UK Watch

[Irrev-Black]

First they reintroduce prison hulks as a kind of "Nauru without the travel" for refugees.

Now, starving peasants are to be sent to the dungeons...

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Watch the painful march toward the Middle Ages.

[Irrev-Black]

It's impossible to spell "fucked" without U and K.

There is no functional policy beyond a performance of repelling invaders and the manufacture of suspicion that Starmer would welcome them ashore. This technique is not restricted to the Home Office. Conservative environmental policy has been stripped down to the idea that Labour is the puppet of eco-fanatics, determined to price hardworking drivers off the road. Tory economic policy is a game of running public services into the ground and waiting for Starmer to commit to investment so he can be accused of planning tax rises.

This is what politics looks like between now and the next election. Ministers simulate the business of serious administration but with a singular focus on trapping and unsettling the opposition.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... -stockholm

[pipbarber]

What can labor UK do? There'll be a million refugees in the UK, ten million. If they hint at a neo-keynsianism, which is pretty much all the adjacent left have, how is that going to do anything? Build shit? All adjacent left governments are devoid of a story line. Their days are numbered, me thinks.

The Tories can blame immigrants and the LGBTQR+ community and spin a web of befuddling bullshit. They'll probably win the next election.

[pipbarber]

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

This is a longish article but absolutely worth the read. An extract from a book by former Tory MP and minister of various portfolios, Rory Stewart. So much in here. A few highlights:

An election had just happened. Two Oxford-educated former special advisers in their mid to late 40s – David Cameron and George Osborne – had just defeated two Oxford-educated former special advisers in their mid to late 40s – Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. They had tried, for the sake of the election, to draw clear lines. But in truth, they shared beliefs about the world, which they had developed during their 20s and early-30s: the period just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when they had left Oxford and become high-flying party aides and aspiring politicians.

I enjoyed this appropriate nod to the inadequacy of duopolous political systems and the assumptions that both parties maintained (and still do).

By the time of the 2015 election, the productivity of the British economy had been stagnant for seven years, wages had barely risen in real terms, public sector debt had risen by 50% since 2008, and government revenues struggled to keep pace with the demands of public services. Globally, the rise in democracies had halted, and then began to fall. The “social media revolution” of the Arab spring had failed. Hundreds of thousands had been killed in the Syrian civil war and more than four million refugees had fled the country. The west was humiliated further by our inability to influence the direction of the Yemeni civil wars or to bring any form of stability to Libya. Russia had invaded Crimea. Egypt had reverted to military rule. Modi had been elected in India, and the Law and Justice party was on its way to taking power in Poland. Donald Trump was poised to be the leading Republican contender for the presidency of the United States. Boris Johnson had re-entered the House of Commons. And David Cameron had promised a Brexit referendum.

In short, each of the three assumptions of 90s liberal democracy were now discredited....

It's a long quote but i think it provides clarity around the chasm that is liberal democratic theory and reality. It also provides some insight into how woefully out of touch and bereft of ideas most politicians are. The author would know, and he's not afraid to be honest, at least in hindsight:

...Nine years in politics had already been a dismal insight into the lack of seriousness in British politics. In 2015, the then environment secretary Liz Truss, for example, had asked me to produce a 10-point plan for the national parks within a week of my taking office, thus revealing that what pretended to be policy was simply a press release designed to give the illusion of dynamism. I had discovered how grotesquely unqualified so many of us, including myself, were for the offices we were given.

Oh yes....we know all about government by announcement after a full term of scott fucking morrison, who of course took the craft to previously undreamt of levels. There's quite a lot of this in the UK, apparently, especially when buffoon Boris takes over.

I could quote much of this piece but one could just read it. I suppose it dispels any lingering doubts over political competency. Not that i have many, but sometimes you do wonder whether these people do actually have some large shadowy plan, not in a conspiracy theory sense, but just an over all vision and plan that they can't properly articulate to the public but there is at least some group of people at the wheel. Yeah...nah...they got no fucking clue.

One final point, as an aside:

Politicians like Trump were supported by people who knew they lied to subvert the system, but voted for them nonetheless, to fling them like a hand grenade at the political structures of their world. An age of liberal optimism had been replaced by an age of populism.

I somewhat like the image of Trump as a hand grenade. I don't see DeSantis as that, he's more a nazi dictator, but Trump for another four years will collapse the whole facade, one would think. I'm not at all sure if i'm even opposed to it.

Anyway, a good article.

[stylofone]

There's quite a lot of this in the UK, apparently, especially when buffoon Boris takes over.

