Exilian
Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter => Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza => Topic started by: Jubal on May 03, 2019, 11:11:30 PM
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It's a mess! But it's a mess I'm making this thread to be smug about because we just had the local elections and my party did really well :P
Basically both the main parties did badly - the main opposition, Labour, did moderately badly, and the Conservatives got slaughtered. Over 1300 councillors lost in a single election, which is the largest loss for any party in a single night so far this century. The big beneficiaries were the Lib Dems, who gained 700 seats; the Green Party gained about 150 which is big news for them, and there were over six hundred independent candidates elected, which is a huge increase there as well. In all three cases (LDs, Greens, Independents) they more than doubled their starting total over the course of the night, and the Lib Dems gained complete control of ten councils whilst the Conservatives lost control of forty-four (mostly to "No Overall Control" situations).
Also in amusing news, MP for the 19th century Jacob Rees-Mogg, an aristocratic Catholic conservative who goes campaigning with his nanny, now has a Lib Dem as his local councillor, which is pretty funny.
Everything in the UK is still a mess, but I have something to celebrate for once politically, so I guess time to make the most of it :)
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Did UKIP win seats or are they finished?
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There's that hate speech again. Moderator please ban!
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Did UKIP win seats or are they finished?
They lost a whole bunch more seats but they did hold/gain a few this time, lost 145 net so they have about 31 councillors left. Definitely relegated to Very Minor Party status. They've been wiped out on our home council back in Breckland.
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Congrats to Lib Dems! A very thorough well done to them :)
@Penty - UKIP have been toast for a while, since Farage left they became increasingly racist with that ex-army guy and the other one with gerard batten appointing tommy robinson as his advisor.
Brexit party is the real deal though taking members and support from both liberals and conservatives. Even if their slogan is dumb. I was at the March 29 rally because I said I'd accompany someone there and so many card carrying rednecks saying 'Brexit means Brexit'... to which my response was usually: 'Crayfish means crayfish'. And this is still the party I guess I'd be voting for if given the chance.
I agree with most* analysts saying that it's because both main parties have royally screwed brexit and (in my opinion) diminished the benefits of brexit by not breaking away quickly and early. In addition, tinfoil hatting a bit, I think huawei getting the contract is because a trade negotiation with china said that was a condition.
*maybe loudest/on bcc most/times/telegraph
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The Brexit Party is in vast predominance taking support from the right with some hangers-on from the authoritarian left, I'd say - I can't think of any of their prominent backers who I'd say was a liberal, though some (George Galloway) are traditionally seen as on the left and others (Claire Fox) might have been considered on the left at earlier points in their career. It's a very slickly put together machine though and I think there's a high chance of them winning the Europeans. I'll be interested to see how well my lot do after last night; it's given us a pretty strong argument to be the main pro-EU party, and if we can consolidate that vote and the Tories continue to implode then we've got a solid chance of a good third place at least, even second if the Labour+Remain vote really starts cracking in our favour.
I will admit I basically think the "Brexit should've been done quick and early" was essentially invented by Tory-right and Faragist Brexiteers as the ultimate foil for their careers. It basically imposed a condition that sounds rational ("quick, clean break") but which no government would dare to do because (in my opinion and also what I think the government thinks) it would be the economic equivalent of jumping off a cliff (besides which Vote Leave in the referendum campaigned explicitly on the idea of getting a deal signed off before leaving). What the "quick and early" line meant for those who invented and pushed it, though, was that whatever Brexit deal a government did get could be found wanting, and any of the flaws in the whole project could be written off as "well if you'd just done it like we said"... so it basically allows senior (and perhaps rank and file) Brexiteers to keep the faith, because they can tell themselves that the window has passed to do what should've been done all along, and that no part of this mess is their fault.
I think from a point of view of "could Brexit have been made a success", there was an early window of Brexiteer opportunity that closed, but it was the reverse of the "quick and clean" - what Tory Brexiteers should've done was push a Norway deal hard right from the start, which would've killed half of Remain's support base and potentially also ripped Labour in half into the bargain. As it happened, people like Rees-Mogg and Farage were an absolute godsend to people who actually want to stay in the EU, because they successfully pushed the Tories into such an uncompromising stance that it energised big cadres of campaigners and pretty much brought the Lib Dems back from the dead in order to oppose it.
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You might well think it's idiocy on a slogan and economic suicide, but that's not the whole picture - bailing very quickly would actually have kept up the same supply lines that were in effect but with the imposition of WTO trade rules including paying like 30% more for dinner in the short term. In my opinion the disparity and trade negotiations would have been much more easily worked out from there as it creates a definite base to work from instead of this ludicrous limbo. The time it takes the EU to do anything is a universal weakness of theirs, it's literally the value proposition for that level of democracy, capitalising on it would have been the smart move, it's not that ridiculous.
WTO rules on their own aren't that much of a demon anyway tbqh they've been blown way out of proportion.
Norway option wasn't an option I thought? EU was against it, Norway was definitely against it. I thought it was one the conservative moderates were saying but it never went in front of EU because they'd just burn it?
I think the main mistake that was made was assuming that nobody could pick up our trading needs if we left. It seems to have been the assumption that ~50% of our total trade, the bit we do with the eu is just gone, bamfed out of existence. It doesn't really work like that, we still have that money to spend, just whoever wants the business gets it and we either lose out in quality or we have to take a bad import for a good import. E.g. If Indonesia were to sell us cheap beef in exchange for us buying a frankly overpriced and under-performing 5G infrastructure from them.
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Well, the short to medium term issue with No Deal and supply lines isn't really whether people come to a deal to sell goods, or even the tariffs, it's things like additional import checks and breakdowns in services infrastructure. You basically need to make Dover port twice the size to account for the fact that lorries are taking a lot longer to get through it. If you told me I had to prepare for a No Deal exit in 2016, I would be stalling for as long as possible with the EU whilst throwing all of my actual preparations at increasing the country's economic resilience against shocks like that - I'd have spent the last three years borrowing heavily and investing in power generation, stockpiling of key good, native capacity in energy generation, and shifting the economy hard out of London by taxing the armadillo out of elements of the City that I knew I was going to lose anyway and spending that cash on infrastructure to support manufacturing. As it is, we've done none of that, and I think we're simply not prepared enough to weather it; a government that, as you put it, made people pay 30% more for dinner in the short term would collapse too quickly to be able to see its agenda through anyway, IMO, unless it had an immense parliamentary majority (which will in turn probably never happen while the population is so sharply divided on Brexit).
Norway don't want the UK joining the current EFTA group, because we'd dwarf the other members, but we could easily have just created a separate group with the same functions that solely included the UK. The EU would've been fine with that - their issue is that they won't do any deal that treats the four market freedoms as divisible, so they'll do Norway or closer, and they'll do Hard Brexit or harder, but they won't do any fudges between the two. The real problem with the Norway option is that you don't get to set much of an independent trade policy, and you don't get to vote on what the EU's policy is going to be. It's the only thing that's ever been on the table that I'd actually class as a compromise though, where the result of the referendum is fulfilled but Remainers get enough of what they want that they'd accept it as a new status quo. May's deal, or Corbyn's pseudo-idea-deal, or No Deal, I think will all be sufficiently unacceptable to Remain-leaning people that there'll be a continual pro-EU force in Britain trying to pull us back in if we actually get round to leaving, and that it'll be as strong or stronger a force as Leave-leaning forces were before 2016.
