UK General Discussion: Rishecession

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Say what you will about Liz Truss but one cannot claim that she's a BS artist or a scammer. She once made a pledge that she'd be "opening up new pork markets". By devaluing the pound until it's worthless, pork will be exported abroad. Also, more British people will be tasting "local" apples and Yorkshire pudding: they won't be able to afford anything imported!

Truly a visionary leader, who is making sure that Britain returns to the rustic way of life by generating a massive balance of payments crisis that forces everyone to only eat foods grown locally.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I feel bad for the British people but this is tremendous content.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

It's worth mentioning that the national popular vote in 1997 and 2001 will severely understate Labour's support because turnout was quite low in Labour strongholds, not due to lack of enthusiasm, but due to a sense that Labour's victory was inevitable and that it would be pointless to vote. You also have to take into account tactical support for the LibDems. In the end, I suspect Labour's true level of support was in the high 40s to low 50s in 1997, just as surveys suggested. Overall, I think the seat counts reflect this more than Labour's 13 point lead would.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Assorted thoughts that I have:

• putting too much stock in crosstabs is always a mistake but what we see in crosstabs now compared to crosstabs last month suggests that working class support for the Tories is non-existent now, which is exactly what you'd expect to happen. Genepool Tories are almost never working class and these are the only people who'd pledge themselves to this disgraceful government.
• something in Keir Starmer's recent statements reminds me of Tony Blair at his best in the mid-1990s. By this, I mean that Keir Starmer appears to represent "the center ground" of normal, patriotic people while pledging to end class war waged on the working class. All of this works very well now because the mini-budget is actually a form of class war.
• I still think a lot of Labour's messaging appears as canned nonsense now. Perhaps it reflects the whiplash of the moment but their slogan should not be "a fairer, greener future". They should be leaning into patriotism now, promising to revive the country. I suspect this is coming soon.
• If you watch Labour's broadcasts from 1997, they could simply be ran again, all of them. History has repeated itself somehow, albeit with a few tweaks, a few different events. If you elect Tories, they'll destroy public services, cause increases in crime, social disorder and so on. They'll run disastrous social experiments and disregard fundamental economic sense.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Various facts:

• UK economy is doomed over the next 24 months or so. Even if Truss had never proposed her moronic mini-budget, mortgage rates were going to reset at higher levels while energy costs spiked for households. Even without the mini-budget, UK government will be running massive budget deficits as interest rates spike.
• We live in an even more grim universe where there were a series of panics in financial markets, over pensions such that mortgage markets froze-up. I suspect that home-buying activity was nuked to close to zero overnight. It's hard to imagine how it could recover.
• No U-turn would work, nothing Truss or the Tories can do will work because the Tories are now decisively seen to be responsible for the dire state of the UK economy. This was not exactly true two months ago. No one was pleased with Tory economic management but it wasn't viewed as the sole reason for spiking inflation. Today, everyone assumes that poor outcomes are due to Tory mismanagement. This impression won't change, it's baked-in now.

If I was a Tory MP, I'd still try to take out Liz Truss as a "tit-for-tat" strategy. Sure, you'll be destroyed no matter what, but you might as well humiliate the psycho who guaranteed this fate.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I find the initial interpretation of Hunt's measures as "austerity" to be basically false. Hunt's "U-turn" involves rolling back most of the reckless mini-budget and the reckless part of the energy price cap. Even then, he has kept the reduction in effective stamp duty and what, in American terms, would be a payroll tax cut. Given the costs of massively subisidizing energy costs and the added cost of servicing debt due to Bank of England rate hikes, there should be no tax cuts, it's ridiculous that these are being floated at all.

I think the obvious interpretation is that the meat puppet Truss government will ultimately pursue aggressive spending cuts, probably through the channel of not tying nominal spending increases to inflation. Various "thinkers" will view this as being the clever strategy: you can claim you aren't cutting spending this way. NHS spending increases by the same forecasted X% rate in nominal terms but, due to inflation, it's actually an effective cut.

Certainly, one way of reducing excess demand and curbing inflation would be to slash spending but public services in the UK have already been cut to the bone. The wages of teachers and nurses have been cratering relative to private sector wages. Studies show this reduces the quality of workers. Labour will inherit a busted public sector and its main task will be repairing it, which could be a decade long project...

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Those who are actually in power should have the dignity to seize it formally by installing an actual PM instead of using Truss as a meat puppet. This reeks of cowardice and the desire to avoid responsibility for enabling this maniac. Truss should have the courage to resign for her own good instead of holding onto a figurehead role that's nothing more than a poisoned chalice, a scarlet letter.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Yes--a great number of online Americans delight in such performative displays, usually motivated more by reacting against their youthful television-based Anglophilia or emulating those who are than anything else, which in this latest instance has turned out to be finding any way to pick at the murder dog ban. It is pathetic.

This isn't meant to refer directly to you or anyone else on this side, but something I've noticed having seen many online posts from Britons is that they consistently fail to understand to what extent Britain is the villain in our national myth or how important that is to all Americans. There is essentially no class of Americans, online or not, for whom this is not the case.

In this case, I'm not sure how you can accuse the quoted post of looking to "pick at the murder dog ban" when its author makes it very clear in the post itself that he neither knows nor cares about this British dog issue, which has no impact on us Americans. It's just a way to make fun of Britain, which every American loves to do. It doesn't really matter if people on X are making jokes about Britain; it'll be fine.

The best evidence in favor of this is that when it was revealed that 21 Savage was a citizen of the UK, which caused an uproar online, most memes about this were allusions/references to a) American Revolution b) fact that British people like 'crumpets' or tea. In the mind of most Americans, Britain is an antique country that was once our overlord. Few of us take the country seriously.