British Politics Guide

[Raphael]

This doesn't look good for May, but one thing you have to hand her, not looking good but still being PM is her signature move.

Surely it looks worse for the hard brexiters? It looks like they hyperfocused on getting that 15% of the party members to write to the 1922 committee, and not much on coming up with a name (behind the scenes) that could attract 51%. And now they can't take that route again for a year.

Oh, they've totally fucked it up, I think. I don't really understand what their point was. If it had come out 170-150, perhaps they just got it wrong - but a 200-120... that's not just a miscalculation. So what were they even trying? They've managed to show that they're stronger than some people thought, and that May is weaker... but what can they do with that?

Keep in mind that a lot of UK politicians still seem to delude themselves that a "better deal" with the EU is possible - and those politicians often seem to think that the main reason why that "better deal" hasn't been achieved yet is that May didn't try hard enough. Perhaps the ERG types thought that this whole thing could somehow "force" May to "try harder"?

[Frislander]

This doesn't look good for May, but one thing you have to hand her, not looking good but still being PM is her signature move.

Surely it looks worse for the hard brexiters? It looks like they hyperfocused on getting that 15% of the party members to write to the 1922 committee, and not much on coming up with a name (behind the scenes) that could attract 51%. And now they can't take that route again for a year.

Oh, they've totally fucked it up, I think. I don't really understand what their point was. If it had come out 170-150, perhaps they just got it wrong - but a 200-120... that's not just a miscalculation. So what were they even trying? They've managed to show that they're stronger than some people thought, and that May is weaker... but what can they do with that?

Keep in mind that a lot of UK politicians still seem to delude themselves that a "better deal" with the EU is possible - and those politicians often seem to think that the main reason why that "better deal" hasn't been achieved yet is that May didn't try hard enough. Perhaps the ERG types thought that this whole thing could somehow "force" May to "try harder"?

Eh, the ERG types are the kind of people who actively want No Deal - perhaps this was an attempt to sufficiently destabilise the UK government that such an outcome becomes unavoidable without a large-scale miracle, like God manifesting before Jeremy Corbyn and shouting at him to just fucking do something for once the useless git.

[MacAnDàil]

It's worth mentioning, btw, that when Yougov asked if May should be removed as PM or kept in power, 40% wanted her kept, and only 34% wanted her gone. With a stratospheric minus 14% net approval rating, she's one of the country's most popular politicians - only one point behind Boris for the title of most popular. Only 68% of people fail to approve of her, which is much, much higher than for most politicials.

The 14% for May appears to come from April. Current figures from all 3 institutes that ask the question put May in the negative 20s, a little less unpopular than Corbyn. Nicola Sturgeon and Vince Cable do have -14% among her most recent figures however.

[chris_notts]

Question of the day: is calling Theresa May a stupid woman sexist? And is it reasonable for a muttered comment not intended for public dissemination to be the basis for a witchhunt?

I personally don't think it is, necessarily. I would happily call someone else a stupid man or stupid woman although I don't believe there's any significant correlation between stupidity and gender.

What else could h3 have said? Person for me is a marked noun I wouldn't normally use for a specific person I knew the sex of. Any other noun would also sound a bit odd: stupid prime minister, stupid MP,... etc don't exactly roll off the tongue.

It clearly would be sexist if the reason for calling TM a stupid woman was that she's a woman. But it's also possible the reason for her supposed stupidity is every policy position she's ever held, or her incompetence at implementing said policies, and woman was just a placeholder noun to follow the adjective.

[Moose-tache]

That's not how politics works and you know it. If something can be read the way you want it to be, that's the end of it. You don't need to support the idea, or rule out reasonable alternatives. You just assert things and collect outrage points.

[Salmoneus]

Update: nothing's happening.

We've now been promised the brexit vote on the 15th, when the government will be defeated, after which labour will call a vote of no confidence, which will in turn be defeated. However, the 15th is days away, so it'll probably be rescheduled for February anyway.


