Definitely worth the six figure salary

  • Awoo [she/her]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    She tweeted that "he got a little flustered" in this interview.

    Image of union man getting flustered.

    Mick Lynch has dismantled every single fucking media goon that has tried to have a pop today. He's done 40+ interviews on tv and radio like this and he smashed every single one of them.

    Richard Madeley on GMB tried to do the old anti-communism

    Big fan of him calling out lying politicians to their face.

    Another

    I don't even know who you are :gigachad:

    This government of billionaires tell everyone else to tighten their belts while they're raking it in :porky-scared:

    It becomes so incredibly obvious what a farce media has become when you put someone in front of the cameras who doesn't give a fuck about keeping a long-term media career. He makes them all look like idiots.

    EDIT: I should add that Kay's line of questioning in the original clip is a complete load of bollocks too.

    Her claim that they'll bring in agency workers is nonsense. Where are they going to get 40,000 workers who know how to run Britain's rail lines from overnight in these conditions ?

    Does anyone have 40,000 experienced railway workers lying around doing nothing? Do they fuck. You gonna run and repair trains and railways on day 1 temps with no training? No. You wanna get European workers to do that immediately after the country just voted for Brexit to stop that? Good luck with the fallout from that one.

    • LeninsBeard [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Holy shit him just calling that Tory politician a liar over and over is giving me energy

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Real opposition works. People like it and people resonate with it.

        The tories are on the backfoot here, they miscalculated that people would be against the strikes because the country was hurt by covid but instead what it's done is make it really easy for people to shrug this off. Working class people are used to being disrupted right now, covid disrupted them many many times more than this strike, people have just stayed at home, there's no road chaos, there's no train station chaos, everything is just empty. People are chilling and they've absolutely failed at this early stage to turn public opinion against this strike.

        They should have waited 5 days for the public to get a bit antsy before starting their campaign against it but they've fucked it up now. Country will rally behind the strikers and probably won't change their opinions until a good offer is on the table. I think 5% is where they'll settle.

        • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Very much this. It's a consequence of the Tories basically having no political opposition. They've gotten used to just being able to bulldoze through everything and they just couldn't hold themselves back from laying into the unions preemptively. The media will support them unconditionally of course, but they've overplayed their hand here I suspect.

          • Awoo [she/her]
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            They just went in far too early, complete miscalculation. I guess they thought they needed to set the narrative from the start but they've fucked up by demonstrating very very clearly that they're not unbiased and that's set the working public against them.

            This will set up all the other unions for followup action and all of them will get public support. The only ones that I have concerns about are the energy companies, people may conflate workers there with the 50% to 300% price rises they're feeling in their households and that they don't deserve it. I'm not completely confident that people will split striking energy workers from their bosses and company owners in germany and the rest of europe.

            It might be possible to solve that by simply including them in a General Strike rather than having their own independent strike.

            • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Agreed, a general strike apart from being obviously stronger would help keep the focus where it should be. Short of that, if energy workers strike they need a strong line and narrative that neutralises that attack; something along the lines of "our members work for these price-gouging companies and, like millions of others, don't even get paid enough to afford their own outrageous energy bills".

              • Awoo [she/her]
                ·
                2 years ago

                There's no guarantee they'll let a union rep into the media again after Lynch, can't rely on being able to properly publicise that message to the audiences that the media reaches who do not get their information from any other source.

                • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  In a General Strike situation I imagine they won't, but while it's individual unions I suspect they will to try and pick them apart, look for weaker links who can be bullied by the media, and try and play them against each other. Mick might not be getting many more bookings before long though, although saying that it's not his first time on the media merry go round anyway.

                  But you're right that the messaging has to come from outside the traditional media too; union releases, Twitter campaigns, friendly independent media, satellite figures etc and of course in the street too ideally.

                  • Awoo [she/her]
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    2 years ago

                    What we desperately need to take advantage of is any opportunity in media to plug alternative media. Tell people to view direct sources for information, the RMT twitter, Trades Union Congress, etc etc. Take every opportunity given to us in the media to plug alt-media because it disempowers traditional media.

                    In the UK we should genuinely be looking at Trump and his attack on the media in the US as a model to follow but from the left. Get people to recognise television as not presenting the whole story and tell people to go to the source and hear it directly from us because you're not going to get the right information when they decide to put a liberal Labour MP next to a Tory MP to talk about it instead of the union reps.

                    • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]
                      ·
                      2 years ago

                      Absolutely. This has been my go to for a long time.

                      It's just a shame the left in this country doesn't have better signal boosting media. Novara (despite often being pretty cringe) aren't bad for union boosting stuff, but they're shite at playing the social media algorithms and seem to have pretty much stagnated in terms of reach. For all the many, many challenges for leftism in the states at least there's a more robust alternative media with more reach.

                      • Awoo [she/her]
                        ·
                        edit-2
                        2 years ago

                        Novara are unfortunately targeting middle class and university-educated audiences which would be completely turned off by algorithm chasing shit because they're not as poisoned as americans are. The online landscape being all american companies is an issue and there's no low-brow bottom of the barrel left media that's willing to do anything and everything regardless of reputation it might create for chasing the bottom of the barrel that all these shite american social media companies promote.

                        The other side of this is also that chasing algorithms doesn't actually get you in front of British audiences, it gets you in front of Americans. I do think we need more some bottom of the barrel leftist media here though, right now we've got Novara, Double Down News and a rough coalition of independents. It's not nearly enough. We need a genuinely funny dirtbag left group with preferably rev-left tendencies but played skillfully. We have enough middle class and academic targeting shit between Novara, Owen Jones etc.

    • HauntedBySpectacle [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The contempt just dripping from that politician's eyes at being called a liar under his breath each and every time he should be is fucking invigorating

      Bodied

    • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      This is a great collection. I've been avoiding this stuff as much as possible beyond a few snippets on the radio. Your last point is spot on too. You wouldn't be able to find thousands of retail workers to just waltz in and take over entire stores, never mind bloody rail engineers and drivers.

      • Awoo [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Yeah you can't even get the drivers, let alone the people that walk the lines every single day looking for and repairing faults, or signal operators, or communicators, who's going to operate the thousands of switches? It's a level of nonsense that only deserves ridicule on the face of it. Entertaining the idea that it's plausible requires being utterly misinformed about the reality of how a nationwide railway network operates. It requires the audience to be literally uninformed.

        The media are disinformation.

    • SoyViking [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      But also there are armed forces veterans who risked their lives for our freedoms who won't be able to celebrate armed forces day on Saturday

      :dril:

    • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      > "image of union man getting flustered"

      > :panting:.jpg

      > he's perfectly calm

      > :ooooooooooooooh:

      Edit: Having now watched the videos I'm back to :panting: