UK General Discussion:The Rt. Hon Alex Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Populist Hero

[Estrella]

This thing I saw in another thread made me wonder:

Blue Labour is a mixture of red-brown cranks and Cambridge theology students (but I repeat myself).

Nobody in the UK has referred to Red Tories since about 2014.

How does C of E clergy typically vote? And how about Catholics or other Protestant denominations?

[Estrella]

I realize I'm someone from the Continent who just doesn't understand cricket and that the biggest cricket nations are non-white, but there's something (everything, really) about that sport that just screams 19th century. Which is why I'm not surprised it's now embroiled in a pretty serious racism scandal.

[Estrella]

What are some good books to read about British politics ?

Al will give you much better advice for sure, but I'd recommend Peter Hennessy's The Prime Minister: the office and its holders since 1945. It's a great book, going over both the politics of PMs' time in office and their personalities and private life. The only thing I'm not sure I like is that it's a little too heavy on details about organization and bureaucracy that were probably too boring even to contemporary political journalists, let alone some guy reading about it fifty years later. But those things can be interesting in their own way too.

_{(I discovered Hennessy when I had a strange phase of being a weird teeaboo who was also really into Cold War history, so I ended up reading his book The Secret State about Britain's preparations for a nuclear war. Related: the Protect and Survive booklets and PSAs are the best works of horror since Lovecraft. Fight me.)}

[Estrella]

Some of you may know Alex McPhee and his wonderful maps. I've found a map he made of the 2019 election and it's beautiful. I'm not posting it here because it's just YUGE, but you can see it for yourselves here.

Explanatory note: colour going around the outline of the square means the winning party got more than 50%, colour on the bottom of the square means it won with less than 50%.

[Estrella]

BBC again at the forefront of investigative journalism.

How many wine bottles can you fit in a suitcase? The latest revelation - published by the Telegraph - includes the detail that staff were reportedly sent to a nearby shop with a suitcase, that was brought back "filled with bottles of wine".

How many might that be? Following a very unscientific experiment - how big is a suitcase, after all - we found we could fit roughly around 30 bottles, or possibly one Nebuchadnezzar, in a medium-to-large suitcase. Although it would be less if you wanted to pad out the bottles to avoid breakage. And would there be room for snacks? Do you sacrifice a bottle of wine for a family-sized pack of crisps?

The research continues.

[Estrella]

Which followed this little exchange. Can someone just lock Fabricant in a cupboard until Boris is forced out? The man's a national embarrassment at this point.

https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1485242385768529921

https://twitter.com/Mike_Fabricant/status/1485000638232674304

Compare and contrast:

[Estrella]

It should be noted that the Liberal Democrats are already a merger between a liberal party & a social democratic one; and this was a complex & painful process for the party which was still causing issues 20 years later.

I'm not very familiar with the history of Lib Dems, but didn't most SDP people slowly return to Labour during Kinnock's leadership?

[Estrella]

Incidentally, if Johnson were to repeat a certain lie outside the Commons chamber, he would almost certainly face a libel suit which, were it to happen, he would certainly lose and would certainly have to pay extremely heavy damages.

Which lie ?

Keir'll Fix It

[Estrella]

The British Green Party People:

A local party winning on the exact opposite platform of what the parliamentary party stands for? I see they're doing their best to become a worthy replacement of Liberal Democrats.

[Estrella]

Does receiving city status mean any practical changes for these places or are they just the municipal equivalent of Hyacinth Bucket?

[Estrella]

Try telling me that this man didn’t know exactly what he was doing.

I'm sure the voters of Wakefield, Tiverton and Honiton and the yet to be revealed Mystery Sex Pest Constituency will be thrilled to see this photo on their leaflets. Preferably next to a stock image of an elderly woman in a hospital bed.

[Estrella]

Hilarious briefing that Boris will call a snap election- something ofc that would be most likely rejected by the Queen, and which would happen under the old election boundaries.

The results from Wales alone would knock back their majority by a good chunk…

If BoJo went to the Palace right now & requested that HM dissolve Parliament, would 28 letters of no-confidence publicly submitted to Brady so far out of the 54 that are required to trigger a vote that he'd likely win rn by a 2/3rds+ or so margin anyway be enough reason for her to believe that her PM no longer has the House's confidence & justify a delay or refusal?

