I know this topic is important in substance and the thing I'm about to say is an aesthetic issue, but as an American watching this unfold I have admired the Brits for the sense of heart that still seems to be present in their politics.
I'm referring to the parliamentary sessions in which, even though they're savagely roasting each other, they're doing in a way that feels somehow good-hearted and doesn't lay bare the naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA.
Also, less amusing but still inspiring, has been articulate criticism from politicians and pundits who seem to actually care about the thing they're talking about; on this side of the Atlantic, it's easy to get the sense that anyone in front of a camera has a pile of talking points on a set of index cards in their lap that they pull out to memorize during commercial breaks.
For all parliament's faults, it's still largely populated by well educated, intelligent individuals who are skilled orators and debaters. Even some of the most awful parliamentarians would easily talk circles around me in any kind of debate.
For anyone not aware, a large number of our politicians come from a background at public schools such as Eton, and read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Institutions such as these place great significance on rhetoric and adversarial debate as a method of reaching consensus. Stephen Fry's address to Oxford is worth watching, where he discusses Oscar Wilde's quote about the Oxford manner being the ability to play gracefully with ideas.
One huge downside of this system is that our politicians are widely considered out of touch and unrepresentative. The role of public schools and Oxford PPE degrees in our political system is an area of active debate within society right now.
If you are ever interested in contemporary British politics, the podcast "The Rest Is Politics" is a great place to start.
It’s the same “public” as in “public houses” (actually privately-owned premises) or “public companies” (publicly traded but still private interests). One more quirk of the English language.
The public in public houses presumably comes from the fact that they're open to the public to enter. There's obviously the implied need to buy something if you spend a length of time there, but compare to a private house (I.e. a residence) where the public does not by default have permission to enter.
Historically, pubs (which is short for "public house") originated as personal residences, whose owners (pub operators are still called "landlords") started creating income by making and selling food and beer to neighbours and strangers.
Public schools originally were the opposite of private tutoring, and often were genuinely targeting poor children who couldn't afford a tutor. Hence why so many of them have a charity status.
It’s the same thing in all cases: the meaning is in general “open to the general public”, often by opposition to what came before or what was the norm at the time (private schools, private salons, and unlisted companies respectively; in all cases you needed to get invited or accepted somehow and entry was restricted).
The issue is that language drifted and now “public” generally means “owned by the public” rather than merely “open to the public”.
The UK government also has an excellent civil servant corps. In reality it’s the civil service, that continues across government, that keeps the UK govt running. The elected officials are limited to providing high level directions.
One of the major mistakes made by Kwarteng as chancellor was firing an extremely senior civil servant which spooked not just the civil service but also the markets, because it indicated that elected officials would now be more active in running the business of government. That’s something no one really wants.
I've read some debates held between MPs in Hansard. I can't speak for any sizable portion, but what I did see on the topics I was interested in is a shockingly low form of discussion abound with fallacies, name-calling, and soliciting the opinions of unqualified individuals to inform the law.
Sure, they may run circles around you or me when it comes to debating some aspects of policy. But not around someone who's invested time and energy into a specific topic, which I think ought to be the bar for whether we consider these people 'well educated' and 'intelligent' when they are running the country supposedly on my behalf(!).
That varies a lot by party. I watched some debates during COVID to do with lockdowns. One stuck in my mind because it was to do with the accuracy of epidemiological modelling.
On the conservative side you have several politicians who had actually been programmers before they went into politics, one who worked with implementing risk models at a betting firm. They had generally read the Ferguson/ICL papers and understood why they were deeply flawed, and could talk at length about the concrete technical problems that had undermined COVID modelling, both statistical and implementation wise. For example, one MP talked about a specific paper and why it was based on circular logic, others about the validation of the underlying assumptions. And of course they asked a lot of pointed questions about how such shoddy 'science' had been allowed to dominate the government, about how the quality of scientific advice could be improved. Concrete things that they'd already thought about a lot.
Then the SNP and Labor MPs stood up. It was night and day. They were, primarily, angry that a debate was being held in the first place. Their entire spiel was "How dare the evil Tories criticize amazing SCIENTISTS who are only trying their best". One even cited the conclusions of the specific paper a Tory MP had just ripped to shreds 10 minutes earlier, apparently without realizing he was discussing the same research. None of them had any knowledge of the actual topic whatsoever. Their worldview went no deeper than: academics are brilliant, Tories are evil, why are we even wasting time debating this?
This is ultimately the reason the conservatives have such long durations in government. The quality of MP they attract seems to be much higher overall. Yes they have lots of the Oxford PPE types but overall they're less angry, way more polite and analytical, and way more likely to have concrete skills obtained outside of politics. A good example of this problem for the left came up just a few days ago where a supposedly neutral Channel 4 presenter was caught on a hot mike calling Steve Baker a "cunt". Baker - a Tory MP and one of their former programmers - just politely brushed it off, clearly the better man.
This sort of thing is routine in Labour circles and it puts voters off. Whilst some may rail against classism, ultimately most people want to see civilized debate between politicians who don't clearly want to kill each other.
> it's still largely populated by well educated, intelligent individuals who are skilled orators and debaters.
Real ill luck then to find the one educated fool who is skilled in obfuscatory rhetoric for the latest PM. Reassuring to know that the rest of parliament is filled with educated good intentions.
They wouldn't need to if the upper class twits weren't allowed to just make stuff up.
Part of the current crisis is the intra-party conflict between the "libertarian" faction that wants more immigration to boost the economy and the "nationalist" faction that wants to eliminate it to win easy votes. They got to have their cake and eat it for the last decade (people voted Brexit to both increase and to decrease immigration from India), but this caught up with them.
So with all information, they must be expert as a how to steal from common man in a more sophisticated way? I mean it just gets more advanced each decade. How they distract via what PM says or do, it is soo good that I admire now.
The book “Chums” is about how UK politics is dominated by PPE majors from Oxford (and frequently Eton or similar before).
In addition to being out of touch and classist, a main thesis of the book is that Oxonians learn “to write and speak for a living without much knowledge”. This worked well for England for hundreds of years but more recently has led to disaster where actual knowledge and expertise matter eg implications of Brexit, pandemic response, etc.
No "Public Schools" in the UK refers to a very specific subset of fee-paying schools mentioned in the Public Schools Act of 1868 (sometimes informally includes a couple of others). Private Schools are the other fee-paying schools. What a non-Brit might think of as "public" schools are actually called "state" schools in the UK
The way I explain it to American friends is that any member of the public, if they have £45,000+ per year to spare, can send their son to Eton. Simple.
