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

[Cassius]

Labour has been moving to becoming more devolution-friendly since the 1960s.

Something else that is often missed.

True, but prior to the 1980’s it was an issue upon which there was considerable division (Neil Kinnock had some choice words to say about Welsh devolution and Welsh nationalists in 1979 for example), as was the case with Europe. It was only with the advent of Labour’s repeated electoral failures that firm support for both became the consensus opinion across the party (with a few exceptions).

Replace "Tory majority" and "Tory power" with "(Little) English Nationalism" In Cassius's typical blue-goggled #Analysis and you have the crux of the problem that Gordon Brown was hinting at the other day.

Oh get a grip. If Scotland wishes to leave the UK that’s fair enough. I don’t particularly see how weakening the ability of the national government to do anything meaningful (as federalism always does) will achieve the goal of ‘strengthening the Union’, but I’m sure that you, as a galaxy-brained euro-federalist, can explain it to this slope-headed ‘Little Englander’.

[Cassius]

Cassius thinking devolution in Scotland was a devious Labour 'plot' and thinking the people of Scotland didn't have any f-cking agency in choosing it themselves.

Well, they wouldn’t have been able to exercise their ‘f-cking agency’ if Labour hadn’t given them a referendum, would they? I suppose if Labour hadn’t done so Salmond could’ve held up a post office in Edinburgh and inspired a national uprising in favour of devolution, but I suspect that would have been somewhat unlikely. Devolution was self-evidently a galaxy brained scheme to try and head off the electoral threat of the SNP, but it clearly wasn’t a very good idea for the Labour Party in hindsight was it? I mean for the record I’m all in favour of Scottish independence at this point, rather than persisting with this charade of the Scottish government demanding that the UK government treats Scotland as a independent country in all but name whilst Scotland continues to send 59 MP’s to Westminster.

[Cassius]

Its a particular sort of feminism that is susceptible to TERFism.

(basically the lifestyle based "what matters above all is getting women into prominent positions and actual structural inequality be damned" type - one well represented in the UK's political/media class)

I try to avoid following this particular debate in which Cherry has found herself embroiled, but this characterisation is simply not accurate given that Cherry is clearly well within the left-wing mainstream of her party on every issue except the transgender one (and made her career as a lawyer working on sex crimes, hardly the path that a lawyer unconcerned with social issues would try to carve out, and one that has probably helped shape her position on this particular issue, for good or ill).

[Cassius]

Handforth Parish Council. Discuss.

‘In the name of the Parish Council of Handforth, you have no authority here, Jackie Weaver’.
‘Are you threatening me Master Clerk’?
‘The Parish Council will decide your fate’
‘I am the Parish Council’

[Cassius]

I’m sure Treasury officials will be absolutely delighted about potentially moving from London to Darlington.

[Cassius]

I’m sure Treasury officials will be absolutely delighted about potentially moving from London to Darlington.

Randomly moving officials to the North will make no difference if the government has no real interest in its people.

I agree with you, I was just being a little facetious. I don’t think it will do much for Darlington and I don’t think it will do much for the Treasury.

[Cassius]

Alternatively they could build a high speed rail link between London and Darlington so that any senior treasury staff that did get moved there would still be within range of the Royal Opera House and Harrod’s.

[Cassius]

While the result is unlikely to last, why are greens polling so high?

They’ve been bouncing around for a while at about 3-7% so I think that a lot of it can be explained by margin of error noise and differences in methodology between the various polling companies. Despite that, they are getting quite a lot of sixes and sevens at the moment, so I’d hazard a guess that they’re getting some protest votes from people on the left who would normally (and probably will) vote Labour but are dissatisfied with the current direction under Starmer (from a brief scan of the polls the ones with the highest Green shares tend to be ones with lower Labour figures). This can work the other way; anecdotally I’m aware of some Labour voters who couldn’t stomach the state of the party under Corbyn voting Green as a protest, even though the Greens were very much simpatico with the policies that Labour ran with in the 2019 general election.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if they were picking up some of the ‘plague-on-all-your-houses’ protest votes that in the past have gone to UKIP and the Lib Dems.

[Cassius]

Nigel Farage has resigned as Reform UK leader. Not particularly surprising given the party’s failure to make hay over the government’s COVID policy, but I suspect he may have been pushed out by/come to a gentleman’s agreement with Richard Tice, who will now assume the leadership.

I’m sure he’ll be back as soon as the bar tab needs topping up.

