UK General Discussion: Rishecession

[Filuwaúrdjan]

One thing to note is this agreement scuppers (and for good) the insane plan of the Johnson government to simply ignore the rules around the NI Protocol, legislation for which was technically still moving through parliament and which will now be scrapped. Dodging a completely stupid and entirely unnecessary trade war is a good thing from pretty much any sane perspective. Another thing to note is that, and for various different reasons, this will make the process of moving towards greater alignment between the EU and the UK easier over the medium-term.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That's not what's happened here at all: Sunak isn't Johnson and stupid threats won't have been made. Instead it just happens that this is mutually beneficial, and removing Johnson's brainless and thuggish strategy from the table entirely will have been part of the attraction to the EU. Where there is deference to the Conservative Party's toxic internal politics is the fact that everyone is carefully avoiding drawing too much attention to that fact. Negotiation doesn't have to be a contest and generally works better when it isn't: the platonically ideal outcome is generally an arrangement that both sides can live with but which leaves each perhaps mildly (but only mildly) disappointed. That a lot of the Brexit negotiations have taken on a more aggressive, competitive (and can we say macho? Unfortunately, yes, we probably can) aspect has been more of a comment on the sort of people conducting them, especially after the fall of May, than the nature of negotiation.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I do think you are reading this slightly wrong.

Sunak has actually had to accede to a fair amount his party won't really like - in particular his saying the ECHR's jurisdiction is here to stay will not please quite a few Tory MPs at all.

Implicitly he's also making it clear that regulations will not differ substantially from EU ones in the near future. Now, while there's no reason for them to (quite the opposite), there's an element in the Conservative Parliamentary Party that would wish for substantive differences just to have substantive differences.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Why would anyone trust Isabel Oakeshott with sensitive information, ever? She accidentally got one of her previous sources imprisoned!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ok she's the No2.

Her official title is : Cabinet Office Second Permanent Secretary

Job titles can be misleading: she wasn't even the second most senior civil servant at the Cabinet Office.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The first people we need to deport are these moronic Australian political advisors.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

lmao this is like when the worst excesses of the Australian right try to make dumb American culture wars a thing

We're through the looking glass here, people.

Some random cabinet minister is going to start bleating about 'battlers' and 'the Mortgage Belt' next.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's all very strange. There's been next to no actual media coverage/saturation of 'people in boats'. Not even on Twitter. Certainly in comparison to the Sangatte reporting a few years back.

The government has decided this is a problem, that a 'showdown' is needed...before it's in the public consciousness. Not to say it won't be, but there's a weird disconnect.

It happens that an unusually high proportion of both Conservative Party members and journalists for national broadcasters/publications live in Kent.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ferrets, sacks, etc.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Ah, Leominster. One third angry farmers (whatever their actual employment), one third hippy types and one third your actual underclass. Of course the rest of the constituency is more 'normal', but...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

...Calder Valley where there’s a high proportion of hippie types

That's really just one town and it's not that large. Though could certainly be the start of a decent GE vote in the future, the factors governing that being different to the factors governing decent Green votes in local elections (where they're basically Community Liberals with a different coloured rosette).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The idea that General Elections are applied local elections is the sort of error you usually associate more with particularly partisan-and-or-delusional LibDems...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

What is interesting is that there was far, *far* more of this sort of thing pre-'97 than is now generally remembered. Right up until literally days before the election!

I remember Michael Portillo going on like this on the television a couple of days before polling day and Child Me being concerned enough about this (I know...) to ask my Dad if it were true. He laughed and said, no, they were going to get smashed.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I remember Michael Portillo going on like this on the television a couple of days before polling day and Child Me being concerned enough about this (I know...) to ask my Dad if it were true. He laughed and said, no, they were going to get smashed.

Extra shades of humor here, considering that Michael Portillo of all people was saying this.

It did add to the amusement later, yes...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The owner of the Guardian apologized for the role the paper's founders played in the transatlantic slave trade.

The owner of the Guardian has issued an apology for the role the newspaper’s founders had in transatlantic slavery and announced a decade-long programme of restorative justice.

The Scott Trust said it expected to invest more than £10m (US$12.3m, A$18.4m), with millions dedicated specifically to descendant communities linked to the Guardian’s 19th-century founders.

It follows independent academic research commissioned in 2020 to investigate whether there was any historical connection between chattel slavery and John Edward Taylor, the journalist and cotton merchant who founded the newspaper in 1821, and the other Manchester businessmen who funded its creation.

The Scott Trust Legacies of Enslavement report, published on Tuesday, revealed that Taylor, and at least nine of his 11 backers, had links to slavery, principally through the textile industry. Taylor had multiple links through partnerships in the cotton manufacturing firm Oakden & Taylor, and the cotton merchant company Shuttleworth, Taylor & Co, which imported vast amounts of raw cotton produced by enslaved people in the Americas.

It's one thing if there were actual investments in the abominable trade, but quite another if we're talking of a commercial relationship with the results. Those same mills will have employed local children, and will have used (both directly and indirection through e.g. iron and steel in the machinery) coal produced in very dangerous conditions and often, again, featuring children in the production process. Most of the factories will have had slate roofs, and the production of that was also notoriously exploitative at the time. Are we going to get 'apologies' for all that as well, given that there is no obvious moral distinction?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I've never understood why the ceremonial counties aren't just the traditional ones. They have no administrative function so there's no need for them to match up with existing local authority boundaries and they exist for the purpose of flummery so it makes more sense for them to be as traditional as possible.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It's like the old ads I did in Fantasyland back in the day; I unironically love it.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Sentencing guidelines are set very broadly, in accordance with the traditions of a Common Law system. It is not generally expected that judges should default towards the lower end, but this has often been happening (and for a wide range of offences) due to the damage austerity has caused to the criminal justice system: the prison estate is now too small and cases take far longer to come to court than they ought to, and the results are what they are.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The real question is why so many in our media* still feel obliged to report on Truss as if what she said still carried either merit or import.

It's interesting as it didn't use to be this way if a politician were discredited, no matter how senior they had previously been. No one wished to hear of Stanley Baldwin's views about anything after 1939 and so on.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Of course, Baldwin was independently wealthy so had no need (or desire to be fair) to try and turn his failed premiership into cash, unlike Truss.

He appears to have spent his (massive) inheritance like a drunken sailor, and yet still died with total assets of c.£280,000, which was a lot of money in those days.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yeah what does Cameron actually do? Isn't he a bit bored? Is he just a retired country gent who occasionally lobbies the UK gov through back channels? What happened to his bid to become NATO sec gen. For all his hubris and faults, by all accounts he seemed to be an excellent operator in the "summit" type setting in terms of knowing his brief and everyone elses.

Essentially he's on the consultancy racket. His main activity was as a lobbyist for Greensill Capital (which was run by a friend of his), which did not end very well for anyone.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Is it true the SNP are going bankrupt?

No, because political parties in the UK cannot go bankrupt as legally they are what is known as 'unincorporated associations'. They can become insolvent, but it's a messier process if they do: the organization itself would not be held to be liable for any debts, but its officers would be personally.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I didn't know that the SNP was a democratic centralist organization.

Yes, they banned 'factionalism' (which, to an extent, was often interpreted as public dissent from the leadership) forty years ago after some very brutal infighting that nearly killed the party. And a very secretive internal culture developed around that: a lot of the issues that have blown up this year are what happens when that collides with the inevitable demands for transparency from a party of government in a liberal society.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Both of those issues - massive red flags! - were on his actually very brief Wiki biography as well.