British Politics Thread

I'm glad you didn't, that just makes long quotes harder to read because every other line is a change in emphasis.

I saw one article on the report (or was it part of the report?) claiming that ministers are in denial. When no, they're not. There's no way the Tories are in denial about what this means; they just don't care. Why should they give a damn about how things affect the poor? They're fine.

The Nasty Party: never forget that they've repeatedly earned that name.

And, for all GRRM has given us grimdark wedding receptions, remember where WH40k grimdark came from in the first place: Nottingham under Thatcher's social butchering of the Midlands (a lot of guys were left with time on their hands, workshop experience and plenty of scrap from abandoned warehouses and factories they had previously known well very well to work with).

If there's an upside coming to the crisis we've got, is that we're likely to produce something that culturally tops the current stylishly grim.

Yay?

Edited by Euodiachloris on Nov 17th 2018 at 12:35:31 PM

There's a reason the Top Ork in 40k ist named after ol' Maggie

I'm not sure it's the case that Tories don't care. Rather it's a fatal combination of a "born to rule" mentality with a distrust of the state and civil service.

The net result I feel is that you get far too many ministers sitting paranoid and not trusting the evidence from their own staff because all they see are plots to undermine their authority and cause political embarrassment.

Universal credit is a key example. Anyone can see two facts about it. 1) on the face of things it is a good idea to simplify the many different sources of government support for impoverished families to one payment. 2) it was always going to be fiendishly difficult to implement and would require a fair bit of investment to do so.

We can argue over the political questions behind universal credit later but just starting from the two points above demonstrates the problem pretty clearly.

All DWP ministers have dealt with the observations about the difficulty of implementation (and the countless social tragedies that have resulted) by conflating point 2 with point 1 and therefore responding that the criticism has no merit because the critics are against the aims of the program as a whole instead of simply criticising how it is being implemented.

Which means that all constructive criticism is ignored as a political smear and the minister knows better than you so jog on.

I guess what I am saying is that I hope the Tory party doesn't believe that the poverty caused by universal credit is a feature not a bug. But at the same time I feel that they are mentally and philosophically unsuited for the thankless task of bug hunting and patching up a broken system.

It kind of is a feature for them and theirs. Poor people borrow money in order to continue living, this pushes up the profits of the City of London + Friends but decreases the profits of all other businesses since the money servicing the debt + interest isn't being spent on their products, this means they go bankrupt and/or cannot give pay rises, so you get more poor and unemployed people borrowing more money, repeat until private debt overwhelms the economy as in 2008 or the Japanese crash in the '90s.

They can't possibly be blind enough to not see this, you can construct a simple model of the whole thing almost entirely from statements that are true by definition or extremely obvious, but I also can't imagine that anyone would be willing to impoverish hundreds of thousands of people to make more money next time they go through the revolving door. Consider me perplexed.

No. It's worse. While she opened the door to what's happening now, you have to bear in mind that, under the current government, Thatcher would look like a left-wing kitten. And, by that, I mean this: for the standards of the day (70s, 80s, 90s), Thatcher was considered extremist right-wing. By the standards of now (since 2010), she's not extreme enough.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Nov 17th 2018 at 3:23:45 PM

Thatcher is, in so many ways, Britain's Reagan. She might not have overseen this disaster, but she led the charge that would eventually place the Tories where they are.

In fact, I'd suggest it's the other way around (Reagan is America's Thatcher). The same envoy assessed Trump's America as well as the current UK. The Guardian asked him to compare the two and his response was stark — the Tories are worse, more extreme, and more successful than the Republicans.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Nov 17th 2018 at 3:32:13 PM

As far as I can tell, the thing with Thatcher is that she is a double edged sword. On the one hand she secured the favourable positions of the UK in the EU, and while she laid the groundwork for what is happening now, it wouldn't be so bad if the bucket had stopped with her. The problem is more that it didn't. Instead of course correcting in the other direction or at least staying on her position, everything she did within the UK was made worse while what she managed to achieve on the international stage was p... away carelessly.

