British Politics Guide

[MacAnDàil]

It's more about following whatever the megacorps want you to like because they get ill-gotten money out of it.

But how does a type of food become favored by "the megacorps" in the first place? I don't think the desires of a lot of people are quite as irrelevant for that as you seem to think they are. And I'm generally no fan of the "People would share my own preferences if they wouldn't be unduly influenced by bad people"-mindset.

Oh, logistics and ease of mass production. These improve a lot if people grow a handful of cash crops instead of something more diverse.
It's not just megacorps; governments are in on it too. Government help and regulation are a huge factor in what actually gets grown.

Sure, some of the largest corporations are government-owned.

[Moose-tache]

I don't think it's necessarily about eating what we want when we want because here in Réunion the actual ingredients in many people's diets seem less varied these days: burger, pizza (and other variants of wheat, tomato, cheese) v various actual individual species of taro, manioc, various species I don't know English names for etc. It's more about following whatever the megacorps want you to like because they get ill-gotten money out of it.

Hey Reunion, you know when Sempai says you're the metropole not the periphery, he's lying to you, right?

I don't know Sempai but of course Réunion is the periphery and not the metropole. Otherwise, you'd all be eating kari shoushou and gato patate.

My point is that Reunion being forced to eat Globus Brand Starch Slurry is a feature not a bug. It's part of the plan that includes people in Paris eating avocadoes in January. The real failure of modernism would be not that Reunion loses its curried uncles and cat potatoes, but that Paris stops eating cheese.

[Ares Land]

Sure, some of the largest corporations are government-owned.

More than that... The French government regulated a fair amount of cultivars to extinction (well, close to extinction; things are a lot better now, the scientific consensus recognizes the value of variety). That was in metropolitan France but I very much doubt they were any kinder to Réunion crops.

[MacAnDàil]

Hey Reunion, you know when Sempai says you're the metropole not the periphery, he's lying to you, right?

I don't know Sempai but of course Réunion is the periphery and not the metropole. Otherwise, you'd all be eating kari shoushou and gato patate.

My point is that Reunion being forced to eat Globus Brand Starch Slurry is a feature not a bug. It's part of the plan that includes people in Paris eating avocadoes in January. The real failure of modernism would be not that Reunion loses its curried uncles and cat potatoes, but that Paris stops eating cheese.

Modernism is a bug. Which brings us back to my points about the overubiquitousness of advertising, cultural domination and ecological imperialism.

[MacAnDàil]

Sure, some of the largest corporations are government-owned.

More than that... The French government regulated a fair amount of cultivars to extinction (well, close to extinction; things are a lot better now, the scientific consensus recognizes the value of variety). That was in metropolitan France but I very much doubt they were any kinder to Réunion crops.

sure, there used to be varieties of sugar cane like canne mapou (like in the song) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MKg0nH-KmAk but now they have numbers. But the implantation of sugar cane is itself an act of an earlier wave of human, mostly European, modification. Before the first inhabitants, there was forest all over except for the beaches filled with flamingos and two species of flightless bird. Neither of those were dodos, however, despite some people's impressions due to the existence of a beer called dodo first brewed in the fifties. So that's an exampe of a company encouraging ecological amnesia.

[Raphael]

There was a brief discussion of the politics of media outlets over in the US politics thread, during which some people mentioned the Guardian. Picking up from there...

Agree on the NYT; less so on the Guardian, which seems to take a "broad church left" approach and occasionally publishes opinions anywhere from straight center, err, centre, to almost tankie-ish. (Which is perhaps a smart strategy commercially speaking.)

The Guardian definitely has some breadth in its opinion pieces, but I think it's clear the core editorial line is centre liberal to moderate left? They endorsed the Lib Dems at least once (in the election that resulted in the Tory coalition no less),

IIRC, back in 2010, the Lib Dems had spend years fooling a lot of people into seeing them as relatively more to the left than the Blair/Brown era version of Labour.

[Travis B.]

There was a brief discussion of the politics of media outlets over in the US politics thread, during which some people mentioned the Guardian. Picking up from there...

Agree on the NYT; less so on the Guardian, which seems to take a "broad church left" approach and occasionally publishes opinions anywhere from straight center, err, centre, to almost tankie-ish. (Which is perhaps a smart strategy commercially speaking.)

The Guardian definitely has some breadth in its opinion pieces, but I think it's clear the core editorial line is centre liberal to moderate left? They endorsed the Lib Dems at least once (in the election that resulted in the Tory coalition no less),

IIRC, back in 2010, the Lib Dems had spend years fooling a lot of people into seeing them as relatively more to the left than the Blair/Brown era version of Labour.

The thing is that Blair and Brown also did a lot to trick people into thinking this too.