Regarding trade, I think you're thinking about it too much in terms of physical imports/exports, which haven't been the mainstay of Britain's trade strategy for a good century or more now. If you're a country that manufactures a bunch of stuff that other folk want to buy, and it's good enough that they still want to buy it, sure, you get some leverage that way. But we're mainly a country that sells people services, and then buys their stuff with the money they pay us to, among other things, look after their money. Plus we're a knowledge and culture hub as a country; strong universities that export information, decent sized film and tech industries, etc. All those things are really quite mobile, and they're heavily reliant on access to international agreements that go beyond the very limited scope of WTO rules. As long as Britain doesn't politically collapse (which I don't think is an impossible outcome) in the wake of a May style or No Deal Brexit, it would eventually recover of course, but I think it would have to turn into a very different economy in order to do so, and would lose its world-leading status in the areas I just mentioned. I hope I don't have to see that develop but the historian in me would find it quite interesting - I suspect Dublin could become a very major boom-town in the coming years if it allows easy access into European digital (and physical) markets for English speakers and London doesn't any more.
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Meanwhile, the Brexit party just fought their first by-election, in a 60% Leave seat that's usually a Lab/Con marginal, with the sitting Labour MP having been kicked out for fraudulently trying to avoid a speeding ticket and the replacement Labour candidate having liked a bunch of outright anti-semitic stuff on social media, and the Conservatives still in national meltdown. And, um, they still managed to lose to Labour and I have no idea how. I was seriously expecting them to get 35%+ vote share, maybe 40. They need to be asking a lot of questions about their strategy and lack of campaign infrastructure after this - it was pretty much perfect conditions for them and absolutely none of the people I know expected them to not make the gain. Lib Dems came fourth and quadrupled our vote share, which I'll take in the circumstances, getting back into double figures somewhere like Pboro is decent for us.
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Our latest joy is the Conservative leadership contest. The first ballot of Tory MPs was today (they have several rounds to whittle down to the last 2 contenders who then get to be voted on by party members).
Boris Johnson got 36% of the MPs and was miles ahead of his rivals. He's now definitely in the strongest position to win. For most of his career this guy has been considered a complete joke, but he's backstabbed his way to the top very effectively. He might also split the party by being too hardline to the right though - they can only afford to lose at most four MPs or the government could fall, and several have said they'd bring the government down in preference to having Boris implement No Deal. Boris' allies tolerate him because they think he can win, and his enemies really hate him, so we'll see where we end up...
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I kind of want Boris to win just so we can watch Prime Minister Boris in meetings with President Donald.
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Chances are pretty good that he'll win, I think. Though he may win and then not become Prime Minister, because he only needs 3 Tories to go off in a huff and he probably falls immediately to a Vote of No Confidence which would be an oddly fitting end to his career.
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It's happening, Big Bad Boris is boss and he's going to make Britain Great again.
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We're so unbelievably portugaled.
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I have no idea what you mean. What about him does not inspire you with thoughts of a dignified, wise and respected leader?
(https://cdn.images.dailystar.co.uk/dynamic/1/photos/420000/620x/BORIS-525259.jpg)
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Lots of crossed fingers today - by-election in Brecon and Radnor (rural Wales), basically Lib Dem vs Conservative and probably going to be very tight indeed. If LDs win, Johnson's majority is down to only one seat.
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congrats!
Big fan of this (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-politics-49200636)
Both Plaid Cymru and the Greens did not field candidates, to try to maximise the Remain vote.
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Yeah. Standing down is more complex in practice than on paper (voters have an awkward habit of not changing their voting behaviour predictably in the way parties want them to), but it's good to do it where it works and I hope we can agree on some reciprocal arrangements for an upcoming GE.
Really happy for Jane as well. She's a thoughtful person with a good head for policy and she'll be a very useful voice in parliament.
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Yeah, that entitled attitude of large parties, that votes for smaller parties really belong to them in a predictable way does not make sense, especially when the media teaches people to vote for a party or a party head not a candidate and with turnout under 70% (I don't know how things are in the UK, but for a federal election in Canada 66% turnout is respectable, and MPs sometimes get elected without visiting their riding during the campaign).
I can see how this particular byelection was a special case.
Parties have been dropping like flies in Canada (the Progressive Conservatives44 year old government in Alberta, the Bloc Quebecois, the federal Liberals almost dropped behind the NDP) but its never been in the middle of such a fraught issue as Brexit or paralyzed a whole level of government for three years. Things didn't seem so bad in London earlier this summer, but London is its own place and I noticed the signs for Marxist walking tours and the stickers with a charming skulls-barbed-wire-and-weapons theme (in South Tirol its posters with a black white and red scheme).
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I am glad that I have a choice: I have not been looking seriously for academic jobs in the UK for a number of reasons. If you are say a small business in the UK which relies on supplies from or sales to the rest of the
UK EU, you don't have that luxury :(
Right now, a lot depends on a parliament which hasn't been making the best decisions.
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Yep. I'll be off to Lib Dem conference next month and arguing the case for improved (in my view!) policies on welfare and policing, but it all feels a bit like rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic at the moment.
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Are the Lib Dems working on proposed constitutional changes to prevent something like the end of the May prime ministership from happening again? I have seen arguments that in the Netherlands, say, if a government can't pass a motion for X, then can't pass a motion for not-X, an election is called whether the government wants one or not.
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Mm, I think it'd be very difficult in the UK system to provide a formal legally workable definition of X and not-X in your example, but I can see the argument for that.
Our biggest underlying problem, I think, is our voting system, in any case - it's largely responsible for locking most MPs into the two main party structures and giving them strong incentives to stay there no matter how venal, corrupt, or accepting of bigotry their party leadership are. Changing from FPTP to STV is the second longest standing liberal/lib dem policy, and one of the largest reasons I joined the party (in what seems now like a more innocent time, as grim as 2015 already was, before the word "Brexit" was a regular fixture in our politics).
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Yes, unfortunately that was one of the first promises which the current Canadian PM broke after being elected, and electoral reform has failed three referendums in BC (getting a majority at first, but not a big enough majority). So it looks like we are stuck with First Past the Post.
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Yep. Trudeau has been very disappointing on a number of fronts (as much as I'd still happily have someone with his views replacing the leaders of, say, almost any of the countries higher in the world pecking order than Canada). The electoral reform failure will especially come back to haunt the Canadian liberals in years to come, I think. :(
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I am afraid that the people in big party machines and the old media commentariat who run the federal Liberal party are incorrugible: if they form the next government, that will be proof that putting up a figurehead whose dangerous ideas they can diffuse worked just fine, if they don't then it will be somebody else's fault.