Is that really true though? Money is the only factor in admission? No entrance exams? No rejections for “families we don’t want to be associated with”? No special admittances for prestigious families that don’t get charged?
If not, maybe that explanation isn’t a very helpful one.
Well, it was a joke, but to take an earnest question seriously, there are entrance exams, but they're not especially hard, particularly if you've been coached beforehand, as many of these kids will be. Theoretically no special cases, and "celebrity" would certainly be frowned on at Eton / Harrow - these are old-money families, not nouveau-riches.
The funny thing is that this entrance exam to Eton is effectively their ticket to the top, once you're there you're on easy street. Boris Johnson attended Eton, didn't achieve particularly good results but cruised into a scholarship at Oxford. I attended a decent state school and had a fellow student who had literally top grades in all the exams he'd taken (eight "1"s at Standard Grade, five "A"s at higher, five "A"s at Advanced Higher) and his application to Oxford was touch-and-go. Now, such grades do not guarantee anyone a place at Oxford as there is a lot of competition, but you can be sure that if he had two English A-levels at grade B or C[0] he wouldn't even have been considered. The application would go instantly to the bin.
This is not true of Eton (or I guess Harrow or the other public schools).
[0] - Or whatever Boris Johnson got, I can't recall exactly, they were spectacularly subpar but he's masterfully scrubbed them from the internet
I edited the comment — “celebrity” might be the wrong word, but I was thinking that they might care more about having a noble’s kid attend than the 45k, and, like you just implied, they’d reject nouveau-riches even if they had the money, especially if the riches came from a source that’s frowned upon.
So it’s not a very good joke, as it implies that there aren’t any other filters, despite their intense concern for reputation.
They need to have enough truth/insight to be funny. When your premise is that Eton only looks at cash-in-hand for admissions -- pretty much the opposite of the truth -- that doesn't qualify.
The joke would only work for schools that famously looked the other way on pretty egregious stuff if you paid them enough -- not on a school that makes a point of heavily filtering beyond the official tuition. (Sorry, "sticker price".)
Side note: It's also kinda funny how the parent expects 45k to be some kind of jaw-dropping, outrageous number, when Americans routinely pay that much for college.
The point is that the school won't reject a child because their parents don't work in a particular industry or belong to a certain religious organisation, as was sometimes the case with "private" schools previously. Both private and public schools pre-date state schools in the UK, hence the confusion over the terminology.
Our son went to a public school and my wife came back from a meeting at the school amused that she had managed to catch sight of the schools evaluation of us as parents - she scored very highly as an advocate (Scottish equivalent of a barrister) and I was scored down for being a humble computing type.
It’s supposedly meritocratic by academic ability and potential, now - about 25% of pupils receive bursaries covering a substantial percentage of the fees, but that means the other 75% require parents capable of spending £45,000 pa on their education.
Given the life-long opportunities an Eton education affords someone, and the likely backgrounds of that 75%, you’d be reasonable in suspecting “a system of perpetuated inherited privilege”.
When these schools were founded, the alternative was to have private tuition - as opposed to be taught "publicly" and live with children from other families.
(The school I went to was founded in 1513 - but is known as a private school rather than a public one because it was never a boarding school).
Back when I was a youngster, I was at a private school (council was paying for me) which was making a big deal about getting admitted to the Headmasters' Conference because that meant they could now refer to themselves as a public school.
(Although that school isn't currently in the HC, presumably because it was run by Christian Brothers and one of the teachers has since been imprisoned for inappropriate behaviour with children.)
Nine prestigious schools were investigated by Clarendon (including Merchant Taylors' School and St. Paul's School) and seven subsequently reformed by the Act: Eton, Shrewsbury, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, Westminster, and Charterhouse.
Confusingly, "Public School" refers to the most elite (and very exclusive) schools in the UK
In UK "public school" means private school, generally old ones with traditions going back to British Empire, or subscribing to a similar ideology. Training the new elites, building character, connections etc.
They do tend to be very good schools but raise issues about social mobility, elitism etc (they tend to be expensive).
And yet Americans still mog, and I mean badly mog, British at actual competitive debate.
This is true both in their inferior form of "British Parliamentery debate" as well as the various American styles, such as Lincoln Douglas, Policy, or Public Forum.
This doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the culture of parliament, and I must confess I don't know a huge amount about competitive debate.
Naturally the most obvious explanation for the US beating the UK at something is that the US population is 5x ours. Another explanation is that outside of public schools and Russel Group universities, we don't actually have much of a culture of competitive debating or debating societies any more. None of the schools I went to had a debate club, despite being relatively good schools, and I never heard of any debate competition being held.
From what I've seen from US competitive debate, it seems to be surprisingly popular with minority students and seems to use a style of rhetoric and scoring that I'm completely unfamiliar with - seemingly sometimes rewarding speed or Gish galloping. Here, the debates that most people would be familiar with are most commonly judged by their ability to convince the audience and are more popular with well educated, upper middle class people.
I've never seen or heard of a debate like the one in Peter Schiff's youtube channel there, and it is pretty obviously being shared on social media for emotional effect.
I agree; the video in the comment above yours was edited specifically to focus hate on a couple of high school students.
While I have to admit I'm not a fan of that debate style, if you want to know the context behind it, there's an episode of Radiolab on the topic: https://radiolab.org/episodes/debatable
The short version is that it seems to have been a response and rebellion to what was already an arguably ridiculous style of competitive "debating": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0
You'd think that in a community of "hackers" that should value actual skepticism and subversion that people wouldn't fall so easily for obvious propaganda.
Defending their performance by arguing that it was rebellion or satire is pretty much admitting that the debate style (fast debating, AKA spreading [1]) is ridiculous and deserves rebellion or satire.
And if this was an intentionally extreme example meant to demonstrate problems with the format, then sharing it and citing it here seems entirely appropriate and even expected.
So, this was clearly racist misinterpretation from the context, but I still didn't understand enough to know exactly why it was racist misinterpretation and was curious.
For anyone else curious, this is maybe a good read:
It starts with the knee-jerk conservative anti-woke reaction, which peaks here:
> A reader in the comments suggests that these students should listen to MLK’s oratory and take a lesson. Absolutely. King was a master of rhetoric. That is the way to change minds. The teachers who are instructing these kids in this sort of thing are guilty of intellectual abuse, as are the CEDA officials who reward it.
