Exilian
Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter => Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza => Topic started by: Jubal on January 09, 2023, 11:44:21 PM
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Hopefully containing fewer Prime Ministers than 2022's trio.
The focus of politics has rather moved out of Westminster for a winter of discontent, we start the new year with Lots of Strikes (no really, lots), and the unions at loggerheads with a Conservative government that's very unwilling to compromise. Rishi Sunak hasn't revived Conservative fortunes, and Keir Starmer is still sitting on an enormous polling lead on the basis that he's not Those Bastards. The Lib Dems are sitting rather statically on ten percent ish or a bit less, the Greens and hard-right Reform on a few points each, the SNP sabre-rattling about independence... it all feels rather strange, with a pretty lame duck government, an opposition touting very few ideas, and a desperately exhausted and angry country not entirely sure where to turn.
Someone recently linked me to this, noting the Lib Dems' soft-pedalling of their drug policy, which is a microcosm of where the party is generally under Ed Davey. Very much going for the softly approach to avoid upsetting anyone and hoping enough people will be put off the Tories to win us some seats.
https://volteface.me/missing-the-liberal-democrats/
The bad news for the Lib Dems is that there have been some reports that the Tories are going to give up on the northern seats they're fighting with Labour altogether, effectively conceding the election, in favour of a really hard push to keep affluent southern voters onside rather than risk losing on both fronts. That could really screw over the Ed Davey strategy, given the resources Sunak would have for trying to hold those seats.
Anyway, the real story is the cost of living. Things are pretty desperate in the UK right now, and it's hard to see much change happening this year as the Conservatives try to hang on as best they can (I doubt they'll call an early election to get the pain over with: they'll just be hoping the economy revives a bit and they can take credit next year).
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I have seen a claim on social media that the Scottish gender recognition reform bill is originally a piece of legislation which Theresa May brought out as a quick thing to do for LGBTQ+ rights before trans issues became such a culture war issue in the UK. And that a group called Stonewall drafted the original version. Is that correct?
I find it very hard to find clear, honest information about trans issues.
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Ah, did you see Sarah Brown's post that was going around on Mastodon? Yeah, Sarah knows what she's talking about, she's been very much at the front line on this stuff in a UK context (I should also add for the register of interests that we know each other).
Anyway, you're mostly right but a bit fudged on the precise details. Stonewall's report precipitated a proposal for a UK-wide reform bill under Theresa May: Stonewall didn't actually draft the legislation, but they produced the recommendation. Stonewall, for context, is the UK's biggest LGBT rights charity: they've become the focus of much ire of social conservatives lately, but really they're traditionally the more establishment side of LGBT rights campaigning. Anyway, it was in the wake of the UK-wide effort failing as the Conservatives swung authoritarian under Boris Johnson that a bill to do the same thing but only in Scotland alone started being pushed forward. Scotland is more urbanised than England and tends in consequence to lean left, and the SNP have been very keen to precipitate a stand-off over legal issues like this because it helps them make the case that Scotland can only really do what it wants if it leaves the UK.
And that brings us to where we are now, with the post-Johnson Tories trying to block Scotland from doing the reform. There will be a court challenge and it's not clear how it will go: I've seen some posts by people I wouldn't expect to be radicals or pro-Scottish independence on this suggesting that the government may lose in the Supreme Court because the bar for using a Section 35 order to block legislation is actually quite high and it's not clear that they've necessarily met it.
One pertinent question is why the Tories think this is a battle worth fighting: I don't think many people believe that Sunak and Hunt are rabidly anti-trans-rights on anything other than a political calculation level. They may be hoping to use this as a wedge issue to keep social conservatives voting for them, or to raise the prominence of the SNP in an attempt to scare English voters off the idea of a Labour-SNP coalition: I don't buy the idea that they're simply using it to try and distract from the strikes. We'll see what happens next I suppose.
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Thanks! The culture war thing does seem to engage very small but passionate groups: LGBTQ+ and trans rights organizations, feminist organizations, the radical right, and some people who spend too long on social media and take it all seriously. And the current issue of making it easier for people to have their state-issued ID reflect their gender presentation and identity seems like a pretty estoeric one which mostly affects trans and intersex people and mostly affects their interactions with states rather than eg. sports organizations or women's organizations. Isn't the most common use case stopping trans and intersex people being hassled by police or customs officials because their gender presentation does not match their ID (or being outed to employers because their gender presentation does not match their ID?)
