Exilian

Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter => Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza => Topic started by: Jubal on February 01, 2020, 10:22:33 PM

Title: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on February 01, 2020, 10:22:33 PM
Well here we are - the day of infamy/destiny has happened, and now we buckle in and see what happens next.

In practical terms, the UK now has one year of regulatory alignment in which nothing changes and everyone probably gets lulled into a false sense of security, and the government has to panic over a new trade deal (and replacing all the UK's other EU-linked trade deals). And then... we'll see. The noises from the UK government are currently heavily against regulatory alignment of any kind, but the less we have of it, the less trade we get. After the December election the parliamentary stuff at our end will be easy, but it's now all on PM Johnson to try and deliver on his promises - or more accurately on what his voters feel like they were promised, which may not be the same thing at all. There's still a lot that's unclear about the UK's world role outside the EU - integration has been been central to Britain's post-war strategy since the 1960s and it's not clear where we sit without it, especially as our relationships with the Commonwealth and the US were predicated economically on the UK being a gateway to the EU market, which it won't be any more.

Meanwhile the opposition: two leadership elections (first Labour, then the Lib Dems) are coming up. Labour's is first, between former public prosecutor and Brexit spokesman Keir Starmer, Corbynite left-loyalist Rebecca Long-Bailey, longstanding shadow cabinet member Emily Thornberry, and northern, slightly more Eurosceptic backbencher Lisa Nandy. Starmer is basically running as "elect a sensible, slightly less left wing man who looks and sounds like people expect a Prime Minister to", Nandy is running on a fairly strong "reconnect with lost small-town voters but also be modestly socially liberal" platform, and RLB is running on "Corbyn was great and we should keep doing that". Honestly no idea what the Thornberry pitch is. My expectation is that Starmer will win - Labour are clearly now desperate for a winning candidate. The LD race I can do in more detail but I'll leave to a later post.

Finally worth noting: a poll recently put Yes ahead on a "should Scotland be independent" question and the SNP are heavilly lobbying for a new referendum, Northern Ireland has major upcoming problems with a customs border set to run down the Irish Sea, and Spain has reiterated that the status of Gibraltar will be on the table in the upcoming trade negotiations. Outside England, there are some serious problems brewing for the Johnson government, and how those will be solved, if at all, is still something of a mystery.
Title: Re: UK politics 2019
Post by: dubsartur on February 02, 2020, 05:49:24 PM
A.J. West, a British scholar of pre-Columbian Southeast Asia (https://medium.com/@siwaratrikalpa/despairing-a-little-1e3e2f4f84f1), can't live in the UK with his wife without putting 60.000 GBP in a bank account for six months and paying several thousand GBP for an Indefinite Leave to Remain.  (He also gambled on starting a PhD in the Netherlands without funding, and the dice turned against him; I rolled a Venus and got federal government funding from my home country).  In Austria you need some money in an account to immigrate without family ties but not so much.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on February 02, 2020, 06:48:54 PM
Merged post from the 2019 topic into the more recent newer topic

And yeah, the high and increasing wealth and income barriers for UK migrants are going to be an increasing problem in the coming years. It's a horrible system. :(
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on February 02, 2020, 08:53:12 PM
That is OK!  I thought maybe I deleted the tab without posting it since I did not see it and did not see a warning/message.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on February 02, 2020, 09:28:19 PM
Yes, sorry, that was just me half-doing the moving job and then forgetting about it. D'oh.

Interesting UK oddments lately:

Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on February 05, 2020, 08:03:36 PM
Humh, I will put that on my queue for after I have finally finished some job applications.

Macleans, the main magazine of opinion-pieces on politics in Canada, has an article on BC privacy law and custom as its likely to affect the Sussexes (https://www.macleans.ca/royalty/how-much-privacy-harry-and-meghan-can-realistically-expect-in-canada/) ("BC Civil Liberties Association" is another good keyphrase).  People who hang around Parliament Hill say there are plenty of people who know which Conservative cabinet ministers are gay or who is in the middle of breaking up with their significant other but Canadians normally treat that as a private matter rather than splash it all over the headlines.  Political gossip is more often about who is likely to run for party leader, why there are so many cabinet ministers with overlapping magisteria, and so on.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on February 16, 2020, 12:48:01 PM
Emily Thornberry is out of the Labour leadership race, so only Lisa Nandy, Keir Starmer, and Rebecca Long-Bailey will be on the final ballot. My suspicion is that Starmer will win handily.

Meanwhile the government is working on kneecapping the BBC, hardly unexpectedly. They also managed to lose the Chancellor mid-week: the Prime Minister demanded he fire all his advisors and report to a new joint advisory unit led by Downing Street, and he resigned saying that no self-respecting politician would have agreed. What this says about his successor Rishi Sunak may be left as an exercise for the reader. Oh, and those Downing Street joint advisory blocks appear to include at least one straight-up eugenicist which is causing some consternation. It's all really Very Bad Indeed.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on February 24, 2020, 09:13:47 PM
Apparently there is a strike at 74 UK universities, after the last one at 60.  What should I be reading?

On the subject of attacks on media, is there a guide to what happened to the Times of London, and how it went from a "standard daily read for the universitied" to something nobody outside the UK notices?
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on February 24, 2020, 09:29:01 PM
I don't know, I'm very out of the loop on UK campus politics. I have heard friends worrying that the union has overplayed its hand and that there will be significant strike-breaking and hardship to younger and non-tenured staff as a result of the strikes - it's now very difficult to make that sort of industrial action work well. Part of the problem stems from the heavy businessisation of universities - and I say that rather than marketisation advisedly. It's not so much that universities actually have signficant marketisation in the sense of them having significant competitive pressures on them, most of them don't. But most of them are increasingly being run as if they were by people with private sector experience who like building stuff and have a very bad incentive structure around them, which incentivises attracting private sector investment far too heavily and doesn't really incentivise doing any of the actual work a university ought to do. Frankly they should really be mutualised and run between students, academics, and staff, but nobody's going to do that any time soon. But yes, I wish the strikers all the best and fully support them, but I'm not up to date on the precise dispute details.

I think the Times has fallen out of circulation for a number of reasons. Partly they've handled the online move less well than they might have done - they're paywalled heavily, as I recall, which tends to push their message to a smaller and more elite/wealthy readership. They're also part of the Murdoch stable, and broadly centre-right in their leanings, and the UK's intelligentsia have shifted left over the course of my lifetime (the archetype intelligentsia seat, Cambridge, had a Tory MP as recently as the early 1990s: despite the city's significant wealth, that would be unthinkable now). The modern university-educated reader is reading news online and not wanting to pay for it: the wealthier parts of the Conservative readership have stuck with the Telegraph, and the Times is somewhat caught in the middle I think. I don't know of anything good written on the phenomenon though. But even inside the UK it's not something we notice much any more, increasingly I'd say.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on April 06, 2020, 11:30:30 PM
A government minister recently threatened to ban all outdoor exercise, and the opposition said they'd agree to it if he did. I wrote an article on why that was stupidly counterproductive all round:
https://www.libdemvoice.org/threats-to-ban-outdoor-exercise-are-dangerous-and-show-us-our-mission-now-63993.html


Meanwhile Prime Minister Boris Johnson is in intensive care for Coronavirus. He is reportedly not yet needing a ventilator, but certainly he's not in a good way.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Tusky on April 07, 2020, 07:44:54 AM
A government minister recently threatened to ban all outdoor exercise, and the opposition said they'd agree to it if he did. I wrote an article on why that was stupidly counterproductive all round:
https://www.libdemvoice.org/threats-to-ban-outdoor-exercise-are-dangerous-and-show-us-our-mission-now-63993.html

