John Harris
@johnharris1969
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Guardian: Politics Weekly UK, columns. Plus MOJO. Maybe I'm Amazed, my new memoir about autism & music, out March 2025 https://t.co/b1DcmIp9Kj
West England
Joined September 2014
After two years of writing and 18 years of life, this is out next March: my memoir about my autistic son James, how songs became our shared language. and how music & its magic affect us all. Pre-order here!
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Quite the day, when you think about it. Stroke & heart attack victims now waiting two hours for an ambulance, people unable to afford food, and the UK pulling apart as never before. But, you know, the leader of the opposition ate a meal.
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Funny how Brexiteers promise miracles, then fuck off before the difficult bit.
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Someone at the top could say "Instead of buying flowers that'll just get thrown away, please donate to the Trussell Trust/MacMillan Cancer/a cause of your choice." Most people organising funerals do.
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I have thought for several minutes about how to sum this up, but words fail me.
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The other half of the story, clearly, is that nothing happens in 10 Downing Street without the cops knowing, and that looks like a very big question indeed.
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In which, with 100,000 dead, a cabinet minister breaks cover to yell about **statues** and accuses Labour councils of "ripping down heritage". Whose cuts shut Victorian libraries, left centuries-old parks in decay and closed museums?
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BBC News channel now describing the Rwanda thing as gov's plan to "send illegal asylum seekers" there. This is messed-up language.
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Clearly, it's not just Truss & Kwarteng who've done this. It's an entire network of politicians, media voices and more who pushed Brexit as an ultra-neoliberal wonderland that could defy gravity. Look at a lot of the commentary that followed the mini-budget. There they all are.
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The Thatcher winter hat is on. The temperature in Kyiv is currently 6 degrees, the same as Manchester
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This is mendacious rubbish for loads people on UC. For many, if they earn £200 a week, they will have to earn £67 a week more to make up for the £20 loss; and for someone currently not working at all, the figure will be £54. That's how the system works.
"£20 a week is about two hours extra work every week, we will be seeing what we can do help people perhaps secure those extra hours”. On #BBCBreakfast Work and Pension Secretary Thérèse Coffey says the increase to universal credit was always temporary.
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If we're told there's an increasing chance of infections/deaths reaching the point that even Conservative MPs will accept mandatory masks, we're clearly *now* at the point where we should have mandatory masks. Such is the lunacy of modern English politics.
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Rishi sunak: mocking someone's alopecia is different from questioning the spouse of a senior minister's economic interests in Putin's Russia, something that clearly falls within the remit of the ministerial code. As you know, you chancer.
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A politics in which Brexit - as both a root cause & aggravating factor - isn't mentioned by either main party is part of the dystopian atmosphere.
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It is becoming very clear that we are governed by people who know nothing about anything.
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With the exception of Truss, I have never, ever seen a Prime Minister speak this badly.
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"Fuck your council, sorry about the local school, yes I know theres shit in the river, here's about eight quid a week for you, shut up.".Good election pitch.
EXCLUSIVE:. Jeremy Hunt will cut national insurance by 2 per cent in the Spring Budget tomorrow. It will cost £10bn and be worth £450 for the average worker. He will sell it as £900 worth of tax cuts when combined with 2 per cent NI cut in Autumn Statement. As per @SamCoatesSky.
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This is good. I keep having conversations about Project Fear etc, so let's hear about No Deal from the road haulage industry
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Is just like to say that it’s a wonderful thing to wake up in a country whose future is the hands of Mark François, Iain Duncan Smith, Steve Baker & Arlene Foster. Thankyou.
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As some of us have been saying since March, the gap between an arrogant govt & people on the ground was always this crisis's key story. This is the moment when everything collapsed
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We know it: Brexit is a broken right-wing failure. But the Labour l'ship seems ok with it, so long as blame for the chaos can be pinned on the Tories. In a grave crisis, it is playing politics, ducking responsibilities it ought to shoulder. If you aspire to power, that's the gig.
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There is an awful tone-deafness to these endless photos. A weary, cash-strapped country constantly being fed narcissistic pomposity from spod West Wing junkies
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Our son James is 15. He's autistic, & he's brilliant. With his sister & me he's just walked the 70-mile Cumbria Way, to raise money so more autistic people can learn to swim. Donations are open until Sunday June 12th. If you can, you can help here
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Watch Paula Sheriff. Then watch the PM's response and think: enough of your amoral bullshit.
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I'm so old I can remember when it was cars & holidays, not your most basic living costs
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Paging Marie Antoinette.
