Author Topic: UK politics 2019  (Read 17866 times)

Jubal

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UK politics 2019
« on: May 03, 2019, 11:11:30 PM »
It's a mess! But it's a mess I'm making this thread to be smug about because we just had the local elections and my party did really well :P

Basically both the main parties did badly - the main opposition, Labour, did moderately badly, and the Conservatives got slaughtered. Over 1300 councillors lost in a single election, which is the largest loss for any party in a single night so far this century. The big beneficiaries were the Lib Dems, who gained 700 seats; the Green Party gained about 150 which is big news for them, and there were over six hundred independent candidates elected, which is a huge increase there as well. In all three cases (LDs, Greens, Independents) they more than doubled their starting total over the course of the night, and the Lib Dems gained complete control of ten councils whilst the Conservatives lost control of forty-four (mostly to "No Overall Control" situations).

Also in amusing news, MP for the 19th century Jacob Rees-Mogg, an aristocratic Catholic conservative who goes campaigning with his nanny, now has a Lib Dem as his local councillor, which is pretty funny.

Everything in the UK is still a mess, but I have something to celebrate for once politically, so I guess time to make the most of it :)
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Pentagathus

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #1 on: May 04, 2019, 01:05:50 PM »
Did UKIP win seats or are they finished?

comrade_general

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #2 on: May 04, 2019, 01:08:14 PM »
There's that hate speech again. Moderator please ban!

Jubal

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #3 on: May 04, 2019, 01:12:38 PM »
Did UKIP win seats or are they finished?
They lost a whole bunch more seats but they did hold/gain a few this time, lost 145 net so they have about 31 councillors left. Definitely relegated to Very Minor Party status. They've been wiped out on our home council back in Breckland.
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Clockwork

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #4 on: May 04, 2019, 03:49:16 PM »
Congrats to Lib Dems! A very thorough well done to them :)

@Penty - UKIP have been toast for a while, since Farage left they became increasingly racist with that ex-army guy and the other one with gerard batten appointing tommy robinson as his advisor.


Brexit party is the real deal though taking members and support from both liberals and conservatives. Even if their slogan is dumb. I was at the March 29 rally because I said I'd accompany someone there and so many card carrying rednecks saying 'Brexit means Brexit'... to which my response was usually: 'Crayfish means crayfish'. And this is still the party I guess I'd be voting for if given the chance.



I agree with most* analysts saying that it's because both main parties have royally screwed brexit and (in my opinion) diminished the benefits of brexit by not breaking away quickly and early. In addition, tinfoil hatting a bit, I think huawei getting the contract is because a trade negotiation with china said that was a condition.

*maybe loudest/on bcc most/times/telegraph
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Jubal

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #5 on: May 04, 2019, 05:19:12 PM »
The Brexit Party is in vast predominance taking support from the right with some hangers-on from the authoritarian left, I'd say - I can't think of any of their prominent backers who I'd say was a liberal, though some (George Galloway) are traditionally seen as on the left and others (Claire Fox) might have been considered on the left at earlier points in their career. It's a very slickly put together machine though and I think there's a high chance of them winning the Europeans. I'll be interested to see how well my lot do after last night; it's given us a pretty strong argument to be the main pro-EU party, and if we can consolidate that vote and the Tories continue to implode then we've got a solid chance of a good third place at least, even second if the Labour+Remain vote really starts cracking in our favour.

I will admit I basically think the "Brexit should've been done quick and early" was essentially invented by Tory-right and Faragist Brexiteers as the ultimate foil for their careers. It basically imposed a condition that sounds rational ("quick, clean break") but which no government would dare to do because (in my opinion and also what I think the government thinks) it would be the economic equivalent of jumping off a cliff (besides which Vote Leave in the referendum campaigned explicitly on the idea of getting a deal signed off before leaving). What the "quick and early" line meant for those who invented and pushed it, though, was that whatever Brexit deal a government did get could be found wanting, and any of the flaws in the whole project could be written off as "well if you'd just done it like we said"... so it basically allows senior (and perhaps rank and file) Brexiteers to keep the faith, because they can tell themselves that the window has passed to do what should've been done all along, and that no part of this mess is their fault.

