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UK Politics: Bully for you


Derfel Cadarn
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4 hours ago, Gaston de Foix said:

I think the Queen had superb negative judgment, i.e., she knew what not to do.  Charles makes decisions that seem petty and self-defeating and will come back to bite him after the honeymoon of the Coronation.  behave like politicians, just trying to get a few good tabloid headlines and get through the week.  

I think the Queen had good judgement about her own personal comportment and avoided negative personal press pretty well. She also presented herself as a mediator/peacemaker in the all the crises between other members of the family, or appeared aloof from it.

I don't think there's any question that the rest of the Royal Family was a constantly exploding drum of flaming hot turds for a very large part of her reign, but she avoided personal scandal in almost every way.

One of the problems with Charles becoming King is that his dirty laundry has already been fully itemised, billed, declared and discussed ad nauseum for decades, unlike Liz2, and that is why he is personally loathed by a lot of people (and held in utter indifference by a lot more). Finding people who personally hated the Queen (as opposed to the institution she represented) was pretty difficult.

Edited by Werthead
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Indeed, that is precisely the problem with having 60 years to prepare for being King, rather than basically no time at all, it's 60 years of public life you can't hide or take back.

It also seems to me like in QEII's time as queen public regard for the monarchy in general has diminished substantially. This is likely a combination of the behaviour of the Royals over that time, and the evolutionary march of modern civilisation away from the veneration of people people who think they should rule by inheritance and, possibly also, divine right. 

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11 hours ago, Werthead said:

I think the Queen had good judgement about her own personal comportment and avoided negative personal press pretty well. She also presented herself as a mediator/peacemaker in the all the crises between other members of the family, or appeared aloof from it.

Again, this is  recency bias. Go back to the 80s/90s. It was worst, of course, in the aftermath of Diana's death, when the Queen personally was seen as remote, uncaring, and obsessed with formality but these impressions weren't untypical of her public perception at the time. She got an easier ride from the press in the last few years and particularly after the deaths of her mother and her husband. She also got better advisors after the Diana debacle.

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She also lost a portion of that accrued good will after Andrew's case, even if I was wrong about where she yanked the money from. Like, it's only anecdotal but I'm definitely not the person about my age or younger who was broadly on the 'I'm against the monarchy but the Queen is a cool old lady' train until that bubbled up and she didn't condemn him. 

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2 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

She also lost a portion of that accrued good will after Andrew's case, even if I was wrong about where she yanked the money from.

You were not wrong. As I've said before, the idea that any of the Royal family's money is not public money is an attempt to give them legitimacy. It all belongs to the nation by rights.

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44 minutes ago, mormont said:

Again, this is  recency bias. Go back to the 80s/90s. It was worst, of course, in the aftermath of Diana's death, when the Queen personally was seen as remote, uncaring, and obsessed with formality but these impressions weren't untypical of her public perception at the time.

In fairness I'd argue that the problem there was a significant proportion of the population's weird obsession with Diana.

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1 hour ago, polishgenius said:

She also lost a portion of that accrued good will after Andrew's case, even if I was wrong about where she yanked the money from. Like, it's only anecdotal but I'm definitely not the person about my age or younger who was broadly on the 'I'm against the monarchy but the Queen is a cool old lady' train until that bubbled up and she didn't condemn him. 

Maybe it had an effect with the sort of anti royalist crowd like yourself ,  but I doubt it registered with your average Brit much. 
 

1 hour ago, BigFatCoward said:

I can't actually find the image from the guardian that has caused all the drama. Did anyone see it and was it as bad as is being made out? 

It’s all over Twitter and easy to find. Personally I don’t think it’s all that bad and people tend to look too deeply into this stuff and see what they want to see. On the other hand the Guardian artist has history of putting out imagery that can cause this sort of trouble and you have to be very careful you aren’t invoking these tropes if you don’t want to create a huge backlash. 

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On Thursday's elections and the new voter suppression measures.

I see that the Right are pre-emptively declaring that left wing activists are going to pretend en masse not to have id at polling stations, so as to "disrupt the elections". Thus implanting the idea that what voter suppression does happen will just be fake news.

Telegraph article

They get more like the US Right every day.

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35 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

The Seldon book reveals that even Johnson knew Brexit was a stupid idea, with him panicking when Leave won.

So… kind of like the Republicans losing at the ballot box after Roe being  overturned?  Johnson wanted to keep the EU as a wedge issue to keep conservative voters voting?  In other words “Be careful what you wish for”?

