UK Politics: This Country is Going to the Moggs

[mormont]

It might. But it won't solve the fundamental problems, which are:

- voters are poorly informed about the issue of the EU, and have been fed misinformation for many years about it, and

- the concept of 'Brexit' is even now ill-defined and voters cannot be expected to understand it until it is clarified, and

- the country is fairly evenly split on the issue of the EU and has been for some time. 

A fresh election won't help these problems in and of itself. Only if there is an honest debate as part of that election can we hope to sort this out. The chances of that happening, given the prominent politicians who will be campaigning for the two major parties, is remote to say the least. 

[A Horse Named Stranger]

54 minutes ago, SeanF said:

If it is not possible for the Commons to agree on any deal, or no deal, or revoking A.50 then perhaps a fresh election would be the way to break the logjam.

How so?

Both major parties are hellbent on leaving, that takes revoking article 50 off the table (willl of the people, yadda, yadda, yadda). Labour's stick is, we will get a better deal (aka the a customs union, but not the customs union comedy routine) - spoiler alert, they won't get any unicorns either. So a Labour goverment won't sign off on a non-unicorn deal. Then how would a fresh election change the situation in any shape or form?

And then there's also this minor problem of the ticking clock in the background. Which basically means no negotiations during the election campaign. 

You want out of it, the only way I see is a new referendum for the UK. Which, again, both major parties don't want.

[williamjm]

8 hours ago, SeanF said:

If it is not possible for the Commons to agree on any deal, or no deal, or revoking A.50 then perhaps a fresh election would be the way to break the logjam.

I think to really solve the problem via an election, a party would have to win a majority (large enough not to suffer from rebellions) on a manifesto that actually gave a detailed and achievable plan for what they planned to do. Sadly, I don't think there seems to be much prospect of that happening at the moment. 

[BigFatCoward]

I'm probably going to get shot down in flames here, but I can't really give a shit about what Boris said.  I think he is a bell end and would be a terrible leader, but seriously, are we honestly getting that worked up about this?

 

[mormont]

The thing about Johnson's article is, it tells you rather a lot about him. He doesn't call for a ban on face veils, but in the process of saying so he does decide to make a couple of crass and racist barbs about it. Why? Because Johnson is, as I've noted before, a moderately intelligent man who believes he's an extremely intelligent man, and that's dangerous. He's a mediocre journalist who thinks he's a political heavyweight, a great man in the making. He's smart enough not to want to actually be a racist populist of the Geert Wilders type, but he's not smart enough to realise that playing with those type of tropes for personal advantage in this way is almost as harmful. 

He needs to go away forever. 

[Spockydog]

32 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

I'm probably going to get shot down in flames here, but I can't really give a shit about what Boris said.  I think he is a bell end and would be a terrible leader, but seriously, are we honestly getting that worked up about this?

 

 

 

[mormont]

7 hours ago, Triskjavikson said:

Popping in from the US to link a long Andrew Sullivan piece on Jeremy Corbyn.  A lot of this about his personal background and positions over the years was new to me.  I've mostly just heard the comparisons to Bernie Sanders and whatnot.  

I'd love to hear what you guys think of it (i.e., if it's a good overview, if some of the suggestions about where this is going seem accurate, etc...).

Is there really a possibility that Blair could still be tried for war crimes???

I think it's a flawed piece. 

For one thing, the word 'cordial' (which Sullivan repeatedly uses to describe Corbyn) is a strange choice. His private personality may be cordial, though I've heard different things on that, but publicly, Corbyn is not 'cordial'. He's often quite stiff and even severe in media interviews. (Also, if Andrew Sullivan has never met anyone who has a personal issue with Corbyn, he hasn't looked all that hard IMO.)

For another, Sullivan doesn't tackle the issue of Corbyn's ceiling. It's true that people who approve of Corbyn, really love him. It's also true, though, that his approval ratings in terms of whether the public think he's doing a good job as leader, or would make a good Prime Minister, remain stubbornly negative. Certainly, Theresa May's ratings are often found to be even worse, but the article places a lot of emphasis on Corbyn's personal appeal  to voters and so it should have touched on this topic IMO.  

 

[SeanF]

2 hours ago, mormont said:

The thing about Johnson's article is, it tells you rather a lot about him. He doesn't call for a ban on face veils, but in the process of saying so he does decide to make a couple of crass and racist barbs about it. Why? Because Johnson is, as I've noted before, a moderately intelligent man who believes he's an extremely intelligent man, and that's dangerous. He's a mediocre journalist who thinks he's a political heavyweight, a great man in the making. He's smart enough not to want to actually be a racist populist of the Geert Wilders type, but he's not smart enough to realise that playing with those type of tropes for personal advantage in this way is almost as harmful. 

