UK Politics: Who Pays the Andyman?

[HexMachina]

How fucking depressing 

[Darryk]

Does the rise of the right around the world predict a long-term trend, or is it just because people on the right (mostly older folks) sense that all the things they've held onto their whole lives (religion, nationalism, patriarchy, white domination etc.) are fading away, and this is just a way for them to express their bitterness about it before they all die off and take their archaic views with them?

[mormont]

1 hour ago, Ser Arthur Hightower said:

Thirdly, Johnson is a PR disaster, and could be trusted to botch any campaign. In this they were correct, but the English public love Johnson, so they weren't bothered by him hiding in a fridge, avoiding questions, bumbling like an idiot and just generally being a total cretin.

Again, this is not actually true. There's plenty of polling evidence, particularly from the last few weeks of campaigning, that the general public's opinion of Johnson was affected negatively by his behaviour during this campaign and his overall approval ratings are firmly negative. The English people don't, in fact, particularly like Johnson. But they loathe Corbyn. Corbyn's approval ratings haven't been net positive since 2017. Quite simply, he had been performing poorly as a leader of the Opposition for a long time, and that was apparent. Corbyn should be taking the blame fairly and squarely for this, and he should have resigned last night. There's no lipstick you can put on this result, and no scapegoats you can nominate. It's a disaster and this 'period of reflection' stuff is nonsense. Corbyn's led his party to a historic defeat. He needs to go, and it is not remotely credible that he should stay on in an attempt to get an ally to take over. The party needs a fresh start. 

As for the Tories, the party has been heading in this direction for a generation. For at least that long, the party has been selecting candidates on the basis of ideology (particularly but not exclusively anti-European ideology) rather than talent, and in the process driving out moderate candidates and, for that matter, members. That's what put Johnson into office despite his record of incompetence and duplicity: there were quite frankly no adults left to prevent it. But, he told people what they wanted to hear, and enough of them voted for it, so here we are.

The Lib Dems are also, less obviously, in an ideological dilemma: they're theoretically a middle-of-the-road party but they've been quietly moving more to the right than they used to be, and the experience of the coalition has not reversed that process as you might expect. That, I think, has made Labour voters more reluctant to switch: in other words, I think Swinson's biggest blunder was not promising to reverse the referendum without another vote, but ruling out any coalition with Corbyn. It drew attention to the fact that the party's platform, Brexit aside, was not a comfortable fit for disaffected left-wing voters. In any case, they're deep in the shit now. 11 MPs, 4 of those in Scotland: they have 7 MPs in all of England, none in Wales. And it's not obvious that any of those have the ability to rescue the party. 

The SNP had a good night (though my own MP lost his seat to a Lib Dem - which is a shame, because he's been a good constituency MP). Will that lead to another independence referendum, though? The SNP will definitely demand one, but why would Johnson agree? His party's whole brand in Scotland is about refusing that demand. He certainly won't give an inch on the topic until after the Scottish Parliament elections, and after last night, nobody can make him. 

The Brexit party is done. Farage has been talking about a Reform party, but nobody gives a shit, Nigel. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. 

[Spockydog]

Fuck Johnson. Fuck Corbyn. Fuck Facebook.

But most of all, fuck everyone with a working class background who's saying this morning, 'I'd never voted Tory before, my ancestors are probably spinning in their graves, but I had no choice.'

Fucking morons.

 

[Free Northman Reborn]

Nigel Farage made Brexit happen when he won the referendum. He might be the most important British politician since Churchill, when all is said and done. He created the fork in the road which may change Britain forever.

 

 

[Liffguard]

We lost here in my constituency, despite our candidate increasing her share of the vote by five percentage points and getting over 40% total. We lost to some empty-suit, Patrick Bateman looking, Tory party apparatchik parachuted in from fuck knows where. I've been relatively sanguine about the national results so far, but I won't lie, this one stings.

[Liffguard]

33 minutes ago, Darryk said:

Does the rise of the right around the world predict a long-term trend, or is it just because people on the right (mostly older folks) sense that all the things they've held onto their whole lives (religion, nationalism, patriarchy, white domination etc.) are fading away, and this is just a way for them to express their bitterness about it before they all die off and take their archaic views with them?

My fervant hope is that we're looking at an extinction burst, exactly as you say. But I'm not sure there's any evidence to back it up. And even if there is, we can't afford to wait. Economic policies and authoritarianism can ultimately be changed even if they're established for a long time, but climate change is a ticking clock, and every year without radical action will have long-reaching and irreversible consequences.

[Jen'ari]

13 minutes ago, Liffguard said:

We lost here in my constituency, despite our candidate increasing her share of the vote by five percentage points and getting over 40% total. We lost to some empty-suit, Patrick Bateman looking, Tory party apparatchik parachuted in from fuck knows where. I've been relatively sanguine about the national results so far, but I won't lie, this one stings.

