Brexit and General UK politics thread

[K. A. Pital]

Well, this just got leaked.

Britain will end the free movement of labour immediately after Brexit and introduce restrictions to deter all but highly-skilled EU workers under detailed proposals set out in a Home Office document leaked to the Guardian.

The 82-page paper, marked as extremely sensitive and dated August 2017, sets out for the first time how Britain intends to approach the politically charged issue of immigration, dramatically refocusing policy to put British workers first.

“Put plainly, this means that, to be considered valuable to the country as a whole, immigration should benefit not just the migrants themselves but also make existing residents better off,” the paper says.

I haven't gone through all 82 pages of the thing on Scribd, and frankly I'd rather not, but it looks like they actually want to make the whole "servant underclass" thing official.

When writing this document, I am sure he was trying to hold his hand down to prevent it from flying up. Like in Dr. Strangelove.

[Flagg]

So are we going through see them go full 'Children of Men'? I mean I can't immigrate anywhere I'd want to live and get citizenship, but I possess no desirable skills (at least on paper) and I'm permanently disabled physically plus mentally ill, so I don't blame countries for not wanting my crippled ass. But this looks like criteria set up so that they can deny immigration to brown people anyone for racial purity any reason.

[Zaune]

So are we going through see them go full 'Children of Men'? I mean I can't immigrate anywhere I'd want to live and get citizenship, but I possess no desirable skills (at least on paper) and I'm permanently disabled physically plus mentally ill, so I don't blame countries for not wanting my crippled ass. But this looks like criteria set up so that they can deny immigration to brown people anyone for racial purity any reason.

At this point, nothing would surprise me...

Oh, and speaking of bleak post-cyberpunk dystopias, our esteemed government has finally decided to partly relax the pay-increase cap of 1% on public-sector workers. Police and prison officers are getting a 1% bonus and an increase to 1.7%, respectively. Everyone else, like nurses, teachers and refuse collectors? They can continue to suck it up and deal with an effective pay cut.

Although if this government's idea of preferential treatment is a raise that has to come out of existing funds and isn't even half-way to making up for the cost of living increases since 2010, I can't help but feel they're in for a rude shock if the angry mutterings about a general strike come to anything.

[Flagg]

That's quite American of them. Any time they go after public sector unions in the US the police and most of the time, but not always firefighters are conspicuously left alone.

[Vendetta]

The tories have no qualms about fucking over the police on the quiet.

This is just them preferentially fucking the police over a bit less in public. Also on the sly still fucking them over because they're not actually increasing their budget to pay for the paltry 1.7% payrise, so something else is going to have to get cut. Probably force numbers.

[Vendetta]

Oh, and the payrise they're getting is still lower than inflation so real terms pay is still going down. (Police pay in real terms is down 16% in the last decade).

[Minischoles]

It's not even an actual payrise - part of it is a 'one time' bonus of 1% (that won't be consolidated into pay, so its this year only) and then the tiny bonus next year.

Given that inflation has jumped to 2.9% its effectively a pay cut once again, for another year running.

It's no wonder the Unions at this years TUC have all been rumbling about General strikes, no matter how illegal they are; if even the preferential offers are below inflation pay rises, what are the rest of them going to get?

[Starglider]

UK per capita GDP (adjusted for inflation) is roughly where it was in 2005. UK government tax receipts per capita (adjusted for inflation) were substantially down between 2007 and 2015 and only just recovered to where they were in 2006. Through the low-inflation crash period there was not even enough revenue to pay for frozen headcount and pay and borrowing increased. Currently there is in theory enough revenue to pay 2005 equivalent salaries i.e. pay rise equivalent to net inflation over the last 10 years. However in practice inflation-adjusted debt service cost are up by about 10% since 2005 (the national debt has gone up much more but the weighted average interest rate has slowly dropped), and NHS costs are increasing disproportionately to population due to demographic aging. As such the UK government cannot deliver substantial across the board pay rises or a general return to 2005 pay levels without substantially increasing the tax take (which at 36% of GDP is at more or less the highest level it's been for 30 years and substantially higher than 90s levels) or public borrowing (which is already on an unsustainable trajectory).