The general thinking back in 2016 was that Johnson was just supporting Brexit because it would raise his profile outside London before he ran for head of the Tories, wasn't it? And then when the referendum passed and he was faced with explaining how exactly he would deliver all the wonderful things he had promised, he disappeared for long enough for other people in the party to push him aside.
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Yes, party machinery is generally a pretty awful thing to have to cope with.
And yes, Johnson clearly always wanted to be PM, he was high profile nationally before he even became Mayor of London so it wasn't so much profile raising as burnishing his Conservative credentials with the party base. Then after the referendum, his bid for the leadership was scuppered partly because lots of Tory MPs hated him and partly because some people expected to back him at the time instead launched their own bids. So he became foreign secretary, then resigned, then spent a while criticising the government for not being purist enough and rode the wave of May's failure into Downing Street, where he's still on a popularity honeymoon taking votes off the Brexit Party :/
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And wow, now the Liberal Democrats are going from taking seats from the other parties in byelections to having Conservative MPs defect to them :o
Could Johnson be planning to hold an election and hope that he can pull together a coalition which does not include that Northern Irish party? Then he could put the customs controls in the Irish Sea, leave the EU and tell his base in England he has won. I just don't see a plausible end game for him, unless he really thinks that the EU will accept an insurgency in Ireland for slightly smoother trade with the UK.
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(https://pics.me.me/make-britain-great-again-boris-johnson-3192996.png)
https://www-newsweek-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.newsweek.com/boris-johnson-already-helping-make-britain-great-again-opinion-1451823?amp_js_v=a2&_gsa=1&=1&usqp=mq331AQEKAFwAQ%3D%3D#aoh=15676933372637&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&_tf=From%20%251%24s&share=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fboris-johnson-already-helping-make-britain-great-again-opinion-1451823
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Well, after his first week in parliament as PM Johnson is currently the only person to have been appointed Prime Minister and never won a vote in the House of Commons. On anything. 0% record.
His own brother resigned within four days of parliament returning, and his majority of one seat has gone to minus forty due to defections from the ranks. It is in many senses pretty funny - after weeks of being bigged up by the press for his decisiveness etc (if not as much as in that weird Newsweek fantasy article), the second he's had to do anything it's just instantly fallen to bits. Even Theresa May now looks like a strong PM by comparison, which given how useless she was is pretty weird to realise.
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If only people would work together instead of spending their energy pushing against the people they don't like. :(
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To work together you do have to be able to agree on what you're working towards, is the issue. Fundamentally, I don't agree with the more Conservative wing of UK politics about what the world should look like, what's valuable in it and what we should have more of, which makes it next to impossible for us to work together as we don't have a shared collective vision of what we're working on. Where you can find shared goals, of course, I agree that working together is great and especially in the US and UK political systems more of it needs to happen.
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Well, for now a lot of people in different parties can agree that they don't want to drop out of the EU without trade and travel arrangements in place and that they don't want to give Boris Johnson any chance to do this, and that is a good thing isn't it? Right now parliament does not have much time to address normal issues.
Because the leaders of the Labour and Conservative parties are both in favour of leaving the EU, so organizing to stop this will require like-minded people in different parties to organize themselves. And right now, leaving without a deal is the default outcome- it happens unless a majority of parliament votes to do something else (and for some outcomes, the EU has to agree).
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At least Halloween could be genuinely scary this year
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Less likely now parliament has legislated for yet another kicking of the can, but we'll see.
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The situation is bad enough that I would not make any jokes about it from outside the UK. Like I said on mastodon, I hope that my friends in the UK have money and storage for several months' emergency supplies, and a plan for what to do if serious violence breaks out in their community. I don't have anything light to say about a situation where one constitutional court says proroguing parliament was unconstitutional, another with another legal tradition says that it was, the Prime Minister's Office is threatening to ignore laws and court rulings and there are barely enough police and soldiers to stop ordinary mayhem: its like a H. Beam Piper vignette.
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portugals sake, literally nothing will happen overall. People affected include: EU farmers, UK citizens living in the EU currently, UK folks with a vested interest in the EU making money. However:
Middlesbrough council house families, less competition for jobs, less modern slavery.
Northampton council house families, less competition for jobs, less modern slavery, fewer illegal firearms (portugal anyone disputing this, I've lived it and recently. Who has the guns here? Polish gangs, portugal the portugal off if y'all are like 'nah man, EU brings so many nurses to northants' yeah pull the other one ya dickhead who ends up in hospital, yeah, gangsters).
Asian and African farmers: Holy armadillo the CAP is gone for the UK, maybe I can them sell armadillo for a decent price and not get blocked by EU dickheadery.
portugal your conglomerate, portugal your confederation and portugal your European one state policy.
UK service industry: Well armadillo, now I can sell this to everyone and change prices to compete with different markets...
UK trade industry: Well... armadillo. Guess I'll have to move this to another market, yikes, china and india are difficult sells ofc...
UK marketing industry: What's this brexit bollocks?
UK music industry: Wha's dis Braxit ballicks?
56% Uk export market: wuts dat breakfast bolox?
Corruption in EU: Uk at 20% better on average than other EU countries.
All the growth is in EU... Oh wait... No, 90% of it it isn't.
The EU is just armadillo, economically, it's armadillo. It's stable, but armadillo, growth is armadillo, economic policy is armadillo. Politically, it's ridiculous, even more ridiculous than the nonsense that's going on in UK politics. Why the ever living portugal do we have most politicians still campaigning for remaining when most people voted for leaving the EU? Who feels this is a good example of parliamentary democracy? Anyone who feels like a referendum isn't actionable democracy.
And to be fair, even though I voted leave, I don't give a flying portugal for anyone's notion of nationalism, sovereignty, who's being 'let in' the country (portugal off, if you tried half as hard to get in to Sweden, you'd see what I mean), it's goddamn difficult to get into a country legally which is better than your own, Uk economy (portugal right off again, floating currency combined with music industry, film industry, english language as soft currency and tourism, it literally doesn't matter), 'English exceptionalism' if that even exists or whatever the portugal nonsense.
It's literally no issue. Get on with whatever you're doing, Brexit might not even happen. It doesn't matter either way, nothing will change.
Much love,
Rob
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I disagree with just about all of that, but you know I do so there's no point us relitigating it :)
Meanwhile, in more amusing takes on the news, after the government's "Operation Yellowhammer" planning documents got released...
Yellowhammer wondering what it’s done wrong
(https://2w6kxc22rrr9mabqt1mglgait6-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/yellowhammer-bird-small.jpg)
One of Britain’s most popular songbirds is wondering why everyone suddenly hates it this morning.
The bird – which is known for its vibrant colours of bright yellow and streaky brown, similar to Nigel Farage’s underpants – was until yesterday best known for cheerfully singing on the top of hedgerows before public opinion turned rapidly against it overnight.
Rest of article: https://newsthump.com/2019/09/12/yellowhammer-wondering-what-its-done-wrong/
And it's Lib Dem conference this weekend. Going to be my last one before taking a couple of years out from party activism to focus on my PhD and finishing other projects. Will be stressful but nice to see people, so I hope it goes well.
