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

[Filuwaúrdjan]

He was a silly old fool, but the penalty for that should not be death.

He was a good MP with similar political views to my own.  It's a bit beneath you to attack him now.

I'm not attacking him. A lot of people are silly old fools and generally they're harmless, pleasant and basically well-intentioned people. It makes someone like that being murdered all the more incomprehensible.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Extract from the police statement:

A man has been arrested on suspicion murder after a man was stabbed in Leigh-on-Sea.

"We were called to an address in Eastwood Road North shortly after 12.05pm today (Friday, 15 October).

"We attended and found a man injured.

"He was treated by emergency services but, sadly, died at the scene.

"A 25-year-old man was quickly arrested after officers arrived at the scene on suspicion of murder and a knife was recovered.

"He is currently in custody.

"We are not looking for anyone else in connection with this incident.

It should be possible to work out exactly what happened very quickly.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

One of the more attractive small 'd' democratic features of the British political system is the accessibility of its political figures, even very senior ones. An MP's surgery is basically open-house and it's common to see politicians use public transport like ordinary people: I once sat behind a sleeping man on a train who I realised after a few seconds was Carwyn Jones, the First Minister of Wales at the time - he had an aide with him, but no security. The frequency of serious attacks on politicians - and of deaths - probably puts this at risk, at least in its present form. Sweden, of course, has had similar issues.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Amess o/c was one of the longest-serving MPs in the Commons at the time of his death - I'm not sure exactly why, but that somehow makes this feel even stranger.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes, Sir David Amess is not someone with remotely similar views to mine but he wasn't a carpetbagger, a careerist, or media talking head but instead was an exemplary local MP.

He did, of course, do a little sidestep over from Basildon to Southend West in 1997, using major boundary changes to the former (which were actually theoretically quite favourable) to exploit a convenient retirement in the latter, but under the circumstances just about any MP would have done the same. He then went on to be as enthusiastic a constituency representative in the latter he had been in the former, despite being so no longer being an electoral imperative. It has been reported that only yesterday he was telling local radio that he was planning yet another push for city status for Southend.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I don't think this is official yet, but it is being widely reported that Amess's murder is being investigated as possible Islamist terrorism.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

In any event, I hope MPs consider granting city status to Southend in his honor. His bringing it up at every PMQ's which he was called may have been a long-running joke, but he truly worked tirelessly for it.

This is happening.

It seems like the logical thing to do. And, really, it's no more absurd than Wolverhampton being an official city is it?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The Essex Myth is quite fascinating in its way: the reality is that more East Enders moved to Australia than to anywhere else and that postwar development in Essex was driven by private-sector building for middle and lower-middle class commuters much more than by New Town developments for the upwardly mobile working classes.* Billericay is more typical than Basildon.

_{*As originally designated, anyway. Over time they have changed a lot sociologically and this explains their extreme and often baffling electoral instability since the 1970s or so. Well, some of it.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Estimated partisan shifts (and I'd take notionals as even less useful than usual right now o/c) usually end up as quite small, though Labour having so few MPs right now does limit things further.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What interests me is that the backlash over this is organic (ho, ho, ho) rather than media-driven. Very much welcome from the perspective of my 'serious environmentalist' hat, and fascinating from my 'jaded observer of politics' hat as well...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

...and see to what extent the speech is actually an accurate reflection of the content of the Budget.

Particularly as the answer is frequently 'honestly very little'.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's more or less the view that you would expect someone who got a Second in Classics at Oxford in the 80s to hold.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

At the same time the sport has always had a substantial working class following, particularly in the Pennine mill towns on both sides of the Lancashire/Yorkshire border and in most of the old coalfields. Whereas some sports in England with serious class issues ended up running parallel systems often using alternative codes (the most famous example of which is rugby), class divisions in cricket were expressed and imposed within the sport: a rigid distinction was drawn between Gentlemen Amateurs (predominantly batsmen) and Professionals (largely bowlers). In practice the former tended to earn more from the game. Long ago and far away now, but always useful to remember. It is rather grim to note that as elite cricket has become more socially elite over the past couple of decades - after the ECB decided to allow a really excellent grassroots training strategy to wither away for no good reason whatsoever - the principle exception has been... bowlers.