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Yeah, the actual uses of gender recognition documentation are pretty legally limited. You can change the sex marker on your medical records, passport, and driving license without one, so it's not really a police officials issue as you don't need it for the most common forms of ID. But you do need it to change the sex markers on HMRC documentation, on your birth certificate, to have it recorded reliably properly on your death certificate, and to have marriage licenses issues per the correct gender. If that sounds bizarre as a system for what it affects, yes, it is: it's one of these things that's become totemic for the right despite being really quite bureaucratically esoteric.
Meanwhile a number of rule-breaking scandals seem to be hitting the government, and the cost of living crisis worsens.
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So what are the working models in the UK of when ID should reflect biological sex and when it should reflect gender identity, gender presentation, or something else? Making it easy to change on the birth certificate is surprising since a newborn does not have, and certainly cannot express, gender identity (although birth certificates absolutely get used for other things later in life).
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Birth certificates are in the harder category to change, in that you do need gender recognition documents (and you can only do it for your own: so this is adults changing their birth certificates retroactively). There's no case where you're obliged to keep your sex-assigned-at-birth (which I'll assume is what you mean by "biological sex") on documentation if you have a gender recognition certificate, at least so far as I'm aware. But since the most important documentation can be changed even without a GRC, it doesn't seem like it makes much sense to make a GRC especially hard to get. I don't think that having legal documents be reflective of gender rather than attempting to describe sex is a bad working model, though I think we should simplify it to allow legal self-certification of gender. I'm not aware of any case where knowing sex assigned at birth on a piece of paper is actually very helpful, as opposed to people making individual decisions on certain matters on a case-by-case basis.
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(scratches head)
I have to say you are not helping the case that its only crazy nasty people who say that there is a movement to deny the existence or importance of biological sex!
Trans and intersex people call to mind the maxim that hard cases make bad law (ie. make sure that your policies work for most people, then see about the unusual cases)
Edit: and I was serious: what are the different models proposed for when various types of British ID should reflex sex, when they should reflect gender identity or presentation, and when they should have nothing about sex or gender at all? What are the best arguments for them? How do they handle the tough cases such as intersex people?
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I'm not aware of any case where knowing sex assigned at birth on a piece of paper is actually very helpful, as opposed to people making individual decisions on certain matters on a case-by-case basis.
At about the same time as the current gender identity movement became famous, there was a simultaneous movement pointing out that a lot of medical science has been tested exclusively on people of the male sex, and it turns out that things like medicine or seatbelts often affect people of the female sex differently. Women and girls are not just shorter, lighter men and boys. (The arguments for just testing males are often hilarious, such as "women have hormone fluctuations"). In a world of mass-produced objects, accessible design has to consider sex, just like it has to consider handedness or disability.
So when you are doing biomedical studies, its important to know the subjects' biological sex. Even if someone identifies as nonbinary, genderfluid, agender, etc. they still belong to a class which has meaningful and substantial differences on average from the other half of humanity, and which is distinct from their identity. Intersex people and trans people who use gender-affirming care are an edge case, I'm not sure what current best practices are (but they are much less common than people who identify as butches or softboys or nonbinary or all these amazing categories which people find helpful to understand their place within the system of social categories that is gender).
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I wouldn't say I deny the importance of biology at all. What I do deny is binary and simplistic thinking about that biology, because I think that is likely to hurt people who in one way or another don't fit the assumed norms of those categories. I obviously agree that assuming everyone can be approximated to a white European man is pretty awful: I don't see the argument for advocating fixing that by turning one pigeonhole into two, when we could do so much better by using our capacity to describe and model the complexity of people's realities and experiences. I don't think one can detach the sorts of concerns you raise from gender, too: the reason for poor outcomes for women medically is based on the wider oppression of women as a gender category.
I also don't think this is a case of hard cases making bad law: when it comes to issues of medical rights and identity, the law needs to cover everyone to create a reasonable measure of equality: at the very least, it needs a strong case that including the edge cases will produce actual harms to the majority, which in my view hasn't really been made here.