But the updates after that, explain what is really going on:
> Rod, this post needs a serious correction. While that debate was ridiculous, it is entirely typical of what college “cross examination” debating has been for decades. The trend has been for (mostly white) debaters to talk about nuclear war in a debate about education policy, the environment in a debate about military policy, post structuralism pretty much whenever they feel like it, etc. etc. It’s a ridiculous form of debate but it isn’t some weird black thing. The reason these black students are debating like this is that they are competing, in a league with teams from schools like Harvard and Yale, that rewards this style of debate.
And the author is slightly magnanimous in his apology:
> UPDATE.3: To be perfectly clear, I concede that I was wrong to say that this team broke the rules of debate by refusing to address the topic, instead choosing to rant about racism, and to say that the woman who looked as if she were having a psychotic break (which she does, to the untrained eye) was doing anything wrong. I learned from readers that the Towson team’s bizarre display is actually well within the rules and the custom of competitive debate. So, congratulations to them, I guess. I learned something new today: Competitive debate is a completely insane phenomenon.
I don’t know much about UK politics but why can’t you guys get Kemi Badenoch elected? She is younger and did not go to Oxford. Try something different. Maybe Oxford is overrated:)
Serious means impotent? You guys voted for brexit and that would put brexiters with the majority/centre. Plus this isn’t general election to the best of my understanding. Therefore, no need to appeal to leftists at all.
> You guys voted for brexit and that would put brexiters with the majority/centre.
The brexit vote passed with a very slim majority, which is why it's still controversial here.
It's also a cross spectrum issue, i.e. not of the left or the right.
Personally, I would like to see our politics become more centred and pragmatic again.
I don't want anyone like either Jeremy Corbyn or Jacob Rees-Mogg near the levers of power. Both seem determined to destroy things of value for the sake for the sake of the personal political dogmas.
If wokeness is the biggest problem a politician sees at the moment (which is the implication if that's the platform they're running on), then no - they are not serious.
Of cause wokeness is the biggest issue because it causes paralysis of governance. No one can get anything done when non-issues or issues with no solutions are prioritised
In context of the parent article, UK politics and the Tory party that's been in power for a while now: Would you say that "wokeness causing paralysis of governance" is their biggest problem to tackle right now?
Because, on the face of it, that viewpoint seems to be simply deranged.
Not being anti-woke does not make someone woke. There’s a whole bunch of people who think both sides range from silly to dangerous and would rather solve comparatively inconsequential issues like the economy/cost of life/global warming.
The principles are very serious; the implementation suffers from the usual risk of fighting a wrong in one direction with another wrong in the opposite direction.
I still think that woke is a lot better than not woke, although they sometimes would need a reality check, which ultimately would help a lot the cause.
She's on the right wing of the ring wing party in the UK, so she's likely not a good candidate for a general election where you need at least some centerist support. This is likely why Labour are doing well with Kier Starmer as he's palitable enough for modorate Tories to vote for.
it's worse than that, if you want to appeal to "the right wing of the ring wing party in the UK", then being either a woman or a person of colour is a disadvantage with that specific group of voters, more so than with the general UK voting public.
> they're doing in a way that feels somehow good-hearted and doesn't lay bare the naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA
It's nice that it looks this way, but the different parties and their supporters in the UK absolutely hate each other. Front-bench party members now routinely and openly using words like 'scum' and 'detest' to talk about their colleagues on the other side. I don't think US politics is quite that openly aggressive and hostile.
In the past few years we've had politicians on both sides killed in politically motivated attacks. I think that's a worse tally than the US as well.
I would say that the hate between parties is not nearly as strong as the hate within parties, often veiled entirely or hidden in extremely polite language. After all, the other party is opposition, your own party is competition.
I remember Jo Cox, who was the conservative who got killed?
The death of Jo Cox wasn't a party political matter, it was a US-style radicalized loner.
A lot of it is theatre. For example keir starmer congratulating boris on the birth of his child, i think, and sounding sincere. Then pretty much in the same breath, he lashes out at him on some policy or scandal. English people banter a lot more then americans, so its not taken personally.
Many of the politicians insulting each other in the chamber are on quite good terms outside of it. There are exceptions, of course, and the conduct of certain MPs can be troublesome - but it is broadly good natured. If you watch closely during PMQs, you can even see the adversarial act breaking from time to time when one of them gets in a good joke about the other.
Politicians being killed is clearly unacceptable and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of even very politically partisan people in this country would strongly condemn any kind of violence. However, we don't routinely have much security for MPs when they are at their constituency office, so it only takes one nutter to do something. If anything, it's sadly surprising that it doesn't happen more often.
> Many of the politicians insulting each other in the chamber are on quite good terms outside of it.
At least up until recently, this was true in the US too. On camera, in front of a microphone, and they say the crappiest things about one another. Then a few minutes later they're shaking hands, slapping backs, and laughing about the whole thing. Hasn't even been that long since the President schmoozed with politicians from both parties as he made his way to the podium for the State of the Union. Now it's "YOU LIE!"
A cursory glance at the various Wikipedia lists of politicians assassinated in either country rebuts your last point.
US political discourse is vastly more hostile than you give it credit for, as well. Veiled death threats (shooting pictures of opponents, burning in effigy, etc.) are increasingly common, particularly on the conservative side.
In your reckoning, you ignore the difference in access to politicians. UK MPs have weekly 'surgeries' where any constituent discuss issues one on one. It's somewhat harder to meet a representative one on one in the States.
The UK gets it right. Half again as many representatives as the US, while having a fifth of the population. So each MP has about 100K citizens they represent, versus each representative in the US that has more like 750K.
Quite. Jo Cox, David Amess and Andrew Pennington (a local
councillor defending MP Nigel Jones) were all murdered at surgeries. Stephen Timms also survived an attempted murder by stabbing.
> In the past few years we've had politicians on both sides killed in politically motivated attacks. I think that's a worse tally than the US as well. (emphasis added)
Looking from the outside, I think US political discourse IS far more hostile.
Britain won't accept things like Politicians being harassed, or one politician calling for other politicians to be harassed (and that's before we even get to anything Trump related).
And the amount of references I see to "civil war" when wandering across anything relating to US politics (i.e. not zero) is disturbing.
