British Politics Guide

[mèþru]

Fixed, will try to keep that in mind in the future

[chris_notts]

I just can't stop laughing....

[chris_notts]

I might buy a copy of the Star for the first time ever just to have that front page in my possession.

[Kuchigakatai]

What's up with British tabloids being so... brutal and in your face, holy crap.

I mean, you make it sound like that one there is exceptional, but it looks pretty normal compared to others I've seen before.

Here the closest things I see to those are celebrity magazines, but those nearly never have anything political or governmental.

[chris_notts]

What's up with British tabloids being so... brutal and in your face, holy crap.

I mean, you make it sound like that one there is exceptional, but it looks pretty normal compared to others I've seen before.

They're often brutal, but normally in an angry way, rage trolling style. In the Daily Mail for example you'll get headlines with random caps in them like this "NOW the EU is coming for your VACUUM CLEANERS". The difference with this one is that the Star has gone for just taking the piss and making fun of Dominic Cummings. And it is incredibly funny to anyone who's been following the news here, which is odd since the average Daily Star reader still regards Benny Hill as the epitome of humour.

[mèþru]

Also thought they'd back up the Tories, they're a right-wing mag.

[Owain]

Helen Whately says on Question Time we should be focusing on having the pandemic under control, not Dom Cummings.
Yes. The reason this, as Alex Massie put it, moved from a story to a scandal, is that the government is demonstrating day after day it cares more about saving Dom Cummings' skin than getting the pandemic under control.

[chris_notts]

Helen Whately says on Question Time we should be focusing on having the pandemic under control, not Dom Cummings.
Yes. The reason this, as Alex Massie put it, moved from a story to a scandal, is that the government is demonstrating day after day it cares more about saving Dom Cummings' skin than getting the pandemic under control.

It's pretty clear we're going to reopen too soon, with dysfunctional alternative measures (the track and trace thing is a shambles), and inadequate support. People can't afford to isolate for two weeks on statutory sick pay and the Treasury is now winding down support because the bean counters are worrying about imaginary debt problems despite the BoE literally printing money and shoving it at the government.

When we need to reimpose the measures in that context it's not going to work. It's just not. What's going to happen is that middle class office workers will self isolate voluntary, those who can't afford to won't, and then the sick poor will collapse the NHS. Barring a major change in policy, Boris "One Nation" Johnson is going to collapse the health system, kill large numbers of the working poor, and achieve the biggest peace time death toll in the last century. At least he'll go down in history though, I guess?

[chris_notts]

I'm really wondering as well about the long term health costs of all this. Some studies now claim that some survivors, especially the ones who got seriously ill but didn't die, show signs of organ damage. If 1% die, do another 1-2% (possible including younger demographics less likely to die) end up with new health problems that will come back later in life?

[Frislander]

Yet again we are being shown that our governments are full of far more wilful stupidity and anti-intellectualism than we thought, and wishing that we'd got a Corbyn government (because this is a situation where not being pro-business is the only good position).

[chris_notts]

Yet again we are being shown that our governments are full of far more wilful stupidity and anti-intellectualism than we thought, and wishing that we'd got a Corbyn government (because this is a situation where not being pro-business is the only good position).

This is a hard one to judge. I agree that Corbyn's instincts to use state power to help people would be better than the Conservatives'. But imagine what would have happened if Corbyn had won. I don't believe for one minute that the right would have accepted his legitimacy the way the left has accepted Boris. Yes, we hate him, but we're not questioning his legal authority as PM for the most part.

If Corbyn were elected, not only would Tory voters probably disobey en-mass just because "I live in a free country and comrade Corbyn won't stop me", but the economic and political establishment would do their best to destroy him the same way members of his own party did. Let's be honest, we live in a democracy as long as we only vote for options approved of by the great and good. That's one reason I'm not so enthusiastic about Starmer: the very fact the establishment aren't already trying to destroy him suggests he's going to be a "kind face of capitalism" Blair type who won't fix the things fundamentally wrong with our society. You can judge a man by his enemies, afterall.

Anyway, what I'm saying with all this is that a competent right wing PM might be the best person to convince the right to go along with massive economic and social interventions, in an "only Nixon could go to China" way. It's just unfortunate that we don't have a competent Conservative PM, we have Boris and his puppetmaster Cummings.

[Frislander]

Yet again we are being shown that our governments are full of far more wilful stupidity and anti-intellectualism than we thought, and wishing that we'd got a Corbyn government (because this is a situation where not being pro-business is the only good position).

