ballsing up the negotiations, they might be lured back rightwards by UKIP or a successor party offering easier certainties.

Group 2 will be even more disappointed: May is not the second Iron Lady and won’t even be PM for long (though who knows). They may drift away or fall back into apathy.

Group 3 will be even more concerned, and are likely to stay with the Tories unless there are major shifts in Corbyn’s own positions (and why should there be?)

Group 4 I don’t have much idea about - Scottish politics seem in flux. I assume they will stay though.

What this adds up to, for me, is a Tory vote that’s much softer than it might look - not so much because it’s vulnerable to Labour but to apathy and whatever UKIP morphs into.

[hacash]

I’m sure by now a lot of people have heard that the Tories intend to form a working agreement with the DUP, a party with a history of homophobia, climate change denial, terrorism links and an assault on female rights. As is pretty much par for the course these days, this can all seem very scary, especially to those people who have been struggling to get by under a Tory government.

But! The important thing to remember is combined, these two parties have a majority of two seats. That is not a strong and stable government. That is barely a government at all. What this means in practical terms is that if May’s government wants to put some absolutely heinous bill through Parliament - and there’s a fair chance… - and everyone else outside her coalition voted against it, she would only need three members of her own party to back down in order to lose the vote. And there’s plenty in the Tory party right now who are not happy with Theresa May. There’s also some Tory MPs who only got back into power by the skin of their teeth (hello Zac Goldsmith) and they are not going to want to vote in anything that damages their constituents lest they lose what little majority they have.

So when government opens again and shit starts getting real, much as US tumblr has urged Americans to put pressure on their representatives, do the same for your MPs. If you have a Tory MP who only got in by a small minority, remind them of how tenuous their position is. Hell, if you have a Tory MP who has an ok-ish voting record, encourage them to stick to their guns. Remember that the election turned out the way that it did because of the staggering number of youth voters, and get involved.

(Non-UK followers very much encouraged to reblog!)

[tomewing-blog]

https://www.writetothem.com has an automated system that makes writing to your MP INCREDIBLY EASY!

Also, I am old enough to remember a minority Conservative government propped up by Unionist votes - we had one in 1996-7. It was laughably weak. Pay attention to the Queen's Speech, identify the stuff you don't want to happen, hammer your MPs about it (or encourage them if they're opposition MPs).

[tomewing-blog]

Waiting For The Great Leap Forward

I’ve seen retweeted American takes on the election result which - unsurprisingly - tend to fit it into whatever lens the U.S. poster views their own politics through. That’s fine - it’s how these things work - but some of these takes are very wrong and some are not but are still mildly off.

First of all the take that May’s vote collapsed because of her own bad decisions (like allying with Trump) not because of socialism so there’s nothing to learn. This is the very wrong one because May’s vote did not in fact collapse. The Tories got a hell of a lot of votes - their share jumped 5-6 points. Their LEAD collapsed, and their lead was why May called the election in the first place. But the Tory vote share was way above their pre-Brexit polling. All the things May did wrong - from Trump to the Dementia Tax - didn’t actually shift that, though her incompetent campaign surely hit her approval ratings.

What really shifted was the Labour vote. Up FIFTEEN points off their polling lows. Up nine since the 2015 election. And that almost all happened after the manifesto leak and after they unveiled a bunch of populist left wing policies. If this election result was about May’s incompetence (vast though it is!) then you’d have seen a big drop in Tory polling and a mild recovery in Labour’s. That’s not what happened. Occam’s Razor suggests that Labour surged and ended the Tory majority because of its policies. Which are solid, sensible social democratic ones.