On your example: firstly, biomedical studies aren't in any sense a legal documentation issue, and it had been my understanding that was the focus of our discussion. Second, if you're doing biomedical studies, it is important to know a range of details about the subjects' biological sex characteristics, but I think those are things you should be asking them and if necessary verifying at the time of the study. That may be best done by using a heuristic of asking people what sex they were assigned at birth, but it may be best done by checking or asking about their chromosomes or which hormones they produce or take supplements of or their height and weight or their bone structure or their genital structure or any number of other potentially relevant features. At best, in biomedical terms, a binary sex marker is a rough heuristic that we have to use for the sake of time and cost: I don't think we should elevate it to the point where we treat it as a social class, because then we're just reinventing a new binary form of gender with all the problems that implies.
I am yet to see anyone explain how the position of "sex isn't simple, so get some actual data and do your best to cover the things you're actually studying" is a threat to accessible design.
Regarding ID models, the answer frankly is that nobody in a serious governing position seems to have thought about it in depth, and outside those circles really the only pitches on the table are "binary sex for everything, get rid of gender wokery" (from the right and the conservative-feminists), and "maybe switch to a trinary gender system across most forms of ID" (from some liberals who care about these issues) and "remove gender and sex from all forms of ID" (which I've seen from a few gender abolitionist left types, not to be confused with gender criticals who are in the binary sex only camp). Nobody so far as I'm aware has published any comprehensive reform scheme, or proposed any differentiation between different forms of ID, and the current differences in which ID requires or reflects what are due to circumstance not intention.
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Nadhim Zahawi, the Conservative party chairman, has been sacked over investigations being made into his tax affairs.
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Okay, THIS is a big one: Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish FM since 2014 and their leader through almost all their most successful elections ever, is stepping down:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-64647907
I think Sturgeon going is a political resignation that does matter: she's managed to hold the SNP together and beat back alternative Scot-Indy parties like Alba, and has really been the face of their strategy for so many years that it's hard to imagine someone stepping into her shoes. And I don't know if the disagreements on strategy etc within the SNP will be quiet ones to resolve.
A friend with much better insight into Scottish politics than me thinks Angus Robertson is the most likely successor.
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With Angus Robertson not going for the SNP job, Humza Yousaf seems to be the favourite by far. There are three candidates running: Ash Regan, a centrist running hard against the SNP's recent equalities bills on trans rights, Kate Forbes, an economic centre-leftist but with really socially conservative religious views on all LGBT rights, and Yousaf, who is the continuity candidate and seems overwhelmingly likely to win. Either Forbes or Regan winning would be a massive change for the SNP to a more conservative set of stances: elected officials have been openly suggesting that a Forbes win would split the party, and either Forbes or Regan would be overwhelmingly likely to have to pull the plug on the SNP's cooperation with the Green Party because of their social views.
Yousaf, on the other hand, is not of the calibre of Sturgeon: he's been attacked for his time as Scottish health secretary by the other candidates and opposition alike, and Alex Salmond (former SNP leader, now Alba Party leader, who has said he might rejoin an SNP run by Regan) has been attacking him for not turning up to the vote that passed same-sex marriage in Scotland a few years ago. For a mix of reasons, largely his ministerial record, he polls worse than Forbes does among the general public. It's really hard to know what this might mean for the SNP's future.
Anyway, the current grand meltdown in the UK is that half the BBC's sports programming or more is off air because the BBC decided its Match of the Day anchor, Gary Lineker, was contractually not allowed to tweet extremely sharp criticism of the government over its new anti-refugee policies (he compared them to 1930s Germany and that upset the Home Secretary). The pundits, commentators, and anchors of just about every football show the BBC has have walked out in solidarity with Lineker, even some right wingers have realised that the concept that an employer can censure a personal twitter account for a non-news presenter goes a bit far for them, and the BBC is apparently just going to run highlights with no commentary on today's MotD.
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Humza Yousaf is the new SNP leader, by a thin margin. The first count was 48.2% Yousaf, 40.7% Forbes, 11.1% Regan, and then the second count 52.1% Yousaf to 47.9% Forbes, according to the BBC.
That puts him in a tricky position: Forbes presumably will expect a seat at the top table with a performance that strong, but she was also running on really pivoting the SNP to a noticeably less socially and economically centre-left position and it's hard to see where Yousaf can give ground there. And she was finance minister already, so it's hard to just give her a promotion while keeping her supporters happy. He's also by all accounts somewhat less popular among the Scottish public than Forbes, and he's certainly viewed less well than Sturgeon was. He can keep the wheels on the bus right now - the Greens will stay cooperative with him which they wouldn't have done with his rivals - but the key thing in the coming weeks will be seeing whether he can keep the SNP, and with it the Independence VI, polls in the ranges the SNP have become accustomed to.