As for Yorkshire CCC specifically, there have been issues there for decades. The club used to be notorious for imposing a rule specifying that only players born in the county were allowed to play for it and this insular mentality spilled over into other areas - there was for a long time a suspicion that it operated an unofficial colour bar, and after that period ended there were question marks about the willingness of the club to recruit from the (mostly cricket-mad) Asian populations that had grown up in the West Riding since the 1960s. Since the 1980s there have been cricket leagues specifically for local Asian teams in the county which may or may not tell you a few things.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The moral of the story? Do not heed the advice of Charles Moore.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I mean she's dreadful and ghastly, but how many people have actually heard of her? But members of the informal Cummings fan club (which is a real thing, somehow) are amongst the most sensitive people on British Political Twitter which is saying a lot.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The comments are very ugly, but he has apologised forcefully and hasn't tried to justify or excuse himself - the general reaction from the Jewish community has been to accept this.

Note that he had previously made a point - including at the committee hearings the other day - of praising Matthew Hoggard for contacting him (privately and unprompted) to give what was apparently a  sincere apology so there isn't actually a hypocrisy issue here. There's only really a great problem if you wished to make him some sort of saint.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Bullsh**t, the only reason he's apologised is because he was caught red handed and the evidence is irrefutable, not just lockeroom hearsay.

It is generally the case that people only apologise when what they have done is known to other people, one way or another. But here's the thing: even had he not said sorry, even had he not damned his younger self for 'saying' such awful things, it would not invalidate his complaints about Yorkshire County Cricket Club as an institution. Victims don't have to be perfect.

Sadly there's a long history of people playing down anti-semitism. You wouldn't be giving him the benefit of the doubt if it wasn't jew-hate.

I resigned my longstanding Labour Party membership because of the antisemitism scandal and posted my not exactly diplomatically worded resignation letter in public when I did so. I can be accused of a lot of things, but not of treating that issue lightly.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's also much easier for an intense campaign to swing a local by-election than literally any other form of election.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oh it's quite possible that a replacement would be a complete disaster.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I mean, when Lizz 'Pork Markets' Truss is talked of seriously as a successor and may even really do it, then, yes, the bench is... thin. It's actually quite interesting that the bench has not become deeper and stronger with substantial electoral gains. The volume of the parliamentary party is only as large as it is because of deadwood.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

O.K. that's actually quite, quite hilarious. Amazing.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

He even looks more like an upper class albino Tu... *gunfire*

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's interesting, particularly because the urban strip west of Brighton has not had the sort of labour market statistics usually associated with reliably Conservative constituencies for quite a while now, but an important caveat to be aware of: when a ruling group is not used to a challenge, particularly from a new direction, it can often be very easy to push over in local elections but this does not always translate so well in higher-turnout environments. And in general momentum is a much bigger thing in local politics than national.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I don't think it's really sunk in yet just how screwed we are in Teeside for example

A lot of that is down to Houchen though, fortunately people like him aren't two a penny in the Tories.

And this is one part of the country (and I mean Teesside specifically not the wider North East) where local Labour parties have a spectacularly horrible image way worse than that of the national party at its lowest ebbs.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If you're comparing the politics of abortion (or similar issues) in Britain and the United States then it's an error to assume that the situation in America is the norm and that it is the state of play in Britain that must be explained. On the contrary: what happened here is what happened in most other countries, which is that a pragmatic social compromise was eventually reached on what will always be a difficult issue, one that did not (and does not) exactly please anyone, but which largely takes the heat out of the matter and turns it into a matter of technicalities and regulation. On this particular issue the compromise reached in Britain is actually a little different to most other European countries (essentially abortion is legal for a longer period into the pregnancy, but there is no on-demand access to it) but the general framework is recognisable across the board. So the real question is why this did not happen in America and (perhaps) what this curious failure says about the American political system and its functionality.