UK Politics 2022

[Jubal]

Two more by-elections yesterday, with sizeable opposition wins in both cases: one for the Lib Dems in Tiverton & Honiton, and one for Labour in Wakefield. No real sign of the Tories actually ditching Johnson though as a result.

[BagaturKhan]

Anyway , i must say congratulations to your country about a new prime-minister, missis Elizabeth Truss!
Always respect the Great Britain. My grandfather had the same opinion. He also had a medal of Cambridge for his work on geophysical science.

[Jubal]

I suspect most of us here aren't feeling very positive about her, but we'll see how it goes! She's my member of parliament (for the constituency of South West Norfolk, where I grew up). She's not had a good record as a minister - for example, her department several times approved weapon export licenses to Saudi Arabia that were illegal under UK law. She also once claimed British people were "among the worst idlers in the world" when writing a book, so I'm not sure she really likes the country she's meant to be running. She is very popular with the members of the Conservative Party, I suppose, largely I think because she reminds them a bit of Margaret Thatcher (though I think she's far less politically heavyweight).

Her new cabinet is about as right-wing as they come: an anti-LGBT health secretary, a climate secretary who is not in favour of tackling climate change, and a home secretary who might actually manage to be worse than her predecessor Priti Patel which would be impressive if it wasn't terrifying.

Either way, she certainly doesn't have an easy job ahead. It currently looks like she's maybe going to go for large-scale government borrowing to try and reduce the scale of the current energy crisis, but it's not clear how well that will work. And in terms of her party, the Conservatives are over ten points behind, and polls asking about voting intention with Truss in charge specifically have suggested the Conservatives might do even worse under her leadership...

[BagaturKhan]

My big condolences for the whole British nation and all people of UK and all people of this world about the death of Her Majesty Elizabeth.
Its a pain, and i know about it. And i feel this pain too. Queen Elizabeth was decent, kind and very powerful woman, woman with a big power within, with kind heart and strong will.
Her name will never be forgotten.

[Jubal]

Yes, it's definitely a strange feeling having someone who was so central to the country's life for so very long suddenly be gone. It's an unsettled time to be British, I think... as a matter of principle I generally think it'd be better to transition away from having a royal family, but most British people are quite accepting of the institution. And there's no doubt that a lot of that was the personal effectiveness of the Queen at presenting that theme of stability and public service as the public face of the monarchy. We live in strange times.

[dubsartur]

Queen Elizabeth was a symbol of the 20th century which so many people in the Northern Hemisphere are desperate to return to (not just the US and UK, there is Soviet nostalgia in Russia for example).  But nobody can step in the same river twice.

So her death will hit many people hard, although its not unexpected that a 96 year old whose spouse died last year dies during a respiratory pandemic.

[Jubal]

Very mixed thoughts having slept on it.

Facetiously: I do think at the least we should try changing it up a bit, whales have had a prince for centuries, so we should now make William the Prince of Manatees or something for once. Maybe also change the royal bird away from swans, run a randomiser on a British bird guide and end up deciding that teal or dunnocks are now the royally protected ones.

Experientially: Twitter of course is now a melee between people who think the Queen was an angel crossed with a Disney princess crossed with everyone's grandmother versus people who think she was a cartoon villain, when it's almost like things tend to be a teensy bit more complex than that.

Historically: It's tricky - a lot of colonies were still extant and suffering severely during Elizabeth II's reign, and the disparities created by colonial rule do persist, and I absolutely see the extent to which the royals are the figurehead for all that. They're representatives of the state after all, that's kind of their thing. And I think there's a fair case that the presence of the royals still rather white-washes some of that past. I slightly worry, on the other hand, that some people seem to treat the UK's monarchy as if it actually had executive authority over all of these things, which just misunderstands the system (in ways that make the system harder to fix: if you want to change how power works, you need to start by locating it accurately).

Nationally: For most of my British friends I think it's less a matter of grief and more a sense of uncertainty that's getting to people about this.