I think from a point of view of "could Brexit have been made a success", there was an early window of Brexiteer opportunity that closed, but it was the reverse of the "quick and clean" - what Tory Brexiteers should've done was push a Norway deal hard right from the start, which would've killed half of Remain's support base and potentially also ripped Labour in half into the bargain. As it happened, people like Rees-Mogg and Farage were an absolute godsend to people who actually want to stay in the EU, because they successfully pushed the Tories into such an uncompromising stance that it energised big cadres of campaigners and pretty much brought the Lib Dems back from the dead in order to oppose it.
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Clockwork

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #6 on: May 09, 2019, 09:31:17 PM »
You might well think it's idiocy on a slogan and economic suicide, but that's not the whole picture - bailing very quickly would actually have kept up the same supply lines that were in effect but with the imposition of WTO trade rules including paying like 30% more for dinner in the short term. In my opinion the disparity and trade negotiations would have been much more easily worked out from there as it creates a definite base to work from instead of this ludicrous limbo. The time it takes the EU to do anything is a universal weakness of theirs, it's literally the value proposition for that level of democracy, capitalising on it would have been the smart move, it's not that ridiculous.

WTO rules on their own aren't that much of a demon anyway tbqh they've been blown way out of proportion.

Norway option wasn't an option I thought? EU was against it, Norway was definitely against it. I thought it was one the conservative moderates were saying but it never went in front of EU because they'd just burn it?

I think the main mistake that was made was assuming that nobody could pick up our trading needs if we left. It seems to have been the assumption that ~50% of our total trade, the bit we do with the eu is just gone, bamfed out of existence. It doesn't really work like that, we still have that money to spend, just whoever wants the business gets it and we either lose out in quality or we have to take a bad import for a good import. E.g. If Indonesia were to sell us cheap beef in exchange for us buying a frankly overpriced and under-performing 5G infrastructure from them.
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Jubal

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #7 on: May 09, 2019, 10:24:40 PM »
Well, the short to medium term issue with No Deal and supply lines isn't really whether people come to a deal to sell goods, or even the tariffs, it's things like additional import checks and breakdowns in services infrastructure. You basically need to make Dover port twice the size to account for the fact that lorries are taking a lot longer to get through it. If you told me I had to prepare for a No Deal exit in 2016, I would be stalling for as long as possible with the EU whilst throwing all of my actual preparations at increasing the country's economic resilience against shocks like that - I'd have spent the last three years borrowing heavily and investing in power generation, stockpiling of key good, native capacity in energy generation, and shifting the economy hard out of London by taxing the armadillo out of elements of the City that I knew I was going to lose anyway and spending that cash on infrastructure to support manufacturing. As it is, we've done none of that, and I think we're simply not prepared enough to weather it; a government that, as you put it, made people pay 30% more for dinner in the short term would collapse too quickly to be able to see its agenda through anyway, IMO, unless it had an immense parliamentary majority (which will in turn probably never happen while the population is so sharply divided on Brexit).

Norway don't want the UK joining the current EFTA group, because we'd dwarf the other members, but we could easily have just created a separate group with the same functions that solely included the UK. The EU would've been fine with that - their issue is that they won't do any deal that treats the four market freedoms as divisible, so they'll do Norway or closer, and they'll do Hard Brexit or harder, but they won't do any fudges between the two. The real problem with the Norway option is that you don't get to set much of an independent trade policy, and you don't get to vote on what the EU's policy is going to be. It's the only thing that's ever been on the table that I'd actually class as a compromise though, where the result of the referendum is fulfilled but Remainers get enough of what they want that they'd accept it as a new status quo. May's deal, or Corbyn's pseudo-idea-deal, or No Deal, I think will all be sufficiently unacceptable to Remain-leaning people that there'll be a continual pro-EU force in Britain trying to pull us back in if we actually get round to leaving, and that it'll be as strong or stronger a force as Leave-leaning forces were before 2016.

