The big Brexit thread - news, updates and discussion

[bimble]

I always thought the kids in my classes who laughed at other kids knowing things were wankers. I used to say so at the time too, though it made my school days miserable.

Yep. I was miserable too, didn’t have much of a chance at coolness seeing as I turned up already embarrassingly bilingual / a bit foreign.

 

[two sheds]

Half the enjoyment of learning Dutch for me (after school though) was getting the accent right. I still don't know why I chose Dutch though, it was before I'd thought of working there.

 

[TopCat]

Wondered who it was, so gone from helping fuck over the country to saving the planet. Sick bag please.

He is a leader in everything.

 

[Serge Forward]

The view of some of the 'big guns' in the TUC What do unions say about Brexit deal?

 

[Smokeandsteam]

Ow, it only hurts when I laugh.

If only we had an example of just how possible it was, say from in the last 3 years, then your laughter would say more about you than the post covid economy and the questions it will bring to the fore again.

 

[Serge Forward]

Half the enjoyment of learning Dutch for me (after school though) was getting the accent right. I still don't know why I chose Dutch though, it was before I'd thought of working there.

It's meant to be the closest language to English?

 

[TopCat]

So the meeting of the 27 EU leaders today.
Anyone think they will do anything other than what they are told?

 

[mojo pixy]

Do you mean Labour sabotaging itself in 2019?

 

[two sheds]

It's meant to be the closest language to English?

Don't know, but is sort of half way between English and German.

Do like the language though, really good for humour - they had some superb stand-up comedians in the 60s very laid back. Similar sense of humour to English too, a lot of word play.

 

[Serge Forward]

The EU is not the problem for the radical left, it's parliamentarism and reformism.

 

[kabbes]

I read that if you haven’t learnt to speak a language by the age of 10, you’ll always speak it with an accent. I have no empirical proof of this one way or the other though.

 

[Serge Forward]

It's to do with the young 'acquiring' rather than learning a language when immersed in another country. Once you get older, we lose that skill.

 

[philosophical]

I don't know about speaking a foreign language, but when it comes to speaking English your 'final' accent tends to become embedded (so I believe) between the ages of about 17 to 23.

 

[mojo pixy]

I always suggest "warming up" by saying a short monologue in your own language but with an outrageously strong accent (of the target language) and then switching to the target language and going on with the same outrageous accent. Takes confidence but works well

 

[teuchter]

Bit of a tangent but I wonder if this is just me or more broadly true:
In my (crap comp) 2ndary school, it was very important to refuse to try at all, in French or German lessons. Everyone went out of their way to see much you could maintain a taking the piss English accent when you had to say stuff in foreign in the classroom. Not being demonstrably terrible at languages made you an instant loser, definitely worse than letting people know you were into maths or whatever else.
Was that normal?

This applied to all subjects at my school.
Except sports of course.

 

[Smokeandsteam]

Do you mean Labour sabotaging itself in 2019?

Labour lost the last election when Corbyn and McDonnell (under pressure from liberals and right wingers) abandoned their instincts and politics in respect of the EU.

But I specifically mean that the post-covid economy will necessitate a form of Keynesian intervention by government. Under the Tories the plan will be financial support and boosterism for capital. Our aim is the restoration of social democracy. One small step, but a step nonetheless, away from neoliberal orthodoxy. Anyone who predicts what comes next is foolish, but anyone who denies the extent to which things are going to open up over the next decade is equally foolish.

I think the key point is that there is all to play for. There is no hegemony about what comes next.

 

[Pickman's model]

Do you mean Labour sabotaging itself in 2019?

Yet more votes than under blair in 05, brown in 10 or miliband in 15...

 

[mojo pixy]

Labour lost the last election when Corbyn and McDonnell (under pressure from liberals and right wingers) abandoned their instincts and politics in respect of the EU.

But I specifically mean that the post-covid economy will necessitate a form of Keynesian intervention by government. Under the Tories the plan will be financial support and boosterism for capital. Our aim is the restoration of social democracy. One small step, but a step nonetheless, away from neoliberal orthodoxy. Anyone who predicts what comes next is foolish, but anyone who denies the extent to which things are going to open up over the next decade is equally foolish.