There was an attempted mass shooting at the Republican practice for the Congressional baseball game back in 2017 [0] that was a politically motivated domestic terrorist attack (per the FBI's report on the incident in 2021). If Steve Scalise (the house GOP whip who was shot that day) hadn't been there with his security detail, a couple dozen Republicans would have likely died that day including Senator Rand Paul and future Florida governor (and the current leading 2024 presidential candidate not named Trump or Biden) Ron DeSantis.
We've had 4 presidents assassinated in our history (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy) and there were attempts on the lives of at least 3 more while they were president or president-elect (Jackson, FDR, Reagan). There have also been a significant number of attempts on the life of presidential candidates (Huey Long and RFK were assassinated, George Wallace was shot and paralyzed) We also don't know where Flight 93 would have gone on 9/11 if the heroes on board hadn't charged the cockpit and crashed the plane in a Pennsylvania field instead of somewhere in DC. The reason why we haven't had many politicians assassinated lately is largely good luck but also because we now have Secret Service protection for all major presidential candidates.
Words like "scum" and "detest" are also not that different from the way people speak about political opponents here. Every presidential election for at least the past 20 years has involved people throwing words like "socialist", "communist", "fascist" and "theocrat" around to describe the other party's presidential candidate even when those candidates were centrists. There's always alarmist insinuations that we're going to turn into the USSR or Nazi Germany if the wrong political party wins the next election. In reality, the US will be largely the same but always getting slightly worse no matter which party wins the election. The difference between the donkeys and the elephants is that one of them makes things worse faster than the other (but people don't agree which is the lesser evil). I imagine Labour and Tory are probably the same way in the UK (although Truss did seem to be especially terrible at her job even compared to her predecessors).
Nicola Sturgeon said that she detests the Tories. her own party (the Scottish National Party, whose central goal is Scottish independence) distanced themselves from those comments. Labour are not saying things like this. the Lib Dems are not saying things like this. and the Tories themselves aren’t saying things like this either
this is the exception not the rule, and as evidence of this, it’s something that’s been turned over and over in the (especially right-wing) media for weeks now
the two MPs killed were killed by Islamic and right-wing extremists, respectively. this has no bearing on how the main parties treat each other
> Tories themselves aren’t saying things like this either
Maybe not, but pretending they are better while ignoring the homophobia, racism, sexism and offensive class warfare from the like of Boris Johnson seems disingenuous.
It's not disingenuous it's just not related to those issues. You can talk about the government having a sense of decorum without addressing policy issues.
The fact is that Johnson was ousted by his own party, as was Truss. That would never happen in the US because it's party before everything.
>the Labour leader distanced himself from her words
you’ve cherrypicked two examples that were disregarded by the parties as a whole, then discussed ad nauseam in the media. this is not evidence of anything
I don't understand this response - it's ok for people in one party to say whatever they want and it doesn't count because someone else 'distances' themselves? It was still said - the damage is still done to the level of civility and more hatred was thrown into the fire.
In your first comment you said you thought the right-wing party weren't talking like this!
No I think the problem is just as bad across all parties - hence those recent examples from a couple of moderate left-wing party members as well.
That's the worst of it - the civility and willingness to work together is down across the board so I can't see a change of government improving it either.
each of the examples you’ve given were and currently are being endlessly rerun and reran in the media. condemned by allies and discussed ad nauseum. this is hardly routine, normalised behaviour you can point to and say “this is representative of the whole”
Let's be clear here: there was a left-winger killed for trying to make the country a better place, and a right-winger killed by an ISIS sympathiser (literally no reason to think this MP was targeted for his party)
It does, but the comment made it sound as if multiple MPs on different sides were targeted because of their political affiliations. In reality, only one was. I just felt that needed to be clarified.
One of my favorite C-Span shows was The Prime Minister's Questions[0].
Don't mess with British politicians. Even the grumpiest old dogs can savage most American politicians, as the folks that tried roasting Galloway found out[1].
No, her job was to guide the nation forward. She started by putting forward policies that were complete nonstarters including a tax break for the rich that stunk up the whole room something awful. Leaning this way or that is one thing, but getting the math completely wrong is another.
I have to commend you, the testimony is hilarious to watch and succors a distant memory of the "mission accomplished" era of our dear George W Bush. This show trial if anything was a teachable moment for a party which --at the time-- had grown quite comfortable crushing any and all dissent during the Iraq war.
the great irony here is that Galloway left an innocent man, only to watch the US casually endorse its private contractors as they bribe taliban warlords for safe passage in Afghanistan in 2010.
I don't think you should caveat that by saying it's "just aesthetic". It's at the heart of politics - how you say something carries a great deal of meaning, not just the words themselves. Witness the difficulty of good written communication. Unfortunately the tone in the UK is worse than it was, lead by a good dose of unhinged rubbish on social media: https://twitter.com/flashboy/status/1582784766222684160
It's not just social media, remember when the Daily Mail was complaining about an "openly gay, ex-olympic fencer" being allowed to rule on a Brexit case (as if being gay, openly or not, or an ex-olympic athlete has ever stopped people from being a) competent and fair judges or b) right-wing nutters)
My impression is that British politics are more resentful, but that you don't see it the way you do in the US because the structure of the system is different.
In Britain the PM is chosen by the party in power so you don't get the divided government situations you see in the US where usually the Democrats control some of (1) the Presidency, (2) the Senate, (3) the House of Representatives and the Republicans control others. Considering the veto power of the President and the filibuster rule in the Senate that can be a formula for gridlock.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both represented a move to the right but when Thatcher was in power she had no effective opposition while any legislation that passed in the 1980s was a compromise between Reagan in the US and Tip O'Neill and I think between having a good conservative and a good liberal, we got a lot of good legislation in the 1980s (we got a new Clean Air Act in that time frame, for instance.)
As a result there was a lot of resentment towards Thatcher from Labor advocates who felt completely shut out, so some sang "Ding Dong the Wicked Witch is Dead" when Thatcher died
> In Britain the PM is chosen by the party in power so you don't get the divided government situations
The UK government has been in utter turmoil for a long time now and it’s at its worst right now. This resignation marks a new low in self destructive politics and posturing.
I know you are referring to a different type of political impasse, but the chaos that is present in the UK is not a lot better than what the US system seems to see so regularly.
It's a different kind of turmoil than we have in the US.