In other news, because this one has to be shared: ferries. Heard what's happening with ferries?

We're worried we won't have enough food to eat after No Deal. So the government's arranged some emergency ferries. They've paid over £90m to French and Danish shipping companies to provide emergency freight services after the Fall. But France and Denmark aren't British! So they've also paid £14m to a British company to run an emergency ferry line from Ostend to Ramsgate.

There are just a FEW minor problems.

The company is question does not own any boats. It's unclear whether it'll be able to borrow any boats in time for the Cataclysm.

That's what's gotten the headlines. But, you might think, does it matter? Perhaps what matters most is whether these people have experience, expertise, and the proven record of fiscal responsibility necessary to efficiently employ £14m of public money?

...their current total assets as a company, other than this contract, amount to approximately £66. No, I didn't miss an 'm'. £66.00.

OK, but the people IN the company, they must be...

...they have no employees.

Well sure, but the people behind the company, the owners...

...well, the CEO's previous shipping experience was his company going into liquidation, millions in debt. The COO's claim to fame is an illegal firearms conviction. They have some experienced directors, though! I mean, one of their directors has worked as a director on the boards of 4,945 companies... in the last five years alone.

Oh, and their website? The login form, before they removed it, was a screenshot of a form. The website timeline page was a lorem ipsum. And the company's terms and conditions... were those for a pizza delivery company. This is a company, incidentally, that has been "operating" for two years now.

Chris Grayling (a man the Guardian describes quite accurately as "a man you'd supervise if you saw him operating a pair of scissors") defended the awarding of the contract with perhaps the single greatest legal defence I've ever heard:

There is no due diligence we have done that indicates there is anything wrong with these people .

Yes, I think everybody believes that that sentence is quite literally true.

[for a flavour of Grayling's due diligence reports, here are some extracts from government reports into some of the important issues around Brexit:
Electricity is a fundamental part of modern society. Residential and industrial users rely on its use to ensure basic and vital needs such as lighting, heating or refrigeration are met on a daily basis.
or, describing the fishing industry:
As an island nation, the UK has been dependent on the sea for its trade and defence throughout history, and strong traditions of seafaring can be traced back hundreds of years... There is a concentration of activity in coastal towns.
Real top-quality wikipedia users at the government, as you can see...]

Anyway, it turns out it doesn't really matter that this freight company has no ships, no knowledge of how to use ships, and may actually be a pizza delivery company. Because it also doesn't have contracts in place with the ports of either Ramsgate or Ostend, so it can't legally operate anything anyway. But that doesn't matter. Because Ramsgate is not CAPABLE of operating as the sort of ferry port required by the contract. In fact by this point, it's really only a 'port' in name only. And THAT doesn't matter either. Because Ostend will require investments and upgrades to accept the new ferry line, which it says will be impossible to accomplish before B-Day. Which doesn't matter to the people at Ostend, because they say they won't have any dealings with the freight company unless they provide substantial bank guarantees first, because they're too disreputable.

And the freight company may struggle to get those bank guarantees, given that it's a shipping company with no experience, no expertise, no assets, no ships, no employees and a board with a history of legal and financial difficulties, attempting to operate a ferry between a port that's not ready and a port that's not a port, with neither of which they have any binding agreements.



Grayling's explanations of how well this was going were met in the Commons by praise from Tory backbenchers, including Owen Paterson, who cried "I commend him for showing we are serious!" - but as the Independent point out, "Admittedly, this is a man who, while environment secretary, went on live television to blame the failure of a badger cull on the fact that “the badgers have moved the goalposts”.

[chris_notts]

Update: nothing's happening.

We've now been promised the brexit vote on the 15th, when the government will be defeated, after which labour will call a vote of no confidence, which will in turn be defeated. However, the 15th is days away, so it'll probably be rescheduled for February anyway.

