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

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I actually know disappointingly little about the English side of my family’s politics, despite them coming from one of the 20th century’s most politically infamous towns (no points for guessing which based on the county mentioned above!).

Very much a place to stress the links to one of the greatest cricketers to have ever lived - S.F. Barnes - rather than its unique and special place in political history.

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On the matter of Great Grandparents and politics, it always amuses me to recall that Grandad's parents (DMA, ILP and Primitive Methodist) will both have voted against Anthony Eden when he stood at Spennymoor in 1922 and produced some of the most ill-advised leaflets in the history of British election literature: he stressed that he personally knew most of the major coal-owners in the area, apparently quite unaware that this came across as a ham-fisted threat!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

On the matter of Great Grandparents and politics, it always amuses me to recall that Grandad's parents (DMA, ILP and Primitive Methodist) will both have voted against Anthony Eden when he stood at Spennymoor in 1922 and produced some of the most ill-advised leaflets in the history of British election literature: he stressed that he personally knew most of the major coal-owners in the area, apparently quite unaware that this came across as a ham-fisted threat!

My great-great-grandfather worked at Spennymoor before finally moving up to Tyneside. Around twenty years before then though.

Mine lived in Willington, where all the men for about a century worked down (and were ultimately, one way or another though usually the slow way, killed as a result of doing so) Brancepeth Colliery, the pit heap of which loomed over the town like a stratovolcano.

When you consider the population of the area now it's crazy to think that there were enough people in that stretch of Durham for a full-sized parliamentary constituency, but there were. Not quite Abertillery* levels of 'a place that people left' but not so far off either.

_{*Where as it happens a branch on the other side of the family lived until the 1920s...}

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Apparently word is that Labour MPs who stood on the RMT picket line are going to be desciplined.

Ironic. A Labour Party is punishing MPs who stand with labour.

It's disgusting is what it is.

Well it’s only partly true- members of the frontbench might get told off. If you’re on the frontbench you have to do whatever stupid thing the leader wants you to do, or in this case- doesn’t want you to. MPs were at one stage shocked to discover they couldn’t break the whip on votes and remain!

I don’t support it but it’s not as if the Labour Party has an unblemished history on this- Attlee used ex-soldiers as strike-breakers

The traditional Labour Party position on industrial action is not what a lot of people assume anyway. The line was always to prefer what used to be called class collaboration over class conflict and so to view strikes as regrettable things that should be avoided if possible.* Against that there was also an old tradition at the Left end of the Labour Movement (which partially overlaps with the Labour Party, but has only ever done so partially) which saw strikes in a more positive light, not as a sign that negotiation has failed but as way of forcing good outcomes at the point of production. Both positions, of course, still exist, are very well established and are perfectly respectable within their contexts. The unresolvable tension between the two positions has been a central theme in British Labour History for over a century now and quite famously led to the defeat of the 1974-79 Labour government.

_{*It has also always been the case that a) Labour politicians as a group are much less likely to be overtly supportive of strikes by non-affiliated unions than affiliated ones, and that b) the traditional Labour Party line was also always been to be very leery about strikes when they affected major parts of the national infrastructure: plenty of examples from Harold Wilson's tenure of this, though he actually tended to take a harder line than the position of benign neutrality that Starmer has taken over the rail strikes. Again this has often been a source of tension. There is nothing new under the Sun.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Now where things used to get really messy was that the CPGB (which had a massively outsized presence in the leaderships of many unions for the usual reasons) in practice, if not in theory, tended to take a similar line to the Labour Party, despite technically being on the left end of the Labour movement. The only practical difference between someone like Dai Francis and a Moderate Labour type was that Francis believed much more keenly in Democratic Centralism and drove a Trabant! Mind you, the CPGB also had its own issues with important members who disagreed and took the other position - Derek 'Red Robbo' Robinson for instance.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes, there were a reasonable number in the area but not as many as in some other parts of West Durham. The tendency was for large pits (e.g. Brancepeth was one of the largest collieries in the county away from the massive pits on the coast and along the Tyne, this despite being sunk in the 1840s) and for sizeable towns to have grown up around them, and depopulation was centered on the towns. For instance, Willington UD had a population of about nine thousand in the 1920s and the equivalent area (Willington plus the village of Oakenshaw) comes to around about five and a half thousand. Some towns have lost even greater shares: Tow Law's population has halved since the 1920s.

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🚨 Lib Dem by-election gain… 🚨

…in North Shropshire

Council by-election today has resulted in a Lib Dem pickup.

Actually South Shropshire, about as far south as you can go. The resigning incumbent was a Local Independent For Local People type: personal views rather right-wing, though as always with such politicians that's a detail.

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I don't think this is true. Look at Canada.

There's also France where politicians will sometimes even brag about being parachuted in to this or that constituency. It isn't as if Le Pen had any ties to Henin-Beaumont before she alighted on it as a perfect place to build a personal stronghold for a milder version of the FN and Francois Hollande probably couldn't have found Corrèze on a map before Mitterrand decided that he should run there. Of course the assumption is that, once successfully parachuted, one should then make an effort to bed-down, to become part of the local political and social establishment if possible. Which he certainly did.

German politicians can also be quite mobile, despite proportional representation: Scholz was a Hamburg MdB for years and then became the City State's Lord Mayor, but presently represents Potsdam in the Bundestag. As it happens he does actually live there now (moved when he became Finance Minister) but that's quite a trek. Merkel had no ties to Pomerania before she was elected for Stralsund and surrounds in 1990 - she did grow up in the north of Brandenburg, but that's still more than a hundred miles away. And then there are all those Westerners who ended up as the PMs of various Eastern states in the 90s...

