British Politics Guide

[alice]

Don’t put the cart before the horse, as they say. There has been a tremendous increase in Reform councilors, it is true; but that doesn’t necessary translate to them being ‘in power’ if there are more councilors from other parties, as appears to be the case.

Based on my reading of social media

There’s your problem. Social media is not a reliable guide to… well, anything, quite frankly. It’s especially dangerous for someone predisposed to catastrophising such as yourself.

Realistically, Reform's popularity is unlikely to increase much further - and they actually got a lower share of the vote in the council elections than they did last time - and they repel enough people that tactical voting will sink then in a General Election. And they could only get 16% here in Scotland. They're noisy and unpleasant, but they'll eventually disspate, not unlike a particularly nasty fart.

[alice]

Why do you have two footnotes numbered ⟨¹⟩?

A glitch in the space-time continuum set both DEFAULT_BASE_FOR_PRINTING_NUMBERS and MAXIMUM_WIDTH_FOR_NUMBER_FIELDS to 1?

[alice]

Don’t put the cart before the horse, as they say. There has been a tremendous increase in Reform councilors, it is true; but that doesn’t necessary translate to them being ‘in power’ if there are more councilors from other parties, as appears to be the case.

Based on my reading of social media at least, the British left has deemed the election results an utter catastrophe. The situation sounds incredibly bleak with many predicting reform will win the general election in 2029 outright.

And yes, I should have said this earlier, but by "reading social media" in various different ways you can find convincing arguments for anythng between "Absolutely nothing can stop Trump from serving three more full terms as president" to "Absolutely nothing can keep the right-wing from crashing and burning most horribly and amusingly". It's like a book of symptoms: look carefully enough and you'll discover that you're in imminent danger of dying from numerous uncurable diseases you've never heard of before.

[malloc]

Realistically, Reform's popularity is unlikely to increase much further - and they actually got a lower share of the vote in the council elections than they did last time - and they repel enough people that tactical voting will sink then in a General Election. And they could only get 16% here in Scotland. They're noisy and unpleasant, but they'll eventually disspate, not unlike a particularly nasty fart.

What exactly prevents them from gaining further popularity though? Have they suddenly gotten the yips when it comes to propaganda and lost their knack for converting people?

[Ketsuban]

Have they suddenly gotten the yips when it comes to propaganda

Did they ever not? Where I'm from the catchphrase used to be "the right can't meme".

[Lērisama]

Have they suddenly gotten the yips when it comes to propaganda and lost their knack for converting people?

They haven't, to my knowledge, lost their knack of converting angry Brexit voters¹ who feel like immigration² is the problem and like they don't have much to lose, only there's a somewhat limited supply of people who fit those requirements.

¹ This is somehow still a meaningful divide, and I'm saying this as someone who couldn't vote at the time
² Other motivating issues are available, although less common

[Raphael]

Social media is not a reliable guide to… well, anything, quite frankly.

Often true, but not completely. If you never pay any attention to social media, you're going to miss out on some important stuff. Like, for instance, how the core of Trump's base already consisted largely of a bunch of Nazi trolls back in 2016.

[Raphael]

⁶ Irish Gaelic, we ourselves, named after the original Sinn Féin of the independence movement.

Well, they themselves would, of course, claim that they are the original Sinn Féin of the independence movement. Though there was a somewhat well-known court case in Ireland more than half a century ago on that matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinn_F%C3%A9in_Funds_case

[Lērisama]

In the latest installment of the ongoing internal Labour psychodrama, after the Catherine West leadership half-retracted her leadership challenge¹, that and the local elections spooked² 4 juniour ministers into resigning yesterday, the most damning of them Jess Phillips⁴ and almost immediately, rumours to start circulating that Wes Streeting would resign and launch a challenge today. Come today, he did indeed resign and call for Starmer to resign, but didn't actually launch a challenge himself⁵. This then scared the MP for Makersfield (a place in Manchester) to resign with the explicit goal of getting Andy Burnham in parliament, and Andy Burnham has said he wants the seat. As a reminder of what happened last time Burnham wanted a seat at the by-election, the NEC said no and the Greens won it by quite a bit, which means the previous decision is now considered a mistake by everyone who doesn't like Wes Streeting / has their own leadership ambitions some Labour politicians, so who knows what they'll vote.