I subscribe to The Economist which would like to support the Tories but has had nothing but contempt for Teresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
Some people say that the Democrats in the US are like the losers in professional wrestling but the complete incompetence and inability of Labor to get elected makes it possible for conservatives to get elected by pandering to a particular segment of the population. Voters have no interest in talk about redistribution if they think they think the people who talk about redistribution push policies that will leave people with nothing to redistribute. Jeremy Corbin did nothing to push back on the perception that he wanted to turn the UK into Cuba, and by not providing a viable alternative the Tories became useless. Corbin hoped that the fall of the Tories would lead to the rise of Labor but oddly it doesn't work that way.
> It's a different kind of turmoil than we have in the US.
100%.
The inability of Labour to make headway at this time is so depressing.
The common ground between the UK and the US is the inability to find and promote leaders with a combination of age, charisma and ability on their side.
If their best are those elected, the future is grim.
Labour has nobody to blame but themselves. They walked the exact same path that democrats did in the US—abandoning their working class base in favor of college educated liberals. The error in that approach became clearer more quickly for them because they don’t have (as much) the added overlay of racial sectarianism to keep working class minorities voting for them.
Agree 100%. IMO abandoning the working class is by far the stupidest thing the Democratic Party has done in recent memory. And even now, as it should be becoming crystal clear, they still don't seem to have the ability for introspection. They keep thinking they should be winning handily, and on the merits this is a plausible argument, but they really have a hard time with culture. I find it very frustrating, because I am pretty sympathetic to having the US become a modern social democracy like some Western European nations, but our politicians seem to focus on culture wars instead. When your party can have basically all of the ideas and the other party still succeeds dramatically by just saying they hate you, it's time to ask why.
The problem is, with what platform are you gone capture those working class people. You can't just win on the rural working class. You need to convince deserve urban working and upper class citizens.
In the US, if you want to go after the rural working class then you better be talking correct about abortion and guns otherwise you will get nowhere.
Making abortion an effective wedge issue was an excellent strategy by the GOP, no doubt. And continuing to pursue gun control is an unforced error on the part of the Democrats (though they eased off quite a bit on that starting with Obama, to be fair).
IMO the Democrats would have been better off focusing most of their effort on something like single payer health care, along with minimum wage and housing affordability, things like that. Those are issues that are ostensibly part of the party platform but are not high priorities.
The GOP didn't so much make abortion a wedge issue as much as evangelicals captured a big chunk of the party's lame duck platform during the various positional realignments of the 60s-80s. The GOP, by almost sheer luck, managed to stumble in to an apathetic voter block, and came out with one of the strongest, most long lived cores of voters out there.
The real strategic leadership of that block mostly died off in the 2000's though, leaving evangelicals headless and politically adrift. These days most seem to have reverted back to being somewhat apathetic in the positive direction, and aside from abortion, are voting completely based on the products out outrage culture.
> Making abortion an effective wedge issue was an excellent strategy by the GOP, no doubt.
Calling abortion a “wedge issue” leads you to thinking about it the wrong way. Sure, democrats say abortion is an unimportant distraction the GOP likes to trot out—but only insofar as everyone unilaterally accepts their position on it. They certainly didn’t treat it that way when Roe was repealed.
There’s no “wedge issues.” The electorate cares about what it cares about. Parties need to triangulation on positions that keep their coalition together, and avoid positions that allow the other party to divide their coalition. It’s just math.
Thinking your political opponents are duped by propaganda just means you lack the ability to think outside your bubble and understand people who have different values and priorities. Certainly abortion views are not the result of GOP propaganda, seeing as how it’s illegal in two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the subject of careful compromises in all but a few liberal democracies. (Views on immigration, same sex marriage, multiculturalism, etc., aren’t the product of “propaganda” either. Most people in my home country of Bangladesh would agree with the GOP on all those issues—especially if the shoe were on the other foot and you were talking about e.g. hearing people speak foreign languages in Dhaka—but they certainly don’t have positive views of the GOP itself.)
This myopia is a great shortcoming of democrats (of the last 20 years—the party used to be savvier in the past), because it leads them to believe that politics is about lecturing and badgering, instead of building coalitions of people who agree more than they disagree.
> seeing as how it’s illegal in two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa
List of countries with same or more restrictive laws for abortion when compared with Texas abortion laws.
Europe - None
Asia - Afghanistan, iraq, syria, Yemen, Burma, Papua new Guinea, Bangladesh
Africa - Somalia, Mali, Malawi, south Sudan, Congo, Niger, Nigeria, Madagascar.
America - Venezuela, Haiti, Suriname, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, tiny Caribbean islands.
Your use of the phrase "seeing as how it’s illegal in two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa" would have been a great example of propaganda, especially considering that no country in Europe is as restrictive as Texas. Especially, leading with "Europe,..." instead of leading with " barely 2 dozen non European countries across the 200+ countries in the world".
But as we all know wedge issues and propaganda don't exist. So, my previous paragraph can actually be deleted because it is a non-sequitur.
Abortion and guns are different. Many rural voters own guns and personally feel a loss from gun control. The average rural voter has a basically libertarian bent and would probably be pretty happy with a truce that they are left alone about guns and women are left alone about abortion.
Like it or not the electoral map favors rural voters, Democrats can recruit more urban voters and it will make no difference for winning seats. If Democrats gave up 5% of their urban votes in exchange for 3% of the rural votes the Republicans would find themselves in the wilderness.
Depends on how those votes are distributed, in both directions, but I doubt either would make a huge difference. One thing to remember is that rural areas are less red than cities are blue. A 75/35 split seems to be the most common rural distribution, whereas many city districts are 90% dem with the GOP struggling to outperform the greens or libertarians.
The GOP stands to gain nothing in the urban cores outside of a few southern cities and Texan cities, but they currently live for the suburban fight. The Dems biggest struggle out in the sticks is less that they can't field any candidate that isn't an 80 year old union man or a local youngin' fresh out of college who says all the wrong things (and is thus unelectable).
New York City was 80/20, with Trump making significant gains in heavily immigrant neighborhoods: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/20/us/politics/e.... Trump won 26% in LA County. He ran within 7% of Biden in Miami-Dade County. The GOP absolutely has room to grow among working class Hispanics and Asians in cities.
You’ve got it backward. You do it by not talking about abortion (and other things that divide your coalition of urban liberals and working class people). “Celebrate your abortion” isn’t helping democrats with my Bangladeshi immigrant family in Queens either.