Thoroughly agree, I think people that are adhering to the rules and getting some excercise is probably not contributing to the problem very much (although that is just an opinion). It is what they have already done in Spain and Italy though, I think. Maybe one reason for it is to be seen to be doing as much as possible in the "fight". I would be very annoyed if they did ban excercise. I also agree that it would put strain on the NHS in other ways such as those you point out: abusive relationships and mental health. There is also the impact that a lack of excercise on a large proportion of the populace would have further down the line in terms of obesity levels etc.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on April 11, 2020, 08:08:40 PM
People in the UK, is it only from abroad that UK news coverage feels super creepily weird right now? Like, when Italy and Spain were clocking up the sorts of death tolls the UK is now exceeding, it was portrayed in the UK media as unimaginable horror and catastrophe, and now it's happening in the UK and NHS staff are dying for lack of PPE it's... just not being treated like that at all, it seems? Everyone keeps saying "well maybe it'll level off soon" even as the active case numbers keep going up pretty fast, and from a lot of the reports you'd think everything was much more in hand than the death statistics indicate.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Gmd on April 14, 2020, 12:22:03 AM
The media reaction here has been catastrophically bad. An entire media more concerned about Boris being ok, than nearly 1k deaths in 1 day is absolutely horrific. Sure i wish Boris well, as i would wish anyone well with this virus, but the media is completely now playing that he is beyond criticism for his governments response, because he's "witnessed it first hand", this is unacceptable. He is not beyond criticism for his delayed response, especially after he has witnessed that the NHS is under such a huge strain and everyone is forgetting that his is caused due to years for privatisation, underfunding and mismanagement, actively encouraged by the conservative party.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on April 14, 2020, 04:08:26 PM
People in the UK, is it only from abroad that UK news coverage feels super creepily weird right now? Like, when Italy and Spain were clocking up the sorts of death tolls the UK is now exceeding, it was portrayed in the UK media as unimaginable horror and catastrophe, and now it's happening in the UK and NHS staff are dying for lack of PPE it's... just not being treated like that at all, it seems? Everyone keeps saying "well maybe it'll level off soon" even as the active case numbers keep going up pretty fast, and from a lot of the reports you'd think everything was much more in hand than the death statistics indicate.
The only British media I follow these days is the Guardian (and that not so regularly, the online site makes it so hard to separate the news from clickbaity opinion pieces) but I have watched a few US and UK sources sink back to staring at themselves, reporting policies introduced in South Korea in January as something exciting and new and discovering asymptotic transmission at the end of March not the start of February when it appeared on preprint servers and American blogs.  The quick rise of the death rate is very sad even though much of that is not identifying infected people earlier.

They printed the thing about the Johnson government missing three chances to join a large EU purchase of PPE.

How is the talk about re-opening parliament going?  Or the new Labour leader's position with respect to the Tories?

Could someone give me background on Simon Jenkins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Jenkins), the elderly columnist with an arts background who wrote a piece on the theme "the evidence is not good enough to justify sending everyone home" in early March and then a series defending his own judgement?  There are all kinds of uncertainties, but as with climate science, things could easily be worse than the 'safe middle ground' projections from scientists!
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on April 14, 2020, 05:04:36 PM
Jenkins is something of an oddity in that he is fairly genuinely untroubled by things like "what literally anyone else thinks on  the matter" which tend to be a concern for most opinion writers - he's one of the more idiosyncratic columnists out there, I'd say, and relatively hard to pigeonhole.

I don't really know what's going on with Labour, though apparently some new report from the party's left which seeks to actively prove that the right wing of the party were sabotaging them in 2017's election has been leaked or released or something, which is only going to reignite their internal tensions. Keir Starmer is quite an instinctive authoritarian, and will probably stand up to the government modestly well on general competency issues but less well on e.g. civil liberties or looking

One thing that's notable is that a large proportion of the UK's death spike at the moment is not formally coronavirus: whether this is due to unreported Coronavirus or to other lockdown death causes/people being scared of going to hospital when they need to is unclear.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on April 14, 2020, 06:38:35 PM
That is what the Spanish and the mayor of Nembro near Bergamo found: death rates were 3-5 times normal, of which 1 was the normal death rate, 1 was deaths attributed to covid-19, and the other 1-3 was unknown but probably a lot of cases of coronavirus.  And there is no way to sort this out except researching one jurisdiction at a time to understand how they define their terms and who gets tested and how statistics from lower levels of government are combined into regional and national totals.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on May 10, 2020, 03:32:30 PM
The UK's VE day celebrations (note, this isn't something we usually celebrate, but the Tories moved the May Day bank holiday to VE day this year) seem to have included a lot of street parties and even conga lines, which presumably will be really quite bad from a virus perspective :(

The UK's home media seem to just be in denial about how badly everything is going still. It's very upsetting to watch.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on May 11, 2020, 10:11:23 PM
Looking at the WHO situation report https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reports/, I am seeing similar numbers of confirmed cases and deaths in the UK, Italy, and Spain despite the epidemic in the UK starting later.  And the UK government seems to have just recommended face masks on public transit which is a month later than Austria.

It also looks like it will continue to be rough for British universities, which I imagine depended quite heavily on tuition fees from international students, many of them from East Asia (and of course their EU funds have been in danger since the Brexit referendum).  Since I got a PhD at the end of 2018 and am looking for work in my field (and have friends at universities there) this makes me  :o

I have one friend who works at the Open University in the UK (a web-based distance learning institution) and they are probably doing better than most. 
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on May 26, 2020, 11:33:46 PM
The biggest surprise of the scandal around the PM's overmighty chief advisor breaking lockdown is that the UK is starting to react to it like an actual scandal - the press have knives out for Johnson and a minister has resigned over the issue. It feels weirdly like scandals used to feel back when I first remember being interested in politics: the government really taking noticeable political damage and, importantly, not having anyone else to really deflect onto. This may be part of the thing of having a secure majority government for the first time in a long time, the tabloids are now lacking targets outside the government to fire at and, in need of fuel to sell papers, are forced to turn their fire inwards.

Meanwhile Labour's numbers have been creeping up but not surging since Keir Starmer became leader, as much at the expense of the Liberal Democrats as of the Conservatives.

The Lib Dems have finally announced our leadership contest timings, which will be August through to September. Wera Hobhouse and Layla Moran have signalled their intention to run and Ed Davey is widely expected to do likewise: new MP Daisy Cooper was touted as a possible candidate and is known to be ambitious enough to want the job, but has backed out this time. Of the candidates, Hobhouse is running on a strategy of explicitly hugging Labour much more tightly and avoiding talk of "equidistance", though she's probably one of the less lefty candidates economically - she's also probably one of the most hardline Europhiles of the candidates. Without Cooper running, Moran is pretty clearly the candidate of the party's radical wing and probably of its centre-left more widely, she's very strongly socially liberal and is going to have minimum income as a core of her campaign strategy. She's also probably the candidate who invests most in the idea of member-led politics: I'm very much a shouty voice in the party for democratic policymaking, and Layla reliably comes across as at least as committed to it as I am which is rare in senior party figures. He main drawback is a known past arrest over a household dispute where she lashed out physically at an ex-boyfriend: she wasn't charged and both she and her ex-partner say they've moved on, but it's the sort of thing the press can get their teeth into and Davey supporters have been making jabs about her having baggage. Ed Davey is the most establishment of the three candidates, and has the longest political CV by a mile, and will basically be running as the safest pair of hands, though he's also being explicitly pro minimum income as a play for the party's left. He's known for being quite a hardball dealer with Conservatives in coalition where he was Energy and Climate Change minister, though he's equally been heavily criticised within the party for being too willing to defend coalition-era spending cuts.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on May 31, 2020, 12:07:01 PM
I heard that even the Daily Mail came out against Dominic Cummings' decision to drive to a tourist spot during the stay-at-home order while feeling unwell/planning to visit his elderly parents at their home?
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on May 31, 2020, 12:58:05 PM
Yes - I think that's a mix of the lack of non-Tory targets to fire at, and the DM changing key editorial staff in the last year or two; they seem to be slowly shifting to be more "screw the lot of you" about politicians as opposed to just "screw the left, the right are lovely anti-establishment darlings".
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on May 31, 2020, 02:06:27 PM
That kind of political nihilism, government-is-of-the-problem (which somehow exempts the current way of doing things from critique) has been popular in the USA lately too.

Canadian Prime Ministers these days also acquire these un-elected and press-shy advisors who do things which elected MPs would have done a hundred years ago.  Trudeau II lost one, Gerald Butts, over the SNC Lavalin affair.  On the other hand, petitioning the prince to depose his wicked advisor is a traditional human thing, it gives the prince a way to back down and the people to get what they want while keeping "do we need a prince?" off the table.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on June 07, 2020, 11:15:52 AM
Yes, the UK has seen a number of "target the evil advisor" in recent years...

One major row in the UK right now is that the Government has mostly ended the virtual parliament rules, meaning  that parliamentarians are required to go to Westminster to vote. With hundreds of deaths still being recorded from Coronavirus, this has caused considerable outrage. The most prominent case that has been brought up - especially because the government is refusing to even put in an exception for his case - is that of Jamie Stone MP, who is a carer for his disabled wife: if he were to go and stay in London she'd be without care, if he commuted - and bear in mind this is a commute to Caithness, Sutherland, and Easter Ross, the northernmost UK constituency - it would break shielding for her, not to mention that the Highlands have come away fairly unscathed from the virus so far. So the people of northern Scotland aren't getting to vote in any parliamentary votes right now, because they could only do so if their MP was willing to risk killing his wife. It's a horrific situation.