Well the government has lost a couple of votes yesterday and today, although it's not clear how significant they are. It seems that:

1. If the deal is rejected, TM will have to return to the common within 3 days with a new plan

It seems like this is intended to stop her running down the clock or keep on trying to extract concessions from the EU, but what's to stop her saying "my plan B is to go back and talk to the EU again"? And even if MPs vote in favour of something else, presumably such a vote would not be binding because almost anything they vote for would need agreement from the EU anyway apart from no deal or revoking article 50. And even if Parliament voted to revoke article 50, presumably Theresa May could still block it by refusing to send the letter and daring Parliament to depose her.

2. A restriction on tax rises / spending if the Government allows a no deal Brexit with Parliamentary approval

But realistically, a no deal Brexit would be such a crisis that whatever needed to happen to allow necessary things to be done will happen.

So both votes seem designed to create political pressure and restrict TM's political room to manoeuvre, but what effect they actually have on the process beyond that isn't obvious.

Regarding the delay... I agree that TM might try it. But there are two risks: one is that people were so angry after the first delay, including people on her own side, that it would harden the mood against her, and two is that the Speaker is apparently now minded to let MPs amend business motions regardless of what the government wants, so is there any reason they couldn't just schedule the meaningful vote without her consent?

[Frislander]

With regards to the shipping contract nonsense (I do despair I really do), isn't the entire reason they got the contract basically because they have a family/friendship connection with a cabinet, in the same way that the selling off of council housing under Thatcher resulted in most of the properties being bought up by the friends and family of those immediately around her?

[Moose-tache]

A google maps perusal shows the port of Ramsgate unloads ships from the bow somehow? What even is that? Is that a thing, or are they just too cheap to build piers and cranes?

[Salmoneus]

A google maps perusal shows the port of Ramsgate unloads ships from the bow somehow? What even is that? Is that a thing, or are they just too cheap to build piers and cranes?

...do American ships not unload from the bow!?

I think the problem is that Ramsgate doesn't have RORO facilities, which I guess would make sense if everything is bow-loaded and bow-unloaded?

[Salmoneus]

Anyway, for any politics watchers: the big Brexit vote is at 7pm GMT tonight, and is expected to last a few hours (there's a lot of amendments).

[Owain]

Anyway, for any politics watchers: the big Brexit vote is at 7pm GMT tonight, and is expected to last a few hours (there's a lot of amendments).

As it turned out, they mostly got cancelled, except Rees-Mogg and friends', which went down 600-24.
The main motion was lost 432-202 - biggest ever defeat for a sitting government.
After that I think it's No Deal.

No confidence vote tomorrow, Jez almost gave the impression he actually believes it'll pass.

[Salmoneus]

That vote against was so immense that there might actually be a chance that it does pass. It was a bigger defeat than even the most pessimistic/optimistic forecasters had considered. For context, the largest previous defeat anyone knows about was against Ramsay MacDonald in the 1920s, when he lost a vote by 166 - so to lose by 230 is not just unprecedented, it's on a whole other scale from precedented!

That said: there's a chance, but it's not a big one. May is very likely to win comfortably.

I think the scale of the defeat indicates that this government cannot pass any deal that the EU could agree to. No deal is the most likely option. The alternative is an entirely different deal - there's probably a majority in the Commons for membership of the customs union, but it's not clear how we can get there. It would take either a general election or a constitutional rebellion in parliament to handle the deal directly by parliament, and they're just not there yet. A compromise might be if MPs rebel and force an extension of the article 50 period, but I don't see how that process actually ends - we can't stay in limbo forever, surely.

[zompist]

Well, granted that she had a hard set of problems to solve, but it's hard not to conclude that about every step May took was a disaster:

* quickly invoking Article 50
* calling an early election
* defining her "red lines" in a way that ensured a Big Problem in N. Ireland
* negotiating a deal without the support of her cabinet or the party
* postponing the vote in hopes that people would come around somehow

Easy prediction: Plan B, whatever she announces in 3 days, will fail just as badly. The EU isn't going to offer anything that makes the deal pass. (It's hard to imagine they even could.)

