Bumping up this article I wrote last year - think it stands up pretty well in light of events since Biden took office and now with the #AUKUS deal.

It's absolutely astonishing that the bin workers have been on strike in Britain's second biggest city for eight months under a Labour government. The dispute has run on so long that now the strike-breakers who were recruited to try and end it are also themselves going on strike.

On the latest episode of PTO Interregnum, we're talking about the government's asylum crackdown, the threat of AI, the downfall of Wagenknecht, the BBC's crisis, and the problem of burned out activists.

"If it sounds like it's Nazi shit, it's supposed to. The bourgeois state and its political servants have for some time now been trying to get a bit of the glamour of fascism." - @leninology on Labour's asylum policy announcement:

"There's a kind of deliberate dressing up in the regalia, and the attitudes of fascism as they - in their blithe and cynical way - pave the way for an actual fascist kind of administration." - @leninology on the Starmer government's announcements on asylum policy:

Clip from a forthcoming listener questions episode:

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"The modern bourgeois state and its class of political servants increasingly craves the borrowed glamour of fascism, especially in its dealings with those whom ‘the people’ are supposed to hate.. It’s worth asking why and what that means." - @leninology https://t.co/HhRFSkDlRF

If it sounds like Nazi shit, the prudent assumption is that’s how it’s supposed to sound. Even with a certain ambiguity retained for deniability and equivocation, hitting those notes is a strategy and not a slip. https://t.co/E6et4B5uZC

Nolan is a Tory and his films evince some moderately reactionary politics. But more importantly, most are lifeless, bloated and two-dimensional with just enough gimmickry and budget to pass muster with a the lowest common denominator in an age in which film is dying.

We’re doing Radical Abundance book events around the country. Details in the link in first comment.

3/3 there's no fluidity to the situation.

2/3 ... open to the possibility that the trajectory of the party is not set in stone. And that holds even just from an analytic standpoint - even if you've left Labour (as I have), even if you hate the Labour Party (as I do at this stage) it doesn't mean that...

1/2 People are understandably annoyed by the tagline of this article (especially today) but it's a serious contribution and given that in 2014 absolutely no one predicted that the hard left was about to take up the leadership of the party it makes sense to at least be...

#VoteLabour

If you'd like to follow PTO over on the other place we've created a PTO starter pack - so you can automatically follow all of the excellent guests who've been on the show over the years who also have accounts there. Just search for 'Politics Theory Other' on the app.

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Of course that's not the main reason Starmer is so unpopular, but having literally millions of people out there who have a vague sense that someone they know used to be a big Labour person and now they hate him definitely hasn't helped (and the galaxy-brains thought it would).

A thing that doesn't get said enough is that the simple act of driving several hundred thousand people out of the Labour Party was always going to have severe blowback. All those people have friends, family and social media accounts, and are highly politically motivated (1/2).

Nicely tweaked older episode (for sound quality), which looks at debates about Thatcherism and hegemony. Well worth a listen.

📻 Sunday listening 📻 - Alexander Gallas on popular support for the Thatcher governments of the 1980s, Thatcherism as a "two-nations hegemonic project" and the debates between Stuart Hall and Bob Jessop on how to make sense of Thatcherism: https://t.co/9WbAam300S