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2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So… kind of like the Republicans losing at the ballot box after Roe being  overturned?  Johnson wanted to keep the EU as a wedge issue to keep conservative voters voting?  In other words “Be careful what you wish for”?

Huh? That wouldn’t make sense. If it remained a wedge issue it would take votes away from the Tories and over to parties like UKIP 

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4 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So… kind of like the Republicans losing at the ballot box after Roe being  overturned?  Johnson wanted to keep the EU as a wedge issue to keep conservative voters voting?  In other words “Be careful what you wish for”?

 

 

Not even that (as HoI says, as wedge issues went, Brexit was stealing Tory voters more than anyone else- it's why Cameron called the vote in the first place, in the assumption Remain would win and nullify the issue and UKIP for a few years). 

But in Boris' case, the only reason he supported Brexit was he knew he'd be the most prominent party figure on that side, and be able to use it to position for PM at some point afterwards even if Remain won. This book seems to confirm it but I think we already knew he wasn't actually expecting to win, nor for it to be a particularly prominent issue after the vote- he was just hoping that genuine Brexiteers would remember that he had campaigned on their side. Pure in-party power-play. 

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8 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

But in Boris' case, the only reason he supported Brexit was he knew he'd be the most prominent party figure on that side, and be able to use it to position for PM at some point afterwards even if Remain won. This book seems to confirm it but I think we already knew he wasn't actually expecting to win, nor for it to be a particularly prominent issue after the vote- he was just hoping that genuine Brexiteers would remember that he had campaigned on their side. Pure in-party power-play. 

It’s not like Boris ever had any strong beliefs in anything other than his own career. Outside of some vague ideas about small state Toryism he really didn’t care about anything. Other than lies and incompetence his time in charge was mostly a story of not sticking to any principles whatsoever. We also didn’t need a book to see he didn’t have a clue what to do with Brexit or his own election win.

Edited by Heartofice
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On 4/30/2023 at 12:58 PM, mormont said:

Anyone who think Liz had an innate sense of what to do or not to do to avoid PR disasters is doing some selective reading of history.

I said she had a good sense of what not to do.  The PR disasters that befell her were the result of inaction when action was necessary. 

But yes, in the course of a long reign she made mistakes.  Monarchy is usually a bad idea, and even the best examples are less than perfect.  King Bhumibol comes to mind.  He became heir and then monarch in sketchy circumstances (a supposedly accidental shooting of his elder brother).  But his reign was a golden age compared to his son's current reign.  It can always get worse.  

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42 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

I said she had a good sense of what not to do. 

 

Quote

 

On 4/30/2023 at 5:58 PM, mormont said:

Anyone who think Liz had an innate sense of what to do or not to do to avoid PR disasters is doing some selective reading of history.

 

 

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12 hours ago, mormont said:

Again, this is  recency bias. Go back to the 80s/90s. It was worst, of course, in the aftermath of Diana's death, when the Queen personally was seen as remote, uncaring, and obsessed with formality but these impressions weren't untypical of her public perception at the time. She got an easier ride from the press in the last few years and particularly after the deaths of her mother and her husband. She also got better advisors after the Diana debacle.

Eh, that lasted about a week or two.  All she had to do was 1) look at some flowers, 2) give a short speech and 3) her masterstroke of the head nod at the funeral cortege and all was forgiven by the public.  As to the idea that the RF money is 'really' public money, that's close to 'how to say you don't believe in property rights without saying it' territory.

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4 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So… kind of like the Republicans losing at the ballot box after Roe being  overturned?  Johnson wanted to keep the EU as a wedge issue to keep conservative voters voting?  In other words “Be careful what you wish for”?

That's the running con. Conservatives across oceans don't actually give a fuck about the policies they advocate for, they just know it works for the dumb voters, and then when they catch the car they don't know what to do so they lean into even dumber policies the worst of their supporters want. We cannot put this in any simpler terms. When you put unserious people in office you cannot be shocked by the unserious results. And God help us all if you let a cruel, serious person in office. 

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6 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So… kind of like the Republicans losing at the ballot box after Roe being  overturned?  Johnson wanted to keep the EU as a wedge issue to keep conservative voters voting?  In other words “Be careful what you wish for”?

It was less about the "conservative cause" or "Team Conservative" and more about the personal political fortune of Alexander Boris De Pfeffel Johnson. 

He (rightly) calculated that fighting for Brexit would endear him to the vast pro-Brexit majority of the Tory party membership and (to a lesser extent) MPs and make him a cinch for the leadership in the next contest.  If he had lost the referendum, he would have had the best of both worlds. 

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