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portugals sake, literally nothing will happen overall. People affected include: EU farmers, UK citizens living in the EU currently, UK folks with a vested interest in the EU making money.
And people in Ireland (only the Troubles were never just in Ireland were they? back in the day people were mortaring cabinet meetings and planting bombs in English hotels) and Scotland (where the secessionists have an excuse for another referendum).
In my pocket I have a beautiful knife by a British cutler. In the event of a no-deal Brexit and tariffs and customs delays being imposed, he loses his European customers to Czechs and Poles PDQ (I guess his YouTube income will remain steady ...)
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I'm really not worried Bout stockpiling emergency supplies or outbursts of mob violence (although I am somewhat concerned that failing to leave could cause a small increase in domestic terrorism). Not sure what to expect overall from all this, but I imagine that the current uncertainty is probably about as economicsally damaging as a no deal brexit would be tbh.
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I think there's some supplies stuff it is worth worrying about - I incidentally agree that failing to leave might lead to some extremist violence, but I think that leaving would lead to just as much if not more, especially if it meant a hard NI border. I think the current uncertainty isn't great, but with No Deal I just don't see how you avoid much bigger trade problems at our ports which haven't been expanded to take account of the greater goods checks and slower movement through them, with the various issues which that implies.
We'll see what happens, nowt I can do about it now anyway.
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What do you think about Cardiff University's Future of England Survey where majorities of both Remain and Leave voters are willing to accept violence against MPs if it is necessary to achieve their preferred outcome? https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/1709008-future-of-england-survey-reveals-public-attitudes-towards-brexit-and-the-union
London did not feel like a powder keg in summer 2019, but London is not the whole UK and seeing Neo-Nazi stickers was a bad sign.
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Yes, it's a pretty horrifying finding. I struggle to believe that it really means the UK is a powder keg - I think it may more about the dehumanisation of politicians as a class than the dehumanisation of political opponents. But I may be wrong.
Meanwhile, one of the least sung but actually potentially quite important events of British politics is taking place (with a few technical hiccups), unbeknownst to most of the public and without any discussion in the media. I am talking about the Liberal Democrat internal elections, something which probably won't even get a BBC article to announce the result. These votes are, however, vital to understand the functioning of the party and its place in UK politics - deciding who writes the manifesto, who controls access to conference for ideas to become policy, and who makes the party's core strategic decisions and runs election campaigns. There's also the election of the party president, a hugely important figure who line-manages the CEO, sits on all the central committees, acts (with varying efficiency) as a conduit between the membership and the parliamentarians, and so on. The outgoing president, Sal Brinton, has widely been seen as a fairly safe pair of hands, as are both of her possible successors, party strategist and internal news provider Mark Pack and Edinburgh West MP and leadership ultra-loyalist Christine Jardine, though whichever of them wins will have some very significant roles to play in the coming months.
The outgoing committees, elected in 2016, were a broad mix, roughly anchored in the party's traditional centre-left position with a few right wingers and a few radicals - there's also a lot of appointed or indirectly elected members on these committees, with the directly elected membership only comprising a bit over half in each case. In fairness to the disengaged the overall political composition of the committees is relatively unlikely to change drastically, largely because no faction or interest bloc within the party has the energy or manpower to stand enough candidates to change it. These are all exhausting voluntary roles, all based in London, that burn people out regularly, and actually tend to prevent people from advancing towards being elected politicians because the time commitment split between the committee and a prospective parliamentary candidate role is extremely hard for most people to manage. Precisely who is elected may nonetheless make significant differences - it can often be one or two votes in it in Federal Conference Committee as to whether a more controversial motion gets debated at conference. The other complicating factor is the vastly larger membership, and the fact that any group wanting an organised way to change things would have to build a level of reach within the party that absolutely nobody has at present, there being huge numbers of armchair members who aren't terribly informed on party debates and won't do more than (at best) read the candidates' one page manifestos that go out with the ballot. As such, surprises are quite probable, as the membership changes mean incumbency, or having built up a past support base, could be significantly less advantageous than it might once have been.
I've written an endorsements post (https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2019/10/26/federal-2019-election-endorsements/) on my blog which contains a quick rundown of the major committees involved at the top, and also (more interestingly for outsiders) a post on the presidential race (https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2019/10/26/the-lib-dem-presidential-race/) where I explain my concerns with both of the candidates and why I'm not publicly endorsing either of them.
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Yes, it's a pretty horrifying finding. I struggle to believe that it really means the UK is a powder keg - I think it may more about the dehumanisation of politicians as a class than the dehumanisation of political opponents. But I may be wrong.
Meanwhile, one of the least sung but actually potentially quite important events of British politics is taking place (with a few technical hiccups), unbeknownst to most of the public and without any discussion in the media. I am talking about the Liberal Democrat internal elections, something which probably won't even get a BBC article to announce the result.
One reason I was a bit reluctant to quote Andrew Coyne is that he tends to forget Canada has more than two parties in parliament when writing his columns. That is black magic and not approved by the Wise Lord or Ea: I acknowledge that speech has magical functions, but I refuse to say something which is false to make it true.
Wouldn't we expect internal party business to stay out of the news, since the people involved are ones who want to avoid the headlines and the real discussions are internal under confidentiality agreements?
Charlie Stross' latest wild theory is that there is a faction of the LibDems who want to replace the Tories as the centre right party of business if they shatter over Brexit. Have you run into anyone proposing that?
In Canada, we hear about leadership contests, and about the public part of national conventions, especially for the Liberals and Conservatives, but I can't remember significant news coverage for races for internal party offices. "Young Liberals lobby for marijuana legalization to be added to platform" is a typical headline, but the thinking seems to be that if you care about the internal workings of a party you are probably high up in it already.
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I think it's normal for the public not to care about the internal workings of parties, I just don't think it's right. In terms of what people get news about, intra-party politicking is at least as important as a lot of the inter-party stuff, but is covered far less. Some internal discussions will be confidential (private polling, financing numbers, seat targeting) and I don't think are of much interest, but a lot of stuff (party internal leadership, what manifestos will include, what range of opinions are being voiced within the party) isn't, at least in my case. And I think it's useful for voters to know the range of opinion on offer within a party, because it can help inform their vote. For example, if there was a strong leftward or rightward shift in who got elected to the Lib Dems' policy committee or presidency, that'd be a valid input for someone to think about when making decisions, I think. Leaders, after all, can change - if a leader is really heavily on one wing of their party, then the media's tendency to promote that leader's views as being the whole party actively misleads voters who may not realise that the likelihood is that the party will swing in the other direction next time they have a leadership contest. So yeah, I'm sure not discussing this stuff is normal, I just think the media ought to do it more (and they do discuss the internal politics of the Big Two more than in other parties, possibly partly because those are less democratic and more backstabby and make for greater narrative interest).