I think the key point is that there is all to play for. There is no hegemony about what comes next.

Fair enough.

I desperately hope it all goes the right way and I'll make my own contibutions as I can, but I'm extremely pessimistic. Especially in the short-medium term (10-20 years)

It's not even just the Brexit, but that will IMO make everything just a bit worse at least for all except the socially comfortable. At the moment I'm not seeing much in the way if golden futures for me or most of us - less probably than ever before in my life.

I made a promise to myself while back to start putting that shit in songs or whatever again, instead of social media posts, but from time to time the gag falls out.

I don't know how I keep the faith, and I know it doesn't show, but in the end what else is there to believe in?

So I hope you are right.

 

[two sheds]

I read that if you haven’t learnt to speak a language by the age of 10, you’ll always speak it with an accent. I have no empirical proof of this one way or the other though.

I put a lot of effort into actually listening to how they were saying things and repeating - mainly Fons Jansen old stand-up. I could often say a few sentences before people realized I wasn't Dutch (hard to tell of course) and it was normally my grammar or vocabulary that let me down. Got taken for Belgian a couple of times because I was close to the border.

Spent two years there and lost the language when I got back. Then spent another three years and it's stayed with me 35 years later. Having Dutch girlfriends helped greatly

 

[mojo pixy]

Yet more votes than under blair in 05, brown in 10 or miliband in 15...

That underscores the heinousness of the sabotage

 

[Smokeandsteam]

Fair enough.

I desperately hope it all goes the right way and I'll make my own contibutions as I can, but I'm extremely pessimistic. Especially in the short-medium term (10-20 years)

Making your own contribution, as best you can, is the most anyone can do. There isn’t much to feel optimistic about at the moment I agree. But, as the last 10 years has surely taught everyone, the chronic systemic failure of late capitalism mean things can change rapidly.

 

[mojo pixy]

I want to unpack sabotage really, because it's easily misunderstood. I mean the anti-semitism and the faffing about in dealing with it, Corbyn being personally likeable but not a good leader, trying to please everyone and failing, the party not supporting the outcome of the referendum and presenting a decent Lexit plan as something they could ''get brexit done'' with that (which IMO would have got them a landslide) and then the actual sabotage by named individuals high up in the party hierarchy.

And this isn't even radical left, it's fucking Labour ffs. Hope is really hard to keep alive and I know I'm not alone in feeling that.

I feel the radical right will do better at capitalising on post-covid resentment, than the radical left, but I hope I am wrong.

 

[Pickman's model]

Labour lost the last election when Corbyn and McDonnell (under pressure from liberals and right wingers) abandoned their instincts and politics in respect of the EU.

But I specifically mean that the post-covid economy will necessitate a form of Keynesian intervention by government. Under the Tories the plan will be financial support and boosterism for capital. Our aim is the restoration of social democracy. One small step, but a step nonetheless, away from neoliberal orthodoxy. Anyone who predicts what comes next is foolish, but anyone who denies the extent to which things are going to open up over the next decade is equally foolish.

I think the key point is that there is all to play for. There is no hegemony about what comes next.

Yeh. We saw how hegemons reacted to a timid attempt to reintroduce a tepid form of social democracy in the labour party. And how the results of the last election have been spun by loads of people to fit the narrative that auld lefty Corbyn's labour party was utterly dismissed. Yet fewer votes than the vote the lp received last year returned it to power in 2005. Labour lost the last election when they failed to put out a clear message as the conservative party did, where a new policy was launched every day and none were really developed. I wonder to what extent the attitude of half the plp, who didn't want a Corbyn government, affected the result.

Recasting the events of last autumn in the way you do isn't to my mind persuasive, as I think the last election was really lost when after huffing and puffing against an election Corbyn lost any freedom of manoeuvre when forced by the golden shower to go to the country at a time not of his choosing. The only person really happy to go then was Johnson, who despite being a shitty lying cunt had the tory media and half the plp acting in his interests. If Swinson hadn't cracked then the events of the past year would have been very different.

 

[editor]

Th thread was discussing a possible erosion of workers rights, unions are central to resisting such a thing. I expect most unions will be doing a post Brexit briefing at some point.

The view of some of the 'big guns' in the TUC What do unions say about Brexit deal?

