UK General Discussion: Rishecession

[Filuwaúrdjan]

British stereotypes about New Zealand still reflect how the country was before Rogernomics

The view of it as a present day 1950s Britain is still remarkably persistent.

And, of course, inaccurate.

It's still Austin Mitchell's Half-Gallon Quarter-Acre Pavlova Paradise to people here, yes.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Gotta find a Muldoon equivalent too given his absurdly harmful policies necessitated such extreme fiscal measures.

That one is easy enough: just making Anthony Barber a long-serving Prime Minister.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It does strike me as very telling that they still haven't thought up any credible explanation for whey they lost a rural constituency with a monstrous majority (and which they would have held in 1997) to Labour in a by-election.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes, broadly speaking Pimlott's position has won out. Wilson is now usually seen as a successful reforming Prime Minister who made some serious errors but who, on balance, made the country a better place in which to live. Mary Wilson lived to see her husband's rehabilitation, which was nice.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Blair's reputation is on the same distinctive upwards curve as Wilson's was thirty years ago. The past couple of years, in particular, have had an understandable impact there, by way of contrast.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Rishi Sunak is about to be even less popular in South Wales than he was before, I see.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I wouldn't say these accusations are of misdemeanors.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Half the stuff he says he's scrapping doesn't actually exist and hasn't been proposed.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

On a related note a sign of how weird 2019 was that when I saw the exit poll I expected a number of MPs who won in 2015 and 2017 to lose their seats; they in fact won with small majorities while other MPs with majorities 2 or 3 times as big lost…

The telling thing was that Labour's only decent results were in constituencies where there was a strong Remain majority and they were the obvious tactical option. Sobering.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A poll showing a Labour lead of 14% has caused a big wobble in the media and questions about whether the Net Zero stuff has made a difference.

A single poll from a firm that bounces around- I can remember all the excitement at the ‘narrowing’ of the polls at the start of the year.

Which poll is this? I know that the lead in the latest Deltapoll dropped to 16pts, but their poll previous to their previous one had it at 18pts. Most poll movements for a long time have basically been statistical noise, as always happens once leads get mountainous. In any case, 14pts would still be a huge lead, larger than Labour have ever had if it were the result of a General Election.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

So if it is the most recent Deltapoll, then it shows the Conservatives down 17pts on the last General Election, which is firmly in to 'utter catastrophe' territory with FPTP unless the principal opposition party is also struggling. However.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.

Seems to be an awful lot of squinting and trying to see things that aren't actually there.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

One whose parents are rich.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It is a shame that he wasn't selected for Selby in preparation for the GE, as that would have meant he was their candidate for the Selby & Ainsty by-election and just think at what we missed out on.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

More to the point, the incumbent government ran one of the very worst campaigns that an incumbent government ever has in Britain: it was, perhaps, the closest thing we've ever seen to the infamous Liberal campaign at the 1957 Canadian federal election. David Butler, who o/c came briefly out of retirement to analyze the campaign on twitter, noted that not in his seven decades (!) of analyzing elections had he ever seen an incumbent government drop a major plank in its manifesto halfway through the campaign, or even anything comparable to that.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

More to the point, the incumbent government ran one of the very worst campaigns that an incumbent government ever has in Britain: it was, perhaps, the closest thing we've ever seen to the infamous Liberal campaign at the 1957 Canadian federal election.

For those not in the know, this was the election in which the "Minister for everything" CD Howe was accosted by an angry voter who said "farmers are starving" to which the minister's response was to poke the man in the stomach, saying "looks like you eat pretty well under a Liberal government".

And the election in which the Prime Minister's handlers accidently seriously assaulted a child who was heckling him at a rally.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That depends on your definition of Evangelical, which has many more meanings in Britain than the USA. And, in some cases, on the election.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Northern Ireland isn't part of Britain, you see.

Anyway, historically speaking there were major sectarian and confessional influences on British voting patterns, though they steadily faded throughout the twentieth century as the reasons for them faded.*  There are still traces, though more in the form of 'our family has always supported Party X unless there was a good reason not to' etc.

_{*By means of a much more complex story than mere secularization on its own.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

On the Bridlington constituency, it turns out that not one but two Conservative incumbents are seeking selection there: Richard Holden and Stuart Andrew. Shouldn't there at least be a limit on chicken-runners per constituency?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ah, the sort of openly shameless defection one associates more with local government.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's mostly that higher education has become less and less a class marker in Britain but has retained much more of its traditional status in the United States. The British figures are not that different to those in a lot of other European countries, tellingly.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

So then. 'Useless fuckpigs'. Discuss.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Interesting (though not terribly surprising) findings here - worth going through the whole thread:

https://twitter.com/sundersays/status/1721107432175173961

I.e. amongst the broad public, the present flare up of ~The Conflict~ is not a massively polarizing issue with nuanced opinions being very common.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Got to admit that Braverman accidentally comparing pro-Palestinian demonstrators and Islamists to the Orange Order is incredibly funny.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Her approach seems to be a combination of American talking points and a French attitude to the appropriate use of state power.

Yeah, she seems to think that as Home Secretary she can just direct the police to do whatever she wants them to, and that's just not how it works here.