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

[afleitch]

It's a pity that the right didn't succeed in forcing Corbyn out, because now we've got a secure Tory government until at least 2024 and quite likely 2029.

I think the electorate is elastic enough to see the majority wiped out in one electuon rather than two but yeah the Tories are in until 2024 even if they are 10 points down right through (a bit like Major was)

[afleitch]

Again, it's curious that Labour haven't accepted that they might not get Scotland back and therefore need some detente with the SNP or even stand down in order to get into No. 10. Indeed their 'Paper on Scotland' in the appendix which I'm assuming informed the report is from before the 2019 election.

[afleitch]

It isn't as if there is no space between 1987-2015 style domination of parliamentary representation or 'just one seat, you know, the one full of English students'.

True.

Scottish Labour is however the canary in the closed coal mine (ba dum)

As I've joked before the fragile coalition of English students, flute band aficionados and 'yer granny who goes to mass' isn't a Labour Party; it's a reaction against a whole host of political and constitutional issues. Labour can put on 20 points tomorrow by committing to a second referendum and lose only 5 in response. They know that. But they can't do it. They are completely inert and this easily goes back twenty years.

Which I think is something the report misses; some outreach problems clearly extend to the Blair years too. (2001 turnout collapse etc)

[afleitch]

Whoa.

Way to horeshoe Labour.

I really dislike RLB.

But she shared an interview with Maxine Peake with claims which are yet to be fully substantiated about Israeli Security services but has been alleged by Palestinian activists and got the attention of Amnesty International. That isn't anti-semitic nor even remotely a dog whistle.

[afleitch]

Mass stabbing incident in Glasgow. Suspect shot dead. No information other than spurious rumours.

[afleitch]

I'm a little bit concerned about the local clusters reporting, particularly as some outlets emphasise the 'high south asian' aspect. While it is true that some cultural factors are at play here, there's a lot of the demography of politics/poor health, extended families in one household that is perhaps too nuanced to get across. For now the potential instigators are fuming over face masks, but I worry going forward.

[afleitch]

I think the failure to investigate alleged Russian attempts to influence the independence referendum are more striking. The alleged attempts were for the losing side, so they couldn't be accused of having influenced the result, and any backlash would have been from people who were unlikely to vote Conservative anyway, so that one seems like it would have been more of a freebie.

All references to the Scottish independence referendum are heavily redacted. If anything that infers what was previously suspected is that Russia flooded both campaigns to some extent. The UK intelligence services were not poorly served by that attempt given the result, so why bother investigating it?

[afleitch]

I'm a little bit concerned about the local clusters reporting, particularly as some outlets emphasise the 'high south asian' aspect. While it is true that some cultural factors are at play here, there's a lot of the demography of politics/poor health, extended families in one household that is perhaps too nuanced to get across. For now the potential instigators are fuming over face masks, but I worry going forward.

So yeah. The Daily Mail is now going there.

[afleitch]

I do love that they've had five years of scandal in six months and Centrist Dad can't get ahead of them.

[afleitch]

John Swinney. Saviour of the Students

[afleitch]

What people forget is that Michael Howard was supposed to be the dark horse against Ken Clarke with Hague as his deputy but a combination of that Paxman interview and an anti-semitic dogwhistle from the dreaded Strictly woman sunk him.

Howard, when he eventually got the chance, was actually quite effective against Blair. Perhaps pre Iraq crisp jeans and guitar case Blair would have been more of a match, but had Howard made it, 2001 would have been quite different.

[afleitch]

You do realise that Perth and North Perthshire contains Perth. Not really the hill to die on if you want to disprove the model.

[afleitch]

Speaking of which why is it that transphobia seems to be such an issue specifically on the left in Britain?

Like, in most of the world it tends to fit fairly neatly into the "usual" left-right divide. Yet in the UK, it seems to be the Labour party that is tearing itself apart over trans rights; it is often nominally left-wing or feminist people making a fuss about their opposition to trans rihts; and it was Theresa May of all people's government that tried to bring in the new gender recognition act.

Yeah, it's baffling on the face of it, but fairly easy to explain. Basically, it boils down to class and race (and there isms thereof).

Like many UK political movements, women's liberation has been inordinately influenced by wealthy, well-connected folks whose primary goals were less about dismantling systems of oppression and more about achieving respectability. (This happens elsewhere, of course, but the UK's stuffy class system reinforces it). As a result, its leaders have been more resistant to embracing 'radical' policies (trans rights now; gay and lesbian rights in the 70s/80s; reproductive freedom in the 50s and 60s; women's suffrage before 1900) than their rhetoric of social change, or association with leftwing groups on other issues, might imply. Put more bluntly, a lot of upper middle class middle-aged British women don't want to let trans people into their special women's (liberation) club because ... well, it's just not done!

This same dynamic maps perfectly onto the category of race. Women's groups in the UK, putatively liberal or otherwise, are overwhelmingly white. Consequently, there's been less engagement with the intersectional feminism that's helped propel trans rights into the mainstream over the past 25ish years in the US or other countries where non-white non-elite women challenged feminists on their assumptions about what women's liberation really means.