Did he like Huey Lewis and the News?.

[Bael's Bastard]

I am glad UK Jews will not have to endure an antisemitic government led by Corbyn and his allies, though it's still frightening how many people were willing to ignore their fears to support such blatant Jew-haters.

Sadly, the refusal to listen to the fears of Jews and others about Corbyn and his allies doomed Labour, and the refusal to deal with Corbyn months or years ago is the biggest reason the UK is now cursed with Johnson. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

1 hour ago, Which Tyler said:

Tory remainers liked the lies about "keep Corbyn out" (I will allow that they were mostly exagerations rather than outright lies; and allow some leeway here).
Labour leavers liked the lies about "get brexit done" despite knowing full well that they were lies.

A victory for duplicity, prejudice and bigotry

I've never been more ashamed to be British

The only glimmer of silver lining is that 53.3% voted for pro-EU parties, compared to 45.7% voting anti-EU - even though that's completely irrelevant in our FPTP system

True. Too bad a 2nd referendum is off the table now. It does seem to offer proof to a majority of citizens not being enchanted with leaving the EU. Also too bad some conservatives stopped paying attention after reading the message of ”Tories win bigly” before pronouncing this as being unequivocal proof of the majority of citizens still being in favor of Brexit. Perhaps once the sever economic turmoil that will come from Brexit will rock enough people back to their senses. Ooh, or maybe they'll simply buckle down harder, and blame the new onslaught of asian immigrants for the all the woes. And act befuddled as to why so many of these people--who are not even from ”the West” were allowed in the first place. Clearly a nWhen it literally was one of things touted out to the Asian-community by Leavers. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/94adcefa-1dd5-11e6-a7bc-ee846770ec15

There's 

55 minutes ago, Darryk said:

Does the rise of the right around the world predict a long-term trend, or is it just because people on the right (mostly older folks) sense that all the things they've held onto their whole lives (religion, nationalism, patriarchy, white domination etc.) are fading away, and this is just a way for them to express their bitterness about it before they all die off and take their archaic views with them?

I think this is an optimistic view often trotted out by those on the left. I think this is quite frankly naive perhaps in some cases arrogant belief. So, often trotted naive perhaps in some cases arrogant belief. Any sort of progress could be reversed-and quickly at that. Look at Bolivia-the country had made a lot of social and political gains, under it’s the socialist government. Now a pretty standard racist Christian extremist is in executive power after the right wing threatened left-wing leaders and their families their families with death. Dozens of protesters have already been since said racist killed in a span of a month. And the situation appears to be only getting worse. Do not take anything as a given. 

[Liffguard]

1 minute ago, Bael's Bastard said:

I am glad UK Jews will not have to endure an antisemitic government led by Corbyn and his allies, though it's still frightening how many people were willing to ignore their fears to support such blatant Jew-haters.

I'm too tired to fully address this right now. Suffice to say, I think you're deeply mistaken. Even if you accept the charge that Corbyn and the Labour leadership are personally anti-semitic, it would still be better to have an anti-semitic government than a racist, homophobic, islamophobic, classist, authoritarian government, nakedly hungry for power purely for its own sake. In any case, I think the charge is false. A failure to adequately deal with the real but fringe elements of anti-semitism within the pary is not the same thing as being anti-semitic.

[BigFatCoward]

16 minutes ago, Bael's Bastard said:

I am glad UK Jews will not have to endure an antisemitic government led by Corbyn and his allies, though it's still frightening how many people were willing to ignore their fears to support such blatant Jew-haters.

Sadly, the refusal to listen to the fears of Jews and others about Corbyn and his allies doomed Labour, and the refusal to deal with Corbyn months or years ago is the biggest reason the UK is now cursed with Johnson. 

Is one type of racism better than another? 

[Liffguard]

A few muddled thoughts that I'm trying to synthesise and turn into something coherent.

I agree that Corbyn needs to resign. I respect the man enormously, I support his policies and his moral philosophy. I would have been very happy for him to be Prime Minister. But the simple truth is that he has failed. His job as leader of the Labour party was to get enough Labour party MPs elected to form a government, and he failed at that job, decisively. He faced a huge challenge, against a nakedly hostile and partisan media landscape. Regardless though, it was his job to deal with that media landscape, one way or another, and in that he failed too.

The next Labour leader needs to be aware that if they want to improve the country for the better in any way, the press will be against them, and they need a strategy to deal with that. That doesn't mean kowtowing to Murdoch and other billionaire interests, but it might well mean cultivating alternative channels to get the message out. And it might mean that when they do engage with the press, they need to stop being so hand-wringing and deferential. One of Corbyn's failures was that he seemed to think if he was just patient and reasonable enough, that would be enough to win over the press. In that he was naive.

