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

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Except the 'politics' comes from the authors own work.

Quite. Pratchett did, of course, have his more small 'c' conservative aspects (or as he liked to put it, in his mischievous way, he was 'so left wing that I'm coming back at you from the right'), but in this case they actually led him to the position that can be clearly inferred from his work; that his family and associations state that he held. Besides, there is nothing wrong in the family of a deceased writer defending his or her memory.

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Shades of C.S. Lewis arguing for decriminalizing homosexuality on the quintessentially Tory grounds of disliking "interferers and busybodies". Although obviously Pratchett wouldn't have had anything like the same personal and philosophical views on the matter as Lewis.

A case of reaching a remarkably similar destination by a very different route.

In the same period, of course, you had the Suffolk Constabulary cheerfully letting Britten and Pears live openly as a couple, while in London the Met as good as had an undercover officer in every public toilet in the West End.

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If the situation looks serious enough that defeat is possible, Conservative leaders always resign. There's a thing about not wanting to be another Ted Heath.

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I mean they still are to a significant extent, it's just that social divisions are much blurrier than they were and our society in general is less highly political than it was, so it is much more common to not really have one at all.

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Surely you mean partisan. If anything, the present day accentuates the degree to which people/things/concepts are filtered first and foremost through a political lens, particularly compared to preceding decades of greater parochialism and provincialism.

Depends when you're thinking of really. If we're talking, say, twenty years ago or so, then, yes, that would be a better way of framing it. There is a large and loud minority of the population who are highly political in a way that was quite rare then. But if we mean fifty, sixty, seventy years ago and longer, then I would say very clearly not. Politics and even a faith in political ideologies was never the primary concern of all that many people, but it was a feature of the everyday lives of ordinary people in a way that is very much lost now.

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Her family was traditionally Liberal, perhaps unsurprisingly for Methodist shopkeepers. Though They were Liberals of the Gladstone rather than Lloyd-George variety, and by 1950 her father said that the Conservatives had come to stand for much of what the Liberals used to.

This was how she always liked to present things. The reality was a bit more complicated. Alfred Roberts was not a humble shopkeeper even if he had started out as one: he ran a local chain of grocery stores. And he was functionally a Conservative in local politics as early as the late 1920s and was quite openly so by the 1930s. Of course this was not incompatible with a view (one that he clearly had) that he hadn't changed, that the party had, that the Yellow Book in particular was the thin end of the wedge, that he represented the legitimate Liberal tradition and that whatever was left of the party did not.

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I’m living for the FBPE crowd praising and hoping for President Barnier.

Truly we live in the Banter Timeline.

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I mean he is genuinely posh, but at a lower (worse: provincial) rung. Old gentry family and in the West Country, almost as much as Wales, that largely means little more than 'posh farmers'.

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Social Care is the opposite of Housing as an issue: everyone thinks it's about money, but actually it mostly isn't.

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35/33? Party like it's 2005 everyone.

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As recently as 2001, Mr Tony left out all mention of Margaret Bondfield (an important figure in the early Labour Party and the first female cabinet minister) in a speech commemorating the party's centenary because she was insufficiently hostile towards MacDonald after the formation of the National Government, despite the fact that she did not join it or MacDonald's splinter party.

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IRC Blair is actually more popular than JC among Labour party members now.

There's been a very large turnover of members: many have left, but many have joined (and a lot of these are returning members). And this is not the first time that this has happened. It's always useful for people to remember that the membership body of a political party is not a constant thing.

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Mr Tony's reputation is artificially depressed because of his embarrassing post-premiership antics and will rise quite a bit in the future (he'll move firmly into the Lloyd George/Wilson/Thatcher category), but the main reason why the process is so slow is that he cannot help but open his mouth every thirty seconds...

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Mr Tony's reputation is artificially depressed because of his embarrassing post-premiership antics and will rise quite a bit in the future (he'll move firmly into the Lloyd George/Wilson/Thatcher category), but the main reason why the process is so slow is that he cannot help but open his mouth every thirty seconds...

Copium's a hell of a drug.

I'm hardly a Blairite, so I don't see how that works.

