This Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy

[afleitch]

I'm an armchair observer from overseas, obviously, and a left-wing one to boot, but it looks an awful lot to me like the Johnson government only seems "leftist" compared to the towering hard-right Thatcher legacy and the (overstated and mildly unfair) Blair-Brown reputation for capitulating to that legacy. I can't think of anything they've done that's made stateside news that would have been out of place for an early- or mid-twentieth-century Tory government, except maybe for some of the authoritarianism-adjacent policing/Home Office stuff.

The Home Office stuff is more bluster and bravado than anything really from what I can tell - hence why Patel's numbers are fairly poor amongst the base (obviously I'd rather keep it that way). They have made it more difficult to unilaterally remove statues but that's the least one would expect.

There is something to what you're saying on economic issues. Definitely from WW2 to 1975* we fell into a "Labour - 15%" approach and Boris is returning towards that. Of course that's partly because there is little appetite for economic liberalism these days. But I would take Harold Macmillan any day over this car-crash even if they hold fairly similar dirigiste economic views.

*Excepting 1970-1972, an oft-forgotten period of proto-Thatcherism, and genuinely a missed opportunity. Had Heath managed to stick to his guns I think the "Thatcher revolution" pursued ten years earlier would have been less painful.

It's clear economic liberalism has failed and you have a generation now who know nothing positive of it. What unites modern day Tories with their precedeccesors is the swiftness to use variance in income taxes (the threshold, PAYE/NIC etc) as a 'leveller' which it was up until the early 90's under the guise of it being a fair method of taxation today. Which it isn't.

[afleitch]

It's all very SERIOUS stuff this.

Everything is woke. People need to have babies etc.

And everyone you'd expect to be at a conference as niche as this, is there.

This is a soft launch for the next pet project of the international right wing. We're going to get this drip by drip.

[afleitch]

This'll scare you: some of us on the right actually believe in and agree with most of the things said at these conferences.

Of course. Doesn't mean they should even be running a parish council.

[afleitch]

As Truss found out, you can't stake out a 'populism' that isn't popular. If the Tories want to 'wokerati' themselves down the drain, let them. If the Cadbury Bunny comes back and isn't 'sexy enough' I'm sure they'll have a fart sniffing blast.

'Anti-wokery' doesn't feed you.
'Being proud of the past' doesn't pay the rent.

[afleitch]

My feelings about fascism are mixed at best.

Horrifying.

[afleitch]

I wonder whether Miriam Cates MP and the others there so concerned about the birthrate are aware of precisely which government introduced various caps on child benefit a number of years ago?

If everyone just picked fruit there wouldn't need to be any child benefits obviously.

[afleitch]

They are really digging in on the 'cat' thing.

https://twitter.com/KemiBadenoch/status/1672336213489885184

[afleitch]

As much as it pains me to restrict discussion, I have deleted a post (without infraction etc) because unfortunately we've been slapped before.

[afleitch]

Truss has announced she's writing a book - "Ten Years to Save the West". Which, you know, big swing from someone who didn't make it to ten *weeks* in office to take that responsibility on.

It's being put out by Lord Ashcroft's "Biteback Publishing", the same people who brought us that David Cameron biography with the unsubstantiated rumour involving a particular farm animal.

It was previewed in an editorial she's written for the Mail today, and it's kinda fascinating how sharply she's pivoting towards the conservative US speech circuit. She endorses the GOP for next year's presidential election (Biden is a hardline socialist, apparently), hints at the existance of some sort of global left-wing conspiracy, and declares Greta Thunberg the head of some sort of civilisation-threatening, anti-capitalist movement. Like most things she does these days, it reads like a cover letter for a Heritage Foundation job.

[afleitch]

We didn't dodge a bullet as it certainly scraped us, but a Truss premiership was only a few additional months away from causing genuine civil unrest. Possibly the most dangerous person to have held the office of PM in modern political history, even if it was fleeting.

