It’s a government who’s been in power too long, whose talent base was massively thinned by a Brexit Purity witch hunt and the impossibility of delivering the Brexit fairy-tale, and who weren’t simply ejected at the last election because of Corbyn’s overwhelming unpopularity.
It's a deeper problem than simply being in power for too long. They have been in power that long because the alternative offer was worse as you mention.
I agree. In a pattern that seems to be repeated globally and frequently, dissatisfaction drives polarization, which in turn pumps up the dissatisfaction, and also encourages actions which are ideological rather than pragmatic and at least as rash as they are bold - and when they go wrong, it gives objective reasons to be even more dissatisfied.
Two party polarized systems, aside from the murky money enabling shadow control of both parties, enables centralized control of policy because rather than on a per-issue consensus decision, it enforcesstrictly "party line" votes.
... the "party line" being decided by the small cabal in charge of making the "party line", usually the ones with the most access to monetary funds.
But the inability to see even 10% of party legislators deviate from party lines in various votes means that not only is rational policy not being well served, regional representation is being undermined since adhering to the party line does not optimize for the policy for their region/district.
And in the US house/senate, the seniority system is another undemocratic institution. Why should changing representatives reduce your effective power in a legislative house? I can't think of a system where codified seniority was a good thing
Maybe I am reading something into your comment that isn't there, but I don't think this is particular to two-party systems. Israel is explicitly not a two-party system (it uses proportional representation), yet it seems to becoming increasingly and strongly polarized.
From the outside looking in, was the opposition worse?
On the one hand, labour seem really similar to the Tories - disunited, dogma over common sense and oddly out of touch.
Their policies _were_ opposite to Tory policies but they are trying to be an opposition so…
Yes Corbin was a leftie (corduroy elbow patches and all) but he’s a leader of a left wing party. It’s like complaining that Thatcher was a bit right-wing.
It seems like the core issue is that the voters want something like Tory-lite. Blair did that and no one wants to go back to it. So this is what you’re left with
Corbyn is a hardcore anticapitalist whose aim is a socialist society (soviet block style). He is in favour of Brexit, too, for this reason. Same goes for McDonnell, a Marxist.
That's very far left and is opposed by most people including in the Labour Party. Basically, those guys were the Communist Party and unsurprisingly people did prefer to keep the Tories...
It was the same in the 80s when Labour was essentially unelectable. Blair saw that the centre left was politically the best bet, and pragmatically that social policies needed the private economy to produce wealth.
> Corbyn was a leftie ... but he’s a leader of a left wing party
Corbyn was hard left in a distinctly centrist country whose "Left Wing Party" is (despite its roots) very much left-leaning centrist, and who's only ever seen real success while occupying the middle-ground.
> voters want something like Tory-lite. Blair did that and no one wants to go back to it
If nobody wanted to go back to it then we'd have Rebecca Long-Bailey as Leader of His Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition, not another centrist.
The policies were popular. 2017 saw the reversal of decline in Labour votes that started under Blair. Labour got more votes than any Blair election other than 1997.
There is a large constituency against the status quo in the UK. We have proof of that in the 2016 Brexit referendum, where 17 million people voted strongly against the establishment line and effectively against an economic model that we had had for 40 years. People voted in part to take back control, and what is nationalisation of basic aspects of our lives like water / housing / energy / drug manufacturing / transport etc if not taking back control?
Since the pandemic, the implementation of a chaotic version of Brexit, and the cost of living crisis. The underlying aspects of the 2017 / 2019 Labour policies are even more starkly relevant. Everything has been laid bare, and for some reason the two main parties are now completely devoid of ideas or vision.
There are massive systemic issues in the country. Lack of housing, regional inequality, geographical inequality, falling real terms wages, chronic underfunding of R&D. Basically everything is falling apart. 40 years of financialisation of public services and nearly every aspect of our lives (there's virtually nothing you can do as part of your daily routine that doesn't trigger a transfer of wealth from public or household money to the top).
The Brexit vote itself was partially a reaction to these issues.
These things need real solutions and real ideas. Any ideas that even start to address them let alone reverse the issues will look radical, and Labour 2017 / 2019 was barely doing that just offering a mild social democratic platform that would not be out of place in Northern Europe or indeed in the 1983 SDP-Liberal manifesto.
Adding to that we would have had a planned and controlled Brexit, with certain Eu agreements being replaced with equivalent things with different names.
All of this is mostly academic though as the first restrictions in the pandemic would have given the key to removing a Corbyn government by an effective establishment coup.
The government in power from 2010-2015 was very different than the one today. For starters it was a coalition with the Lib Dems, but even comparing today's rump with Cameron's second ministry shows massive divergence in competence as well as policy.
Judging what is "worse" is tricky. Of course, if the alternative is proposing policies that don't fit with your ideology, you are going to judge them badly ("how can they be good politicians, they haven't even understood what is obvious to me"). But it does not mean they are worse, it just means that they are not representative of your ideology. In a healthy democracy, the community should accept that there will be people with different ideology, and that there will therefore be political parties representing them.
I think this is the problem: politicians representing the ideology X can afford to be mediocre because they have some room before "voting for mediocre politicians that still agree with what I believe is the best" is worse than "voting for non-mediocre politicians that disagree with what I believe is the best". If a party ends up with mediocre politician, it is its own failure, and the other parties (even if they themselves have bad politicians) are not responsible: the other parties represent other people. If the party that represents your ideology is managing to put forward mediocre politicians, then, it is your failure for letting that happens or accepting this situation.
(I'm not saying that you are incompetent: you may have failed because it was impossible. Still, it's certainly not the responsibility of people who have a different ideology)
In short, in a healthy democracy, there will always be a "worse" party. It cannot take away the responsibility of the party you have voted for for being bad. It's a bit like having giraffes and lions at the zoo, and having the lions saying "the meat is full of maggots and really bad quality, but the alternative is having the vegetables that suits the giraffes, so, it's the giraffes' fault".
Except pretty much everyone agrees, even within Labour, that Corbyn was unelectable... in part because his team and policies where squarely on the far left. A repeat of the Micheal Foot days in the 80s.
So, yes, in the end people may have had issues with the sitting government but they concluded that they were the "least bad" option.
> Except pretty much everyone agrees, even within Labour, that Corbyn was unelectable... in part because his team and policies where squarely on the far left.
That does not make of him a bad politician (he can be, but you keep saying "he is a bad politician because I don't like his ideology and his ideology was not popular enough", which is NOT a criteria to decide if it's a bad politician or not). In a democracy, every ideology must be represented, even if they don't correspond to the majority and are therefore unelectable.
But again, that is not my point: Corbyn was shit, unelectable, whatever, ... And yet, the other party had bad politicians. Corbyn is not the one putting those politicians there. Corbyn supporters neither. Neither Corbyn or his supporters have any say in this, because they have a different ideology and therefore cannot build a good-politician party that defends an ideology they don't agree with.
The fact that the restaurant A serves expired food is not a good excuse for going to the restaurant B, eating slightly less expired food, pay your bill, leave without complaining about restaurant B, and conclude that the main reason is that restaurant A was bad. Restaurant A is bad, and we can, and should, complain about it, but when there is an article about restaurant B explaining that they are failing to serve correct food, you cannot bring in restaurant A as an excuse for the failure of restaurant B. The MAIN REASON restaurant B serves bad food is BECAUSE RESTAURANT B IS FAILING.
You may even be centre-left and chosen Tories for the first time just because you did not like Corbyn. But as soon as you vote Tories, the quality of the politicians in the Tory party is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. If you vote for them, you are part of the process that reward their choice of bad politicians. (I use "you" as the "hypothetical you", not you in particular)
Also, your idea that what matter is the electability is really bad for democracy. Basically, it implies that minorities should never be represented.
> A healthy democracy needs a credible opposition.
If your definition of "credible opposition" is "an opposition that I would have maybe voted for", you are dead wrong.
In a healthy democracy, when you have two main parties, one in power, one in opposition, then, there is one party that you should think is okay, and one party that you should think is shit (it's more complicated than that, but it is to illustrate). If you like all the parties, it just means that you have just one ideology represented.
It's still interesting to think about given America's current gerontocracy. My last position put me in contact with a fair amount of local and state level politicians in the US and I'm very concerned about the talent bases/pipelines of the political class here.
Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump were all born within a year of each other, with Biden being 4 years older. There is a specific generation of politicians Born within a decade period who managed to get elected young and have clung to power in both parties very successfully, see John Bohner, Nancy Pelosi, and Ted Kennedy for other examples.
That's the question I always ask when viewing the gerontocracy.
In academia at least it's been very clear that the boomers were shameless about working long past the time they should retire, preventing gen Xers from rising to top positions.
Most broad statements including GenX really need to be qualified by noting its size (slightly greater than half) relative to either of the two pigs working their way through the python before and behind it. Three when you count GenZ.
Apathetic? Maybe. But even if we were all on the same page as a group (which we're not) I don't see how we have the numbers to force a systemic turnover on our own.
I am, of course, a member of GenX. Sometimes, as Planck said, progress has to happen one funeral at a time. None of this brings me any joy to observe.
I'm not an ideologue so I don't derive my identity from my politics, and therefore don't view political opinions as "impressing" anybody.
I don't like the GOP for many reasons (maga) and I think the current iteration of Democrats are horrifically inept with economics to a degree where they are a net harm for the people they strive to help. Belief in policies such as rent control is as anti-science as creationism.
Most Americans have fallen into the trap of lesser of two evils to a point where they don't hold their chosen side accountable at all and the result is predictable. Incredibly dysfunctional policy.
Locally the person that I know that was most heavily involved in politics, serving as organizer for a well known local non profit, campaign manager for a mayoral campaign, etc, finally reached the limits of their patience. Now they use their very considerable organization skills as a marketing exec at a startup.
Lessig proved tiresome in the later parts of his media campaign, but I don't think he was wrong about this basic asymetry: there's some political positions that are far more likely to receive substantial financial support, and this distorts nearly everything in our political system. The people who crusade against this are generally speaking, doing something irrational out of principle, meanwhile the people they're fighting just get more money and power.
Hadn't Starmer already replaced Corbyn by the last election? I don't think you can blame this on him. I don't think he's really the most unpopular element of Labour either. Even after most media was slandering him as an "antisemite" and all that other garbage because neoliberals have captured all of the institutions in the UK.
The accusations were partly based on him cosying up with terrorists, from Hamas, Iran, etc. Is it too much to ask that a candidate for Prime Minister should respect the Rule of Law?
There's also his support for Chavez/Maduro, his suicidally naive pacifism which helps the enemy, etc.
Oh, and the episode with the mural, where he was too stupid to understand why a picture of fat people with hooked noses oppressing "the workers" would be offensive to a certain group. And what kind of adult sees the world in that way anyway?
[edit] Whatever. Downvote me. You people will never win in the real world.
Boris Johnson met ex-KGB oligarch and made his son a member of the House of Lords[1]
He said "let the bodies pile high" about his plan for COVID, a plan which ended up killing ~100,000 people.[2][2.5]
> "Oh, and the episode with the mural, where he was too stupid to understand why a picture of fat people with hooked noses oppressing "the workers" would be offensive to a certain group."
Is the certain group Jews? Were they offended by Boris Johnson's book with rude Jewish stereotypes?[3] Or his other racist public writings?[4]
> "Is it too much to ask that a candidate for Prime Minister should respect the Rule of Law?"
Is it too much to ask that the actual Prime Minster respect the law? Partygate, for example[5]
What's that saying "with Conservatives, every accusation is a confession".
Is the goal here to make Corbyn look good by comparison to Johnson? The median voter seems to think they are both unfit to lead, so it’s probably not an effective argument.
The goal is to refuse to let Conservatives leave that kind of spin uncontested.
Everything the comment accused Corbyn of doing leading to "you people will never win in the real world" was done by BoJo, and it didn't stop him winning in the real world.
Some of the stuff you listed happened after Johnson won (or came to light after his victory), and before he resigned in disgrace, so doesn’t particularly serve the point you are making.
he wrote Seventy Two Virgins (the book having a character who loved money, had a hocked nose and jewish name) in 2004. he continuously wrote racist, sexist and homophobic comments in his articles since.
His relationship with Jennifer Arcuri and public spending implications was out before 2019.
It was all out in the public domain.
It was the media's jobs to ignore this and pretend the main issue was one case where Corbyn liked a photo on facebook that he later claimed he hadn't paid enough attention to and apologised for (Johnson has never apologised or been called on to apologise)
Mostly seems to be that British press is entirely opinionated tabloids who choose to "find out" that a scandal happened a year later based on whether they like the guy it happened to or not.
The way we elect a prime minister (i.e. we don't) plays a large part here I think. Parties themselves select the leader.
Johnson, Corbyn, Truss, Sunak - all voted in by relatively small numbers of people (e.g. 80k in the case of Truss IIRC), yet they are somehow the leader of the party and potentially even PM.
This is where labour shat the bed I think with Corbyn - totally obvious that he would be terrible as a PM yet the favourite of the popular vote of self-selected labour party, who of course are too extreme to represent the common person on the street.
No, Labour isn't a popular vote. It is a popular vote AND a union vote (and the PLP, although they have never mattered in practice, they tried to oust Corbyn three times iirc...didn't work).
Corbyn had popular support but, like Miliband, relied relatively heavily on unions...and one union at that: Unite (and btw, his popular support was always overstated hugely...in late 2019, you had a sizeable minority who thought he would walk it, he was massively popular in the Westminster bubble...this is despite him being regarded as a totally odious figure under Blair when he was a backbencher).
The Tories have never had this issue because their electorate is relatively diffuse, and MPs have been quite willing to stab their leader in the back at the first sign of trouble.
Blair (like Thatcher) was an accident. I agree with your point but the Tories have been generally able to produce more effective leaders with their constitution.
Corbyn and McDonnell were essentially communists and therefore unelectable.
Blair took the realistic route: Socialism does not work, let's have a market economy create wealth that can then be used to finance social programs. A flavour a social democracy.
I think a reason Corbyn was so popular among the young is that enough time has passed so that this generation has no idea what socialist countries in Europe were actually like.
The problem with Blair was that he lost the right on EU/immigration and lost the left on everything else.
Brownites sound good but say nothing specific...often the specific stuff is bad too. I agree with you in that there is a route in the centre, but Labour aren't. The party is fundamentally broken. Starmer isn't it, Reeves isn't a leader, Streeting is a joke. Obviously, they have moved to the centre on immigration and crime but...the party are just mad, and it doesn't seem authentic at all (Starmer was a human rights lawyer, getting rid of ECHR is the only course...you would have to be an idiot to believe he would do that, it just isn't credible).
The ambiguity of Labour is causing part of these problems. For example, their position of ambiguity on healthcare...clearly, it is broken...but they decide to be ambiguous (again, classic Brown) so their polling numbers stay up. There needs to be some kind of cross-party move towards reform but it is impossible when one side just wants to score points as the "protector of the NHS" (and it will end up with Labour winning, then finding out they are neck deep in trouble trying to do reforms that don't work...it will never be fixed).
> The problem with Blair was that he lost the right on EU/immigration and lost the left on everything else
Yes, that's a good point, but it's not only the right. All the traditionally Labour constituencies in the North (but not only) which voted for Brexit did so largely because of immigration.
Immigration control is not traditionally right wing only. The left has also been in favour of control and restrictions in order to protect workers' wages.
Their wages are low because they're British and live in a failing country.
Immigration raises wages; more people = better economy. That's why every other Anglo country is doing better than them. And has food that isn't brown slop.
Immigration doesn’t lower wages. Telling people this usually doesn’t convince them because they just want an excuse to complain about immigrants, but nevertheless it’s true.
In particular Australia’s population is 1/3rd immigrants. Australia’s minimum and median wages are both significantly higher than the UK. Does that mean there are so many immigrants they’re taking each others jobs instead?
There's a very big assumption in your claim, which is that immigration is balanced among 'social classes', skills, jobs,etc. In that case, indeed overall demand grows along with overall supply. Australia has an immigration system aimed at achieving that.
Things do not work out so great if immigration isn't balanced.
In the UK there has been a huge influx of unskilled or low skilled workers from Eastern Europe that has put a big dampener on wages at the low end of the spectrum.
One of the reasons the UK has a productivity issue is that cheap labour.
The papers I linked are empirical evidence, not assumptions. There’s two specifically on the UK that find no evidence of this.
They also find that skilled immigration systems don’t always work, because all immigrants tend to be unusually highly educated anyway, but also significantly downskill the jobs they choose after arriving. So you’d expect them to always compete with low end natives, but in fact they don’t because they mainly compete with other immigrants instead. And “compete” isn’t how labor works anyway, since all workers are also customers.
The problem with that argument is where the money comes from. If you look at government tax take relative to GDP we aren't paying in much less tax than at any other time in most of our living memories. If anything it is the other way around.
We'd all like public services that do everything for everyone but few of us would be willing to pay what that would actually cost and many of us literally couldn't afford it. Meanwhile expectations of government services are rising and in many areas demographics are against us. If you rule out reform of government services then you don't have a lot of options left to square a lot of circles.
It's important to consider that "reform" is not the same as "cutting standards". For example if we could redistribute the available resources for health and social care to focus more on prevention than cure then many problems might be detected and dealt with earlier resulting in lower overall costs and crucially also
better outcomes for patients. Of course there is so much firefighting happening in the NHS now that it's hard to see how any radical reform could happen without a huge injection of both cash and trained medical staff over a period longer than a single electoral cycle and that makes it a political problem as much as an economic or healthcare one.
The NHS has been in continuous reform.
Thatcher / Blair / Brown / Lansley / Hunt.
Most of these reforms have included injecting private sector and internal markets into the system.
You may agree or disagree with these reforms, but it's difficult to argue that they don't incur overhead. Outsourced contracts need administration, legal frameworks; private parties take profit or else they wouldn't exist.
I'd argue it is likely that most of the extra funding is seeping out through these reforms, plus the legacy of not nationalising the whole health system - GP surgeries, pharmacy, generic drug manufacturing - when the NHS was formed.
I agree with you on the prevention aspect.
but my thought is that a more joined up system including GPs, pharmacy and especially social care, would manage a lot of lifestyle related issues much better.
I expect you're right about all of this. The famous "joined up thinking" at a national scale across a whole government is frequently what is missing. Sometimes it's missing within "only" one area such as health and social care but that area alone is already huge and almost unbelievably complicated to run.
There are probably a lot of real costs in our current healthcare system that never make it onto the books as well. For example in many parts of the country it is impossible for an adult to register with a dentist as an NHS patient right now. There are zero dental practices within a reasonable distance of many people willing to accept new NHS patients. That appears to be because the deal governments currently offer to NHS dentists makes no sense financially so it's hard to blame the dentists. But the effect is the same - many of those people are not getting regular dental check ups and preventative or early treatments. The ones who are went private and paid themselves.
That's money going into private healthcare not from the tax man but from the individual patient but that still means the individual patient no longer has that money to be able to afford higher taxes that could better fund the NHS. Unfortunately the lack of huge public outcry as this frog has been boiled only proves that a government strategy of slowly eroding even essential healthcare provision to encourage privatisation by the back door can be effective.
The NHS is the largest employer in Europe. 1.7 million employees for 141,000 beds. I believe it is fundamentally irreformable, but clearly it needs reform.
They weren't essentially communists, that is taking the Tory press talking point. They were further left than any other recent popular politicians. Left in the form of worker rights, unionism that sort of thing, not communism.
Given how far we've gone into a low wage and poor rights economy I don't think a hard left leadership would have been that bad, especially as it would have been tempered by the rest anyway. However, I don't like Corbyn's extreme passivism.
I'm the first person to criticise McDonnell and Corbyn's radical postures, but the idea that Labour's manifesto proposal to renationalise the railways, Royal Mail and some utilities is communism is utterly laughable.
Somehow we managed state owned railways and utilities for basically the entire Cold War without ever once feeling tempted to join the Warsaw Pact, and the Royal Mail was a government agency for nearly 400 years...
Nationalisation with control handed to the workers.
And of course there's also the little thing about McDonnell and Corbyn being Marxist and socialist.
Again, too many people still seem not to be willing to see what's not even hidden. History should really be compulsory over the whole of secondary school.
Edit: they had hinted it very strongly but did not mention it in the 2017 manifesto apart from calling to promote coops. But in the 2019 manifesto it is explicitly written that nationalised utilities would be "run by service-users and workers".
McDonnell is a Marxist and so, obviously, he wanted a Marxist economic policy in which nationalisation does not mean state capitalism but really indeed workers in charge of the means of production.
I'm not sure the italicised bit conveys quite the sinister undertones you intended.
Consider the following: if you consider communism to be a bad thing which people should be vigilant against, arguments to the effect that the defining feature of communism is having rail decisions made by employees of a state railway company rather than the boards of Abellio and Arriva[1] probably aren't going to help. Firstly because there's a wee bit more to communism than that, and secondly because the consensus of British rail users is that decision making concerning our railways is currently crap.
There are plenty of decent arguments that Labour's 2019 nationalisation plans wouldn't solve the fundamental problems of those services, but the idea that it's basically Marxist-Leninism isn't one of them.
[1]incidentally entities which are wholly owned by governments, just not the British one
Firstly that involving workers in the ownership and running of a company is a successful model that is working in German for example.
Focus on short term shareholder value is not good for employees or the company.