[Cassius]

Fourth I believe (there was the 2015 un-resignation resignation, the ‘I want my life back’ resignation of Summer 2016 and the resignation after he temporarily resumed the UKIP leadership following the Diane James farrago); I do think that Tice might finally be the person able to fill the long-prophesied ‘successor to Farage’ role that the right-of-the-right has been searching for since 2016, so I predict that this may actually be Farage’s last resignation.

If I still lived in London I think I’d give Fox a vote even if he is a prick, out of respect for his role in Lewis. Tough choice though given the true smorgasbord of high quality minor-party and independent candidates standing for the post.

[Cassius]

Yeah, I think now that Johnson’s survived the Winter of Our Discontent he should be fine, barring some major catastrophe/scandal emerging in the next three years. I still think that there’s every possibility that he decides to call it quits at some point in the lifetime of this parliament and goes back to writing columns and having books ghostwritten for him, since I don’t think he really has any aims in politics besides being an election winning Prime Minister (which he’s now achieved). If he stood down, say, at the end of the year or some time in 2022, he’d have presided over Brexit and a successful roll out of the COVID vaccine, in addition to, hopefully, the country returning to some sort of economic normality. He could easily say he was standing down to ‘spend more time with the family after three hard years’ and if he did so he’d probably be remembered (by conservative Britain at least) as the best Conservative PM since Thatcher. Not a bad prospect for him really.

[Cassius]

Yeah, I think now that Johnson’s survived the Winter of Our Discontent he should be fine, barring some major catastrophe/scandal emerging in the next three years. I still think that there’s every possibility that he decides to call it quits at some point in the lifetime of this parliament and goes back to writing columns and having books ghostwritten for him, since I don’t think he really has any aims in politics besides being an election winning Prime Minister (which he’s now achieved). If he stood down, say, at the end of the year or some time in 2022, he’d have presided over Brexit and a successful roll out of the COVID vaccine, in addition to, hopefully, the country returning to some sort of economic normality. He could easily say he was standing down to ‘spend more time with the family after three hard years’ and if he did so he’d probably be remembered (by conservative Britain at least) as the best Conservative PM since Thatcher. Not a bad prospect for him really.

I got the sense that he never really recovered after getting COVID and the whole thing has dampened his desire for the job (which was limited since he has no real long-term policy goals). Better for him to bow out gracefully.

If he's the best conservative PM since Thatcher, it's because the competition was incredibly weak.

No doubt about the weakness of the competition, but I feel if he left within the next year he’d be able to carve out a good reputation for himself on the right of politics, especially if things went south for the Conservative party after his leaving the leadership.

I’m inclined to be sceptical of the after effects of COVID being a reason for him wanting to quit though. It’s certainly a good excuse for quitting, but I feel like he’s much more likely to quit because being PM is a hard and (mostly) thankless job where his capacity to ‘be himself’ (whatever that means) is considerably curtailed. He’ll have a lot more freedom and will be able to make a lot more money once he leaves office, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he quit now that he’s ticked being PM, winning a big election victory and notching up a few achievements in office off of the bucket list. Getting out early and thus avoiding being widely despised would be a bonus on top of these.

[Cassius]

I imagine they didn’t want to be seen to be picking and choosing which large scale events should be allowed to take place, given that they’ve been aggressively policing other large gatherings and demonstrations throughout the year. I think that most of the other gatherings around the country only involved a relatively small number of people, making it much less likely that things would get out of hand as they did in London.

[Cassius]

Mike Hill, the MP for Hartlepool, has just resigned, so there’ll be a by election there at some point, possibly on the same day as the locals. I guess it’s not outside the realms of possibility that Labour could actually lose the seat, although I’d think it unlikely as Richard Tice will probably stand again and split the non-Labour vote as he did in 2019 (and of course Labour might just hold it with an increased vote share, who knows).

[Cassius]

If Labour gets blown out would there be talk of a leadership election?

I doubt they’ll lose (not impossible, but unlikely) but obviously if they did it would be a serious blow for Starmer, who has spent much of the last year trying to ‘detoxify’ (to put it crudely) Labour’s image in precisely these kinds of seats. Still, I don’t think he’d be challenged, not least because I don’t see who could credibly claim to do a better job.

[Cassius]

I don’t know a lot about how the selection process works in the Labour Party, but one thing you have to bear in mind about the Conservative party selection process is that it is incredibly centralised; in order to get round to applying to be the candidate in a particular seat, you need to pass the parliamentary assessment board (PAB), which to all intents and purposes functions much like a corporate interview process (with much of the same mindless crap playing a key role), and is managed centrally. If you pass this, that gets you onto a long list of approved candidates who are then eligible to apply to local constituency associations for selection. This does mean that aspiring candidates have to criss cross the country in order to find a winnable nomination (although this has always been a feature of candidate selection).