Personally: Meanwhile another thing I find at times like this is how strong my social mores against celebrating death are, as I've noticed people on the "the Queen was a monster" side of the fence doing. Outside any feelings on this particular case, I never celebrate death - I mean, I'll celebrate someone's life at their funeral, I think that's what funerals should be for, but I never go "yay, the bastard's dead" about... anyone, really, ever. Even for some of the most obviously evil people who've died in my lifetime, the furthest I can get is "at least their death means they can't hurt more people". I guess for me, death is a time to look back over someone's life and therefore to see how it could have been different. And that's always a sobering and often a tragic set of thoughts, especially if the person did or was associated with bad things because it's a time to understand the paths that led to all of that. But death isn't justice, it doesn't as a rule undo or heal hurts, and I really struggle with seeing it as a matter for joy.

[Pentagathus]

I can't say I particularly give a unit of faecal matter about the Queen's death, but some of the outfits for the coronation were pretty fly.

Truss is an absolute tool, I really wish our next GE was coming up much sooner than it's likely to. Feels like we might finally get out of a Tory government again at least.

[dubsartur]

The inimitable Laurie Penny has a piece on the UK Conservative Party conference:

The unfortunate Toby Young, a living monument to the English Art of failing upwards, is on one of their panels, and seems distressed to be the most liberal person here by far, making an asinine but apparently genuine argument for academic freedom alongside some of the most racist speeches I’ve heard that weren’t improvised by thugs on a night bus. At one point, an old man next to me in the audience genuinely finds it necessary to comment that are “rather too many black players in Premier League football”. He turns out to be a former government minister.
...
And that’s when it hits me. What’s wrong with the suits. They’re too good. Really, actually posh people don’t wear a perfect three-piece to a wingnut fringe event. The Chipping Norton set has left the building.

Once you've spotted it, you see it everywhere. These men – there really are very few women here – were never in the club. They may be known in Tufton Street and seen in the best restaurants, but they were only ever tolerated because they make useful scapegoats. They aren’t real insiders. They’re the middle-class, or foreign, or brown-skinned, or grasping little scholarship kids – and I can spot one of those staggering drunk down a Birmingham side street any day, because I’m one, too. It’s times like this that you remember that the British ruling class has never shown mercy to its expendable members.

I don't see any masks in the crowded conference hall in the picture which illustrates her essay.

[Jubal]

The UK continues to be politically and economically in a bizarre state - if you'd told me in 2012 that we'd all be considering as an improvement the idea that Jeremy Hunt was taking over as chancellor, overruling all the Prime Minister's signature economic policies, and replacing them with his own, I'd have thought you were mad. And yet, here we are. Kwarteng is gone and with him Truss' political project, the Tories are polling below twenty percent in some polls, and the government is basically threatening a new round of austerity on a country that can't remotely afford it as a replacement for its previous policy which was to crash the whole economy into immediate freefall because nobody thought we could pay for all the tax cuts.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Greens (who are a fully separate party to the Green Party of England & Wales) have formally cut ties with the GPEW over the latter's tolerance of transphobia.

I'd say trans rights are also one of the most prominent issues in the Liberal Democrat internal elections that are ongoing - there's a very clear slate pushing for the view that the party essentially can't have an anti-transphobia policy, and quite a bit of organised pushback to that, with the party complaints process and various legal opinions on its handling of certain issues being very wrapped up in all of this. One of the most prominent bits of complaints system drama has been around former federal board member Jo Hayes, who wanted to run for President but was expelled from the party (not for transphobia, to clarify - I think the issues/accusations were around harassment of staff): she attempted to legally challenge this but had her attempt to get an injunction against the federal elections taking place very much rejected in court. Her faction, and the transphobe lobby (which do overlap at least to some extent) seem to be backing Liz Webster for the party presidency, who's largely standing on a tub-thumping pro-EU platform, an interesting choice given the President is traditionally not really a policy-first role.

Webster is standing against incumbent Mark Pack, who's probably the establishment candidate, and former MEP Lucy Nethsinga, who is very likeable and a hard worker but currently seems to be a bit of a none-of-the-above candidate, I'm not sure what her core pitch is. There isn't really an obvious candidate for president from the party's left/radical wings: I'd expect Nethsinga to do very well in those groups somewhat by default, though I think Pack will win pretty easily overall because of his greater reach and name recognition. As always people are tending to ignore the "down-ballot" races, which cover about 170 (!!!) candidacies across six elections (Board, Council, Conference Committee, Policy Committee, International Relations Committee, ALDE delegation). It's debatable how important individual seats on these bodies are, but cumulatively these are the organs of the party that set direction, write manifestos, etc, and I feel people tend to think about them too little.