In recent weeks Labour seem to be continuing to climb at Johnson's expense with the other parties flatlining well below ten percent - the Lab/Con gap has halved since Sir Keir Starmer became the Labour party's leader.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on July 17, 2020, 12:43:18 PM
I finally wrote up some notes and thoughts on my party's leadership contest: https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2020/07/17/lib-dem-leadership-notes-2020/
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on July 17, 2020, 04:32:07 PM
I also see that a UK court pushed back against depriving a UK citizen born in the UK of her citizenship for actions committed for Da'esh in Syria?

This practice of rendering people stateless (or effectively stateless) terrifies me.  We got rid of it after WW II, but as C.S. Lewis teaches us, with a little incanting you can always bring evils back ...
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on July 20, 2020, 04:19:17 PM
Yeah, rendering people stateless is emphatically one of those powers that government just should never have under any circumstances. (Lib Dem policy is to add a ton of new safeguards to this ability - I tried last year to amend it to "just abolish the relevant provision", but didn't manage to get that one tabled).


Meanwhile I've produced another blogpost, on the particular characteristics of British as opposed to other liberalisms, and the "misfit" culture which I think in part characterises and explains its appeal for many activists like me:
https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2020/07/19/on-misfit-liberalism/
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on July 21, 2020, 09:28:57 AM
Thanks, I saw it on Mastodon.  How does the earlier history of the Lib Dems as one half of a two-party system fit in? 

In writey lefty circles in Canada and the USA, a fairly common ideology is that large groups should be microcosms of the larger society and that if a group has different demographics than the surrounding society in a way which is not obviously functionally relevant (the Association of Retired Persons does not have a lot of 18 year olds, a Bosniak mosque does not have a lot of Buddhists) that is strong evidence of discrimination and grounds for intervention by whoever is most powerful in the group.  Carried to its logical conclusion that would be homogenizing because it does not leave much space for likes to gather with likes or for aspects of what a person is to have effects in multiple areas of life.  Has that ideology reached the UK and how does it relate to your misfit Lib Dem model?
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on July 21, 2020, 10:05:28 AM
I think in some ways the two-party period of the then Liberals was when my model had its genesis to some extent. As I mention in passing in the post, at that point it was more specifically religious conformity that was at issue. The balance was such that the Liberals as a largely Nonconformist and Catholic party of free trade could viably compete with the Conservatives as a largely Anglican party of landed wealth.

Regarding your second point - I think it varies, and to the extent that this sort of ideal exists then in my experience it's usually applied in cases where it has a reasonable basis (that there is, for example, discrimination against women or black folks who wish to enter politics is uncontroversial). There is definitely an awareness in the Lib Dems that the party often does not reflect the communities and country it wishes to serve, in ways that do suggest there's a problem rather than simply the natural effect of a coalition of interests. All of British politics, the Lib Dems included is very much a middle class, white, male, London centric pursuit: this sits badly with a party whose roots are often on the fringes of Britain and its society, and I think there's an extent to which the non-misfit tendencies in the party tend to be very much stronger because they're concentrated in its middle class London element who have far easier access to e.g. sit on Federal committees. However, there is a lot of controversy within the Lib Dems about what one ought to do about this, and it's a split that doesn't sit easily along other ideological lines within the party. The last debate we had about the use of diversity shortlisting was very fractious indeed, and I felt there were good and interesting arguments on both side so I sat it out. To give a converse example, though, nobody seems to think that the fact that the Lib Dems have a lot of atheists and relatively few Anglicans, or that we have so many nerd subculture types that we can usefully run political ads targeted to "Doctor Who" as a targeting category, is a problem: that's just treated as a natural consequence of our voting base and history.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on August 28, 2020, 03:48:42 PM
Well, the Liberal Democrats voted about two to one for the supposed safe pair of hands white bloke with a knighthood (though turnout in the leadership election was really poor, which signals general demoralisation I think). This leaves all three main nation-wide UK parties led by middle aged white men representing London constituencies, two of whom have knighthoods - and the front runners in the Green race are also a pair of candidates from London.

I suppose the good news is that I may get to spend more time on Exilian stuff since I'm going to have very little energy for campaigning for this particular liberal leadership, but I'm feeling rather sore about the whole thing right now given how I was treated (https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2020/08/09/statement-on-the-radical-association-hustings/) by the winner's team during the campaign.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on August 30, 2020, 08:24:34 PM
I liked the point about how in a multiparty system, parties can influence policy in ways other than entering government, passing laws and regulations and appointing officials.  A lot of NDP and Green ideas become Liberal policy after a discreet interval.

In many countries, elections are carefully designed so they can't change much, and while I have always voted in national and provincial elections there are other ways of being politically active (like working within a party!)
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on September 21, 2020, 05:21:45 PM
It's the Liberal Democrat conference next weekend. I will be going and proposing a couple of tweaks to party policy - one in favour of a wider range of public engagement measures after COVID-19 than the party's working group favours (specifically, they're very in favour of sortition strategies, which on the specific issue of a pandemic really aren't very good because they are quite hard for more marginalised or unwell people, the worst affected by the pandemic, to actually engage with). The other is in favour of explicitly mentioning and incorporationg biodiversity into how we approach planning for after COVID-19, including favouring nature recovery networks as an approach (which in short involve working out how to create corridors between habitats that wildlife can move along: this is really important to ensure populations don't get isolated and then collapse due to lack of genetic diversity).

One big ticket debate will be on whether the party should adopt UBI - this is extremely likely to pass, though it's also quite possible that the new leadership will then slowly try to water it down and make it a small universal payment (which is fine but doesn't do a lot) rather than a real minimum income. The other perhaps even bigger argument will be on our strategy regarding the EU - the leadership clearly want to try and water down our pro-EU stance quite a bit and have been trying to bounce conference into backing them, which I suspect won't work very well for them not least because a lot of other senior party figures are absolutely spitting blood about some of the machinations behind this - Ed has made himself a lot of enemies very recently.

The rest of UK politics rumbles on. Keir Starmer seems to be polling better than Boris Johnson as to his leadership capabilities but is strenuously avoiding having much of a position on anything - Labour are still a point or two behind the Conservatives in most polls. I wonder how much of the Conservative dominance is Brexit related though still: as the debate moves on it may prove to be rather brittle.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on September 21, 2020, 09:40:18 PM
One of the controversial aspects of a UBI is that to get some of the benefits you have to get rid of the old programs targeted at the worthy poor.  Just paying poor people is quicker and avoids the overhead cost of deciding which of the poor are really worthy in any one program's definition (and managing one subsidy for groceries, another for rent, a third for single parents ...), but people are attached to the names of programs and full of reasons why their sinecure is for being worthy not being poor.  And I hear that the period since 2008 has been hard for poor British people.  What do Liberal Democrats in the UK think of that?
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: DeepCandle Games on September 22, 2020, 12:16:20 AM
Some interesting elements to consider, on the whole I'm really glad that people are discussing them in an open forum as it allows me to have a sort of port-hole into internal political situations around the UK and thread-appropriate areas

Always been difficult to find politically contested arguments and what party or demographic was associated and affiliated with them; Perhaps because the UK is generally 4 different countries and it seems to have a lot of layers that make it hard to gauge whether something is just an emotional sentiment on a local level or a political conversation at a regional level (which I'm interested in), or a national headline which I'd receive anyway through one of the local proxy news outlets

Top stuff
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on September 22, 2020, 12:35:34 PM
What any group think isn't monolithic of course.

Regarding dubsartur's point: generally, I don't think this is hugely a point of debate about UBI in the UK: there aren't actually that many varied systems for cash payment for living costs since everything got rolled into the awful Universal Credit system, which everyone except the Conservatives now kind of dislikes (arguably UC isn't actually that bad as a theoretical delivery system for benefits, it's just that it was cut back really hard while being implemented so people lost money hard as they moved onto it and it had huge IT problems so it's got an unsalvageable reputation on the left). I think the two big things which would be necessary but tricky to realise the full potential of a basic income would be to have it used for student living cost support and to dovetail it properly with pensions - there'd be some pushback on the latter I suspect. The other thing to note re the mix of subsidies is that you probably actually do still have to manage separate housing and disability payments even with a UBI: housing costs are so variable in the UK that paying just enough to someone in London would mean dumping vast additional sums on people who live in poor bits of the north, and disability likewise has hugely variable costs that probably need independent assessment. The big financial benefits to UBI aren't actually the decreased administration costs, but the income security, which gives you a far more flexible labour force (easier to move and retrain if you're not too poor to do so when out of a job), and to things like healthcare where lower stress levels can genuinely decrease strain on the system.

