British Politics Guide

[Travis B.]

I am not sure why one would even want those galvanized steel garbage cans without wheels - they'd be a major PITA to drag from by one's house to the street each garbage day without having wheels. The wheeled garbage cans we have here are so much more practical t han those.

[Raphael]

You're in Hamburg, right?

Not quite; I live about a two or three minutes' walk from the Hamburg city border, but still in Lower Saxony.


(It's kinda interesting from a "be-careful-about-sociological-data" perspective: my neighborhood has the city border of a major city running through it, and legally speaking, if you stand on one side of the border, you're in a city with more than a million inhabitants, while if you stand on the other side of the border, you're in a much smaller suburban municipality, but the neighborhood looks pretty much the same on both sides of the border, except that if you look closely, you'll notice slightly different tile patterns in places where different local government offices are in charge of maintaining the sidewalks. There are entire fields of scholarship dedicated to researching the differences between life in larger and life in smaller cities, towns, and villages, and these fields have important and interesting things to say - but from the perspective of these fields of scholarship, people in one part of my neighborhood are city dwellers, while people in the other part are suburbanites, and again, the neighborhood looks the same everywhere.)

[Raphael]

Wait, so Boris has now lost Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak? I would never have expected that. Especially Javid - how messed up do you have to be for that guy to think you've gone too far...?

[alice]

They're just backsliders! Replace them with some Proper Conservatives™who can Support Boris and Get The Job Done!!!

[Raphael]

I'm more and more worried that they might actually replace Boris with someone slightly less embarrassing. My hope would be that they're still led by Boris in the next General Election.

[Moose-tache]

Remember when we spent three years saying "surely THIS is the thing that will finally force Theresa out!"? It seems like we're doing the same thing with Boris. Every few weeks there's some new existential threat that's sure to be the thing that knocks him down. Eventually something's bound to, but the man could survive a scandal that involved video evidence of him throwing kittens off the white cliffs of Dover. Sooner or later we have to stop pretending that this or that political setback is likely to finish him off.

[alice]

You don't understand. Boris with fight on! and fight on! and GET THE JOB DONE that 14 million voters elected him to do! Mere resignations from his cabinet won't distract him from his Ordained Destiny! Don't you read the Daily Express?

[zompist]

He's lost the Daily Mail now though, it appears. Surely that's a bad thing?

Edit: it must be, BBC just announced he is resigning.

[alice]

Trump was the tragedy, Boris the farce. Discuss!

[WeepingElf]

Edit: it must be, BBC just announced he is resigning.

*sigh of relief*

[Jonlang]

Boris is gone. But the Tories remain... sometime next week we can look forward to Rishi Sunak taking up the role of PM. We all know it'll be him, but they'll make out like they aren't expecting it.

[Raphael]

Trump was the tragedy, Boris the farce. Discuss!

It's a bit optimistic to already speak of Trump in the past tense, though this is probably the wrong thread to make that point.

I can't imagine Trump ever resigning, no matter under how much pressure he is put or how many people quit on him.

[Travis B.]

I was hoping that Boris would stay in power until the next general elections...

[Moose-tache]

*sigh of relief*

Tell me you know nothing about Sunak, Patel, and the rest of the Conservative party, without telling me you know nothing about Sunak, Patel, and the rest of the Conservative party. Boris is an almost-charming buffoon from season 3 of Downton Abbey. The rest of them are psychopaths.

[Travis B.]

*sigh of relief*

Tell me you know nothing about Sunak, Patel, and the rest of the Conservative party, without telling me you know nothing about Sunak, Patel, and the rest of the Conservative party. Boris is an almost-charming buffoon from season 3 of Downton Abbey. The rest of them are psychopaths.

Priti Patel for one wants to turn Britain into Oceania...

[zompist]

Ah wait! Today's Daily Mail says Boris was forced out by "collective hysteria".

[alice]

Boris himself, in his characteristically dignified, reflective, and selfless resignation speech, blamed the "herd instinct", which amounts to pretty much the same thing.

[WeepingElf]

Indeed, I know close to nothing about British politics, and thus can't say whether whoever will follow Johnson may be worse. Maybe my sigh of relief was premature!

[Jonlang]

And the "we're getting a PM we didn't vote for" brigade are already out. How can these people be so unaware of how general elections work? Are they so taken up by US politics and presidential races that they think our own elections are the same? – You vote for a party to form a government, you are not voting for who you want to be PM. If you voted Tory you voted for the Tories to form the Government and it is they who choose their leader - who will also be the PM. It's not hard.

[Raphael]

Ah wait! Today's Daily Mail says Boris was forced out by "collective hysteria".

Ah, "hysteria". One of the standard words that people use when they don't have any actual arguments. Always nice when people, in this way, declare themselves that they've got nothing. That way, you don't even have to listen to what their opponents say about them.




(To avoid any, no matter how small, risk of a misunderstanding: that was directed at the Daily Mail, not zompist.)