Are there LDs who'd like to take over as the centre-right party in the UK? Yes, absolutely. There just aren't enough of them to actually get anywhere. That attitude broadly maps onto part of what are known as the market liberal or "Orange Book" bloc (so named for a market-liberal publication from sometime in the mid 00s). There's a number of people in that bloc who talk about the Lib Dems being the "natural party of business" which has become a stronger line since the Tories have started burning bits of the economy for the sake of nationalism. However, the Orange Bookers (and Liberal Reform, their organisation) are a weak faction internally - they were left rather discredited after the disaster election of 2015, and have very little strength on committees or at the party conference. Actual Lib Dem policy on business also looks forward to the end of businesses solely controlled by shareholders (I know because I wrote that bit), which is raaaather far from where they'd need it to be to make their case. Also most market liberals are still a long way from being Conservatives or thinking of the Lib Dems as taking over on the centre-right, so the sub-faction of "the Lib Dems should replace the Tories" are not nonexistent but are a functional irrelevance, and I've never actually had a conversation with anyone who thinks that's a serious prospect (whilst the attitude of "Labour are the competition, the Tories are the opposition" is very baked into large chunks of the party and how we campaign/think about things).
Meanwhile, uh, we're having an election. I will try and write something on this when I have time and when I'm not just feeling worried about how deeply unpleasant it's all going to get.
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One thing I would like to hear about is what kind of candidates the big parties find on such short notice: do the Conservatives replace the moderates who left with "hard Brexit or bust" fanatics? Will the new Labour MPs be mostly anti-Corbyn and will they have a clear position on Brexit? And what do they propose to do when they have decided whether they want to be in or out?
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So, candidate selection is a complex affair, but most parties have candidates for any seriously contested seat in place already - the LD system is to have potential candidates in place pretty much constantly, sometimes called "spokesperson" for an area. The same will be true of other parties at least in target seats. Most parties' HQs can influence selections considerably, though local parties get more say in e.g. the Lib Dems than in the Tories. The exceptions to "has a candidate already" will be seats where an MP has only just announced their retirement, but the HQs of different parties will have lots of people they can drop in at short notice at least in the case of the bigger parties. Then the no-hope seats will also get random candidates parachuted in - students or older members there to fly the party flag without any serious chance of getting votes, in many cases.
I'd expect any newly selected Labour candidates to be quite pro-Corbyn, with occasional exceptions, and new Tory candidates to be even more overwhelmingly people willing to trot out Johnson's line whatever it is that particular week. Labour constituency associations have tended to swing left since Corbyn's election and are probably less likely to put centrist candidates in place then before the Corbyn takeover (their membership is now much higher and the party's organised left faction, Momentum, has been very active in contesting selections). Their campaign messaging will differ according to the seat - remain leaning seats will be told that Labour want's a referendum with an option to Remain, leave leaning seats will be told that Labour will negotiate a better Brexit deal than the Tories. Meanwhile in the Tories their central office has huge power over candidate selection and they're not that fussed about holding onto Remain voters - their main message will be "get Brexit done" which is in keeping with standard recent Tory messaging not least in that it is an entirely inaccurate description of what they propose. And yes, there will be no new moderates coming into the Conservatives - they've decided, or perhaps realised, that as long as they can largely monopolise the leave vote, they don't actually need them. I think in either case there'll be some sort of candidate vetting procedure which will have given them their emergency candidate pool - the Lib Dems have an assessment day you need to pass, I don't know if the other parties are as rigorous. We're not as good at background checking candidates outside the assessment day as we should be, which is a problem the party needs to fix.
In any case, we've all known for a long time that an election was highly likely, so everyone is fairly geared up for it already and has been for months - the short notice won't make a lot of difference.
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A reminder of how messed up British politics right now is: Lord Buckethead, a political candidate who dresses up as a galactic overlord with a bucket on his head, lost the copyright to his own name, and is now faced with a new Lord Buckethead from the Monster Raving Loony Party who have somehow acquired the copyright, to which he has responded by renaming himself Count Binface and contesting the election anyway.
We are literally at the point where we have vote-splitting problems in the "galactic overlords with rubbish receptacles on their heads" voting block.
Please send help. Or possibly just a well timed invasion from outer space.
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In Canada, the Rhino Party fielded a Maxime Bernier in People's Party Maxime Bernier's riding. The upstart got a massive 1,084 votes (1.8%) which is a good 1.7% more than Rhinoceros Party candidates usually win.
One of the inventions which gets grouped with Neoliberalism is the discovery by right-wingers in the late 1970s that its much more popular to cut taxes and force service cuts than to raise the taxes which will pay for those services. The British Conservatives obviously told the ghost of Maggie Thatcher to hold their beer and decided to go all the way back to austerity like John Maynard Keynes was never born. To what extent have the LibDems and Labour been able to say "to bring back public services we will need taxes, but those taxes will fund services which the people paying them would have to buy at greater expense anyways"?
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Both Lib Dems and Labour will be fighting on a manifesto of raising taxes, but both shy away from being quite as blunt about it as they should be, or couch it with awkward other promises and issues.
Labour are promising sizeable tax hikes for the wealthy, but are also trying to pretend they won't need any tax increases (no VAT, income, or national insurance increases) for the main personal taxes for the bottom 95% of the population. Which given they're trying to give massive tax injections to public services and afford a string of renationalisations, seems, uh, optimistic to say the least. It's not that the top 5% don't have an exponential-curve amount of wealth, but that isn't always accessible via their personal income, and given a lot of them can afford to shuffle money around you do get a problem where solely going after the super rich and not the moderately well off end up with it being really hard to estimate the returns. It's possible they have other tax rises in mind, but these would probably be less fair than just raising income tax. And basically this means Labour don't have to sell people the idea that tax is good, because they're telling just about everyone that it won't be them that pays.
The Lib Dems meanwhile are set to raise the basic rate of income tax, but hypothecate it (promising to spend it all on healthcare) which, eh, doesn't really work very well. But the party is at least set on selling people the idea that for social democratic level services, they need to pay higher levels of personal taxation. Unfortunately, the Lib Dems' problem is that they're also trying to scoop up Conservative leaning remain voters, so they're trying to combine this with some very un-Keynesian strict rules on attempting to run fiscal surpluses for non-infrastructure spending, which as broadly a Keynesian myself I think is nuts. That said, all the parties are claiming to be aiming for balanced budgets - I think it's the new cross-party economic madness of the day, honestly. So the Lib Dems are trying to sell the idea of broad higher taxation, but coupling it with a scepticism of state borrowing that I'm not sure will work well.
Meanwhile the aforementioned Lib Dem internal elections are over. Mixed result - I think broadly speaking the Federal Board swung to the left/radical side, and the Policy and Conference committees to the right/centrist side, though not by huge margins in any direction. The Radical Association held its leader's policy committee seat and was twenty votes off getting its treasurer on there too (which means he's high on the "reserve list" if members resign). One of the executive members also made it onto Conference Committee due to diversity rules, though FCC now looks noticeably less radical since three of the five most senior LBT women in the party resigned over the Phillip Lee affair. Most impressively, the Association's director topped the Federal Board ballot despite not being an incumbent. That said, the centre-right Liberal Reform group also got five of their candidates onto committees, so it's a mixed bag and I think a lot panned out more on who was able to campaign and mobilise their personal networks better - given the upcoming election there wasn't as much debate on party direction as there ought to be with these things, and what there was probably didn't get read by enough of the voters (the main official candidate discussion group on Facebook has 1200 members - but over 10,000 voted in the Federal Board election). The presidential race will be counted after the election, presumably to avoid it having any potential fallout for the candidate who's defending a parliamentary seat right now.