¹ A very Keir Starmer sort of a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer, I thought
² To be clear, Malloc, that's for the Labour party, rather than the left as a whole, for who they were a bit disappointing, but better than last year, and another demonstration of the eternal problem of having more people but a more split vote than the right².
³ Go tactical voting! (Which people mostly don't bother with for local elections.)
⁴ Safeguarding minister, whose resignation letter basically said Starmer's a nice person but not cut out for PM, complete with not-actually-that-juicy details to provide examples.
⁵ Apparently this means he doesn't have the numbers, which doesn't surprise me as he's a) too right wing and b) too annoying⁶ for most Labour MPs.
⁶ Okay, that might just be me.

[alice]

² To be clear, Malloc, that's for the Labour party, rather than the left as a whole, for who they were a bit disappointing, but better than last year, and another demonstration of the eternal problem of having more people but a more split vote than the right².

A bit off-topic: malloc() in a recursive footnote is probably not a good idea.

Back on topic: the current nonsense in the Labour Party can be traced in large part to FPTP, which (1) favours large parties (which will inevitably be susceptible to factional infighting, especially on the left) and (2) means that a party can be elected more or less by accident with 30% of the vote. Basically, British politics is entering a state which FPTP can't handle.

[malloc]

Back on topic: the current nonsense in the Labour Party can be traced in large part to FPTP, which (1) favours large parties (which will inevitably be susceptible to factional infighting, especially on the left) and (2) means that a party can be elected more or less by accident with 30% of the vote. Basically, British politics is entering a state which FPTP can't handle.

So even without further breakthroughs in propaganda, reform could still win the election through a narrow plurality. That sounds quite alarming to say the least.

[bradrn]

Back on topic: the current nonsense in the Labour Party can be traced in large part to FPTP, which (1) favours large parties (which will inevitably be susceptible to factional infighting, especially on the left) and (2) means that a party can be elected more or less by accident with 30% of the vote. Basically, British politics is entering a state which FPTP can't handle.

So even without further breakthroughs in propaganda, reform could still win the election through a narrow plurality.

Or they could not.

[Lērisama]

Back on topic: the current nonsense in the Labour Party can be traced in large part to FPTP, which (1) favours large parties (which will inevitably be susceptible to factional infighting, especially on the left) and (2) means that a party can be elected more or less by accident with 30% of the vote. Basically, British politics is entering a state which FPTP can't handle.

So even without further breakthroughs in propaganda, reform could still win the election through a narrow plurality. That sounds quite alarming to say the least.

Basically all Labour leadership challengers, and the Labour membershio that will decide on which one gets in, are amenable to some form of PR. It will be promised, and hopefully also acted on. And if it isn't, remember the concept of tactical voting. In 2024 this was mostly against the Tories, and Labour benefitted massively. In 2029, it will be mostly against Reform¹. We have planned for this, and have been planning for years.

¹ Don't underestimate the extreme toxicity of Nigel Farage to at least half the population

[alice]

Back on topic: the current nonsense in the Labour Party can be traced in large part to FPTP, which (1) favours large parties (which will inevitably be susceptible to factional infighting, especially on the left) and (2) means that a party can be elected more or less by accident with 30% of the vote. Basically, British politics is entering a state which FPTP can't handle.

So even without further breakthroughs in propaganda, reform could still win the election through a narrow plurality. That sounds quite alarming to say the least.

"Could", in the same sense that Vermont "could" vote Republican at the next presidential election.