The people you’ll lose doing that are the Rockefeller republicans—Silicon Valley and Westchester types. And that’s fine.
I think you need to read more into Thatcher and what happened under her to understand why some sections of society reacted like this.
I don't know a huge amount about Regan, but I doubt you can really compare them.
Britain in the late 70s and early 80s had huge issues which Thatcher addressed, but in hugely contentious ways, in some cases destroying entire industries and their communities.
The structural impact of some choices she made are still present in British society even now, decades later.
I've got three books about Thatcher I am reading right now.
To interpret Thatcher you need to know about the labor unrest in the UK in the 1970s. Back then there seemed to always be a strike in some chokepoint industry (Coal mining, trucking) that threw the rest of the economy into chaos, almost like a general strike. This gets talked about it in this song
A lot of people saw the labor movement as a big problem, thus Thatcher was in position to make a big crackdown against it. I occasionally meet an Americans who is opposed to unions, but there never was a time when a reasonable person could say unions were bringing the US economy to its knees.
Reagan had an impact of moving the US to the right a lot like Thatcher did, but not so much.
The Democrats largely accepted Reagan's viewpoint because it was perceived to work. Clinton accepted Reaganism just as Blair accepted Thatcherism, in fact both politicians were able to outdo their predecessors because on the other side of the aisle they were able to neutralize any possible opposition and normalize the slogan "there is no alternative".
Although Barack Obama introduced almost universal healthcare but implemented the public-private partnership plan that Nixon offered in 1974... One that almost works as a policy, but does great damage to institutional legitimacy because it looks like another case of regulatory capture and ultimately contributes to the nation becoming ungovernable.
Inflation always has an element of circularity in the explanations of it.
There's no doubt that workers would like to get a 10% raise in a year when there is 10% inflation. Since labor is a substantial input into the cost of services, it also seems like a plan to have at least 10% inflation next year.
The problem with many of those unions was just that they depended on industry that no rational country could have continued to run forever. Like are you seriously going to just continue to mine coal forever, in mines that have been active for 100s of years and were just losing money.
The leader of the coal miners union didn't even fight for coal minor wages, he was talking actually revolution.
Some privatizations were sensible, lets remember that Nordics, Switzerland and so on also did that and you can do it well depending on the situation. But they are complex issues that you need to consider rationally on what you want to do.
The British government rail was probably to big, doing to many things and selling part of that and splitting it up and opening it up to some competition is sensible.
In my opinion labor in the 1950/1960 just did poorly, overly focus on some of their socialist hangups rather then making smart policy. Like Britain had debt after the war for sure, but its not like it was bombed to the ground (the Blitz was minor compared what most countries experienced), you have a rebuilding Europe. Britain had a world class aircraft industry, advanced nuclear, building lots of cars, world leading and so and so. Its had a great good electronics sector as well. Being among the best in the world in almost every major technology.
And somehow that couldn't be leveraged into much economic success. You have terrible growth and massive inflation just 20 year later. Something did go wrong, and you can't blame the conservatives. Even when they were in power for period they only slightly slow down the agenda.
To be sure, good things were done in that period as well it certainty wasn't all bad but its hard to look at pre-Tracher Britain and be overly impressed.
and the low cost of gas of Natural gas in the US and UK, the latter because of the discovery of petroleum in the North Sea. The same economic steamroller pushed "pause" on nuclear energy.
Today we see coal miners in the US who are empowered by the "one state, two votes" structure of the Senate to keep the industry alive despite it being basically uneconomic as well as environmentally unsound, the difference is this time the coal miners are supported by the right instead of the left.
Those who hate Thatcher today aren't so much pining away for the way things used to be but instead for the loss of their dreams for how they think things could have been.
Thatcher's most memorable slogan was "There is no alternative" and it's that sense that the realm of the possible in politics shrunk dramatically is why people have a sense of loss. (I'm amused that both Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton liked that slogan too.)
It's hard to get a clear view on these things within your own country, my advice would be to compare Reagan, Thatcher and fascist military dictator Pinochet.
One of them killed lots of people, and still gets praised today as making their country richer, when the evidence suggests they didn't. Which wouldn't really justify the deaths even if true. Sorry, did I say one of them, all of them, I meant all of them. Seems easier to spot that when it's not your country though.
It's the American Way. Reduce the cost of social services, in the short term, by making them very difficult to apply for.
Once I heard Newt Gingrich talk vaguely that high deductible plans and health savings accounts (a core idea of Obamacare) would be a good "free market" solution but it strikes me as another one of those penny wise and pound foolish ideas.
If people don't buy the $200 a month Asthma inhaler which high deductible plans make them pay for themselves they might have 2 hospitalizations a year which cost $15,000 a piece... which high deductible plans will pay for. High deductible plans seem to be a way to maximize the costs of chronic disease like diabetes.
The originally introduced plan was nearly a mirror of what is currently law in Massachusetts which does cover everyone. As put in place by a Republican Governor, no less. It is only during long and bad faith negotiations that the Affordable Care Act became the extremely limited and optional alternative that we now live with.
> The structural impact of some choices she made are still present in British society even now, decades later.
Financial impact too; oil company privatisations and tax cuts which offset the income from the oil fields deprived the UK of a sovereign wealth fund equivalent to Norway's (although likely not as large, due to variations in the price of oil).
> Both nations, too, now, are nasty places. They feel so markedly different than the great social democracies of Western Europe and Canada. The atmosphere and mood are ones of constant, omnipresent hostility — to everyone, from everyone
What’s incredible to me is how honestly they talk about the facts on the ground. Truss admitted that the tax cuts were a bad idea in an inflationary environment and taxes would go up. American politicians would have lied and said “taxes will go up to curb inflation but they’ll go down also and you won’t pay more in taxes.”
They lie out of their arses. She also tried claiming that revoking a law limiting the bonuses that bankers could get (which was instated after the '08 crash...) would help poor people.
I’m sorry if this is really how you feel about US politics but there is still healthy debate to be had (and that people are having) regardless of those who are “shouting the loudest”.
The media veneer around US politics is just that. If anything, it’s helped unearth (some would say legitimize) things that have always been here. I’d rather it be like it is than festering under the surface.
There’s a lot of people “saying the quiet thing out loud” on both sides that needs to be fully processed by the American people, no matter how polarizing.