So that’s the very bad take. The less bad but still mildly off take is the one that projects the big argument in the US left - between “class” and “identity” politics - onto this election. Labour did in fact have an internal movement dedicated to embracing the “legitimate concerns” of the “white working class” - it was called Blue Labour and its entire premise was shredded last night. It believed that the only way back to power for Labour was reconnecting with UKIP voters on the issues that mattered to them (eg immigration). What this election proved is that you can appeal to some UKIP voters on quite different issues without compromising on metropolitan, ‘liberal elite’ cultural values if the root of your appeal is generational. Activate young voters and the class v identity question becomes vastly less relevant and more artificial, because you then have a movement capable of holding your 'heartland’ seats but striking out into Tory territory like Canterbury, Hastings, or Kensington (KENSINGTON ffs).

I’ve been wrong about lots of stuff myself of course - I assumed the Tories were going to win yesterday, I also assumed that Corbyn’s personal ratings were in an unclimbable pit. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It underlines that what Labour achieved yesterday is ASTONISHING - almost no prior theory or precedent fits it, though credit to those (Corbyn included) who saw this way forward and took it. It tears up everything people thought they knew about British elections. It’s been a remarkable day and it now feels like anything could happen.

[tomewing-blog]

"They're the great British mistake. The genie's out of the bottle, call in the magician. They didn't mean to free him, devil behind them, devil in the mirror, chained to their right hands. They're the great British mistake. They'll have to come to terms now, they'll take it out somehow. They'll blame it all on something. The British mistake - when will it be over? How can they avoid it - avoid it - avoid it?" Voting today, not hopefully, in an election that will settle nothing.

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Tom Ewing (London, H9, The United Kingdom)’s review of Watchmen

Modern comics events seem to demand endless lead-ins and spin-offs, and sadly Doomsday Clock, from the blockbuster team of Geoff Johns and Gary Frank, is no exception to this trend.

I feel it’s important to keep up with the hottest comics out there, so I reviewed the prequel to this autumn’s blockbuster DC event. Unfortunately it let me down on a number of levels.

[tomewing-blog]

Take your pick.

[thesinglesjukebox]

IBIBIO SOUND MACHINE - GIVE ME A REASON [7.67] Or maybe we’d prefer this 80s fusion song…

Thomas Inskeep: Singer Eno Williams and her band of merry men fuse African sounds with new wave and techno – Highlife horns! “Pew pew"s! – and on "Give Me A Reason” craft a song with one foot in 2017 Lagos and its other in 1982 KROQ-listening Los Angeles. This moves like hell and is even funkier. A bonus point for their awesome name, too. [9]

Juana Giaimo: “Give Me a Reason” is musically a song of euphoria – it’s edgy and so much fun! The synths give a retro style while the trumpets provide a smooth feeling, but the vocals have all the energy – as if calling you to join in to the party. [7]

Anthony Easton: The build up/breakdown near the end of this is one of my favourite sounds of the year–I know that the PR material says clash, but this is a seamless machine. [7]

Will Adams: This is the kind of cross-generational appeal – big band maximalism, nimble bass runs, modern percussive flourishes, some “Cars” doing circles around it all – that so many songs attempt in order to reach as wide an audience as possible but never reach this level of fun and effortlessness and ass-shaking glory. [8]

Jessica Doyle: I have some quibbles with the execution: the mixing seems to put Eno Williams’s voice in competition with the guitars, so that (until the two enter into a dialogue, about two-thirds of the way through) I want to push one out of the way so I can hear the other better. The concept is fantastic. [7]

Alfred Soto: Damn! Now this is fusion. Horns, synths, talking drums, whistles, and Lagos-raised singer Eno Williams’ peppy vocals mourn the abduction of 276 Chibok girls in 2014. I need a 12" remix fast, and tell James Murphy to keep the fuck away. [8]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

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This is my Pop Conference presentation from last month, a brief history of the last 40 years of UK-Europe relations via the medium of Eurovision entries.

[blackbeardblog-blog]

Fyre Festival organizers blew all their money months early on models, planes, and yachts

One month before thousands of well-heeled millennials were set to descend on a remote island in the Bahamas for the Fyre Festival to frolic on yachts, rub elbows with models, and hear acts like Blink 182 and Major Lazer, the organizers had a big problem. They were running low on…

Have you been entertained by stories about Fyre Festival? Of course you have. This one is also deeply entertaining and horrifying. But not just that! It holds interesting lessons for marketers, because it is possible to use this thing to put together the skeleton of a Fyre Festival marketing ROI case study.