The big anti-UBI argument in the UK is "if you pay people without forcing them to work they won't work". Which actually we know from pilots isn't true, but it's still the core argument one hears. I don't know a lot about the demographics of UBI support: most of the places that seem to have strong UBI campaigns are urban and northern. The Lib Dem group in Hull is where a lot of the most pro-UBI people in the party hang out, Sheffield has a strong UBI network, and Leeds council recently passed a pro-UBI motion put forward by the Liberal Democrat group there. So there's definitely an explicit pro-UBI activist network in the UK in a way that there wasn't five years ago. My guess is that UBI support tends to skew more northern, urban, educated, and young, in general: it tends to appeal most easily to people whose work is irregular in its hours and availability, so contract and gig workers, who again tend to be younger and more urban.

As to the Lib Dems' stances on poverty: we're against it, unsurprisingly, but there's a difficult internal split because of the party's time in government (2010-15) between members who argue that the austerity measures taken during that period were justified to stabilise finances and people like me who think they weren't justified and leaned far too hard on the poorest to pay for problems they hadn't caused. In general the party agrees more about the future than the past on this, and has sat left of Labour on benefits for the poorest since about 2016. (Labour have generally tended to advocate spending more money in total in recent years, but much of that is on universalising benefits that are currently means tested - for example, making free childcare available to middle class as well as badly off citizens). Part of the issue for both Labour and the Lib Dems is that both are very, very middle class parties with lots of people talking about social issues who've never really experienced them, and who are nominally committeed to "making politics more diverse" but don't understand what the barriers to that look like when you're on the other side of them. I mean I include myself in that, but I do what I can to work with people who do understand these things on a more personal level. The Conservatives meanwhile now have older white working class people among their core voters, mostly appealing to them on more conservative cultural principles.

Re what Baragon said about the UK being four different countries: yes, though some are more different than others. :)

Sorry that was a bit of a ramble, hopefully it contained some interesting oddments.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on September 30, 2020, 10:04:32 PM
Lib Dem conference went pretty well! I helped moderate stuff and got a co-written motion and two amendments passed.

Some further thoughts:
https://thoughtsofprogress.wordpress.com/2020/09/30/lib-dem-conference-2020-a-party-with-a-voice/
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Othko97 on October 21, 2020, 08:23:16 PM
Right now I feel particularly frustrated with UK Politics, thanks largely to being a citizen of Greater Manchester. For those not in the know, the UK government decided that Greater Manchester needed to be boosted up a tier in the new system. This decision may have been entirely justified, although cases in Manchester have been declining without the additional measures. Manchester has already been under additional restrictions compared to the rest of the country for months, and our businesses have suffered a lot already. Now the government wanted to close a large portion of pubs (any that don't serve "substantial meals") along with a litany of other businesses staffed by minimum or low wage workers. This would have been entirely laudable and acceptable, apart from the fact that the government were only willing to compensate those made unable to work 66% of their lost wages. 66% of minimum wage is essentially a pittance that may not even cover rent in some cases, so naturally our local government pushed back to get the additional funding to boost that to 80%.

Despite having no problem affording extortionate amounts for their corporate friends (£7000 per head per day for Serco's Track and Trace shambles, not to mention the millions for ferry companies without ferries or PPE suppliers who have never made PPE), the government could not even stretch to give Manchester the money it needed to reach this reasonable request. Especially frustrating is the fact that Manchester had already given back  more[\b] than requested back from previous Coronavirus relief.

I don't know, often I feel the London/Not London divide being a lifelong inhabitant of Greater Manchester, but this really pushed that feeling given Manchester is supposed to be the second largest economic power in the country.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Pentagathusosaurus rex on November 15, 2020, 01:30:41 PM
Is it a completely crazy idea that anyone who earns less than a certain threshold should be compensated their full wages if furloughed or forced to self isolate? Is it such an insanely complex twist? I get that most people are spending less money whilst in lockdown, but if your income is normally close to your basic living costs then even losing 20% of your wages can fug you sideways.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on November 25, 2020, 10:32:25 PM
The UK government is abandoning its commitment to a 0.7% GNI international aid budget - saving a fraction of the money that it's spent in recent months on, among other things, lorry parks to deal with their own failure to negotiate functional trade deals, ferry services with no ferries, and test & trace systems that don't actually work at all.

It's not even a good move from a hard-nosed strategic POV even if you're not a hippie liberal like me who cares about things like children not growing up starving - the amount of money it saves is negligible compared to the fact that Britain desperately needs to not lose international standing further so people take it semi-seriously as a player without us being politically joined at the hip to one of the two larger powers we sit between post-Brexit. We need to bring something to the table for that to make sense, and a really effective international aid infrastructure is a really important part of that because it's one of the ways we actually make geopolitical friends outside our own backyard.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on November 26, 2020, 04:22:12 AM
I lived through the Harper years of systematic destruction of institutions so I sympathize!

With Dominic Cummings out of his job ... have people in the UK talked about his intellectual context?  The couple of blog posts I flipped through were very much in the neighborhood of the rationalist / right libertarian circles of autodidacts with big ideas in the United States, people like Tyler 'Marginal Revolution' Cowen, Eliezer 'LessWrong'  Yudkowski, Scott 'SlatestarCodex' Alexander, Robin 'Overcoming Bias' Hanson, or Michael Shermer.  The blog posts were regurgitating their ideas in a less articulate form, like the bloggers rely on books for many of their more convincing ideas.  The Americans did not have so many rants about elites / the civil service but that has been a part of discourse on the right in the United States in general and California in particular since the New Deal.  This 2019 Jonathan Heawood piece in The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/15/dominic-cummings-blog-political-values) uses the term 'rationalist' but does not drop names and explain what 'rationalist' means in this context.  This piece is much more helpful but in a website I don't know https://unherd.com/2019/08/dominic-cummings-is-no-chicken/

Edit: one last edit ... there was a long tradition in this rationalist / right Libertarian world of rants against higher education, often in pseudo-economic and psychological language ("signalling," claims that education does not increase income because the kind of people who seek degrees are the kind who would do well on the job market regardless).  Bryan Caplan's "The Case Against Education" is a highbrow version by a university press but Heinlein was already whining about progressive high-schools in the 1950s.  Vicious attacks on book learning are pretty common among autodidacts who don't have the respectful audience they feel they deserve, but it fits with Cummings' anti-establishment word salad.

I had a phase playing around with big ideas and finding the weak spots in them, but I would not want to be in a country run by someone grabbing whichever of them looks shiny!  I am more an "the easiest person to fool is yourself" kind of thinker and I'm terrified of the people who think that because they are clever and studied one subject for a long time, they can master the next one over a long weekend.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on November 26, 2020, 09:36:11 AM
UnHerd is AFAICT mostly right-wing, though a few left-wing, opinion writers and bloggers who think that they should have a space to float ideas that would be considered objectionable or too far off the beaten track in a regular publication. They do publish some good pieces now and again, but their general alignment is towards contrarianism more than anything else.

The term rationalist always feels to me ironic, since one of their primary characteristics seems in practice to be the out-of-hand denial of their own irrationality (which is in itself an irrational act, since an actor attempting to be rational needs to be aware of and account for their own human tendency to not think rationally about things).
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on November 26, 2020, 06:01:29 PM
Anyways, I am asking because I read a lot of Brits talking about anti-Semitism and different flavours of Marxism and accelerationism in their politics, but not saying "hold on, the Prime Minister's wazir / rab ummâni is the kind of person who knows what Rocco's Basilisk is."  Political journalists are deeply intellectually incurious (they often spend 20 years writing the same column), and worshipful of Old Media authority and face-to-face relationships.  The LessWrong crowd never got a major publisher or newspaper interested like the Richard Dawkins / Sam Harris New Atheists did, and they mostly live in California and a few other parts of the United States and spent time with other people who have a great love of ideas and great confidence in the ability of their rationality to conquer any problem, not with writers of opinion pieces.

Its symptomatic that journalists barely acknowledge that blogs exist (and when they do with a visible sneer) but embraced birdsite like a lover they have not seen for a year.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on December 06, 2020, 10:07:44 PM
In fairness, Brits talking about anti-Semitism and Marxism and accelerationism may imply you're reading a very Labour/old left heavy segment of political analysis and commentary, and those people don't tend to have much of an opinion on Conservative personnel or trying to understand anyone outside the Labour paradigms. We could do with more people on the left taking that sort of approach though.

