UK General Discussion: 2017 and onwards, Mayhem

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The DUP will vote to prop up the limpet Prime Minister, because of course.

So aside from wasting nearly a third of the remaining available time, delaying the vote by a month achieved... what exactly?

The plan may be to try again with even less time left and try to get it through via fear alone.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The DUP will vote to prop up the limpet Prime Minister, because of course.

So aside from wasting nearly a third of the remaining available time, delaying the vote by a month achieved... what exactly?

The plan may be to try again with even less time left and try to get it through via fear alone.

Tea Party tactics there, except emnating from the government.

Yeah. I've been predicting - as a possibility not as a certainty, obviously - this to people in Real Life for about a year now.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Parliament has shown that it will intervene to prevent that running down the clock.

Yes. But she may well try anyway...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

For the record, that is basically a party line vote between the Conservatives and the DUP vs the rest.

Well, yes. It was a confidence vote. That's how they go.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The House can vote to expel, and probably ought to.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

We can't really rule anything out, and that's part of the problem. No one has a clue what's going, including and especially the people making the decisions.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A 'Blair-type' leader would... not be what you all seem to be assuming, in any case. He was, in his prime at least, an extremely 'electoralist', even populist, figure, often to the point of a very strange form of 'the People have I spoken; I am their leader; I must follow them' dogmatism.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Newspaper reports have correctly predicted about thirty of the past zero Labour splits. Doesn't mean that nothing will happen - there's a huge amount of strain at present for various reasons - but people need to avoid being credulous.

Anyway, the irony of the present situation is this: if a genuine equivalent of the original SDP were to be formed - a more moderate and small 'l' liberal version of the Labour Party headed by three and a half popular former cabinet ministers formed at a moment of apparent national crisis - it would almost certainly sweep all before it in the current climate; the various structural factors that doomed the SDP are no longer relevant. Trade Unions no longer have any hold over the political imagination or voting habits of the historic Labour electorate, the remarkable grassroots political organisation still possessed by the Conservative Party in the 1980s is long gone, the postwar generation - with its deep sense of loyalty towards Labour and the Tories and its propensity to turn out at extremely high rates - is dead, and the LibDems do not have the cross-class credibility as a protest option that the old Liberals had. The critical part, however, is 'three and a half popular former cabinet ministers' - a couple of callow randoms who are not even household names in their own houses would (probably) not cut through, no matter how widely reviled May and Corbyn are these days.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Paul Flynn, the MP for Newport West since 1987 and an entertaining and endearingly cranky fixture of public life in South Wales, has died. He was 84 and had been seriously ill for some time.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

To be fair the murmurings this time seem to be coming from multiple reporters across the spectrum.  Whether the MPs end up bottling it or not, the media have obviously heard things which suggest it's closer to crunch time.

Whatever happens this hasn't been handled particularly well by anyone, at least up until this point: too many false starts and rumours on the one hand (not great for credibility), the fact that it has reached this far and not been prevented on the other (as we all know the reality of the electoral system is that even a small splinter is not good for the mother party). But then such has been the increase in political tensions across the board with Brexit looming, maybe that's understandable on both sides, I don't know.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Well, two days after I said it probably wouldn't happen, it happens. I should start calling myself NostraDaWNmus.

I'm glad I'll have someone to vote for without holding my nose, but I do worry about the long-term prospects of this new party. I feel people seriously underrate to embedded partisanship in this country, even with the current two leaders of the main parties.

It might just be mass whip-resigning rather than a new party, of course. Though the one can obviously function as a precursor to the other.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

To confirm: they've resigned the whip and will sit together as a formal parliamentary group, but have not formed a new party.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yet; the SDP wasn’t formed straight away either.

This is correct. Of course the news cycle moved at a slower pace back then.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Don't kid yourself. This is no principled stand. It's a publicity grab, pure and simple.

Mike Gapes, a career backbencher well into his sixties, was on the verge of tears at the press conference. The tendency to assume that the motivations of people who do something you oppose can only ever be base is dismal in the extreme. This mass-resignation might well turn out be a very bad idea, but it is clearly not a light thing for (at least most) of the people involved.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

On that note, can someone give a rundown on the high profile defections? Are they all Blairites, or are at least some regular Labour MPs opposed to Brexit.

Umunna - was associated with the soft-Left socially liberal 'Compass' tendency (which has long since imploded) when he was first elected, but swung sharply to the right (in a vaguely neo-Blairite direction) as the 2010 Parliament wore on. The policy statement put out by the group looks very similar to that which he wrote for his abortive leadership campaign in 2015.

Berger - a slightly confusing case, because although she has always been associated with the Blairite end of the Labour Right, her personal views and enthusiasms are quite left-wing. She's also a friend of Umunna. But the critical thing here is that for more than a year she has been subjected to serious antisemitic abuse, and the response of the leadership and party apparatus to this has been... dire. The latter actually concealed a credible threat of violence from both her and the police. Given this, the only surprise about Berger leaving is that she's taken so long to do so.

Leslie - it would be wrong to describe him as a Blairite, but only because his associations were with the other side of New Labour; famously at the 1997 election he was the 'boy who does Gordon Brown's photocopying' who defeated veteran Tory MP Marcus Fox at Shipley. He was Labour's interim Shadow Chancellor in the summer of 2015, and in that role took stances that were very unpopular with Labour's members and which contributed to Corbyn's victory in the leadership poll.

Smith - this one really is/was a fairly boring Blairite factional hack.

Gapes - not really even on the Labour Right, let alone a Blairite. In most respects he's classic soft Left, and that's why he's a career backbencher (first elected in 1992). But he's a foreign policy specialist whose views are not remotely compatible with Corbyn's, who he thus loathes.

Shuker - a committed Evangelical Christian whose views have not always been all that easy to pin down, but he's been associated with Blairite/Progress types for a while and that's often what matters. I suppose he's politically quite similar to Atlas Forum Legend BRTD.

Coffey - an ordinary constituency-focused backbencher of the Labour Right, associated with Blair and all that, but not usually thought of as being much of a factional hack.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Three and a half former ministers? Which one was the half?

Bill Rodgers of course!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Anyway, Derek Hatton has been readmitted into Labour.

Does he still consider homosexuality to be a bourgeois deviation, do you think? Although, given his career over the past few decades, perhaps he still does think that, but now views it as a positive?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A particular low point was that time when the Party apparatus actually hid an apparently credible threat of violence against Berger from her and also decided not to report it to the police. Your Brain On Factionalism right there.