May and the Tories' relative ease with this issue is more a function of apathy than broadmindedness. They'd never been very concerned about the 'liberation' elements of feminism in the first place, so they never perceived trans rights as a challenge to their hard fought triumphs over patriarchy (as TERFs tend to portray them). Meanwhile, the anti-LGBT hard right in the Tories has been in eclipse since at least 2010, so there's not much agitation to take up the cause.

Also, JK Rowling. Ugh.

Bingo.

Performance feminism in the UK is the purview of Guardian columnists or people who write for the Times magazine section. It's cultivated and curated as a very middle class concern. There is an overlap between that er... 'sort' and those who write about motherhood as if they are the first to discover it. Those actually doing the ground work are removed from that and not nearly as trans exclusionary.

While I don't think there's necessarily a 'crisis' of femininity (?) in the UK, there is certainly both a moral panic and a change in the public/journalism discourse where there is a creeping crass reduction in what makes someone a female/woman to the body; genitalia and capacity to give birth that is both alarming and quite dangerous to feminism going forward.

[afleitch]

SLab are trying to get rid of their leader with some front bench noise. But no one is paying enough attention for it to cascade yet.

Mr charisma himself, James 'fitba' ' Kelly has resigned.

[afleitch]

https://news.sky.com/story/shetland-islands-vote-to-explore-independence-from-scotland-12068826?fbclid=IwAR3LvvsjJ_Pvoos8819n13RK7M0SLU5mezY3-G0NG1fWfTBoNJOoYG_v-Os

Anyone else immensely looking forward to the Cybernat attempts to rationalise this one?

It's a vote to seek different arrangements suited to the Shetland Isles which I support. At it's most extreme, it's also not independence from Scotland, it's independence from the UK which unionist seals appear to have forgotten. If getting independence from the UK somehow sticks it to those wanting independence from the UK let me hear it. If it's good for Shetland but bad for Scotland let me hear it.

[afleitch]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54158832

'Waspi' womern lose appeal. Which I agree with; there had to be a cut off point somewhere. And you can't bind policy to past decisions on pensions, tax and NI.

[afleitch]

The first one basically failed because someone decided to release people from hospitals into care homes without doing a Covid test first.

That happened everywhere and was probably unavoidable (if really regrettable) given the pressures at the time. But the thing that went very wrong in England and Scotland was that people who had tested positive were released back into care homes.

Very true. But it's in part compounded by the fact there was no where else for them to go. It's either a care home, which for some functions as nothing more than a proxy hospital for many, or a hospital which was a no.

As much as there was outrage that people were sent 'home to die' the alternative would have been what did happen for a short while in other parts of Europe; being left to die somewhere halfway.

Obviously that's now given away to a reactive visitation quarantine that has now led to demands to be able to visit relatives. And that is the real fear going into the winter months.

A close friend of mine works at one such home. The harsh reality is that you get someone in who is sick and every winter they are hospitalised once or twice, kept alive, then shipped back to the care home, then back to hospital and this can happen for years every cold and flu season until death. Nothing seasonal is 'allowed' to kill them (as it may in their own home) if it can be helped because it's a sh!t storm if it does. It's a cruel 'industry'.

We are not prepared, either emotionally or in terms of how we deal with this apolitically without points scoring to deal with the real fact that bodies might have to be piled high if this cuts through the vulnerable this winter because it's not possible to do anything with a modicum of dignity if care homes are ground zero and the NHS is overwhelmed.

[afleitch]

Given that it's my hometown seat in question, if she does step down I would expect the SNP to pick it up again. There's nothing more the SNP can do than remove the whip and they do take these things seriously.

[afleitch]

Slightly off topic but finally watched the first episode of Spitting Image

As someone old enough (cough) to have seen at least the last series before it went off the air, and who's watched them all since it has the same pace as the original series (long gaga, short gag, long gag, song) and was about fifty/fifty hit and miss.

What was a bit jarring was seeing Mike Pence as coloured grey (been done with John Major) and Priti Patel as a vampire (they did it with his former squeeze, Edwina Currie) though that sketch was probably the funniest for me. They also had Dominic Cummings as The Mekon from Dan Dare which isn't a point of reference for anyone younger than 65.

It's clear they've also used some really old moulds as I'm pretty sure saw Cilla Black

NBC, who they partnered with for a few specials in the 80's have backed out of showing it, which means the series will thankfully stay UK orientated.

[afleitch]

Well let's just say that the meaning of the term 'lockdown' has been subject to some serious hyperinflation over the past few months in this country.

'This lockdown is terrible' methought as I browsed Primark.

[afleitch]

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

[afleitch]

In a comedy forum I follow there's a good phrase: 'terfing your legacy into a bin'.

Such is the tale of MP Rosie Duffield after two staffers resigned over her transphobia and then she attacked Labour's LGBT group. This came days after the Sunday Times, the terf house paper of note, gave her a lovely magazine spread.

[afleitch]

The 2019 Tories are trying to emulate The Discourse in the USA not only in how they attack but how they defend. They want to get to a point where no matter is resignable, the public are seen as too 'aggressive' towards politicians and everything is very online. They have four years to play about with it.

[afleitch]

Some people are saying that Gary Sambrook MP 'eats big dinners', I understand.

cockpisspartridge.jpeg

[afleitch]

BBC banning staff from Pride as it could breach impartiality rules.