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

[Cassius]

Though nonetheless, I feel the need to repeat this for certain people:

RUSSIA DIDN'T ACTUALLY "DO" BREXIT. RUSSIA DIDN'T ACTUALLY "DO" TRUMP.

The continued pretence otherwise from centrists on both sides of the Atlantic (again clearly on display yesterday) deflects from a far more pertinent reason - their own cosseted complacency for years and years beforehand.

Yeah, I mean I think the key question is ‘is it worth investigating’? and I personally think the answer to that is, ‘no, it’s not’. We know the electoral system itself is pretty much completely safe from efforts at vote rigging by foreign actors (a good reason to keep pen and paper voting). It also seems pretty clear that the Russian government didn’t provide any significant funding to the Leave campaign. So, what is left? A few Russian state and semi-state actors whipping up fake news on social media? Organizations like RT and Sputnik (which have a small following in the UK) doing the same through slightly more conventional channels? Nothing done by either wasn’t already being done, on a much grander scale, by UK politicians and UK media outlets who, once they’d picked a side, began flinging questionable narratives and fake news at each other with abandon (and this very much includes the not-so-saintly Remain campaign).

The fact that is the internet gives foreign actors an easy tool with which to spread disinformation and the only way for the government to stop that is for it to adopt a Chinese style approach to internet regulation (since ‘Russian bots’, by nature of operating outside of HMG’s jurisdiction, cannot be cut off at source). Even if you believe that Russian interference made more than a minuscule difference to the outcome of the referendum, interference of that type isn’t going to go away unless the government adopts of that more authoritarian approach to regulating the internet. In so doing, a lot of domestic political commentary will likely also be caught up in the net, unless you believe that spreading fake news is only wrong when the Ruskies do it. So that will also be incredibly controversial.

I personally think the Russian ‘interference’, such as it was, amounted to little more than background noise on the sturm und drang of the referendum campaign, and that very, very few people are likely to have changed their minds as a result of it. Therefore, I don’t think it’s worth raking over the issue in more detail. Any investigation into the impact of ‘fake news’ on the referendum result would do far better to look into the activities of British politicians and media outlets during the campaign (and of course, that already has been done, in detail).

[Cassius]

Good to see the odious Tom Watson swapped out for Prem Sikka.

[Cassius]

Has there ever been a time that a Conservative government has said "there will be no U-turn under any circumstances" that wasn't immediately followed by a government U-turn within 48 hours?

1980.

Except even then, the government did make U-turn away from hard monetarism, albeit over a period of years rather than 48 hours.

[Cassius]

His job today seems to be opining on a BASICALLY NON-EXISTENT "threat" to the Proms singalong.

As far as I’m aware he was simply responding to a question put to him by a journalist, so I don’t think it’s fair to criticise him for opining in this particular instance.

There appear to be two variants of explanation for why there will be no singing of Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory. One, which has come from Tony Hall and others, is that, without an audience, it doesn’t make much sense to have a singalong as much of the power of those pieces when sung derives from being sung by a crowd, which I kind of buy. The other, which has been proffered by various people (including the conductor!) is that the lyrics need to go because apparently they’re not suitable for ‘modern, diverse, multicultural Britain’ (TM). I hope it’s the former.

[Cassius]

10 PMs in 10 years?

Not *quite*, though at times it has seemed a bit like that I will admit

I seem to remember that way back when (ie two years ago), there were mutterings on the Tory benches about levering our May and replacing her with either David Davis or David Lidington as a caretaker for a couple of years until the party could fix upon a suitable long term leader. One ex-cabinet minister apparently dismissed this possibility by saying something along the lines of ‘we’re not Italy for God’s sake!’.

[Cassius]

What was the case? Wouldn't he have been too Remainy?

I assume, had he remained in frontline politics, that he may well have trimmed his sails on the issue à la May. Given that he had fairly strong eurosceptic credentials dating back to his first stint as leader and had seen his reputation improve drastically with the party and the public from that rather disastrous period (as perhaps will happen for Ed Miliband), I imagine the party would’ve been perfectly willing to accept him if they accepted May, perhaps more so.

