UK General Discussion: Rishecession

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The Mail is genuinely mad these days (was it ever not?), see todays front page on the government induced sterling crisis

It's taken a real turn towards the actively delusional since Dacre's mob Took Back Control of the paper in a palace coup last autumn.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

https://twitter.com/stephenkb/status/1574895997523828779

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I hope we're all looking forward to Liz Truss's big speech at the Conservative Party Conference next week!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

How the hell has Truss crashed the economy and investor confidence this fast? When Cummings referred to Truss as a human hand grenade, he was right on the money.

Cummings on Truss has turned out to be the ultimate case of... well..

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Truss will speak to the nation tomorrow on... wait... the breakfast show on BBC Radio Tees?!?!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There's honestly a real possibility - I will go no further! Simply a possibility - that the walls cave in on all sides.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The above is not an exaggeration. Here's a very brief clip to give... well... a flavour...

https://twitter.com/dinosofos/status/1575395660018368514

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Oh sod it, here's another:

https://twitter.com/dinosofos/status/1575389891453648901

Genuinely worth the small amount of time this takes. You won't regret it.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

https://twitter.com/thhamilton/status/1575404343230173185

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Source

[Filuwaúrdjan]

So... how's that Truss Honeymoon Polling Bounce going?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

So, if Truss is the Kim Campbell in this hilarious scenario, who would the Jean Charest and Elsie Wayne be?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I feel bad for the British people but this is tremendous content.

It is genuinely horrifying but also very, very funny. As an aside, while I'm predictably furious about it all, it isn't actually on the usual ideological/partisan/etc grounds, so much as essentially patriotic ones: anger that these clowns are doing this to the country. And it isn't just me, I've seen this reflected pretty widely including from people who ordinarily would instinctively leap to the defence of a Conservative government out of habit...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

As for Kwarteng: a) he is very close to Truss, shall we say, and this complicates matters in so many ways, and b) if he fell on his sword he'd likely be replaced with Chris Philp who is as implemented in this as he is and is somehow even worse in certain respects. Joy!

[Filuwaúrdjan]

If a government were elected with a pledge to introduce it in its manifesto (for instance), then it would not require a referendum in any sense. But... er... Labour Party policy as voted for at Conference is not and never has been the same thing as Labour Party policy, so wait and see.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Clarke represents a notoriously volatile constituency on Teesside.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

That's so. But (and this is critical) if bad things happen associated with a political party when that party is in government, reputational recovery has always tended to be rather longer. It's taken until, well, this year really, for Labour's reputation to rebound from the damage caused by the impact of the financial crisis, and it took the Conservatives until, well, the financial crisis to full recover their reputation from the impact of Black Wednesday...

[Filuwaúrdjan]

https://twitter.com/OOCThickOfIt/status/1576502896832585728

[Filuwaúrdjan]

When she was originally selected her mother agreed to campaign for her but her father refused. I suspect he ordinarily votes for candidates to the left of Labour - Leeds has historically been reasonably strong for the alphabet left.

Yes, this makes sense. Reading between the lines of what has been said of his politics, he appears to be either a Trot or a Tankie, whereas her mother is - or at least was - a Liberal Democrat: stood as a paper candidate for them in a hopeless ward about twenty years ago. They are divorced.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

For our Labour people, was Lee Anderson always this right wing when in Labour or has he got the zeal of a convert?

Not exactly (or if he was, then nobody knew about it), but he was a racist idiot which is why the suspension that triggered his defection occurred.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

People with the views that Anderson espouses now were never common in Labour Party circles, but there has always been a type of Labour politician who ends up adopting them after a defection, one often prefigured by a slow rightwards creep for many years: John Freeman, Alf Robens, Woodrow Wyatt and Desmond Donnelly would be classic examples. I very much doubt that Anderson will be the last notable case.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

lol lmao lol

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The big difference is essentially quite basic: millions of people have just lost thousands of pounds from their pension pots and they will not get it back. Anyone trying to buy a house at the moment (we're obviously well into the thousands here) will have been screwed over quite terribly and in a life-changing manner, and anyone with a mortgage will be looking at the looming certainty of vaulting interest rates with serious fear. Material factors move polls like nothing else.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I, again, have to believe that the MPs, at least, aren't THAT stupid and extreme (it's pretty clear that the membership is), but while we're on this topic, I learned the other day that Kwarteng not only is the first black Chancellor but was the first black full Cabinet member (as in, not "also attending...") EVER when he was appointed BEIS Secretary in January of last year. There have been all-white slates of full Cabinet members as recently as 2014. That is pathetic, even for a country much whiter than the US or Canada.

That may be true of the Tories, but I'm certain Labour had a few.

Yes, Paul Boateng was a 'full' Cabinet Minister when he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury, which was a 'full' (i.e. salaried) Cabinet post under Blair and Brown, but was downgraded to an unsalaried 'also attending...' post by Cameron after he won his majority in 2015 and has not been upgraded back subsequently.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

As an aside, I don't think there's ever been a Conference of a major British political party quite like this. Even the really bad Labour Conferences - even 2019, even more in the 1970s and 80s than I'd care to mention; yes, even the one where Trade Union General Secretaries accused each other of being JACKELS from the podium, live on on national television - were not this bad. This is a shitshow for All Time.