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Latest from me: on the mounting social catastrophe that sits under lockdown: hunger, people with no money, others faced with impossible choices. Not an arg against the restrictions, but an appeal for less "ooh, we baked cakes & read Ulysses"
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Fuck off. Honestly, fuck off.
"My father was a D-Day veteran, he never submitted to bullying by any German. Neither will his son" . Tory Brexiteer Mark Francois tears up #Brexit warning letter from Airbus chief executive Tom Enders during live BBC interview .
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pundit-led TV has failed, & there's more of it than ever. If there is insight into our national breakdown, unlikely to find it in a collision of novelist, blogger, columnist & thinktanker, at least one of whom will usually be a wholly-owned subsidiary of one of the main parties.
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Latest from me: two and half years on, we know that Brexit is a wildly reckless project, pushed through by the worst of the English ruling class. Time to try & stop it
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Spread this far & wide. "The crash of 2008. can you think of anyone who stuck up for the bankers as much as I did. I defended them day in, day out.".H/t @YvetteCooperMP
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Alan Partridge here, who may not have read the Grundrisse
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The fact that Farage is now talking boastfully about working to get other govts to veto an article 50 extension shows what a chancer he is. No more talk about treachery pls. Patriots believe in our elected parliament, not what Thatcho-anarchists tell Salvini et al to do.
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"The contract with Deloitte [who run testing centres] does not require the company to report positive cases to Public Health England and local authorities." This is such a shambles, with huge consequences.
The idea that Data Protection is stopping testing information going to councils is for the birds- this is the real reason, they didn’t put it in the contracts in the first place!
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A man in a soaking suit, as he shouts over the Labour 97 anthem. Achingly apt.
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One of the key things we are discovering in the midst of this mess is that TV current affairs based on pundits & commentators bigging themselves up is a massive part of why our discourse has gone so wrong. Report. Report.
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The Tory Party is breaking Britain, & in the process, it is breaking itself. The gravity of this gets lost in the social media age, but this is as historic as politics gets in peacetime.
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This is not a 'farce' or a 'mess'. It's a profound national crisis whose eventual resolution will define Britain for decades. If you aspire to power, a test of that aspiration is whether you're prepared to point a way out, and work for it. Silence & obfuscation are not answers.
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Right then. I think we've reached a watershed point in the waging of culture wars, and Conservatives ought to see it, and act on it. I wrote this today: What kind of person would drag autistic children into the culture wars? The Kemi Badenoch kind.
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Once the Prime Minister even suggests that he can personally & arbitrarily intervene on particular people's/companies' tax arrangements, a crack starts to open in the most basic notions of the rule of law & the conventions of government. That's why this is important.
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Just been out. it's odd that the food delivery/haulage crisis is so under-reported. A big part of the surreal-twisted ambience of the summer
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No lectures about pluralism and democracy from people who created these waves, surfed, and then got thrown off
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Boris "Stay at home" Johnson's Scotland trip is so appallingly timed it's downright surreal
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Question here is why it has all disintegrated. 2 answers: 1)the Tory party is now unleadable & collectively mad;2)out in the real world, there is nothing to show after 12 years besides decay & harm (Thatcherism had winners). And the centrality of Brexit to the story is now clear.
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I'm not the first to say this, but it's quite something watching the Conservatives try and kick people back to workplaces to preserve the jobs of people who work in sandwich shops. Quite the contrast with their past approach to, say, coalminers, shipbuilders & steelworkers.
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Labour’s record on Brexit comes down to 3 years of silence, an 11th-hour flurry of displacement activity that slightly tilted it to Remain & made a lot of noise. and the fact that it looks set to be Lab votes that may get Johnson’s deal through, with the leadership’s permission.
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Cheer yourself up, here's Swiss art-punk band Kleenex from. 77? Essentially Elastica, 20 years early
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Amid hype and misplaced relief, it would be good if people focused on the grim absurdity of a 2,000-page trade deal being pushed through parliament in a single day, with most MPs on Zoom. The misrule worsens.
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If you can't grasp "it's raining, there's no cover, you'll look shit", I don't think politics is really your thing.
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Is there a government at the moment? Thought I'd ask.
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"We need to carry people with us, not crush their spirit," says Burnham. Good line, spot on.
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What is this? How much money does Rishi Sunak's wife make every minute? So what?
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There's nothing funny about Hancock on I'm A Celebrity. Mass death meets light entertainment. like something from beyond the imagination of Ballard. If you can't see that, think.