>even though they're savagely roasting each other, they're doing in a way that feels somehow good-hearted and doesn't lay bare the naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA.
The difference is they all went to the same schools together.
Makes close to zero difference who runs the country, because once you’ve lived under both sides it’s the same thing.
That's not even remotely true. The Leader of the Opposition (Keir Starmer) went to Reigate, then to Leeds University. Gordon Brown went to Edinburgh University, Jeremy Corbyn went to North London Poly.
Only Ed Milliband and Tony Blair went to Oxford, which is where (of the Conservative Party): David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Liz Truss went.
Saying "living under both sides is the same thing" is also observably false, as anyone raised under the Labour governments of 1997 to 2010 can attest and compare to the Conservative governments since.
I wasn't trying to do an "epic own" and it sounds like you're implying I'm a Tory which is very funny :)
edit: oh lol I get it now, in the post I replied to you're doing a very literal interpretation of "they all went to the same schools" and refusing to interpret this as it's very clearly intended (that a huge amount of MPs went to a couple of schools)
Man I really do not care where American politicians go to school. But it sounds like you're not aware of the really outsized representation that Oxford graduates of PPE have in UK politics: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/23/ppe-oxford...
30% of our House went to a top 100 university which isn't necessarily saying much - that list includes many state universities and I'd say that's a perfectly appropriate number.
20% of the British Parliament went to Oxbridge alone.
Looking at American politics from the outside, I feel like (in most cases), you're lucky if your elected representatives know how to spell the names of common vegetables and know that the US doesn't share a border with Afghanistan.
Eh, that's true to an extent, especially in the House and double especially in state government, but don't take John Oliver or Daily Show as completely representative. Watching those shows, you'd probably never know, for example, that Ron DeSantis, who is currently one of the Republican frontrunners for 2024, went to Yale and Harvard Law School.
Postgraduate degrees are VERY different from undergraduate degrees, typically being a year long and being a lot less integrated into the "student lifestyle." Where you spend your time as an undergrad is a lot more impactful on who you interact with and how your worldview is formed than the time you may spend as a postgrad.
He has a degree from Oxford. Which you left out to make your side look better.
I think it's time to look in the mirror and see that your preconceptions and biases are making you overlook reality. Like.. obvious reality. Reality that's so obvious it's in Wikipedia info boxes.
The experience of doing a postgraduate degree is so far away from the experience of studying at Oxford as an undergraduate that they may as well be different universities. Different demographic makeup (much fewer private school kids, much more international students), different teaching methods (no training in 'blagging' a 1:1 tutorial with minimal reading, a very transferable skill to politics) and no time to hack around at the Union or make a name in one of the political clubs.
Honestly, the problem isn't even with all Oxford undergraduate degrees, just a slice of PPE and adjacent students who are vastly overrepresented in politics.
(My background: Leeds BA, Oxford MSc/DPhil. Don't like Starmer, though, despite our similar university choices...)
> The difference is they all went to the same schools together.
There's a number of components to the sentence I responded to:
> same schools
and
> together
An undergrad studying PPE and postgrad studying Law are not "going to Oxford together." Instead of trying to uncover some insidious bias on my end, I'd strongly recommend doing more than a surface level scan of Wikipedia pages to "win the argument," so to speak.
The population of the UK is about 67 million. The House of Commons is the major legislative body and it is comprised of 650 members.
That's roughly 1 member per 100,000 people. You know your member. Parliament is dissolved every 5 years. So elections are pretty regular, but not overwhelming.
There's a House of Lords, but they seem to have far less power. The work of Parliament gets done in the Commons.
The main legislative body of the US is Congress, comprising of the Senate and the House of Representatives. There are 100 Senators and 435 Representatives. The US has roughly 330 million people. So about 5 times the population being represented by more than 100 fewer people.
Senators are a little weird. They serve for 6 years but about a third of them are up for election every two years. And never two from the same state. So a Senator is either on Cycle 1, Cycle 2, or Cycle 3. So every 2 to 4 years, a state gets to choose one person to represent the entire state in one of the houses of Congress.
Then for Representatives, all of them are up for reelection every two years. As soon as they are sworn in, they're already thinking about reelection. And the number of representatives are set by the Census taken every 10 years. Right now, California has 53 representatives for 39 million people. About half the population of the UK, but being represented by under a tenth.
So in the US, politicians are more akin to personalities than actual people. We essentially elect brands, not people.
I personally have become a fan of the Wyoming Rule for the House. That seems fair without getting into crazy sizes.
I mean, if the US had representation in the same proportion as the UK, they'd have roughly 3300 representatives. The town I grew up currently has a population of 1500. So I can see why we wouldn't do that.
That’s not the problem though.
Having an elected member represent a larger number of people is fine. However having a rural candidate represent less voters than an urban candidate is terrible.
Wherever you vote it should be worth the same.
The system hasn’t kept pace with demographic changes.
Look past the veneer and you'll see plenty of ugliness in UK politics -- just a few days ago the (now former) Home Secretary was snarling about her plans to fit up "Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati" with ankle monitors and house arrests. Backsliding into invective, authoritarianism, and radicalism seems to be a commonality across Western democracies these days.
Circa 2014, George Mitchell (D-Maine), Bob Dole (R-Kan.), Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) were known to be IRL friends. But that was back then. These days I think the hatred is more real than not.
I think part of it is that we're in the political equivalent of "total war" -- if a politician were seen as being friendly with political opponents they would probably be destroyed in primaries by party rivals using it as red meat for how they were "soft" or an "x in name only" or some similar idiocy.
See for example the criticism of Ellen's friendship with George W Bush.
Though interestingly the Obamas and Clintons don't get the same criticism for that, apart from occasionally being held up to suggest the centre left wing of the democrats isn't that different from the old bush-era republicans
As a counterpoint, a recently released via FOIA transcript of Obama to reporters in the last days of his presidency:
Obama: Privately, that's not -- [Trump's] interactions with me are very different than they are with
the public, or, for that matter, interactions with Barack Obama, the distant figure. He's very polite to me, and has not stopped being so. I think where he sees a vulnerability he goes after it and he takes advantage of it.
A fair amount of it is still kayfabe to the pros (the problem is, it isn't to the public).
I think it started as the latter, but the ideology kind’ve got away from itself and slowly manifested into reality as voters demanded more and more extreme positions from politicians to consider them “authentic.”
> The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you've cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society.
