Author Topic: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition  (Read 15972 times)

dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #60 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?
« Last Edit: July 09, 2021, 04:05:58 AM by dubsartur »

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #61 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:
  • 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.
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dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #62 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).

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #63 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:
  • "Freedom day" and the end of all restrictions are coming up, the UK's case rate is soaring and the government are doing nothing.
  • A new review is calling for salt & sugar taxes again. Personally I disagree with these as a policy.
  • Willie Rennie has stood down as leader of the Scottish Lib Dems after a number of years. The presumed successor is Alex Cole-Hamilton, MSP for Edinburgh West: it's become de facto accepted that a party's Scottish leader should be in Holyrood not in Westminster and the Lib Dem Holyrood bench is quite narrow (indeed it consists of just four members now).
  • Sian Berry has stood down as co-leader of the Green Party. Green leaders don't get to pick their own front benches or do much to keep them in line, and Green spokesman Shahrar Ali has been very outspokenly opposed to trans women being treated as women, contrary to Berry's stance. Her resignation statement essentially said that she wasn't willing to lead a team which wasn't able to be full-throatedly in support of trans right.
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dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #64 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?
« Last Edit: July 15, 2021, 05:41:46 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #65 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.
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dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #66 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.
« Last Edit: July 16, 2021, 06:12:13 AM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #67 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.
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Jubal

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #68 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.
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Tusky

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #69 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.
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Jubal

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #70 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.
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Pentagathus

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #71 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.

dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #72 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.

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #73 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/
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dubsartur

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Re: UK politics: Post-Brexit edition
« Reply #74 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?