A sizeable portion of what Thatcher and later Major did to take the UK into the various European institutions was done precisely BECAUSE that would place the reversal of her policies permanently out of easy reach for the British state. Removed all capital controls in October '79, signed up to early versions of the Four Freedoms to prevent their reinstatement (Maastricht Treaty, "all restrictions on the movement of capital between Member States and between Member States and third countries shall be prohibited"), promoted market competition above any other policy, embedded austerity and privatisation in EEC/EU rules as deeply as possible.

Admittedly the French after the tournant de la rigueur were major cheerleaders for that as well, but Thatcher and her successors weren't exactly cuddly good Europeans.

Edited by DeathorCake on Nov 17th 2018 at 5:08:58 PM

I think calling Thatcher and her band of Tories European would offend just about everyone. The Europeans for the perceived slight, and the Thatcherites for the perceived slight.

The funny thing is, even the Ork named after her in W40K is somewhat likeable in comparison. And given that said Ork is a planet-murdering psychopath, that's really saying something.

Edited by TechPriest90 on Nov 17th 2018 at 2:51:05 PM

They do very much like to forget that Thatcher signed the Single European Act and went around in a jumper covered in all the flags of the EEC, true. Then again so does a large fraction of the current British left.

At least Ghazghull is very much in favour of a robust industrial base judging by how many ships he's managed to cobble together and maintain. Shame they keep trying to take them off my Genetor Explorator Fleet in my group's current campaign, but you win some, you lose some.

Thatcher wanted to prevent the reunification and her main goal in the EU (outside of the single-market) was always to keep a certain level of, well, discord within it, and to avoid too much unity, because she feared that would weaken the UK (and strengthen Germany). It doesn't matter what colour her jumper was.

Edited by Swanpride on Nov 17th 2018 at 3:21:12 AM

A good reminder that no matter how intelligent you are, prejudices can always obstruct your ability to see things clearly.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/nov/16/brexit-paranoid-fantasy-fintan-otoole

Pretty good piece in the Guardian about the feeling of "victimhood" mixed with anti-German sentiments which drove the Brexit debate.

Long article, but an interesting read. It pretty much just confirms my initial assumption - namely, the hardliners want their fantasy of an Empire back, and since they don't have any real enemies now, they invent them.

As for making a pig's breakfast of the EU - that was always their explicit intention. Yes, Minister said it best - "The Foreign Office has always had the same goal throughout it's existence, which is to create a disunited Europe."

You know, I just realized why the Anti-German sentiments bother me so much. Because frankly, they didn't use to. I always felt that the whole "all Germans are Nazis" thing is annoying, but its not like my nation is innocent in creating it, and I certainly would never deny anyone who lost his family due to the war or the Holocaust the right to be bitter about it. But the kind of anti-Germany sentiments which cropped up during the referendum, well, they are different. Because they are not about what we used to do, they are basically accusing us of doing something now. And it is not born out of past losses, it is born out of a past triumph.

It feels really dangerous.

Yeah, read that one, and fifty thousand more like it. Odd how the entire political discourse of the nation can apparently be divined from half a dozen Sun front pages.

Screw it, I'm going to do the rant thing. Feel free to completely ignore it, just venting.

If you want to read anything written by much cleverer people than me on the whole Lexit/Left-wing EU criticism thing I'd recommend these two articles:

http://bostonreview.net/class-inequality/j-w-mason-market-police

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/04/brexit-labour-party-socialist-left-corbyn

Some of the data in the last one is either dated or contested by other economists, but it's got the rough outline about right.

