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UK Politics 2023

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Jubal:
Hopefully containing fewer Prime Ministers than 2022's trio.

The focus of politics has rather moved out of Westminster for a winter of discontent, we start the new year with Lots of Strikes (no really, lots), and the unions at loggerheads with a Conservative government that's very unwilling to compromise. Rishi Sunak hasn't revived Conservative fortunes, and Keir Starmer is still sitting on an enormous polling lead on the basis that he's not Those Bastards. The Lib Dems are sitting rather statically on ten percent ish or a bit less, the Greens and hard-right Reform on a few points each, the SNP sabre-rattling about independence... it all feels rather strange, with a pretty lame duck government, an opposition touting very few ideas, and a desperately exhausted and angry country not entirely sure where to turn.


Someone recently linked me to this, noting the Lib Dems' soft-pedalling of their drug policy, which is a microcosm of where the party is generally under Ed Davey. Very much going for the softly approach to avoid upsetting anyone and hoping enough people will be put off the Tories to win us some seats.
https://volteface.me/missing-the-liberal-democrats/

The bad news for the Lib Dems is that there have been some reports that the Tories are going to give up on the northern seats they're fighting with Labour altogether, effectively conceding the election, in favour of a really hard push to keep affluent southern voters onside rather than risk losing on both fronts. That could really screw over the Ed Davey strategy, given the resources Sunak would have for trying to hold those seats.


Anyway, the real story is the cost of living. Things are pretty desperate in the UK right now, and it's hard to see much change happening this year as the Conservatives try to hang on as best they can (I doubt they'll call an early election to get the pain over with: they'll just be hoping the economy revives a bit and they can take credit next year).

dubsartur:
I have seen a claim on social media that the Scottish gender recognition reform bill is originally a piece of legislation which Theresa May brought out as a quick thing to do for LGBTQ+ rights before trans issues became such a culture war issue in the UK.  And that a group called Stonewall drafted the original version.  Is that correct?

I find it very hard to find clear, honest information about trans issues.

Jubal:
Ah, did you see Sarah Brown's post that was going around on Mastodon? Yeah, Sarah knows what she's talking about, she's been very much at the front line on this stuff in a UK context (I should also add for the register of interests that we know each other).

Anyway, you're mostly right but a bit fudged on the precise details. Stonewall's report precipitated a proposal for a UK-wide reform bill under Theresa May: Stonewall didn't actually draft the legislation, but they produced the recommendation. Stonewall, for context, is the UK's biggest LGBT rights charity: they've become the focus of much ire of social conservatives lately, but really they're traditionally the more establishment side of LGBT rights campaigning. Anyway, it was in the wake of the UK-wide effort failing as the Conservatives swung authoritarian under Boris Johnson that a bill to do the same thing but only in Scotland alone started being pushed forward. Scotland is more urbanised than England and tends in consequence to lean left, and the SNP have been very keen to precipitate a stand-off over legal issues like this because it helps them make the case that Scotland can only really do what it wants if it leaves the UK.

And that brings us to where we are now, with the post-Johnson Tories trying to block Scotland from doing the reform. There will be a court challenge and it's not clear how it will go: I've seen some posts by people I wouldn't expect to be radicals or pro-Scottish independence on this suggesting that the government may lose in the Supreme Court because the bar for using a Section 35 order to block legislation is actually quite high and it's not clear that they've necessarily met it.

One pertinent question is why the Tories think this is a battle worth fighting: I don't think many people believe that Sunak and Hunt are rabidly anti-trans-rights on anything other than a political calculation level. They may be hoping to use this as a wedge issue to keep social conservatives voting for them, or to raise the prominence of the SNP in an attempt to scare English voters off the idea of a Labour-SNP coalition: I don't buy the idea that they're simply using it to try and distract from the strikes. We'll see what happens next I suppose.

dubsartur:
Thanks!  The culture war thing does seem to engage very small but passionate groups: LGBTQ+ and trans rights organizations, feminist organizations, the radical right, and some people who spend too long on social media and take it all seriously.  And the current issue of making it easier for people to have their state-issued ID reflect their gender presentation and identity seems like a pretty estoeric one which mostly affects trans and intersex people and mostly affects their interactions with states rather than eg. sports organizations or women's organizations.  Isn't the most common use case stopping trans and intersex people being hassled by police or customs officials because their gender presentation does not match their ID (or being outed to employers because their gender presentation does not match their ID?)

Jubal:
Yeah, the actual uses of gender recognition documentation are pretty legally limited. You can change the sex marker on your medical records, passport, and driving license without one, so it's not really a police officials issue as you don't need it for the most common forms of ID. But you do need it to change the sex markers on HMRC documentation, on your birth certificate, to have it recorded reliably properly on your death certificate, and to have marriage licenses issues per the correct gender. If that sounds bizarre as a system for what it affects, yes, it is: it's one of these things that's become totemic for the right despite being really quite bureaucratically esoteric.

Meanwhile a number of rule-breaking scandals seem to be hitting the government, and the cost of living crisis worsens.

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