[sangi39]

Local elections tomorrow! Not for everyone (next one for my local council is 2027, woop woop), but the last big set of local elections ahead of the planned-for-2024 general election, so I guess this could be a pretty big one as far as how the various parties might react

[Raphael]

Local elections tomorrow! Not for everyone (next one for my local council is 2027, woop woop), but the last big set of local elections ahead of the planned-for-2024 general election, so I guess this could be a pretty big one as far as how the various parties might react

And a week later, the results are in! Everyone seems to say that they're bad for the Tories, so I assume they are, but, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure I understand those charts and maps and tables:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Unit ... _elections

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-64966933

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng ... il-england

[sangi39]

Local elections tomorrow! Not for everyone (next one for my local council is 2027, woop woop), but the last big set of local elections ahead of the planned-for-2024 general election, so I guess this could be a pretty big one as far as how the various parties might react

And a week later, the results are in! Everyone seems to say that they're bad for the Tories, so I assume they are, but, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure I understand those charts and maps and tables:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Unit ... _elections

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-64966933

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng ... il-england

It does seem to have been pretty bad for the Conservatives (losing 2/3rds or so of the local councils in which they had majority control that were taking part in these local elections wasn't great, and Labour is holds control over the plurality of local councils for the first time since 2002, apparently), but I can't see any consensus as to whether this "guarantees" a Labour majority in the House of Commons (HoC) in the next general election (GE)


For example, TL;DR News over on YouTube suggested that the more accurate metric for the next GE is "Projected National Share" (PNS) and they pointed out that the last two times there was a switch in majority in the HoC (from Con to Lab in 1997, and Lab to Con in 2010 [albeit forming a coalition government]), the PNS lead for the party that "took over" was around 15% in the previous local elections. Labour this time round though only hold an 8% lead

They did also point out, though, that the Conservatives trailing by 2% or more behind Labour could mean they lose their current majority in the HoC at the next GE, but it looks like the vote might be split between Labour and the Lib-Dems? This seems to be where questions about a Lab/Lib-Dem coalition are coming from, but there's a decent chance, looking at it, that the SNP might do better than the Lib-Dems, it's just that these local elections were all in England, so no-one's talking about that


electoralcalculus.co.uk, on the other hand, predicts (based on current polling) that Labour could form a majority government with 409 seats in the HoC (although they also pointed out that because they rely on multiple polling sources, if they're all making similar errors, their results aren't necessarily accurate, as was the case in 2017, where most of their sources all overestimated the Conservatives)


But, yeah, basically seems to a case of it being a bad day for the Conservatives, but not exactly the massive win Labour might have been hoping for (I mean, still not bad) and doesn't really look like they're in "can safely gain an absolutely majority in the next GE" territory yet. Great day for the Lib-Dems and Greens. The only solid takeaway is that, amongst people who bother to vote in local elections, support for the Conservatives is going down (or, conversely, the desire to see the Conservatives gone is going up, I suspect it depends on where you go as to how the vote share changed)

[Raphael]

Thank you!

[chris_notts]

My takeaway is that the story of the local elections was the return of tactical voting. The Conservatives did worse than expected not just because of vote share, but because of a lot of tactical voting for the most likely candidate to beat them. The evidence was much more that people hate the Conservatives than that they love Labour.

But LD and Green do better at local than general elections, and everyone knows this, so this is actually really bad for the Conservatives. It suggests where LD and Greens stand no chance, some people will switch and vote Labour, and similarly for the LDs in Tory - LD marginals where Labour can't win. It was this "anyone but the Tories" level of tactical voting that happened in 97... So unless something changes I'm pretty confident that the message is still Tories get crushed at next GE, in favour of seat gains for both Labour and LDs.

[Raphael]

I just read an email from the Guardian that spelled "needles" as "needless". I had heard long ago just why they're colloquially called the Grauniad, but this was the first time I actually saw it demonstrated.

[Raphael]

Ooops. Don't you just hate it when that happens?

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-66441010

[KathTheDragon]

Well, it looks like Sunak has decided to commit to transphobia.

[Raphael]

Well, it looks like Sunak has decided to commit to transphobia.

That's pretty horrible. (Though, unfortunately, not exactly surprising.) Do the TERFs have any serious amount of support in Labour?

[KathTheDragon]

Good question. Labour has been light on beliefs lately.

[KathTheDragon]

Update: Starmer has endorsed Sunak's transphobia. I think the only hope is that the Labour Party Conference overrules him (since the party members vote on policy, apparently) and Starmer acquiesces. But neither seem terribly likely.

[zompist]

Update: Starmer has endorsed Sunak's transphobia. I think the only hope is that the Labour Party Conference overrules him (since the party members vote on policy, apparently) and Starmer acquiesces. But neither seem terribly likely.

Ugh. Has Starmer heard of the concept of an "opposition party"?

[Raphael]

Update: Starmer has endorsed Sunak's transphobia. I think the only hope is that the Labour Party Conference overrules him (since the party members vote on policy, apparently) and Starmer acquiesces. But neither seem terribly likely.

Ugh. Has Starmer heard of the concept of an "opposition party"?

What makes this perhaps even more depressing is that Starmer seems to have generally decided to be as inoffensive as possible, so if he embraces transphobia, the most likely explanation is that he's decided that opposing transphobia would offend too many people. Which makes things extremely grim.