UK Politics 2023

[Jubal]

Someone quipped that someone with Indian parents and someone with Pakistani parents are about to argue whether to partition the United Kingdom

Yes, there is a certain irony in that particular historical echo. Though it looks like support for independence isn't in its best state after the SNP's slightly bruising leadership contest.

[dubsartur]

Is there anything worth saying about Jeremy Corbyn?  I have him pegged as one of the things that people on social media and pundits babble about but where the babbling is mainly an expression of identity (or the propaganda they want to spread).  I don't do parasocial relationships with celebrities.

I saw something about him drifting towards tanky positions on the Russian invasion of Ukraine?

[Pentagathus]

He's pretty close to being fully pacifist, it's perhaps the main reason I'm glad he's no longer Labour leader. I'm pretty sure he's gone back to being a fairly irrelevant backbencher now, maybe some of the leftier left still support him but I seriously doubt he has much influence anymore.

[Jubal]

Yeah, he's got a very isolationist streak and tends to have that kneejerk anti-westernism of a certain sort of left-winger where he struggles to see Russian and Chinese imperialisms for what they are. I think Corbyn could hurt Labour seriously by trying to front a new political force or join the Greens or something if he wanted to, but he won't because he's actually also a strong party loyalist and most of his fellow Labour-left types would rather fight over the party than leave. So I don't think this will radically shift the political calculus anywhere, I agree with Penty.

[dubsartur]

How big are the tensions inside the Labour party between Corbyn's kind of old-school, socialist-tinged leftism and the beige party-of-vaguely-reformist-power?  And how does Keir Starmer's version of that compare to Tony Blair's? 

Have they given any more hints of what they would do if they get a strong majority government at the next election?

[Jubal]

Most of Labour has always sat between these two poles, I think. Generally Keir Starmer is shutting up the socialist wing by winning: people don't argue with a massive polling lead. If his lead was faltering you'd have more and louder voices arguing for a different route, but for now everyone is desperate to get the Tories out at all costs. I still don't really know what a Starmer government would do: they're very much campaigning on valency/competency rather than very specific policies.

[Jubal]

Further on said winning, the Conservatives lost control of nearly fifty entire councils in this week's local elections and lost over a thousand council seats. Labour took control in over twenty and picked up another 500 councillors, the Lib Dems picked up twelve councils and 400 new councillors of their own, a load more moved into no overall control. The Green Party even took majority control of a council for the first time, in Mid Suffolk, and picked up 240 seats.

My own home patch of Breckland remained Conservative controlled, but even nearby in very blue Norfolk the Tories lost control of Broadland, West Norfolk & King's Lynn, and Great Yarmouth councils. I suspect many of these places will swing back once the Conservatives are out of office nationally, that said. A lot of people have been mumbling about hung parliaments on the basis of the results and I simply don't think they're correct: on these figures Labour are well on course for a majority, given the strength of the national squeeze messages and the fact that the people who turn out at general elections include a lot more lower-information voters who are much more likely to lean Labour or Tory, so I'm not convinced that the good Lib Dem and Green results will carry through as well to a GE whereas conversely I think there are some places where Labour made some local election inroads but that was blunted a bit by LD and Green gains, leading to NOC council areas that are actually ripe Labour targets because of how badly the Conservative vote collapsed.

The Conservatives aren't quite in as bad a state as they were in, say, in the mid 1990s: in 1995 they lost two thousand councillors and had about six councils left out of those contested, whereas this year the Tories still have 33 under majority control. But they have lost more places than they held onto, and generally are looking politically rather fragile.

[dubsartur]

There is a weird mood campaign on social media to shout angrily about the coronation.  I can see Brits getting upset because so many people are struggling while rich people have a big party (and because the UK police are trying out their usual Stasi tricks), but it seems like a strange thing for anyone elsewhere to be angry about.  In Canada, the people who do the most damage are rich or officeholding people who live in Canada.

[Jubal]

I mean I guess people in any other country in the Commonwealth/former Empire might justifiably have pretty negative feelings about the pageantry of the British state, and that is about half the world's population. But I think it's true that the grumpiness, like the fanaticism on the other side of the coin, is probably a bit bigger than the actual role of the monarchy really justifies when compared to the other outrages happening in the world at the present instant. I'm mostly just feeling profoundly apathetic about the whole thing.

[dubsartur]

Yeah, I could understand it it were coming from South Asia and Africa, but aside from one piece in The Continent https://www.thecontinent.org/_files/ugd/287178_fe63188d255147979bb14740630895f4.pdf?index=true  I mostly see this campaign from Europeans and rich Anglos.

To pick one example I know well, there is a school of thought that the Canadian prairies were colonized by Ontario (certainly following a template from the European and postcolonial powers, but the horrible decisions were mainly by people from Ontario and Quebec on behalf of Canada's Parliament).  Blaming the British Empire can be a way to deflect blame.  And while the British were very active in the slave trade until the 1830s, everyone or almost everyone enslaved in what became the province of British Columbia was enslaved by indigenous people.

And there are some indigenous people who if they have to choose would rather deal with the Crown as the House of Windsor than as parliament and legislatures, because the Windsors don't stand to benefit financially from stealing their lands any more (or are pretty sure that most plausible 'reforms' would weaken their position and strengthen that of capitalists).

[Jubal]

Hm, I hadn't considered the angle of blaming Britain when one is a former-British settler colony as blame-deflection so much, I guess that has something to it.

In any case, the international discourse will presumably peter out fairly fast. I am livid about how the coronation policing was done though. Besides the obviously heavy handed arrests of perfectly legitimate protestors, they were arresting people in a programme for handing out rape alarms to members of the public, supposedly "in case they were used to frighten police horses". Just utterly inappropriate and crass behaviour.

[dubsartur]

I agree, police in many places seem to seriously lack a clue right now.

One of the points that many indigenous people in my area have is that to reconcile, you have to stop doing the offensive and destructive thing.  Its no good to say "stealing indigenous land was wrong" if your very expensive lawyers keep fighting for the proposition that all land in Canada belongs to the Crown and indigenous people only have rights to it if they have been explicitly granted those rights.

[Jubal]

The Tory party's right wing is rumbling hard at the moment, it seems like they feel Sunak is wasting time on things like being pseudo-competent rather than doing the things they want like cutting taxes hard, and there is a new attempt to inaugurate a more hardline National Conservative faction (with associated knock-off pound shop CPAC) more explicitly aligned with US Trumpist-Republicanism.

[Jubal]

So, just in case things were starting to get boring, the Tories are starting a new little civil war that's consisted of Johnson and two allies resigning very publicly, triggering by-elections which will probably create further bad news cycles for the government. One seat - Johnson's, in Uxbridge - will almost certainly be a Labour gain in the current climate. Selby seems to be considered the safest Tory seat of the three. Mid Bedfordshire will be the Lib Dems' target, but it looks like Labour are also going to target it, presumably largely to make sure the Lib Dems don't win as Starmer doesn't want the LDs or Greens to be enough of a presence to force him to make any progressive policy shifts that would reduce his ability to capture more right-leaning Tory voters.

[Glaurung]

And just to add to the fun, apparently Dorries has not formally resigned as an MP, despite saying before the weekend that she would go "with immediate effect". So there's now the delightful sight of a Tory MP being pressured by Tory HQ to actually resign.