You are posting on a site that has a large percentage of people working in start-ups. Comments like your kind of goes completely against the audience.
Secondary, I've heard McDonnell describe himself as a Marxist. but he is also a politician. Unlike Corbyn he was the one to (incorrectly in my view) seek compromise and common ground with people who were seeking to undermine him.
He was the key player in getting Labour to adopt a policy of second referendum, something that an ideological Marxist would certainly not go anywhere near, let alone drive.
There's no actual Marxist I know that would go anywhere near the EU.
Youre both wrong. under marxism public utilites would be owned and run by the workers i.e. the people in total, not just the workers who happen to work at the utility. this is because union ownership of public utilites is a recipie for failue and cannot be compared to successful for profit coops
In English "run by the workers" have a very different meaning from "involving the workers". So your point is a strawman.
Yes a large portion of readers probably works in startups, the pinnacle of market and financial capitalism and should in all logic despise Corbyn and McDonnell... although that's irrelevant to the discussion.
McDonnell and Corbyn are indeed life long euroseptics and very satisfied with Brexit, which made it even more ridiculous to see so many students cheering them.
> What do you call nationalising companies and handing control to the workers? (It's in the manifesto)
There is a confusion here between the situation we have and how we address it.
My water supply - water being that thing that falls from the sky on to the top of my house, and humans die if we don't have any within 3 days - is owned by a Hong Kong investment fund that is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
If you asked the person on the street then they would say that this ownership model is radical, and public ownership of water is conservative.
However, if you instead ask them to comment on taking water ownership from a private company into the public domain , they'd say that was radical.
The issue is that we've moved so far in terms of financialisation of nearly every aspect of our lives, that any attempt to address that will be seen as radical.
The young like it because they don't have much skin in the game.
"Tax the rich!" Is great when you are not rich, and most young people are not (yet) rich. Coming out of uni saddled with debt and doing entry level jobs etc, it is easy to just think selfishly and say "The rich should pay for more! Not me!"
Eventually you run out of other people's money though.
> The young like it because they don't have much skin in the game.
This is completely backwards, they have the MOST skin in the game. They are the ones that are going not going to have things we take/took for granted like: living and working in the EU or being able to enjoy a pension.
As a (lamentably) no longer young and (luckily) fairly rich person in London, “tax the rich” is a fucking brilliant idea.
I have received over the past several years a number of stupid tax cuts and energy bailouts that have had precisely zero effect on my family’s well-being or future prospects. Except now I can’t get a fucking doctor’s appointment, the local church is setting up a “warm bank” so that me neighbours don’t die, and my kids will have to pay tens of thousands of pounds for education.
The Labour vote was a popular vote, it just happened to include union members and 'registered supporters' who weren't party members (but would have had the same outcome in 2015 without them). The electoral college system was abandoned by Miliband, and Starmer has given up trying to bring it back in some form.
The Tories haven't got to worry about having self-styled radical socialists on the ballot but have had exactly the same problems: candidates that appeal most to the Tory selectorate like Iain Duncan Smith and Liz Truss are neither in touch with the public mood nor competent.
Not sure that a presidential system with a public vote would necessarily do better though. The public loved Johnson and liked May at first.
I don’t think overwhelming is the right word, his vote share was around Blair’s average.
Now that half of Tory MPs have been cabinet members, it’s harder to demand loyalty by dangling a job for votes. Especially the ministerial roles that the public are aware of.
The article seems to be avoiding the term "lame duck period". It reads an excessively selective set of opinions, and it's unclear who should be trying harder.
Blair got 35% of the vote after 8 years of power and the Iraq war, against a decent challenger and experienced politician.
Corbyn got 32% — as the opposition — against an incumbent who’s approval ratings at the time were underwater and who led an unpopular party who’d been in power far too long already.
Corbyn got 202 MPs in 2019, Blair in his 3rd term got 355
Corbyn wasn't just deeply unpopular across the country outside of student areas. I spoke to life long remainer lib dems in the Tory/Lab marginal seat of Crewe and Nantwich who were voting Tory to stop Corbyn. Across rural areas in Cheshire people were voting Tory because they were scared of Lib Dems backing Corbyn.
Due to the way that FPTP works, his concentrated support in student/young urban areas was wasted, with the result being a Tory landslide.
This describes me. Luckily I was able to meaningfully vote LibDem, because I really could not see myself voting for BoJo or Corbyn in the last election. Neither Starmer nor Sunak would be my first choice, but in contrast I could hold my nose and vote for either of them if I had to.
> I spoke to life long remainer lib dems in the Tory/Lab marginal seat of Crewe and Nantwich who were voting Tory to stop Corbyn.
I spoke to many who similarly voted to stop Corbyn - they were stopping Corbyn because of his vow to reintroduce gas chambers and exterminate every Jew in the land. I am not sure that was his actual policy but many were adamant it was.
I'm no fan of Corbyn but there was a politically motivated character assassination leading up to the election, where all major newspapers reported him and his party for anti-Semitism. The media all parroting lines fed by the Government with no critical analysis is complicit in Tories, and whoever wants to play the dirtiest, to remain in power and do whatever they want.
The naive elector sees Corbyn pissing off the Jewish groups on front pages everywhere, and or course they do not want to associate with people of that ilk. The majority trust newspapers and politicians too much, so get routinely played like a fiddle, and the best liar always wins.
The similar shit show is going to play out next election with Reform UK if the liar extraordinaire Nigel Farage decides to front it.
There's this view amongst Corbyn supporters that everyone would have voted for him if it wasn't for the evil newspapers.
Setting aside that in 2019 under 15% of the country read a newspaper, it's a moot point. Part of the job of being leader of a political party, just like any business, is to handle public relations. Corbyn's team was awful at this. It's no good whining about it, you have to handle it.
Personally his pro-wealthy attacks on making the care system fairer were one major thing that turned me off. He spent a lot of political capital trying to defend the right of millionaires to not pay for their own care (and thus increasing everyone else's tax burden).
Corbyn's proposal to actually tax millionaires failed dramatically because of his inability to handle the media.
Despite it being a policy supported by all sorts of economic think tanks from the IFS to Adam Smith, and has support from the Green party to the LSE, somehow he managed to completely bungle it and push the cause back a generation. Another thing I can't forgive him for.
The problem is more extreme than that - there is not being able to handle the media, and there is Corbyns problem. "Informed voters" are able to precisely articulate what they believe the oposition party (Corbyns) policy is, and what they articulate is not based on any reality that exists on the time space continuum.
I recall at some point last election cycle an interview with a very passionate gentleman in the north who was adamant that we had to "Vote for Change, its time to get Corbyn and his failed policies out of Downing Street". He was utterly certain that Corbyn had been prime minister for the prior four years and the terrible state of the country was down to him.
I am no fan of labour but that environment is not good for anyone and has ultimately (ironically) destroyed the Conservative party.
If you think that's bad, you wouldn't believe all the crazy stuff people believe Donald Trump did while in office. If you took the name off and got rid of all the self-promotion and bombastic media stuff, people would think of him like an obscure post-Civil-War president you have to know for school and can forget after that.
He did superbly in granting a massive majority to Johnson. If that was his goal (“win the argument” but not the election) then you can’t really fault him.
I'm astounded people are STILL burying their heads in the sand about Corbyn. But I suppose that is a large part of the reason why labour was losing for so long they kept denying the obvious reality that the electorate just did not like Corbyn but wouldn't get rid of him for internal political/ideological reasons.
It's also a word most people learned thanks to the fictional Malcolm Tucker character in The Thick of It (Season 3, episode 6 when he's yelling at Ben Swain)
I reject the idea that I'm burying my head in the sand, if that's your reaction to my post. I'm wary of expanding on it on HN. The short version is that there were genuine policy reasons to dislike him (even from a POV left of Blair), overwhelmed by the media and the Labour party disinformation. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62226042
Do you know who the article is saying should try harder?
The article is part of the problem. UK politics and the media narratives around it have beeen utterly wrecked by the fight over Brexit and the attempts to give its creators the boot. For example, take this claim: "Investment is down and inflation higher than it would have been inside the European Union." The UK's inflation in the year to November 2022 was 10.7%, compared to 10.1% in the Eurozone. It just doesn't seem at all plausible that the UK would somehow have substantially lower inflation if it were in the EU, based on what countries actually in the EU have experienced, yet it's treated as so obviously true that only lying Brexiters would reject it.
This belief is boosted by the fact the British press only ever compares our inflation with France, which has the lowest inflation in Europe due to substantial nuclear generating capacity and energy subsidies funded through borrowing. Our government was attacked for attempting even a fraction of those energy subsidies to the point they did a U-turn because ultimately the public pays for it, but that downside is ignored when talking about France. They also also have substantially more national debt for obvious reasons... but luckily the UK national debt is usually only compared with Germany's.
> The UK's inflation in the year to November 2022 was 10.7%, compared to 10.1% in the Eurozone. It just doesn't seem at all plausible that the UK would somehow have substantially lower inflation if it were in the EU
I don't think people who say "UK inflation would have been better in the EU" are basing that on "in UK, it was 10.7% and in EU it was 10.1%", but rather on "since Brexit, wealth generated by export has dropped, wealth generated by import has dropped, wealth generated by EU migration workforce has dropped, ... which obviously means that the crisis can only be worse". It does not mean they are right, but even if UK had a smaller inflation than countries still in EU, you can still say that UK would have been better if you see that all indicators show that the cost of life was at the end globally affected negatively by Brexit.
I always think that comparing inflation or national debt to other countries is meaningless. A big national debt used for good investment is way better than a small national debt while the infrastructures fall apart, and the state and cost of the infrastructure can be very different in each country. And for the same level of inflation, the effects would be very different based on the resources and market characteristics of the country and which measures are taken.
(edit: and indeed, if you re-read the text around the quote you've extracted, this is indeed the reasoning: the author does not justify that with a comparison of the inflation rate, but with a list of where the Brexit made things worse)
10.7% v 10.1% is 0.6%. how long before that compounds into a sizable figure?
I never really bought into the doomsday scenarios. Just a slow slide of Spanish package holidays getting more expensive and people not connecting the dots.
Democracies elsewhere can learn a thing or two from recent election rounds in the US, the UK, and elsewhere. Basically, we've seen a surge in populism and irrational sentiment dominating politics and being translated into actual policy with disastrous results. The lesson there is that you can win an election and then loose an empire.
I don't think it's a British problem either. We've had populists dominating politics in quite a few countries in recent decades. France just had a close call where a neo fascist came close to winning the elections. The Austrians have actually gone there. My home country the Netherlands has had populists come close a couple of times as well. Italy just elected a populist. The issue is that the type of policies populists preach tend to not involve a whole lot of carefully considered long term planning. Big gestures that are supposedly popular and then all hell breaks loose when reality and fantasy meet.
Brexit sounded great to people with no clue about how economies work. Now they are dealing with inflation, lots of failing policies, and the notion that they might soon have to rename their country as it is won't be great or united anymore if Scotland and Northern Ireland cease to be a part of it. I don't think anyone voted for that in England. But it would be a direct consequence of what they did vote for.
Like you, all of my political opponents are stupid or evil, often both! It's so convenient…
Is there no one you disagree with politically who is just popular instead of populist, knowledgeable and yet disagrees with you? If you can't think of any then I'd suggest the problem lies within you.
By the way
> as it is won't be great
Great is a geographical term. Just as British people remain european after leaving the EU, they (those on the island of Great Britain) would remain part of Great Britain.
But do continue to regale us all from up high with your superior knowledge about economies and such, knowing things like why Great Britain is named as it is, that's just a trifling fact for plebs.
"Brexit sounded great to people with no clue about how economies work. Now they are dealing with inflation"
As is pointed out in every single one of these threads, inflation in the UK is no different to inflation in the rest of Europe. Like elsewhere, it's created by money printing to pay for lockdowns and other COVID measures, along with embargoes against Russia.
It's really quite impressive how often this claim about inflation and Brexit comes up on HN, despite it being so easily disproven by looking at the numbers. It seems to happen on literally every single thread about the UK. The idea that Remainer-ism is a bastion of economic logic and common sense doesn't fit with the frequency with which bad economic claims in support of EU membership are made.
> whose talent base was massively thinned by a Brexit Purity witch hunt
How many MPs were removed in this witch hunt? And why is it a witch hunt if the electorate is told "this is the most important question for at least a generation", they vote on it, and the representatives in parliament do their damnedest to prevent carrying out the thing voted for, and thus the electorate decide to remove some of them?
That sounds like democracy in action to me (and anti-democracy by those who tried to stymie Brexit).
The “witch hunt” refers to the actions taken by the incoming Johnson government, who kicked a bunch of generally respected, experienced parliamentarians out of the party because they weren’t “Brexity” enough. We’re not even talking about anti-Brexit people - just the ones that resisted the obviously broken approach that was being taken.
The result was a government forced to bang on about how great an objectively bad process was because nobody was left to say “if you’re going to do this then you need to be realistic about the cost”. And implementing a known-bad policy while trying to pretend it’s great completely fucks a government.
My first question would be, respected by whom, and my second would be, whose respect matters? My guess would be that it was the voters who were most important as they provided a majority to the next most important people, the executive. Do you think those voters respect those MPs? Let's see.
21 Tory MPs had the whip removed for defying the party line and signalling their intent to defy Brexit:
- Kenneth Clarke, sniffed the political winds and stood down. Got given a golden handshake to the Lords.
- Philip Hammond - you must be joking, right? Still managed to get a seat in the Lords though.
- Rory Stewart. Do you think those who voted Brexit respect him? Might win in a contest with Hammond over who is disliked less. So well respected he couldn't even keep his campaign for mayor of London going to the start line, even with London being a remain stronghold.
- Dominic Grieve would not even beat Guy Verhofstadt in a contest voted on by leave supporters over who is liked less, as evidenced by losing his seat to his Tory replacement. I half expected Guy Fawkes day to be renamed Dominic Grieve day. Still could.
- David Gauke has an instructive Wikipedia entry[1]:
> Gauke stood in his constituency as an independent candidate, and came second with 26% of the vote, by far the best result of any of those former Conservative Members who sought re-election as independents.
That'll make the rest of the list an anti-climax but let's have some fun drilling the point home:
- Antoinette Sandbach, stood as a LibDem and lost.
- Sir Oliver Letwin, didn't stand again. I don't know anyone that respects him[2].
- Justine Greening, did not stand. Why not? She was savvy enough to see what was coming.
- Sam Gyimah, stood as a LibDem, lost seat to Conservatives, coming third behind Labour.
- Guto Bebb, didn't stand. Previously managed to gain much respect by bullying a man with Asperger's[3].
- Anne Milton, lost seat in 4th place. Tories kept her seat with a leave supporter in her place.
- Alistair Burt, Caroline Nokes, Greg Clark, Sir Nicholas Soames, Ed Vaizey, Margot James, Richard Benyon, Stephen Hammond, Steve Brine and Richard Harrington had the whip restored. Soames didn't stand at the next election, Harrington, Vaizey and Benyon got bumped up to the Lords where they love remainer Tories. Stephen Hammond and Steve Brine kept their seats with much reduced majorities.
Jo Johnson and Amber Rudd also resigned from the cabinet in support of the rebels and stood down at the next election. Johnson was bumped up to the Lords, because there aren't enough anti-democratic lords, apparently, though their record (and entire structure and history) would suggest otherwise.
I'm impressed at the amount of effort you went into arguing against something I said that was pretty tangential to your point. An entertaining read though – thanks. I think it goes to demonstrate quite tidily the utter mind-rot on the part of some people in the UK right now.
> The “witch hunt” refers to the actions taken by the incoming Johnson government, who kicked a bunch of generally respected, experienced parliamentarians out of the party because they weren’t “Brexity” enough. We’re not even talking about anti-Brexit people - just the ones that resisted the obviously broken approach that was being taken.
That was half of your comment, the opening part, and in response to my comment, yet somehow, going into detail about
a) why it wasn't a witch hunt, and
b) refuting the premises upon which you relied
is somehow pretty tangential to my point?
> I think it goes to demonstrate quite tidily the utter mind-rot on the part of some people in the UK right now.
Do you always respond to cognitive dissonance with personal slights, and do you know that this is HN and not Twitter?
Just to be clear: competent people exist everywhere, in the USA, Canada, UK, New Zealand, India, Japan, China, Argentina, Korea, Luxembourg, Sweden, and everywhere else.
What matters is where these competent people want to go.
When people want to leave, that means there's something lacking at where they are currently.
My opinion is that every place must create an environment where their best brains want to stay there (without being forced to, of course!). The whole world could be better due to that.
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones bennefiting from a brain drain of americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreing talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT.
It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Here in the Valley, I actually noticed an increase in number of international hires coming from commonwealth countries in the last few years.
I've mainly seen Canada be used to park people there who can't immigrate to the US because the system for that is too backed up. Being in the same timezone as SV is pretty helpful for collaboration.
I think that can be true, but from knowing many people that did take that route, I don't think that's a stable kind of immigration though. i.e. people who do that would rather be in the US but couldn't and are often just waiting around for the right opportunity to go back. Some stay forever, sure, but I think the two countries offer entirely different lives, specially for career-driven people.
There was an interesting reading a while ago, trying to find. It basically boiled down to "The Canadian dream is move to America". Canada is a middle-class, "middle-all", in fact, country with, in my opinion little excitement. But then again, that's just my personal opinion. Factually, yeah, the US offers more purchase power, better salaries and better mobility.
My point is: if you have to leave the US due to immigration, frankly I'd rather go to Britain than Canada. At least I get an exciting change in lifestyle. Canada is too close to America in what it tries to do but fails. UK is f* up, but at least it's Europe
Yes, Murdoch is probably the single person with the greatest responsibility for the current mess. The sooner he shuffles off his mortal coil, the better.
Do you mean Brexit? Otherwise I don't recall the last time that the Murdoch press has had any influence on any policy in either the EU or the United States.
The Murdoch press was for Sweden-style COVID-19 policies and deescalation in Ukraine. If it had been listened to, we'd have low gas prices and economic prosperity now.
Instead, Biden pumped up the stock market with COVID-19 relief funds handed out to his interest groups and sent Kamala Harris (who did not know what Ukraine was) to the Munich "peace" conference, where liberals Stoltenberg et. al. escalated further.
So, apart from Brexit, which Murdoch opinion has been implemented in the past decade?
> I don't recall the last time that the Murdoch press has had any influence on any policy in either the EU or the United States.
Are you discounting Fox News as being part of the Murdoch Press? Because they definitely have an outsized influence on US policy, at least on the GOP side.
The economist engages in the usual Brexit bashing, drowns the reader in irrelevant historical references and artfully omits multiple elephants in the room.
2000-odd words, goes into great detail talking about politics, psycho-analyzing the Tories...it is all because they went to Eton...of course...the Brexit, the bankers...it is all so simple.
A brief sentence is expended on planning, no mention about supply-side problems, the productivity crisis in govt (which is now 50% of the economy)...nothing.
I will say this another way, you can measure the intelligence by looking at the gap between how often they talk about Brexit and how often they talk about economic reform. People who talk endlessly about Brexit have nothing to say about any economic reform...beyond reversing Brexit (and then say, without self-awareness, something sniping about the "religion" of Brexit). There is no content.
The UK has many problems but the worst is an elite that is almost totally preoccupied with arguing and rutting with other members of that same elite. Recursive, insular, almost no connection with reality.
That was the problem from the 20s until Thatcher (with exceptions, there were a few good men on both sides...Labour just totally imploded first). That crept back into the Tories in the early 90s, and crept back into Labour with Brown (I will ask you this: Brown oversaw one of the most catastrophic bailout programs that actually brought down healthy institutions...he is still advising Labour, how...he devised not one but two constitutional programs that imploded...he is STILL advising Labour on a third one, how...the article talks about people leaving politics, if people leave how is this unflushable turd still there).
All of the Tories who left after Brexit were some of the worst, most incompetent people in politics. All they did by the end of 2019 was argue with other politicians, they had no connection with reality. The current Cabinet are fine, there are lots of very obviously competent people attempting to deal with massive structural issues (Home Office has gone feral, Justice has gone feral, Health is beyond repair...again, the article mentions not one word about this...why might that be?). Look at Labour...they have Starmer (not wholly competent) and Reeves (who is risking a coup by meeting the Tories on policy)...again, the biggest issue is the profound lack of progress made on massive structural issues and this comes down to a failure of political leadership, not a failure of voters.
This has become my gauge of how serious someone is. Planning reform is both incredibly necessary and incredibly unpopular and if you won't talk about it you are just dancing around the edges of the problem.
The Economist has covered the disfunctional planning system several times recently, so I suppose that's why they only devoted a little to it this week. https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/11/07/the-real-reason... (There was another article about planning in Manchester but I can't find it right now)
This planning problem, or probably more accurately rent-seeking by those profiting by scarcity, seems endemic to English language countries for the past 50 years. At least with housing, which is the root of many problems, economically.
Edit: and I think that the inability to talk about this is highly connected to the lack of other honesty in politics, as well as the perpetual outrage machine that results in things like Brexit.
Because those countries have planning systems which put planning authority in the hands of local govt. It is nothing to do with the language they speak but fairly obvious consequences of how the system is designed.
All the UK needs to do is un-delegate authority for planning to local govt. I think it is accepted, amongst those advocate for this heresy, that local areas need to retain control over the design of houses (this is something that doesn't work today btw). But the structure of the system needs to change: if you buy land, you can build whatever you want on it.