[Cassius]

I suppose it’s symbolically significant, but it is only a margin of error movement, with both parties very much in the same place as they’ve been since about May. Given that Tory governments always fall behind Labour at about this time and yet often come back to win the next GE (1983, 1987, 1992, 2015), I wouldn’t get too worked up about this poll.

In other news, the UCU, after having had many months in which to raise their concerns, have decided that the end of August is an appropriate time to come out against students returning to universities from... the end of September (with most students having already been informed about the arrangements for the coming term). To which I can only say, good luck to them, and I hope they have thought very carefully about the implications of students not being allowed to go back for another indefinite period.

[Cassius]

BoJo now promising to beat the virus with something that has not been invented yet, apparently.

Don’t forget the COVID Freikorps Marshals!

[Cassius]

Toby Young has withdrawn his support for Boris Johnson. This means that Johnson now has ‘longest serving PM since Walpole’ firmly in the bag.

[Cassius]

Time to get those letters in boys.

[Cassius]

Time to get those letters in boys.

Sorry, what?

To the 1922 Committee.

[Cassius]

The efforts of the various governments to impose it’s-not-a-national-lockdown-but-to-all-intents-and-purposes-it-really-is are really straining credibility.

If we take the new pub rule, for example, Tim Martin (whatever you may think of him otherwise) made a pretty good point saying that people, particularly young people, will simply load up on booze from supermarkets and drink at home (in groups) once 10pm comes rolling round. If the government believes that transmission in pubs is a problem then it should order them to shut again, simply as that. This kind of half-arsed measure amounts to spitting into a gale and hoping it will turn away from you. It won’t solve the problem of transmission in pubs and may possibly (as Martin said) have unintended consequences that will be very difficult to police.

We need to abandon this fantastical idea that lockdown can somehow be ‘fine tuned’ as the situation develops. Either we have a lockdown, which means shutting workplaces, pubs, restaurants, public transport etc to as great a degree as possible, or we don’t have one. Arsing around with local lockdowns, the ‘rule of six’, 10pm curfews et al won’t be blanket enough to majorly curb the spread of the virus, whilst simultaneously they’ll cause economic and social chaos and immense frustration for the bulk of the population.

[Cassius]

This may be an attempt to force a change in behaviour. No-one can really afford a second lockdown economically.

Yeah, I guess they’re trying to put the frighteners on. I have strong doubts about the wisdom of this strategy, given the incredibly patronising messaging coming from all the governments about the public’s ‘behaviour’.

Yes, there are certain things that individuals can do to minimise their personal risk of catching and spreading the virus, but, you know, if schools, universities and many workplaces are still open then people are inevitably going to catch the virus. Outbreaks of disease can spiral from one unlucky incident. It reminds me a bit of the old IRA adage ‘you have to be lucky every time, we only have to be lucky once’. Meanwhile, as this is happening, many people, who have made sacrifices and had their freedoms drastically curtailed by this virus, will be understandably pissed off at being spoken to like this by our elected representatives and may not be inclined to fall into line like good little boys and girls. Rather than attempting to turn this issue into one of ‘you, the stupid, feckless British public have brought this lockdown upon yourselves’, the government should have developed a strategy to help us live with COVID-19, which we will have to do now that it is essentially endemic in this country, with no vaccine in sight.

[Cassius]

By-election time maybe?

[Cassius]

What is the whole purpose of the European Union?

1. To provide a make-work programme and pension scheme for has-been and never-will-be politicians who failed/never made it at the national political level.
2. To give  an enormous (but largely false) ego-boost to ‘Europeans’ with small-man syndrome who feel threatened by the fact that the United States, China and, to a lesser extent, Russia, rule the roost in geopolitical terms.
3. To shuffle money more easily around the continent from richer to poorer countries, under the auspices of ‘convergence’ (lol).
4. To shuffle people more easily around the continent from poorer to richer countries, because having British (as was), German or Italian citizens pick fruit or clean toilets is morally wrong.
5. To enable the fulfilment of various national interests; countries with large (in the European context), inefficient agricultural sectors getting subsidies; traditionally poor countries laundering their creditworthiness via membership of the Eurozone; a comfort blanket for Germans who believe they’ll instantaneously march into the Sudetenland/Poland without some form of membership in an international body.