[Raphael]

This is only indirectly related to British politics, but I think it illustrates some of the practical silliness caused by Brexit quite well:

Here are two stickers that came with my new monitor:

spot-the-difference.jpg (179.41 KiB) Viewed 6384 times

As you can see, they're almost identical, except that one of them features an EU flag and the other one features a Union Jack.

I guess what happened there is that back when the UK was still in the EU, the EU passed a rule or regulation or directive or something requiring these stickers, and then that was duly enacted in UK law or regulations, and so, when the UK left the EU, they were stuck with that sticker requirement rule, and didn't get around to repealing it yet, but they couldn't treat it as a EU thing in the UK any more, and so, now, it's treated as an entirely authentically British (TM) regulation there. And since the maker of the monitor didn't know where exactly this particular individual monitor would be sold, they included both stickers in the packaging.

[Lērisama]

This is only indirectly related to British politics, but I think it illustrates some of the practical silliness caused by Brexit quite well:

Here are two stickers that came with my new monitor:

spot-the-difference.jpg

As you can see, they're almost identical, except that one of them features an EU flag and the other one features a Union Jack.

I guess what happened there is that back when the UK was still in the EU, the EU passed a rule or regulation or directive or something requiring these stickers, and then that was duly enacted in UK law or regulations, and so, when the UK left the EU, they were stuck with that sticker requirement rule, and didn't get around to repealing it yet, but they couldn't treat it as a EU thing in the UK any more, and so, now, it's treated as an entirely authentically British (TM) regulation there. And since the maker of the monitor didn't know where exactly this particular individual monitor would be sold, they included both stickers in the packaging.

Yep, happens a lot, sadly.

[Raphael]

In more serious news, yuk. Yuk, yuk, yuk. Really really fucked up. https://www.liberalcurrents.com/fascism ... uks-sikhs/

[Travis B.]

In more serious news, yuk. Yuk, yuk, yuk. Really really fucked up. https://www.liberalcurrents.com/fascism ... uks-sikhs/

Ugh.

[Lērisama]

Yeah, this has been fun. The highlights so far have been:

• Nowak's father asked for people not to politicise his death, or use it to stir up hatred. This did not stop Nigel Farage from reappearing¹ and calling for “pure cold rage”².
• Said rage was delivered via a riot in Southampton. If our police force is so biased, you surely would have expected them to arrest as many people as possible, but because our police are, you know, relatively normal for police, there were two arrests.
• The murderer was carrying a larger knife in addition to his kirpan⁴. Obviously this hasn't been mentioned in any of the “we must ban kirpans!!!” tirades.

¹ He's been hiding away recently to avoid answering questions on a £5 million donation from a Thai-based crypto billionaire, given just before he became an MP and would have had to declare it.
² UPDATE politicians SET danger = 'active danger to democracy' WHERE name = 'Nigel Farage'³
³ He had been at “deliberate causer of misery and suffering in an attempt to create a neoliberal authoritarian hellhole”
⁴ I think the court accepted it was a kirpan, but this was immediately followed by just about every Sikh organisation going “err, no”

[alice]

• Nowak's father asked for people not to politicise his death, or use it to stir up hatred. This did not stop Nigel Farage from reappearing¹ and calling for “pure cold rage”².

There have also been less-than-pleasant responses from certain expletives on the right in other countries, who really ought to shut the expletive up.

• Said rage was delivered via a riot in Southampton. If our police force is so biased, you surely would have expected them to arrest as many people as possible, but because our police are, you know, relatively normal for police, there were two arrests.

There have been several more since, which is obviously evidence of two-tier policing since the murderer was allowed to walk free because he isn't white¹.

¹Note for the sarcasm-impaired: this is what the right-wing expletives would like you to think. In fact he was swiftly convicted and is now living a life of luxury in one of our cushy holiday-camp prisons².

²Note for the sarcasm-impaired: this is what the right-wing expletives would like you to think, since our prisons aren't as awful as they used to be.