In other news in the UK: a major judicial decision this week has prevented the prescribing of puberty blockers to young people with gender dysphoria, on the basis that some people regretted having had that treatment. This causes some literal and immediate problems: the regret rate for puberty blockers, whilst important to consider at around 2%, is a tenth of that for knee operations and nobody is considering banning those, and we know that untreated dysphoria tends to be very mentally damaging to young people who have it. But there's a much more worrying aspect, which is that the arguments used are essentially that under 16s can't unilaterally consent to medical procedures even when diagnosed as needing them by a medical professional. This opens the door for further cases which in particular could attack e.g. the right to young people having abortions (not in fact a hypothetical, as the lawyer who won the Tavistock case has fought anti-abortion cases on exactly the same legal argumentative basis, and now has a large new piece of case law to point at in those). It is an extremely scary time right now for trans friends who feel that their right to exist in the UK is being progressively chiselled away and publicly attacked as the years go by.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Pentagathusosaurus rex on December 08, 2020, 02:03:10 PM
Is it now flat out impossible for children to receive treatment with puberty blockers then? I haven't followed anything in the news at all for a while but for some reason I was under the impression that you could still receive the treatment but there would be additional administrative/legal hoops to jump through first.
I can understand some concern about children starting the transition whilst they're still impressionable or whatnot, especially with the changing trends in gender dysphoria in the last decade but surely the clinicians treating these children should mostly be able to help them identify whether or not the treatments are right for them.
Unfortunately I suspect transgender rights are going to be used as a political pawn for quite a while yet, with the real political actors not actually caring very much about the wellbeing of anyone affected by it.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on December 08, 2020, 02:15:52 PM
If the decision is confirmed after the Tavistock's appeal, yes, it will be illegal to prescribe them for gender dysphoria on the grounds that the patient doesn't have appropriate capacity to consent (it will still, I think, be legal to prescribe them for early onset puberty, which is the other thing they're used to treat, like if a child starts hitting puberty effects at eight or whatever). And yeah, I don't think anyone's really suggesting a free for all on use of blockers and it's always required the doctors to sign off on it - indeed one of the bonus dangers now is that there'll be a spike in people trying to source black market versions of these treatments. I just think that like any other issue, it should be between the medical professionals and the patient to work out what the right treatment is. I wish that wasn't a controversial opinion!
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Pentagathusosaurus rex on December 08, 2020, 02:35:28 PM
Ahh I see. Well I haven't read into this much at all but I don't really see the need for this ban at all, and I don't understand the argument that a child is unable to consent to this particular treatment when many other kind of treatments are fine. Perhaps if these patients are under the impression that there will be no side effects at all before they undergo treatment, but if this is the case then surely the clinicians who fail to explain the treatment properly are at fault rather than the treatment itself (just like with any other medical procedure).
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on December 11, 2020, 06:06:04 AM
In fairness, Brits talking about anti-Semitism and Marxism and accelerationism may imply you're reading a very Labour/old left heavy segment of political analysis and commentary, and those people don't tend to have much of an opinion on Conservative personnel or trying to understand anyone outside the Labour paradigms. We could do with more people on the left taking that sort of approach though.
I am not sure, Charlie Stross is very keen on being Scottish (and very nervous because his ancestors fled the bloodlands and he sees the borders closing and the scapegoating intensifying again), and one of his hobbies is weird intellectualized political communities and their surprising connections.  I stopped following him closely back during my last degree because he was getting so excitied and speculative and some of his most active commenters range from even more excitable and ideological to mentally ill.

I thought that anti-Semitism was something that people who get paid to share their opinions in the UK were talking a lot about a few years ago. 

I'm not sure that the Guardian has a party affiliation, they are a kind of Anglo urban universitied lefty politics plus the kind of shouting about the evils of the day that works on the Internet.  Edit: Its possible that if I were British and spent a few years reading the paper edition several times a week, I would suss out a clear orientation within the British party system.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on February 03, 2021, 01:08:38 AM
On the latest essay on Thoughts of Progress, columnist Paul Wells also accuses the current Canadian federal government of being too reactive and focused on headlines.  But I never found a way to get anything useful out of that kind of talk by self-professed insiders and People who Know People, they just are not basically trustworthy people and they don't provide evidence so you can decide who to trust.  As I said elsewhere, my impression is that Justin Trudeau used up all his ideas of THINGS TO CHANGE in his first term, is not interested in keeping fighting for the ones he didn't achieve then, and is groping around for new ideas that he can actually achieve; Canada is also caught in some nasty political forks like China vs. USA, indigenous rights vs. the way things have been done since 1763, and the established oil industry vs. not killing most life on earth (right now, most biomass 1 kg and up is humans and our cattle and fowl, so if industrial civilization dies that is most of the animal mass gone even without the current Great Extinction).

The NDP also have trouble expressing a vision of how their Canada would be different, and many people don't seem to understand that the Green movement is about reorganizing society around sustainability not about individual environmental issues.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on May 06, 2021, 05:12:49 PM
It's election day in the UK! "Local" elections, but in this case almost the whole country is voting on something, and the "localities" include both of the states that have their own functional legislatures (Wales and Scotland).

Likely occurrences:
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on May 06, 2021, 05:23:24 PM
GLA?

In the EU, there has been a lot of quiet work to disconnect from American systems of digital power since 2016: replacing credit cards and paypal with the EU SEPA system, use open-source software in schools and government offices, and so on.  Is there anything similar in the UK?
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on May 06, 2021, 07:15:42 PM
Sorry: Greater London Assembly.

Not sure about the tech side - I've obviously mostly been abroad since 2016. I'd guess there's been some movement there but not nearly so much as in the EU, especially as the UK is moving out of alignment with the EU on a lot of things.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on May 16, 2021, 04:24:13 PM
So the outcomes since I didn't report them:


So the outlook from the results is that a Scots IndyRef is very much in the offing yet again, Labour look pretty weak everywhere except in Wales, Manchester and London, the Conservatives very dominant in England except with their grip slipping on a small number of pretty affluent liberal areas. It's unusual for the politics of the different UK nations to be quite this divergent, though one could point to the pandemic and point out that the parties in power in all three nations (SNP in Scotland, Labour in Wales, Tories in England) have broadly done well in the current climate.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on June 05, 2021, 04:54:12 PM
An anonymous substack claims that the UK media have joined the Tories in denying that in early 2020 UK government policy was to infect the less vulnerable 80% of the population as quickly as possible (https://lessonsfromthecrisis.substack.com/p/its-bizarre-that-this-needs-saying) (link).  Does that take on the journalism match your experience?  London-based journalists like Gwynne Dyer were heavily criticizing the plan in spring 2020 and the documents have been freely available PDFs for a long time.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on June 05, 2021, 05:24:00 PM
I think like with most media, the big story is more about what gets into the headlines than what's said about certain things if that makes sense?  Like, to the extent that the media end up damping down particular stories, it's usually not really so much by giving out "this is the line, we're going to deny/favour X" and more by "actually, we're not going to make this thing about the UK government trying to infect people super fast a big story, you can mention it sometime maybe and we'll frame it as something the opposition said as a criticism". And a lot of that is quite subconscious I think, even among the people making those calls: it's less a sense of "the UK media have joined the Tories in doing X" and more "the prevailing wind in the UK media is one where stories about Tory mishandling and corruption aren't seen as part of the narrative, the press don't have a big incentive or desire to push them into the narrative, so nothing happens and the stories get buried by something else."
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on June 07, 2021, 05:04:33 PM
I think like with most media, the big story is more about what gets into the headlines than what's said about certain things if that makes sense?  Like, to the extent that the media end up damping down particular stories, it's usually not really so much by giving out "this is the line, we're going to deny/favour X" and more by "actually, we're not going to make this thing about the UK government trying to infect people super fast a big story, you can mention it sometime maybe and we'll frame it as something the opposition said as a criticism."
I think I see what you mean- the difference between "hacker on the Internet calls SWAT team to local man's house leading to shooting" and "police shoot unarmed Black man on basis of anonymous phone call."  Or not running the story at all.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on June 21, 2021, 11:30:12 PM
Congratulations to the Lib-Dems for winning that by-election in England!
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on June 22, 2021, 12:42:54 PM
Thank you! :) Not that I did anything to help, I've just been working on the party's basic income policy recently. But a lot of close friends of mine were down there.