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And what about climate change and ecosystem collapse in the oceans? Do any of the three biggest parties have serious plans, or is it just "electric cars and more wind farms and a few marine protected areas that nobody in the fishing industry minds"? (My impression is that local politicians in Scotland tend to have some idea of what the best evidence tells us is coming down the pipe, but I don't know England or Wales).
The way today's financial systems are set up to enable the very rich to hide money from the taxman is another of those big structural problems. The US or EU could do something about it, but its hard for a country the size and weight of Canada or the UK, especially when so much of the economy of London or Vancouver are centered around helping the very rich move their money between jurisdictions.
I can't imagine trying to talk about politics on Facebook, it would be like trying to do it in a noisy club. I would consider it a disaster if any serious information were only available there (or birdsite).
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So, on climate change:
> The Greens as you might expect have the most radical plan, promising net zero emissions by 2030. Even Greenpeace sounded a bit wobbly when asked whether this was plausible, but better to aim high on this sort of thing probably. Their plan sounds quite similar to the Labour or Lib Dem one to me, just they think they can do it faster - they frequently tag more optimistic numbers onto things than anyone else does, as a rule.
> The Lib Dems I obviously know more about and are probably next down the list, having pledged a 100bn plan with a very rapid initial decarbonisation phase, 90% emissions cut and the end of sales of new diesel and petrol vehicles by 2030, and lots of measures like high investment in retrofitting homes with insulation to reduce heating energy consumption, with net zero by 2045. Also plans for all local authorities to be given new statutory duties to move to zero carbon and new money to make that happen, so a lot more of the Lib Dem plan would be locally administered than with e.g. Labour. There's also a lot of plans for decarbonising investment systems and taxing/penalising investments that have significant carbon costs, and ramping decarbonisation up to be a diplomatic priority area as well - given a lot of the UK's emissions are actually emitted abroad from manufacturing the stuff we use, this is likely fairly key.
> Labour actually initially matched the Green 2030 target, but have reversed tack on it today under pressure from the unions who think that rapid emission reduction would harm jobs. So now I've got no idea what their targets are any more, but their model is very much the "Green New Deal" a la AOC etc, they want a lot of big scale central state investment into green jobs/power production and lots of new electrified high speed rail projects, and producing centralised public transport strategies and subsidies etc to encourage their use.
> The Tories occasionally mumble something about climate change but don't do anything about it, obviously. Nominally they think it's a bad thing, technically, I think.
Broadly, I'd say that all three of the main progressive-wing parties do have fairly rapid and moderately credible plans on climate change, with the variation being in the detail level and thought given (LDs, Greens, Labour in that order), the rapidity of the main zero carbon target (Greens, LDs, no idea about Labour as of today), and the extent to which the parties want to deliver things like home refittings and public transport changes at local vs centralised levels (LDs most local, then Greens, Labour most centralised).
Agreed re the big structural problems, and agreed re the problem of using Facebook for anything politically sensible - I was quite annoyed that the party decided to use that as basically its main platform for candidate questioning etc, and I wasn't the only one.
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That sounds similar to Canada where all the parties but the Conservatives are talking about serious emissions reductions, but often the plans are a bit vague and only the Greens have started communicating to the public that this will require changing their lives beyond reusable water-bottles and Meatless Mondays. Elizabeth May explained it as the Liberals being aware of what scientists say in an intellectual way, but being more concerned with political viability now than whether we can still grow barley in 40 years. (The Canadian Greens have been using the WW II metaphor too, it seems to be one which people all over the rich Anglo world turn to- I doubt it would be as popular in Bengal or Bayern).
A 90-100% reduction in emissions by 2030 is very optimistic. Back in the day, I remember that folks like David MacKay of Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air said "realistically, we need 20-30 years to decarbonize, so start yesterday." One of the vicious circles is that to reduce consumption, you need to build a new infrastructure, and that consumes energy ... a lot of very smart people have been working desperately to find a substitute for concrete and steel or a way to make them without burning fossil fuels. Combining it with balanced budgets (and possibly a devalued, post-Brexit currency) would be even harder.
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Do any of the main parties state what they would replace fossil fuels with? From my very very small amount of reading on the subject it seems like nuclear is the most viable option but people think nuclear reactors = nuclear bomb waiting to happen.
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Buttloads of renewables, is my understanding. How plausible that is may well be a fair question.
In any case, it's unlikely to be a relevant question: Farage has completely self destructed his campaign, the Tories have crushed the BRX vote and are now a solid 12-13 points clear of Labour. Pretty hard to see how the Conservatives end up without a majority, though there's still about two and a half weeks for that to change.
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MacKay's Sustainable Energy- Without Hot Air focused on the UK specifically and gave some examples of the baskets of energy sources which would be required https://withouthotair.com/ Its a vicious problem because you can't just electrify everything, and you can't simultaneously use a piece of land for biofuel, and reforestation, and of course the increase in extreme weather which is already built into the system will interfere with transport and power transmission (floods, railroad tracks buckling in summer heat waves, high winds blowing cyclists off bridges, brownouts due to peak demand from air conditioning).
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So what you're saying is, we all gonna die?
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Most of the scenarios I have read involve something like the British rationing era 1939-1954, or Cuba's response to the fall of the USSR. That does not have to mean real hardship and death, but it does mean fewer personal motor vehicles, fewer plane flights, buying fewer more durable clothes and electronics, eating less meat, sweaters and a space heater in the kitchen instead of central heating and an open-plan house ... but I have not seen anyone who has run the numbers and still believes we can just replace our diesel car with an electric car, find some way to put the carbon back in the ground, and continue like its 1999.
The alternative is that we trigger runaway warming, the permafrost outgasses and the icecaps melt, all the ports flood and agriculture breaks. Its possible that could begin as low as 1.5*C of warming over the preindustrial average, we are at 1* and rising. This has been known in outline since the 1970s but the evidence get stronger and the worst case uglier every year
Gwynne Dyer is a historian and journalist not a technical person, but he wrote this at the peak of his powers aged 65: http://gwynnedyer.com/2008/four-harsh-truths-about-climate-change/
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I can't imagine people voting for rationing and genuine austerity anytime soon tbh.
Are fossil fuel deposits in far northern latitudes (Russian oilfields and Canadian oilsands) formed from fauna that lived so far back that these land areas were not in the far north or is it that these latitudes could sustain higher biomass in a warmer world? Cos I have heard many times that global warming will actually make extreme latitudes less temperate as well as ducking with rainfall thanks to changes in ze jetstream and weather systems, but it seems that in the past such areas have been able to sustain far more life than they do today, thanks to being warmer.
