Author Topic: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition  (Read 15970 times)

dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #45 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.
« Last Edit: December 12, 2020, 03:29:04 AM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #46 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.
« Last Edit: February 03, 2021, 03:15:39 AM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #47 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:
  • The SNP will probably end up close to a majority in Scotland, or with a very narrow majority. They may have to share power with the Greens, the other main Nationalist party. The new, more hardline and populist nationalist party, Alba, may get in but with very few seats. The three unionist parties aren't expected to make much headway.
  • The expectation is that Labour will end up in a different coalition in Wales, possibly with Plaid Cymru, the nationalists.
  • Labour will almost certainly lose, perhaps heavily, the parliamentary by-election in Hartlepool, losing a seat they've held for over half a century (but a very Brexit-supporting one that they've recently won in part due to the Conservative-Hard Right votes being split, hence Conservative hopes of a gain).
  • Labour will probably hold the London mayoralty without any real issue, and will have a GLA they can work with with themselves as the largest party.
  • The local elections in England are likely to be very good for the Conservatives. The Lib Dems falling back since 2019 should mean that they can hold or advance across the south and south-west of England, and Labour's relatively weak position across the north of England may offer further pick-up opportunities for them. Smaller parties and independents did very well in 2019, but this is unlikely to be repeated now as COVID has made it hard to do door to door campaigning (more important for smaller parties).
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dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #48 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?

Jubal

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #49 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.
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Jubal

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #50 on: May 16, 2021, 04:24:13 PM »
So the outcomes since I didn't report them:

  • The SNP were indeed just short of a majority. The Alba party got zero seats, the Lib Dems dropped to four seats meaning they lose parliamentary group status. The Greens are the main natural SNP allies, and form a pro-Independence majority, though polling now isn't suggesting that Independence would necessarily win such a referendum.
  • Plaid Cymru did worse and Labour better than expected in Wales: Labour don't quite have a majority but may well govern as a minority there, especially as Plaid are feeling too bruised to join them in coalition, and they won't work with the Tories. The Lib Dems retained one seat, though now a list seat rather than a constituency one.
  • Labour did indeed lose Hartlepool by a mile.
  • Labour did indeed keep the London mayoralty.
  • Generally the Conservatives did do well right across England, though less well in a few affluent pockets of the south, east, and home counties: in places where Lib Dems were consolidating district-level election wins, they did have some success at converting those into county seats, meaning Oxfordshire's Conservatives will be forced into a minority (and look like trying to do a deal with Labour), and Cambridgeshire's Conservatives have lost power altogether to a Lib Dem/Labour/Independent opposition coalition. These are exceptions rather than the rule though.

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.
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dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #51 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 (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.

Jubal

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #52 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."
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dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #53 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.

dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #54 on: June 21, 2021, 11:30:12 PM »
Congratulations to the Lib-Dems for winning that by-election in England!

Jubal

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #55 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.
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dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #56 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.

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #57 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).
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dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #58 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?

dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #59 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.
« Last Edit: June 28, 2021, 07:46:12 AM by dubsartur »