Brexit and not very united kingdom politics II

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I think the recent trouble has highlighted that Sunak needs to purge the party of Boris Johnson supporters.

[Zaune]

Very probably, but if they don't also reconcile with everyone who was purged (or driven to resign out of sheer exasperation) for not being a Johnson supporter then who are they going to have left?

I'd take more satisfaction in this if I wasn't worried about the exact same thing happening to Labour in five years.

[bilateralrope]

Number of Britons regretting Brexit hits new record high: Survey

About 57 percent of Britons tell YouGov pollsters the decision to leave the EU in 2016 was the wrong one.

18 Jul 2023

The proportion of Britons who say Brexit was a mistake has hit a new record high this month, a survey from pollsters YouGov shows.

With few economic benefits to show for the June 2016 vote to leave the European Union, 57 percent of Britons said the decision was the wrong one compared with 32 percent who thought it was correct, YouGov said on Tuesday.

More than half – 55 percent – said they would vote to remain in the EU against 31 percent who said they would stay out if the referendum were to be held again.

The YouGov survey of more than 2,000 British people showed 63 percent now regard Brexit as more of a failure than a success compared with 12 percent who saw it as more of a success. A further 18 percent said it was neither.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in May that Brexit is delivering benefits, citing his flagship policy of freeports and value-added tax cuts that he said would make beer and sanitary products cheaper.

Economists said freeports – special zones with tax and customs relief and simplified trade regulations – are unlikely to boost Britain’s economy but may have limited value as a regional development tool.

British business investment has barely grown since mid-2016 in contrast with other advanced economies. While Brexit-supporting economists pointed to the fact that capital grew strongly in the years leading up to 2016 and was bound to slow, business surveys pointed to Brexit as one cause of the stagnation.

International Monetary Fund projections put Britain at the bottom of the world’s major economies in terms of expected growth in 2023 (0.4 percent). In 2022, the UK economy grew by 4.1 percent.

“Prior to the 2008 global financial crisis, the UK had been a strong performer among the Group of Seven countries,” the IMF said last week. “But this momentum was lost in the middle of the last decade. By 2022, real business investment was still slightly lower than in 2016 – in contrast to the 14 percent increase among other G7 economies.”

Many business leaders were infuriated by the governing Conservative Party’s decision to leave the EU’s single market and customs union at the end of 2020 and then by the economic turmoil during the premierships of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

Like all companies around the world, the British business community has had to deal with higher energy prices and disrupted supply chains, but they have had further challenges – adapting to new trade rules from Brexit and shortages of workers because EU citizens can no longer travel without visas to work in the United Kingdom as they could previously.

On Monday, Britain added a number of construction jobs to its “shortage occupation list”, which allows the building industry to bring in staff from abroad more easily to help employers struggling to fill positions.

Bricklayers, masons, roofers, roof tilers, slaters, carpenters, joiners and plasterers will benefit from cheaper visas and more relaxed employment criteria under the changes.

The shortage occupation list already includes care workers, civil engineers, laboratory technicians and healthcare workers.

Not much to say about this, except wondering why Sunak thinks that cheaper beer is something he should brag about.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

In the meantime, we've had three out of five upcoming by-elections. Labour and the Lib-Dems took one each, while the Tories held Uxbridge and South Ruislip; Bojo's old seat.

There's a lot of speculation now about what Starmer will do next. In the aforementioned seat, many voters cited ULEZ (ultra low emission zone) charges as their reason for voting Tory. This could lead to Starmer playing down green issues, or abandoning them altogether, in order to secure more Tory voters.

I suspect this would be a bad idea. Starmer has already alienated a lot of his party's base by tacking right on other issues - especially the two-child benefit cap - leading to a lot of online chatter about voting Green instead. I can't say how many will carry out this threat on polling day - the Biden factor still applies - but the angrier left-wing/progressive/green voters get, the more likelier they are to protest vote. If the Tories get back in as a result, they reason, then it's Starmer's fault for not giving them what they want.

[Crazedwraith]

Well it's cabinet reshuffle time, thanks to Suella Braverman going too far.


One of the most remarkable appointments is David Cameron back in government as foreign secretary and as he's not an MP actually ennobled so he can take up the position.


Which is frankly a pretty bizarre occurrence.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

You know what else is bizarre? The Tories gave Priti Patel a damehood when they approved Boris's Resignation Honours.