If the DUP completely abandons the Tories, presumably y'all get new elections. But, there's no time for new negotiations.

The surest bet, when intractable parties are facing a deadline, is for nothing to happen. So No Deal is the most likely result.

I think anything else would require an extension of the deadline. That doesn't seem impossible, but who would even ask for it? PM Corbyn might, if he was smart. (He certainly couldn't renegotiate in the weeks he had left.) If May resigns, surely only a Brexiter would take the job, and would they even want to extend?

The best option at this point would be a new referendum, though polls suggest that it would be far from a landslide. So it would hardly settle the issue, but sometimes kicking the can down the road is the best you can do.

[HourouMusuko]

I thought this was a very interesting quote, from Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian columnist:

"This has been Britain’s European story, repeatedly seeing what was a project of peace, designed to end centuries of bloodshed, as a scam designed to swindle the Brits of their money. You can go further back, to repeated wars against the French, the Spanish and the Germans. Or you can go further back still to the first Brexit nearly five centuries ago, when Henry VIII sought to take back control by breaking from Rome.

Wherever you choose the starting point, the end point is clear enough. It ends like this, in the sight of a parliament paralysed by indecision, still unable to embrace Europe – but just as unable to break away. And in the spectacle of an island lost and adrift."

[Owain]

Well, granted that she had a hard set of problems to solve, but it's hard not to conclude that about every step May took was a disaster:

* quickly invoking Article 50
* calling an early election
* defining her "red lines" in a way that ensured a Big Problem in N. Ireland
* negotiating a deal without the support of her cabinet or the party
* postponing the vote in hopes that people would come around somehow

Easy prediction: Plan B, whatever she announces in 3 days, will fail just as badly. The EU isn't going to offer anything that makes the deal pass. (It's hard to imagine they even could.)

If the DUP completely abandons the Tories, presumably y'all get new elections. But, there's no time for new negotiations.

The surest bet, when intractable parties are facing a deadline, is for nothing to happen. So No Deal is the most likely result.

I think anything else would require an extension of the deadline. That doesn't seem impossible, but who would even ask for it? PM Corbyn might, if he was smart. (He certainly couldn't renegotiate in the weeks he had left.) If May resigns, surely only a Brexiter would take the job, and would they even want to extend?

The best option at this point would be a new referendum, though polls suggest that it would be far from a landslide. So it would hardly settle the issue, but sometimes kicking the can down the road is the best you can do.

Otoh the main complaint at the time about invoking Article 50 was how long it had taken,
And kicking the can down the road has basically been the Tories' official ideology since at least Salisbury.
I think there is still some chance of May doing what I thought was the most likely option when I was expecting a narrower vote - just saying "it's still this or no deal, see you again in March" and Labour voting for it or abstaining to avoid no deal at the last minute (some of Corbyn's comments on Marr on Sunday would have had me think he was already planning for us to do that if it was most party leaders, but it's Corbyn, so it's hard to be sure).

[Frislander]

I am completely at a loss right now. On the one hand this could be the chance we have of putting an end to Brexit once and for all. On the other, in all likelihood we've consigned ourselves to no deal and the inevitable disaster that results.

[zompist]

So, May's zombie government stumbles on to live another day.

She got 325 votes, which is 2 less than her coalition... what's the story there?

[Salmoneus]

You will, no doubt, be all astounded to hear: the government has not fallen.

As expected, Theresa May has survived the parliamentary VONC. The House has full confidence in her to, as the DUP said, 'continue delivering Brexit'.

Unfortunately, the House continues to refuse to accept the Brexit she wants to deliver or the means she proposes for delivering it. The government continues to be unable to deliver meaningful legislation on anything, and Parliament refuses to allow the government to dissolve.