Wherever local govt has had a say on this kind of thing, it has created massive societal costs. The solution is obvious.
I don't mean that the literal English language is the problem, but rather the entire legal system, cultural norms, and evolving attitudes about housing that spread through English language countries with cross pollination of media.
They don't share legal system, cultural norms, or attitudes towards housing...what they share is delegated authority on planning and high levels of population growth. There are countries in Europe with identical systems but do not have the same issue because population growth isn't high enough.
There is nothing to generalize from. You don't need to construct a weird theory about the media (you will notice the other replies, for some reason, have this very odd theory that all English-language countries are the same...the UK doesn't even have one legal system in the country).
Japan is a relatively Anglicized country, had its government structure imposed on it by America, etc, and doesn't have this problem because they simply don't allow local control of zoning or planning.
(Also notable that when America rebuilds another country's government we never give them the American form of government.)
"Economic reform" is just the latest soundbite. Half hearted acknowledgement that current tory policies have failed so by necessity the next thing being pushed must be branded as a change. Hence "reform".
I have yet to see anything of substance fly under that banner.
It isn't (the indicator for this is that Reeves is saying exactly the same thing).
It is hard to be brief but:
* Financial services - totally fucked, most of the VC funding in the UK comes from overseas investors because pension and insurance rules (that were largely adopted from Europe) mean that they have to own large amounts of govt bonds...the recent problems indicate how wise that was. Everything isn't working: retail, savings, banks, it is all not working.
* Planning - obviously...lots of countries have versions of this problem but it is becoming very problematic. Iirc, there was a recent infrastructure project that had to do a new environmental assessment (costing tens of millions) for every km of work they did...it isn't just housing, it is everything, it is all fucked.
* Healthcare - obviously...not going to say anything more but it is at the point where it is impacting the economy.
* Labour - again...do I need to say more? Look at what is happening right now.
* Education - again...do I need to say more? We have massive issues producing people with skills that employers require. There are other issues around this that relate to poor management and immigration, but schools are just bad (this is mentioned in the article to be fair but only from the perspective of too many politicians being from Eton...why can't they just...find people from journalism, who work at...the Economist say?).
* Housing - separate from just planning, there are specific rules within the housing market that cause distortions above the planning system failing to produce enough supply. For example, rent controls in Scotland...that caused a 40% drop in rental supply in two weeks, this is economic mismanagement on a grand scale.
* Local govt - needs fundamental reforms in multiple areas. Social care, planning, a lot of the new environmental rules are very dangerous (if people from outside the UK can believe it, some local councils are introducing rules which mean you will be fined if you exit your neighbourhood in a car to go to another part of the same city).
* Transport - almost everything isn't working properly. Road, rail, it is all gone. Almost all due to problems in other areas above but which will now require structural changes.
Btw, I don't know what planet you have to live on not to notice this stuff. I am in my mid-30s, every single job I have had things that impacted my ability to produce more output because of govt intervention. Every one. Once you see this stuff, you realise how bad it has become, every level of govt, every institution, it is everywhere.
I'm not from the UK, but from a distance (the other side of Europe) it looks like UK's ongoing economic implosion seems to also have been caused by the people over there going all in on "the service industry!" sometime in the late '80s - the '90s, and leaving aside almost anything that involved making physical things, from roads to steel to stuff like that.
Imo that might work for a very small country or for a city-state (like Hong Kong or Singapore, even though these also used to make actual stuff), but I don't think you can base the economy of a country as big and developed as the UK is entirely on services. At most you get a pseudo-city-state, which is what London looks like, surrounded by economic "blob". It's not London that built modern UK, but the likes of Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and, yes, Newcastle and the North-East of England. All those cities might as well not exist now, from an economic pov.
Of course, I might be totally wrong on this as I don't live in the UK, but I've got most of that by reading David Edgerton's The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History [1] recently. (a Economist editorial from a couple of weeks ago was also quoting David Edgerton, if it matters)
But it wasn't an active choice. By the early 1980s, most forms of manufacturing had become uneconomic because of union activity. And, amazingly, this is still the case (there is a refinery near me, was bought by Ineos, they had a multi-decade package of investment based on an agreement with the union not to strike, deal closed...union went on strike almost immediately, Ineos never put another pound in, invested heavily in Europe where unions are more co-operative, they are now beginning to shut down the refinery...it is that simple).
The only exception to the places you have listed is Manchester: towards the south of the city, they have built up a really competitive ecomm hub (with the airport, with the port, and with the support of local govt to build warehouses)...inflation has totally destroyed this industry (China subsidizes international shipping, most of these companies fulfilled orders for Europe/US out of the UK...the rise in air freight finished them). Glasgow is largely retail/govt-based, the North-East is seeing very promising investment in the free port but is very troubled, Birmingham muddles through.
The problem with things like manufacturing is that it overlays several areas that are problematic for the UK: planning, infrastructure, labour, labour mobility, energy...none of this stuff works anymore. For example, not many people know that one of the first modern CPU was made in Scotland (this was when Intel were making a similar chip for the first calculator in the early 70s)...but the industry just died in the 80s.
Again, people will talk a lot about deindustrialization but far less about why this happened. In the 60/70s, the govt invested heavily in local production, almost all of these companies failed or were sold to foreign buyers who could manage them properly (Rolls-Royce is the only exception I believe). There was no active choice, all other options were just removed by repeated failure.
I think it was kind of possible to go so hard on services, as part of the EU Single Market. It was a place where the EU concentrated lots of its finance industry, for instance.
> * Housing - separate from just planning, there are specific rules within the housing market that cause distortions above the planning system failing to produce enough supply. For example, rent controls in Scotland...that caused a 40% drop in rental supply in two weeks, this is economic mismanagement on a grand scale.
Umpteenth reminder that England is the only place on planet Earth where people earning a top 10% salary, that is 70K£ pa, are at constant risk of eviction and live in houses and flats with mice and bed bugs and where children die of mould. Incidentally it is also the country with the least regulated private rental market.
The problem with unsuitable housing is a side-effect of lack of supply. If you make it harder to evict, you make it harder to foreclose, make it harder to buy houses (because landlords can only sell to other landlords)...it is very bad news.
This happened almost immediately after Scotland brought in their rules...because politicians there have been blocking new builds for decades (and favouring social housing so people are more dependent on the state).
What is amazing is that this stuff happens, you see the complete failure of a set of economic ideas, and then the next day you have people suggesting the exact same thing...and people wonder why Britain is in the state it is in? The country's elite have vigorous support for ideas that are economically damaging, the voters love it, the journos love it, the lobbyists love it...not surprising.
No, it isn’t. The current state of affairs in England (even Scotland and Wales have different regulations) only causes misery and an immense waste of resources on housing. Or do you think Germans or Frenchmen spend 3 months a year doing house viewings?
Nowhere in the civilised world you can evict a family that doesn’t have rent arrears and nowhere in the civilised world you have a homelessness problem comparable to the English (maybe San Francisco being the exception).
The reason you spend that time is because of the rules.
Actually, the homeless rate in Edinburgh (which actually has an eviction ban and, even, rent controls now) is 3x the rate of SF...the reason why is that most of the rental market disappeared because eviction control meant that landlords could only sell properties at the end of rental periods (and when these came up in September, they all just removed properties from the market because house prices are going to be lower next September).
The law of unintended consequences. The govt tried to take control, and it has made the problem significantly worse. This is the economic problem that the UK faces in a nutshell: voters want things that are economically damaging (the situation with housing is probably 10x Brexit), they don't understand why they are damaging, and when the damage comes they blame someone else (and btw, the most amazing thing is that if you look at a city like Edinburgh...the people are VOTING for the people who are promising not to build any housing WHILST they are complaining about a lack of housing...it is the kind of thing that makes you realise that people are getting what they are asked for).
You need to find the data yourself. There is no public source that makes this comparison.
I have lived in Edinburgh for two decades btw. Most people who work here have absolutely no idea how many homeless people live there (it has been in the thousands for years) because almost none of these people live on the street or have substance abuse problems (and Edinburgh has very effective segregation so the wealthy don't have to see the poor or their problems). They are just normal people who have been evicted for whatever reason, and have nowhere to live because the city doesn't have enough housing. So they get put into hotels or B&Bs (but, because of the refugee situation, these have largely been exhausted now too...I remember a few years ago when they were trying to house Syrians, the council said...literally no room, we are overloaded beyond belief...since then refugees worth about 2-4% of the population came...the council has been telling poor people they have to leave now, go to England, go to the Highlands, they don't care, just leave...people who have been paying rates for decades).
Last year (i.e. before the latest crisis got very severe) there were 20 thousand people on the council's waiting list...this is in a city of 400k people (and, obviously, significantly less households).
The numbers are absolutely staggering and, again, people who live in Edinburgh have no idea because most people who work there have no contact whatsoever with "locals". They vote for brownfield-only building, they love the Cockburn Association intervening on every planning decision, they vote for the green belt, etc.
I'm sorry but I call BS on this. You claimed a specific figure 3x.
I'm not claiming things are particularly great in Edinburgh, but people on the council's waiting list are not necessarily homeless.
You literally said it's x3 the homelessness. Also, there is a world of difference between being a real SF homeless in the streets; and being B&Bed temporarily by the government in Edinburgh.
Most homeless people in SF aren't living out on the streets, but instead living somewhere invisible like crashing on a series of couches or in their car or RV. So you do have to look at the numbers.
And of course they also aren't bussed in from other states and on drugs or whatever the common story for not building them housing is.
In continental Europe it is practically impossible to evict a tenant without arrears, yet the rental market is larger and there is less homelessness (and, yes, there is plenty of public data on homelessness).
Real world outcomes aside, that is less homelessness and a better functioning private rental market, evicting families with children is just uncivilised and should be allowed just because of that.
If somebody can be evicted with a 2 month notice, are they going to complain about the lack of repairs? The answer is in the abysmal quality of the English housing stock. I mean, would you risk making your child homeless when the law says you are right but there’s nothing you can do to enforce it?
I’ve rented in London for 12 years and I wouldn’t wish that experience on a serial killer. In Italy or Germany, not even people on the dole live as bad as a private tenant in the UK, regardless of their income. (Thankfully the company I used to work for completed its IPO 3 years ago and now I can live like a normal person).
Knowing the law is useless when the law doesn't protect you.
As a student my landlord wanted to do electrical work that required me and my partner to vacate the property. The law states that he has a duty to provide alternative accommodation. We brought this up and the response was simply that we'd be evicted instead.
Fuck private landlords. They can go do actual work for a living instead of leeching off of society.
> Umpteenth reminder that England is the only place on planet Earth where people earning a top 10% salary, that is 70K£ pa, are at constant risk of eviction
Reminder that London is not England. Top 10% earners in most other parts of the country live very comfortably.
Data on the average annual gross salary percentiles in the United Kingdom in 2022 showed that the bottom ten percent of full-time workers earned an average of 19,403 British pounds a year, with the top ten percent of workers earning around 62,583 pounds a year.
That is a perfect example of what I mean by reform chatter being thin on substance. Impressive listing of problems. Incredibly hand-wavy on what to do about it:
>which will now require structural changes.
>needs fundamental reforms in multiple areas.
Everyone can see the problems. Everyone agrees there is need to reform. Actual viable game plans on how to fix it seem to be in short supply though. Current political elites (of all shades) are all about "we promise to make it better" rally slogans like increase trade, reduce redtape, boost growth etc. Those are aspirations not plans.
Reform UK (the party) in fairness has more precise language (and numbers) in their policies than labour/con, but even there it goes fuzzy on key aspects that determine viability. Funding for the very specific spending promises comes from very nebulous sources like "reduce wasteful spending". Not that it matters - small opposition parties can promise unicorns for all. By the time they reach enough votes to get to implementation the unicorn has morphed to a donkey with a superglued on horn.
Perhaps I'm just jaded & expect too much from politicians...
None of this stuff is hand-wavy. There is just no mandate to do structural change because voters vote for things that are directly opposed to each other, and there is no political leadership to actually push this through without voters. For example, healthcare...Javid did an interview the other day where he said explicitly...it is not possible to reform this, the public don't want it but the system is collapsing (and, ofc, this plays into Labour's hands...this is the only area they are strong on despite Streeting seeming to advocate for every position simultaneously).
You have quoted transport and local govt. Both relatively complex areas.
The main structural change in transport is linked to the planning system. All environmental assessments need to be removed, appeals processes need to be time-limited, lawyers removed totally, and (very likely) you need to remove all planning authority from local govt. This is probably the toughest area because central govt will fuck it up, but you could un-delegate it and then re-delegate to a new local body (but not like education pre-academies, it would be something like local infrastructure bodies that raised money from local taxes).
Local govt...where to begin. Social care needs to be moved out, likely some degree of tax devolution, planning needs to be moved out, massive levels of waste...I have not actually seen how this gets solved because unions and nepotism is so embedded (the Tories introduced new disclosure requirements, the media just don't seem to report this stuff...you can see massive levels of not only waste but what looks like graft...nothing), more powers for councils to create economic growth locally (the lobby group against this goes to the heart of govt, some councils like Warrington have created massive growth locally with so few powers...the Civil Service is violently opposed to this)...big picture is: remove powers that have externalities (healthcare, planning) and hand over economic powers (one idea would be local corporation tax).
Reform and SDP are specific. But what people don't understand is that "reduce wasteful spending" is specific...everyone knows the area in which money is wasted. But what they don't say is quite simple: you try to reduce spending, the civil service unions will stop all work across all departments immediately, they are militant. If you look at what is happening at Home Office or Justice, no-one is explicit about that because, frankly, voters don't want to hear it. That is what "structural change" means...the Home Office needs to be burned to the ground (and btw, the Tories have been trying this, the Border Force is still failing...the public doesn't realise that their senior management has been put on measures multiple times, they have brought people in from the MoD, the army...nothing works, they literally restructured the whole thing to get it away from the Home Office MULTIPLE times...it still doesn't work).
But there is masses of very specific policies in every area that can change things. The problem isn't politicians but that there is no mandate (largely due to Labour successfully selling the public repeatedly on bags of magic beans).
> (if people from outside the UK can believe it, some local councils are introducing rules which mean you will be fined if you exit your neighbourhood in a car to go to another part of the same city).
Oxford. Another town announced they were looking at this. I would also point out, this is one measure in a long string of similar measures: LEZs, that wasn't enough so now they are doing ULEZs, banning cars from some cities (York)...near me the council put a traffic calming measure near a school, this was so effective that the school was unable to receive food deliveries...all this stuff came in during Covid (my local council went into an "emergency session" during Covid, passed all these measures without votes or public enquiries...funnily enough, these were all measures that they had proposed before Covid but which failed public consultations).
I live in York, cars have not been banned. Some central streets have been pedestrianised for a long time. Inner roads around the city center can be extremely busy.
> because pension and insurance rules (that were largely adopted from Europe) mean that they have to own large amounts of govt bonds
Let me help you with the brevity - you mean Solvency II. So you're fine with governments bailing out the financial system with our money, but not happy if they put (admittedly heavy-handed) measures in place to stop the casino mentality.
No, I mean Solvency II amongst other rules. There are many others (pension regulations are even worse). Let me help you with complexity (financial regulation doesn't happen to be particularly simple, it won't yield before your mighty intellect because you had a thought, you have to do the work).
Er no, the reason Solvency II exists is to bailout govts (and insurance companies, it is a tacit way of decreasing competition). That is the beauty of these regulations: you have poor people in Europe who are getting absolutely rinsed by this stuff AND they will actually fight for it (the "casino mentality"...is that something that European Commissioner tells you to say?).
It does nothing to increase systemic safety: look at Europe, almost every large bank is functionally insolvent, requires massive zero-interest loans from the govt, almost all new loans in some of the large economies are now govt-guaranteed...is this what a safe system looks like.
If you take a country like Germany, which has gone the farthest down this route, savers have net financial wealth equal to Greece. Look at Allianz's market share, they own everything. It is tragic. Removing these regulations will be massively beneficial for consumers, the reason they exist at all is to limit competition and choice.
Btw, this isn't hard. The US made these changes in the early 70s, that is why they fund most VC activity in London. Consumers need choice, they don't need to have their money trapped in govt bonds subsidizing govts that can't repay their debts in a free market, the only result of this is lower returns for consumers.
Actually key parts of Solvency II (Matching Adjustment - drafted by the U.K.) specifically favours corporate debt over government bonds which is in part why actually U.K. insurers don’t hold much government debt at all. Really odd that you should get this so wrong.
This isn't the case. Solvency II treats govt bonds as essentially risk-free, corporate bonds are not treated as risk-free, and there are substantial capital requirements for non-bond investments. UK insurers have substantial holdings of govt debt (really odd that you should get this so wrong), they are one of the largest non-govt investors in the market (obviously).
I disagree. I voted against it, but to properly have an informed enough opinion on it really required a good understanding of our economy and how it interacted with that of the EUs.
I believe Brexit was such a complex issue that most normal voters could not be expected to be able to be informed enough to actually weigh up the decision by any useful means other than relying on superficial emotional decision making or their historical political leanings.
I think there were possibly advantages of leaving had we made the most of them. (Not enough to persuade me, but the outcomes didn’t have to be all bad). Clearly we didn’t make the most of these potential upsides though and we were never going to because the gvnt was clearly not competent enough to see such a complex transition through successfully.
Having said that, after some cursory reading on the topic, outside of the normal media spin, I believed that we were better in then out. But I disagree that it was trivially obvious for the average voter to determine this. Especially with the ridiculous campaign promises and misdirection of the leave campaign (and I think the remain campaign didn’t do great either).
And even with my background reading, my vote to remain was based largely on a gut instinct rather than a deep conviction or understanding that I was taking the correct side. I think a lot of voters would say the same.
And I know many leave voters who almost immediately regretted voting that way. Such was the “coin toss” decision making for so many people.
Saying that Brexit was obviously a massive con (and the associated implication that leave voters did not sufficient inform themselves) is to risk drastically oversimplifying it.
I will agree that it is very obvious in retrospect that it was a terrible idea.
>I believe Brexit was such a complex issue that most normal voters could not be expected to be able to be informed enough to actually weigh up the decision.
I agree with that and a lot else you say. But the crazy promises being made by 'leave' (£350 million per week for the NHS, being only one of many) were just obvious lies (a con) from day 1.
> Having said that, after some cursory reading on the topic, outside of the normal media spin, I believed that we were better in then out. But I disagree that it was trivially obvious for the average voter to determine this.
That might be true, but
> Clearly we didn’t make the most of these potential upsides though and we were never going to because the gvnt was clearly not competent enough to see such a complex transition through successfully.
Would have been a lot easier to determine, and was all that was needed to work out which way to vote.
...failure of a sad bunch that deserve everything they voted for and didnt vote against.
They DIDN'T pay attention, and they still don't. The only winners here are the politicians, but given the recent and not so recent turnovers, i fear even they've given up.
Bye, Britain- you were great when i was young and the only, only thing i wish for is your Armed Forces keep their shit together, and far away from the cunts in power.
* We do not have enough houses in economically productive areas - look at the OxCam arc, London. NIMBYs keep sapping every attempt at building more houses.
* Terrible childcare - we have to pay about 1-2k per kid for childcare. Go figure out how to have children in a climate where it's cheaper for a parent not to work (if you're on the average income).
* Healthcare - as a naturalised brit I will never understand the sacrosanct nature of the NHS. We plough a ton of money into something that is very equitable but is terrible for outcomes. Most folks who have money I know always tend to go private rather than dealing with a 6 month wait for a routine check up.
Economic reform
* Investment wise - we are funding out deficits by selling our assets to foreign investors. Most of the country's financial assets are seen as safe dividend givers. We have a decent startup ecosystem, but we should invest far more into research, infrastructure to actually ensure there is a boost to the economy.
On the structural - few things come to mind, but can't articulate them super clearly. Hope that helps
> * Healthcare - as a naturalised brit I will never understand the sacrosanct nature of the NHS. We plough a ton of money into something that is very equitable but is terrible for outcomes. Most folks who have money I know always tend to go private rather than dealing with a 6 month wait for a routine check up.
The deterioration of the service is intentional and fairly recent. A large part of that "ton of money" is funnelled straight into private hands thanks to the initiatives put in place by our criminal government.
"Right to choose": Public money funding private healthcare instead of being put towards expanding the capacity of the NHS in that area.
Private consultants: Paying a private company to poach NHS specialists who are then contracted back at a much higher rate.
Agency nurses: Paying nurses so poorly that they leave the profession, resulting in a staffing shortage. Then paying a private agency double to triple the wage of a staff nurse.
Private providers: Preventing the NHS from providing services under it's remit and instead handing public money over to private enterprises.
> Most folks who have money I know always tend to go private rather than dealing with a 6 month wait for a routine check up.
I don't get this - if it's a routine check up you'll have one per year, so your GP will be booking it in for you, and they are paid money to do so.
If you're talking about a routine check-up for the worried well who don't have any health problems but who just want a doctor to tell them that they don't have any health problems, well, those checks cause harm and do not prolong life so you'd want to delay them as much as possible.
To me this sums it up. The political kayfabe is in part constructed to make it appear like the government is in control of state affairs, but Blair's legacy was to remove power from government and spread it thinly through an increasingly overweight bureaucracy that answers to itself and only sings the governments tune when it empowers itself.