All the above reasons are laundered, to a greater or lesser degree, by vacuous appeals to factitious ‘European Values’ and the importance of the EU in maintaining them.

[Cassius]

What is the whole purpose of the European Union?

1. To provide a make-work programme and pension scheme for has-been and never-will-be politicians who failed/never made it at the national political level.
2. To give  an enormous (but largely false) ego-boost to ‘Europeans’ with small-man syndrome who feel threatened by the fact that the United States, China and, to a lesser extent, Russia, rule the roost in geopolitical terms.
3. To shuffle money more easily around the continent from richer to poorer countries, under the auspices of ‘convergence’ (lol).
4. To shuffle people more easily around the continent from poorer to richer countries, because having British (as was), German or Italian citizens pick fruit or clean toilets is morally wrong.
5. To enable the fulfilment of various national interests; countries with large (in the European context), inefficient agricultural sectors getting subsidies; traditionally poor countries laundering their creditworthiness via membership of the Eurozone; a comfort blanket for Germans who believe they’ll instantaneously march into the Sudetenland/Poland without some form of membership in an international body.

All the above reasons are laundered, to a greater or lesser degree, by vacuous appeals to factitious ‘European Values’ and the importance of the EU in maintaining them.

I mean, point by point:

1) I will give you this one. It is a shame that EU institutions often end up as a "retirement home" for have-been politicians. I wish things were different though.

2) Do you seriously deny the fact that, for most European countries, being inside the EU is a big positive to their foreign policy, buying them a ton of influence since they get the backing of a much larger bloc? Unless your name is France, Germany or the UK (I guess bias there ); your foreign policy will be a lot more effective as part of the EU than if you are alone.

Do you seriously think say, Latvia or Belgium would have any chance of "making it" in the world stage outside the EU? Most European countries are unable to compete with the power that countries like Russia or China have, if they act by themselves.

3) Convergence has been extremely effective at its goal though? Southern Europe managed to catch up quite a bit to Western Europe between the 80s and the 2000s; and nowadays it is Eastern Europe that has managed to catch up as well; with countries like the Czech Republic or Estonia not being far from the living standards of countries like Spain or Portugal.

4) I might be a bit biased here. I am actually somewhat against non-EU immigration; but EU immigration has been a huge positive for most countries? EU internal immigration provides most in not all of the positives of immigration with little to none of the negatives.

If anything the issue here would be "brain drain" from some of the less developed countries (I think this is a big issue in countries like Romania or Bulgaria?)

5) This is "international negotiations 101"?  Compromises, by their own nature mean some countries give up on some things in exchange for getting others. Overall the EU is undeniable a positive proposition for all members though.

I was being a bit tongue in cheek to be fair, but:

2) Why would Belgium or Latvia (or the UK for that matter) want to make it on the world stage. The world’s a scary place mun and I don’t particularly see the logic in smaller countries getting themselves dragged into greater power politics. I suppose in the case of Latvia you could fall back on the Russia threat, but that’s dealt with by membership of NATO (underpinned by a military superior to that of Russia, unlike the collective EU militaries). I think the ‘small-man syndrome’ point actually applies to the UK’s original reasons for membership more than anything else, given that we were desperate to find a new avenue to throw our weight around given the loss of our empire and the US government proving to be the treacherous backstabbers we should’ve always known them to be. Of course, once you’re in a big bloc, if you happen to be on the right side of the majority of (or the most powerful) members, then your international influence can be augmented, but it can also be constrained if you find yourself on the opposite side to the other members.