[dubsartur]

What does 'transphobia' mean in this context?  In Internet and Old Media discourse it can mean anything from physical attacks to having a different estoeric opinion on how a particular type of sporting event should be segregated or whether "male and female" in policies from the last century mean sex, gender, or gender identity.

Edit: are the English and Welsh Greens inviting Jordan Peterson and those people who insist that puberty blockers are part of a sinister conspiracy by drug companies to speak at policy events, or did one person once use the wrong pronoun and not apologize profusely enough after correcting themself?  I have seen both types of things called 'transphobia' in Canada.

[Pentagathus]

It wasn't actually mentioned in that article, but it did link somewhere to another article in which it did.
"On July 22, Stonewall tweeted, “Research suggests that children as young as 2 recognise their trans identity”, continuing by saying, “LGBTQ-inclusive and affirming education is crucial for the wellbeing of all young people!” Ali claimed that this was an “off the scale safeguarding risk”, and asked, “would we teach 2 year olds [the] concept of schizophrenia?”. He went on to brand Stonewall an “utter disgrace” and a “danger to children”."

To my very limited knowledge, the majority of children who express some kind of gender dysphoria will "change their mind" (I'm sure there's a better term but I don't know it). If that's the case, and you read Stonewall as suggesting that 2 year olds should be encouraged to question their own gender identity, or affirm any child that is questioning their identify or something like that, then I can see where he's coming from. But there I'm reading into his intent on top of his interpretation of Stonewall's intent, so unless he's clarified exactly what he meant it's hard to say. The link to schizophrenia does suggest he's of the opinion that transgender identity = gender dysphoria = is a negative mental disorder.
One thing I'm fairly confident of though, is that if Stonewall are actually trying to promote pro-Trans views to the wider public they need to seriously rethink their approach, these kind of statements can be very easily misconstrued. I'm guessing that twitter is probably not the ideal platform for such things.

[Jubal]

I'm here using transphobia to generally indicate a set of policies and outlook that, in essence if not stated outright, seek to remove trans people from public life. The largest part of this is the argument that trans people are inherently a predatory threat and should therefore not be allowed in spaces around women and children. There's a fairly small but coherent ideological group here, with a small number of politicians across different parties (most notably Rosie Duffield in Labour, Joanna Cherry in the SNP, Shahrar Ali in the Greens and Baroness Ludford in the Lib Dems), journalists, and public figures who are tub-thumpingly in support. An organisation called the LGB Alliance is their largest organisational body (and I think all the abovementioned politicians have e.g. spoken at their conferences etc.)

The LGB Alliance's positions include that "protecting children from a dangerous and confusing gender-identity ideology" is important such that any content related to trans people shouldn't be taught in schools, and indeed some of their people take the view that this should apply to LGBT content generally, one of their co-founders citing the risk of "predatory gay teachers" in having school organisations or clubs around LGBT issues. They're generally opposed to the concept of Gillick competency (that is, the idea that teenagers should have some privacy and independent assessments of their capacity to make medical decisions, including from their parents if necessary). They're also against banning LGBT conversion therapy (including for LGB people!) on the grounds that they think the ban on conversion therapy will make it harder to persuade children that they aren't actually trans. This somewhat differs from the view of experts and groups like the UN, who have called for a global ban. Essentially a lot of their positions return us to the pre-2000s "don't talk about LGBT issues/panic when they're discussed around minors" view of the world, but somewhat more focused on trans people.

They also tend to take a very specific view on what laws discussing sex/gender/etc mean, and their view is that they should always mean binarily understood chromosomal sex and nothing else, and that the definition of single-sex spaces should be heavily enforced including in spaces where such designations are generally self-made: so in other words, no trans people in public toilets and changing/fitting rooms. This is explicitly not the view of British case law and equalities guidance (which tends to not take a rigidly chromosomal definition of sex on the grounds that this would be somewhat ridiculous: the formal guidance on implementing the Equalities Act has generally suggested the position that single-sex spaces excluding trans people would be legitimate if in service of a reasonable and proportionate aim: to the best of my knowledge there is very little in law that has confirmed any situations that actually meet that test). Generally the LGB alliance has been veering rightwards in its associations over time, because they get more of a hearing from conservatives, and hard-right groups like the Heritage Foundation in the US will invite their speakers over and be personally nice to them.