Personally I would institute actual penalties for underperformance and fire the useless timewasters, instead of the current UK policy (forced by public sector unions) of tolerating a decade plus of literally not doing your job before maybe possibly firing a civil servant.

[Thanas]

British "newspapers" don't need to speak foren when publishing in foren language.

[Crazedwraith]

Ress-Mogg is on a role, after his recent comments on Abortion. (He's against in all cases), has gone to say that the increased use of food banks is a wonderful thing and solely because the Tories told people about them. Not that everyone's getting fucked over by Tory policies. The people who run food banks disagree.

Link

Jacob Rees-Mogg: charitable spirit of food banks 'rather uplifting'
Tory grassroots leadership favourite says rise in use due to Labour government not having told people charities existed

Jacob Rees-Mogg has described the increased prevalence of food banks as a “rather uplifting” show of charity, arguing that the only reason for the rise in their use is that the former Labour government did not tell people they existed.

“I think there is good within food banks and the real reason for the rise in numbers is that people know that they’re there, and Labour deliberately wouldn’t tell them,” the Conservative backbencher told LBC radio.

The North East Somerset MP, recently named as the Tory grassroots’ favourite to succeed Theresa May, said last week he opposed same-sex marriage and was against all abortion, even in cases of rape.

Asked on LBC about moves to make the morning-after pill more easily available to women, Rees-Mogg, a Catholic and father of six, said it was “a great sadness”.

Challenged by a caller about the increased use of food banks – the Trussell Trust, Britain’s biggest food bank network, said it handed out record amounts of supplies last year, in part due to increased benefit delays – Rees-Mogg argued they fulfilled a vital function.

“I don’t think the state can do everything,” he said. “It tries to provide a base of welfare that should allow people to make ends meet during the course of the week, but on some occasions that will not work.

“And to have charitable support given by people voluntarily to support their fellow citizens, I think is rather uplifting and shows what a good, compassionate country we are.

“Food banks pre-date the Conservative government and crucially, the change that took place was that the Conservative government allowed Jobcentre Plus to tell people that food banks existed,” he said.

'I use food banks' – workers on the impact of the pay squeeze
Matthew Jenkin and Guardian readers
Read more
“And the former Labour government would not tell them, and that was a policy decision to stop people knowing that there was help available.”

Labour said it rejected Rees-Mogg’s argument. Ian Lavery MP, the party’s national campaign coordinator, said: “The real reason people are going to food banks in record numbers is because the Tories have slashed public sector jobs and living standards over the last seven years, plunging more families into poverty and homelessness.

“This kind of comment shows Jacob Rees-Mogg really is the dictionary definition of an out-of-touch Tory.”

Garry Lemon, the head of media at the Trussell Trust, said: “Everyone who comes to a Trussell Trust food bank is referred by a frontline worker, like a health visitor, but in the last year only 5% of the record 1.2 million three-day emergency food supplies were given out because of a Jobcentre Plus referral.

“Our recent research with the University of Oxford found that, before being referred to a food bank, people are getting by on an average of just £319 a month. Food banks on the ground tell us the same. People are in real need, and it is clear that the dramatic rise in food bank use over the past five years cannot be attributed to awareness alone.”

He said more needed to be done at all levels of government to both recognise and find solutions to the issues that drove people to use food banks.

“We agree that the work of volunteers and voluntary organisations is uplifting, but food banks are an emergency service and whilst they do all they can to offer support to people in crisis they cannot solve structural problems alone.”

During the phone-in, Rees-Mogg also insisted he had no leadership ambitions. “I have no wish to become leader of the Conservative party. I’m fully supporting Mrs May,” he said. “I am completely backing Mrs May and no one serious thinks that I am a credible candidate.”

Asked what cabinet job he would most like, Rees-Mogg said: “That’s not going to happen.”

He said May had been asked in a radio interview if she might place him in the cabinet, and “she laughed for the longest amount of time she has laughed since the general election”.