I also think there's going to be a hard push for the next leader to be a non-threatening centrist. I think this would be a mistake. 2017 showed that there's plenty of support for genuinely left-wing policies. I think the failure of 2019 has been largely down to messaging and strategy. A more effective politician could sell that message without having to go back to being just a slightly less right-wing Tory imitation party.

[Werthead]

Some net positives: the Tories rejected Cummings' plans to use social issues as a battleground. On paper at least, the Tories remain committed to LGBTQ+ rights, not changing abortion legislation and to tackling climate change. I think we'll see SFA going on with the last point, but the real test will come when US companies want to get involved in the potential for fracking, now the UK companies have given up.

Johnson winning promising improvements to the NHS, schools, police and armed forces now means he actually needs to deliver. If he delivers, then that's a net good thing. The suspicion has to be that he won't deliver, or he will screw over the services with more private corporation involvement, the blowback from which could hurt him badly next time around.

There are a few question marks elsewhere, in particular whether the hard right of the Tories will now be successful in bringing in issues they care about, including more overt privatisation of the NHS and support for the death penalty.

11 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

One of the most telling things I've ever seen was when Lewis Black confronted Chuck Todd on this specific issue. Todd admitted that the media is afraid to push back because they are terrified of losing access to elected officials. 

Yup, that happened to Channel 4 News and also, to a lesser extent, Good Morning Britain when Morgan made it clear he was going to hold everyone's feet to the fire. Andrew Neill also got that treatment, but the politicians couldn't entirely avoid him because he was part of the otherwise highly favourable (to them) BBC coverage.

 

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They'd still vote labour though. I'd rather labour just accept that brexit won the referendum and get behind doing it rather than endure another 5 years of the tories, now both are gonna happen regardless.

This appears to be the tactic that Lisa Nandy used to retain Wigan, which was hugely pro-Brexit but she managed to hold onto her seat (albeit with a reduced majority). She's been carefully critical of Corbyn but not a fierce opponent and has been consistently voicing the concerns with the working class, pro-Brexit voters who felt unclear on Labour's direction (to what degree that's Labour's fault and the media constantly saying that Labour's direction was unclear is a different debate). Some of the other Labour MPs in Leave seats weren't able to negotiate that path and fell as a result.

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Do you genuinely believe that this would have cost them more votes than it gained? Labour's lost a seat that they've held for 70 years. If that's not being out of touch with their old base then I don't know what to tell you.

To what degree are these one-off, Brexit-focused gains though? Five years down the line will they return to the Labour fold or is this now a permanent change of direction? A lot of people saying they were traditional Labour voters but voted Tory and were willing to take a hit on other issues purely because of Brexit.

We were discussing a few months back that getting May or Boris's deal through Parliament and then holding the election would have been a much better idea, as Brexit would cease being a dominant issue.

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Well, I guess they got their “Second People’s Vote”.

Looking at the vote share split, it's still pretty much 50-50 (although that's counting Labour as Remain, on the basis their voters seemed to think so, and not counting Tory Remainers), so not really. I think it does indicate that Ref3 would still be extremely close and a result identical to 2016, or even a notable increase for Leave, would be more likely than not.

 

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The irony of course is that Scottish independence was more viable and less economically impactful while the UK was in the EU. Because effectively nothing much changes. With Brexit Scotland now faces the prospect of either a hard border and immigration controls with the EU or with England. Could it be that Brexit makes Scotland staying in the UK the better option as Scotland is going to be hit really hard either way?

Potentially, not to mention Spain will have issues with admitting Scotland to the EU, but there's also the betrayal factor. Many people who voted to remain in the UK in the 2014 referendum did so believing that the UK would be remaining in the EU (as they were expecting a Labour victory or another hung Parliament in 2015 to stop Cameron calling the EU referendum), and they feel let down on that basis.

 

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Also, does the SNP's strong showing mean that Scotland may actually get a second referendum to Remain and (if it succeeds) secede from the UK?

The SNP need the UK government's permission to hold a binding referendum. They can hold a unilateral referendum, but that would be without legal force.

The Conservatives will be brainstorming this. On the one hand, Johnson being the PM who lost Scotland and broke the Union would be a huge PR victory for the opposing side in 2024. OTOH, that's negated by the loss of 45-50 seats which are highly unlikely to ever vote Conservative, dramatically reducing the bar for the Tories to win a RUK election and making it improbable for an anti-Tory coalition to form unless it's around centrist, Blair 2.0-style parties which can appeal to Tory moderates (who are in rare supply these days). In addition, given the polling that suggests that Leavers see losing Scotland as a "price worth paying" for Brexit, it could be that Johnson could lose Scotland now and not be punished for it at the polls, which is unthinkable at any other time.