I’m going to name the English language as one of the suspects.
A common language with the US makes many of the political and business elite focus on the U.S. It also makes them less inclined to put the effort in to engage with Europe politically and culturally.
That in turn helped to fan the flames of Euroscepticism that in turn led to Brexit.
It’s no accident that the focus of trade deals post Brexit has been with English speaking countries of the former Empire.
Most people in the UK have at least some familiarity with European languages. Many civil servants, a point mentioned in the article, studied Classics so are quite familiar with speaking multiple languages (and our diplomatic service doesn't work the same way as the US, so some civil servants come from the diplomatic service knowing 5-10 languages fluently). And in Europe, many people speak English. Proceedings at Brussels are largely conducted in English, almost everyone will understand English (they often do not speak it publicly, but are able to understand and speak it).
People who talked about Brexit were talking about East Asia and the Commonwealth countries, not the US only. I can't really think immediately of anyone with strong links to the US in the current govt (the only minister in recent memory was Liam Fox, and he hasn't been in govt for close to a decade iirc).
- Brits are famously monolingual compared to the rest of Europe.
- How many senior British politicians speak a European foreign language fluently - Johnson perhaps - I can think of perhaps one or two others.
- Lots of key members of the Eurosceptic movement have deep links to the US. Hannan, Farage, Fox (he was the Brexit Trade Minister in 2019 btw so not close to decade).
- The 'Britannia Unchained' group of Kwarteng, Truss etc all looked strongly to the US.
I speak from experience in UK business and in Brussels.
It's not the only factor certainly but it's contributed.
I have no idea how you measure fluency, but most of the population we are concerned with learned a foreign language until the age of 16. Brits are "famously monolingual" because the country only speaks one language (unlike almost every other European country).
I don't know, I haven't tried to talk to any of them in a language that isn't English. Again, your supposition that this must be true is based on what? It must be...you heard this thing about Brits...
Right and two of the people you mention have never served in British parliament. Hannan has links to the US...and is the same person advocating heavily for a Swiss deal with EU...that couldn't be right though? You said he had "links". He wasn't the Brexit Trade Minister (that is a fictional position).
Truss and Kwarteng didn't look "strongly" to the US...I have no idea where this is coming from. Do you just not like the US so you think this other group of people you don't like must be allied to them? Truss was Trade Minister and did deals with the Commonwealth, there was no real focus on the US at all (because of Biden). Britannia Unchained is famous in the UK for being particularly adulatory towards East Asia, not the US.
>I have no idea how you measure fluency, but most of the population we are concerned with learned a foreign language until the age of 16.
I live in the UK and I am struggling to think of more than 1 or 2 British born people I know personally that speak anything other than English with any fluency.
There are quite a few, it's just that none of them learned it from two hours a week between the ages of 11 and 16. (Mostly they learned it because their parents and many members of their local community speak Welsh or Punjabi or Urdu...)
> I love this place. People speak with total authority about stuff they clearly do not understand.
Well if I lack the authority to comment on my own education, please feel free to share your greater understanding of the years and hours my classmates and I devoted to learning a second language. Perhaps you can even convince me my A* GCSE made me fluent and not utterly incompetent in it!
English is the lingua franca within Europe as well. And last I checked Europe displays a similar obsession with US politics as the UK does. How many Germans bother to learn Polish or Greek or whatever, who do not have family ties there?
The reason british people don't learn languages is that it is not economically beneficial for them to do so. But otherwise, I don't think it is the case that in Europe everybody is enlightened and aware of each other's national politics and culture and Britain uniquely is somehow ignorant of other countries.
The way I think it works is each government starts with a finite amount of political capital after there is a change in majority. This is expended and used up over time, slowly in a growing stable economy, much faster when there are destabilising events.
Delivering Brexit and mitigating Covid were massively destabilising events that required an enormous amount of political capital to deliver. On top of that you then have scandal after scandal which drain that political capital.
Ultimately the Conservatives are out of political capital. They can only regain it by not being in power for a period of time.
As a former inhabitant of England, I always thought that those in charge suffered from a uniquely wide 'competence gap' which I would like to define as the difference between someone's self-perceived competence and someone's actual competence. (The term is probably useful more broadly...)
Maybe it is the historically class-based society alluded to in the article, but it always stunned me how those at the top, and in particular politicians, were pushing through policies without even a modicum of consultation. See for example the 'kamikwasi' budget of last month: in which other European country would this have been done so thoughtlessly?
A competence gap is a very polite way to put it. In Britain we live in
an inverted meritocracy which rewards smug stupidity, elevates
bullshit, while punishing and marginalising our most talented people.
I thought this was going to be another cynical Economist hit piece
like the earlier "Europe not pulling its weight" [1] but was surprised
how on-the-money it is. Some well chosen quotes;
"A family with the wrong members in control" wrote George Orwell of
the English.
Or, a country that "institutionalises lying" ruled "by chancers and
cranks" sums it up nicely. We've had a profound leadership crisis in
Britain for several decades now, and it's not just party politics.
It's endemic to all institutions and industry. We positively celebrate
corruption because we mistake it for power.
We keep selecting incompetents to lead, in all areas, because we
confuse their psychopathic cunning with "leadership". I believe that
the recent visibility of "imposter syndrome" is tactical smoke to
distract from the fact that there really are an extraordinary number
of actual imposters in charge everywhere. Are they're getting
scared? Exposure is coming.
George Carlin put it best I think. He said the definition of real
terror is waking up in mid-life and realising that all those pricks
you went to school with are now running the country. But yes, it's our
fault. We built a system that selects for them. And we continue to
allow it to stand.
What worries me is that, if tomorrow our country came to its senses
and asked genuinely competent people to take the helm, it would
already be far, far too late.
From the outside, the most painful part of UK politics to watch is this instinctual reaction of "well, that didn't work, so let's do anything else." It takes a lot of luck to do that and land on a good idea.
Again, from the outside, the UK looks like a country that has a lot to lose but it's acting quite desperate and it's hard to see why.
> What worries me is that, if tomorrow our country came to its senses and asked genuinely competent people to take the helm, it would already be far, far too late.
I agree with much of the post, but it's this kind of statement that worries me. I think there is a lot of room for incremental improvement in the UK, the dull work of growing in competence, but the appetite seems to be for sweeping measures.
> worries me... the appetite seems to be for sweeping measures.
Yes that is concerning. Desperate voters will follow any crazy with
bold promises.
> I think there is a lot of room for incremental improvement in the UK
Way I see it, I've lived through about 30-40 years of decremental
decline, so if we started "incremental improvement" tomorrow, we'd be
back where I started in the 1970s just by the time I die. I suppose
that's better than watching ones country decline through all your
life, like for Russians. Or disintegrate, as for ex-Yugoslavians for
example.
However, in the era of climate crisis, and myriad other threats, a
sense of urgency is in the air which we cannot ignore. Unless rational
and courageous minds take the lead someone else will.
> the dull work of growing in competence.
Knowing where to even start... how to counter the conditions that are
causing us to lose competence... we need to plug the holes in the ship
before charting a new course.
> George Carlin put it best I think. He said the definition of real terror is waking up in mid-life and realising that all those pricks you went to school with are now running the country.
Not too worried about that; didn't attend Eton. :D
Pretty sure if you went to school with folks running a country, you're probably in the big club he talks about regular people not being in, so you're unlikely to wake up in terror
That jackass kid who would stick a compass in his hand for giggles,
set fire to cats or drink a bottle of antifreeze is now, by pure
devious guile and rotten luck for everyone else, the mayor of your
city.
You studied hard, went to college, served your nation, designed a
better widget, raised a decent family, bought the dream... and have
fuck-all say in what goes.
It's nothing to do with elite schools, prominent families or
money. That's what makes it even more horrifying. The race is not to
the quick etc... How arbitrary it is. I think that's Carlin's point.
I personally think that the problem is that our political class consists almost entirely of humanities-educated politicians. People (who presumably have humanities degrees) will say things like "politicians don't need to be experts" and the even more facile (well, I am really paraphrasing here) "why do you need an understanding of the subject matter to decide what actions to take".
If you look at COVID-19 and climate change you really understand that politicians really don't know how to raise a number to the power of the other (i.e. understand exponential growth). I still vividly recall the ludicrous argument a friend (now studying philosophy at Oxford) attempted to advocate to me, which is that "we should not do anything now so that if we need to fight it later the economy is strong enough" (they did not understand exponential growth). Simple mathematics suggests that if you have some crisis which is going to get exponentially worse over time, and you can mitigate or stop now it's probably better to do something now, rather than later.
Ex-minister Rory Stewart said that (paraphrasing from memory) ministers don't know what they are doing because they don't stay in the job long enough. By the time they get to the point they start to understand what they need to do they are either sacked or promoted to another ministry.
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."
I'd like to suggest you take a look at almost everything done in power by George W. Bush, Donald Trump, François Holland, Paul von Hindenburg, Silvio Berlusconi, Brian Cowen, Jair Bolsonaro... the list could go on... and compare and contrast and then ask if this is subjectively a phenomenon truly unique to the UK.
Bad leadership of the type you describe has shown itself in every country in the World at some point.
the Kamikwasi budget was the end goal of a section of the Tory party who had been planning every single part of it for well over a decade in think tanks, dinner parties and meeting rooms across London and party conferences. Truss told everyone in the party what she was planning to do as part of her campaign for leader. They voted for it because they believed it was the right thing to do for the country. She and her chancellor then went ahead with executing it, and the markets told them to get it in the bin, pronto.
To paint it as a uniquely insane thing to do based on the class system playing out is an odd thing to do to me. It was a political ideology that was planned, plotted, wargamed and ultimately voted for.
It all points to a need for the UK to be rid of the Tories for a generation or two, but I can't see the relationship to a unique and rabid myopic stupidity evident in it that you seem to.
I would like to stress that the gap I speak of is not about stupidity or competence in itself; instead it is about being oblivious to one's own incompetence.
For example, I think that people like Trump, Berlusconi, Cheney, etc. are not in the same class. They are certainly bad leaders, but largely because they are selfish grifters who care little about their country. On the other hand people like Cameron, Rees-Mogg, Johnson and Truss seem to really believe that they are destined to lead the country (to greatness) and that, for them at least, it "cannot be that hard".
So I sense a real difference here, and introducing the "competence gap" was my way to try to make it precise. But maybe there is a better way to formulate it. Arrogance perhaps? (And of course such personalities are not unique to the UK, but I did find them more widespread there.)
Sorry, Trump cares little about his country? Say what you want of him, and he definitely has a big ego to say the least, but I can't think of a more patriotic world leader of late than him. In fact, he's rightly aligned with the nationalist trend in politics that Brexit can be argued to take part in. "America first", remember?
I want to be clear about the argument you're making, as I think this is where our difference arises.
You think Trump, Berlusconi, and so on are selfish grifters but do not believe they are truly destined for greatness?
And you think Cameron, Rees-Mogg, Johnson and Truss are _not_ selfish grifters but are in it for the "greatness"?
I think you should do more research on both groups. Trump and Berlusconi (and many others I mentioned), seem to choose their actions based on self-interest fiscally and for their ego. They are over-confident in their ability to make good decisions because they feel they have been "chosen", and are "special". Their distaste for due process and the rule of law is evidence of this, I feel.
But so are the British leaders. Go do some digging, find out how they made their money and built their relationships in Parliament. Find out about the Bullingdon club, find out about Rees-Mogg's money, find out about the Institute of Economic Affairs, and more. You'll find every single one of the British leaders you named had the exact same profile of grifting and ego-driven self-belief that Berlusconi, Bolsonaro, Trump, W. Bush, and others have shown.
Your argument that there is something unique to Britain about this is weak to my mind. I can find identical behaviours of corruption, idiocy, grifting, ego and incompetence in recent history of every G20 country, every NATO member, every EU state, every democracy.
Writing this makes me feel cynical, but the good news is that there is plenty of evidence of competence and "greater good" style leaders around everywhere too - in Britain, as much as anywhere else.
What would be a politician's ideal outcome of a stint in politics?
I think that Trump and Berlusconi and Cheney and Netanyahu all aim for maximal wealth (and minimal imprisonment) for them and their buddies - and they do very well on this front! So are you sure they are unable to make "good decisions" from that perspective?
On the other hand, I think that people like Macron and Merkel, but also May, Truss and probably even Johnson, are more motivated by their legacy and truly would like to improve the status quo of their country - and they believe that that is their path to greatness.
So I think this sets apart the UK politicians from the "real" grifters. But at the same time I think they are also easily distinguished from people like Macron and Merkel and even Von der Leyen, because the British leaders are just so spectacularly bad at it. Starting at least with Cameron's referendum decision we have witnessed a remarkable sequence of massive unforced errors by UK politicians, the likes of which I have not seen in other "Western" countries or the EU (despite your insistence to the contrary).
Maybe "terrible governing by people who nevertheless care" captures it well.
So I guess where you see "evil" I see "haplessness" as a defining factor among UK leaders. A competence gap was my way to explain its origins.
If you think the referendum was an unforced error, I’m not sure you realise the factors that led to it. Grifting writ large for all the players, including Cameron and Osborne, but especially Rees-Mogg who was forcing the hand somewhat.
I don’t think they’re any more or less money oriented than others or any more or less hapless.
Even Johnson was about the wealth, the Churchill allusions were a sideshow.
There are several obvious culprits, here's the timeline:
1) Promoting the proxy war in Ukraine and impeding diplomatic negotiations, plus pushing for the expansion of NATO, had the result of pushing gas prices through the roof, driving record inflation (and enriching a few gas suppliers). This is the primary cause for the recent economic slump. The Neoconomist magazine is not going to address this issue, however.
2) A poorly managed Brexit. Maintaining a regulatory level playing field with Europe on issues like food safety standards would have facilitated trade. If Brexit had been better focused on pushing back against neoliberalism (halting the export of manufacturing jobs, limiting the import of cheap labor, controlling cross-border capital flows at the nation-state level) it would have worked out better. However, here's what gave impetus for the push for Brexit:
3) Privatization of national resources since Thatcher, and the resulting increase in costs for basic services. Railways, electrical suppliers, etc. were all put in the hands of wealthy interests who steadily raised rates to enrich themselves, leading to increasing poverty and the destruction of the British middle class. This growing wealth gap sparked national anger, hence support for Brexit.
Face reality: the ~40-yr neoliberal program has been an absolute disaster, and should be thrown on the scrap heap of history immediately.
Pushing for the expansion of NATO and promoting a regime change operation in Ukraine that resulted in a government that attempted to ban the Russian language and which had an undeniable neo-Nazi element affiliated with it was not such a good idea in retrospect, was it?
Imagine if a regime came to power in the USA, and it attempted to ban the Spanish language, eliminated Spanish-language versions of government documents, etc. Maybe many regions of the USA - such as much of the American Southwest - would not want to be ruled by such a government?
Similarly, how do you think the USA would respond to Chinese military bases and nuclear weapons being based in Mexico, or Russian military bases and nuclear weapons being based in Cuba (oh, we've already seen what kind of response that triggered, back in 1962-1963, wasn't it)?
Ukraine had no realistic prospect of joining NATO any time soon (that may change since the invasion).
Without the expansion of NATO it might have been the baltic states that were on the recieving end of a 'special operation' long before now. And they would have been much less able to defend themselves than Ukraine has been.
Pretty much every country has a 'neo-Nazi element'. Including Britain and the US. It isn't clear to me that Ukraine was any worse in this respect.
>in a government that attempted to ban the Russian language
Yikes, this is a terrible lie. Source: the Ukrainians in my household who were primarily Russian speaking up until February.
Your comment has no basis in reality, is just regurgitating the propaganda of a genocidal autocrat which is attempting to extinguish Ukrainians as a language.
Repeating lies like this is somewhat despicable, and though I'm trying to remain polite because of HN rules, such ridiculous propaganda that you are spouting is beyond the pale and in real life would be close to fighting words.
One of the things I've learned as an outsider while trying to distinguish between propaganda and reality vis a vis Ukraine is that the Nazis are pretty deniable.
Speaking of weird, I don't think there's a single person banging on about how the presence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine justified the invasion that wouldn't have enthusiastically defended the actual Nazis in the 1930s...
Some people are just confused by what comes out of Russia, because when Russians say "Nazis" they mean "enemies of Russia". They don't care about the anti-Semitism or anything; Russians are also anti-Semitic and didn't bother learning about the Holocaust. They just remember WW2 as that time Germany attacked them. So it's perfectly straightforward that Ukrainian Jewish people like Zelensky are also Nazis.
It is quite a good marker! However, given the history of oppression, pogroms, and anti-Semitism not only in Ukraine but also Poland, Russia, and all of Europe, the lack of anti-Semitism in today's Ukrainian nationalism is a remarkable change from the past. The anti-Semitic statements regularly coming from Russian officials is quite a contrast. The Jewish people at Maidan that ironically referred to themselves as Judeo-Banderistas is quite a comment on this shift in Ukraine.
In fact, the first audience question in this talk by historian Marci Shore speaking to a Judaic Studies audience about the war and Zelenskyy, was "where's the anti-Semitism?" (1:03:00):
And her answer is that a civic identity is being developed in the nation, separate from ethnicity.
Also quite interesting is the assertion that this lie about modern day Ukrainian neo-Nazism came from the same propaganda factory that created the Hillary Clinton pizza pedopholoa conspiracy, and led to the whole Q thing.
One of my favorite lectures I've seen in the past months, if the topic grabs you.
In the US. The waiting lines for specialists are outrageous, a minimum of months to easily half a year for several types of specialists. And that's with devoting a massive amount of our GDP to healthcare, and receiving bad outcomes for it.
Ben Page, the boss of Ipsos, a global research firm, points to what he terms the “loss of the future”, common across the West but acute in Britain. In 2008, as the financial crisis struck, only 12% of Britons thought youngsters would have a worse quality of life than their parents, Mr Page notes. Now that figure is 41%. As elsewhere, people worry about immigration and feel threatened by globalisation. All this makes Britain’s predicament seem less an inside job than part of a wider takedown of democracy.
It is remarkable, such a wordy article, could really begin and end with the above paragraph. We are in uncharted territory, new problems require new ideas but even now public discourse is entirely retrograde and focused on squabbling between two incompetent parties, personalities, scandals and self flagellation.
Like lemmings off a cliff.
I think I've never heard anybody in recent years even attempt to discuss the future of UK without simply falling back on whinging about Thatcher or Corbin or the sins of empire or god knows what. None of it relevant.
Imagine instead you are playing Civilization or Factorio, and this is day 0. Only looking forwards, how do you thrive economically in the 21st century under these current conditions with the cards you have to play?
> this is day 0. Only looking forwards, how do you thrive economically in the 21st century under these current conditions with the cards you have to play
Counterpoint: how do you avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and learning from them by pretending they never happened?
Not pretending/perceiving that the memetic/reductive/imprecise/misinformative/incorrect way we describe them is accurate would be a good start.
Human communication in 2022 is a train wreck, and there are plentiful artifacts of that in this very thread, in this much more intelligent than average community.
It seems to me that Human communication declines the more it becomes divorced from the threat of physical violence.
The peak decline will be when the possibility of consequences (social, physical, legal, financial…) for communicating anything reaches absolute zero.
Human communication is a great tool but must be kept in check, the goal of communication is to produce useful outcomes, not merely deliver messages and opinions.
Your comment seems especially prescient if read in the context of the insane asylum going on in the "Twitter suspends pg's account" thread - what a time to be alive.
It will only hit those nations in the West that succumb to it.
Eurasia is doing fine with stable and reliable power, continuing to both increase fossil fuel usage and build out nuclear power at the same time. Africa is ramping up. Latin America is the wild card. Most of the world is going to keep on using fossil fuels, looking at what happened to Europe as an object lesson of becoming so rich that you forget what is foundational, indulge in religious fantasies -- and commit economic suicide.
In this sense the energy sanctions, while destroying the British and German economies, are a blessing to the rest of the world, because it provides a very clear picture of what happens when you go down this road. This is why China, India, and Japan are rushing to secure long term oil and gas contracts, and many nations in Africa and Asia are joining them in prioritizing secure fossil fuel providers even as they seek to build out more nuclear in order to reduce dependence on foreign inputs. See https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/ for detailed projections out to 2050 of different regions.
Britain and Germany are the main object lessons in this regard, but it's certainly not "the world".
I don’t see what religion has got to do with it? Europe is hardly the most religious part of the world
Maybe Europe is just rich enough to be willing to sacrifice some of that to help others by reducing their emissions (or at least not harm them as much). Maybe Europe feels a certain responsibility, having started emitting carbon in the first place
As an aside, it makes me very uneasy to see grown adults be so infatuated with Disney IPs.
The quote from Alec Guinness about Star Wars in his autobiography:
“A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The first bad penny dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.
'I would love you to do something for me,' I said.
'Anything! Anything!' the boy said rapturously.
'You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do,' I said.
'Anything, sir, anything!'
'Well,' I said, 'do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?'
He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. 'What a dreadful thing to say to a child!' she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.”
I think about that a lot when seeing the lengths many adults go to immersing themselves into these "cinematic universes"
`
> "living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.”
The trend of comics cum cinema, and wizards lording it over muggles, which has been incessant for at least 20 years now, has been so consistent that it begs the question of why.