Keir Starmer has visited Scotland a number of times recently: there's a definite sense that Scottish Labour are scenting blood in the water, and they're a few points up from where they were in the polls already.
EDIT: Kate Forbes has left the Scottish government, reportedly Yousaf offered her only a significant demotion. She was apparently offered the job of Rural Affairs spokesperson, which would have rhymed oddly with the situation of Tim Farron who's essentially taken that role for the Liberal Democrats at Westminster after, like Forbes, screwing up his political leadership of a progressive party due to his rather hardline religious views.
Meanwhile in England, a report has shown that police have apparently been conducting strip-searches on children, and disproportionately non-white children at that: this comes shortly after another report that suggested the Metropolitan Police has massive racism culture problems from the grassroots officers upwards.
It also looks like Labour is poised to ban Jeremy Corbyn from standing for them as a candidate, which is a pretty rare thing for a party to do to a former leader.
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Someone quipped that someone with Indian parents and someone with Pakistani parents are about to argue whether to partition the United Kingdom
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Someone quipped that someone with Indian parents and someone with Pakistani parents are about to argue whether to partition the United Kingdom
Yes, there is a certain irony in that particular historical echo. Though it looks like support for independence isn't in its best state after the SNP's slightly bruising leadership contest.
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Is there anything worth saying about Jeremy Corbyn? I have him pegged as one of the things that people on social media and pundits babble about but where the babbling is mainly an expression of identity (or the propaganda they want to spread). I don't do parasocial relationships with celebrities.
I saw something about him drifting towards tanky positions on the Russian invasion of Ukraine (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/02/jeremy-corbyn-urges-west-to-stop-arming-ukraine)?
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He's pretty close to being fully pacifist, it's perhaps the main reason I'm glad he's no longer Labour leader. I'm pretty sure he's gone back to being a fairly irrelevant backbencher now, maybe some of the leftier left still support him but I seriously doubt he has much influence anymore.
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Yeah, he's got a very isolationist streak and tends to have that kneejerk anti-westernism of a certain sort of left-winger where he struggles to see Russian and Chinese imperialisms for what they are. I think Corbyn could hurt Labour seriously by trying to front a new political force or join the Greens or something if he wanted to, but he won't because he's actually also a strong party loyalist and most of his fellow Labour-left types would rather fight over the party than leave. So I don't think this will radically shift the political calculus anywhere, I agree with Penty.
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How big are the tensions inside the Labour party between Corbyn's kind of old-school, socialist-tinged leftism and the beige party-of-vaguely-reformist-power? And how does Keir Starmer's version of that compare to Tony Blair's?
Have they given any more hints of what they would do if they get a strong majority government at the next election?
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Most of Labour has always sat between these two poles, I think. Generally Keir Starmer is shutting up the socialist wing by winning: people don't argue with a massive polling lead. If his lead was faltering you'd have more and louder voices arguing for a different route, but for now everyone is desperate to get the Tories out at all costs. I still don't really know what a Starmer government would do: they're very much campaigning on valency/competency rather than very specific policies.
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Further on said winning, the Conservatives lost control of nearly fifty entire councils in this week's local elections and lost over a thousand council seats. Labour took control in over twenty and picked up another 500 councillors, the Lib Dems picked up twelve councils and 400 new councillors of their own, a load more moved into no overall control. The Green Party even took majority control of a council for the first time, in Mid Suffolk, and picked up 240 seats.
My own home patch of Breckland remained Conservative controlled, but even nearby in very blue Norfolk the Tories lost control of Broadland, West Norfolk & King's Lynn, and Great Yarmouth councils. I suspect many of these places will swing back once the Conservatives are out of office nationally, that said. A lot of people have been mumbling about hung parliaments on the basis of the results and I simply don't think they're correct: on these figures Labour are well on course for a majority, given the strength of the national squeeze messages and the fact that the people who turn out at general elections include a lot more lower-information voters who are much more likely to lean Labour or Tory, so I'm not convinced that the good Lib Dem and Green results will carry through as well to a GE whereas conversely I think there are some places where Labour made some local election inroads but that was blunted a bit by LD and Green gains, leading to NOC council areas that are actually ripe Labour targets because of how badly the Conservative vote collapsed.
