UK politics: Post-Brexit edition

[dubsartur]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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 

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. 

[Jubal]

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.

[dubsartur]

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?

[Jubal]

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".

[dubsartur]

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.

[Jubal]

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.

[Jubal]

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/

[dubsartur]

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 ...

[Jubal]

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/

[dubsartur]

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?

[Jubal]

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.

[Jubal]

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 by the winner's team during the campaign.

[dubsartur]

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!)