So, re your edit, the transphobe lobby in UK politics is far, far closer to the first bit than the second. The sort of hyper any-slip-up-is-aggression viewpoint, from a British perspective, seems like a rare feature of corners of social media and North American campuses, it's simply not something I've ever seen in UK electoral-political circles (I'm sure the UK has a few of those people, but they don't tend to muddy their hands with actual political parties). A lot of the LGB Alliance type people are perhaps politer and better turned out than Jordan Peterson and the most wingnut online fringe (the online wingnut fringe do exist, I've had to block probably several hundred nameless Twitter accounts claiming my pro-trans-rights views make me an abuser, over the years). Nonetheless this is very much a concerted movement on the borders of middle-to-upper-class British society (polling generally suggests that the electorate more widely do not care about trans issues). This group is a minority within the centre-left parties, but it's a pretty well funded minority who really like taking crowdfunded legal action even despite some stunningly sizeable failures - one flagship discrimination case that they touted as a "success" for getting a 22,000 payout on one of its points cost over five hundred thousand in legal fees. One suspects there are some lawyers somewhere who've worked out that this is a pretty reliable way of getting money out of people without having to go to the trouble of coming up with sensible legal arguments. Regarding the GPEW/SGs split, the primary issue is the apparent inaction of the GPEW on the issue: so it's not so much that the GPEW espouses the above ideology, but they've not treated e.g. Shahrar Ali's views and associations as a deal-breaker in the way they probably would do if one of their senior members was espousing other bigotries.


Regarding Pent's post - I think Stonewall tend to make that point about some very young children having trans identities to push back against the "oh people can just choose to not be trans" view which still exists. Care for young people with dysphoria/potential trans identities is a tricky area to get perfect, but I don't see anything wrong with the idea that people should be told that it's OK if they take time to work out who they are in an identity sense, which AIUI is really what the idea of affirming education is about: it's affirming the possibility and taking a case-by-case approach for what works best for how a child is interacted with as opposed to actively working to reinforce a child's birth-assigned gender, not doing the "oh you say you're a girl, small human, YOU SHALL NOW WEAR PINK FOREVER" which seems to be what Shahrar Ali is imagining. I do get that it's easy to fear that affirming care can become reinforcing an identity that's still developing or ends up wrong for the child, but the cases of that seem AFAICT extremely rare compared to the much more common reverse problem of non-affirming, trying to force people to retain their assigned-at-birth gender, and ending up with a bunch of suicidal trans teenagers. I certainly think/agree that comparing being trans to being schizophrenic is miles wide of the mark: and yes, I've found lots of people in his kinds of circles expressing the view that being trans is a mental illness and the appropriate care is to convince people that they're not trans (which is another root of the scepticism among this movement about banning conversion therapy). I also 100% agree that Twitter is a terrible and clunky platform for talking about what are obviously really really complex issues that should ideally be treated quite individually and where it's extremely difficult for most people to work out what's going on.

But yeah, I think age-appropriate education that helps children understand what different identities are and how that might apply to them seems very reasonable, and I'm much more worried about the risk of UK going back to a pseudo-Section-28 system where LGBT issues are just swept under the rug in schools. I don't think there should be as much reliance on the charitable sector to be dealing with both advocacy and service delivery in some of these areas, which has maybe been an awkward point for groups like Stonewall and Mermaids where they're both having to be the public face arguing the case for better care/funding and being the groups that do a lot of work to deliver resources for equalities training, helplines for young people, service referrals, etc etc... but that's part of the UK's general chronic underfunding of public services, and I'd fault the government rather than the charities for setting up that situational problem.