This process in and of itself is subject to intensive meddling by CCHQ; the shortlist will often consist of three candidates, one of which has to be a woman and another an ethnic minority. This is a legacy of the Cameron era in which the selection process was dramatically centralised to stop local associations constantly selecting white male barristers/bankers/local businessmen/farmers, as that was apparently insufficiently representative. The result of this has been that the Conservative party has dramatically diversified over the last fifteen years, not just in terms of gender and race, but also in terms of schooling and general social background (whilst a large number of Conservative MP’s continue to have been privately educated, that figure has fallen precipitously from what it used to be). A lot of the so-called Red Wall MP’s do come from very atypical backgrounds for a Conservative MP (although there are also some from traditional Tory backgrounds).

The selection process is essentially designed to produce candidates who, firstly, ‘look like modern Britain’ (whatever the hell that means) and, secondly, aren’t likely to rock the boat (and I think this discourages some more accomplished professional people from applying). This is good for publicity and party discipline but often produces dud local MP’s.

[Cassius]

‘Kill the Bill’ demonstrators showcase their commitment to peaceful protest:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/22/twelve-police-officers-injured-in-bristol-kill-the-bill-protests

[Cassius]

More accurately perhaps, perfectly peaceful protest hijacked by trustifarian dicks?

Well possibly, but there were rather a lot of people involved and these types of protests do have a habit of being hijacked by ‘outsiders’ don’t they?

[Cassius]

The reason why they’re visiting it is, I assume, because the Church has been running a food bank throughout the pandemic and recently set up a vaccination centre as well - the senior pastor has called upon his congregants to get vaccinated, in conjunction with calls from sixty other black-majority churches. Given the well publicised (and polled) concerns about the reluctance of Black British people to get vaccinated, I’m sure this is all to the good, given that (as far as I’m aware) black Britons are considerably more likely to be churchgoing Christians than those from other ethnic groups. Given that many minority religious voters vote Labour, I don’t see how barring the Labour leader from interacting with any denominations that don’t affirm homosexuality (which is, you know, the vast majority of them) is particularly smart politics.

[Cassius]

I hear Keir is considering his position over this threat...

https://twitter.com/Femi_Sorry/status/1378338963312803841

The Virgin Former Director of Public Prosecutions and Knight of the Realm vs the Chad Loft Dwelling BA Law and French Graduate.

[Cassius]

Not this sh**t again.

France uses Second Ballot, which is arguably even less representative. Also, as plenty of other countries demonstrate, PR doesn't give you good politicians.

PR is a wonderful way of getting governments that everybody hates. Indeed, our one recent example of coalition is proof positive that the electorate doesn’t want politicians from different sides to work together.

[Cassius]

CofE’s report on ‘racial justice’ has produced some decidedly... interesting suggestions for an organisation that’s currently reorganising parishes and cutting clergy from the payroll.

[Cassius]

Just looking at BBC News it does feel like we're getting into the stage where a government has been in for too long, has no ideas left and all the news is dreary 'sleaze'. Is this a bit like what the end of the Major years felt like?

Its been that way since the days of... well, Cameron.

[Cassius]

Just looking at BBC News it does feel like we're getting into the stage where a government has been in for too long, has no ideas left and all the news is dreary 'sleaze'. Is this a bit like what the end of the Major years felt like?

Its been that way since the days of... well, Cameron.

Certainly not from the referendum till COVID.

Really? I mean quite apart from all of the petty cock-ups and scandals that characterised those years (although tbh those have characterised British politics since the advent of 24 hour media and a more aggressive press), what ideas did the party have? There was Brexit, which May and most of the senior Tories signed onto because they kinda-sorta-had-to and articulated the case for with very little conviction. I think it was quite telling that the Conservative party’s 2019 election slogan devolved to ‘get Brexit done’, as if it was the washing or spring cleaning you’d been putting off forever. Aside from that, what else was there? The government was basically on autopilot for all non-Brexit related things, as was the party, apart from some very feeble and simplistic attempts to reposition itself away from louche liberalism of the Cameron years.

[Cassius]

A political party that can consistently pull in at least 30% (there or thereabouts) of the vote in even the least propitious circumstances (1983, 2010 and 2019 for example) can’t die. What’s going to take its place?

I am coming round to the view that Labour will simply stagnate under Starmer’s leadership though.