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

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obviously it's all dire, but I did laugh at the beeb saying "historic strongholds such as Sheffield". They do know the Lib Dems controlled Sheffield in the New Labour years, right?

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Was polled for the first time in my life by Ipso. Mused about giving meme answers, but decided to go for the boring truth.

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One of the things I never understand about pundit's beliefs around Corbynism is that he was a "populist", normally so they could make various half-baked comparisons with various other international politicians. Corbyn's lifelong status as a gadfly made him one of the least populist leaders in British history, with various planks that individually polled well rubbing shoulders with esoteric concerns that the public at large don't care about and certain issues that fly in the face of public support. This is not necessarily a bad thing or a good thing (it's one of the chief hypocrisies of partisanship that when my guy supports a policy disliked by the masses it is a sign of his noble character and attachment to principles, while if your guy endorses a hated plank he is an arrogant SOB), but the idea that Corbyn can boiled down to "nationalized trains and more money for NHS" is dishonest as either an attack or a defence.

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One thing that's quite clear from how this has played out is that many people who have decided to weigh in have never actually watched the Last Night. Because while certain elements of the programme are taken very seriously (Auld Lang Syne and the National Anthem), these particular songs are not: they're always played for laughs - with stupid costumes, car horns going off all the time, and, occasionally, even deliberate bad-playing from the orchestra - and have been ever since they became regular fixtures in the 1950s. It's a Post-Imperial joke.

the main thing I get out of the debate is that nobody knows how to spell "Britannia".

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The debate about John Lewis set off by a random comment about BJ thinking Theresa May's furnishings are too prole have really set off Twitter, very amusing stuff.

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The issue with Robinson, aside from the obvious fact that he is far too normal to be selected by whatever ominous smoke filled room passes for the DUP's internal democracy, is he would presumably have to resign his seat and the Alliance could very easily gain it in a by election.

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The only newspapers worth reading in this country are the financial times, crazy communist zines handed out by people on the sex offenders register and local papers that have headline news about youths  stealing a traffic cone. Everything else is tabloid junk.

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The average member of the public views all the main players in that drama (trans people, allied activists, religious types, radfems, thuggish gay-bashers in it for their kicks) as varying degrees of oddball. The fierce Twitter debates are basically completely irrelevant to the lives of most people, including trans people.

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https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/aug/19/former-mp-jared-omara-charged-with-seven-counts-of-fraud

Lmao, Jared. Also, im pretty sure his co-defendent is the guy who resigned via hacking Jared's twitter feed.

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I humbly submit that I think I know JRM a bit better than most who just know him from TV.  He's absolutely genuine.  Seriously - it's real and not a character.

Make of that what you will.

I think there is a tendency to become the mask - there is a certain type who really leans on the foppish aristocrat image as essentially a party trick, a mirror of those who lean into mockney or crazy hippy or whatever.

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The Met is a very good example of how the strange centralisation in this country has toxic effects on institutions; essentially it plays two roles - as the local police force for the city and a national force for, say, anti terrorism and so on; leading to a confused system of accountability (given both the Mayor and the government have control) and a weird, arrogant attitude in its rank and file. Tbh it's almost premodern how an institution designed for local public safety in the capital has gradually usurped so much responsibility they have a giant and unfocused national mandate.

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There's no shortage of people who want it - half the cabinet are plotting as we speak. The issue is that the entire party has a sort of PTSD about being the one to wield the knife because of what doing that did to Heseltine's prospects.

Surely that can just be a random backbencher who can be promised a seat in the cabinet or peerage as a reward by one of the actual challengers?

Well, that happened in the Thatcher case as well: a Mr Anthony Meyer put his name to depose her because the likes of Heseltine didn't want to jump the gun. Not that being a stalking horse particularly benefitted Meyer much: he was abandoned, had his longtime affair outed and immediately deselected.

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There's no shortage of people who want it - half the cabinet are plotting as we speak. The issue is that the entire party has a sort of PTSD about being the one to wield the knife because of what doing that did to Heseltine's prospects.

Surely that can just be a random backbencher who can be promised a seat in the cabinet or peerage as a reward by one of the actual challengers?

Well, that happened in the Thatcher case as well: a Mr Anthony Meyer put his name to depose her because the likes of Heseltine didn't want to jump the gun. Not that being a stalking horse particularly benefitted Meyer much: he was abandoned, had his longtime affair outed and immediately deselected.