Very little enthusiasm on display

TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said: “This deal is better than nothing, but not by much. It won’t protect jobs and puts hard-won workers’ rights on the line.

UNISON general secretary Dave Prentis said: “Any deal is better than the catastrophe of no deal. But the government’s mishandling of Brexit means even with this agreement, working people and public services still face huge uncertainty.

“It will be public services and the staff running them who will pay the price, as they always have done. Now everyone needs clarity on what this deal means – especially our public services, which are under such great pressure because of the virus and a decade of austerity.”

TSSA general secretary Manuel Cortes said:
“However, Johnson wants to spin this deal. Make no mistake. As from the January 1st, trade barriers with the EU will have been erected and as a result, we will all be poorer in years to come.”

 

[maomao]

I read that if you haven’t learnt to speak a language by the age of 10, you’ll always speak it with an accent. I have no empirical proof of this one way or the other though.

The age most commonly given for this is 11. Some linguists attribute this to the withering of a childhood 'language acquisition organ' which seems unlikely to me and I have always preferred the idea that it is about this time that social identity, of which accent is a key part, is set. And this is also a possible reason for classes full of unwilling twelve year olds insisting on reading the French and German vocab lists out in an accent as close to their native accent as possible. It's a very difficult age and situation in which to be acting the part of a member of another social group.

This isn't the paper I was looking for but seems to have some stuff on the same topic, phonology as a group recognition device rather than just part of language:

http://tscheer.free.fr/scan/Kaye97group_recogn.pdf

 

[agricola]

Yeh. We saw how hegemons reacted to a timid attempt to reintroduce a tepid form of social democracy in the labour party. And how the results of the last election have been spun by loads of people to fit the narrative that auld lefty Corbyn's labour party was utterly dismissed. Yet fewer votes than the vote the lp received last year returned it to power in 2005. Labour lost the last election when they failed to put out a clear message as the conservative party did, where a new policy was launched every day and none were really developed. I wonder to what extent the attitude of half the plp, who didn't want a Corbyn government, affected the result.

Recasting the events of last autumn in the way you do isn't to my mind persuasive, as I think the last election was really lost when after huffing and puffing against an election Corbyn lost any freedom of manoeuvre when forced by the golden shower to go to the country at a time not of his choosing. The only person really happy to go then was Johnson, who despite being a shitty lying cunt had the tory media and half the plp acting in his interests. If Swinson hadn't cracked then the events of the past year would have been very different.

A good point this - one of the big differences between 2017 and 2019 was that for the first election Woodcock et al hid away whilst being filmed for that BBC programme that was no doubt intended to portray their brave struggles against extremism, but ended up capturing their reaction on finding out they were irrelevant. For the second they took a much more active anti-Labour role and are now peers of the realm, lobbyists or supremos of the musical-gambling industrial complex.

 

[AnnaKarpik]

I read that if you haven’t learnt to speak a language by the age of 10, you’ll always speak it with an accent. I have no empirical proof of this one way or the other though.

I was referred to as 'some German woman' by a Swiss hotelier a while ago. We had been talking on the phone for some minutes so I think he had plenty of time to hear imperfections. And an Austrian called me a northerner, which was fair enough cos I lived in Hamburg at the time. This is probably not proof that I do not (or did not) have an accent but it was faint enough that I could pass for native at least some of the time and no-one ever guessed I was English from the way I spoke.

 

[TopCat]

It will be interesting to get Unite and the RMT, ASLEF etc position and analysis.

 

[Pickman's model]

A good point this - one of the big differences between 2017 and 2019 was that for the first election Woodcock et al hid away whilst being filmed for that BBC programme that was no doubt intended to portray their brave struggles against extremism, but ended up capturing their reaction on finding out they were irrelevant. For the second they took a much more active anti-Labour role and are now peers of the realm, lobbyists or supremos of the musical-gambling industrial complex.

I hide points like this in the middle of my posts to find out who actually reads them

 

[two sheds]

I wonder whether it's sometimes to do with embarrassment/self consciousness at talking a foreign language that some people don't pick up the accent. It does amaze me sometimes when you hear English people talking a foreign language with atrocious accent - they just can't be comparing what they're saying things with how native speakers say it.