UK Politics 2023

[dubsartur]

Reminds me of the fight within the Nazi party over who would replace Hitler in April and May 1945.

[Jubal]

This has led me to contemplate the horrifying alternate reality where Hitler resigned several years earlier and his successors negotiated a surrender far earlier with freedom for the war criminals in its terms, leading to a chunk of the later C20th where Hitler was out there being treated as a retired politician, giving bigoted interviews to the press and telling everyone that really it was all Goring and Goebbels who were at fault and if only people had stuck to *his* vision... eesh.

[dubsartur]

This has led me to contemplate the horrifying alternate reality where Hitler resigned several years earlier and his successors negotiated a surrender far earlier with freedom for the war criminals in its terms, leading to a chunk of the later C20th where Hitler was out there being treated as a retired politician, giving bigoted interviews to the press and telling everyone that really it was all Goring and Goebbels who were at fault and if only people had stuck to *his* vision... eesh.

The American novel from the late 1930s on a fascist takeover in the United States has something similar with a former President for Life wandering around the party circuit like a White Russian noble.

Edit: Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here

It is scary that Trump could lose an election, stage his autogolpe which failed, and win the next election (although he is pretty old, even if he stays out of prison I don't think he will be a factor after 2028 - the real danger is what he has done to the Republican Party).

[Jubal]

More by-elections! Ironically the Conservatives managed to hold the most marginal of the three seats they were trying to defend in a round of by-elections yesterday, Boris Johnson's former seat of Uxbridge, while they lost Selby & Ainsty in Yorkshire (to Labour) and Somerton & Frome in Somerset (to the Lib Dems) on enormous swings.

Apparently the Uxbridge result was in part because Labour hold the London mayoralty and their new plan to expand London's Ultra-Low Emissions Zone (ULEZ) has been unpopular with residents in the suburbs for whom it mainly means a big hike in vehicle costs during a cost of living crisis. I think this is a problem we're seeing across Europe: some voters who might be inclined to vote against Conservative governing parties end up swinging to them or to further right populist parties because those parties are able to present desperately needed climate change measures as a further cost of living hit that people won't be able to afford (this is a big deal in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands rights now with the AfD, FPO, and BBB respectively doing very well as basically primarily anti-environmentalist parties). I wish I knew what the solution was to that one: I don't believe the world can at all afford to have any let-up on climate measures, indeed we need them to accelerate, but it feels like the backlash is something European democracies are struggling with.

The S&F result was very good for the Lib Dems - 11,000 majority, which even if the party performs a bit less well at the general election with a larger electorate is likely to mean we hold that seat next year.

[dubsartur]

Some angry people on social media successfully pushed a speculative fiction magazine to reject all submissions from someone who was in a British neo-Nazi party until 1983 and apparently has no known far-right activity since (probably some ugly opinions which he shares with friends).  One version of the story is https://www.patreon.com/posts/88237737

Is there some UK context in which that makes sense?  The only situation I can imagine someone's political activity 40 years ago being relevant to a publisher was giving context to their activities today (eg. if someone was saying lots of vaguely bigoted and anti-immigrant things, their past in a far-right party would make that speech look worse).

Forty years is a long time.

[Jubal]

It's not something I know enough about to comment: but I don't think this is UK specific behaviour, more a question of whether one needs to have actively atoned for certain bad beliefs versus whether simply no longer being active is enough to allow someone to come back into the fold? And I guess there's some valid debate there over where "okay you left" should be the rule and where "show you've changed" should be the rule.


Meanwhile it's party conference season, the Lib Dem leaders are gearing up for another row on housing and trying to about outflanking Labour on any political issues at all except maybe voting reform.

The Conservatives seem to be going all in on ditching targets to electrify motor vehicles etc, which it's not clear will satisfy many voters and which has led to attacks on the PM from the opposition and from Boris Johnson.

It still looks very like Labour will sleepwalk the next election despite actually a pretty weak policy portfolio and leadership offering.

[dubsartur]

I think if you want to lead people away from groups that advocate lawless violence, you will have much more success if everyone understands that they can return to polite society if they quit the group, stop associating with members, and stop speaking in favour of its goals than if you require them to denounce their former friends.  And I think keeping people out of groups that advocate lawless violence is much more achievable than stopping them being bigots.

The only context I can imagine where digging up someone's political activity 40 years would make sense would be giving context to their actions today (where the actions today are the actually important bit) or if pretty much everyone in the party in question was beating people in the streets but the authorities at the time protected them from prosecution so there was no way to prove which specific members committed what crimes.

[Jubal]

I think it depends a bit on which bit is "return to polite society" (where I agree with your point) and where it shades into "being able to enter communities or spaces where people might have valid discomfort with past actions" (which is a lot more complex in my view)? In this case I'd agree it seems a prima facie unusual call, but I don't know the institutions, individuals, or situation anything like well enough that I'd want to weigh in on it with a clear opinion.


Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrat leadership have been badly embarrassed in the aforementioned debate over housing targets (they wanted fewer targets to build new homes, the membership wanted to retain existing targets). The habit of press releasing a policy before it's been formally agreed is a dangerous one for Lib Dem leaders to make! The leadership do very much seem to be angling for running the next election as almost a set of localist parties in target seats and reducing any "ideological" or policy discussion to a minimum, which is a very strange idea in a world of very national campaigns and politics.

