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28 Jun 23:36 wiki 001 | Anonymous: You don't need to use Linux--that would just be my preference if I was acting as a sysadmin (both from an ideological standpoint and from the fact that I am more adept with it). Go with whatever you're most comfortable with/can afford. I wasn't meaning to suggest Waliki, no. In any case, it's not based around GitHub (the website) as the…
28 Jun 22:07 wiki 001 | Tim Wilkinson: 1. re: Windows - you're probably right. I was just being a bit lazy as I am used to using it. I'll see about Linux. 2. re: GitHub - do you think we ought to be (re)considering Waliki in that case? Did you happen to see what xWiki/its extensions do with respect to this area? I didn't get to the bottom of that entirely 3. Another issue I think…
28 Jun 20:25 wiki 001 | Anonymous: That comment shouldn't be taken to mean that we shouldn't use Windows, by the way.
28 Jun 20:24 wiki 001 | Anonymous: Well, wearing my free-software-zealot hat I'd rather Linux than Windows, but from a technical perspective, I don't think it should matter for something like this. Linux may sometimes be cheaper to get from a hosting company, though. I agree that no wiki really seems to have a tightly integrated and organized discussion system as we might like. I…
28 Jun 09:34 security 001 | Tim Wilkinson: Need input on this: how are we going to vet new members? In security terms, I'm thinking of avoiding saboteurs and vandals, and to the extent that people may end up as admins etc, infiltrators etc. Considering such scenarios may sound over-dramatic but given this is a 'security' thread for once I don't think I have to jump through any hoops…

Wednesday, 29 June 2016

Tim Wilkinson: The Expected Ambush


The Labour grassroots' strategy in backing Corbyn has come to a head.


New Labour's one trick was the tactic of accepting the Tory agenda and hoping that the 'good cop' role will at least sometimes be preferred to the Conservatives' bad cop. By the summer of 2015 that tactic had demonstrably and decisively failed by every measure. The 'wisdom of crowds' embodied in thousands of various and disparate Labour members delivered its judgement: a realignment was needed if the party was ever to regain, and make use of, office in government.


This view was of course not shared by the NuLab tendency, entombed as it was after twenty years in a sealed chamber of self-serving groupthink. From the start it was clear that a sizable faction - or axis - in the Labour Party would go to any lengths to stop Corbyn. Disruption, non-co-operation, sabotage, malicious 'leaks', staged resignations, vicous smear campaigns, several aborted coup plans: Corbyn, put in place and maintained there by the grassroots, has survived them all.


Now the Parliamentary Labour Party has chosen the moment when the Conservatives are most exposed, and a general election may yet be on the cards, to precipitate the long-awaited final coup attempt. This is no coincidence - those implacably opposed to the Corbynist brand of soft-left politics fear a Corbyn general election win above all.


The hardcore plotters - mostly members of the strictly-defined 'Blairite' sub-faction rather than any of the other New Labour and right-wing groupings - must be concerned too about the supposedly imminent publication of the Chilcot inquiry. Perhaps they are feeling some urgency to install a new leader who is either implicated in bloody misdeeds, or disposed to cover up for those who are.


The wider New Labour-habituated PLP seems disorientated and almost traumatised by the Brexit result (as if they had tossed a coin while discounting the possibility that it would present 'tails'). In some fit of mass neurosis they seem to have have found themselves engaged in a last-ditch all-or-nothing coup attempt, and a strangely inept and chaotic one at that.


A too-obviously stage-managed variety-show of non-entities and nepotists all performing the same resignation act, a guilty, furtive secret ballot, a desperate last minute search for the viable challenger they have been vainly seeking for the past ten months...


Somehow the PLP right has managed to catch itself off guard in mounting the very ambush they had been planning. Everyone expected it except, when it actually eventuated, the bushwhackers themselves. Meanwhile all around the high horizon appear the silhouetted figures of half a million Labour members.


The attempt at reforming the PLP and party structures has been exhausted. There is nowhere left to go but a belated Labour Spring and the decisive and very public supersession of New Labour. The amazing thing is that the PLP has not only offered this up on a plate, it has made the offer one that can't be refused. Peter Mandelson will not be pleased. That is not what he meant at all. That is not it, at all.


But how did it ever come to this? The following series of info-memes and links, culled from the timeline of the @SurelySmMistake Twitter account, tells the story: