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

[EastAnglianLefty]

The Electoral Commission have launched an inquiry into whether Johnson and the Conservative party broke electoral law over donations for the flat refurbishment.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Didn't see anyone point it out but only MLAs and MPs actually have a vote in the leadership election. Another rule which could potentially change states that the leader must be an MLA.

They would surely want an MLA as leader because the First Minister would need to be there.  The co-option system means it's easy enough to get someone into the Assembly, but double jobbing is banned, so anyone who's current an MP would have to resign their Westminster seat at the same time.

As well as Poots, Robinson and Donaldson, the Guardian mentions Sammy Wilson, MP for East Antrim, as a possible candidate.  I have an image of him as a bit of a backwoodsman...

Born and raised in Belfast and went to a fairly posh private school there. He's not rustic, just painfully, painfully stupid.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Baffled why Keir Starmer still does these LBC call ins- it just seems to create more westminister drama, poor headlines and I doubt anyone really likes that he does to the extend that they’d vote for him!

I'm baffled there was no backlash when it became clear that LBC had deliberately put a Neo-Nazi caller through to him.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Also including periods when Blair described the council as "more New Labour than me". It's a bad story that nobody comes out of well, but what characterises it is a strong lack of interest in the children concerned from the political leadership, because providing care was less important and less interesting to them than picking a fight with their political opponents.

[EastAnglianLefty]

"The 1983 United Kingdom General Election but somebody stepped on a butterfly"

Short of being replaced by a Soviet sleeper agent, I'm struggling to see any collection of circumstances where Thatcher could ever end up as a Labour supporter.

[EastAnglianLefty]

And fundamentally the difference between a Tory and the sort of Liberal Thatcher could conceivably have been are mostly cosmetic anyway.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The Tories have, to be fair, done a pretty good job of getting non-white candidates elected as MPs from their safe seats, just about none of which have non-white populations of any substantial size. Labour, in contrast, returns its BAME MPs overwhelmingly from constituencies with substantial BAME populations and that is somewhere where we could definitely stand to improve.

[EastAnglianLefty]

We're living in a country where the police have been rather defunded, so that rhetoric doesn't work well. Does the British police need reform? Certainly. Does it need another funding cut, most certainly not.

At this point, anyone who willfully describes (criticism of) the 'defund the police' slogan as a singular campaign to reduce the budgets of policing services is engaging in disinformation. In Blair's case this is perhaps not surprising, as he evinced authoritarian attitudes toward policing, sentencing, prison privatization, and treatment of immigrants and detainees throughout his political career.

If the most obvious reading of your slogan calls for something entirely different than what you actually want, it's a bad slogan. At this point anybody willfully making use of it needs to realise that importing concepts wholesale from the US, regardless of context, is a very bad idea.

[EastAnglianLefty]

We're living in a country where the police have been rather defunded, so that rhetoric doesn't work well. Does the British police need reform? Certainly. Does it need another funding cut, most certainly not.

At this point, anyone who willfully describes (criticism of) the 'defund the police' slogan as a singular campaign to reduce the budgets of policing services is engaging in disinformation. In Blair's case this is perhaps not surprising, as he evinced authoritarian attitudes toward policing, sentencing, prison privatization, and treatment of immigrants and detainees throughout his political career.

If the most obvious reading of your slogan calls for something entirely different than what you actually want, it's a bad slogan. At this point anybody willfully making use of it needs to realise that importing concepts wholesale from the US, regardless of context, is a very bad idea.

Lol. Thank goodness this attitude was ignored by activists in the 1970s and 1980s. Otherwise, Gay Liberation and ACTUP would have been sniffily dismissed as 'bad slogans' and 'imported concepts'.

Gay Liberation actually called for gay people to have the same rights as everybody else. It wasn't a popular slogan at the time, but that was because the underlying concept wasn't popular, not because the slogan had only a tentative relationship to the underlying concept.

The issues with policing in the UK have very little to do with funding and nothing to do with excessive funding. It's just not the right verb. Reform, abolish, rein in, there are plenty of options (and some that probably poll positively, or at least only mildly negatively.) I don't see the benefit of picking an irrelevant and unpopular slogan when in fact the problem is that the Commissioner of the Met is far too relaxed about her officers killing people for no very good reason.

[EastAnglianLefty]

An investigation would find that it was a misjudgement to hand her the detonator, but she couldn't fairly be blamed for having pressed it.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Ian Tomlinson

[EastAnglianLefty]

Class is still an unavoidable substrate to most social, political and economic issues in the UK. It also fuels large amounts of brainless hot takes, although most of them are somewhat more rooted in the 21st century than the examples we're being presented with here.

[EastAnglianLefty]

It's a strategy that will collapse when it meets the first strike ballot over pay in the NHS.

Also enjoy the media claiming that the Tories intervening in things is going left on economics, but the Tories refusing to intervene and that business needs to fix problems itself is also going left on economics. So much 'analysis' is completely untethered from reality.

[EastAnglianLefty]

The Tory line is to insist that everything is going to plan, so they don't need to do anything. The more that things go wrong, the less effective a strategy it is to claim that you planned for this to happen, so there's a pretty obvious down-side risk there.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I think there's just an assumption that substance and coherence are boring. Which is partly a consequence of the Tories always getting a slightly easier ride from the press given that most of it leans right of centre, but a lot of it is about the press corps being in awe of Johnson himself, in a way that the rest of the country isn't really.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Much discussion of Essex is really about the bits of the county that moved into Greater London in 1965, not the county as it exists now. It's also a very large county (getting on for 2 million people) and as such pretty much every summary fails to cover a substantial proportion of its population.

[EastAnglianLefty]

I think that is connected to the Conservatives talking out the bill to ban fire and rehire - allegedly beforehand they were trying to delay things by avoiding a quorum being assembled.

[EastAnglianLefty]

It's pretty much impossible to respond effectively to the budget, because no prior notice of the content is given, so you can only go off the Chancellor's speech. The actual scrutiny doesn't start until about 24 hours later until everybody has had a chance to consult the Red Book and see to what extent the speech is actually an accurate reflection of the content of the Budget.

[EastAnglianLefty]

It's worth noting there's an unofficial rule that the England captain has to be a batsman. Officially this is because of the need to rotate bowlers to avoid injury, but if you believe that then I have a bridge to sell you.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Another day where lobby brain means certain people think that Boris has played a master stroke.

I mean it was pretty obvious they’d do this to avoid labours trap tomorrow around second jobs.

Some journalists like Sam coates at at sky responded by quite smartly asking well what are the specifics of Johnson’s proposals what are the impacts who enforces it where as Laura K as per usual jumps on the usual rubbish.

And it turns out that the Conservative motion accepts the principle that consultancies should be banned, but wants to put off actually doing anything about it to some indeterminate time in the future. Which doesn't strike me as the most defensible line of argument you could come up with.

[EastAnglianLefty]

A broken record but the hysteria over council by elections is getting to the stage where I’d ban them from Twitter.

It’s insane. People are reading more into them than a sane person would gleam from a parliamentary one!

Is this the reaction to green council gain ? Can someone explain why the greens are sometimes randomly strong in conservative rural areas ?

Because vague environmentalism is popular just about everywhere, especially when it's harnessed to NIMBYism; because the Green vibe is much more acceptable to middle-class shire Tories than the Labour vibe is; and because the Greens have got quite good at adopting LD by-election techniques.

Although the gain last night wasn't in a rural area and a slightly (though not entirely) different set of reasons will have existed there.

[EastAnglianLefty]

On the other hand the problem with British-Indian Hindus have been relatively long-running. A lot of people put it down to Modi & the efforts of BJP adjacent parts to whip up anger- and this certainly helped but I've been hearing it as an issue since at least 2010. For some it is a case of the fact that these are voters who own their own home, are relatively affluent and are less likely to live in urban areas- it was quite common for homes owned in London in the 60s & 70s by British asians to now be rented out (sometimes to other members of the diaspora but not always)  

And you can see this in the differing electoral behaviours of Hindu voters in NW London and in Leicester. The former group are politically marginal and predominantly middle-class; the latter group were until 2019 (when there were other factors at play) fairly reliably Labour and predominantly working-class.

A lot of analyses, particularly the more hand-wringing ones, ignore the fact that ethnic minority voters have economic interests in the same way as everybody else does.

[EastAnglianLefty]

Well, it'll be off the front pages tomorrow now anyway.

Nope.

The Sun: "Do as I say, not as I Christmas Do"
Daily Mail: "One rule for them, new rules for the rest of us"
Daily Telegraph: "Don't go to work, but do go to parties"

Yes, that's the Sun, the Mail and the Telegraph.

https://twitter.com/TmorrowsPapers/status/1468724571876597764

When your major backers are all lockdown sceptics to a greater or lesser degree, increasing restrictions does run the risk of pissing them off too.

[EastAnglianLefty]

https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1468892847835340806?s=20

This would appear to be prima facie evidence that Johnson lied to Lord Geidt (and also to Parliament.) Were Lord Geidt to state that Johnson had misled him, that would likely make his position untenable.

Then again, half the reason Geidt was picked is that he's a former royal flunkey who could be relied upon not to develop a spine.

[EastAnglianLefty]

It's undoubtedly true that the Tories running a campaign centred around trans issues would get them a decent amount of favourable coverage in the press. But all that means is that both the Tories and the press would look ridiculous when it turns out that most of the electorate don't care about the issue, and to the extent they do have rather permissive instincts.