[dubsartur]

Publicly committing to things before the election makes it easier to push them through afterwards, and it lets you get your internal thinking and horse-trading out of the way before you have to deal with everyone else and daily news.

An anonymous British rightist (who hints at hereditarian thinking, sigh, that spreads on a certain type of website like infectious disease on a cruise ship) has a good rant about grift at the UK's right-wing think tanks
https://inthesightoftheunwise.substack.com/p/episode-thirty-two-bonfire-of-the

[Pentagathus]

So we've recently had a lot of news articles about the record levels of net migration we're experiencing (around 750k net in 2022), and since our current government has failed at pretty much everything they've stated to aim for and they need to look like they might actually be doing something, they have unveiled upcoming changes to our visa system https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48785695
The general gist of it is that they are raising the minimum wage required for attaining a visa from £26,200 to £38,700 as well as increasing fees and the healthcare surcharge. The median UK wage is £35,000 or so. Those on the "shortage occupation list" will remain exempt from this, though it seems like they will now have to earn at leas the average wage of someone in their industry and will no longer be able to bring family members with them.
And speaking of family members, currently to bring a dependent here on a family visa you would have to earn £18,600 a year, with around 3k extra per additional dependent or so iirc. This will now be changed to £38,700, significantly higher than the median wage. Not sure if there are any changes to whole extra dependents part. For me this means living with my fiancée and stepdaughter is now not an option if I stay in the UK and work in the healthcare career that I'm currently training for, at least not for a good few years.

[Jubal]

I'm horrified by it - even with the Conservatives being who they are, it's an amazing level of both cruel and stupid. I'm so sorry

How close are you to being trained: would bringing your family together abroad be an option? I don't know what the rules or skills shortages are for, say, Ireland.

Economically the whole idea is absolutely crackpot as well, there's absolutely no way to sensibly justify this, it's going to accelerate brain-drain from the UK and effectively cut off British academia and professional sectors at the knees without any viable way to employ entry-level postdocs or equivalents. There is zero way Britain can train people to fill those gaps, it's just going to put an enormous dent in the economy and genuinely break several already close-to-breaking sectors.

[Pentagathus]

I'll be finished around July (fingers crossed). Haven't really looked into working abroad before but I'm fairly sure I will be able to find somewhere we can all move to easily enough tbh. I'm quite surprised that the health and social care visas will lose the right to bring dependents, our healthcare system is already under a ton of strain and we really do rely on foreign born workers, particular it seems in the less desired but more pressured areas (such as old people's medicine and care homes). 

I think the justification is fairly clear, we have had record levels of immigration whilst house building has mostly not kept pace with the net level of migration, on top of a backlog of already high house prices and rent. Politically I expect this move will be pretty popular. Not sure why they decided to raise the minimum salaries required quite so much though.
Economically I imagine it'll help to portugal us more than we already are. Oh well.

[Jubal]

Yeah, I think the "sensibly" in "no way to sensibly justify this" was doing quite a lot of work in my sentence. We'll have even less money and a more threadbare workforce to actually build the houses in question, so this is unlikely to actually get anywhere near solving any of the major rent pressure issues. I agree it's designed to be politically popular, though I don't think it's going to save the Tories by a mile especially with Labour also going fairly anti-immigration recently. But there are definitely reasons for this - I just think they're terrible reasons and that none of them will actually work in the way people are imagining, just like all the other attempts to curb immigration by being more armadillo to immigrants have failed over the last twenty or thirty years.

[dubsartur]

Are health care and education national jurisdiction in the UK?  Because an issue is that the government (in the broad sense including all levels) sets public-sector wages, tuition fees, and immigration policy.  Changes to any one will have an effect on the others (eg. setting tuition fees such that universities have to get more international students which increases immigration, or setting an income floor on immigration which excludes some healthcare or research workers).

Does the UK have terrible single-family oriented zoning like most of the USA and Canada, or can you pretty much put up any kind of lowrise housing and any kind of retail or handicraft manufacturing on any land with residential zoning?

Edit: classic satire piece by a Canadian center-right analyst asking 'Theresa May's immigration policy is so catastrophic for UK universities and so good for universities in the other rich English-speaking countries, what if it were deliberate?'

[Pentagathus]

Are health care and education national jurisdiction in the UK? 

Sort of. Most doctors, nurses and AHPs work for the NHS directly (although GP surgeries are privately owned and so do not), and NHS pay scales have a massive affect on private sector pay scales too I assume.
Carers are almost entirely employed through private companies, even when government funding ends up paying for care. Their pay is invariably terrible, particularly considering how demanding their job tends to be. There have been stories of care agencies exploiting workers who rely on them as visa sponsors and I can certainly believe it.

With education, up to higher education then yes I think teaching salaries are generally up to gov. Colleges and universities are kind of private institutions but with a fair amount of gov oversight.

As to the housing, I'm not too sure.  I expect it massively depends on where you live. In my area many of the recently built houses are large and very expensive but this is more to do with what developers think will sell well than local zoning afaik.