The basic underlying theme of all these 'cultural' products has been to instill the idea that 'little normal people' are powerless victims, and only magical special people with superpowers not available to the common man gets to save the day.
This has the been the programming for the past 20+ years. I hinted at this a few days ago in a comment regarding the strange case of "cults of personality" and "savior hero politicians" in the West.
This isn't a new phenomenon, and, as the author mentions, is not peculiar to the UK. When I was a 13-year-old in 1992 an eccentric science teacher would remind my class nearly every week that ours was the first American generation that was expected to enjoy a worse standard of living than our parents had. (Going back even farther you could point to popular expressions like the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen;" people have been talking like this for a long time.)
I remember reading for the first time about the loss of the future as a frame of reference in this article, which I thought was very interesting but it now unfortunately seems to be only available behind a paywall: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/110330889900700102 .
Anyway, I think this sort of thing happens independently of the specific vagaries of politics and economics in any country: change is taking place quickly, on a grand scale, in societies where ordinary people are enjoined to think about the course of events over which they, individually, have little control.
The neoliberal publication fails to mention "neoliberalism" as a cause. Shocking. Probably the worst thing it says is this:
> For both to do so at once—as happened when, amid recent Tory convulsions, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left throwback—is a calamity.
Corbyn was only "hard-left" in the sense that he wasn't anti-labor. Lots of people like give lots of different reasons why Labor was eviscerated in the last election. The truth is, it was Brexit. Specifically, Corbyn refused to take any position on Brexit nor back a second referendum or otherwise espouse any kind of Remain position or policy.
So the 48% of voters who voted to Remain really had no one to vote for in that election and the Conservatives won in a landslide. What followed was a revolving door of PMs because the Tory vision was based on lies and unworkable. Northern Ireland seems like it will inevitably reunify with the Republic of Ireland (which I personally support in any case).
I've been skeptical that Scottish people would want a hard border with England if they vote for independence and to rejoin the EU but now I'm not so sure, particularly with a worsening economy and rising inflation. If in the next election the gap narrows and whichever party forming government needs the SNP to form a majority, a second referendum seems inevitable. Currently the Tories have a huge majority but that seems unlikely to survive.
London's position as the financial capital of Europe now seems under threat given Brexit. Lies about "saving the NHS" and protest votes about Polish immigration may well have killed the golden goose. Finance really was and is the beating heart of the UK economy.
The financialization of housing is a particularly big problem in the UK too.
Well Corbyn is also a completely hopeless politician. They really should have kept him safely tucked away in Islington north. It's not his political ideology which was the problem, it's that he (not to put too fine a point on it) lacked any modicum of political ability).
One of the problems is that the UK democracy is not very strictly encoded (which Tory politicians will happily tell you is one of the wonders of the British consitution and then a whole bunch of drivel about freedom vs tyranny) - whereas e.g. Germany and France have things encoded that politicians shouldn't be allowed to do (bribery, corruption, etc.) the UK has this very weird theory that politicians should be allowed to self-police and have this ludicrous "no rules were broken" based on investigations carried out by civil servants (e.g. Sue Gray report) which in reality should be carried out by the courts (although I guess Dominic Raab has managed to blow such a big hole in the justice system that we should just be thankful that we at least still nominally posess one).
> So the 48% of voters who voted to Remain really had no one to vote for in that election and the Conservatives won in a landslide.
The Liberal Democrats were unabashedly pro-remain. They did terribly.
If the reason why so many remain folks didn't vote lib-dem was out of a fear of splitting the vote or that they were deemed "unelectable" due to historic reasons, well then the problem here is clearly FPTP, which induces all sorts of nonsense "strategic" voting and yields inflated false majorities.
For Boris Johnson truth was there when convenient, otherwise just lie. He lied to the british people. That's not the problem. The problem was too many people wanted to hear nice things so swallowed what he told them uncritically.
Liz Truss... say no more. But she was chosen (by a small subset of the population I agree) but she was chosen. Some people still think her damn-the-torpedoes policies were a good idea, even after the (rapid!) economic effect was evident.
Problem is the electorate, too many of whom who duck their responsibility of thinking for themselves.
To the downvoters: please complement your downvotes by explaining where I'm wrong in my analysis. In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre slightly misquoted but still valid). If true, how can I not take aim at the electorate for their failure?
Didn't down vote but, on the point of the electorate being responsible, you are correct.
What many observers fail to realise however is that, in our two-party system, we are usually voting for the least worst candidate rather than the ideal.
Next time around we have a rather unique situation where the 'least worst' is going to be hard to pick and many voters will, instead, simply abstain.
Thanks. I'd rebut by saying the two party condition actually isn't - there are several inc. middle-ground lib-dems for example. That they are a small party is - I think - because of the tribalism of the electorate who self-polarise. So that's still a problem with the electorate I'd say.
About 'ideal' there's no such thing for everyone. To some Truss was ideal, to others, Corbyn. They're not my ideal.
BTW I'd say Truss was clearly going to blow things badly cos she was plain stupid, but she got picked anyway. There were less-worse candidates available.
Yes, there are other parties, but, aside from tactical voting, most people accept you're going to get a labour or conservative government no matter what.
A recent exception may have have been the Con/Lib coalition but it was a union of unequal partners at the best of times.
Where you see some inevitability "...you're going to get a labour or conservative government no matter what", I see choices not taken. It's if you're implying political free will doesn't exist. It's very hard for me to understand where you're coming from (no offence!).
There was a previous comment about the "native population" that is now marked dead that I wanted to respond to. The commentator really needs to read Defoe's "True Born Englishman". I offer a quote that is a little longer than the usual given:
The silent nations undistinguished fall,
And Englishman's the common name for all.
Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;
Whate'er they were, they're true-born English now.
> It has nothing to do with multiple large ethnic groups that tend to cause tension in the long run, see Israel and Donbas for example.
Please elaborate. As somebody from the East of Ukraine (and, incidentally, as someone who lived in Israel for some years too), I am curious what I am supposed to learn about ethnic tensions from these two examples.
You don't have any cultural power if you're worried about that. Let someone into America and they're eating cheeseburgers and driving a pickup truck in 5 years flat. It's impossible to avoid becoming an American.
There is a really interesting and seemingly important conversation going on about how globalization will evolve. This touches everything from trade agreements and financial unions like the one Britain exited to restrictions on technology export (e.g. to China) and data harvesting (e.g. EU server requirements) to new thinking about immigration (usually restricted) and labor (expanding benefits and improving wages, more often promised than delivered).
There are credible arguments for clear answers on aspects of this debate, for example that fear of immigrants is almost all xenophobia, as opposed to genuine protection for labor and the poor. (I’m not saying this, but in corners of the broader conversation, you can credibly make these sort of arguments.)
But I don’t think there’s a credible argument that this whole global conversation has some pat clear answer and this article seems to just be simplistically saying we need to go back to a wholesale embrace of globalization. It’s pretty polarizing, for example calling Jeremy Corbyn (a heroic figure to some in the left) an example of Labour losing its mind. It treats Brexit as unalloyed bad. No acknowledgement I can see of why so many people felt compelled to support it.
It feels to me a hard conservative opinion presented as The Truth. Compelling I guess if you agree but given how under siege globalization is right now feels odd to read something so unabashedly one sided. Even in The Economist.
>Some at the top still benefit from unearned deference.
Indeed. Quote a bit of Latin in a posh accent at most British people and they seem to completely take leave of their senses. A bit like the tonic immobility you can induce in some animal by turning them over and stroking them. This is why we have had ridiculous figures like Johnson and Rees Mogg in positions of power.
There was a time a proper English accent earned one instant respect among Americans. We fixed that by taking some Englishmen and letting them talk on cable TV.
> There was a time a proper English accent earned one instant respect among Americans.
I don't think this exploit was ever patched. The caveat is that it does need to be a proper English accent, e.g. RP. Nobody is impressed with a chav talking like Ali G. But if somebody on American TV is talking like David Attenborough, it boosts their perceived credibility immensely.
Because of our first past the post system, the choice at the next election is effectively just:
Conservative. Mostly talentless crooks who are looting the country as fast as they can. But are able to present a fairly united front, no matter how much they hate each other.
Labour. A party that should probably be 2 parties. A left party and a centre party, who are unable to conceal their hatred for each other. Currently led by Starmer, an apparently decent man, but of questionable vision and political instincts.
It's not a great choice. The Conservatives deserve to lose in a landslide. But a victorious Labour party will probably spend most of it's energy fighting amongst themselves. Time for proportional representation?
When you have the left getting 35% of the vote, the centrists getting 19%, and the right getting 30%, the right isn't working, by all means, compromise and try the centrists for a change. Why the left/Labour is unable to understand this, (throwing their weight to the centrists closer to their aims) and instead getting the right elected is astonishing.
The centrists of the Labour party conducted literal purges after intentionally
smearing their own party with fabricated allegations of homophobia and anti-semitism which they spread through the media[0]. Not to mention sabotaging campaign activities by directing resources away from swing seats.
There is certainly animosity from the left but largely due to the ironically Stalin-esque tactics employed by Labour centrists.
I find it frankly perplexing that people can characterise the leftist elements of the Labour party as the aggressors in these circumstances.
That link is not happy reading. I guess it is not surprising that the centrists hate the left back. However saying someone is “truly repulsive” or “literally makes me sick” is not necessarily racist, just because they are from an ethnic minority (note: I don't know the full context).
I have wondered how real the accusations of anti-semitism in the Labour party were. Is it a deliberate conflation of anti-Israel with anti-semitism by political opponents (who I assumed were Conservatives, rather than Labour)?
If we had PR it would probably be better for the Labour party to split into 2 parties. I don't see that happening under FPTP though.
> I have wondered how real the accusations of anti-semitism in the Labour party were. Is it a deliberate conflation of anti-Israel with anti-semitism by political opponents (who I assumed were Conservatives, rather than Labour)?
This is precisely what seems to have happened. Unelected officials on the right of the Labour party appear to have been at the forefront however.
I don't doubt that there are some people in the Labour party that might harbour anti-semitic views. Those people should be removed. However, the only word I can think of to describe the reaction at the time is "Hysteria".
The thing I find most disturbing about this is the willingness of those in power at the Labour party to target at least 35 Jewish members with claims of anti-semitism[0]:
> An 82-year-old Jewish woman, who is being investigated by Labour for alleged antisemitism for the third time in less than three years, is threatening legal action against the party, claiming it has unlawfully discriminated against her based on her
belief in anti-Zionism.
[1]
> The Labour Party has expelled one of its most prominent Jewish members – by telling a right-wing newspaper first, and allowing a journalist to leak it.
[2]
It's planned destruction by bought and paid for politicians from both Labour and Conservative working on behalf of agents of foreign governments. Hell, two of our most recent Prime Ministers have citizenship of a foreign power and no one sees that as something that should stop them from being Prime Minister.
It is quite surprising how cheaply Conservative MPs can be bought by business and foreign powers. I'm thinking of buying my own Conservative MP.
The Labour party isn't immune from this sort of corruption either. A lot of them have taken money from that old scourge of the working classes, the gambling industry.
Britain's been decaying since at least 1940. Basically everyone left alive here knows only failure. The idea of any success is as alien and revolutionary as suggesting we all convert to a new religion or give up private property. So any time things look like they might be succeeding, people, from voters to PMs self sabotage.
The press helps by giving people plausible deniability. Letting them pretend they didn't know. Politicians help by enacting terrible policies they know will fail just to stay in power for 6 more months. And other groups help by blaming each other (the hard left blames the centre left, right wing nationalists blame right wing free traders).
That's why people looked at the expert advice (that we would be prosperous and successful and might end up part of a world super power of we kept this EU business up) and immediately quit. That's why people were so willing to accept the bullshit and pretend it was real (like that we could leave the EU and stay in the EU).
Brexit is but a symptom of this, a big one but just one. It infects every aspect of our national identity. From the housing market to jobs to education.
Until things get a lot worse people won't be ready to try succeeding. So here we are, 5 years into a(nother) lost generation.
I think its just a return to normal service after a spectacular period in the 90s and early 2000s. Back then everything was close to perfect, economy, music, politics UK became the best at everything. Now its kinda back to how it was in post war era which is fine but not great.
I think it's worse than that, it feels like the end of the exponential part of the massive growth S-curve that started after WW2 with rebuilding, tech breakthroughs, the transistor, electronics, computers, globalization, etc. Now all that is finally in steady state and the structures that built up around the growth are falling in on themselves. People try to blame whichever government is currently in power or whatever but it's mostly irrelevant.
Agree, and it's sad because indeed Britain in the early 2000s was the coolest place to be. I mean, if they had stayed in the EU it'd still have a lot of its appeal. Now it's just a sad island with tough immigration and not much to offer. London used to be the kind of place young Europeans would head to, without plans. Now not sure whey are people going.
Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid - there aren't any good affordable capital cities any more. Maybe Berlin? It has the advantage its rebuilding after the cold war still.
583 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] threadIt’s a government who’s been in power too long, whose talent base was massively thinned by a Brexit Purity witch hunt and the impossibility of delivering the Brexit fairy-tale, and who weren’t simply ejected at the last election because of Corbyn’s overwhelming unpopularity.
... the "party line" being decided by the small cabal in charge of making the "party line", usually the ones with the most access to monetary funds.
But the inability to see even 10% of party legislators deviate from party lines in various votes means that not only is rational policy not being well served, regional representation is being undermined since adhering to the party line does not optimize for the policy for their region/district.
And in the US house/senate, the seniority system is another undemocratic institution. Why should changing representatives reduce your effective power in a legislative house? I can't think of a system where codified seniority was a good thing
On the one hand, labour seem really similar to the Tories - disunited, dogma over common sense and oddly out of touch.
Their policies _were_ opposite to Tory policies but they are trying to be an opposition so… Yes Corbin was a leftie (corduroy elbow patches and all) but he’s a leader of a left wing party. It’s like complaining that Thatcher was a bit right-wing.
It seems like the core issue is that the voters want something like Tory-lite. Blair did that and no one wants to go back to it. So this is what you’re left with
That's very far left and is opposed by most people including in the Labour Party. Basically, those guys were the Communist Party and unsurprisingly people did prefer to keep the Tories...
It was the same in the 80s when Labour was essentially unelectable. Blair saw that the centre left was politically the best bet, and pragmatically that social policies needed the private economy to produce wealth.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/11/leaked...
Corbyn was hard left in a distinctly centrist country whose "Left Wing Party" is (despite its roots) very much left-leaning centrist, and who's only ever seen real success while occupying the middle-ground.
> voters want something like Tory-lite. Blair did that and no one wants to go back to it
If nobody wanted to go back to it then we'd have Rebecca Long-Bailey as Leader of His Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition, not another centrist.
There is a large constituency against the status quo in the UK. We have proof of that in the 2016 Brexit referendum, where 17 million people voted strongly against the establishment line and effectively against an economic model that we had had for 40 years. People voted in part to take back control, and what is nationalisation of basic aspects of our lives like water / housing / energy / drug manufacturing / transport etc if not taking back control?
Since the pandemic, the implementation of a chaotic version of Brexit, and the cost of living crisis. The underlying aspects of the 2017 / 2019 Labour policies are even more starkly relevant. Everything has been laid bare, and for some reason the two main parties are now completely devoid of ideas or vision.
There are massive systemic issues in the country. Lack of housing, regional inequality, geographical inequality, falling real terms wages, chronic underfunding of R&D. Basically everything is falling apart. 40 years of financialisation of public services and nearly every aspect of our lives (there's virtually nothing you can do as part of your daily routine that doesn't trigger a transfer of wealth from public or household money to the top). The Brexit vote itself was partially a reaction to these issues.
These things need real solutions and real ideas. Any ideas that even start to address them let alone reverse the issues will look radical, and Labour 2017 / 2019 was barely doing that just offering a mild social democratic platform that would not be out of place in Northern Europe or indeed in the 1983 SDP-Liberal manifesto.
Adding to that we would have had a planned and controlled Brexit, with certain Eu agreements being replaced with equivalent things with different names.
All of this is mostly academic though as the first restrictions in the pandemic would have given the key to removing a Corbyn government by an effective establishment coup.
I think this is the problem: politicians representing the ideology X can afford to be mediocre because they have some room before "voting for mediocre politicians that still agree with what I believe is the best" is worse than "voting for non-mediocre politicians that disagree with what I believe is the best". If a party ends up with mediocre politician, it is its own failure, and the other parties (even if they themselves have bad politicians) are not responsible: the other parties represent other people. If the party that represents your ideology is managing to put forward mediocre politicians, then, it is your failure for letting that happens or accepting this situation.
(I'm not saying that you are incompetent: you may have failed because it was impossible. Still, it's certainly not the responsibility of people who have a different ideology)
In short, in a healthy democracy, there will always be a "worse" party. It cannot take away the responsibility of the party you have voted for for being bad. It's a bit like having giraffes and lions at the zoo, and having the lions saying "the meat is full of maggots and really bad quality, but the alternative is having the vegetables that suits the giraffes, so, it's the giraffes' fault".
So, yes, in the end people may have had issues with the sitting government but they concluded that they were the "least bad" option.
A healthy democracy needs a credible opposition.
That does not make of him a bad politician (he can be, but you keep saying "he is a bad politician because I don't like his ideology and his ideology was not popular enough", which is NOT a criteria to decide if it's a bad politician or not). In a democracy, every ideology must be represented, even if they don't correspond to the majority and are therefore unelectable.
But again, that is not my point: Corbyn was shit, unelectable, whatever, ... And yet, the other party had bad politicians. Corbyn is not the one putting those politicians there. Corbyn supporters neither. Neither Corbyn or his supporters have any say in this, because they have a different ideology and therefore cannot build a good-politician party that defends an ideology they don't agree with.
The fact that the restaurant A serves expired food is not a good excuse for going to the restaurant B, eating slightly less expired food, pay your bill, leave without complaining about restaurant B, and conclude that the main reason is that restaurant A was bad. Restaurant A is bad, and we can, and should, complain about it, but when there is an article about restaurant B explaining that they are failing to serve correct food, you cannot bring in restaurant A as an excuse for the failure of restaurant B. The MAIN REASON restaurant B serves bad food is BECAUSE RESTAURANT B IS FAILING.
You may even be centre-left and chosen Tories for the first time just because you did not like Corbyn. But as soon as you vote Tories, the quality of the politicians in the Tory party is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. If you vote for them, you are part of the process that reward their choice of bad politicians. (I use "you" as the "hypothetical you", not you in particular)
Also, your idea that what matter is the electability is really bad for democracy. Basically, it implies that minorities should never be represented.
> A healthy democracy needs a credible opposition.
If your definition of "credible opposition" is "an opposition that I would have maybe voted for", you are dead wrong.
In a healthy democracy, when you have two main parties, one in power, one in opposition, then, there is one party that you should think is okay, and one party that you should think is shit (it's more complicated than that, but it is to illustrate). If you like all the parties, it just means that you have just one ideology represented.
The 2017 / 2019 Corbyn manifesto were more aligned with the SDP-Liberal alliance manifestos of 1983.
Don't take my word for it, here is one of the members of SDP at the time who split from the Labour party because of Foot.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/11/leaked...
There but for the grace of God...
That's the question I always ask when viewing the gerontocracy.
In academia at least it's been very clear that the boomers were shameless about working long past the time they should retire, preventing gen Xers from rising to top positions.
Apathetic? Maybe. But even if we were all on the same page as a group (which we're not) I don't see how we have the numbers to force a systemic turnover on our own.
I am, of course, a member of GenX. Sometimes, as Planck said, progress has to happen one funeral at a time. None of this brings me any joy to observe.
I don't like the GOP for many reasons (maga) and I think the current iteration of Democrats are horrifically inept with economics to a degree where they are a net harm for the people they strive to help. Belief in policies such as rent control is as anti-science as creationism.
Most Americans have fallen into the trap of lesser of two evils to a point where they don't hold their chosen side accountable at all and the result is predictable. Incredibly dysfunctional policy.
Lessig proved tiresome in the later parts of his media campaign, but I don't think he was wrong about this basic asymetry: there's some political positions that are far more likely to receive substantial financial support, and this distorts nearly everything in our political system. The people who crusade against this are generally speaking, doing something irrational out of principle, meanwhile the people they're fighting just get more money and power.
No.
There's also his support for Chavez/Maduro, his suicidally naive pacifism which helps the enemy, etc.
Oh, and the episode with the mural, where he was too stupid to understand why a picture of fat people with hooked noses oppressing "the workers" would be offensive to a certain group. And what kind of adult sees the world in that way anyway?
[edit] Whatever. Downvote me. You people will never win in the real world.
He said "let the bodies pile high" about his plan for COVID, a plan which ended up killing ~100,000 people.[2][2.5]
> "Oh, and the episode with the mural, where he was too stupid to understand why a picture of fat people with hooked noses oppressing "the workers" would be offensive to a certain group."
Is the certain group Jews? Were they offended by Boris Johnson's book with rude Jewish stereotypes?[3] Or his other racist public writings?[4]
> "Is it too much to ask that a candidate for Prime Minister should respect the Rule of Law?"
Is it too much to ask that the actual Prime Minster respect the law? Partygate, for example[5]
What's that saying "with Conservatives, every accusation is a confession".
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62068421
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-pms-former-adviser-confi...
[2.5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/26/ons-figures-sh...