The Lib Dem by-election machine is a well noted feature in British political circles that probably doesn't get much noticed elsewhere: it turns out that a smaller party that has a lot of extremely dedicated, experienced middle-class campaigners can build a whole (not always healthy) campaign culture of having people travel to by-elections and swamp a single constituency with door-knockers and leafleters from across the country. Certainly we can easily field more activists and communications in a by-election where we turn the taps on than we could ever manage in most General Election seats, and that coupled with very experienced back-end staff can make the Lib Dems rolling up in force quite a headache at least in certain sorts of seats: I think this is a peculiarity of the UK's Lib Dems and political culture, I don't know of any party anywhere else in the world that has that sort of specialised experience and capacity for by-elections.

The difficulty around the win within the party was that the win was in part on the basis of local discontent with the Tories over new high-speed rail projects and housebuilding... both things that the Lib Dems are nominally in favour of but picked a candidate who wasn't so in favour of them then soft-pedalled them during the by-election campaign. So there's been some discontent with the win among the more avid pro-housebuilding lobbies within the Lib Dems (this is a permanent cold war within the party, as so many of our seats are in areas with high house prices and homeowners who don't want their asset values to fall, but our activist base is largely in favour of deflating the housing market so people can afford places to live). Nonetheless it's generally an upbeat mood, and Sarah Green, the winning candidate, is reportedly very nice and solidly liberal on most issues. And it's very good that it suddenly makes the Conservatives seem an awful lot less electorally bulletproof than they did previously.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on June 23, 2021, 03:21:09 AM
I think the small size and high population density of the UK must have something to do with it?  It would be easier for LibDems to travel in the aerable south-east of England and along the Glasgow-Edinburgh corridor than to gather volunteers across a whole Canadian province let alone the country.  And culture is different enough between say Northern BC and Southern Vancouver Island that those volunteers might not be very helpful.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on June 23, 2021, 10:37:14 AM
Yes, that's probably true. And the other countries or areas where pop density is that high, aka mainland Europe, mostly have proportional systems where by-election campaigns don't matter (it's an irony of the Lib Dems that so much of our political culture as a party comes from adaptations to systems that we'd actually like to abolish).
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on June 24, 2021, 03:29:56 AM
What are the benefits to a small party in the UK such as the Lib-Dems picking up one more seat like this?
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on June 28, 2021, 03:01:33 AM
Do UK journalists love to speculate in public when the government will call an early election?  Canadian journalists do and I just do not get it- it is not something ordinary people can act on, and journalists are terrible at predicting the future (probably because they have no training and face no consequences for being wrong).  Since many political journalists are proud of not being active in party politics or activism, they can't claim to be competent at party politics, let alone experts on party politics.  I guess it lets them feel like insiders because they can hear gossip in Ottawa or the provincial capitals and pass it on to people who have not heard it yet?

A lot of very important things are happening right now which are much more worthy of reporters' time.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on July 09, 2021, 03:56:46 AM
I just thought I would repost this.  We are in the middle of a pandemic, bad drugs are killing more people than the pandemic, the military has a sexual assault crisis, the RCMP appears to have lied during the worst mass murder in recent Canadian history, there is an unprecedented heatwave and settler-indigenous relations are not so good, culture and the economy have been transformed by movement restrictions during the pandemic, and Canadian journalists can't think of better ways to use a few column inches than gossip about when they think the Prime Minister will call an election to try and turn a do-nothing second term into a do-nothing third term.  The chances that anyone other than a Liberal or Conservative would be PM after such an election are almost nill.  Do journalists in other Westminister System countries have the same fixation?
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on July 10, 2021, 09:17:22 PM
Aaaa, I'm sorry, I've been meaning to reply to these for ages, it's been a very difficult month at my end.

Quote
Do journalists in other Westminister System countries have the same fixation?
Yes, broadly speaking. Indeed we have terms of reference for this, and call it "lobby journalism" (that focused on the internal factions, gossip, and maneuvering of politicians), or sometimes, often a little pejoratively, "access journalism" (that is, journalism that relies on privileged access to the internal stories of government, at times alleged to involve quid pro quo situations where some information is revealed on the understanding that other things won't be).

I don't actually think that lobby journalism is inherently bad, which I know some people do, and nor do I think it's quite the same as idle gossip. Changes of government and changes of governing faction, even between e.g. different centrist and centre-right groups, do make a difference to vast, vast numbers of lives: those who claim they don't tend to be either in such a bad situation that they'll get screwed over regardless, or (more usually) in a comfortable enough situation that they won't have to notice the difference. I think there is a genuine need for people who understand the factionalisation and networks that contribute to the workings of government.

What I'd criticise about the situation is firstly that lobby journalists are often really bad at their jobs. Understanding political networks means not just understanding individuals and their feelings, but being able to effectively assess loci of power within those systems and being able to explain to people why and how that system works. The UK shouldn't have politics journalists of any variety who don't understand or can't explain how different parties make decisions even in broad terms, and yet that seems to be often how things happen. In reality, and this is my second criticism, they often dress what's happening up as soap opera rather than considering its consequences even when those are very real.  My third and probably biggest criticism is that we've allowed lobby journalism to become what's considered political journalism, rather than being a small subset of political journalism the main meat of which should be public interest policy journalism (covering what the government is doing) and also administrative journalism (covering how competent or corrupt they're being whilst doing it), with decent local politics & electoral politics journalism to back things up. The predominance of lobby journalism crowds out and has bad effects on these other forms of political journalism.

Quote
What are the benefits to a small party in the UK such as the Lib-Dems picking up one more seat like this?

I also meant to answer this question! There are several. In no particular order:
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on July 15, 2021, 03:44:25 AM
Quote
What are the benefits to a small party in the UK such as the Lib-Dems picking up one more seat like this?

I also meant to answer this question! There are several. In no particular order:
  • Personnel: We don't have many MPs, and that means a restricted talent pool to send out to interviews, or to give speeches, etc etc. Every extra MP adds to our capacity there and essentially deepens our bench when it comes to finding people to do the various roles in the party that only MPs can do.
  • Resources: we have an extra office, additional staff, etc, and when you have 12 MPs that percentage difference in paid manpower is worth having.
  • Entrenchment: it's easier to hold a seat than win one, and it means local activists in the area now have a big prize to build around. It'll thus be easier to build up the local party in the area, which can have good effects on surrounding areas as well by making things feel more winnable all around that locality.
  • Finances: By-elections make money for the party. Obviously they also cost money for the campaign, but in general, in a successful campaign, we'd hope to raise more than we spend by some margin. Especially if it's tight or we weren't considered likely to win, as in this case, there can sometimes be some chunky donations after the election from people who placed well-chosen bets on the outcome as well.
  • Recruitment: people notice a good result for us and that makes politically attuned people more likely to join or rejoin in order to support what we do.
  • Narrative versus Tories: one of the big problems for small parties is the "they can't win, so don't vote for them" attack line. It's much harder to sustain that when you've shown you can pull off enormous swings and win normally "safe" government seats. This makes it easier nationally especially when we're trying to squeeze voters: that is to say, if we're targeting another Conservative seat in the south, it's now easier for us to say to Labour voters there "look, if you back us we really can unseat a Conservative" whereas the same voter might otherwise have written us off and voted Labour.
  • Narrative versus Labour: we beat the Tories by a big margin in C&A, whilst Labour recently lost Hartlepool and only narrowly held onto Batley & Spen. This helps us because some people (rightly or not) see it as an assessment of relative capacity to hurt the government, so we might attract donations or manpower that would otherwise have gone to Labour.
Thanks!  A few years ago, I decided that there was an almost total disconnect between the people I know who are talking about Anglo politics and actual knowledge of Anglo politics.  (Excluding the officials, the candidates, and the party hacks who all know something but refuse to say it for the good of the cause).  Many articulate people seem to like talking about politics but not doing the most basic things to understand how it works in their country.  So I am trying to ask more questions of people with actual verifiable expertise (but no record of chronic lying).
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on July 15, 2021, 09:53:48 AM
Yes, I wouldn't call myself an expert on the ground campaigns aspect, but I do get to talk to the people who are. :)

As I say, I think the people who claim to know about politics often do know about a very niche bit of personal or factional politics, but don't always have the detail down on the rest.
I often come up with ideas for political blogposts and then scrap them because I don't feel I know enough, but then I'm not trying to be a political commentator or build an audience around it.

Other recent news from UK politics:
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on July 15, 2021, 04:22:41 PM
You have been involved in setting policy for a party, campaigned on the ground for candidates, and I think lobbied the government for policy (vs. just telling the Internet or the newspaper that you are VERY UNHAPPY) which puts you 3 for 3 ahead of the average political commentator in Canada who is not so obviously partisan that they would say the sun rises in the west if they thought it would get their party into government.