The Conservatives aren't quite in as bad a state as they were in, say, in the mid 1990s: in 1995 they lost two thousand councillors and had about six councils left out of those contested, whereas this year the Tories still have 33 under majority control. But they have lost more places than they held onto, and generally are looking politically rather fragile.
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There is a weird mood campaign on social media to shout angrily about the coronation. I can see Brits getting upset because so many people are struggling while rich people have a big party (and because the UK police are trying out their usual Stasi tricks), but it seems like a strange thing for anyone elsewhere to be angry about. In Canada, the people who do the most damage are rich or officeholding people who live in Canada.
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I mean I guess people in any other country in the Commonwealth/former Empire might justifiably have pretty negative feelings about the pageantry of the British state, and that is about half the world's population. But I think it's true that the grumpiness, like the fanaticism on the other side of the coin, is probably a bit bigger than the actual role of the monarchy really justifies when compared to the other outrages happening in the world at the present instant. I'm mostly just feeling profoundly apathetic about the whole thing.
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Yeah, I could understand it it were coming from South Asia and Africa, but aside from one piece in The Continent https://www.thecontinent.org/_files/ugd/287178_fe63188d255147979bb14740630895f4.pdf?index=true I mostly see this campaign from Europeans and rich Anglos.
To pick one example I know well, there is a school of thought that the Canadian prairies were colonized by Ontario (certainly following a template from the European and postcolonial powers, but the horrible decisions were mainly by people from Ontario and Quebec on behalf of Canada's Parliament). Blaming the British Empire can be a way to deflect blame. And while the British were very active in the slave trade until the 1830s, everyone or almost everyone enslaved in what became the province of British Columbia was enslaved by indigenous people.
And there are some indigenous people who if they have to choose would rather deal with the Crown as the House of Windsor than as parliament and legislatures, because the Windsors don't stand to benefit financially from stealing their lands any more (or are pretty sure that most plausible 'reforms' would weaken their position and strengthen that of capitalists).
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Hm, I hadn't considered the angle of blaming Britain when one is a former-British settler colony as blame-deflection so much, I guess that has something to it.
In any case, the international discourse will presumably peter out fairly fast. I am livid about how the coronation policing was done though. Besides the obviously heavy handed arrests of perfectly legitimate protestors, they were arresting people in a programme for handing out rape alarms to members of the public, supposedly "in case they were used to frighten police horses". Just utterly inappropriate and crass behaviour.
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I agree, police in many places seem to seriously lack a clue right now.
One of the points that many indigenous people in my area have is that to reconcile, you have to stop doing the offensive and destructive thing. Its no good to say "stealing indigenous land was wrong" if your very expensive lawyers keep fighting for the proposition that all land in Canada belongs to the Crown and indigenous people only have rights to it if they have been explicitly granted those rights.
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The Tory party's right wing is rumbling hard at the moment, it seems like they feel Sunak is wasting time on things like being pseudo-competent rather than doing the things they want like cutting taxes hard, and there is a new attempt to inaugurate a more hardline National Conservative faction (with associated knock-off pound shop CPAC) more explicitly aligned with US Trumpist-Republicanism.
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So, just in case things were starting to get boring, the Tories are starting a new little civil war that's consisted of Johnson and two allies resigning very publicly, triggering by-elections which will probably create further bad news cycles for the government. One seat - Johnson's, in Uxbridge - will almost certainly be a Labour gain in the current climate. Selby seems to be considered the safest Tory seat of the three. Mid Bedfordshire will be the Lib Dems' target, but it looks like Labour are also going to target it, presumably largely to make sure the Lib Dems don't win as Starmer doesn't want the LDs or Greens to be enough of a presence to force him to make any progressive policy shifts that would reduce his ability to capture more right-leaning Tory voters.
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And just to add to the fun, apparently Dorries has not formally resigned as an MP, despite saying before the weekend that she would go "with immediate effect". So there's now the delightful sight of a Tory MP being pressured by Tory HQ to actually resign.
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Reminds me of the fight within the Nazi party over who would replace Hitler in April and May 1945.