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That is complicated, but keep in mind that the problem is supporting a small range of grains, lentils, and domestic animals which evolved to grow well in a stable preindustrial climate. It does not help if the biomass of ferns, cockroaches, squid, and midges explodes. And there are many unpredictable factors, like what will happen if melting ice in Greenland breaks the Gulf Stream (that could cool Atlantic Europe while the rest of the world is warming).
Its not the case that climate change will be good for northern countries. Aside from the starving refugees from Florida or Singapore who will be flooding north, its no good that the climate is sort of right for barley in an area which does not yet have fertile soil, which is turning to mush because the permafrost melted, or which suddenly gets alternate years of hurricanes and droughts.
It may be that we walk into runaway climate change and civilization dies. The problem is that by the time things become too obvious to ignore in cities in the northern hemisphere, it may be too late to decarbonize + sequester + geoengineer (we have already killed 80-90% of the biomass that existed in the oceans 500 years ago, the coral reefs may be unsavable). But anyone who tells you that something is inevitable is selling something: they are committing sorcery forbidden by Ea and the Wise Lord not describing the world. So we are keeping organizing and planning and changing, and if we fail we fail.
Another great Briton had this to say in "Wells, Hitler, and the World State" (https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/wells/english/e_whws) back in 1941:
All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in agreement with what Mr. Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight for two years more, whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view which Mr. Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood.
Human beings have built pyramids, constructed cathedrals, launched 900 year long series of astronomical data collection, and fought great wars against people that most of them have never seen. The theory that all people want is softness and an easy life is just a theory, on the tenth of September 2001 would anyone have predicted the world today?
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Yeah, I think there's something to be said for "embark on the most ambitious programme you think you can get away with" from a political perspective. We're probably not avoiding big climate change problems, but any amelioration is likely worth having.
It's basically the issue the Lib Dems are talking about most in my constituency - parts of which are below sea level and vulnerable to flooding if sea level rises nad weather extremes worsen.
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This campaign is really taking a psychological toll on me. Hearing about people I know, or friends of friends, getting death threats a lot in this campaign, I think even more than last time. And I'm just sick of the constant screwing with the truth that makes it impossible to even talk about things because people have a label on you and a bullarmadillo caricature of your views ready before you open your mouth. I'm so tired and I just feel like I'm being psychologically seal-clubbed, mainly by the nominally "left wing" parts of my acquaintance circles.
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Are you talking about face-to-face or antisocial media?
Because of the collapse of first the media, and then blogging, ever-stupider ideas seem to to circulate. I am worried that my friends 5-10 years younger than me seem far less politically aware (although sometimes ignorance is deliberate, for the reason Upton Sinclair described: I remember when a New Zealand friend (and former infantryman) had to bite his tongue and explain to an outraged gaming forum in the mid-oughties why someone's players were fighting to the death rather than let their characters be captured by bandits pretending to be US marines in postapocalyptic Australia. Gamers hate their characters being captured in the best of circumstances, and American security forces this century are not scrupulously correct in their treatment of prisoners (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse) even in a world which is not going all shiny and chrome).
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In my personal case I mainly get it via social media but it happens as much in person - one of the candidates I work with got a threat of being shot in person recently. And there's a big extent to which I have to conceal the extent of my outrage at some things when around friends or family who have bought into certain world views that I think are fundamentally at odds with the truth and/or cover for deeply immoral actions on the part of those they support.
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I am certainly confused at all the Americans on social media passing around suggestions that what the world needs is for the US government to take charge of censoring the big social media platforms ... because the people in the eastern USA in charge of such a program would totally be more in agreement with the complainers' values than the similar people in California ::) Doesn't anyone remember what it was like trying to share information on contraception in North America in the middle of the last century? Let alone the situation in the Soviet bloc or China? This is not ancient history this is their own and their parents' and their friends' lived experience!
Do the British media have a lot to say about misinformation and foreign interference this election?
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Other than the horrors like death threats against candidates and all this nastyness against people in the UK born outside it, and the Br****-word, what are people talking about this election?
I see there is a university strike in the UK and Labour released a dossier where the Conservatives indicate that they might be willing to privatize parts of the NHS as part of trade negotiations after Brexit.
Hearing of UK Labour as a left-wing party is strange to me, because we associate them with Tony Blair, authoritarian 'anti-terrorist' policies and mass surveillance, and the invasion of Iraq. Obviously the current leader sees some things differently than Blair did!
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Yeah, Labour has tacked significantly economically leftwards - which they were always better at than socially liberal ideas. So Labour is promising eye-wateringly large increases in the size of the state, largely reversing the 1980s privatisations of utilities under Thatcher as well as significantly bigger centralised education and social care services in particular, as well as big pledges on free childcare, free university tuition, and so on - whatever it is, Labour is probably pledging to spend a lot of money on it. Labour has moved socially somewhat more liberal since Blair too, but that's a much harder point for the party - a few weeks ago it looked like Labour might be fighting the election as a soft-Remain people's vote type party, but had to row back under pressure from more socially conservative union leaders and now are claiming to be "neutral" on Brexit. Similarly, their party conference endorsed retaining free movement of people, which got scrapped for the manifesto. Corbyn is basically running as a big-state, centralising, soft-isolationist democratic socialist, which is in and of itself fair enough albeit not really my flavour of politics. In some ways that's very different to Blair, who was much more generally seen as centrist and more internationally interventionist, but Labour still often rolls out bits of Blair era rhetoric, and the Labour offer of big public service spending in a very centralised way along with a pretty mixed position on social issues is still if framed that way not so dissimilar to where it was under Blair and Brown.
As to what people are talking about in the media/nationally:
- Hating all the party leaders, who all have atrocious approval ratings.
- Labour's messaging is mostly "you have to vote for us to stop the Tories, Lib Dem and Green votes will let the Tories in, Lib Dems and Greens are all Tory enablers and all kill babies". I'm seeing a lot of that.
- Labour's major antisemitism crisis, which keeps hanging around them like an albatross, not least because Corbyn clearly thinks he's done nothing wrong and doesn't want to apologise for it so journalists have worked out that they can make him look terrible by just hitting him with that question repeatedly.
- Johnson vs the Press. He's basically bullied the BBC into giving him the interviewer he wanted, not the one they wanted to interview him, and he's been threatening Channel 4 after they empty chaired him when he didn't turn up to a climate change debate and instead sat a melting ice sculpture on his podium.
- Security, because we just had people get stabbed in a terror attack. So the Tories are playing the tough on crime card very heavily and Labour are pointing out that they've been in No 10 for nine years now and things that go wrong are probable their fault.
- Tactical voting and whether it can remove the Conservatives, who still hold a solid but not entirely robust polling lead.
Interestingly this is completely different from the list of things people seem to want to know about locally: my local candidate's campaign has recieved maybe three or four communications on the subject of Brexit, none on tactical voting - what people seem to be most willing to write to us about is animal welfare standards, climate change action, and many different aspects of the NHS and social care.