This is a hard one to judge. I agree that Corbyn's instincts to use state power to help people would be better than the Conservatives'. But imagine what would have happened if Corbyn had won. I don't believe for one minute that the right would have accepted his legitimacy the way the left has accepted Boris. Yes, we hate him, but we're not questioning his legal authority as PM for the most part.

If Corbyn were elected, not only would Tory voters probably disobey en-mass just because "I live in a free country and comrade Corbyn won't stop me", but the economic and political establishment would do their best to destroy him the same way members of his own party did. Let's be honest, we live in a democracy as long as we only vote for options approved of by the great and good. That's one reason I'm not so enthusiastic about Starmer: the very fact the establishment aren't already trying to destroy him suggests he's going to be a "kind face of capitalism" Blair type who won't fix the things fundamentally wrong with our society. You can judge a man by his enemies, afterall.

Anyway, what I'm saying with all this is that a competent right wing PM might be the best person to convince the right to go along with massive economic and social interventions, in an "only Nixon could go to China" way. It's just unfortunate that we don't have a competent Conservative PM, we have Boris and his puppetmaster Cummings.

I can definitely see that (I'm not saying Corbyn would be my first choice for PM out of the Labour candidates that have been about since Blair), but I'll note I don't think the acceptance of the left is derived from an acceptance of democratic legitimacy per se (because if there's any administration that shows the brokenness of our "democratic" system it's this one) but rather because the left are more likely to actually understand the logic of the epidemiology, i.e. would probably have been trying to socially distance even if the government wasn't imposing (though corollary this isn't necessarily something for specifically left-wing groups - the CofE has been pretty strict even beyond what the government required), and it just so happens thats this is one of the few things the government has got right.

[MacAnDàil]

At the time, people were fed up with Blair (and Brown), but the three Tories since have gotten progressively worse. Retrospectively, Blair wasn't all that bad: he did introduce devolution and House of Lords Reform in his first term and improved the NHS. He later jumped shark with the Iraq War dossier and private public partnership, but he did improve things.

[Frislander]

At the time, people were fed up with Blair (and Brown), but the three Tories since have gotten progressively worse. Retrospectively, Blair wasn't all that bad: he did introduce devolution and House of Lords Reform in his first term and improved the NHS. He later jumped shark with the Iraq War dossier and private public partnership, but he did improve things.

This!!! I'm not gonna say the Iraq war was a fuck up (though tbh I think we in the UK shove a bit too much of the blame on Blair as if it was a decision taken by the UK in a vacuum without any influence from Bush), but the main criticism that can be made about Blair was that he didn't quite live up to the hype. The fact that people still think of him as this Emmanuel Goldstein-type character only worthy of a two minute's hate whenever he's mentioned is utterly mind-boggling to me given the past decade of the Tories being actively harmful to this country, its people and its institutions.

[alice]

The fact that people still think of him as this Emmanuel Goldstein-type character only worthy of a two minute's hate whenever he's mentioned is utterly mind-boggling to me given the past decade of the Tories being actively harmful to this country, its people and its institutions.

Maybe this little equation might help:

Blair = Labour Party = Socialists = Very Not British
Tories = Not socialists = British

[chris_notts]

This!!! I'm not gonna say the Iraq war was a fuck up (though tbh I think we in the UK shove a bit too much of the blame on Blair as if it was a decision taken by the UK in a vacuum without any influence from Bush), but the main criticism that can be made about Blair was that he didn't quite live up to the hype. The fact that people still think of him as this Emmanuel Goldstein-type character only worthy of a two minute's hate whenever he's mentioned is utterly mind-boggling to me given the past decade of the Tories being actively harmful to this country, its people and its institutions.

I'll freely admit that Blair was less bad than the Conservative PMs we've had since, but he wasn't that great. I see two major problems with the Blair years:

1. Foreign adventures

I know it's the obvious one, but it's important. Bombing and killing a load of foreigners on flimsy evidence just to remain buddies with Bush was not acceptable. Afghanistan was a bad idea but vaguely defensible, but Iraq was completely unacceptable. And he knew, he must have known, that the dodgy dossiers were rubbish designed to mislead. Saying this doesn't matter is saying that murdering hundreds of thousands or millions (it's hard to know exactly how many have died as a consequence of the Iraq war) of innocent civilians is an acceptable form of diplomacy.

2. Accepting the economic framing of his opponents

This is the big domestic one. Third way politics was all the rage in a number of countries at the time, and everywhere it's gone wrong the same way. The basis of the third way was to accept much of the conservative framing: free markets and competition are always good and all that. What this means in practice is adopting changes which, even if they help, are brittle and easy to destroy for any subsequent administration, and by accepting your opponent's framing you also reinforce it in the population even if it's rubbish (like the recent national debt fetishism of the Tories).