[His Divine Shadow]

Good to see that Cruella could go too far even in todays Britain. Wasn't sure there were any more stops left.

[Gandalf]

They'll find some way to be worse.

Braverman's parting letter may coax Sunak into proving he's not a weak leader. So maybe they'll just start openly hunting the homeless or whatever rich Tories do.

[Zaune]

Not sure whether to post this here or in the main Gaza thread, but you know what's really fun to read about after you've spent four hours leafletting for the Labour Party? Our illustrious leader sacking a significant chunk of his shadow cabinet because he wanted to water down the wording of a motion criticising Israel's actions to avoid explicitly calling for a ceasefire.

I mean, come the fuck on. Is that the hill he wants to fucking die on, forcing him to replace several shadow ministers with less than eighteen months to a general election and pick another fight with the members? The wording of a motion that is a symbolic gesture at best?

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Not exactly the actions of a party that wants to show it's in a position to form the next government, is it? All it does is make Keir Starmer as unelectable as Jeremy Corbyn.

[bobalot]

Not sure whether to post this here or in the main Gaza thread, but you know what's really fun to read about after you've spent four hours leafletting for the Labour Party? Our illustrious leader sacking a significant chunk of his shadow cabinet because he wanted to water down the wording of a motion criticising Israel's actions to avoid explicitly calling for a ceasefire.

I mean, come the fuck on. Is that the hill he wants to fucking die on, forcing him to replace several shadow ministers with less than eighteen months to a general election and pick another fight with the members? The wording of a motion that is a symbolic gesture at best?

He doesn't strike me as someone who tolerates much dissent.

Given that a majority of Americans support a ceasefire, his political nous seems to be lack as well.

[madd0c0t0r2]

Not sure whether to post this here or in the main Gaza thread, but you know what's really fun to read about after you've spent four hours leafletting for the Labour Party? Our illustrious leader sacking a significant chunk of his shadow cabinet because he wanted to water down the wording of a motion criticising Israel's actions to avoid explicitly calling for a ceasefire.

I mean, come the fuck on. Is that the hill he wants to fucking die on, forcing him to replace several shadow ministers with less than eighteen months to a general election and pick another fight with the members? The wording of a motion that is a symbolic gesture at best?

He doesn't strike me as someone who tolerates much dissent.

Given that a majority of Americans support a ceasefire, his political nous seems to be lack as well.

It's really UK contextual. anti-Semitic stuff was the only smear that stuck to St Corbyn, and it was a wedge topic the Tories could hammer on to split parts of labour, and appeal to their own anti-islamic supporters.
The UK diplomatic core have almost no ability to influence Israel's war. The leader of the opposition, on a purely symbolic vote has fuckall ability to do anything.
The Israeli diplomatic core do have the ability to influence UK political conversation, they have massive interest in trying to dominate the Anglosphere perception of Israel. I suspect the far right Likud government find the Tories preferable to deal with (remember Priti Patel going AWOL on Israel?).

This symbolic vote has no benefit, and large negatives for labour. It's self sabotage, not idealistic.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Well it looks like Sunak has decided which hill he wants his premiership to die on, its name is Rwanda and has been nothing but a huge waste of money.

[Crazedwraith]

The hilariously awfully thing is that the split about Rwanda is his legislation doesn't go far enough as far as the real crazies are concerned.

Apparently it's legal/constitution for them to legislate a matter of fact, i.e. put into law that the courts must consider Rwanda 'safe' regardless of... you know fact.

Sunak hasn't done this yet and his party want him to. It astounds me.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Apparently a group of MPs have already announced their intention to abstain from this vote, I'm not sure if that's a help or hindrance at this point.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

Parliament has voted for a second reading of the bill; by 313 votes to 269; or a 44 majority. No Tory MPs voted against the bill; though some abstained or were absent. The next debates are expected to take place early in January.

It would seem the Tories don't want to risk a leadership contest or an early General Election just yet. There's still the Committee and Report stages, then a Third Reading before it goes to the House of Lords; so they could drag this out a while yet.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Parliament has voted for a second reading of the bill; by 313 votes to 269; or a 44 majority. No Tory MPs voted against the bill; though some abstained or were absent. The next debates are expected to take place early in January.

It would seem the Tories don't want to risk a leadership contest or an early General Election just yet. There's still the Committee and Report stages, then a Third Reading before it goes to the House of Lords; so they could drag this out a while yet.