The PM is now talking to other leaders - a climbdown from this morning's position where she would only talk to backbenchers from other parties, not leaders. But leaders are not refusing to talk to her: Corbyn says he won't talk to her unless she stops "blackmailing" the country with the threat of No Deal. May, for her part, has promised to talk widely and consider all options that are the same as the option she's already decided on, and the EU seem to be backing her this-way-or-no-way approach. So... nothing happens until No Deal, then?

Well, not quite nothing. Today did also see discussion of a 'key' proposed bit of legislation regulating the height of front door letterboxes, which under proposed new rules would have to stand between 70cm and 170cm from the ground. This, it's argued, will substantially reduce inefficiencies in the postal service resulting from cumulative back strain from excessive bending. The proposal has been rescheduled for further debate at a later date, but it's thought unlikely to actually pass the House.

[Salmoneus]

So, May's zombie government stumbles on to live another day.

She got 325 votes, which is 2 less than her coalition... what's the story there?

I guess 2 rebels vote against her. Honestly, while I thought she'd win, I'm surprised at least a couple more haven't gone against her.

EDIT: no, she got them all, apparently. She has 317 Tories, and 10 DUP, to give 327. However, the Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means (Dame Eleanor Laing) by convention does not vote*, which brings it down to 326. There's then confusion over vote-counting: the ayes and the nos are each physically counted by tellers (actually, by someone who then tells the tellers), who are MPs, and don't count themselves, but are automatically counted. So a vote can be described as "327" (tellers counted), "325" (tellers not counted), or "325+2".

That takes her maximum down to 324. But she won the vote of Sylvia Hermon, who used to be UUP and is now "Independent Unionist", which puts her back up to 325.**


*The Ways and Means Committee doesn't exist, but it has a Chairman and two Deputy Chairmen. These are the deputies to the Speaker; together with the Speaker, they add up to 2 of each side, and by convention they don't vote (unless a casting vote is needed). But they're countedly differently: the Speaker, once they are the Speaker, is officially not a member of any other party, and cannot have any personal political identity. The deputies, however, don't vote, but they continue to be members of their original party, and they continue to represent their constituency in constituency matters, short of actually voting.


**While we're at it, for a full accounting, the anti-May forces comprise all the other represented parties (Labour, SNP, Lib Dem, Plaid, and the Greens), and four further Independents - Kelvin Hopkins (Brexiteer, expelled by Labour for alleged sexual misconduct), Jared O'Mara (expelled by Labour, reinstated, and then resigned from Labour again for misogynistic, racist and homophobic online comments (he was on the Committee for Women and Equalities, naturally)), Frank Field (resigned from Labour allegedly in protest at anti-semitism, though really because he was getting ditched by his constituency party for being a Brexiteer), and Stephn Lloyd (resigned from Lib Dems in protest at their Brexit policy (he's a Remainer, but thinks the referendum should be treated as decisive and there shouldn't be another one).

Labour were down one vote (Paul Flynn) due to illness. There were also three non-medical abstentions: John Woodcock (expelled by Labour for alleged sexual misconduct), Ivan Lewis (expelled by Labour for alleged sexual misconduct), and Fiona Onasanya (expelled by Labour for being convicted of perverting the course of justice, currently awaiting sentencing***).


***at heart, a traffic offence: she was speeding. But she then lied to the police, conspiring with her brother to implicate someone else as the driver (twice - her brother was speeding on another occasion). She then claimed to be suffering from multiple sclerosis, though as she's just been convicted for lying, nobody's sure if that's true. She's refused to resign as an MP, on the grounds that she is merely being persecuted "in good biblical company along with Joseph, Moses, Daniel and his three Hebrew friends", later doubling down by comparing herself to Christ, saying that, just as Christ's legal conviction was not the end, but only "the beginning of the next chapter in his story", so too a conviction for perverting the course of justice to get herself off a speeding ticket was only the first step in her own path to glory. If she's sentenced to more than a year in jail, she'll be kicked out of the House, and her former constituency association is now actively campaigning for that.