That said, the Conservatives may also be looking at their more promising performance in 2017 and calculating that more seats in Scotland are in play, if they can get a good enough Scottish-based messenger (pissing off Ruth Davison was a huge mistake in that sense) to come on board. There's also the tremendous logistical problems of Scotland seceding that they have to address, like losing their Trident nuclear sub base and how to apportion Britain's debts etc. There's also the prospect of Scotland joining the EU and Glasgow and Edinburgh becoming sources of competition for trade and growth on the island, and a brain drain north of the border.

Boris' instinct will be to refuse a referendum, but that could also play into the SNP's hands. Keeping Scotland in the UK against its will could deliver them an even bigger win next time, enough to push them into coalition territory with other parties. It'll be a careful balancing act. Boris may also decide that he has a reasonable chance of winning such a referendum, putting the issue to bed for a generation.

[Jen'ari]

1 hour ago, mormont said:

Again, this is not actually true. There's plenty of polling evidence, particularly from the last few weeks of campaigning, that the general public's opinion of Johnson was affected negatively by his behaviour during this campaign and his overall approval ratings are firmly negative. The English people don't, in fact, particularly like Johnson. But they loathe Corbyn. Corbyn's approval ratings haven't been net positive since 2017. Quite simply, he had been performing poorly as a leader of the Opposition for a long time, and that was apparent. Corbyn should be taking the blame fairly and squarely for this, and he should have resigned last night. 

The Brexit party is done. Farage has been talking about a Reform party, but nobody gives a shit, Nigel. Don't let the door hit you on the way out. 

I completely agree with you about Corbyn and Farage.

Corbyn needs to show that integrity, he needs to show class like Kinnock,Major and Brown did and stand down, or at least confirm he’s standing down and carrying on as caretaker until Labour choose a new leader.

Isn’t it pretty much the done thing to stand down as leader of the opposition if you fail to win an election?,Hague and Howard stepped down as Tory leader straight afterwards even if they must have known they weren’t going to win those elections in a million years.

Farage just seems to me to be trying to stay relevant when he isn’t at all.

I don’t think he will be greatly missed on the political stage.

[Varysblackfyre321]

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

the Tories remain committed to LGBTQ+ rights, not changing abortion legislation and to tackling climate change. 

Oh, let's see how far it goes. I do believe next election they may feel more at ease at letting loose and experimenting. Testing their limits so to speak. I don't mean immediately rush out proclaiming that gays need to be locked up if they smash naughty bits with members of the same sex and make it policy for government to turn into a Christian theocracy-while that would be applauded by a few like Free Northman as acting like true Christians it’s a tremendous gamble. 

Also, restructuring of the courts to be more conservative-friendly probably should happen first.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

hard right of the Tories will now be successful in bringing in issues they care about, including more overt privatisation of the NHS and support for the death penalty.

It seems odd the farthest right desire to make it much more comfortable for the government to kill off citizens. Given their proclamation of wanting to limit government as much possible, it's quite extraordinary how such hypocrisy isn't even recognized.

1 hour ago, Werthead said:

Looking at the vote share split, it's still pretty much 50-50 (although that's counting Labour as Remain, on the basis their voters seemed to think so, and not counting Tory Remainers), so not really. I think it does indicate that Ref3 would still be extremely close and a result identical to 2016, or even a notable increase for Leave, would be more likely than not.

Meh, this is a fair point. There was a not inconsequential part on the left who did want to leave as well. And there were plenty of tories who recognized Brexit as a bad idea but put aside their grievances and voted their party. 

 

[Maltaran]

26 minutes ago, Jen'ari said:

 

Isn’t it pretty much the done thing to stand down as leader of the opposition if you fail to win an election?

If you lose but show improvement on last time you might stay on (Corbyn in 2017, Kinnock in 1987), but this kind of disaster means he has to go sooner rather than later.

[HexMachina]

54 minutes ago, Jen'ari said:

I completely agree with you about Corbyn and Farage.

Corbyn needs to show that integrity, he needs to show class like Kinnock,Major and Brown did and stand down, or at least confirm he’s standing down and carrying on as caretaker until Labour choose a new leader.

Isn’t it pretty much the done thing to stand down as leader of the opposition if you fail to win an election?,Hague and Howard stepped down as Tory leader straight afterwards even if they must have known they weren’t going to win those elections in a million years.

Farage just seems to me to be trying to stay relevant when he isn’t at all.

I don’t think he will be greatly missed on the political stage.

Just listened to him speak and seems this is more or less what he will do. Stated he will not lead the party in any future GE but will remain leader for now while the party holds discussions on future policy etc. So i imagine he will be gone soon

[Spockydog]

He needs to go. Today.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

I'm surprised to learn that the Tories won a majority in Parliament.  From discussions hear and what I say on my social media feeds it seemed that Brexit was disfavored and that the Tories were on the outs.  Was this more a rejection of Corbyn than a reaffirmation of the earlier Brexit vote?