“I was delighted to bring some happiness and joy to our distinguished prime minister, but that’s how seriously she takes it,” he said.

So we've got the choice of May, BoJo or this guy heading up the Tories. I say the choice, obviously that's not true in the case of Tory leadership election.

[Zaune]

Personally I would institute actual penalties for underperformance and fire the useless timewasters, instead of the current UK policy (forced by public sector unions) of tolerating a decade plus of literally not doing your job before maybe possibly firing a civil servant.

"Underperformance" being defined as what, and by who? Quotas and league tables based on some meaningless alleged performance indicator and an arbitrary number some empty suit pulled of their arse so they've got something to brag about in Powerpoint presentations are bad enough when not meeting them gets the budget slashed, do you want people getting sacked over them as well? And I guarantee it won't be the people who's actual fault it is who carry the can either.

[K. A. Pital]

British "newspapers" don't need to speak foren when publishing in foren language.

Thank you for this, Thanas. This reading practically made my day. I think, though, that it is common for carriers of a world language to show a careless attitude when learning or using other languages.

[Thanas]

An interesting article.

[Simon_Jester]

Very charming in the way it attributes a sort of collective mental illness to an entire ethnicity.

[K. A. Pital]

Revanchism is not a mental illness, but it is a collective phenomenon very much. Weimar Germany, post-Soviet Russia, post-Empire Britain are parts of a similar narrative. Maybe even post-war Japan in the present day, as it was never denazified.

[Simon_Jester]

Revanchism isn't, but words like "psychosis," "narcissistic," "traumatic blow to the psyche," "psychoanalysts," a blatant amateur psychiatric 'diagnosis,' "psychosis" again, "The English... like other psychotics..." "narcissism" again, and "collective mental breakdown..."

Yeah.

Look, I don't think any intellectually honest reading of that article can be done without taking away the conclusion "the authors are comparing the English to an individual with severe mental illness." While using the terms rather inaccurately. Every paragraph or two, throughout the whole article.

I'm not saying there is zero truth to the article, but jeez they lay on the "oh, you just think that because you're crazy!" with a trowel.

[K. A. Pital]

It is typical of the Western intellectual tradition to malign entire races, not speaking of individual nationalities, so I guess I just read this as a typical Western article. The only difference being, in that article a fair share derogatory descriptions are applied to white people.

[Simon_Jester]

It is typical of the Western intellectual tradition to malign entire races, not speaking of individual nationalities, so I guess I just read this as a typical Western article. The only difference being, in that article a fair share derogatory descriptions are applied to white people.

Do you mean "literally every article does this, so I don't notice it at all?" Or do you mean "some articles do this bad thing, but I don't notice or care when it describes someone I dislike?"

The former version isn't really true. A lot of people manage to criticize political decisions and foreign policy stances of various countries, without immediately resorting to pop-psychiatry and calling nations of tens of millions of people "insane." I know I do. So no, not everyone does it, and it's a more fallacious form of 'tu quoque' fallacy than usual.

The latter version is rather dishonest. Bad practices do not become good practices when aimed the "right way" along some kind of one-dimensional hierarchy of "Western imperialism-ness" that gives everyone a position on a totem pole from "least Western imperialist pig" to "most Western imperialist pig.* Arguments that are dishonest, manipulative, or in this case grossly condescending to the point where it is very doubtful to me that the authors really understand the culture they're mudslinging at, are not inherently righteous when used on historically unrighteous targets.
____________________________

*(Such a hierarchy of "less imperialism-ness" might apply to Africans criticizing the Chinese, Chinese criticizing Germans, Germans criticizing the English, English criticizing Americans, and so on, enabling each group to be intellectually dishonest without penalty when criticizing the next group down the chain. Obviously this is a bad thing.)

[Zaune]

For what it's worth, from my point of view right in the middle of this clusterfuck I think they might have a point. Didn't Sam Vimes have a good quote on this in Monstrous Regiment, about whether it's possible for a nation to be insane even when most of the individual people aren't?