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This has led me to contemplate the horrifying alternate reality where Hitler resigned several years earlier and his successors negotiated a surrender far earlier with freedom for the war criminals in its terms, leading to a chunk of the later C20th where Hitler was out there being treated as a retired politician, giving bigoted interviews to the press and telling everyone that really it was all Goring and Goebbels who were at fault and if only people had stuck to *his* vision... eesh.
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This has led me to contemplate the horrifying alternate reality where Hitler resigned several years earlier and his successors negotiated a surrender far earlier with freedom for the war criminals in its terms, leading to a chunk of the later C20th where Hitler was out there being treated as a retired politician, giving bigoted interviews to the press and telling everyone that really it was all Goring and Goebbels who were at fault and if only people had stuck to *his* vision... eesh.
The American novel from the late 1930s on a fascist takeover in the United States has something similar with a former President for Life wandering around the party circuit like a White Russian noble.
Edit: Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here
It is scary that Trump could lose an election, stage his autogolpe which failed, and win the next election (although he is pretty old, even if he stays out of prison I don't think he will be a factor after 2028 - the real danger is what he has done to the Republican Party).
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More by-elections! Ironically the Conservatives managed to hold the most marginal of the three seats they were trying to defend in a round of by-elections yesterday, Boris Johnson's former seat of Uxbridge, while they lost Selby & Ainsty in Yorkshire (to Labour) and Somerton & Frome in Somerset (to the Lib Dems) on enormous swings.
Apparently the Uxbridge result was in part because Labour hold the London mayoralty and their new plan to expand London's Ultra-Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) has been unpopular with residents in the suburbs for whom it mainly means a big hike in vehicle costs during a cost of living crisis. I think this is a problem we're seeing across Europe: some voters who might be inclined to vote against Conservative governing parties end up swinging to them or to further right populist parties because those parties are able to present desperately needed climate change measures as a further cost of living hit that people won't be able to afford (this is a big deal in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands rights now with the AfD, FPO, and BBB respectively doing very well as basically primarily anti-environmentalist parties). I wish I knew what the solution was to that one: I don't believe the world can at all afford to have any let-up on climate measures, indeed we need them to accelerate, but it feels like the backlash is something European democracies are struggling with.
The S&F result was very good for the Lib Dems - 11,000 majority, which even if the party performs a bit less well at the general election with a larger electorate is likely to mean we hold that seat next year.
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Some angry people on social media successfully pushed a speculative fiction magazine to reject all submissions from someone who was in a British neo-Nazi party until 1983 and apparently has no known far-right activity since (probably some ugly opinions which he shares with friends). One version of the story is https://www.patreon.com/posts/88237737
Is there some UK context in which that makes sense? The only situation I can imagine someone's political activity 40 years ago being relevant to a publisher was giving context to their activities today (eg. if someone was saying lots of vaguely bigoted and anti-immigrant things, their past in a far-right party would make that speech look worse).
Forty years is a long time.
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It's not something I know enough about to comment: but I don't think this is UK specific behaviour, more a question of whether one needs to have actively atoned for certain bad beliefs versus whether simply no longer being active is enough to allow someone to come back into the fold? And I guess there's some valid debate there over where "okay you left" should be the rule and where "show you've changed" should be the rule.
Meanwhile it's party conference season, the Lib Dem leaders are gearing up for another row on housing and trying to about outflanking Labour on any political issues at all except maybe voting reform.
The Conservatives seem to be going all in on ditching targets to electrify motor vehicles etc, which it's not clear will satisfy many voters and which has led to attacks on the PM from the opposition and from Boris Johnson.
It still looks very like Labour will sleepwalk the next election despite actually a pretty weak policy portfolio and leadership offering.
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I think if you want to lead people away from groups that advocate lawless violence, you will have much more success if everyone understands that they can return to polite society if they quit the group, stop associating with members, and stop speaking in favour of its goals than if you require them to denounce their former friends. And I think keeping people out of groups that advocate lawless violence is much more achievable than stopping them being bigots.
The only context I can imagine where digging up someone's political activity 40 years would make sense would be giving context to their actions today (where the actions today are the actually important bit) or if pretty much everyone in the party in question was beating people in the streets but the authorities at the time protected them from prosecution so there was no way to prove which specific members committed what crimes.