It's not so much about the PM not having confidence of the House:

In so far as this matter can be publicly discussed, it can be properly assumed that no wise Sovereign—that is, one who has at heart the true interest of the country, the constitution, and the Monarchy—would deny a dissolution to his Prime Minister unless he were satisfied that:
(1) the existing Parliament was still vital, viable, and capable of doing its job;
(2) a General Election would be detrimental to the national economy;
(3) he could rely on finding another Prime Minister who could carry on his Government, for a reasonable period, with a working majority in the House of Commons.

Tories still have an ample majority, so the current Parliament definitely qualifies as "vital, viable and capable of doing its job". If the 54th letter arives, Boris somehow loses the vote and decides to exit with a bang, the third point applies.

[Estrella]

Nadine, this is not America.

[Estrella]

It's basically people who would never (and largely have never, except maybe in 1997 or thereabouts) vote Labour and a much smaller group of people who somehow always or nearly always vote Labour anyway, despite that.

Plus a much smaller amount of people in east Kent and environs who are actually directly affected by the issue.

They maybe voted Labour when they were young in the 1960s/70s, or perhaps just once in 1997.

(some remarkably right wing people did so then, as was also anecdotally the case in 1945)

My paternal grandfather (died in 2005) voted Labour in 1945 and subsequently said "never again", although he was never a particularly right-wing Tory (had reservations about Thatcher, including her handling of the Falklands). Legend has it that he was a radical leftie in the 1930s, however.

1997 saw Labour get the endorsements of some celebrities with generally unpleasant views - John McCririck (the now deceased horse racing bloke) and Michael Caine come to mind.

My paternal grandfather voted Labour in 1945 and spent the last fifty odd years of his life as an extremely partisan Tory. Though to be fair, that conversion may have been less a landslide effect and more that a) my grandmother was incredibly right-wing and b) he had to deal with the DMU when he was involved in the building of Newton Aycliffe. He never forgave them for shooting down his plan for district heating.

Do you know more about her politics? I wonder what "incredibly right-wing" meant in 50s/60s/70s for people who weren't Enoch Powell.

[Estrella]

Michael Ellis making an almighty idiot of himself in the HoC has become one of the great traditions of this government.

Nominative determinism?

[Estrella]

So, where does Johnson rank compared to his two predecessors? I, for one, called both Cameron and May among the worst in British history, and I knew it wouldn't be long before he usurped them both for that title. Can the streak continue?

Cameron is still the absolute worst. His Brexit Referendum gambit to shut up the Eurosceptics within the Tory Party put the UK on its current path. That's not to say that there should not have been a referendum (because, clearly, Brexit had/has widespread support), but there should have been a **plan** in case leave won.

Cameron was not individually at fault for the Brexit mess - he led the Conservatives to a narrow victory on the strong and stable message and once that happened no Tory leader could have resisted the Brexiteer wing of the party that was baying for blood. May and Johnson have to own this political disaster alongside Baker and the other hardliners who never seem to get their hands stuck into governing.

He was responsible:

• He promised the referendum in 2013 to try to avoid facing a leadership challenge, with no intention to go through with it because he assumed the Lib Dems would force him to drop the pledge during coalition negotiations.
• He then won a majority by deliberately knee-capping the Lib Dems.
• He ran a tone deaf campaign, aimed at ensuring Tory voters voted Remain and that those who voted Leave didn't get too angry with him, whilst failing to realise that in a referendum you need to get 50% and so you have to try and win the support of non-Tory voters.
• When the result happened, he promptly ran away.

His successors handled things very badly, but it's Cameron's fault that it ever happened.

This is something seemingly every Tory politician struggles with. The 90s civil war made them view relations with the EU - and then the whole process of Brexit - as an internal party matter, as if the universe ended at the door of CCHQ. This attitude is probably the main culprit for why the Brexit negotiations were such a chaotic farce.

[Estrella]

Meanwhile in Mississ- sorry, the UK: Woman kept in police cell for 36 hours after stillbirth due to suspicions she had ‘illegal abortion’

In related news, Dorries wants to reduced the time limit for abortion by four weeks while Tory backbenchers talk about how women don't have bodily autonomy. I'd rather not know what Braverman thinks. Funny, isn't it, how the Party of Personal Responsibility has so many fans of state-mandated pregnancies.

[Estrella]

“Suella De Vil” is my potential contribution

You beat me to it! Well done! I was just about post that one alongside these:

-"Jeremy Hunt for Red October."
-"Penny (Mordaunt) for Your Thoughts."
-"Trussfund Baby."

I’m always a sucker for “Hunt for the Red October” puns! That would get my vote if Hunt wins.

Coming soon to a Number Ten near you!