Well,we've pretty solidly lost a giant class war for half a century, it was just very very quiet. After all, everyone was agreeing that there was no alternative. The UK government has a long history of outsourcing policy to international institutions like the IMF and EU to justify what they were doing anyway, they intended to use it as a different kind of scapegoat. Easy to whip that up into this kind of faux-revanchist sentiment by linking it to the last actual war that might feasibly have done this much damage, do not call up that which you cannot put down and all that. At least it provides delicious schadenfreude by the barrel.

Edited by DeathorCake on Nov 17th 2018 at 2:02:13 PM

The first link was, to my shame, utterly beyond my comprehension, beyond a vague indication that Neoliberal Economics deliberately created a flawed system (a fairly common sentiment these days). Maybe I'm getting that wrong. Someone explain it to me, please?

The second one was all for throwing it right out and going back to pre-Neoliberal Ideas (again, a fairly common sentiment), and basically calling out Labour and the British Left for being idiots.

As for class war - well, that UN Envoy report was pretty damning if you ask me about who finally won the class war. So yeah, you've got that right.

The problem with that logic is that you'd then be lining up behind the glorious cause of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson.

Like I said, extremely biased rant. Still, sometimes I prefer the fairly obvious bastards to the patronising hypocrites, and if we're lucky they might be easier to dispose of than the Blairite types since I firmly believe that most people don't actually want the government to be completely gutted.

The authors of the second one are post-Keynesians, so less going "back" to the postwar consensus and more updating it, since we don't have the institutions of that era to use and can't really build them again, but on the upside we have no Gold Standard nonsense getting in the way. Apart from the Euro, obviously, but that's not a problem in the UK.

The first one is rather wordy. In essence, their whole ideology held that you can't trust politicians or electorates with anything because they will be shortsighted and populist and mess things up, so they had every important power parcelled out to "independent" institutions ran by technocrats. Independent Central Bank and IMF do econ policy, WTO does trade, QUANG Os and privatisation handle industry and public services. A certain type of politician likes it too, because that means they don't actually have many responsibilities that can get them thrown out of office.

Of course that's hilariously inefficient because you're adding in many extra layers and systems of management you don't need, but they covered it all over with financialisation and loads of private debt so it all looked roughly OK until 2008.

EU does the same thing but more so. They have so many checks in the name of separation of powers that very few people can actually do anything and when they do it's generally ad hoc, like the ECB bending their constitution so far the Bundesbank took them to court over it so Draghi could do QE by another name and save the Euro. In the meantime they've taken those powers from the actual states so they can't do anything either, since they can't print money, deficit spend or use capital/import controls, and they can't get the power to do that BACK because that would necessitate leaving the Euro, which blows everything up because reasons.

The EU is really really hard to reform because it was deliberately designed to be mostly unreformable on the grounds that markets are perfect and you don't need interventionist capacity anyway. Hence the six thousand mostly irrelevant summits that don't do anything whenever there's a crisis, and then a milquetoast fudge so they can look like they're sticking to the rules.

If the obvious assholes were easier to remove they would be gone by now. Never make the mistake of thinking otherwise.

If there was anyone still doubting that May is a raging xenophobe, get a load of her last claims:

"It will no longer be the case that EU nationals, regardless of the skills or experience they have to offer, can jump the queue ahead of engineers from Sydney or software developers from Delhi. Instead of a system based on where a person is from, we will have one that is built around the talents and skills a person has to offer."

Nobody was jumping any queue. This is extremely insulting to all the EU citizens who came to the UK in good faith. And it was always the "movement of workers", meaning people were following job offerings and opportunities.

If there's free movement of labour but only for some countries, then those countries are thus bypassing any queue that nationals from other countries would find themselves in. It's not technically inaccurate, but it is founded in xenophobia: "you need to prove you have the skills to come here before you can".

It is offensive. It is implying that the EU citizens did something wrong or cheated their way in. There is no queue. There is an agreement which works both ways. Nor does any "unskilled" EU worker take away a job from some software developer living in Sidney.

Edited by Swanpride on Nov 19th 2018 at 6:27:43 AM