[afleitch]

https://twitter.com/joss_prior/status/1708837819588722863

Who could have foreseen 😶😏

[afleitch]

This was a speech in which the PM effectively said 'children are the problem.'

[afleitch]

The PM's potential contempt of court was quite something.

[afleitch]

I’m pretty sure if a newly elected Christian leader of SNP had started his career with inviting his extended family into the official residence the first evening in to for a joint prayer, there would have been some reactions.

The difference there was that unlike the Christian, the Muslim didn’t come from a fundamentalist sect and didn’t spend half the campaign talking about how he wants to impose his religious values on the country.

The difference here is that we define White Britons who are as public about their religion as part of fundamentalist sects and we don’t do the same with members of immigrant groups. But the real question is whether this is just Chattering Class who define it this way or whether it also extend to general public.

Humza Yousaf degree of religiosity is honestly not really that relevant, the important part is Scottish voters perception of his actions. A party like SNP likely get a lot of votes, whose views of immigration, minority issues, gender issues, EU etc. are far more in line with UKIP than with SNP.

Except this is not the case. Blair was public about his Catholic faith, yet was not considered fundamentalist.

However, the Wee Frees are definitively not mainstream.

Yes, because Blair was not at all treated as weird for his very public religiosity, it wasn’t like there were stories about him praying with Bush before the Iraq invasions.

The Wee Frees are not a mainstream sect within Presbyterianism never mind Christianity. Islam, particularly how it is expressed in Scotland/Glasgow by both Yousaf and Sarwar, is 'mainstream.'

Also the last SNP leader at Westminster was a member of the same religious denomination as Forbes. So even that wasn't an issue.

The issue was, as has been said by others, was the excitation not of religious devotion, but of specific public policy as it related to personal faith.

[afleitch]

Getting rid of him is the worst possible outcome for the Tories, so they absolutely should do it.

[afleitch]

She doesn't seem to do very much

https://twitter.com/alicemydaughter/status/1760258880330686681

[afleitch]

Speaking of whom, some charming comments today…

I'm finding it rather difficult to work out if his conflation of 'Muslim' and 'Islamist' is an example of him being especially thick or especially malign. A hard one with him.

We used to be quite good at keeping these people out of office shove parish council level too.

[afleitch]

Tory MSP Stephen Kerr being a serious politician in raising the serious question as to whether there's a serious conflict of interest in ScoGov sending aid to Gaza because the FM has family there.

[afleitch]

I'm not sure Humza Yousaf overruling official advice, is a story about Stephen Kerr. Deciding to send far more than suggested, and to UNRWA (at at time when it was under heavy scrutiny for alleged ties to Oct 7th perpetrators), rather than Unicef (the suggested recipient), isn't a great look.

Seems like well-intentioned carelessness more than anything else, but not ideal. A political row over this would be unedifying, (and I'm not looking for a fight) but a brief review by Audit Scotland might not be amiss.

Allocating funding to Gaza, via UNRWA as a more direct approach to targeting aid at a time when the UK and other governments were sending aid through UNRWA (to which half of all aid from 2014 to suspension in January of this year, was sent by the UK) and then claiming that this has something to do with the FM's family, rather than as a humanitarian response, and the innuendo surrounding the use of UNRWA, I don't think is as excusable as you claim.

[afleitch]

Some kind of alliance of moderates and right-wingers is apparently plotting to install Penny Mordaunt. She has many of the same problems that Sunak has.

On paper a pro-Brexit but otherwise moderate candidate sounds ideal (to a large extent this was the Boris formula). However, the right wing press seem utterly obsessed with her supposedly liberal views on transgender people and so helped nuke her bid last time and would presumably try again next time.

She's a probable frontrunner if she can hold on in Portsmouth North, which demographically is the sort of seat Labour will likely pick up.

As for the 'trans' issue, that'll cease to be salient when the funding tap (in terms of the media and donors) is switched off which I think is more likely to happen when 'anti-woke' bombs at the ballot box.

If it's to the Tories success, and Penny Mordaunts, to drop it. It'll be dropped.