Regarding trade, I think you're thinking about it too much in terms of physical imports/exports, which haven't been the mainstay of Britain's trade strategy for a good century or more now. If you're a country that manufactures a bunch of stuff that other folk want to buy, and it's good enough that they still want to buy it, sure, you get some leverage that way. But we're mainly a country that sells people services, and then buys their stuff with the money they pay us to, among other things, look after their money. Plus we're a knowledge and culture hub as a country; strong universities that export information, decent sized film and tech industries, etc. All those things are really quite mobile, and they're heavily reliant on access to international agreements that go beyond the very limited scope of WTO rules. As long as Britain doesn't politically collapse (which I don't think is an impossible outcome) in the wake of a May style or No Deal Brexit, it would eventually recover of course, but I think it would have to turn into a very different economy in order to do so, and would lose its world-leading status in the areas I just mentioned. I hope I don't have to see that develop but the historian in me would find it quite interesting - I suspect Dublin could become a very major boom-town in the coming years if it allows easy access into European digital (and physical) markets for English speakers and London doesn't any more.
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Jubal

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #8 on: June 07, 2019, 09:20:57 AM »
Meanwhile, the Brexit party just fought their first by-election, in a 60% Leave seat that's usually a Lab/Con marginal, with the sitting Labour MP having been kicked out for fraudulently trying to avoid a speeding ticket and the replacement Labour candidate having liked a bunch of outright anti-semitic stuff on social media, and the Conservatives still in national meltdown. And, um, they still managed to lose to Labour and I have no idea how. I was seriously expecting them to get 35%+ vote share, maybe 40. They need to be asking a lot of questions about their strategy and lack of campaign infrastructure after this - it was pretty much perfect conditions for them and absolutely none of the people I know expected them to not make the gain. Lib Dems came fourth and quadrupled our vote share, which I'll take in the circumstances, getting back into double figures somewhere like Pboro is decent for us.
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Jubal

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #9 on: June 13, 2019, 03:11:37 PM »
Our latest joy is the Conservative leadership contest. The first ballot of Tory MPs was today (they have several rounds to whittle down to the last 2 contenders who then get to be voted on by party members).

Boris Johnson got 36% of the MPs and was miles ahead of his rivals. He's now definitely in the strongest position to win. For most of his career this guy has been considered a complete joke, but he's backstabbed his way to the top very effectively. He might also split the party by being too hardline to the right though - they can only afford to lose at most four MPs or the government could fall, and several have said they'd bring the government down in preference to having Boris implement No Deal. Boris' allies tolerate him because they think he can win, and his enemies really hate him, so we'll see where we end up...
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Pentagathus

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #10 on: June 14, 2019, 02:28:08 PM »
I kind of want Boris to win just so we can watch Prime Minister Boris in meetings with President Donald.

Jubal

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #11 on: June 14, 2019, 04:58:24 PM »
Chances are pretty good that he'll win, I think. Though he may win and then not become Prime Minister, because he only needs 3 Tories to go off in a huff and he probably falls immediately to a Vote of No Confidence which would be an oddly fitting end to his career.
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Pentagathus

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #12 on: July 29, 2019, 07:44:20 PM »
It's happening, Big Bad Boris is boss and he's going to make Britain Great again.

Jubal

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #13 on: July 29, 2019, 10:57:54 PM »
We're so unbelievably portugaled.
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Tusky

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Re: UK politics 2019
« Reply #14 on: July 30, 2019, 06:58:05 AM »
I have no idea what you mean. What about him does not inspire you with thoughts of a dignified, wise and respected leader?

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