[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/jan/23/london.race
[5] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-60124162
Everything the comment accused Corbyn of doing leading to "you people will never win in the real world" was done by BoJo, and it didn't stop him winning in the real world.
His relationship with Jennifer Arcuri and public spending implications was out before 2019.
It was all out in the public domain.
It was the media's jobs to ignore this and pretend the main issue was one case where Corbyn liked a photo on facebook that he later claimed he hadn't paid enough attention to and apologised for (Johnson has never apologised or been called on to apologise)
That's the actual interesting question here.
Johnson, Corbyn, Truss, Sunak - all voted in by relatively small numbers of people (e.g. 80k in the case of Truss IIRC), yet they are somehow the leader of the party and potentially even PM.
This is where labour shat the bed I think with Corbyn - totally obvious that he would be terrible as a PM yet the favourite of the popular vote of self-selected labour party, who of course are too extreme to represent the common person on the street.
Corbyn had popular support but, like Miliband, relied relatively heavily on unions...and one union at that: Unite (and btw, his popular support was always overstated hugely...in late 2019, you had a sizeable minority who thought he would walk it, he was massively popular in the Westminster bubble...this is despite him being regarded as a totally odious figure under Blair when he was a backbencher).
The Tories have never had this issue because their electorate is relatively diffuse, and MPs have been quite willing to stab their leader in the back at the first sign of trouble.
Blair (like Thatcher) was an accident. I agree with your point but the Tories have been generally able to produce more effective leaders with their constitution.
Blair took the realistic route: Socialism does not work, let's have a market economy create wealth that can then be used to finance social programs. A flavour a social democracy.
I think a reason Corbyn was so popular among the young is that enough time has passed so that this generation has no idea what socialist countries in Europe were actually like.
Brownites sound good but say nothing specific...often the specific stuff is bad too. I agree with you in that there is a route in the centre, but Labour aren't. The party is fundamentally broken. Starmer isn't it, Reeves isn't a leader, Streeting is a joke. Obviously, they have moved to the centre on immigration and crime but...the party are just mad, and it doesn't seem authentic at all (Starmer was a human rights lawyer, getting rid of ECHR is the only course...you would have to be an idiot to believe he would do that, it just isn't credible).
The ambiguity of Labour is causing part of these problems. For example, their position of ambiguity on healthcare...clearly, it is broken...but they decide to be ambiguous (again, classic Brown) so their polling numbers stay up. There needs to be some kind of cross-party move towards reform but it is impossible when one side just wants to score points as the "protector of the NHS" (and it will end up with Labour winning, then finding out they are neck deep in trouble trying to do reforms that don't work...it will never be fixed).
Yes, that's a good point, but it's not only the right. All the traditionally Labour constituencies in the North (but not only) which voted for Brexit did so largely because of immigration.
Immigration control is not traditionally right wing only. The left has also been in favour of control and restrictions in order to protect workers' wages.
Immigration raises wages; more people = better economy. That's why every other Anglo country is doing better than them. And has food that isn't brown slop.
That's why businesses have been keen and workers have had enough.
That's not specific to the UK, and is the usual effect of large immigration.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-immigration-doesnt-red...
In particular Australia’s population is 1/3rd immigrants. Australia’s minimum and median wages are both significantly higher than the UK. Does that mean there are so many immigrants they’re taking each others jobs instead?
Things do not work out so great if immigration isn't balanced.
In the UK there has been a huge influx of unskilled or low skilled workers from Eastern Europe that has put a big dampener on wages at the low end of the spectrum.
One of the reasons the UK has a productivity issue is that cheap labour.
They also find that skilled immigration systems don’t always work, because all immigrants tend to be unusually highly educated anyway, but also significantly downskill the jobs they choose after arriving. So you’d expect them to always compete with low end natives, but in fact they don’t because they mainly compete with other immigrants instead. And “compete” isn’t how labor works anyway, since all workers are also customers.
> because all immigrants tend to be unusually highly educated anyway
That's obviously not true.
Blair won three sizeable outright majorities in the three elections he lead Labour in
We'd all like public services that do everything for everyone but few of us would be willing to pay what that would actually cost and many of us literally couldn't afford it. Meanwhile expectations of government services are rising and in many areas demographics are against us. If you rule out reform of government services then you don't have a lot of options left to square a lot of circles.
It's important to consider that "reform" is not the same as "cutting standards". For example if we could redistribute the available resources for health and social care to focus more on prevention than cure then many problems might be detected and dealt with earlier resulting in lower overall costs and crucially also better outcomes for patients. Of course there is so much firefighting happening in the NHS now that it's hard to see how any radical reform could happen without a huge injection of both cash and trained medical staff over a period longer than a single electoral cycle and that makes it a political problem as much as an economic or healthcare one.
Most of these reforms have included injecting private sector and internal markets into the system.
You may agree or disagree with these reforms, but it's difficult to argue that they don't incur overhead. Outsourced contracts need administration, legal frameworks; private parties take profit or else they wouldn't exist.
I'd argue it is likely that most of the extra funding is seeping out through these reforms, plus the legacy of not nationalising the whole health system - GP surgeries, pharmacy, generic drug manufacturing - when the NHS was formed.
I agree with you on the prevention aspect. but my thought is that a more joined up system including GPs, pharmacy and especially social care, would manage a lot of lifestyle related issues much better.
There are probably a lot of real costs in our current healthcare system that never make it onto the books as well. For example in many parts of the country it is impossible for an adult to register with a dentist as an NHS patient right now. There are zero dental practices within a reasonable distance of many people willing to accept new NHS patients. That appears to be because the deal governments currently offer to NHS dentists makes no sense financially so it's hard to blame the dentists. But the effect is the same - many of those people are not getting regular dental check ups and preventative or early treatments. The ones who are went private and paid themselves.
That's money going into private healthcare not from the tax man but from the individual patient but that still means the individual patient no longer has that money to be able to afford higher taxes that could better fund the NHS. Unfortunately the lack of huge public outcry as this frog has been boiled only proves that a government strategy of slowly eroding even essential healthcare provision to encourage privatisation by the back door can be effective.
Given how far we've gone into a low wage and poor rights economy I don't think a hard left leadership would have been that bad, especially as it would have been tempered by the rest anyway. However, I don't like Corbyn's extreme passivism.
What do you call nationalising companies and handing control to the workers? (It's in the 2019 manifesto)
That's my point: people, especially the young, don't even recognise it when described under a microscopically thin veneer. That's very worrying.
They didn't hide it, either. McDonnell did say clearly that he was a Marxist [1] and Corbyn is a socialist in the very Soviet sense.
[1] https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2018/05/how-john-mcdon...
Somehow we managed state owned railways and utilities for basically the entire Cold War without ever once feeling tempted to join the Warsaw Pact, and the Royal Mail was a government agency for nearly 400 years...
And of course there's also the little thing about McDonnell and Corbyn being Marxist and socialist.
Again, too many people still seem not to be willing to see what's not even hidden. History should really be compulsory over the whole of secondary school.
Edit: they had hinted it very strongly but did not mention it in the 2017 manifesto apart from calling to promote coops. But in the 2019 manifesto it is explicitly written that nationalised utilities would be "run by service-users and workers".
McDonnell is a Marxist and so, obviously, he wanted a Marxist economic policy in which nationalisation does not mean state capitalism but really indeed workers in charge of the means of production.
Consider the following: if you consider communism to be a bad thing which people should be vigilant against, arguments to the effect that the defining feature of communism is having rail decisions made by employees of a state railway company rather than the boards of Abellio and Arriva[1] probably aren't going to help. Firstly because there's a wee bit more to communism than that, and secondly because the consensus of British rail users is that decision making concerning our railways is currently crap.
There are plenty of decent arguments that Labour's 2019 nationalisation plans wouldn't solve the fundamental problems of those services, but the idea that it's basically Marxist-Leninism isn't one of them.
[1]incidentally entities which are wholly owned by governments, just not the British one
Firstly that involving workers in the ownership and running of a company is a successful model that is working in German for example. Focus on short term shareholder value is not good for employees or the company.
You are posting on a site that has a large percentage of people working in start-ups. Comments like your kind of goes completely against the audience.
Secondary, I've heard McDonnell describe himself as a Marxist. but he is also a politician. Unlike Corbyn he was the one to (incorrectly in my view) seek compromise and common ground with people who were seeking to undermine him. He was the key player in getting Labour to adopt a policy of second referendum, something that an ideological Marxist would certainly not go anywhere near, let alone drive.
There's no actual Marxist I know that would go anywhere near the EU.
Personally I don't believe Marxism to imply state control, or public ownership to mean state ownership.
I'd also see ownership models to include workers and customers. e.g. as a seasonal reference Building and Loan from It's a Wonderful Life.
Of course not everyone sees it that way.
Yes a large portion of readers probably works in startups, the pinnacle of market and financial capitalism and should in all logic despise Corbyn and McDonnell... although that's irrelevant to the discussion.
McDonnell and Corbyn are indeed life long euroseptics and very satisfied with Brexit, which made it even more ridiculous to see so many students cheering them.
There is a confusion here between the situation we have and how we address it.
My water supply - water being that thing that falls from the sky on to the top of my house, and humans die if we don't have any within 3 days - is owned by a Hong Kong investment fund that is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
If you asked the person on the street then they would say that this ownership model is radical, and public ownership of water is conservative.
However, if you instead ask them to comment on taking water ownership from a private company into the public domain , they'd say that was radical.
The issue is that we've moved so far in terms of financialisation of nearly every aspect of our lives, that any attempt to address that will be seen as radical.
"Tax the rich!" Is great when you are not rich, and most young people are not (yet) rich. Coming out of uni saddled with debt and doing entry level jobs etc, it is easy to just think selfishly and say "The rich should pay for more! Not me!"
Eventually you run out of other people's money though.
This is completely backwards, they have the MOST skin in the game. They are the ones that are going not going to have things we take/took for granted like: living and working in the EU or being able to enjoy a pension.
I have received over the past several years a number of stupid tax cuts and energy bailouts that have had precisely zero effect on my family’s well-being or future prospects. Except now I can’t get a fucking doctor’s appointment, the local church is setting up a “warm bank” so that me neighbours don’t die, and my kids will have to pay tens of thousands of pounds for education.
Tax the rich.
The Tories haven't got to worry about having self-styled radical socialists on the ballot but have had exactly the same problems: candidates that appeal most to the Tory selectorate like Iain Duncan Smith and Liz Truss are neither in touch with the public mood nor competent.
Not sure that a presidential system with a public vote would necessarily do better though. The public loved Johnson and liked May at first.
Now that half of Tory MPs have been cabinet members, it’s harder to demand loyalty by dangling a job for votes. Especially the ministerial roles that the public are aware of.
The article seems to be avoiding the term "lame duck period". It reads an excessively selective set of opinions, and it's unclear who should be trying harder.
Blair got 35% of the vote after 8 years of power and the Iraq war, against a decent challenger and experienced politician.
Corbyn got 32% — as the opposition — against an incumbent who’s approval ratings at the time were underwater and who led an unpopular party who’d been in power far too long already.
Corbyn wasn't just deeply unpopular across the country outside of student areas. I spoke to life long remainer lib dems in the Tory/Lab marginal seat of Crewe and Nantwich who were voting Tory to stop Corbyn. Across rural areas in Cheshire people were voting Tory because they were scared of Lib Dems backing Corbyn.
Due to the way that FPTP works, his concentrated support in student/young urban areas was wasted, with the result being a Tory landslide.
This describes me. Luckily I was able to meaningfully vote LibDem, because I really could not see myself voting for BoJo or Corbyn in the last election. Neither Starmer nor Sunak would be my first choice, but in contrast I could hold my nose and vote for either of them if I had to.
I spoke to many who similarly voted to stop Corbyn - they were stopping Corbyn because of his vow to reintroduce gas chambers and exterminate every Jew in the land. I am not sure that was his actual policy but many were adamant it was.
The naive elector sees Corbyn pissing off the Jewish groups on front pages everywhere, and or course they do not want to associate with people of that ilk. The majority trust newspapers and politicians too much, so get routinely played like a fiddle, and the best liar always wins.
The similar shit show is going to play out next election with Reform UK if the liar extraordinaire Nigel Farage decides to front it.
Setting aside that in 2019 under 15% of the country read a newspaper, it's a moot point. Part of the job of being leader of a political party, just like any business, is to handle public relations. Corbyn's team was awful at this. It's no good whining about it, you have to handle it.
Personally his pro-wealthy attacks on making the care system fairer were one major thing that turned me off. He spent a lot of political capital trying to defend the right of millionaires to not pay for their own care (and thus increasing everyone else's tax burden).
Millionaires paying for their own care is how you end up with a terrible, underfunded, and eventually privatised public care system.
Despite it being a policy supported by all sorts of economic think tanks from the IFS to Adam Smith, and has support from the Green party to the LSE, somehow he managed to completely bungle it and push the cause back a generation. Another thing I can't forgive him for.
I recall at some point last election cycle an interview with a very passionate gentleman in the north who was adamant that we had to "Vote for Change, its time to get Corbyn and his failed policies out of Downing Street". He was utterly certain that Corbyn had been prime minister for the prior four years and the terrible state of the country was down to him.
I am no fan of labour but that environment is not good for anyone and has ultimately (ironically) destroyed the Conservative party.
Poe's law never fails
The career politicians, the party functionaries and virtually the entire media had their daggers out for Corbyn.
The 2017 election was a different story. The elites hadn't closed ranks at that point.
https://www.politicshome.com/news/article/jeremy-corbyn-most...
I'm not sure it's really fair but that's kinda how the polls went.
It’s febrile at this point.
Not really sure what you're saying here. Did you mean to use the word "juvenile"?
Edit: Actually probably what the UK ppl are saying
Do you know who the article is saying should try harder?
This belief is boosted by the fact the British press only ever compares our inflation with France, which has the lowest inflation in Europe due to substantial nuclear generating capacity and energy subsidies funded through borrowing. Our government was attacked for attempting even a fraction of those energy subsidies to the point they did a U-turn because ultimately the public pays for it, but that downside is ignored when talking about France. They also also have substantially more national debt for obvious reasons... but luckily the UK national debt is usually only compared with Germany's.
Why not?
I always think that comparing inflation or national debt to other countries is meaningless. A big national debt used for good investment is way better than a small national debt while the infrastructures fall apart, and the state and cost of the infrastructure can be very different in each country. And for the same level of inflation, the effects would be very different based on the resources and market characteristics of the country and which measures are taken.
(edit: and indeed, if you re-read the text around the quote you've extracted, this is indeed the reasoning: the author does not justify that with a comparison of the inflation rate, but with a list of where the Brexit made things worse)
I never really bought into the doomsday scenarios. Just a slow slide of Spanish package holidays getting more expensive and people not connecting the dots.
Also, 0.6% is probably noise or error
I don't think it's a British problem either. We've had populists dominating politics in quite a few countries in recent decades. France just had a close call where a neo fascist came close to winning the elections. The Austrians have actually gone there. My home country the Netherlands has had populists come close a couple of times as well. Italy just elected a populist. The issue is that the type of policies populists preach tend to not involve a whole lot of carefully considered long term planning. Big gestures that are supposedly popular and then all hell breaks loose when reality and fantasy meet.
Brexit sounded great to people with no clue about how economies work. Now they are dealing with inflation, lots of failing policies, and the notion that they might soon have to rename their country as it is won't be great or united anymore if Scotland and Northern Ireland cease to be a part of it. I don't think anyone voted for that in England. But it would be a direct consequence of what they did vote for.
Is there no one you disagree with politically who is just popular instead of populist, knowledgeable and yet disagrees with you? If you can't think of any then I'd suggest the problem lies within you.
By the way
> as it is won't be great
Great is a geographical term. Just as British people remain european after leaving the EU, they (those on the island of Great Britain) would remain part of Great Britain.
But do continue to regale us all from up high with your superior knowledge about economies and such, knowing things like why Great Britain is named as it is, that's just a trifling fact for plebs.
As is pointed out in every single one of these threads, inflation in the UK is no different to inflation in the rest of Europe. Like elsewhere, it's created by money printing to pay for lockdowns and other COVID measures, along with embargoes against Russia.
It's really quite impressive how often this claim about inflation and Brexit comes up on HN, despite it being so easily disproven by looking at the numbers. It seems to happen on literally every single thread about the UK. The idea that Remainer-ism is a bastion of economic logic and common sense doesn't fit with the frequency with which bad economic claims in support of EU membership are made.
How many MPs were removed in this witch hunt? And why is it a witch hunt if the electorate is told "this is the most important question for at least a generation", they vote on it, and the representatives in parliament do their damnedest to prevent carrying out the thing voted for, and thus the electorate decide to remove some of them?
That sounds like democracy in action to me (and anti-democracy by those who tried to stymie Brexit).
The result was a government forced to bang on about how great an objectively bad process was because nobody was left to say “if you’re going to do this then you need to be realistic about the cost”. And implementing a known-bad policy while trying to pretend it’s great completely fucks a government.
21 Tory MPs had the whip removed for defying the party line and signalling their intent to defy Brexit:
- Kenneth Clarke, sniffed the political winds and stood down. Got given a golden handshake to the Lords.
- Philip Hammond - you must be joking, right? Still managed to get a seat in the Lords though.
- Rory Stewart. Do you think those who voted Brexit respect him? Might win in a contest with Hammond over who is disliked less. So well respected he couldn't even keep his campaign for mayor of London going to the start line, even with London being a remain stronghold.
- Dominic Grieve would not even beat Guy Verhofstadt in a contest voted on by leave supporters over who is liked less, as evidenced by losing his seat to his Tory replacement. I half expected Guy Fawkes day to be renamed Dominic Grieve day. Still could.
- David Gauke has an instructive Wikipedia entry[1]:
> Gauke stood in his constituency as an independent candidate, and came second with 26% of the vote, by far the best result of any of those former Conservative Members who sought re-election as independents.
That'll make the rest of the list an anti-climax but let's have some fun drilling the point home:
- Antoinette Sandbach, stood as a LibDem and lost.
- Sir Oliver Letwin, didn't stand again. I don't know anyone that respects him[2].
- Justine Greening, did not stand. Why not? She was savvy enough to see what was coming.
- Sam Gyimah, stood as a LibDem, lost seat to Conservatives, coming third behind Labour.
- Guto Bebb, didn't stand. Previously managed to gain much respect by bullying a man with Asperger's[3].
- Anne Milton, lost seat in 4th place. Tories kept her seat with a leave supporter in her place.
- Alistair Burt, Caroline Nokes, Greg Clark, Sir Nicholas Soames, Ed Vaizey, Margot James, Richard Benyon, Stephen Hammond, Steve Brine and Richard Harrington had the whip restored. Soames didn't stand at the next election, Harrington, Vaizey and Benyon got bumped up to the Lords where they love remainer Tories. Stephen Hammond and Steve Brine kept their seats with much reduced majorities.
Jo Johnson and Amber Rudd also resigned from the cabinet in support of the rebels and stood down at the next election. Johnson was bumped up to the Lords, because there aren't enough anti-democratic lords, apparently, though their record (and entire structure and history) would suggest otherwise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gauke
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Letwin#1985_Broadwater_...
[3] https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/aberconwy-...
That was half of your comment, the opening part, and in response to my comment, yet somehow, going into detail about
a) why it wasn't a witch hunt, and
b) refuting the premises upon which you relied
is somehow pretty tangential to my point?
> I think it goes to demonstrate quite tidily the utter mind-rot on the part of some people in the UK right now.
Do you always respond to cognitive dissonance with personal slights, and do you know that this is HN and not Twitter?
I received my Green Card since that post and I've booked my flights for a visit to the UK for early next year.
Mostly I just want to share how sad reading this article made me feel this morning.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33682030
One wonders if the average intelligence of the place is going down?
What matters is where these competent people want to go.
When people want to leave, that means there's something lacking at where they are currently.
My opinion is that every place must create an environment where their best brains want to stay there (without being forced to, of course!). The whole world could be better due to that.
It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Here in the Valley, I actually noticed an increase in number of international hires coming from commonwealth countries in the last few years.
Curious about this. Could you please elaborate?
Like, the differences in lives of a software developer in, say Toronto and San Francisco (other than salary)?
Just curious.
The Murdoch press was for Sweden-style COVID-19 policies and deescalation in Ukraine. If it had been listened to, we'd have low gas prices and economic prosperity now.
Instead, Biden pumped up the stock market with COVID-19 relief funds handed out to his interest groups and sent Kamala Harris (who did not know what Ukraine was) to the Munich "peace" conference, where liberals Stoltenberg et. al. escalated further.
So, apart from Brexit, which Murdoch opinion has been implemented in the past decade?
Are you discounting Fox News as being part of the Murdoch Press? Because they definitely have an outsized influence on US policy, at least on the GOP side.
Apart from choosing pretty much every British PM in my lifetime?
2000-odd words, goes into great detail talking about politics, psycho-analyzing the Tories...it is all because they went to Eton...of course...the Brexit, the bankers...it is all so simple.
A brief sentence is expended on planning, no mention about supply-side problems, the productivity crisis in govt (which is now 50% of the economy)...nothing.
I will say this another way, you can measure the intelligence by looking at the gap between how often they talk about Brexit and how often they talk about economic reform. People who talk endlessly about Brexit have nothing to say about any economic reform...beyond reversing Brexit (and then say, without self-awareness, something sniping about the "religion" of Brexit). There is no content.
