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

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The critical thing is that this is not the end of the matter, no matter.

Which is why one plausible scenario is that after a no deal Johnson, declaring "mission accomplished", calls it a day in the next few months - leaving his successor to clear up the mess.

(of which there is likely to be plenty)

There is a sense to which he does seem rather to combine the worst features of Brian Mulroney and David Lange, certainly...

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I've reached the stage where I don't even feel like saying anything, you know? Just...

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Johnson must be worth a few points to the independence polling, just personally.

Oh he clearly is. One of the salient facts about polling for the independence question is the number rises and falls in response to the ups and downs of entirely (or mostly) unrelated political factors all the time.

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Donald Trump, real estate mogul turned Reality TV Star turned politician, is a quintessentially American figure who doesn't really make sense in the context of any other society. Except maybe Italy.

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Ducks are not quite yet all in a row, but things have reached that Special point where to back out would be so embarrassing that...

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Well the issue won't go away in a broad sense because the exact relationship between Britain and its continental neighbours has always been fluid and changeable. But there is a considerable difference between that and the issue as it was between the referendum and the last election.

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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.

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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.

You might not be aware that you are doing it but you absolutely are. Fundamentally, anyone arguing that the differences between 'metropolitan' and 'non-metropolitan' Britain trump all other social cleavages does not understand the first thing about this country.

It is perhaps also a good idea to note that seats and votes are not the same thing. All reliable evidence points towards this fact: that what did the greatest damage to Labour in 2019 was not direct defections to the Tories,* but that a large chunk of its usual base vote decided not vote at all, and that a smaller section of it voted for a scattering of minor parties. I noticed this in my own family, which is very much one shaped by long-dead extractive industries and the subcultures those created: a remarkable number of people who always or usually vote Labour either did not or only did so extremely reluctantly. On top of this we add the strange impact of 2019 being an Issue Election and the simple fact that a lot of people who normally move their votes around were quite genuinely afraid of Corbyn. Which is where all this 'Red Wall' nonsense falls apart: you're actually dealing with a quite complex series of processes.

Whatever can be said of Labour in 2019 (and I would tend to diagnose the problem differently, even less sympathetically, but that all is all very much in the past now), Labour now is absolutely not focused on the concerns of its membership as opposed to those of the electorate. There has been, for instance, a heavy focus on the flawed and limited nature of the Treasury's covid support, that the self-employed have been treated shabbily, that people in the trades have borne a much heavier share of the load (in more ways than one) than is remotely fair.

'Social conservatism' also strikes me as something of a red herring - perhaps even, from certain commentators, as wishful thinking. I cannot say that I have ever noticed much demand from the people of West Bromwich or Blyth for the return of social stigma around births out of wedlock, I have never noticed people in Derbyshire or Durham gearing themselves up for a rearguard action against the normalisation of homosexuality. I'm not sure if defining 'finds the nostrums of the New New Left to be a bit bloody weird actually' as 'social conservative' is especially helpful, particularly as it would mean defining at least 90% of the country as being so. What is true is that most of postindustrial Britain was quite indeed quite 'socially conservative' back when there was no 'post' in front of the 'industrial' - a world of tight-knit, even clannish, extended families with Rules and social Order - but that society, that world, died many decades ago.

_{*What was damaging on that front was that though the number of Lab > Con switchers was low, there was almost no traffic at all in the opposite direction. Ordinarily there is an approximate balance between the two.}

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A lot of the things a government might do to make things 'more strict' would almost certainly have no significant impact on the spread of the virus, so would be, in effect, little more than pandemic theatre. I suppose it would make a lot of people on twitter happy, but it wouldn't reduce the pressure on hospitals or save lives.

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The leader of the Welsh Conservatives has resigned - as has the party's Education spokesman - after it emerged that he and another group of MS's broke lockdown restrictions by drinking booze on parliamentary premises.

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As for patriotism...

https://twitter.com/sundersays/status/1356710844894167046?s=19

Exactly, it's... the Labour Party? This is what it has always done, how it has always campaigned.

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Maureen Colquhoun, Labour MP for Northampton North 1974-9, has died at the age of 92. She was Britain's first openly homosexual MP, though until recently had been largely written out of that narrative for various reasons. Even today she has generally been described as the first 'openly lesbian MP' - correct, but only half the story. Her tumultuous time in Parliament was not long, but her time in public life was, and it is probably fair to call her 'a character'.

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...but I do also think many of the intra-Labour spats are passing most actual voters by

...and what they notice might not make them think worse of the present leadership, bluntly. Political people have a habit of assuming that voters have a much more 'fixed' notion of what the parties 'are' than they actually do: the typical response to 'party leader does 'normal' thing, other people in the party gripe about this' is not 'that party is beyond hope lol' it is 'lmao he/she has pissed off the nutters'.