In the USA, one issue with 'junk food taxes' is that many poor people only have access to convenience stores and fast-food restaraunts.  There are big gaps in the network of grocery stores and poor people often don't have cars or useful public transit or work irregular hours.  So taxes on 'junk food' are taxes on the poor.  Is that the case in poor parts of the UK?

"Trans rights" is one of those phrases with quite a variety of meanings not all of which are innocuous.  Did Shahrar Ali take the position that some things in law  and policy which speak of "men" and "women" or "boys" and "girls" mean sex not gender, the position that gender is not just an internal self-asserted feeling, or something else?
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on July 15, 2021, 07:57:21 PM
Yes, I suppose there's a bit of an exponential curve of perception: I'm close enough to the heart of the party to see how far away from me some of the actual levers that do things really are.

And yes, that's the exact issue with junk food taxes in the UK as well.

Yes: Shahrar Ali is very much of the "women have two X chromosomes, trans women are not women" viewpoint/bloc. As you know, I don't personally agree that there are non-innocuous meanings of trans rights in any significant usage, or that there's anything terribly meaningful behind the idea of a clashing concept of "sex based rights" which is what Ali and others push forwards. The primary policy outcomes that faction suggests - that is to say, primarily, the removal of certain women's ability to access women's spaces - tend to be harmfully discriminatory, unenforceably silly, or a mixture of the two. It's also not something being pushed for by any of the organisations or people who would seem to have the most evidence-based and direct connection if there were a problem here, and rather seems to be an obsession primarily of a small section of the commentariat and an associated activist base. People will no doubt validly continue to debate the semantics of words like "gender", but the policy outlook (which I care rather more about) is I think rather more clear-cut, and phrases like "a woman is an adult human female" which could be construed innocuously in other contexts have essentially become shibboleths and dogwhistles for a small electoral minority whose sole policy focus is the eradication of trans people from public life. That's the crowd Ali is playing to.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on July 16, 2021, 02:18:41 AM
Ok.  To me institutional policies should generally focus on sex because its much less complicated than gender, and the idea that someone's gender is whatever they say it is is a very strange one.  Personal policies should focus on tolerance and liberalism.  People can respect each other without having to agree on what someone's gender or sex is or how those things are defined, just like they can respect each other's religion while believing that the other person's is nonsense.  "Robin wants to be called he now and we should do that" is a reasonable thing to ask in civil society but "Robin says he is male and we should accept that unconditionally for all purposes" sounds a lot like "Alexander says he is a god so he is a god."

In my understanding (and to the talky gays, lesbians, and feminists I learned from in the oughties), gender is a social construct overlaid on biological sex which is performed in a society.  Performance which one culture reads as masculine might be feminine or a third gender in another society.  Societies exert pressure on people whose performance does not match their perceived gender, and it is much more practical to reduce or redirect these pressures than to change (eg.) human sexual dimorphism or the way that people of the female sex have to put more time and energy into reproduction than people of the male sex.  As Elizabeth Moon put it, the high school students she coaches are much more athletic than her generation of girls were allowed to be.

One of the most frustrating things about this discourse is the way people conflate sex and gender and often seem to suggest that policies should classify people by self-asserted gender rather than sex or the gender which someone is recognized as in their society.    People whose sex is female have many troubles because eg. medical experiments treat males as the default, and sometimes it turns out that a treatment has different effects on different sexes.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on July 16, 2021, 05:02:47 PM
I don't see why self-identification for legal and institutional purposes is in any sense strange: we use it for lots of things related to legally protected characteristics, and it's frequently by far the most sensible way of handling a range of issues. Any attempt to create neat, medicalised categories in this area tends in practice to exclude and harm people who don't fit those boxes, not to mention often being deeply invasive. I think, too, that it's not quite as simple as "respect but disagree": I'd tend to consider it an important feature of respect to believe people when they tell me a fundamental characteristic of who they are.

In any case, I think your case above is also predicated on an incorrect assertion about sex, namely that it's less complicated than gender. It's possibly more complicated, because "sex" is a way of sorting humans into categories (which do not form a neat binary) based on a vast, vast range of different characteristics, many of them mutable, including chromosomes, a wide range of secondary sexual characteristics, and hormone levels among other things. There's no way to test for, or perfectly categorise, sex, any more than there is for gender. People whose sex is female for an awful lot of medical processes include, for example, trans women taking oestrogen, because that's, well, kind of the point of oestrogen. The fact those people still have an XY chromosome structure isn't a sufficient bit of information to sort for medical processes. The implications of trying to check and test people's sex for their general interactions with institutions are deeply troubling to me due to the arbitrariness with which some of these categorisations would end up being made and due to the personal invasiveness of checking people's medical details in various ways for access to services. Where there are specific medical things that rely on certain body parts, hormone levels, and so on, we are scientifically at a point where we can (and should) be more precise about who things will and will not benefit than trying to lump the population into a strict binary when actually the edges are very woolly indeed.

Regarding what gender is: yes, it's a social construct through which we understand a lot of these sorts of sex and performed characteristics, and yes, it can be categorised differently across cultures. It's clearly true that societies do tend to exert pressure towards gender conformity - but it's also true that some of the characteristics we understand through gender are fairly innate, precisely because gender and sex are different layers of social understanding of our bodies and societal roles that can't be fully disentangled. As such even if you remove pressures for a gender to act in a certain way you should still expect that people will not all necessarily be OK in the gender and with the sex characteristics that they were assigned at birth. Indeed, the expectation that people must retain their birth gender contributes in the main to societal pressures towards gender conformity. Excluding trans women from womanhood starts producing a list of "people with these characteristics aren't really women" - and you invariably find that a lot of cisgender women share characteristics with some trans women, especially when those are things like "some women are taller than average and have deeper voices and a more square jawline" (which are the sort of cues people practically use to assess gender or sex in public spaces).

For me, what I care about most in this are the practical questions like "can people I care about go to the bathroom without being harassed for not conforming to someone else's idea of what a woman should be", and "could trans women I know use gender-appropriate domestic violence shelters", and "can medical specialists get on with treating trans children for gender dysphoria without being defunded due to an arbitrary moral panic". The answer - which I believe to be extremely harmful - of the "sex is inherent and chromosomal" lobby has invariably in recent years been that children should not get affirming treatment for gender dysphoria, that trans women should not be housed in women's prisons or domestic violence shelters, and that trans women should not be able to use women's bathrooms. Those things are not supported by the shelters or medical practitioners in question, or indeed women in general, and have led to extreme levels of personal harassment to people I care about. That's the practical, day to day reality of what this particular thought trend is currently doing and looking like in the UK. The abstract theory points are something I'd be much more interested in discussing if it wasn't for them being used as the backdrop for a reprehensible political agenda, the primary platform of which advocates for things that will cause genuine suffering to trans people. I appreciate that most people don't really get to see just how under siege trans people in the UK feel right now or some of the hatred that gets directed against them, but it honestly scares me.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on September 27, 2021, 01:26:12 PM
The UK is literally running out of petrol due to haulage collapse and panic buying and the government still have a polling lead. I find it hard to imagine many other countries with nominally free democracies having this level of economic shock whilst still seeing government poll numbers this robust, it's honestly bizarre.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Tusky on September 27, 2021, 01:57:26 PM
I agree, I can't understand it.
I remember this morning watching the transport secretary being pressed on the issue of a lack of haulage, what steps are being taken, and is brexit playing a part. He replied to say that Brexit is not solely to blame, and it's a problem that's been known about for years. So surely then, this situaltion could have been anticipated and avoided.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on September 27, 2021, 03:15:22 PM
Plus it's kind of noticeable that over here on the continent people are not, in fact, panic-buying petrol. I dunno: maybe at some point it will really hit a switch and Conservative numbers will start to collapse. But it's terrifying how little difference it makes that we've seen ambulance crews struggling to fuel their vehicles this week - just the sort of thing that feels like it would've been unimaginable seven or ten years ago in the UK.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Pentagathus on September 29, 2021, 03:04:14 PM
I suspect that the general idea of Tories being good at handling the economy is so ingrained that a lot of people assume it would be worse under Labour. Maybe.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on September 30, 2021, 06:11:03 AM
I suspect that the general idea of Tories being good at handling the economy is so ingrained that a lot of people assume it would be worse under Labour. Maybe.
I wonder if that commonplace is a Boomer thing?  Since at least the 1980s, Anglo conservative parties have built up massive deficits with tax cuts for the rich and military spending which centrist and leftist parties dutifully pay down.  But if you became interested in tax and economic policy in the 1970s, and are not scientific, you might get stuck.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on October 02, 2021, 05:51:23 PM
Quote
I wonder if that commonplace is a Boomer thing?
To some extent, but Boomers wrote my generation's school textbooks and news outputs. It's a commonplace that's still found among a surprising number of millennials.