The UK has many problems but the worst is an elite that is almost totally preoccupied with arguing and rutting with other members of that same elite. Recursive, insular, almost no connection with reality.
That was the problem from the 20s until Thatcher (with exceptions, there were a few good men on both sides...Labour just totally imploded first). That crept back into the Tories in the early 90s, and crept back into Labour with Brown (I will ask you this: Brown oversaw one of the most catastrophic bailout programs that actually brought down healthy institutions...he is still advising Labour, how...he devised not one but two constitutional programs that imploded...he is STILL advising Labour on a third one, how...the article talks about people leaving politics, if people leave how is this unflushable turd still there).
All of the Tories who left after Brexit were some of the worst, most incompetent people in politics. All they did by the end of 2019 was argue with other politicians, they had no connection with reality. The current Cabinet are fine, there are lots of very obviously competent people attempting to deal with massive structural issues (Home Office has gone feral, Justice has gone feral, Health is beyond repair...again, the article mentions not one word about this...why might that be?). Look at Labour...they have Starmer (not wholly competent) and Reeves (who is risking a coup by meeting the Tories on policy)...again, the biggest issue is the profound lack of progress made on massive structural issues and this comes down to a failure of political leadership, not a failure of voters.
This has become my gauge of how serious someone is. Planning reform is both incredibly necessary and incredibly unpopular and if you won't talk about it you are just dancing around the edges of the problem.
Edit: and I think that the inability to talk about this is highly connected to the lack of other honesty in politics, as well as the perpetual outrage machine that results in things like Brexit.
All the UK needs to do is un-delegate authority for planning to local govt. I think it is accepted, amongst those advocate for this heresy, that local areas need to retain control over the design of houses (this is something that doesn't work today btw). But the structure of the system needs to change: if you buy land, you can build whatever you want on it.
Wherever local govt has had a say on this kind of thing, it has created massive societal costs. The solution is obvious.
There is nothing to generalize from. You don't need to construct a weird theory about the media (you will notice the other replies, for some reason, have this very odd theory that all English-language countries are the same...the UK doesn't even have one legal system in the country).
(Also notable that when America rebuilds another country's government we never give them the American form of government.)
I have yet to see anything of substance fly under that banner.
It is hard to be brief but:
* Financial services - totally fucked, most of the VC funding in the UK comes from overseas investors because pension and insurance rules (that were largely adopted from Europe) mean that they have to own large amounts of govt bonds...the recent problems indicate how wise that was. Everything isn't working: retail, savings, banks, it is all not working.
* Planning - obviously...lots of countries have versions of this problem but it is becoming very problematic. Iirc, there was a recent infrastructure project that had to do a new environmental assessment (costing tens of millions) for every km of work they did...it isn't just housing, it is everything, it is all fucked.
* Healthcare - obviously...not going to say anything more but it is at the point where it is impacting the economy.
* Labour - again...do I need to say more? Look at what is happening right now.
* Education - again...do I need to say more? We have massive issues producing people with skills that employers require. There are other issues around this that relate to poor management and immigration, but schools are just bad (this is mentioned in the article to be fair but only from the perspective of too many politicians being from Eton...why can't they just...find people from journalism, who work at...the Economist say?).
* Housing - separate from just planning, there are specific rules within the housing market that cause distortions above the planning system failing to produce enough supply. For example, rent controls in Scotland...that caused a 40% drop in rental supply in two weeks, this is economic mismanagement on a grand scale.
* Local govt - needs fundamental reforms in multiple areas. Social care, planning, a lot of the new environmental rules are very dangerous (if people from outside the UK can believe it, some local councils are introducing rules which mean you will be fined if you exit your neighbourhood in a car to go to another part of the same city).
* Transport - almost everything isn't working properly. Road, rail, it is all gone. Almost all due to problems in other areas above but which will now require structural changes.
Btw, I don't know what planet you have to live on not to notice this stuff. I am in my mid-30s, every single job I have had things that impacted my ability to produce more output because of govt intervention. Every one. Once you see this stuff, you realise how bad it has become, every level of govt, every institution, it is everywhere.
Imo that might work for a very small country or for a city-state (like Hong Kong or Singapore, even though these also used to make actual stuff), but I don't think you can base the economy of a country as big and developed as the UK is entirely on services. At most you get a pseudo-city-state, which is what London looks like, surrounded by economic "blob". It's not London that built modern UK, but the likes of Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and, yes, Newcastle and the North-East of England. All those cities might as well not exist now, from an economic pov.
Of course, I might be totally wrong on this as I don't live in the UK, but I've got most of that by reading David Edgerton's The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History [1] recently. (a Economist editorial from a couple of weeks ago was also quoting David Edgerton, if it matters)
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Fall-British-Nation-Twentieth-Ce...
But it wasn't an active choice. By the early 1980s, most forms of manufacturing had become uneconomic because of union activity. And, amazingly, this is still the case (there is a refinery near me, was bought by Ineos, they had a multi-decade package of investment based on an agreement with the union not to strike, deal closed...union went on strike almost immediately, Ineos never put another pound in, invested heavily in Europe where unions are more co-operative, they are now beginning to shut down the refinery...it is that simple).
The only exception to the places you have listed is Manchester: towards the south of the city, they have built up a really competitive ecomm hub (with the airport, with the port, and with the support of local govt to build warehouses)...inflation has totally destroyed this industry (China subsidizes international shipping, most of these companies fulfilled orders for Europe/US out of the UK...the rise in air freight finished them). Glasgow is largely retail/govt-based, the North-East is seeing very promising investment in the free port but is very troubled, Birmingham muddles through.
The problem with things like manufacturing is that it overlays several areas that are problematic for the UK: planning, infrastructure, labour, labour mobility, energy...none of this stuff works anymore. For example, not many people know that one of the first modern CPU was made in Scotland (this was when Intel were making a similar chip for the first calculator in the early 70s)...but the industry just died in the 80s.
Again, people will talk a lot about deindustrialization but far less about why this happened. In the 60/70s, the govt invested heavily in local production, almost all of these companies failed or were sold to foreign buyers who could manage them properly (Rolls-Royce is the only exception I believe). There was no active choice, all other options were just removed by repeated failure.
We know how that went...
Umpteenth reminder that England is the only place on planet Earth where people earning a top 10% salary, that is 70K£ pa, are at constant risk of eviction and live in houses and flats with mice and bed bugs and where children die of mould. Incidentally it is also the country with the least regulated private rental market.
The problem with unsuitable housing is a side-effect of lack of supply. If you make it harder to evict, you make it harder to foreclose, make it harder to buy houses (because landlords can only sell to other landlords)...it is very bad news.
This happened almost immediately after Scotland brought in their rules...because politicians there have been blocking new builds for decades (and favouring social housing so people are more dependent on the state).
What is amazing is that this stuff happens, you see the complete failure of a set of economic ideas, and then the next day you have people suggesting the exact same thing...and people wonder why Britain is in the state it is in? The country's elite have vigorous support for ideas that are economically damaging, the voters love it, the journos love it, the lobbyists love it...not surprising.
No, it isn’t. The current state of affairs in England (even Scotland and Wales have different regulations) only causes misery and an immense waste of resources on housing. Or do you think Germans or Frenchmen spend 3 months a year doing house viewings? Nowhere in the civilised world you can evict a family that doesn’t have rent arrears and nowhere in the civilised world you have a homelessness problem comparable to the English (maybe San Francisco being the exception).
Actually, the homeless rate in Edinburgh (which actually has an eviction ban and, even, rent controls now) is 3x the rate of SF...the reason why is that most of the rental market disappeared because eviction control meant that landlords could only sell properties at the end of rental periods (and when these came up in September, they all just removed properties from the market because house prices are going to be lower next September).
The law of unintended consequences. The govt tried to take control, and it has made the problem significantly worse. This is the economic problem that the UK faces in a nutshell: voters want things that are economically damaging (the situation with housing is probably 10x Brexit), they don't understand why they are damaging, and when the damage comes they blame someone else (and btw, the most amazing thing is that if you look at a city like Edinburgh...the people are VOTING for the people who are promising not to build any housing WHILST they are complaining about a lack of housing...it is the kind of thing that makes you realise that people are getting what they are asked for).
I have lived in Edinburgh for two decades btw. Most people who work here have absolutely no idea how many homeless people live there (it has been in the thousands for years) because almost none of these people live on the street or have substance abuse problems (and Edinburgh has very effective segregation so the wealthy don't have to see the poor or their problems). They are just normal people who have been evicted for whatever reason, and have nowhere to live because the city doesn't have enough housing. So they get put into hotels or B&Bs (but, because of the refugee situation, these have largely been exhausted now too...I remember a few years ago when they were trying to house Syrians, the council said...literally no room, we are overloaded beyond belief...since then refugees worth about 2-4% of the population came...the council has been telling poor people they have to leave now, go to England, go to the Highlands, they don't care, just leave...people who have been paying rates for decades).
Last year (i.e. before the latest crisis got very severe) there were 20 thousand people on the council's waiting list...this is in a city of 400k people (and, obviously, significantly less households).
The numbers are absolutely staggering and, again, people who live in Edinburgh have no idea because most people who work there have no contact whatsoever with "locals". They vote for brownfield-only building, they love the Cockburn Association intervening on every planning decision, they vote for the green belt, etc.
I did not say everyone on the council waiting list was homeless. I have no idea why you think this because it isn't anything that I said.
And of course they also aren't bussed in from other states and on drugs or whatever the common story for not building them housing is.
Real world outcomes aside, that is less homelessness and a better functioning private rental market, evicting families with children is just uncivilised and should be allowed just because of that.
Issue #1 is that the supply does not keep up with demand so rents keep going up. Issue #2 is that tenants don't know the law.
I’ve rented in London for 12 years and I wouldn’t wish that experience on a serial killer. In Italy or Germany, not even people on the dole live as bad as a private tenant in the UK, regardless of their income. (Thankfully the company I used to work for completed its IPO 3 years ago and now I can live like a normal person).
As a student my landlord wanted to do electrical work that required me and my partner to vacate the property. The law states that he has a duty to provide alternative accommodation. We brought this up and the response was simply that we'd be evicted instead.
Fuck private landlords. They can go do actual work for a living instead of leeching off of society.
Reminder that London is not England. Top 10% earners in most other parts of the country live very comfortably.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-53628115
>which will now require structural changes.
>needs fundamental reforms in multiple areas.
Everyone can see the problems. Everyone agrees there is need to reform. Actual viable game plans on how to fix it seem to be in short supply though. Current political elites (of all shades) are all about "we promise to make it better" rally slogans like increase trade, reduce redtape, boost growth etc. Those are aspirations not plans.
Reform UK (the party) in fairness has more precise language (and numbers) in their policies than labour/con, but even there it goes fuzzy on key aspects that determine viability. Funding for the very specific spending promises comes from very nebulous sources like "reduce wasteful spending". Not that it matters - small opposition parties can promise unicorns for all. By the time they reach enough votes to get to implementation the unicorn has morphed to a donkey with a superglued on horn.
Perhaps I'm just jaded & expect too much from politicians...
You have quoted transport and local govt. Both relatively complex areas.
The main structural change in transport is linked to the planning system. All environmental assessments need to be removed, appeals processes need to be time-limited, lawyers removed totally, and (very likely) you need to remove all planning authority from local govt. This is probably the toughest area because central govt will fuck it up, but you could un-delegate it and then re-delegate to a new local body (but not like education pre-academies, it would be something like local infrastructure bodies that raised money from local taxes).
Local govt...where to begin. Social care needs to be moved out, likely some degree of tax devolution, planning needs to be moved out, massive levels of waste...I have not actually seen how this gets solved because unions and nepotism is so embedded (the Tories introduced new disclosure requirements, the media just don't seem to report this stuff...you can see massive levels of not only waste but what looks like graft...nothing), more powers for councils to create economic growth locally (the lobby group against this goes to the heart of govt, some councils like Warrington have created massive growth locally with so few powers...the Civil Service is violently opposed to this)...big picture is: remove powers that have externalities (healthcare, planning) and hand over economic powers (one idea would be local corporation tax).
Reform and SDP are specific. But what people don't understand is that "reduce wasteful spending" is specific...everyone knows the area in which money is wasted. But what they don't say is quite simple: you try to reduce spending, the civil service unions will stop all work across all departments immediately, they are militant. If you look at what is happening at Home Office or Justice, no-one is explicit about that because, frankly, voters don't want to hear it. That is what "structural change" means...the Home Office needs to be burned to the ground (and btw, the Tories have been trying this, the Border Force is still failing...the public doesn't realise that their senior management has been put on measures multiple times, they have brought people in from the MoD, the army...nothing works, they literally restructured the whole thing to get it away from the Home Office MULTIPLE times...it still doesn't work).
But there is masses of very specific policies in every area that can change things. The problem isn't politicians but that there is no mandate (largely due to Labour successfully selling the public repeatedly on bags of magic beans).
Can you give an article or city name for this?
Let me help you with the brevity - you mean Solvency II. So you're fine with governments bailing out the financial system with our money, but not happy if they put (admittedly heavy-handed) measures in place to stop the casino mentality.
Er no, the reason Solvency II exists is to bailout govts (and insurance companies, it is a tacit way of decreasing competition). That is the beauty of these regulations: you have poor people in Europe who are getting absolutely rinsed by this stuff AND they will actually fight for it (the "casino mentality"...is that something that European Commissioner tells you to say?).
It does nothing to increase systemic safety: look at Europe, almost every large bank is functionally insolvent, requires massive zero-interest loans from the govt, almost all new loans in some of the large economies are now govt-guaranteed...is this what a safe system looks like.
If you take a country like Germany, which has gone the farthest down this route, savers have net financial wealth equal to Greece. Look at Allianz's market share, they own everything. It is tragic. Removing these regulations will be massively beneficial for consumers, the reason they exist at all is to limit competition and choice.
Btw, this isn't hard. The US made these changes in the early 70s, that is why they fund most VC activity in London. Consumers need choice, they don't need to have their money trapped in govt bonds subsidizing govts that can't repay their debts in a free market, the only result of this is lower returns for consumers.
I guess we are diametrically opposed. I can equally ask you if Jacob Rees-Mogg writes your posts.
I disagree. That Brexit was a massive con was obvious to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. But the electorate voted for it anyway.
I believe Brexit was such a complex issue that most normal voters could not be expected to be able to be informed enough to actually weigh up the decision by any useful means other than relying on superficial emotional decision making or their historical political leanings.
I think there were possibly advantages of leaving had we made the most of them. (Not enough to persuade me, but the outcomes didn’t have to be all bad). Clearly we didn’t make the most of these potential upsides though and we were never going to because the gvnt was clearly not competent enough to see such a complex transition through successfully.
Having said that, after some cursory reading on the topic, outside of the normal media spin, I believed that we were better in then out. But I disagree that it was trivially obvious for the average voter to determine this. Especially with the ridiculous campaign promises and misdirection of the leave campaign (and I think the remain campaign didn’t do great either).
And even with my background reading, my vote to remain was based largely on a gut instinct rather than a deep conviction or understanding that I was taking the correct side. I think a lot of voters would say the same.
And I know many leave voters who almost immediately regretted voting that way. Such was the “coin toss” decision making for so many people.
Saying that Brexit was obviously a massive con (and the associated implication that leave voters did not sufficient inform themselves) is to risk drastically oversimplifying it.
I will agree that it is very obvious in retrospect that it was a terrible idea.
I agree with that and a lot else you say. But the crazy promises being made by 'leave' (£350 million per week for the NHS, being only one of many) were just obvious lies (a con) from day 1.
That might be true, but
> Clearly we didn’t make the most of these potential upsides though and we were never going to because the gvnt was clearly not competent enough to see such a complex transition through successfully.
Would have been a lot easier to determine, and was all that was needed to work out which way to vote.
Hah!
* We do not have enough houses in economically productive areas - look at the OxCam arc, London. NIMBYs keep sapping every attempt at building more houses.
* Terrible childcare - we have to pay about 1-2k per kid for childcare. Go figure out how to have children in a climate where it's cheaper for a parent not to work (if you're on the average income).
* Healthcare - as a naturalised brit I will never understand the sacrosanct nature of the NHS. We plough a ton of money into something that is very equitable but is terrible for outcomes. Most folks who have money I know always tend to go private rather than dealing with a 6 month wait for a routine check up.
Economic reform
* Investment wise - we are funding out deficits by selling our assets to foreign investors. Most of the country's financial assets are seen as safe dividend givers. We have a decent startup ecosystem, but we should invest far more into research, infrastructure to actually ensure there is a boost to the economy.
On the structural - few things come to mind, but can't articulate them super clearly. Hope that helps
The deterioration of the service is intentional and fairly recent. A large part of that "ton of money" is funnelled straight into private hands thanks to the initiatives put in place by our criminal government.
"Right to choose": Public money funding private healthcare instead of being put towards expanding the capacity of the NHS in that area.
Private consultants: Paying a private company to poach NHS specialists who are then contracted back at a much higher rate.
Agency nurses: Paying nurses so poorly that they leave the profession, resulting in a staffing shortage. Then paying a private agency double to triple the wage of a staff nurse.
Private providers: Preventing the NHS from providing services under it's remit and instead handing public money over to private enterprises.
I don't get this - if it's a routine check up you'll have one per year, so your GP will be booking it in for you, and they are paid money to do so.
If you're talking about a routine check-up for the worried well who don't have any health problems but who just want a doctor to tell them that they don't have any health problems, well, those checks cause harm and do not prolong life so you'd want to delay them as much as possible.
To me this sums it up. The political kayfabe is in part constructed to make it appear like the government is in control of state affairs, but Blair's legacy was to remove power from government and spread it thinly through an increasingly overweight bureaucracy that answers to itself and only sings the governments tune when it empowers itself.
A common language with the US makes many of the political and business elite focus on the U.S. It also makes them less inclined to put the effort in to engage with Europe politically and culturally.
That in turn helped to fan the flames of Euroscepticism that in turn led to Brexit.
It’s no accident that the focus of trade deals post Brexit has been with English speaking countries of the former Empire.
People who talked about Brexit were talking about East Asia and the Commonwealth countries, not the US only. I can't really think immediately of anyone with strong links to the US in the current govt (the only minister in recent memory was Liam Fox, and he hasn't been in govt for close to a decade iirc).
- Brits are famously monolingual compared to the rest of Europe.
- How many senior British politicians speak a European foreign language fluently - Johnson perhaps - I can think of perhaps one or two others.
- Lots of key members of the Eurosceptic movement have deep links to the US. Hannan, Farage, Fox (he was the Brexit Trade Minister in 2019 btw so not close to decade).
- The 'Britannia Unchained' group of Kwarteng, Truss etc all looked strongly to the US.
I speak from experience in UK business and in Brussels.
It's not the only factor certainly but it's contributed.
I don't know, I haven't tried to talk to any of them in a language that isn't English. Again, your supposition that this must be true is based on what? It must be...you heard this thing about Brits...
Right and two of the people you mention have never served in British parliament. Hannan has links to the US...and is the same person advocating heavily for a Swiss deal with EU...that couldn't be right though? You said he had "links". He wasn't the Brexit Trade Minister (that is a fictional position).
Truss and Kwarteng didn't look "strongly" to the US...I have no idea where this is coming from. Do you just not like the US so you think this other group of people you don't like must be allied to them? Truss was Trade Minister and did deals with the Commonwealth, there was no real focus on the US at all (because of Biden). Britannia Unchained is famous in the UK for being particularly adulatory towards East Asia, not the US.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Just because you're not an MP doesn't mean you can't have huge influence - Farage obviously being the most prominent example.
Brexit Trade Minister - my typo should have been Post Brexit Trade Minister - but he was clearly in Govt in 2019 contrary to your claim.
I live in the UK and I am struggling to think of more than 1 or 2 British born people I know personally that speak anything other than English with any fluency.
Well if I lack the authority to comment on my own education, please feel free to share your greater understanding of the years and hours my classmates and I devoted to learning a second language. Perhaps you can even convince me my A* GCSE made me fluent and not utterly incompetent in it!
That pretty much describes my foreign language education (learning French in England, 1970s/1980s).
https://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/census-results/at-a-glanc...
(We don't yet have the results for the 2022 census)
Also the figures on that page include people born abroad. I know a few people who can speak 5+ languages. But they weren't born in the UK.
Boris Johnson was born in New York.
> he went to Stanford, and his wife's family has a house there
The craziest part is that I believe this actually makes sense to you. How sad.
If I have a house in France and went to a French University does that mean I have strong connections with France. Of course. Likewise with the US.
The reason british people don't learn languages is that it is not economically beneficial for them to do so. But otherwise, I don't think it is the case that in Europe everybody is enlightened and aware of each other's national politics and culture and Britain uniquely is somehow ignorant of other countries.
I’ve worked in Brussels and whilst English is spoken an awful lot communication is still not as straightforward as working in the US.
Delivering Brexit and mitigating Covid were massively destabilising events that required an enormous amount of political capital to deliver. On top of that you then have scandal after scandal which drain that political capital.
Ultimately the Conservatives are out of political capital. They can only regain it by not being in power for a period of time.
Maybe it is the historically class-based society alluded to in the article, but it always stunned me how those at the top, and in particular politicians, were pushing through policies without even a modicum of consultation. See for example the 'kamikwasi' budget of last month: in which other European country would this have been done so thoughtlessly?