He needs to go away forever. 

What he wants is publicity, and he's had three days of it.

I think that he is now highly unpopular with most Conservative MPs, very popular with a lot of Conservative voters, and still ravenously ambitious for the party leadership.  If May goes, and if he could get 70-80 MPs to back him, that could be enough to get him into the last two.

[SeanF]

9 hours ago, Triskjavikson said:

Popping in from the US to link a long Andrew Sullivan piece on Jeremy Corbyn.  A lot of this about his personal background and positions over the years was new to me.  I've mostly just heard the comparisons to Bernie Sanders and whatnot.  

I'd love to hear what you guys think of it (i.e., if it's a good overview, if some of the suggestions about where this is going seem accurate, etc...).

Is there really a possibility that Blair could still be tried for war crimes???

I think it is vanishingly unlikely that Blair would ever be tried for war crimes.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

9 hours ago, Triskjavikson said:

Is there really a possibility that Blair could still be tried for war crimes???

Realistically, that is almost as unlikely as Dubya getting tried next to him. How probable you think it is, that either of them gets tried, that is up to you.

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

I'm probably going to get shot down in flames here, but I can't really give a shit about what Boris said.  I think he is a bell end and would be a terrible leader, but seriously, are we honestly getting that worked up about this?

 

Johnson has been hanging out with Bannon, and I think Bannon's advice has rubbed off on Johnson. Unfortunately - or, more hopefully - fortunately for us (since it may destroy him), that advice seems to have been to try to do what Trump did in America by appealing to the far right whilst using his familiarity (I think an underappreciated reason why Trump won: people actually knew who the hell he was) from years of public life and TV appearances to win over people disenchanted with politics because they don't know who these people are. The UK political system and ethnic makeup is quite different from the USA's however, and I don't believe this will be as effective.

I think Johnson knows he is now a laughing stock in serious political circles, his cynicism has been exposed and laid bare and most political commentators are aware of his self-serving nature (such as him writing two articles, one pro-Brexit and one pro-Remain, and waiting to the last moment to choose between them). He's burned a lot of bridges with the core of his party and is unlikely to become leader on that basis. However, by engaging in some light Islamaphobia, he excites the far right and the returning UKIP members (who moved from the Tories to Farage's Magic Kingdom when the Tories were not being xenophobic enough for their liking, and are now drifting back) and builds up some capital there which cynically he thinks he can exploit later on. Note that Boris is not angling to become leader now, but after Brexit is complete so he can declare himself innocent of any fuck-ups and blame it all on the negotiating process (the British public, of course, having the memory of goldfishes and not recalling his Big Red Bus of Lies).

To become PM, Johnson therefore needs a different approach and has decided to copy the Trump playbook. The problem is that this pisses off the Muslim community - many of whom vote Conservative - and the large number of Muslims within the party (including 2 Muslim MPs and those who aren't practising Muslims but are from the same cultural background, most notably Sajid Javid), and a lot of Tory MPs who find this kind of race-baiting disgusting and a poor strategy. It's also extremely dangerous because the Conservatives have had significant success in keeping a lid on accusations of Islamaphobia in the wider party, which Baroness Warsi has been complaining stridently about for years, contrasted to the Labour Party's anti-Semitism row (which the Tories seem to have identified as the only thing that might stop Corbyn from winning the next election). Johnson suddenly breaking ranks and making remarks that seem to be Islamaphobic and anti-women's rights (see the blowback from Muslim women angrily saying they wear the veil from choice, not from being forced into it) threatens to drag that issue kicking and screaming into the light, and that's a much bigger problem for the Tories (the number of Muslims in the UK massively outnumbering the Jewish community).

Hopefully this is the last gasp of Johnson before he slinks off into the shadows (well, of regular TV appearances and having newspaper columns probably until either he or print media dies and being a new speech-maker for the alt-right). It's certainly exemplary of the man's cynicism and utter lack of integrity.

[mormont]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

contrasted to the Labour Party's anti-Semitism row (which the Tories seem to have identified as the only thing that might stop Corbyn from winning the next election).

This is an odd way to represent the issue: it suggests that the row is mainly being fueled by the Tories, which is not the case at all. The extent of Tory involvement is the odd taunt in the Commons: otherwise, they've mainly observed the old adage and left the Labour party alone while it self-inflicts the wound. 

[SeanF]

9 minutes ago, mormont said:

This is an odd way to represent the issue: it suggests that the row is mainly being fueled by the Tories, which is not the case at all. The extent of Tory involvement is the odd taunt in the Commons: otherwise, they've mainly observed the old adage and left the Labour party alone while it self-inflicts the wound. 