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safe to say that A.Burnham was the one Labour politician who approached this with the correct level of energy & righteous fury.
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The ppl around Starmer go on about how "ruthless" he is. Ruthlessness in politics often causes disaster. But now we also see what else it leads to: two women of colour who've come further & worked harder for Labour than any central-casting apparatchik being thrown under the bus.
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Everything gets lost in an endless bullshit blizzard, but let's try & see this for what it is:.A Conservative Prime Minister threatening the country she ostensibly governs with chaos & breakdown.
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Just to make this clear: this 'Good Friday agreement has failed' stuff coming from Brexiteers (it's Daniel Hannan now) is conclusive evidence that the agenda is being driven by right-wing Bolsheviks: real zealots, who'll steamroller anything in pursuit of their supposed cause.
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The government that did "it's your duty to to the pub", "it's your duty to eat out", "the right honourable gentleman wants to cancel Christmas", "it's coming down to one metre". now says the public is fucking up & it's time to get tough. God help us.
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Seems the two-party consensus is that these results say that we all want Brexit "done" (Tories) or "sorted" (Labour). Clearly, what has happened shows that millions of us don't want it at all. However flawed the vehicles for saying so, that's blindingly obvious.
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Hostility towards teachers & their professional organisations is wired into a certain kind of English Conservative. It's a striking thing, given that successful countries/cultures tend have deep respect for teachers & teaching. And small wonder: if you can read this, thank one.
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And so it goes. You can't run national media outlets on an understanding of political discourse that's 10 years out of date.
Left: BBC version. Right: Leave manipulated version. Lesson: Farage agrees to BBC interview. Gets grilled but gets in his talking points. Shortly after his supporters are spreading cuts across social media with Leave instead of BBC bug and @AndrewMarr9 cropped from visual. watch.
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I have watched this a few times. What's breathtaking about it is not just the content & delivery - but the fact that politics is in such a messed-up state that the most raging class analysis of Brexit lunacy comes from. a Tory MP.
Conservative MP @Anna_Soubry attacked "ideologically driven" colleagues with "gold-plated pensions and inherited wealth" for ignoring the "reality" of Brexit.
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Great scoop from tmrw's Sunday Times. Partying like it's 1789
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As the post-Brexit Tory vision of Britain as Northern Europe's offshore casino & zero-hours hell is put before us, you'd think the Opposition might be tirelessly pointing these things out. Anyone seen them/him?.
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Fuck off.
Close allies say the Prime Minister would act 'harder, earlier and faster' to battle the coronavirus outbreak if he had his time again.
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There is a strong argument that Wichita Lineman is among the greatest 10 pieces of popular music ever recorded. #GlenCampbell.
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Note to Brexiters indulging in spectacular Whataboutery on Vote Leave/electoral commission: you either believe in the rule of law and its application to democratic processes. or you don't.
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Have avoided saying this so far but. What is going on at the BBC? One of their own correspondents says the Wylie hearing is "the most astounding thing I've seen in Parliament."
"Vote Leave's cheating may well have swung the Referendum result." Wylie tells Parliamentary select committee. NOT covered on @BBCNews site which instead is carrying the fact that Zuckerberg won't appear in front the committee.
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And somewhere in an alternative universe there's a Labour leader with the wit & basic sense of class politics to be all over the media this morning pointing out that the Rulling Class are laughing at us. But, you know, "we've been joined by Barry Gardiner"
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At a time of climate emergency, widespread poverty, a housing crisis, ruined local & city government, an ever-ageing society, huge changes to the world of work. they decide to go after the BBC.
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The Conservative Party is going bonkers. Stand well back, if you can. Millions can't.
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Independent record shops are great, but in the midst of HMV news, the idea that it/Tower/Our Price were only ever for non-specialists is pure rubbish. Most of my Fall CDs were bought in HMV. Its jazz/country basement on Oxford St was basically a niche shop, staffed by experts (1).
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A reminder to everyone writing: "first/biggest European war in 70 years": the Balkans. Fucking hell.
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That's his defence. That's. It. The fact there a significant numbers of Conservative MPs who would apparently die ina ditch for this bollockry is amazing.
Boris Johnson just said holding the parties was "essential" to the functioning of government. Well.
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Latest from me. This has bern waiting to be pointed out for quite a while
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Raab, Johnson, Gove, Hunt, Rudd, Mordaunt, possibly Truss with McVey as the punchline. Yes, we've arrived at the gates of hell.
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