Sorry that ended up so long, I'm still feeling like crap and I tend to overexplain when I'm struggling to express myself well. I frankly wish I didn't end up knowing this much about an issue that I would like to be able to not personally care about because I'd like to be able to leave it up to trans people and relevant experts to sort out... I find it really exhausting how much time and effort ends up being spent on this, and miserable how it's ended up as one of these daft 'culture war' things. One of the biggest recent social media storms over this stuff was one of the prominent LGBA types yelling at a local library in the UK and people sending them hate mail over the fact that the library used they/them pronouns for their new reading mascot, who is a colourful dungarees wearing alien. Which is just the icing on the cake of how incredibly silly this has all gotten - but it's a silliness that certain people are spending a huge amount of money and legal time on in ways that then force people like me (activists in political parties) to waste endless time on it. I can't talk about all the exhausting machinations I'm vaguely aware of that underpin some of these things in public because it's hard to remember if there are bits I don't officially know re ongoing legal stuff, but I'll very much admit at this stage that my view of this movement has been coloured for the worse by many of their antics: I've tended to find them entitled in their mentality, obtusely obsessive in their ideology, and aggressively timewasting in their methods.


Meanwhile the UK is still working out what to make of events, and Liz Truss still looks incredibly weak. Journalists have been asking if she is 'a prisoner' of the new Chancellor, and one of her own MPs recently described a speech by her as "the first time I have heard a corpse deliver its own eulogy". And tons of budget measures have been U-turned on. So that's all going well...

[dubsartur]

Sounds like you see groups in the UK overlap with the groups in the US who want medical exams to verify sex in school sports!  I guess there are all those Bathroom Bills in the US too.

I'm more familiar with general xenophobia being directed against trans people (ie. people who don't like LGB people or visible minorities or people of different religions also don't like trans people) and with the theory that the explosion in trans and nonbinary identities is driven by sinister propagandists.  The only 'predatory trans person in Canada' narrative I can think of is about Jessica Yaniv.  I did a quick DuckDuckGo and it looks like there are still a lot of right-wing nonsense sites screaming about Yaniv.

I think one controversy in the Green Party of Canada was about one person using the wrong pronoun once and correcting themself, and it looked to me like basically an interpersonal conflict being rationalized as about sacred values.  Its easier to recruit supporters for a Moral Crusade than for monkey politics.

It does not surprise me that this got started on twitter, that site is to stupid like stagnant water is to mosquitos.

I don't really understand trans and nonbinary identities, but we have survived for 100,000 years without chromosonal tests or genital exams to verify everyone'e sex, and if we just keep calm we can find new policies which work.

[Pentagathus]

Sounds like you see groups in the UK overlap with the groups in the US who want medical exams to verify sex in school sports!

Now that sounds like a great way to keep kids safe from sexual abuse. Can't imagine any unnecessary trauma there.


I did end up reading the tweets mentioned, the Green guy definitely came of as transphobic. I haven't bothered looking into his policy suggestions, I can't imagine I'll be voting green anytime soon anyway.
The Stonewall tweet was, a tweet. Not long enough to make it's position clear, it was in response to an article about a NB child not having their identity respected at a nursery, so I would assume that it was simply advocating for schools, nurseries etc to respect children's identities even at a young age, and maybe for some kind of age appropriate education on trans identity too (although the concept of age appropriate is obviously contentious by itself but anyway). The reaction to it did not seem great, not sure how twitter works but all the responses I saw (presumably the most popular?) were very much opposed to the tweet, either there's a lot of transphobes on twitter (or a lot of twitter transphobes are drawn to such tweets), or it's a topic that's easily misconstrued. I suspect that studies regarding the minds/brains of very young children are probably best left out of public debate for the most part, as it does sound very dubious without having read the studies (obviously it doesn't help when media outlets sensationalise studies without actually understanding them, or deliberately misconstruing their contents to make them sound more significant/relevant/exciting than they are).

Re transphobia in politics generally, again it's not really something I've looked into, but it does often seem to largely be a weird mix of people who are also homophobic and generally right wing, along with people who could be described as the "man hating" feminists that the reactionary types are always railing about. Those types seem to think (if I very crudely boil it down) men = dangerous/bad -> transwomen = men pretending to be women so they can take advantage of cis woman because men dangerous. There are also the genuine issues where more "normal" people get dragged into it and it's hard to guess the intent, like with sports or prisons.