Anyway, what I mean is that at present there's a huge disconnect between public opinion of the domestic legacy of the Blair government (generally very popular) and public opinion of the man himself (pretty low). Over the longer term there's more or less no way that this will hold and, given that it is unlikely that the controversies about him and his time in office will vanish, it's likely that he will be seen as a complicated figure whose tenure at the top was capital 'i' Important, combining major positives with assorted negatives and ethical question marks. Wilson and Lloyd George in particular are useful points of comparison there - especially as both had honours related scandals on their watch!

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Most scales are printed in both measures and it has never been illegal to sell things in imperial measures. This will change very little in practice and is largely aimed at pacifying the party's members.

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Frankly, I had a hard enough time figuring out pre-decimal currency for a 1960s spy RP I run.

You think that's tricky? Try figuring out how a financial subsidies system based on Old Money worked (do not do this).

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Most scales are printed in both measures and it has never been illegal to sell things in imperial measures. This will change very little in practice and is largely aimed at pacifying the party's members.

The supposed "change" is that people will now be able to use imperial measures only - which ignores the reality that hardly any businesses will actually do this. This is ultimately market forces at work.

Quite. And given that most scales are printed with both measures... I mean what's the suggestion here, turning custom away if someone is more familiar with metric and wants X kilos of plums rather than X lb? A market trader who did that would not be one for very long.

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Yep. And the politics of policing and the police have tended to differ in different parts of the country as well. Provincial police forces have always tended to reflect the areas they serve, which are also the areas they recruit from. Senior officers were (are) mostly Conservatives, but that was (is) the norm for higher management posts in general. But the Met was, and to an extent still is, very different: it has always recruited from across the whole country rather than just London, has always attracted more ex-army types than normal, and developed a fierce hard-right political culture that became increasingly toxic and dangerous as time moved on: efforts to reform it since the Macpherson Report have largely involved trying to battle against this and the consequences of it.

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Of course, the Met were (in)famously involved by Thatcher in the 1984/85 miners strike - precisely because the local forces were often considered too "soft" to people they not infrequently lived with.

South Yorkshire police in particular tending at the time to draw its recruits from the same places that still had substantial mining workforces in 1984, yes.

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And they’ve just extended the term of the commissioner! A move supported by both the Labour Mayor and Tory Home Sec- specifically because both are worried about the replacement!

It's increasingly clear that Cressida Dick could survive a nuclear explosion.

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When did the trend start of people in British Politics spending too much time at looking at individual opinion polls?

I feel that after 2015 & to an extend 2017 we came very close to reconsidering how voter intention polling shapes our politics- but people still love that drug.

Considering how bad our polling industry is (they've ballsed up three General Elections out of the last four!) it's honestly quite amazing by this point. And that's when people are paying attention to politics... I mean, it is not really even clear exactly what it is that off-season polls even actually measure.

I mean, they're worth monitoring as there's nothing else. And maybe the odd one every now and again will be worth commenting on, usually for a very brief laugh. But in non-VI questions are more useful.

It seems to have now crossed over into council by-elections; where every result is just used to reconfirm peoples prior assumptions.

Particularly hysterical when you look at the turnouts for those things lmao.

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Turnouts in local by-elections seem to be - on average - even lower than they used to be, which means that turning up in a ward with an intensive campaign based around this or that (often completely manufactured) local issue will be even more effective than normal.

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I’ve also been reminded that Stephen Timms was assaulted in 2010 in a similar surgery event.
That’s 3 times in 11 years. This is unacceptable.

And some other attempts have been prevented before they have happened. Someone was locked up the other year for planning to attack Bridget Phillipson, and another a bit before for planning to attack Rosie Cooper. The reasons vary: sometimes the perpetrator/would-be perpetrator is a political extremist (Neo-Nazi being relatively common, but the one who nearly killed Stephen Timms was an Islamist), sometimes they are extremely mentally ill. Sometimes both.

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Tory MP David Amess has just been stabbed at his constituency surgery.

Not just stabbed. Stabbed 32 times.

I've not seen that confirmed anywhere, but certainly multiple times. Latest is that an air-ambulance was flown to the scene and that he's being treated there: condition described as 'very serious'. This is very much not a good description.

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This is really horrific. He was a silly old fool, but the penalty for that should not be death. Nightmarish and you feel terrible for his family, absolutely awful for them.