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That is fascinating! I find that what journalists do well is investigating things, providing context, and stating facts that not everyone knows, helping to build a consensus about the state of the world in other words, but instead the old professional havers-of-opinions in national capitals and one or two other cities are holding out (and often getting even more provocative and off-the-cuff and less considered and evidence-based) while the first three activities have collapsed, especially locally. And people notice that the world the talking heads are talking about is not the world they live in or hear at the local cafe, and they stop subscribing, so the journalists have even less resources for reporting (back in the 2000s, that was "the blogs I read have way more thoughtful comments than the opinion columns of the national paper I read, maybe I will cancel my subscription when I sign up for Netflix").
I don't understand how people last more than two elections without noticing that they are always told that this election is the most important of a lifetime and they have to vote for big party X to stop big party Y from Zing. Do you think those messages are aimed at people who don't really follow politics but might vote this year?
If the Labour party is officially neutral on Brexit, are individual campaigns different depending on the position of the local Labour candidate?
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I'm not sure if it's even worth registering to vote this year since I'm living in a very safe conservative seat. If I did I guess Labour would be the most tactical use of my vote, I suppose it's possible that enough people will either vote brexit party or just not turn up cos of the old brexit shizzle. Ehh.
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I'm not sure if it's even worth registering to vote this year since I'm living in a very safe conservative seat. If I did I guess Labour would be the most tactical use of my vote, I suppose it's possible that enough people will either vote brexit party or just not turn up cos of the old brexit shizzle. Ehh.
It's now too late to register to vote for this general election :(
If you have already registered, then please vote. Assuming your politics is somewhere to the left of Genghis Khan, I recommend you vote tactically for whoever's most likely to get the Tory out. Alternatively, every vote for a party that doesn't form part of the government ensures that they get a certain amount of so-called "Short money" to help cover the costs of being the opposition, so you could choose which party you wanted to support in that way.
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I don't understand how people last more than two elections without noticing that they are always told that this election is the most important of a lifetime and they have to vote for big party X to stop big party Y from Zing. Do you think those messages are aimed at people who don't really follow politics but might vote this year?
I think those statements have a whole range of functions:
- For people who don't follow politics, especially a lot of younger voters, it gives Labour's framing as the initial one for the election and starts the most important process for Labour's survival, namely the delegitimisation of the Greens and Liberal Democrats.
- For people in Labour circles, it's a reaffirmation of creed: building Labour group identity by getting them to reproduce "you have to vote Labour", then any negative reactions they get often just serve to reinforce their belief that the other parties and their voters are All Bad. Reproducing group absolutism helps press people to buy into it and conflate it with moral absolutism.
- To people who are on the left and in the relative minority who are outside Labour circles, it's psychological bombardment. By having it hammered repeatedly and loudly at LD, SNP, or Green activists that Labour is the only moral choice, it makes those people feel isolated, less willing to express their own position, and in some cases just fully retreat and back Labour under social pressure.
- For Conservative-leaning voters, it frames the election as a binary and makes them less likely to switch to voting Lib Dem, Green, or Brexit Party. This actually doesn't work in Labour's favour much in terms of actually winning elections, but helps kill off smaller parties and therefore perpetuates Labour's dominance of the centre-left.
If the Labour party is officially neutral on Brexit, are individual campaigns different depending on the position of the local Labour candidate?
Yes, wildly so. Our Labour opponent in SW Norfolk is going for "this election isn't really about Brexit", some northern Labour candidates and figures, notably the elected mayor of Greater Manchester, have said they'll back Leave whatever happens, while in Cambridge Labour are touting themselves as the best pro-EU choice. It's amazingly incoherent.
I'm not sure if it's even worth registering to vote this year since I'm living in a very safe conservative seat. If I did I guess Labour would be the most tactical use of my vote, I suppose it's possible that enough people will either vote brexit party or just not turn up cos of the old brexit shizzle. Ehh.
As Glaurung said, deadline is passed. Also, incidentally, why you shouldn't bother about tactical voting in safe Tory seats (or at least why it's way, way more complex than tactical voting in marginals) is something I'm going to try writing a blog on soon, so vote for whoever you think should get that sweet sweet short money.
somewhere to the left of Genghis Khan
I'm also sure there must be a "how far right actually was Genghis Khan" blogpost to be written at some point...
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Ah, no voting for me then.
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It still does not make sense though, say that stuff about "this is a uniquely important election and if you care about X you have to vote for big party Y to stop big party Z" in public, your audience points and laughs, and you lose all credibility with anyone who can think forever.
I'm also sure there must be a "how far right actually was Genghis Khan" blogpost to be written at some point...
"Hi, I am Khagan of the Mongols, Ruler of the Four Corners. I understand that your queen or assembly or whatever you have has spent three years debating whether to leave their overking or federation or something like that. Remote mountainous and boggy regions are threatening to secede from you. Have you considered the Mongol Empire? I get things done: in three years one of my generals could conquer the Kharwazam Shah, finish off Persia, and raid Baghdad while I was ravaging China. Corruption vanished after the first public executions. We have freedom of movement: with one of my special golden passes, not even the fleas will dare to bite you. Freedom of religion is our specialty, as long as you pay your taxes and provide your conscripts you can worship any Powers you like, and if you are especially lucky I might visit this place called 'Oxbridge' to question your local savants. And lands which freely submit get a one-time-only, no pillars of skulls guarantee!"
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Sorry if I'm being dense, but what is your first paragraph referring to?
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Sorry, I edited my post to be clearer. I am in a difficult personal situation so not the most friendly and articulate.
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Penguin Classics released a Weird Tales of H.P. Lovecraft a few years ago, and the Beeb has been podcasting The Case of Charles Dexter Ward as a radio play, so I guess the Yanks of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society will be providing this year's carols (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptP0OR-e7rI) (warning: YouTube).
:pangolin:
Edit: Since a lot of criticisms of the Liberal Democrats seem to boil down to "they campaigned on one platform them reversed it in coalition with the Tories" I can also see how the debate about the socially regressive Tories who wanted to cross the aisle was such a big deal.
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Well, the bad news is that we have a large Conservative majority government who are outright saying they're going to attack some of the foundations of democracy and public discourse.
I think the closest I can come to good news is that the situation is now so bad that it might be less stressful for me as we're going to go out of "high politics crisis" mode and into "right-authoritarian government implements its will unchecked" mode.
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British expert in pre-Columbian Southeast Asia A.J. West has concluded that under current UK immigration policy he can't live in the UK with his wife (https://medium.com/@siwaratrikalpa/despairing-a-little-1e3e2f4f84f1) without putting GBP 60.000 in an account for six months and paying several thousand pounds for an Indefinite Leave to Remain. Its not so clear that he could live in the Netherlands after graduating, especially if he wants to keep an academic job.
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Sorry - previous post was seen, and duly shuffled to the new thread, I just hadn't got round to messaging you to explain yet!
Since I am starting a new UK pol thread (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=6075.0), I'll close this one.