[Simon_Jester]

What bothers me is when this is done so casually.

A plurality of voters in a country on the fringe of a large collaborative international project decide the project is taking their country in a direction they don't want to follow? They're narcissists! And schizophrenics! And psychotics! All at once!

When a country does this to individuals, it's the foundation of "the medicalization of dissent," the practice of labeling those who disagree with the accepted views of the government as being insane and in need of 'therapy' that will fix their 'dysfunction' of having the wrong political opinions.

When individuals do this to a country, it's not as horrible and dangerous in the short term, because the power imbalance points the other way. But it's still one of the foundations of racist and nationalist stereotyping.

...

There are times when you can begin to look at a country and identify its behavior with some kind of insanity. North Korea comes to mind. Nations that go to war often experience such things- a convulsion of violence and wrath. Religious and ethnic purges, and other sources of great destruction.

But when you're blaming the fact that a plurality of citizens in a country voted Leave over Remain on collective national insanity, while spamming inaccurate pop-psych terms to make the blame stick... It's just catastrophically poor practice, if you're doing anything other than venting how much you despise the country in question.

[Starglider]

That wasn't an article. It wasn't even a rant, it was a screed chock full of barely-coherent emotional arguments and ivory tower cultural fictions, and utterly devoid of evidence or logic. It dripped with arrogance, contempt and elitism, not to mention a fair amount of unstated uncritical teutophila, which is of course exactly why Thanas loved it. It was written for him and the sad cluster of deseperate British EU worshippers huddling around their niche publications and blogs presses to try and hide from the storm. Anything but actually deal with reality or talk to the commoners.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

There is one thing it did get right though:

But they were not being asked by the Leave campaign to express a preference for a particular rationally argued and practically feasible economic and political alternative to membership of the EU – that is evident, for none was offered before the referendum and none has emerged since.

[Simon_Jester]

Even a stopped chronometer is right once in a millennium.

That said, there is a world in which I could imagine someone respectably saying "It doesn't matter what we plan to replace it with, it's a bad enough idea that just getting out is the priority, even if it's a decision with costs." Even if it means the London financial sector shrivels up because it's on the other side of an economic border from the European trading zone. Even if it means massive dislocation of a labor market the current British status quo isn't sure how to handle. Even if, even if, even if, et cetera.

The problem is, there are still people who are supposed to be willing to work with and think about implementing Leave. Of realistically assessing its costs and finding ways to cope as best they can. Instead of just saying "meh, it can't be that bad, we'll just wing it." There should be people who can do that. Like the politicians who campaigned for it in the first place. And they're not doing their jobs, which significantly undermines any claim that the British leadership had to honesty about the merits of leaving in the first place.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Even a stopped chronometer is right once in a millennium.

That said, there is a world in which I could imagine someone respectably saying "It doesn't matter what we plan to replace it with, it's a bad enough idea that just getting out is the priority, even if it's a decision with costs." Even if it means the London financial sector shrivels up because it's on the other side of an economic border from the European trading zone. Even if it means massive dislocation of a labor market the current British status quo isn't sure how to handle. Even if, even if, even if, et cetera.

The problem is, there are still people who are supposed to be willing to work with and think about implementing Leave. Of realistically assessing its costs and finding ways to cope as best they can. Instead of just saying "meh, it can't be that bad, we'll just wing it." There should be people who can do that. Like the politicians who campaigned for it in the first place. And they're not doing their jobs, which significantly undermines any claim that the British leadership had to honesty about the merits of leaving in the first place.

God forbid those who campaigned for Brexit should take responsibility for actually making it happen And of course May could only put Brexiteers in charge of making it happen. No remainer worth their salt would touch that with a barge pole. TBH I'm surprised she didn't appoint Nigel Farage for the job

[Thanas]

The guy is like a conservative from the 1920s who time-travelled into today.

I feel for the ambassador.

The previously unbroadcast footage shows the diplomat managing to halt Johnson before he could get to the line about a “Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud/ Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd” – a reference to the Buddha.