Evidence 1: Investment

“He spent $250,000 on a single Instagram post from Kim Kardashian’s half-sister Kendall Jenner and laid out hundreds of thousands more on lesser-name “influencers,” none of whom were paid less than $20,000, one person familiar with the payments said.”

Evidence 2: Return

“Despite a pitch deck that promised 10,000 ticket-holders each weekend, sales were low and largely discounted. Most buyers had paid somewhere between $500 and $2,000 for their tickets, despite outlandish claims that people were purchasing ticket packages for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The target audience wasn’t elite or affluent people — it was people who wanted the lifestyle but couldn’t afford it, until Fyre Festival came along.”

So the interesting thing here, I reckon, is that even if Fyre Festival had not been the logistical apocalypse it obviously was, because it was run by somebody who imagined that magical bro fairies are enough to plan an event - even if it had worked on the ground, it was clearly not a major success from a marketing point of view. The marketing strategy - which seemed to be based around influencer marketing - was plainly not achieving its sales goals. Projected numbers dropped from 40,000 sales to 20,000 sales and didn’t manage that.

And the other interesting thing is what this says about influencer marketing itself. In this case - perhaps extreme, perhaps not - It’s a form of marketing that uses people’s endorsements to sell aspirational dreams of imitation and access to other people “who want.. the lifestyle but couldn’t afford it”. This sounds very like a pyramid scheme, which, like all pyramid schemes, targets the lonely, foolish and desperate. Most marketing fads look this way, if you poke at them enough.

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Bliar's A To E

I've been thinking a bit about Tony Blair and his legacy, so forgive the long post. When Tony Blair made his anti-Brexit intervention last week there were people saying, ah, he's only doing this to undermine Corbyn. I feel like this misses the point about Blair - for him, opposing Brexit and undermining Corbyn are intimately entwined, they're both symptoms of where Things Have Gone Wrong. Blair is one of those unfortunate politicians, like Ted Heath, who's lived to see his legacy thoroughly dismantled in his lifetime. (And reports from the time reinforce how crucially important the idea of legacy always was to him.) What was Blair's imagined legacy? In 2002, after two landslides and just pre-Iraq War, it might have looked something like this: A. Liberal interventionism/the "ethical foreign policy" - the idea that democratic Western countries have a moral duty to act against oppressive regimes. B. "No more boom and bust" - a stable and growing UK economy with inflation under control C. New Labour - a broadly united and purposeful election-winning machine. D: A new consensus politics based around a permanent centrist majority wanting high levels of public spending (mainly on health and education). E: A more tolerant, multicultural and outward looking Britain. This, I think, is where Blair would have staked his claim to represent something different from the Thatcherism he inherited and in many ways continued. What has happened in the 15 years since is the collapse of all of these. Each involved a convenient fiction, and a blind eye that needed to be turned to those left outside the Blairite "big tent". And they all turned out to be dependent on one another - the failure of A (suborned by the US neocon project) was the rock on which C broke; the mirage of B shattered D; without B, C and D, E withered. From this angle, Brexit wasn't some new alignment but the final unraveling of the Blair legacy, as David Cameron, the Tory leader who'd only been selected (after 3 hardliners) as a grudging acknowledgement of the new consensus found himself having to appease UKIP, the media, and his own right wing with the stupid gamble of the referendum. It's hard to think of a politician whose achievements have been so comprehensively demolished so quickly. In a final ghastly irony, Brexit now looks like it might derail Blair's one undeniable legacy (shared with Major): peace in Northern Ireland. It's no wonder Blair is on the comeback trail trying to put this jigsaw back together again and salvage something. After all, none of the catastrophes were inevitable, some of the aims at least were good, and Britain in the late 90s and early 00s really was - I think - a better, happier place than it is now. But it's also hard to see any realistic way back there.