3) Making this point using convergence was pretty weak, but we’ve seen the results of EU monetary and fiscal policy in your own and other countries in recent years and it has a pretty bleak record. In addition, whilst some of the development in Southern and Eastern Europe is certainly attributable to EU money and markets, not all of it is. This again links back to a British perspective for joining - a lot of British politicians confused (either knowingly or not) correlation with causation when it came to making the case our membership by pointing out the healthy economies of the (then) EEC countries. Yes, France, Germany and Italy had seen more economic growth and faster increases in living standards than we had during the post-war period, but most of this was due to starting from a lower base and because of endogenous economic policies adopted by their respective governments. EU boosters like to insert the EU into every ‘good thing’ that has happened in Europe since 1945, but usually context is missing.

4) This is a pretty normative argument where we can agree to disagree. I think ‘hourglass’ immigration policies, where the most developed countries suck in all the young and qualified people from less developed countries, are pretty pernicious, both for the country that suffers from the brain drain and for the country that becomes reliant on a transient workforce and neglects to provide jobs and education for its own citizens.

5) This was fairly jokey and much of it was a reference to the below sitcom as CumbrianLeftie pointed out:

https://youtu.be/rvYuoWyk8iU

I do think there’s a good point to be made here, which is that EU partisans like to lie and say it’s all about promoting peace and democracy and fluffy bunnies and ‘European values’ and all the rest, but we don’t need an EU for any of that. We do need an EU so that failed politicians can get their snouts in the trough and arses in the air, and we need an EU so that small countries can play at being big countries, and we need an EU so that national politicians can spend copious amounts of time arguing over problems (the Euro, Schengen, EU budgetary contributions being funnelled to states that other EU countries don’t like) that wouldn’t exist if we didn’t have an EU in its present form.

[Cassius]

I believe the current plan to save the Union consists of putting the union flag on everything & getting Michael Gove to shuffle papers around in Whitehall if that fills anyone with confidence.

FTFY
The plan is that every bit of infrastructure or investment will be emblazoned with red, white and blue in a similar fashion to what the EU does when it builds a bridge or whatever.

Question is: is this enough or too little too late?

With regards to Johnson he may not be PM anymore in a year's time and the next PM just *might* be more popular in haggis country.  I'm pretty pessimistic personally and reckon Scots independence is nearly inevitable.  I hope I'm wrong.
In other news Liz Truss (!) is the most popular minister amongst the Tory membership.  She certainly has a growing fan club on the right and her speech this week attacking wokery won't hurt that.  Sunak still rides high in the opinion of the membership (and the public) and Patel is treading water with good approvals.

This shouldn't matter but it does because Johnson is steadily losing support in the party.  I doubt the requured number of letters will ever be reached (I reckon only 3 are sent) but might the infamous Grey Suits push him out?  Hope so.

I would’ve thought that now we’ve begun vaccinating, assuming it works, Johnson will probably be safe in the medium term, given the government now have the vague light on the hill of Easter/Summer/‘sometime in 2021’ to browbeat any opponents of further lockdowns with. On the latter subject I note with concern the way parts of the media have suddenly begun to revive the ‘Long COVID’ speculation now that we’ve begun to vaccinate the elderly and care home workers.

[Cassius]

Several new members of the House of Lords announced today, including one who was rejected by the House of Lords Appointments Commission, due to allegations about his behaviour a few years ago when he was Treasurer of the Conservative Party, only for de Pfeffel to override them.

The government really doesn't give a sh*t anymore, do they?

They think they can do pretty much anything they want because the media will let them.

And little has happened to dissuade them of such a belief thus far.

Well to be fair bunging a bent businessman a baronetcy is bipartisan British tradition.

Anyway, large parts of the country will be heading into Tier 4 on Boxing Day, presumably a prelude to a new national lockdown in the new year. Time to be summarily shot by the COVID marshals for travelling back from my Mum’s to my house in a Tier 4 zone.

[Cassius]

So we’re going into Lockdown Part III from Wednesday. Appears as though this one will be more similar to Part I as opposed to Part II.