Some of them voted the way they did on the presumption it would be modified along the way.

[bobalot]

Parliament has voted for a second reading of the bill; by 313 votes to 269; or a 44 majority. No Tory MPs voted against the bill; though some abstained or were absent. The next debates are expected to take place early in January.

It would seem the Tories don't want to risk a leadership contest or an early General Election just yet. There's still the Committee and Report stages, then a Third Reading before it goes to the House of Lords; so they could drag this out a while yet.

Some of them voted the way they did on the presumption it would be modified along the way.

The buffoonery never ends.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

Parliament has voted for a second reading of the bill; by 313 votes to 269; or a 44 majority. No Tory MPs voted against the bill; though some abstained or were absent. The next debates are expected to take place early in January.

It would seem the Tories don't want to risk a leadership contest or an early General Election just yet. There's still the Committee and Report stages, then a Third Reading before it goes to the House of Lords; so they could drag this out a while yet.

Some of them voted the way they did on the presumption it would be modified along the way.

Possibly. It seems to me that the Tory Right (the Five Families, as they're calling themselves now) want a hard version of this bill pushed through before the election. With the committee stage coming up, it makes more sense to pump it full of crazy now before the Third Reading vote; after which it goes to the Lords.

[His Divine Shadow]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... rchaeology

Archaeology is Woke now.

Badenoch condemns London plague study after MP calls it ‘woke archaeology’

Equalities minister has written to Museum of London over a study that examined plague victims’ ethnicities

A new front has emerged in the culture war as Kemi Badenoch, the equalities minister, condemned an academic study an MP described as “woke archaeology” that examined whether ethnicity was a risk factor with medieval plague.

Badenoch said the research into 14th-century London risked damaging trust in modern health services and that she had written to the Museum of London, where the lead author of the study in question works.

During equalities questions in the Commons, Philip Hollobone, a Conservative MP cited the study, asking Badenoch, who is also business secretary, to “ensure that such sensationalist research findings and woke archaeology have no impact at all on current health and pandemic policy”.

“I do agree,” Badenoch replied. “I am not even sure whether we can call it just sensationalist or woke.”

She added: “I agree with my honourable friend that this type of research is damaging to trust, to social cohesion and even to trust in health services. I have written to the director of the Museum of London to express my concern.”

It was the first recorded use of the term “woke archaeology” in more than 200 years of Commons transcripts.

The paper, published in the journal Bioarchaeology International, examined the remains of 145 people buried at London plague cemeteries, 49 of whom died from the plague.

By examining five features of the skulls and comparing these with a forensic databank covering modern and historical global populations, it estimated the likely heritage of people who died and found that those of African heritage were disproportionately more likely to have died from plague than people of European or Asian ancestry, compared with non-plague deaths.

While stressing the need for caution given the sample size, the authors said the results suggested there was value in considering structural racism in such research, likening this to the higher death rates for people from some minority ethnic groups during Covid.

In the Commons, Badenoch said the study “apparently was based on phrenology” – a long-discredited topic which sought to determine people’s characters by examining bumps on their skull – which is not the case.

Badenoch’s letter to the Musuem of London’s director complained that the sample size did not “warrant such a definitive conclusion being propagated”, and said the idea of structural racism being a factor in health outcomes, which she has previously rejected, could be damaging even 700 years later.

“This government has done a significant amount of work to reduce levels of fear and anxiety among ethnic minority communities around health,” she said.

“It is imperative that ethnic minorities feel able to trust our healthcare institutions, and that they are given accurate information about health outcomes based on robust evidence. It is also important that evidence – be it historical or current – is not presented in a way that is misleading or that implies that the information is reliable when it is not.

“This is so that we don’t undermine the trust and confidence ethnic minorities have in accessing the healthcare they need. It is also so that we don’t promote a culture of fear and conspiracy theory around causes for disparities in health outcomes.”

A spokesperson for the museum said: “I can confirm that the museum received a letter from the minister regarding the research and we have responded to her directly.”

This is the funniest thing I've read in a while:

the research into 14th-century london risked damaging trust in modern health services

[Juubi Karakuchi]

Either the Tories are addicted to culture war, or the idea of structural racism has them seriously spooked. Possibly both.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Yeah that jumped out at me in a WTF? moment.