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I think it depends a bit on which bit is "return to polite society" (where I agree with your point) and where it shades into "being able to enter communities or spaces where people might have valid discomfort with past actions" (which is a lot more complex in my view)? In this case I'd agree it seems a prima facie unusual call, but I don't know the institutions, individuals, or situation anything like well enough that I'd want to weigh in on it with a clear opinion.
Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrat leadership have been badly embarrassed in the aforementioned debate over housing targets (they wanted fewer targets to build new homes, the membership wanted to retain existing targets). The habit of press releasing a policy before it's been formally agreed is a dangerous one for Lib Dem leaders to make! The leadership do very much seem to be angling for running the next election as almost a set of localist parties in target seats and reducing any "ideological" or policy discussion to a minimum, which is a very strange idea in a world of very national campaigns and politics.
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Publicly committing to things before the election makes it easier to push them through afterwards, and it lets you get your internal thinking and horse-trading out of the way before you have to deal with everyone else and daily news.
An anonymous British rightist (who hints at hereditarian thinking, sigh, that spreads on a certain type of website like infectious disease on a cruise ship) has a good rant about grift at the UK's right-wing think tanks
https://inthesightoftheunwise.substack.com/p/episode-thirty-two-bonfire-of-the
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So we've recently had a lot of news articles about the record levels of net migration we're experiencing (around 750k net in 2022), and since our current government has failed at pretty much everything they've stated to aim for and they need to look like they might actually be doing something, they have unveiled upcoming changes to our visa system https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48785695
The general gist of it is that they are raising the minimum wage required for attaining a visa from £26,200 to £38,700 as well as increasing fees and the healthcare surcharge. The median UK wage is £35,000 or so. Those on the "shortage occupation list" will remain exempt from this, though it seems like they will now have to earn at leas the average wage of someone in their industry and will no longer be able to bring family members with them.
And speaking of family members, currently to bring a dependent here on a family visa you would have to earn £18,600 a year, with around 3k extra per additional dependent or so iirc. This will now be changed to £38,700, significantly higher than the median wage. Not sure if there are any changes to whole extra dependents part. For me this means living with my fiancée and stepdaughter is now not an option if I stay in the UK and work in the healthcare career that I'm currently training for, at least not for a good few years.
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I'm horrified by it - even with the Conservatives being who they are, it's an amazing level of both cruel and stupid. I'm so sorry :(
How close are you to being trained: would bringing your family together abroad be an option? I don't know what the rules or skills shortages are for, say, Ireland.
Economically the whole idea is absolutely crackpot as well, there's absolutely no way to sensibly justify this, it's going to accelerate brain-drain from the UK and effectively cut off British academia and professional sectors at the knees without any viable way to employ entry-level postdocs or equivalents. There is zero way Britain can train people to fill those gaps, it's just going to put an enormous dent in the economy and genuinely break several already close-to-breaking sectors.
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I'll be finished around July (fingers crossed). Haven't really looked into working abroad before but I'm fairly sure I will be able to find somewhere we can all move to easily enough tbh. I'm quite surprised that the health and social care visas will lose the right to bring dependents, our healthcare system is already under a ton of strain and we really do rely on foreign born workers, particular it seems in the less desired but more pressured areas (such as old people's medicine and care homes).
I think the justification is fairly clear, we have had record levels of immigration whilst house building has mostly not kept pace with the net level of migration, on top of a backlog of already high house prices and rent. Politically I expect this move will be pretty popular. Not sure why they decided to raise the minimum salaries required quite so much though.
Economically I imagine it'll help to portugal us more than we already are. Oh well.
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Yeah, I think the "sensibly" in "no way to sensibly justify this" was doing quite a lot of work in my sentence. We'll have even less money and a more threadbare workforce to actually build the houses in question, so this is unlikely to actually get anywhere near solving any of the major rent pressure issues. I agree it's designed to be politically popular, though I don't think it's going to save the Tories by a mile especially with Labour also going fairly anti-immigration recently. But there are definitely reasons for this - I just think they're terrible reasons and that none of them will actually work in the way people are imagining, just like all the other attempts to curb immigration by being more armadillo to immigrants have failed over the last twenty or thirty years.
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Are health care and education national jurisdiction in the UK? Because an issue is that the government (in the broad sense including all levels) sets public-sector wages, tuition fees, and immigration policy. Changes to any one will have an effect on the others (eg. setting tuition fees such that universities have to get more international students which increases immigration, or setting an income floor on immigration which excludes some healthcare or research workers).