[Cassius]

With schools and universities now shut for the foreseeable future, it’s difficult to see how the restrictions can practically be made stricter, short of ‘well if we self-nuked the country then that would prevent anymore COVID-related deaths’.

[Cassius]

With schools and universities now shut for the foreseeable future, it’s difficult to see how the restrictions can practically be made stricter, short of ‘well if we self-nuked the country then that would prevent anymore COVID-related deaths’.

Our first lock-down had us stay within 500 meters of our home, no visits to others even if they live next door, and closing any nonessential business with more than 10 employees.

My understanding (correct me if I’m wrong) is that your lockdown was partly enforced by the Israeli Defence Force? That would not be acceptable in this country, and even if it were the British Army doesn’t have the men to enforce it nationwide.

[Cassius]

With schools and universities now shut for the foreseeable future, it’s difficult to see how the restrictions can practically be made stricter, short of ‘well if we self-nuked the country then that would prevent anymore COVID-related deaths’.

Our first lock-down had us stay within 500 meters of our home, no visits to others even if they live next door, and closing any nonessential business with more than 10 employees.

My understanding (correct me if I’m wrong) is that your lockdown was partly enforced by the Israeli Defence Force? That would not be acceptable in this country, and even if it were the British Army doesn’t have the men to enforce it nationwide.

no, it wasn't. some home front soldiers were attached to the blue police unit to help with various things, but enforcement remained in police hands. The MI helped the health ministry conduct epidemiological investigations, and some military technological measures were used to track quarantine breakers. But always the final call was in civilian hands.

The first lockdown saw a really high level of compliance regardless of enforcement, the second saw mass rebellion that even martial law wouldn't have solved.

Ah okay, thanks for the clarification. Yes, compliance was also much higher in our first lockdown than in the second, although the second was far less stringent so the lines between what was and wasn’t illegal were a bit blurry. Rereading your first comment, as far as I’m aware all nonessential businesses have been ordered to close this time around, whilst a 500m rule would not be enforceable because a lot of people don’t have access to a supermarket/chemist within that distance.

[Cassius]

Notoriously, certain police forces have tried to get people on "breaking the spirit of the rules".

Then of course you spy them chatting to their mates, on what must be their lunch-break, not socially distanced and not wearing masks!

[Cassius]

Brexit is an incredibly weak justification for Scottish independence - an independent Scotland won’t get the same kind of relationship that the UK had with the EU when it was a member state, and will face more disruption separating from an ex-EU UK than it did from Brexit itself. I think the recent surge in support for independence has been driven primarily by Boris Johnson’s lack of appeal north of the border and the perception that Nicola Sturgeon has done a better job handling COVID.

Of course, ‘getting lost in pointless constitutional wrangling’ has been baked in from the moment the Labour Party signed up to turn this country into a tea-drinking Yugoslavia through the devolution experiment, an experiment that has been continued by the Conservatives since 2010 (all these ridiculous metro-mayors et al).

[Cassius]

Labour started espousing devolution in order to:

A) Hobble the ability of the Conservative Party to make policy at the national level, in the same vein as its Damascene conversion to full-throated support for the EU in the 1980s (sad how both of these schemes have now spectacularly rebounded upon the party).
B) To fend off the possible electoral threat posed by the SNP and avoid defections by nationalist-curious Labour Party members to that party (the dreaded ‘party management’ that apparently only the Tories engage in).

Of course, devolution has not fended off Scottish nationalism (or any of the other ‘nationalisms’), instead its given it a pair of skates and a jet pack.

As for the question of independence, I understand perfectly well that a significant plurality of the Scottish electorate doesn’t wish to be part of Britain and I accept the reasons for that. Nonetheless, if you’re the kind of person who wants to see meaningful policy change across the entirety of the UK, then supporting more devolution and ‘federalism’ (shudder) will simply be counterproductive. I look forward to seeing the elected ‘Council of the Nations and Regions’ set up by a future Labour government blocking Labour’s policy agenda because through some bizarre turn of events it ends up with a Tory majority.