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

[brucejoel99]

In hilarous news the Government have re-imposed quarantines for those returning from Spain; and it appears the Transport Secretary (who is in charge of this; god knows why it isn't an FCO issue?) is in spain himself.

Seems wise, though I wouldn't be surprised if Shapps just didn't bother upon returning & literally just ignored it, knowing there likely won't be any consequences anyway.

[brucejoel99]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/26/49-of-voters-believe-kremlin-interfered-in-brexit-referendum-russia-report

This poll seems interesting. [...]  In any case, while serious the problem doesn't seem quite as bad as the US because it didn't have much impact on the final outcome (though the UK is just luckier in this respect, and if action is taken there may be a close vote that is swung by foreign interference).

Yeah, my (completely inexpert) opinion is that the result might've been the same without any interference, but they might consider themselves to have perhaps been successful in 'inflaming' the divisions. But the result was so close that I guess it's difficult to tell how a little nudge might've helped (though I still imagine something like years of tabloid stories probably had more of an effect).

[brucejoel99]

Has there ever been a time that a Conservative government has said "there will be no U-turn under any circumstances" that wasn't immediately followed by a government U-turn within 48 hours?

[brucejoel99]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/aug/25/boris-johnson-will-quit-dominic-cummings-father-in-law-reportedly-says

Downing Street probably hoped Dominic Cummings’ family would not provide any more headaches after the furore prompted by Boris Johnson’s adviser’s lockdown dash to his parents’ Durham farm this year.

But, in a fresh blow to No 10, the top aide’s father-in-law has reportedly said Johnson will stand down as prime minister in six months.

The claim – strenuously denied by Downing Street and, later, Johnson – was apparently delivered by Sir Humphry Wakefield to a visitor to the family’s 13th-century Grade I-listed Chillingham Castle, in Northumberland, last week.

The 84-year-old baronet, father of Cummings’ wife, Mary, told visitor Anna Silverman Johnson was still struggling badly after having coronavirus and would step down in six months, according to a report in the Times.

The Prime Minister, for his part says he is feeling "far better" and calls the claim "utter nonsense".

10 PMs in 10 years? Strong & stable indeed. Little did we all know, there was simply no escaping the Miliband Chaos whichever way the UK voted in 2015. Scientists will one day refer to this as the Miliband Paradox.

[brucejoel99]

The shocking thing is that I just read that Hague is only two years older than Starmer...

[brucejoel99]

Don't worry, they'll just whip up some nationalism over Brexit or go on the attack against unpatriotic people who hate sandwiches or something & their polling will go right back up again

[brucejoel99]

PM's personal mouthpiece the Borisograph now briefing that he wants to scrap all human rights laws.

They've been planning to do that since Cameron was PM circa 300+ years ago: repeal the HRA, leave the ECHR, & adopt a pared-down "British Bill of Rights" that the government won't find constricting. Don't worry, though, at least there'll surely be half of half-a-dozen Tory rebels when it passes the HoC.

[brucejoel99]

Keir we go.

[brucejoel99]

Relatively big announcement from Keir Starmer calling for a 'circuit breaker' lockdown of two weeks in England.

I don't know if Boris is hesitating because he needs a death toll first before he can make a national lockdown politically viable for the Tories, or if he's just genuinely dim enough to be sitting in his home right now & hoping it all fixes itself, but either way, this is an easy win for Starmer. The trend is there, & the people that'll be dying in 2 weeks as the UK approaches 500 deaths/day are already walking around infected now. As they were in March, the consequences of Boris' (in)actions are set in stone: he'll need to lock down when the chickens come home to roost, there'll be a human cost to not having done so sooner, & everybody will be asking why he didn't do it when advised.

[brucejoel99]

In other news, support for Scottish independence has hit 58% in a poll by Ipsos/MORI.

Brexiteers killed the UK. I don't blame Scotland (or Northern Ireland, either) for wanting to choose a brighter future.

[brucejoel99]

In other news, support for Scottish independence has hit 58% in a poll by Ipsos/MORI.

Brexiteers killed the UK. I don't blame Scotland (or Northern Ireland, either) for wanting to choose a brighter future.

If the Scottish think they can just leave the UK and join the EU, they're much dumber than the Brexiteers. Spain will never allow them in; they'll veto anything that lends credence to European independence movements. That said, the EU is very much to blame for this, due to their idiotic "Leave a light on" stance on Scotland. I guess other Eurozone nations now know that the penalty for voluntarily choosing to leave this """trade bloc""" is that the remaining nations will systemically undermine their integrity as sovereign nations. Funny-- you'd think that if leaving the EU were so disastrous, such high penalties wouldn't be necessary as a deterrent!

Stopped reading at the bolded section, given that Spain has already made clear time & time again that they'd have no problem allowing Scotland back into the EU so long as Scotland had left the UK in a legitimately legal manner (i.e. with the consent of the UK, which has been & still remains an obvious 'must' for independence).

[brucejoel99]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/oct/19/utter-rubbish-theresa-may-incredulous-at-michael-goves-brexit-claims

Damn, I wish Theresa May was negotiating the future relationship with the EU rather than these incompetent idiots.

Even for an avid Brexiteer, this shouldn't make sense. How is not having access to SIS data possibly better in anyway for security in the UK?