His problem was not having demanded a specific payment from someone with sufficient security to ensure he received that payment.

Such is the life of a stalking horse, and why in practice it's a pretty stupid career plan, unless your life goal is appearing in one sentence in the history books.

Also the Tory party rules have changed somewhat to dissuade such kamikaze attacks on the leadership: I believe the Hague reforms mean you are automatically protected from a future VONC if you survive one, meaning you could just entrench an incumbent further.

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To observe a similar thing in real time: the Swedish and Danish current social democratic governments heavily resisting EU attempts to force a minimum wage. Same with Germany, which only brought in a minimum wage under the grand coalition, partially as a consequence of the post Agenda 2010 jobs market.

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Im not sure why people are debating this as if this is a novel idea rather than a key element of every Labour strategy since the Lib SDP Alliance first emerged? Aside from 2015, for obvious reasons, Labour have always id'd a few seats for the LDs and ran skeleton campaigns, while avoiding formal pacts which would run into various local problems and headaches.

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The thing is a lot of things old people instinctively think of as luxuries: electronics, weekend trips abroad and foods from different countries (see the nonsense about avocados) are very cheap these days: say what you like about capitalism and free markets, this is what they are good at creating and supplying in abundance, but house prices are not really following these numbers. If it was a matter of ""I didn't upgrade my iPhone this year and I took a staycation so bow I have the equivalent of a down payment" then the logic would hold more water.


On a broader scale, we have the issue that we are a consumer economy that depends on disposal income being thrown around - the results of everyone cautiously dumping everything into ISA's while eating own brand cornflakes would be a slump.

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If Boris is knifed, I don't think he'll go quietly: the behaviour of Kevin Rudd after he was removed comes to mind.

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My great grandfather was a Tory who basically came from the pages of Remains of the Day, given he was a footman of some sort who strongly identified with the house he represented. His wife was a radical leftist who forced him to resign to take up a respectable working mans job in a factory, to which he did, but he would always show up to work in the spats etc that he did in service. For her part, although she was involved in radicalism, his wife apparently never voted either because she didn't care about electoralism or even because she was ambivalent to women's suffrage.

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Assuming that the rules are changed and that Johnson does lose a VONC next week (although, at this point, I'm not 100% confident that the party won't bottle it yet again), the rule that leaders can't be challenged again for one calendar year after winning a one needs to be scrapped ASAP. Sure, a threshold of letters for a challenge is probably a necessity, but the one year rule has created a truly ludicrous situation.

At this point I'd also have to say that the careers of anyone who remains in cabinet after this point must be toast. The Johnson loyalists apart, you can't announce that you have no confidence in the PM, tell that to his face, then back down and announce that you support him just because he ing says 'no - piss off'. This is possibly the only parliamentary democracy in the world where the politicians could be that weak and spineless in dealing with a failed leader. You can't imagine them sh*tting the bed this badly in an Australian party.

Yeah, I'm especially curious about what the endgame of Zahawi is. Sure, it's an amusing bit of Machiavellian tactics, but surely all he'll get out of it is like a position in pub trivia nights (who was the shortest serving Chancellor?)

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Well, there are schools as well, but there aren't enough supply teachers to fill the gaps in the event of a teacher's strike (also the idea of a school mainly relying on agency supply teachers for even a day is ... ambitious).

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Not being a ‘boomer’ I don’t have a Times subscription, but do share the article where the Times blamed the possibility of Winter blackouts on wokeness and transgender people.

I'm not convinced it matters (in terms of public opinion) what any news service with a subscription model has to say about anything. Some politicians might give too much credence to them, but that's more of a problem with said politicians than with the news services in question.

I used to believe this - not least because of the way their actual dead tree sales are on an inexorable downward trend (you rarely see anybody younger than about 50 actually buying or reading a paper) But the sheer scale - and effectiveness - of the job they did on Corbyn's Labour in 2019 has made me reconsider that, unfortunately. They still have the broadcast news channels totally under their thumb, and their often both lurid and totally dishonest headlines still scream out at people from supermarkets and petrol station forecourts - and just those *do* influence many people.

Thinking back, this was always a no brainer. Why would megalomaniac plutocrats still invest so much in such apparently doomed causes, otherwise?

They know how public opinion is moulded and manipulated.

My thought is that the newspaper's attitudes towards Corbyn did not substantially changed between 2017 and 2019, and in the former election the newspaper caterwauling had very little effect.