I think that foreign policy and defence put people off voting Labour, as well as the row over anti-Semitism.  Corbyn wasting loads of breath doubting whether Russia was responsible for the Salisbury poisonings killed off Labour's small poll lead.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, SeanF said:

I think that foreign policy and defence put people off voting Labour, as well as the row over anti-Semitism.  Corbyn wasting loads of breath doubting whether Russia was responsible for the Salisbury poisonings killed off Labour's small poll lead.

Foreign policy and defence are not major vote-winning areas of interest, however, whilst austerity, the economy, the NHS and (currently) Brexit are, and those are areas where the Conservatives remain extremely vulnerable and Labour are much stronger (apart maybe from Brexit, where both parties are consumed by internal debates; much less revelant for Labour, of course, for whom the issue is academic whilst they are in opposition). We saw this in 2017 when the media and the politicians walked into a campaign which they thought was going to be all about Brexit and it was more about the economy, and the Conservatives took an unexpected hammering because their arguments in those areas were poor.

One danger of the press's unrelenting and frequently incoherent anger towards Corbyn (which has surged back this year, after that grace period of a few months after the election when the media actually engaged with Labour's policies and proposals versus those of the Tories) is that it has allowed people in Labour to dismiss the whole thing as more of the media's anti-Corbyn bias, and it's surprising how many Labour-supporters I've seen who deny there is an anti-semitism problem in Labour at all. There is a danger here of the boy who cried wolf effect, as there clearly is a real issue in Labour on this and it has not been resolved satisfactorily and it's an on-going problem, but the media's screaming of Corbyn being Satan for three years straight means their reporting of this issue is being simply dismissed in some quarters and embraced without question in others.

That's why Johnson's statements are hugely problematic for the Conservative Party, which has it's own issues with bigotry and racism to deal with (and it has generally dealt with them in the past) and it'd like to do that without a massive spotlight being thrown on them by Johnson's blustering burblings. Good news on the BBC just now was that he has been referred for breaching the Conservative Code of Conduct. It'd be interesting to see if he now faces sanctions (although I am now having slightly nightmarish visions of Johnson breaking away to form his own party and becoming the slightly unknowing face of the British alt-right).

[A Horse Named Stranger]

15 minutes ago, Werthead said:

One danger of the press's unrelenting and frequently incoherent anger towards Corbyn (which has surged back this year, after that grace period of a few months after the election when the media actually engaged with Labour's policies and proposals versus those of the Tories) is that it has allowed people in Labour to dismiss the whole thing as more of the media's anti-Corbyn bias, and it's surprising how many Labour-supporters I've seen who deny there is an anti-semitism problem in Labour at all. There is a danger here of the boy who cried wolf effect, as there clearly is a real issue in Labour on this and it has not been resolved satisfactorily and it's an on-going problem, but the media's screaming of Corbyn being Satan for three years straight means their reporting of this issue is being simply dismissed in some quarters and embraced without question in others.

 

Hum, that sounds awfully close to the anti-semitism allegations are just another Blairite ploy to get rid of Corbyn, which is somewhat annoying to argue with. I mean I really have no dog in this Labour dispute by any stretch of imagination, but some of the defenses brought forward by  Corbyn supporters sound really a bit like Our Dear Leader is never wrong per definition. The problem is, quite a bit of the criticism of Corbyn is (at least imho) quite valid. And it's really bothersome to argue, when everything gets dismissed out of hand as a personal attack on the dear leader, or as campaign by the media or blairites, or whatever.

[williamjm]

10 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

I'm probably going to get shot down in flames here, but I can't really give a shit about what Boris said.  I think he is a bell end and would be a terrible leader, but seriously, are we honestly getting that worked up about this?

I suspect some of his critics from within the Tory Party are probably happy to take any excuse to criticise him, a less high profile Tory MP might not have got quite such a big reaction from such comments. Not that Boris doesn't deserve the criticism, as Mormont says he's clearly deliberately trying to appeal to anti-Muslim sentiment among parts of the Tory base

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

(although I am now having slightly nightmarish visions of Johnson breaking away to form his own party and becoming the slightly unknowing face of the British alt-right).

I'm reminded of Robert Kilroy-Silk doing exactly that a few years ago, I suspect if Boris did try to start his own party then it might not do much better than Veritas did. Boris himself might be able to get elected as a MP, but the British system isn't kind to new parties.

[mormont]

2 hours ago, Werthead said:

it's surprising how many Labour-supporters I've seen who deny there is an anti-semitism problem in Labour at all

If you've had experience with the more left-wing Labour activists, it really isn't surprising at all, I'm afraid.