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Handforth Parish Council. Discuss.

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Handforth is very "white" I think. Concur on the age point, typical of local government more generally.

Parish Councils have always tended to be quite elderly - it's essentially uncompensated voluntary work for the administration of the sort of fairly minor local issues that most people find to be quite dull. Local government in general - at the 'principle authority' level - did not used to be as elderly as it tends to be now, though the reason for that shift is actually very different to the longstanding reason for elderly Parish Councils: over the past few decades local government has become increasing 'concentrated' - its powers and responsibilities have remained broadly unaltered, but the number of councillors has been dramatically reduced, which means that each individual councillor has more (and longer) meetings to attend, which is not compatible with holding down most full-time jobs or with raising children. Increasingly large allowances for councillors has not solved this problem, because money isn't really the issue.

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Apparently Handforth was 91.6% White, 4.7% Asian and 0.8% Black at the 2011 Census, which by the way is less White than Cheshire as a whole.

Feel free to draw your conclusions.

Is that 'White' or 'White - British'? My assumption would be the latter. Anyway it's a very ordinary and fairly boring Manchester commuter town - humdrum middle class with a couple of small postwar estates, remarkably unremarkable. Which makes all this even funnier.

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I have wondered if the various scandals that are brewing around local Governments mean we will get to a position where councillors are either full time professionals, or at the very least given a pool of staff members to support their work.

Oddly, the obvious solution is to move back towards the traditional model of British local government, which is to have strong officers with a significant degree of specialist knowledge balanced against a larger number of councillors than currently fashionable drawn from a wider pool - note that the size of the pool increases as the time pressures decrease. Broaden things further by introducing proportional representation in local elections. This wouldn't eliminate local corruption scandals (no system can do that!), but would get rid of certain specific factors that have led to some particularly nasty ones that are currently occupying minds.

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Also very typical that this has taken close to half a century to be "revealed".

More typical than that: it was 'revealed' at the time to a mild degree of fuss but then everyone forgot about it.

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Moving a small number of civil service posts to a random large town rarely does anything for the town, certainly does nothing for governance, and is at best highly questionable politically as it entails a bunch of outsiders moving in and getting paid more than the locals, who do not really benefit: such situations can sometimes, if not always, cause backlashes.

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And surely nobody actually thinks many of those uprooted by this are going to *actually live* in Darlington?

Do they??

Some might well live south of the river, in the constituency of... oh ffs.

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The Met is the worst police force in the country. It has improved a bit since Macpherson, but the fundamental character is what it is and just look at it.

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The main problem for Labour would be the reason for the vacancy: Hill has been accused of sexual harassment and faces an Employment Tribunal relating to the allegations later this year. Given that the accusations were known at the time of the last election he really should not have been allowed to stand again.

Anyway, this is a very odd town with very odd and not always entirely predictable politics. Labour have the biggest base and are the best organised party locally and will benefit from the fact that opposition voters are more likely to turn out in by-elections. Assumptions that you can just add up the Conservative and Brexit Party votes from the last GE and project onto a by-election are... silly... but I presume the Conservatives will make an effort (or at least run a noisy campaign to the effect) and hope that the oddities of the constituency break their way. Quite what to expect from the artists formerly known as UKIP/the Brexit Party I'm not entirely sure, but, again, presumably some effort just because of past performances and local government strength.* Which is the other issue: there might (although this isn't certain) be various independent runs from various egotistical local players that might be worth a few thousand votes, or not.

_{*What isn't good for them is that their issues are either dead (Brexit) or don't poll particularly well (lockdown scepticism), which doesn't seem like good news from a motivating-your-electorate perspective. But we shall see.}

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Richard Tice stood there last time. I expect ContinuityKIPxit to at least put some effort in.

And they have their local government presence. They sort of have to try.

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Mostly they're just notable for being very low quality. Most are not particularly (or at all) local to their constituencies at all either.

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My favourite is alma-mater (shudder) Gerry Malone who lost in Hillhead in 1982, won Aberdeen South in 1983, lost it in 1987, won Winchester in 1992 lost it in 1997 by two votes, won a legal challenge and got hammered in the by-election

It was a long time ago when things were very different, but the list of constituencies that Leslie Haden-Guest* ran in is genuinely impressive in its range as well: the ones I remember offhand are Southwark North, Wycombe, Brecon & Radnor, and Islington North, but there might have been a few others - don't have access to a copy of Craig 1918-49 with its useful index right now.

_{*Labour's first Jewish MP (and parliamentary candidate, actually), later a member of the Lords. Grandfather of Christopher Guest who he looked pretty much exactly like.}