UK politics: Post-Brexit edition

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

A.J. West, a British scholar of pre-Columbian Southeast Asia, 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.

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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.

[Jubal]

Yes, sorry, that was just me half-doing the moving job and then forgetting about it. D'oh.

Interesting UK oddments lately:

• Hull's Liberal Democrat group managed to get a motion passed with Labour help calling for a minimum income pilot in the city. They're the first LD group to have tried something like this and it got good coverage, as well as the party's acting leader (who is usually on the party's economic right) tweeting in support of them. I'd like to think that my work getting mincome trials into party policy has helped create the climate for this to happen, though I don't know how much impact it really had.
• One friend of mine has been posting a lot about twinning, and seeing this as an important thing to revitalise post-Brexit: twinning arrangements have often become very mcuh reduced to councils, and getting them more properly set up again with school and community group links could be a good way to get rural UK communities in particular reaching out to people in other countries better.
• This fantastic article from Nick Barlow, which I think is immensely worth reading in terms of understanding the roots of some of our problems with local politics in the UK (and the liberals' fairly crucial if tragic part in unwittingly causing them).

[dubsartur]

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 ("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.

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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?

[Jubal]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[Tusky]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[Gmd]

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.

[dubsartur]

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, 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!

[Jubal]

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.