In other UK politics news, the national minimum wage is due to go up in April. Which is good. The bad news is that my government department are sufficiently stingy that my grade will be only 46p an hour about said minimum wage - and I'm not the lowest grade. And they have the gall to wonder why they have such a turnover of staff! Fuck's sake.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

A Happy New Year to all, and some new developments.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... es-dilemma

On the eve of an election year, Rishi Sunak has a dilemma: at what point should he lose?

Isabel Hardman

Whether in May or autumn, the prime minister faces a fraught campaign, and even a shock win could make him worse off
Sun 31 Dec 2023

Rishi Sunak barely took much time to relax over Christmas. He was back at his desk in Downing Street when most people were still trying to work out what day of the week it was. The prime minister is well known for believing hard work will get you what you want. But even if he had worked nonstop through the festive period, he would have got no closer to solving the fundamental dilemma he faces next year.

Early or late? Sunak hasn’t made his mind up whether to hold the general election in May or the autumn, with his senior aides sitting on different horns of the dilemma. Conservative Campaign Headquarters is working on the assumption that the election could be at any point, but many MPs assume he will go early: one sent me his diary, which runs from the 6 March budget as the starting gun for a campaign that culminates on 2 May. The second week of May is ominously blocked off as “election recovery”.

If Sunak did decide to go to the polls in May, it would mean that election recovery would be for MPs (or, at that point, many ex-MPs) and councillors too. Tory England is also up for election in May, with councillors in 107 local authorities going to the polls. Those councillors will be more motivated to go out and save their own bacon as well as that of their local MPs: if they lose their seats, they may still be licking their wounds come an autumn polling day. The party machine is pretty demoralised and understaffed, but if the campaigning engines in constituencies are recovering from big local council losses, they may find it even harder to get enough canvassers to fight the ground war. One benefit of so many Tory MPs standing down at this election rather than lose their seat is that their replacement candidates aren’t cynical and mentally checked out in the way someone merely going through the motions of losing a seat would be. But new candidates rely even more on their local parties to do the campaigning: and that assumes a local party is in good shape.

The budget-as-starting-gun theory relies largely on that fiscal event going well. They don’t always – and that would be particularly damaging for a Conservative party trying to recover from one of the most infamous examples of a budget backfiring: Liz Truss’s mini-budget of 2022. The Conservative party used to taunt Labour for “blowing up the economy”, but voters are more likely to remember what happened to their mortgages in the past few years than anything Gordon Brown got up to 14 years ago. So even a big giveaway budget which cuts income tax, national insurance and does something eyecatching on inheritance tax has big risks: if it isn’t accompanied by an explanation of how the Conservatives would pay for these policies, then voters might be forgiven for wondering whether the party is being fiscally reckless to try to win an election.

Paying for tax cuts would involve squeezing departmental spending even more. No party wants to go into an election with a plan for spending cuts, even less now when voter satisfaction with public services, including the ever-salient NHS, is so low. When he was health secretary, Jeremy Hunt used to argue to cabinet meetings that even Conservative voters were happy to pay higher taxes if they could trust that the NHS would look after them properly when they were ill and that they’d have a secure retirement. They may not be as grateful for tax cuts as many Conservative MPs think they will be.

Whether Sunak goes for ‘finish the job’ or some other slogan, he can’t be sure that his troops will actually echo it

Some Tories think they could use the prospect of spending cuts to make Labour’s life uncomfortable. But the opposition is now much more at ease with talking about running the country without much money. Labour’s sketchy readiness for government in the middle of 2024 is something that some in Whitehall think means Sunak should go early to expose Starmer and ensure the party’s tenure in power ends up being short enough for the Tories to take a sabbatical in opposition, then return pretty quickly. This is the sort of thing that parties that have been in government for a very long time end up thinking, though: they forget how ill-prepared they were when they came into power. New Labour hadn’t thought through every policy area in 1997, while David Cameron had some charmingly naive ideas about how government worked when he entered Downing Street in 2010.

So even if the tax cuts they’ve been agitating for over the past year do turn up in March, Tory MPs are anxious about the budget kicking things off. “Let’s hope this starting gun doesn’t have duds like the party conference and the king’s speech,” says one junior minister. That party conference speech, at the time written up as “bold”, given it rejected 30 years of political consensus, is largely regarded as a misstep, even by Sunak’s supporters. One senior Conservative says: “We need to talk more about what has happened in the last 13 years. But Rishi’s own conference speech didn’t help by attacking the last 30 years.” What also doesn’t help is there are only a handful of policies that Tories feel they can sincerely boast about: school reform, universal credit, getting Brexit done, and more recently, halving inflation.