As well as the ongoing crisis of shelves and petrol, the UK is also going through a major row since a police officer murdered a young woman after arresting her. The police response to this has not generally improved confidence: some of the murderer's colleagues are under investigation for messages shared with the murderer, but the police are largely digging in and insisting on the importance of the public trusting them without proposing to adopt any measures to regain said trust. Particularly bad have been suggestions that women worried about an officer's conduct should flag down a bus (what the driver is meant to do is unclear, and those with any experience of UK buses' propensity to stop will immediately see further problems here), or that they should call the police to check if it's a real police officer (to which the answer in this case would have been that yes, he was a real serving police officer), or that they should run away (which... what?).

David Allen Green on some wider issues around this is worth reading: https://davidallengreen.com/2021/10/the-i-will-make-something-up-who-are-they-going-to-believe-me-or-you-police-officer-only-gets-a-written-warning-and-why-this-matters-after-the-sarah-everard-murder/
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on October 03, 2021, 06:23:08 AM
As well as the ongoing crisis of shelves and petrol, the UK is also going through a major row since a police officer murdered a young woman after arresting her. The police response to this has not generally improved confidence: some of the murderer's colleagues are under investigation for messages shared with the murderer, but the police are largely digging in and insisting on the importance of the public trusting them without proposing to adopt any measures to regain said trust. Particularly bad have been suggestions that women worried about an officer's conduct should flag down a bus (what the driver is meant to do is unclear, and those with any experience of UK buses' propensity to stop will immediately see further problems here), or that they should call the police to check if it's a real police officer (to which the answer in this case would have been that yes, he was a real serving police officer), or that they should run away (which... what?).

David Allen Green on some wider issues around this is worth reading: https://davidallengreen.com/2021/10/the-i-will-make-something-up-who-are-they-going-to-believe-me-or-you-police-officer-only-gets-a-written-warning-and-why-this-matters-after-the-sarah-everard-murder/
I have noticed that recently quite a few institutions are brandishing some authority they imagine they had in the 1990s, rather than reforming themselves or responding to criticisms.  That never works and anyone who has listened to people arguing knows it.

In Anglo Canada, one problem the police have is that they get infected with the "wolf and the sheepdog" meme from the United States (and related ideas like the fashion for paramilitary uniforms).  Canadians who want use-of-force training often read books, watch videos, and hire instructors from the United States.  What are the main cultural influences on British police now that they don't hire as many aging ex-servicemembers?
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on October 16, 2021, 10:16:10 AM
Quote
What are the main cultural influences on British police now that they don't hire as many aging ex-servicemembers?
That's a good question, and I'm not sure it's one I could answer perfectly. Like in most places the police tend to lean politically authoritarian, though not universally and they've not got quite the same militaristic lean for the most part as I've seen in US police.


Anyhow, the key UK news is sadly that an MP, Sir David Amess, has been murdered in what appears to be an Islamic extremist terrorist attack. Definitely everyone I know in politics is feeling quite rattled right now, and there's discussions over whether this will lead to more spending on protection for MPs or less access to MPs for the public.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on October 21, 2021, 06:22:21 AM
I also saw something about the London Metropolitan Police creating an app to call in to verify that plainclothes officers are police officers which, again, would not have helped the murdered woman just made it quicker to track down her killer.

In the US, the War on Some People using Some Drugs was a big driver of police militarization (dealers start flushing the goods down the toilet, so police start dawn raids with battering rams and get surprised when robbers use the same tactic or a frightened homeowner stabs them; gangs settle their business disputes with Glocks, so the police demand heavier weapons and get offended that someone thinks firing 50 rounds at a traffic stop was excessive).  The UK has many fewer firearms in circulation, and its not quite as invested in the War on Some People as the USA is, so how does that affect things?

In the Can pol thread you brought up redistricting.  Are there debates in the UK about rural areas being over-represented by population but being further from the centres of power to use their representation like there are in Canada?
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Glaurung on October 22, 2021, 10:34:40 PM
In the Can pol thread you brought up redistricting.  Are there debates in the UK about rural areas being over-represented by population but being further from the centres of power to use their representation like there are in Canada?
The UK has a fairly long-standing tradition of making parliamentary constituencies have roughly equal population, with a periodic review process (carried out by a government body called the Boundary Commission) to make sure that's maintained in the face of population shifts. So rural areas are not over-represented relative to their population. However there is a definite sense (whether or not justified) that places further from London (even major cities) have less influence in national politics.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on October 24, 2021, 07:35:26 AM
In the Can pol thread you brought up redistricting.  Are there debates in the UK about rural areas being over-represented by population but being further from the centres of power to use their representation like there are in Canada?
The UK has a fairly long-standing tradition of making parliamentary constituencies have roughly equal population, with a periodic review process (carried out by a government body called the Boundary Commission) to make sure that's maintained in the face of population shifts. So rural areas are not over-represented relative to their population. However there is a definite sense (whether or not justified) that places further from London (even major cities) have less influence in national politics.
Here is a journalistic take on the situation in Canada https://www.thestar.com/politics/2019/10/13/one-person-one-vote-in-canada-its-not-even-close.html  I'm not qualified to comment on it in detail, other than that its broadly in line with what I remember.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on December 10, 2021, 09:49:37 AM
Well, the UK's politics are getting somewhat interesting in that the Conservatives finally seem to be dropping rather hard in the polls, in the wake of so many government scandals that some are being covered up by the coverage of other scandals. The "No. 10 had a Christmas party whilst telling everyone else  to be in lockdown" seems to have some real traction and is hurting the Tories - recent polls actually have some clear water with Labour ahead for the first time in a while.

The Conservatives quietly held a recent by-election in the safe seat of Old Bexley and Sidcup: next week there's another, in the (again nominally safe) seat of North Shropshire which the Lib Dems are throwing the kitchen sink at - it's a heck of a lift but with the government doing this badly some people do seem to think we might win it.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Pentagathus on December 11, 2021, 06:19:41 PM
It's a shame we've got such a wait until the next scheduled GE. Long time to keep the fingers crossed.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Glaurung on December 17, 2021, 01:04:21 PM
The Conservatives quietly held a recent by-election in the safe seat of Old Bexley and Sidcup: next week there's another, in the (again nominally safe) seat of North Shropshire which the Lib Dems are throwing the kitchen sink at - it's a heck of a lift but with the government doing this badly some people do seem to think we might win it.

And indeed, after much kitchen-sink throwing, it's a LibDem win - a 34% swing from 2019, albeit on a rather reduced turnout. In practice what appears to have happened is lots of Conservative voters staying at home, and non-Tory votes coalescing around the LibDems.
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: dubsartur on December 18, 2021, 01:26:52 AM
It occurs to me that the Tory Christmas Party Scandal is a lot like the scandal in Alberta where several MPs spent the end of 2020 on vacation somewhere warm after telling their constituents to stay home this year?  Hypocrasy tends to annoy people who otherwise don't pay attention to government.

What does "throwing the kitchen sink" at a riding look like in a small-party, UK context?
Title: Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
Post by: Jubal on December 18, 2021, 09:28:15 AM
To give an idea of the scale, 34 percent puts it as the seventh largest by election swing in British history. It's a very, very big number as these things go.

What does "throwing the kitchen sink" at a riding look like in a small-party, UK context?
Not just any small party - the Lib Dems essentially have a political culture that has almost evolved to specialise in by elections. If we decide we're fighting one hard we flood the seat with activists and leaflets - a lot of it's show of strength to convince people we're the main challenger - and whilst our activist base is smaller than e.g. Labour's, they're well trained and extremely dedicated and mobile and when the party starts pushing core activists to go a by election, quite a lot will (there's a camaraderie element too of course: building friendships etc creates cohesion and encourages people back). We had people from the whole country just descend on the seat - but we also have the knowhow on how to get an HQ set up fast, how to find stakeboard sites, how to get printing set up, etc. There's a lot of quite politically unusual specislised skills in how to turn up with nothing and have a campaign infrastructure workable for hundreds of activists built within a week. When concentrated, even from a weak start we can get a lot of canvass data very fast, then use that to target leaflets and drop bits of internal polling through the rest of the campaign. A lot of it is just delivering lots of material and canvassing very fast: as the government scandals emerged this week, we were getting them onto leaflets and hand delivered out to a large chunk of the constituency practically by the next day. There's financial spend too of course, though in a good by election with the wind in our sails we probably make more from donations than we actually spent on the ground.