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Of course we currently have a politician who has stood under at least four labels and has sat as an MP for constituencies in Glasgow, London and Bradford, and has stood elsewhere as well...

His predecessor in Glasgow had previously sat for a seat in Birmingham and one in London and was actually Welsh.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Of course we currently have a politician who has stood under at least four labels and has sat as an MP for constituencies in Glasgow, London and Bradford, and has stood elsewhere as well...

His predecessor in Glasgow had previously sat for a seat in Birmingham and one in London and was actually Welsh.

And who are these people? Tried searching the Glasgow constituencies and couldn’t find someone that seemed to fit the bill.

George Galloway and Roy Jenkins.

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How did the Nottinghamshire miners vote? I’ve heard of the swing to the Conservatives in the Notts coalfield before but looking at the actual results that seems pretty small, while they were already starting from a strong position (and had won a late seventies by-election in Ashfield).

The thing is that by the 1980s there actually weren't as many as you might assume: most of the older pits in the county had closed, which altered the geography of mining employment in the county considerably - especially as Notts miners had always been quite geographically mobile. By the 1980s there were about 26,000 in the county (about two thousand of which worked at pits technically classified as Yorkshire rather than Notts) with the vast majority living in two constituencies: Bassetlaw and Sherwood (largely in the Dukeries by that point, though there was still a colliery at Hucknall). There were still a reasonable number open in Ashfield and a moderate amount of mining employment (though nothing on what had been the case a few decades earlier), and a few isolated collieries elsewhere: two in Mansfield, one in Nottingham North, one in Gedling and one in Rushcliffe. As the strong electoral movement away from Labour in the area predated the 1987 election, we can be fairly sure that it had more to do with the movement away from the mining economy - and perhaps, though this is more speculative, that the remaining were less monolithically Labour than elsewhere because of the better pay received due to the new regional pay scales from the 1970s onwards - than the strike, as bitter and divisive as it was.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Chris Pincher, yes that’s his name, has resigned as deputy chief whip after an incident last night.

Will post more once his letter is released…

Nominative determinism it appears.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ironically I was going to say it’s been a relatively quiet week with Bojo abroad.

Pincher is a very close ally of the PM- albeit it with no talent beyond being one of these MPs who seems to live for intrigue as a whip.

!!!!

https://twitter.com/thhamilton/status/1542587248348172291

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Would be an interesting by-election. Since he first contested (and lost) in 2005 he turned a Labour majority of 6100 to a Tory majority of 19,600.

Nothing for Labour to squeeze here; would have to have a solid swing from the Tories.

It is a rather peculiar constituency that has changed a lot in recent decades (but then it did before: very much a case of 'what demographic change giveth, demographic change taketh away' from a Labour perspective) but it's worth noting that until 2019 majorities were not greatly larger than for its predecessor constituency in the 1980s, and also that the Labour MP defeated in 2010 (who was first elected at a by-election in 1996) was well regarded and appears to have had a sizeable personal vote that disappeared when he ceased to be the candidate (2015).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It isn't as if anyone is going to buy it anyway.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Depends entirely on whether he's willing to risk suing over it: the risks of actually doing so are greater than always realised. Because while the burden of proof is on the respondent rather than the claimant over the matter of truth,* it is also necessary for it to be shown that the claimant's reputation has been damaged by the alleged defamation. There is also the small matter that during the course of a libel case, all sorts of information might well come to light that could be reputationally damaging on their own: this is one reason why politicians are rather less likely to follow through with a libel threat than you might think.

_{*Not that this is actually an impossible hurdle anyway if something is true.}

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It would be so funny if Chris Pincher is the downfall of Boris Johnson. Which is now more possible given the latest revelation.

We need to accept that if Americans are living in a David Foster Wallace novel, then we are living in a novel written by Tom Sharpe.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Had a routine medical procedure today for monitoring purposes, so no news for a few hours. Got back home about half an hour after ~all this~ broke. Hahahahahahahahahaha.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Maybe the electorate have *finally* turned on the Tories *now* (we can but hope) but they've proved malleable by the right wing's (and captive media's) ever changing cynicism for a pretty long time.

Consider the old Italian First Republic and its eventual collapse. One minute everything is fine and dandy and you're carving up government posts between each other and extorting bribes up and down the land and everyone knows and you all still keep winning, and the next people are pelting you with coins in the street.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Robin Walker, another Minister in the Education Department, has resigned.

At this rate the Dept. of Education is going to be as empty as a high school during lockdown 1.

Current status in the Department:
- Secretary of State: Michelle Donelan MP
- Minister of State for Unis: VACANT
- Minister for Schools Standards: VACANT
- Minister for Children and Families: VACANT
- Minister for Apprenticeships: Alex Burghart MP
- Minister for School System: Baroness Bannan ~AA

Given that the flagship Schools Bill has turned into quite the flaming zeppelin, well...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Worth noting that the PM does not have the unrestricted power to dissolve Parliament when he/she wishes: a request must be made to the Sovereign, who can refuse. The rules governing this at present are the so-called Lascelles Principles, submitted by terrifying Mid Century Arch-Flunkey Sir Alan Lascelles (a.k.a. 'Tommy', a.k.a. 'Senex') in an anonymous letter to The Times in 1950. Quite a few of the scenarios being floated around at present happen to violate both active parts of the Lascelles Principles, which would presumably mean a refusal.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why can't the parliament do vote of no confidence?

Oh it's an option if events head in one particular direction. But we aren't there yet.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

LOL

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I note that he didn't promise to give his successor his full support! Oh dear, oh dear.

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Bit of historical trivia: Johnson is the first Prime Minister to be ousted in part due to personal scandal since Walpole.