I thought this was going to be another cynical Economist hit piece like the earlier "Europe not pulling its weight" [1] but was surprised how on-the-money it is. Some well chosen quotes;
"A family with the wrong members in control" wrote George Orwell of the English.
Or, a country that "institutionalises lying" ruled "by chancers and cranks" sums it up nicely. We've had a profound leadership crisis in Britain for several decades now, and it's not just party politics. It's endemic to all institutions and industry. We positively celebrate corruption because we mistake it for power.
We keep selecting incompetents to lead, in all areas, because we confuse their psychopathic cunning with "leadership". I believe that the recent visibility of "imposter syndrome" is tactical smoke to distract from the fact that there really are an extraordinary number of actual imposters in charge everywhere. Are they're getting scared? Exposure is coming.
George Carlin put it best I think. He said the definition of real terror is waking up in mid-life and realising that all those pricks you went to school with are now running the country. But yes, it's our fault. We built a system that selects for them. And we continue to allow it to stand.
What worries me is that, if tomorrow our country came to its senses and asked genuinely competent people to take the helm, it would already be far, far too late.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=33992393
Again, from the outside, the UK looks like a country that has a lot to lose but it's acting quite desperate and it's hard to see why.
> What worries me is that, if tomorrow our country came to its senses and asked genuinely competent people to take the helm, it would already be far, far too late.
I agree with much of the post, but it's this kind of statement that worries me. I think there is a lot of room for incremental improvement in the UK, the dull work of growing in competence, but the appetite seems to be for sweeping measures.
Yes that is concerning. Desperate voters will follow any crazy with bold promises.
> I think there is a lot of room for incremental improvement in the UK
Way I see it, I've lived through about 30-40 years of decremental decline, so if we started "incremental improvement" tomorrow, we'd be back where I started in the 1970s just by the time I die. I suppose that's better than watching ones country decline through all your life, like for Russians. Or disintegrate, as for ex-Yugoslavians for example.
However, in the era of climate crisis, and myriad other threats, a sense of urgency is in the air which we cannot ignore. Unless rational and courageous minds take the lead someone else will.
> the dull work of growing in competence.
Knowing where to even start... how to counter the conditions that are causing us to lose competence... we need to plug the holes in the ship before charting a new course.
Not too worried about that; didn't attend Eton. :D
I'd call it the Biff Tannen (AKA Trump) effect.
That jackass kid who would stick a compass in his hand for giggles, set fire to cats or drink a bottle of antifreeze is now, by pure devious guile and rotten luck for everyone else, the mayor of your city.
You studied hard, went to college, served your nation, designed a better widget, raised a decent family, bought the dream... and have fuck-all say in what goes.
It's nothing to do with elite schools, prominent families or money. That's what makes it even more horrifying. The race is not to the quick etc... How arbitrary it is. I think that's Carlin's point.
If you look at COVID-19 and climate change you really understand that politicians really don't know how to raise a number to the power of the other (i.e. understand exponential growth). I still vividly recall the ludicrous argument a friend (now studying philosophy at Oxford) attempted to advocate to me, which is that "we should not do anything now so that if we need to fight it later the economy is strong enough" (they did not understand exponential growth). Simple mathematics suggests that if you have some crisis which is going to get exponentially worse over time, and you can mitigate or stop now it's probably better to do something now, rather than later.
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
Bad leadership of the type you describe has shown itself in every country in the World at some point.
the Kamikwasi budget was the end goal of a section of the Tory party who had been planning every single part of it for well over a decade in think tanks, dinner parties and meeting rooms across London and party conferences. Truss told everyone in the party what she was planning to do as part of her campaign for leader. They voted for it because they believed it was the right thing to do for the country. She and her chancellor then went ahead with executing it, and the markets told them to get it in the bin, pronto.
To paint it as a uniquely insane thing to do based on the class system playing out is an odd thing to do to me. It was a political ideology that was planned, plotted, wargamed and ultimately voted for.
It all points to a need for the UK to be rid of the Tories for a generation or two, but I can't see the relationship to a unique and rabid myopic stupidity evident in it that you seem to.
For example, I think that people like Trump, Berlusconi, Cheney, etc. are not in the same class. They are certainly bad leaders, but largely because they are selfish grifters who care little about their country. On the other hand people like Cameron, Rees-Mogg, Johnson and Truss seem to really believe that they are destined to lead the country (to greatness) and that, for them at least, it "cannot be that hard".
So I sense a real difference here, and introducing the "competence gap" was my way to try to make it precise. But maybe there is a better way to formulate it. Arrogance perhaps? (And of course such personalities are not unique to the UK, but I did find them more widespread there.)
You think Trump, Berlusconi, and so on are selfish grifters but do not believe they are truly destined for greatness?
And you think Cameron, Rees-Mogg, Johnson and Truss are _not_ selfish grifters but are in it for the "greatness"?
I think you should do more research on both groups. Trump and Berlusconi (and many others I mentioned), seem to choose their actions based on self-interest fiscally and for their ego. They are over-confident in their ability to make good decisions because they feel they have been "chosen", and are "special". Their distaste for due process and the rule of law is evidence of this, I feel.
But so are the British leaders. Go do some digging, find out how they made their money and built their relationships in Parliament. Find out about the Bullingdon club, find out about Rees-Mogg's money, find out about the Institute of Economic Affairs, and more. You'll find every single one of the British leaders you named had the exact same profile of grifting and ego-driven self-belief that Berlusconi, Bolsonaro, Trump, W. Bush, and others have shown.
Your argument that there is something unique to Britain about this is weak to my mind. I can find identical behaviours of corruption, idiocy, grifting, ego and incompetence in recent history of every G20 country, every NATO member, every EU state, every democracy.
Writing this makes me feel cynical, but the good news is that there is plenty of evidence of competence and "greater good" style leaders around everywhere too - in Britain, as much as anywhere else.
I think that Trump and Berlusconi and Cheney and Netanyahu all aim for maximal wealth (and minimal imprisonment) for them and their buddies - and they do very well on this front! So are you sure they are unable to make "good decisions" from that perspective?
On the other hand, I think that people like Macron and Merkel, but also May, Truss and probably even Johnson, are more motivated by their legacy and truly would like to improve the status quo of their country - and they believe that that is their path to greatness.
So I think this sets apart the UK politicians from the "real" grifters. But at the same time I think they are also easily distinguished from people like Macron and Merkel and even Von der Leyen, because the British leaders are just so spectacularly bad at it. Starting at least with Cameron's referendum decision we have witnessed a remarkable sequence of massive unforced errors by UK politicians, the likes of which I have not seen in other "Western" countries or the EU (despite your insistence to the contrary).
Maybe "terrible governing by people who nevertheless care" captures it well.
So I guess where you see "evil" I see "haplessness" as a defining factor among UK leaders. A competence gap was my way to explain its origins.
I don’t think they’re any more or less money oriented than others or any more or less hapless.
Even Johnson was about the wealth, the Churchill allusions were a sideshow.
Bollocks to that. I hope this will be the Last Tory Government.
1) Promoting the proxy war in Ukraine and impeding diplomatic negotiations, plus pushing for the expansion of NATO, had the result of pushing gas prices through the roof, driving record inflation (and enriching a few gas suppliers). This is the primary cause for the recent economic slump. The Neoconomist magazine is not going to address this issue, however.
2) A poorly managed Brexit. Maintaining a regulatory level playing field with Europe on issues like food safety standards would have facilitated trade. If Brexit had been better focused on pushing back against neoliberalism (halting the export of manufacturing jobs, limiting the import of cheap labor, controlling cross-border capital flows at the nation-state level) it would have worked out better. However, here's what gave impetus for the push for Brexit:
3) Privatization of national resources since Thatcher, and the resulting increase in costs for basic services. Railways, electrical suppliers, etc. were all put in the hands of wealthy interests who steadily raised rates to enrich themselves, leading to increasing poverty and the destruction of the British middle class. This growing wealth gap sparked national anger, hence support for Brexit.
Face reality: the ~40-yr neoliberal program has been an absolute disaster, and should be thrown on the scrap heap of history immediately.
Taking a lead in helping the Ukrainians defend themselves seems like about the only laudable thing the UK government has done in a long time.
Imagine if a regime came to power in the USA, and it attempted to ban the Spanish language, eliminated Spanish-language versions of government documents, etc. Maybe many regions of the USA - such as much of the American Southwest - would not want to be ruled by such a government?
Similarly, how do you think the USA would respond to Chinese military bases and nuclear weapons being based in Mexico, or Russian military bases and nuclear weapons being based in Cuba (oh, we've already seen what kind of response that triggered, back in 1962-1963, wasn't it)?
Without the expansion of NATO it might have been the baltic states that were on the recieving end of a 'special operation' long before now. And they would have been much less able to defend themselves than Ukraine has been.
Pretty much every country has a 'neo-Nazi element'. Including Britain and the US. It isn't clear to me that Ukraine was any worse in this respect.
>in a government that attempted to ban the Russian language
"Ukraine’s parliament approved a law on Thursday that grants special status to the Ukrainian language and makes it mandatory for public sector workers" https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-parliament-langua...
If that what you are referring to? That doesn't sound like a ban on the Russian language to me.
Yikes, this is a terrible lie. Source: the Ukrainians in my household who were primarily Russian speaking up until February.
Your comment has no basis in reality, is just regurgitating the propaganda of a genocidal autocrat which is attempting to extinguish Ukrainians as a language.
Repeating lies like this is somewhat despicable, and though I'm trying to remain polite because of HN rules, such ridiculous propaganda that you are spouting is beyond the pale and in real life would be close to fighting words.
One of the things I've learned as an outsider while trying to distinguish between propaganda and reality vis a vis Ukraine is that the Nazis are pretty deniable.
In fact, the first audience question in this talk by historian Marci Shore speaking to a Judaic Studies audience about the war and Zelenskyy, was "where's the anti-Semitism?" (1:03:00):
https://youtu.be/VBEZqFXtxEc
And her answer is that a civic identity is being developed in the nation, separate from ethnicity.
Also quite interesting is the assertion that this lie about modern day Ukrainian neo-Nazism came from the same propaganda factory that created the Hillary Clinton pizza pedopholoa conspiracy, and led to the whole Q thing.
One of my favorite lectures I've seen in the past months, if the topic grabs you.
I still prefer NHS waiting lists to breadlines.
Like lemmings off a cliff.
I think I've never heard anybody in recent years even attempt to discuss the future of UK without simply falling back on whinging about Thatcher or Corbin or the sins of empire or god knows what. None of it relevant.
Imagine instead you are playing Civilization or Factorio, and this is day 0. Only looking forwards, how do you thrive economically in the 21st century under these current conditions with the cards you have to play?
Counterpoint: how do you avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and learning from them by pretending they never happened?
Human communication in 2022 is a train wreck, and there are plentiful artifacts of that in this very thread, in this much more intelligent than average community.
The peak decline will be when the possibility of consequences (social, physical, legal, financial…) for communicating anything reaches absolute zero.
Human communication is a great tool but must be kept in check, the goal of communication is to produce useful outcomes, not merely deliver messages and opinions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34044047
Eurasia is doing fine with stable and reliable power, continuing to both increase fossil fuel usage and build out nuclear power at the same time. Africa is ramping up. Latin America is the wild card. Most of the world is going to keep on using fossil fuels, looking at what happened to Europe as an object lesson of becoming so rich that you forget what is foundational, indulge in religious fantasies -- and commit economic suicide.
In this sense the energy sanctions, while destroying the British and German economies, are a blessing to the rest of the world, because it provides a very clear picture of what happens when you go down this road. This is why China, India, and Japan are rushing to secure long term oil and gas contracts, and many nations in Africa and Asia are joining them in prioritizing secure fossil fuel providers even as they seek to build out more nuclear in order to reduce dependence on foreign inputs. See https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/ for detailed projections out to 2050 of different regions.
Britain and Germany are the main object lessons in this regard, but it's certainly not "the world".
Maybe Europe is just rich enough to be willing to sacrifice some of that to help others by reducing their emissions (or at least not harm them as much). Maybe Europe feels a certain responsibility, having started emitting carbon in the first place
I just want to mention that actual lemmings are not doing this. This was faked by Disney employees throwing lemmings out off a cliff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Wilderness_(film)#Contro...
When explained why the host’s family were not amused. :P
Never. Trust. Disney.
The quote from Alec Guinness about Star Wars in his autobiography:
“A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The first bad penny dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.
'I would love you to do something for me,' I said.
'Anything! Anything!' the boy said rapturously.
'You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do,' I said.
'Anything, sir, anything!'
'Well,' I said, 'do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?'
He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. 'What a dreadful thing to say to a child!' she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.”
I think about that a lot when seeing the lengths many adults go to immersing themselves into these "cinematic universes" `
I'm surprised he hasn't been cancelled for "not letting people enjoy things."
The trend of comics cum cinema, and wizards lording it over muggles, which has been incessant for at least 20 years now, has been so consistent that it begs the question of why.
The basic underlying theme of all these 'cultural' products has been to instill the idea that 'little normal people' are powerless victims, and only magical special people with superpowers not available to the common man gets to save the day.
This has the been the programming for the past 20+ years. I hinted at this a few days ago in a comment regarding the strange case of "cults of personality" and "savior hero politicians" in the West.
So the meme lives on.
I remember reading for the first time about the loss of the future as a frame of reference in this article, which I thought was very interesting but it now unfortunately seems to be only available behind a paywall: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/110330889900700102 .
Anyway, I think this sort of thing happens independently of the specific vagaries of politics and economics in any country: change is taking place quickly, on a grand scale, in societies where ordinary people are enjoined to think about the course of events over which they, individually, have little control.
> For both to do so at once—as happened when, amid recent Tory convulsions, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left throwback—is a calamity.
Corbyn was only "hard-left" in the sense that he wasn't anti-labor. Lots of people like give lots of different reasons why Labor was eviscerated in the last election. The truth is, it was Brexit. Specifically, Corbyn refused to take any position on Brexit nor back a second referendum or otherwise espouse any kind of Remain position or policy.
So the 48% of voters who voted to Remain really had no one to vote for in that election and the Conservatives won in a landslide. What followed was a revolving door of PMs because the Tory vision was based on lies and unworkable. Northern Ireland seems like it will inevitably reunify with the Republic of Ireland (which I personally support in any case).
I've been skeptical that Scottish people would want a hard border with England if they vote for independence and to rejoin the EU but now I'm not so sure, particularly with a worsening economy and rising inflation. If in the next election the gap narrows and whichever party forming government needs the SNP to form a majority, a second referendum seems inevitable. Currently the Tories have a huge majority but that seems unlikely to survive.
London's position as the financial capital of Europe now seems under threat given Brexit. Lies about "saving the NHS" and protest votes about Polish immigration may well have killed the golden goose. Finance really was and is the beating heart of the UK economy.
The financialization of housing is a particularly big problem in the UK too.
One of the problems is that the UK democracy is not very strictly encoded (which Tory politicians will happily tell you is one of the wonders of the British consitution and then a whole bunch of drivel about freedom vs tyranny) - whereas e.g. Germany and France have things encoded that politicians shouldn't be allowed to do (bribery, corruption, etc.) the UK has this very weird theory that politicians should be allowed to self-police and have this ludicrous "no rules were broken" based on investigations carried out by civil servants (e.g. Sue Gray report) which in reality should be carried out by the courts (although I guess Dominic Raab has managed to blow such a big hole in the justice system that we should just be thankful that we at least still nominally posess one).
The Liberal Democrats were unabashedly pro-remain. They did terribly.
If the reason why so many remain folks didn't vote lib-dem was out of a fear of splitting the vote or that they were deemed "unelectable" due to historic reasons, well then the problem here is clearly FPTP, which induces all sorts of nonsense "strategic" voting and yields inflated false majorities.
Liz Truss... say no more. But she was chosen (by a small subset of the population I agree) but she was chosen. Some people still think her damn-the-torpedoes policies were a good idea, even after the (rapid!) economic effect was evident.
Problem is the electorate, too many of whom who duck their responsibility of thinking for themselves.
Just my take anyway.
What many observers fail to realise however is that, in our two-party system, we are usually voting for the least worst candidate rather than the ideal.
Next time around we have a rather unique situation where the 'least worst' is going to be hard to pick and many voters will, instead, simply abstain.
About 'ideal' there's no such thing for everyone. To some Truss was ideal, to others, Corbyn. They're not my ideal.
BTW I'd say Truss was clearly going to blow things badly cos she was plain stupid, but she got picked anyway. There were less-worse candidates available.
A recent exception may have have been the Con/Lib coalition but it was a union of unequal partners at the best of times.
The silent nations undistinguished fall,
And Englishman's the common name for all.
Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;
Whate'er they were, they're true-born English now.
The wonder which remains is at our pride,
To value that which all wise men deride.
For Englishmen to boast of generation,
Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation.
A true-born Englishman's a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True-Born_Englishman
It has nothing to do with multiple large ethnic groups that tend to cause tension in the long run, see Israel and Donbas for example.
Another quote:
Your Roman-Saxon-Danish-Norman English.
The great invading Norman let us know
What conquerors in after-times might do.
To ev'ry musketeer he brought to town,
He gave the lands which never were his own.
When first the English crown he did obtain,
He did not send his Dutchmen home again.
Please elaborate. As somebody from the East of Ukraine (and, incidentally, as someone who lived in Israel for some years too), I am curious what I am supposed to learn about ethnic tensions from these two examples.
There are credible arguments for clear answers on aspects of this debate, for example that fear of immigrants is almost all xenophobia, as opposed to genuine protection for labor and the poor. (I’m not saying this, but in corners of the broader conversation, you can credibly make these sort of arguments.)
But I don’t think there’s a credible argument that this whole global conversation has some pat clear answer and this article seems to just be simplistically saying we need to go back to a wholesale embrace of globalization. It’s pretty polarizing, for example calling Jeremy Corbyn (a heroic figure to some in the left) an example of Labour losing its mind. It treats Brexit as unalloyed bad. No acknowledgement I can see of why so many people felt compelled to support it.
It feels to me a hard conservative opinion presented as The Truth. Compelling I guess if you agree but given how under siege globalization is right now feels odd to read something so unabashedly one sided. Even in The Economist.
Indeed. Quote a bit of Latin in a posh accent at most British people and they seem to completely take leave of their senses. A bit like the tonic immobility you can induce in some animal by turning them over and stroking them. This is why we have had ridiculous figures like Johnson and Rees Mogg in positions of power.
I don't think this exploit was ever patched. The caveat is that it does need to be a proper English accent, e.g. RP. Nobody is impressed with a chav talking like Ali G. But if somebody on American TV is talking like David Attenborough, it boosts their perceived credibility immensely.
Conservative. Mostly talentless crooks who are looting the country as fast as they can. But are able to present a fairly united front, no matter how much they hate each other.
Labour. A party that should probably be 2 parties. A left party and a centre party, who are unable to conceal their hatred for each other. Currently led by Starmer, an apparently decent man, but of questionable vision and political instincts.
It's not a great choice. The Conservatives deserve to lose in a landslide. But a victorious Labour party will probably spend most of it's energy fighting amongst themselves. Time for proportional representation?
There is certainly animosity from the left but largely due to the ironically Stalin-esque tactics employed by Labour centrists.
I find it frankly perplexing that people can characterise the leftist elements of the Labour party as the aggressors in these circumstances.
[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/labour-files-forde-repo...
I have wondered how real the accusations of anti-semitism in the Labour party were. Is it a deliberate conflation of anti-Israel with anti-semitism by political opponents (who I assumed were Conservatives, rather than Labour)?
If we had PR it would probably be better for the Labour party to split into 2 parties. I don't see that happening under FPTP though.
This is precisely what seems to have happened. Unelected officials on the right of the Labour party appear to have been at the forefront however.
I don't doubt that there are some people in the Labour party that might harbour anti-semitic views. Those people should be removed. However, the only word I can think of to describe the reaction at the time is "Hysteria".
The thing I find most disturbing about this is the willingness of those in power at the Labour party to target at least 35 Jewish members with claims of anti-semitism[0]:
> An 82-year-old Jewish woman, who is being investigated by Labour for alleged antisemitism for the third time in less than three years, is threatening legal action against the party, claiming it has unlawfully discriminated against her based on her belief in anti-Zionism. [1]
> The Labour Party has expelled one of its most prominent Jewish members – by telling a right-wing newspaper first, and allowing a journalist to leak it. [2]
[0] https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/a-disproport...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/dec/20/jewish-woma...
[2] https://www.thecanary.co/uk/2022/12/16/labour-has-expelled-a...
The Labour party isn't immune from this sort of corruption either. A lot of them have taken money from that old scourge of the working classes, the gambling industry.
The press helps by giving people plausible deniability. Letting them pretend they didn't know. Politicians help by enacting terrible policies they know will fail just to stay in power for 6 more months. And other groups help by blaming each other (the hard left blames the centre left, right wing nationalists blame right wing free traders).
That's why people looked at the expert advice (that we would be prosperous and successful and might end up part of a world super power of we kept this EU business up) and immediately quit. That's why people were so willing to accept the bullshit and pretend it was real (like that we could leave the EU and stay in the EU).
Brexit is but a symptom of this, a big one but just one. It infects every aspect of our national identity. From the housing market to jobs to education.
Until things get a lot worse people won't be ready to try succeeding. So here we are, 5 years into a(nother) lost generation.