So much bad shit has gone down, it's too much to take in. Remember when Liz Truss was PM and horrified everyone with an insane plan to burn down the whole country? It was over so quickly. Now it looks like Labour will finally end 13 years of tory stupor, but Starmer is like a British Albanese. None of them will do anything of substance because if they do, it will be ripped apart by a ravening mob of conspiracy theorists and Putin-backed social media saboteurs. Just look at the Voice referendum, easily damaged by malicious bullshit and dog-whistling. The one policy where Albanese has gone out on a limb, and the chainsaw was already running to cut it off and send him tumbling down. UK Labour has a history of reproducing successful strategies from the colonial cousins, they'll be even less effective if they copy us again.

I have to agree, Pip, politics is really broken on so many levels.

[pipbarber]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/20 ... russ-group

Yes, she's back and she has policies.

At a packed fringe meeting during the Conservative party conference, Truss and her supporters held a rally where they pushed for the chancellor to cut corporation tax, build 500,000 new homes and resume fracking to cut energy bills.

Truss has a new party, within the party, called the 'Growth group.' Another of its core policies is ending the inheritance tax, which only effects the wealthiest 4%. And she's got Priti Patel onboard. She hates Suella Braverman for being so soft on refugees.

The Tories are firing off SOS signals looking for someone to save them from drowning and they are clearly hoping the corporate set will be the ones. It worked in 1980s, after all.

Incredibly, we have another 18 more months of this. I wouldn't be surprised if Truss is PM again at some point soon. These 5 year election cycles are torturous.

[pipbarber]

More from the Tory conference.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... conference

This time, the argument is that the more the party realises it is dead in the water the faster it lurches to the right, with each emerging faction attempting to 'out-conservative' the others. As the article points out, the moderates seem to have either not bothered turning up, or simply don't exist.

This is all very interesting and it's impossible not to compare them with the GOP, who have been bifurcated by the MAGA faction. But what does Dutton make of it all? It's hard to think he'd put up with being 'out-conservatived' by Rishi.

We can comfort ourselves with the polls, i suppose.

Rishi Sunak’s latest YouGov rating is his worst yet: 23% view him favourably, 68% unfavourably – the party’s reputation is no better than it was under his predecessors. “He has completely failed to rescue his party,” writes the former YouGov president Peter Kellner. Just look at this: the Tories score 12% for competence, 8% for trustworthiness, 14% for trying to do the right thing, and 5% for being in touch.

But the more alarming point is obviously the hard right direction of the right adjacent duopolies. The Dems along with Aus and UK Labor don't have any answers, generally speaking, and even if they all win their next elections they probably won't win the one after next because everything will inevitably get worse as climate change reeks havoc on food chains, natural disaster costs and millions attempting to seek climate asylum from Africa, Central America and Asia respectively. It's hard not to imagine that one of these crazy hard right factions will take power somewhere in the English speaking world. So for me, the polls are not really any comfort at all.

[pipbarber]

One more, from the conference of collapse. Raphael Behr.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... conference

This bit caught my eye.

Having defeated facts on the road to power, the revolution sustains itself on perpetual war against reality and its institutional redoubts in the pre-revolutionary establishment.

It really is incredible how speaker after speaker (from my limited view of them) have stood up and listed endless grievances and complaints about how terrible Britain has become. Ok, sure, but...these are the very same people who have been in government for 13 years!

As the above quote points out, the real enemy of the Tories is reality, which is hardly a groundbreaking realisation, the GOP have been at it for decades, but so have the left adjacent mobs in their own way. Perhaps the denial of basic facts in electoral politics should be conceived of spectrally. The Tories are hard on that particular spectrum right now, at least the equal of the MAGA crowd.

Just to add the final most shocking thing of all, of the three right parties in AUKUS, Dutton's coalition is by far the most sane! (For now).

[stevebrooks]

It really is incredible how speaker after speaker (from my limited view of them) have stood up and listed endless grievances and complaints about how terrible Britain has become. Ok, sure, but...these are the very same people who have been in government for 13 years!

And you know, it only gets worse, the Prime Minister has come up with a brilliant plan to get the UK back on track and save the conservative party!

“We will be bold, we will be radical. We will face resistance and we will meet it,” he told delegates.

And what is this brilliant new strategy to get the UK back on track and conservatives back to public favourites, why it's attack minorities of course, just as it always has been! Oh yes, and ban smoking.....yeah I think that's about it, this will definitely save the conservatives in the UK!

“We shouldn’t get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be. They can’t. A man is a man and a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense.”

His health secretary then came out to say transgender people may be banned from single-sex hospital wards under plans to restore “common sense” in the NHS – despite the health service not receiving a single complaint about the issue. Not one.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/le ... 3ef608d556

[Irrev-Black]

(SNIP)

And what is this brilliant new strategy to get the UK back on track and conservatives back to public favourites, why it's attack minorities of course, just as it always has been! Oh yes, and ban smoking.....yeah I think that's about it, this will definitely save the conservatives in the UK!

Any minority will do, apparently.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-67029288