Let's take the new Labour approach to poverty and inequality, for example. What they did was to redistribute a bit more to poor people via means tested benefits, including benefits given to the employed. But by doing that they accepted:

1. That in-work poverty wages were acceptable (yes they brought in the minimum wage, but at an unacceptable low level)
2. That there was no need to look at the cost side of poverty, and that the market would sort out supply of affordable goods to the poor. A good example being the housing cost explosion that took place under their watch, which they make no attempt to control, refused to intervene (e.g. by building lots of council houses) and where Brown actually fiddled the inflation metrics via the change to CPI to stop the Bank of England trying to pop the bubble, or for that matter parasitic finance in general.
3. That benefits should be strictly rationed to the minimum each person needs via a complex series of tests to weed the deserving from the undeserving poor.

Nothing was done to fundamentally restructure the bad, unfair, or dysfunctional parts of the system. The preferred solution was either to throw a bit of government money at the problem to subsidise the losers or to tweak a bit via extra regulation. And what happened? The Conservatives happily cut all the government transfers and started burning the "red tape", and it was easy to do because all the solutions were sticking plasters on top of the fundamentally Conservative view of how the economy should work. We literally had a Labour government selling the UK to foreign companies as an entry point to the EU on the basis that it was easy to hire and fire people and our workers were cheap compared to the French and Germans, instead of thinking that maybe a bit more employee protection and power might be a good thing. And let's not mention PFI, where the government chose to pay private companies double the interest it would have cost if the state itself has borrowed the money and owned the assets. What kind of left wing government chooses to give more money than it has to to private finance?

That's the big failing of New Labour. They spent a bit more money that a Conservative government would have, and undoubtedly the people at the bottom had it a bit better than they would have otherwise. But this wasn't accomplished by challenging the unfair parts of the private sector or fixing anything. And because nothing fundamentally changed for the majority, it was easy for subsequent Conservative governments to rob the poor of that money without any resistance from those who had no stake in that spending.

The economy as it exists now is still mostly the Conservative vision of Thatcher. Unions remain shadows of their former selves, people are afraid to stand up for themselves because getting rid of them is ridiculously easy, and all the power is in the hands of management and capital. What's the point of Labour if it doesn't shift real economic power towards the little people when it's in office?

[chris_notts]

My point, I guess, is that giving people a bit of money is distinct to giving them economic power. If all you give them is money, it will be taken away again at some point. If you fundamentally redistribute economic power, that's harder to unwind and also better psychologically for the poor than making them powerless servants of a constantly testing, form filling welfare system.

And if you make sure those in the middle of the income distribution also benefit from greater job security and power over their own labour, you've got a solid coalition against a reversion to Thatcherism. Don't chase the Overton window, drag it left and make the Tories adopt your framing.

[Travis B.]

My point, I guess, is that giving people a bit of money is distinct to giving them economic power. If all you give them is money, it will be taken away again at some point. If you fundamentally redistribute economic power, that's harder to unwind and also better psychologically for the poor than making them powerless servants of a constantly testing, form filling welfare system.

And if you make sure those in the middle of the income distribution also benefit from greater job security and power over their own labour, you've got a solid coalition against a reversion to Thatcherism. Don't chase the Overton window, drag it left and make the Tories adopt your framing.

The thing is that to give people true economic power that cannot be taken away from them, you need to do more than simply build up unions, as unions can always be suppressed again as we have seen - rather, you need fundamental changes, such as worker ownership and self-management of capital, so workers have true economic power.

[chris_notts]

The thing is that to give people true economic power that cannot be taken away from them, you need to do more than simply build up unions, as unions can always be suppressed again as we have seen - rather, you need fundamental changes, such as worker ownership and self-management of capital, so workers have true economic power.

Yes, of course there's always more to do and there's no system that can't be demolished over enough time. But my point was that New Labour didn't even try to go down this road. They didn't even dip their toe in the water. Instead they decided to just accept the Thatcherite economic system and add a bit of tax and spend on top. Tony Blair helped the "left" to win, but then he failed to do much that would be traditionally considered left wing. He was a bit kinder than a Conservative PM, but the difference was in degree not in kind.

The pernicious idea that the only difference between the left and the right is the level of spending is a form of Stockholm syndrome. It's also about the distribution of power, and limiting the power of economic winners.

[Travis B.]

The thing is that practically all the social democratic parties have gone this route, such that capitalism is essentially accepted as is, without any effort being made to actually change things. Rather, what social democracy has come to mean is merely tax-and-spend rather than to seek fundamental solutions that would actually better the workers in a more permanent fashion that cannot be taken away from them the next time elections come around.