[Werthead]

6 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Hum, that sounds awfully close to the anti-semitism allegations are just another Blairite ploy to get rid of Corbyn, which is somewhat annoying to argue with. I mean I really have no dog in this Labour dispute by any stretch of imagination, but some of the defenses brought forward by  Corbyn supporters sound really a bit like Our Dear Leader is never wrong per definition. The problem is, quite a bit of the criticism of Corbyn is (at least imho) quite valid. And it's really bothersome to argue, when everything gets dismissed out of hand as a personal attack on the dear leader, or as campaign by the media or blairites, or whatever.

And that in turn sounds awfully close to we should believe everything the mostly right-wing-owned media in Britain says about Corbyn despite it's blatant anti-Corbyn bias we have seen on a daily basis since the 2015 leadership election.

Does Labour have an anti-Semitism problem? Yes, and it is a serious issue the party needs to get to grips with. Has Corbyn responded to this issue on an adequate basis? Demonstrably not. Does the party (and, well, the planet) have a problem where certain people conflate the very serious issue of anti-Semitism in all cases with the much more cogent and intelligent criticism of the increasingly apartheid attitude of the state of Israel? Yes, most certainly, and this is increasingly annoying to argue with, especially when other British political parties have anti-Semitism and Islamaphobic issues which get brushed under the carpet because the party saying them isn't arguing for a fairer system which may inconvenience rich people and the media.

As I've said before, I'm a very long way from being a Corbyn supporter. I have issues with some of the people around him and their blindly pro-Iranian and pro-Russian stances in all instances (although the Tory government's blind pro-Saudi stance is certainly more damaging to our international standing at the moment, and causing deaths on a daily basis), and Corbyn's failure to interrogate those issues more closely. I am not convinced that Labour is a completely viable government in waiting, especially given its commitment to Brexit at at the cost of fundamentally damaging our future prosperity and strength as a nation. However, our current government is a total shitstorm shambles. If it was a sheepdog, it would be declared not remotely fit for purpose, marched outside and shot through the head.

Britain is not in a great shape politically at the moment.

[SeanF]

17 hours ago, Werthead said:

Foreign policy and defence are not major vote-winning areas of interest, however, whilst austerity, the economy, the NHS and (currently) Brexit are, and those are areas where the Conservatives remain extremely vulnerable and Labour are much stronger (apart maybe from Brexit, where both parties are consumed by internal debates; much less revelant for Labour, of course, for whom the issue is academic whilst they are in opposition). We saw this in 2017 when the media and the politicians walked into a campaign which they thought was going to be all about Brexit and it was more about the economy, and the Conservatives took an unexpected hammering because their arguments in those areas were poor.

One danger of the press's unrelenting and frequently incoherent anger towards Corbyn (which has surged back this year, after that grace period of a few months after the election when the media actually engaged with Labour's policies and proposals versus those of the Tories) is that it has allowed people in Labour to dismiss the whole thing as more of the media's anti-Corbyn bias, and it's surprising how many Labour-supporters I've seen who deny there is an anti-semitism problem in Labour at all. There is a danger here of the boy who cried wolf effect, as there clearly is a real issue in Labour on this and it has not been resolved satisfactorily and it's an on-going problem, but the media's screaming of Corbyn being Satan for three years straight means their reporting of this issue is being simply dismissed in some quarters and embraced without question in others.

That's why Johnson's statements are hugely problematic for the Conservative Party, which has it's own issues with bigotry and racism to deal with (and it has generally dealt with them in the past) and it'd like to do that without a massive spotlight being thrown on them by Johnson's blustering burblings. Good news on the BBC just now was that he has been referred for breaching the Conservative Code of Conduct. It'd be interesting to see if he now faces sanctions (although I am now having slightly nightmarish visions of Johnson breaking away to form his own party and becoming the slightly unknowing face of the British alt-right).

1. Usually, defence and foreign affairs are  niche issues, but in Corbyn's case, they do reinforce the view that he's too much of a risk.  This morning, there's a new poll showing 22% want Corbyn to be PM, compared to 36% for May.  Even among Labour supporters, only 50% want him to be leader.  That's an extraordinary position for an Opposition leader to be in.

Labour do have strengths, in that the public prefer them on issues like health, education, and housing, but they're being outweighed by their weaknesses at the moment.

2. Mainstream socialists and social democrats are largely free of anti-Semitism.  However, it's rife among communists and Trotskyists, and a lot of the latter joined Labour in the run up to, and subsequent to, Corbyn becoming leader.

[Werthead]

1 minute ago, SeanF said:

2. Mainstream socialists and social democrats are largely free of anti-Semitism.  However, it's rife among communists and Trotskyists, and a lot of the latter joined Labour in the run up to, and subsequent to, Corbyn becoming leader.

I'd agree with that, and it's a problem for the Conservatives as well (returning UKIPpers coming back and bringing Islamaphobia and antisemitism with them). You try to create a broad church and end up with some unsavoury people getting involved and have to find a way of dealing with them.