Sunak’s more recent refrain is “finish the job”: something he said repeatedly in his press conference about the Rwanda policy. Some of his aides think “finish the job” would be better in May when there is still a chance that things could get worse, than in autumn when the job looks so messy that voters might conclude it’s worth abandoning. If Rwanda is still a prospect rather than a reality, at least the Conservatives can blame others for blocking it, rather than face up to the possibility that it doesn’t work. Then again, others think May means he doesn’t have enough time to come up with evidence of things he can sell to the electorate.

There are a lot of “then agains” in the prime minister’s mind at the moment. Another is that leaving more time makes him look feart: allowing speculation about a spring election to build, then not doing anything would give him a Brown problem of appearing to run away from the electorate at the last minute.

Of course, Theresa May can give Sunak some advice on the downsides of going for an election at the wrong time, but this is different: she was calling an election for no reason other than she wanted one. Sunak doesn’t want one: for all his party management problems with his hollow majority at the moment, even a shock win would leave him in a worse position.

Those party management problems mean Sunak can’t take a lot of the big decisions he really needed to in order to have meaningful reform to show the electorate. But they will be a nightmare whenever the election campaign starts. Whether Sunak goes for “finish the job” or some other slogan, he can’t be sure that his troops will actually echo it. They’re not in a loyal mood. They don’t know what their party stands for, and are all offering their own versions of Toryism: just look at the storm over James Daly’s ill-disciplined comments about “crap parenting” this week. Everyone says daft things when they’ve relaxed in an interview: but MPs who are part of a serious election-winning machine don’t relax.

Even if Sunak manages to avoid similar “bigoted woman” moments on the campaign trail proper, he knows there will be plenty of senior Conservatives who are sounding off about his policies and publicly pushing him to go further. Half of the party is already thinking about the leadership election after a polling day defeat, and will be campaigning more vigorously for their pitch to take over the party in that “election recovery” period than they will be for their current chief. Many will want to make pronouncements during the campaign so that they can say “I told you so” afterwards. Many of their colleagues will amplify those pronouncements.

Sunak will have to embrace a noisy, ill-disciplined campaign as there is little chance of him getting anything else. He has seen the virtues of this to some extent, concluding after his party held Uxbridge in July that niche campaigns on local issues could allow the Conservatives to stem losses in other areas too. But he will probably get frustrated by the sense that while he is working relentlessly, his party won’t be beavering away in the same way.

Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of the Spectator

This article was amended on 31 December 2023. The Uxbridge byelection was held in July rather than in “autumn”.

Yes, that General Election we've been waiting for is finally happening; seemingly in the coming year. General consensus is that it will take place in May (the traditional time) or in October. This is plausible, if only because a winter election risks both cold weather (keeping the grey vote at home) and cutting into the Festive season. Also, there is to be a budget in March.

[His Divine Shadow]

I thought the movie Brazil was fiction, but apparently not, holy shit.
https://www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/ed ... s-28443143

[Zaune]

Some additional context for this: BBC News Report, Wikipedia article

For any overseas members who aren't aware of this, British post offices handle a lot of other government functions like passport applications, vehicle tax and other financial matters -mostly for people who can't won't use the web portal these days- and also offer banking and sometimes currency exchange facilities. This means they handle very substantial amounts of money, as much as some bank branches in fact. They're also operated on a franchise basis, meaning that the manager is a sub-contractor rather than an employee, and therefore doesn't have the support of a public sector union if they're suspected of malfeasance.

The upshot of that was when the fancy new accounting software being rolled out at the turn of the millennium started flagging shortfalls where it shouldn't, a lot of post office managers found themselves accused of skimming the books. The luckier ones merely lost their jobs, or had to make good the illusionary shortfalls out of their own money: Others ended up convicted of false accounting and theft. This despite the fact that some of those people had been the ones to tell Post Office Ltd (who for reasons best known to the people who thought privatising it was a good idea is a separate company to the Royal Mail) about the shortfalls in the first place.

It took over a decade for enough questions to be asked that a third-party audit of the software source code was undertaken, which the Post Office allegedly attempted to sabotage, and another ten years for a public inquiry to happen.

This might not be the absolute worst miscarriage of justice in British history, if only because nobody got hanged for it, but it's definitely up there in terms of sheer scale and collateral damage.