[brucejoel99]

"This could be his Suez" is the something so ridiculous it makes sense it would come from out of touch anonymous Tories.

It's an occasional metaphor in UK politics?

Not to mention, this - if anything - is worse than Suez.

[brucejoel99]

BoJo seems to have thrown Trump under the bus. Which is something.

Under a homemade, hand-painted model bus made out of wooden wine boxes, or the £350M/wk. for the NHS bus?

[brucejoel99]

All that political capital wasted over Barnard Castle just to keep him around for 7 more months.

[brucejoel99]

There's a thinking among some that Johnson is trying Nixon and Trump's "madman strategy".

What's the incentive for the EU to give in, though? He's not in any sort of advantageous position of strength like Nixon/Trump in their pursuit of such a strategy.

[brucejoel99]

Because a No Deal isn't exactly great for the EU either... but they don't seem to be biting yet.

Yeah but still, it's not like No-Deal hurts the EU more than it hurts the UK. This is akin to BoJo pointing a water pistol at the EU & a bazooka at the UK.

[brucejoel99]

Deal (possibly) back on.

Tune in tomorrow for the next exciting installment of Brexit Ball Z!

[brucejoel99]

Thanks to the U.K"s COVID response, support for Scottish Independence is growing.

At the Scottish National Party's recent annual conference, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's first minister, said she had "never been so certain" that Scotland would become an independent nation.

"Who do we want to be in the driving seat of shaping Scotland's future?" she asked. "The Scottish government has not got everything right, far from it. But I doubt there are many people in Scotland who would have wanted Westminster to be more in charge of our pandemic response."

Sturgeon was referring to Prime Minister Boris Johnson's approach to the coronavirus, which has included a botched testing plan and repeated policy U-turns. With more than 63,000 deaths, the U.K. has the highest toll in Europe.

Johnson's performance is one reason why the last 15 polls show that — for the first time — most Scots consistently support leaving the United Kingdom. A poll in October found 58% of likely voters backed an independent Scotland. That is a big shift from 2014 when voters easily defeated a referendum on independence by 55% to 45%.

Here's a link to the most recent poll on Scottish Independence.

https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/record-public-support-scottish-independence

Hasn't Scotland only done marginally better than the rest of the UK in terms of their COVID response? I'm personally supportive of Scottish independence efforts but if I were them, I definitely wouldn't be citing COVID as anywhere close to one of the reasons for independence.

[brucejoel99]

Several new members of the House of Lords announced today, including one who was rejected by the House of Lords Appointments Commission, due to allegations about his behaviour a few years ago when he was Treasurer of the Conservative Party, only for de Pfeffel to override them.

The government really doesn't give a sh*t anymore, do they?

[brucejoel99]

A deal has been reached!!

https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1342123109424504833

Somebody please tell me that the fish will be okay !!1!

[brucejoel99]

Starmer's strategy is clearly that he wants to ignore Brexit as much as possible and talk about other issues, so he can win back those socially conservative Red Wall voters. [...] it's unclear whether Brexit getting done now will make people think it's not as bad as they were warned (even if it's pretty bad) or if it's even worse and a big mistake. [...] Will Starmer be able to get the balance right then and win over both sides of the divide, without a movement to rejoin the EU becoming a big thing in the next four years?

It depends whether the Tories can find other wedge issues to keep the support of those Red Wall voters. A good parallel might be how all of those people who said that not joining the Euro would be disastrous largely escaped with their reputations intact because people just forgot, so perhaps Labour will turn out the same? Remember, though, that Brexit was just a consequence of Britain's national divide, rather than an actual cause of it. Finally leaving the EU in full doesn't do anything to change the significant gap between metropolitan & non-metropolitan Britain.

[brucejoel99]

We have plenty of other nasty social divisions that cut in very different directions. This is not the United States, do not assume that your pathologies and politics offer any clue as to ours.

Funny, I wasn't aware that that's what I was doing? It just seems like a pretty big problem for Labour when most of those Red Wall voters are socially conservative in their outlook & Labour looks like it has nothing to offer them because it's more focused on the vocal but diminutive-in-number metropolitan membership that has mainly been focused on social justice issues (which those Red Wall voters probably consider to be trivial) & internal squabbles.

[brucejoel99]

We have plenty of other nasty social divisions that cut in very different directions. This is not the United States, do not assume that your pathologies and politics offer any clue as to ours.

Funny, I wasn't aware that that's what I was doing? It just seems like a pretty big problem for Labour when most of those Red Wall voters are socially conservative in their outlook & Labour looks like it has nothing to offer them because it's more focused on the vocal but diminutive-in-number metropolitan membership that has mainly been focused on social justice issues (which those Red Wall voters probably consider to be trivial) & internal squabbles.

?

Economically left-wing working-class voters with socially conservative instincts in the small towns of northern England, the Midlands, & Wales aren't exactly a new phenomena. It's just that BoJo's Tories presenting themselves as the stereotypical party of patriotic, tea-drinking, Brexit-supporting, football-lovers & Labour as the party of cosmopolitan students who've never left (let alone even spoken to somebody outside of) London put a newly-preeminent focus on them.

[brucejoel99]

Are the Tories really about to bring back the death penalty?

I honestly can't see it. Even among Tory MPs, it isn't that popular & Britain obviously isn't leaving the ECHR anytime soon either.