Does the UK have terrible single-family oriented zoning like most of the USA and Canada, or can you pretty much put up any kind of lowrise housing and any kind of retail or handicraft manufacturing on any land with residential zoning?
Edit: classic satire piece (https://higheredstrategy.com/the-resignation-of-theresa-may/) by a Canadian center-right analyst asking 'Theresa May's immigration policy is so catastrophic for UK universities and so good for universities in the other rich English-speaking countries, what if it were deliberate?'
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Are health care and education national jurisdiction in the UK?
Sort of. Most doctors, nurses and AHPs work for the NHS directly (although GP surgeries are privately owned and so do not), and NHS pay scales have a massive affect on private sector pay scales too I assume.
Carers are almost entirely employed through private companies, even when government funding ends up paying for care. Their pay is invariably terrible, particularly considering how demanding their job tends to be. There have been stories of care agencies exploiting workers who rely on them as visa sponsors and I can certainly believe it.
With education, up to higher education then yes I think teaching salaries are generally up to gov. Colleges and universities are kind of private institutions but with a fair amount of gov oversight.
As to the housing, I'm not too sure. I expect it massively depends on where you live. In my area many of the recently built houses are large and very expensive but this is more to do with what developers think will sell well than local zoning afaik.
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As to the housing, I'm not too sure. I expect it massively depends on where you live. In my area many of the recently built houses are large and very expensive but this is more to do with what developers think will sell well than local zoning afaik.
Humh, you can model the housing crisis in the USA and Canada as three types of factors.
Fiscal policy
- Wealth inequality (if Jeff Bezos can pay USD $50m for a London house- and he wanted to, only to find that none met his requirements- that drives up the price for everyone)
- the Zero Real Interest Rate Policy of 2008-2022 which drives up the price of financial assets (if two lawyers or surgeons with a few million dollars can borrow money for free, if they don't bid higher for property then someone else will)
- the aspects of the global capital system which cause a lot of money with dubious origins to be spent on real estate (NB. whether a specific act is 'money laundering' or 'integrating Russia into the global economy,' 'allowing capital flight from China' or 'opening our universities to young Chinese people' changes with the wind, but both kinds drive up housing prices)
- rent controls in some US cities (if you can't make back your money you won't invest in renovations or new construction)
Physical constraints
- energy supply
- timber, steel, concrete supply
- labour supply (NB. that expensive housing reduces the supply and increases the cost of labour, and that bringing in large numbers of people drives up the price of housing)
- geography (Vancover is a wedge between a border, steep mountains, and the Salish Sea which is also some of the very limited farmland in BC)
Local housing policy constraints
- building codes
- zoning (A very large part of greater Vancouver, a metropolitan area of 3 million people, is zoned Single-Family Residential and has been as long as my parents have been alive http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/episodes/the-death-and-life-of-the-single-family-house (http://www.scienceforthepeople.ca/episodes/the-death-and-life-of-the-single-family-house))
- liberum veto (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto) type policies where a few homeowners with time on their hands can block new developments just by attending council meetings and speaking
For five years or so high-income, university-educated people tend to focus on the last two points under local housing policy. Fiscal policy is arguably more important but seemed more intractable until 2022.
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I think in the UK there's a big thing of local councils generally trying to block any new housing (because it reduces house prices of existing voters and puts strain on infrastructure) plus developers wanting to build inefficient single units in a sprawl.
In other news, Mark Drakeford, the Welsh first minister (and for most of the last few years therefore probably the most powerful executive Labour politician in the UK) has decided to step down, it's not clear who'll replace him but as far as I'm aware there's not a hugely wide difference between possible candidates.
Several members of Layla Moran MP's family have been trapped in a Gaza City church around which people keep getting shot by the IDF: it's the sort of thing that makes it significantly harder for pro-Netanyahu types to make their case in the UK when public figures are able to directly contradict their claims of the necessity of how they're conducting the operation.
In the polls (https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/), Sunak is only a point or two above where Liz Truss fell to at her worst: with another possible by-election in a very winnable seat for Labour after the Tory MP for Blackpool South got found blatantly breaking lobbying rules, and with most of Sunak's plans being attacked from all sides, it's hard to see where the Conservatives make up the shortfall.