I think with the older politicians, who have been in office for a while, it might be more kayfabe. But so many of those politicians have retired, and have been replaced with newer members who don't have personal relationships with other members, it's probably real hatred.
It used to be the latter until the marks started getting elected. For the congressional boomers (Pelosi, McConnel et al), it's a grift. For the young crowd (AOC, Crenshaw, etc), it's a mission.
This - the problem with Truss was that she was a "true believer" in total garbage, so as soon as she tried to turn it into policy it blew up. Johnson's skill was in talking a lot and not delivering any policy.
Let's also be clear the ideas were right-wing libertarian market fundamentalism, fomented through the shady 55 Tufton Street establishment, likely funded by American billionaire money.
The market fundamentally rejecting the ideas of the market fundamentalists would be hilarious, if it wasn't happening to us.
Fellow American, asking earnestly - are both examples just products of the media environment of their respective countries? Does the UK still have popular media outlets that aren't solely pushing corporate agendas?
I wonder if district gerrymandering plays a role in the US. When your districts become packed to the extent that it's safely owned by one party, the only risk to an elected official's seat is a primary from a more extreme candidate. So instead of finding compromise to maximize your general appeal, you would be motivated to embrace extreme ideas and promote those on TV/social media. More elected officials doing this gives license to everyone to embrace the extremes, even if they're not very popular.
It typically has no shareholders and its powers are defined by the Act of Parliament which creates it, and may be modified by later legislation. [...] The phrase is not used to describe a company which operates as a conventional shareholder-owned company registered under the Companies Acts.
I think after seeing that all this got worse after Win Red/Act Blue donations displaced corporate support, trying to blame “corporate agendas” for polarization is willful blindness.
I think the BBC still counts, though I left the country in 2018 and most of my subsequent experience of the BBC has been the satirical news quizzes "Have I Got News For You", "Mock The Week" (TV), and "The News Quiz" (radio/podcast).
The BBC, at least in the last few years, has definitely been, if not taken over, strongly guided by the Tories (because they hold the purse strings, control over appointments, etc. and are vocal about this whenever the BBC annoy them.)
> How many right wing comedians get on to panel shows?
I'd counter that with how many right wing comedians could be funny on general-public-friendly panel shows absent the usual "my pronouns are ..." / "I identify as ..." jokes?
The UK doesn't quite have the same level of TV polarization. We can argue exactly how right-wing the BBC is, but the crucial thing is that most people are watching the same news. There isn't really a UK Fox daily hate channel. GBNews was explicitly trying to be that, and has completely died in the ratings.
The UK press is pretty far right and a major element of how we got to this mess, though.
I used to be utterly aghast at UK parliamentary behavior (as seen on CSpan or CNN I suppose), and thankful that the USA did not behave this way. So I guess that dates me, because we are a toxic and shaming embarrassment now, even in comparison. Pity.
> naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA
The question I have is which came first, in the US? Regular citizens in the US harbor the same naked resentment and hatred for their fellow Americans based solely on political affiliation. We used to hide it better, especially around family, but that barrier has mostly been broken down too. Did our politicians turn us this way? Or did we just elect politicians that say the things we want to say? Did the news media whip up this resentment with biased stories, or did we voluntarily filter bubble our way into incentivizing that behavior?
How do you watch that video and think it's a sign that things are going well? That's idiocracy level of discourse. My take away from that video is that the UK had much more serious problems than I realized.
I have spent very little time (maybe a couple months in my whole life) in the UK, but when I go it definitely feels to me like Britons feel a much keener sense of the Commons there than we do here in the US.
It's not just you. It's how what you do affects other people. This is a better way to live than the "I got mine, fuck you" which seems more common in the US.
>This is a better way to live than the "I got mine, fuck you" which seems more common in the US.
This is also exceptionally common in the UK. There's a reason the Brexit vote passed, and there's a reason people voted so strongly for right-wing parties over the last 12 years.
Parliamentary conduct is fairly strictly policed. That said, you can still jeer and yell in a way which would be unacceptable in 99% of professional workplaces.
I think the fact that yelling and jeering is allowed actually helps somehow. It's like it releases some of the pressure rather than people bottling it up and exploding.
Parliament itself is that old, but it's possible to argue that the UK didn't qualify as a democracy until the Reform Acts of the 1800s (and possible to argue against it too, of course).
At this point, a general election would be the obviously correct solution. It's clear that the conservative party don't have a platform and can't agree major policy points amongst themselves.
However that would require conservative MPs to vote for it, which is the turkeys voting for Christmas so unlikely to happen, so I'd expect we'll have to wait till 2024 for that election.
The best likely outcome is that a set of senior people in the party agree a policy platform and try to steady things for now.
Calling an election is now back in the hands of the government (not parliament) since the repeal of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act; a PM can ask the monarch to call an election without having to get the agreement of parliament. Neither the current nor next PM (whoever they end up being) is likely to do this if the polling numbers are anything to go by, of course. I think the only other way an election can be called is if the government loses a vote of no confidence.
Technically speaking, King Charles III does not actually need to PM to ask in order to dismiss parliament and force a new election. Given that Charles I and Charles II both dismissed parliament maybe Charles III will grow a pair and do the same. It is somewhat ironic that while dismissing parliament caused the downfall of the monarchy for Charles I is it likely to buy a significant amount of time for the monarchy if Charles III does the same.
This is a typical misunderstanding of British politics. In theory the King is supposed to have power on a range of things, but there are very clearly set constitutional conventions that mean he does not. These are now so powerful that not even the "theory" is able to supersede them. This was found out the hard way by Boris Johnson when he tried to prorogue (suspend) Parliament using the Royal Prerogative. The supreme court cancelled his 'advice to the Queen' very quickly and restored Parliament.
Yes it's confusing and it would be better to write down a constitution reflecting how things actually are, but that's how it is.
Honestly having lived in the UK I find the flexibility of the unwritten constitution to be both a good and a bad thing.
On one hand, the constitution where I come from (Portugal) is unnecessarily binding and causes a lot of issues the country suffers from. On the other hand in the UK you get this feeling that the PM can do almost anything, which in the hands of a decent person can heavily advance the country or in a period like now, can cause utter chaos.
> you get this feeling that the PM can do almost anything
Technically, whoever has the majority in the parliament can literally do anything, including introducing the laws that require photo ID for voting (in a country without a mandatory photo ID) [0], or that anyone who protested in past five years are required to wear an electronic tag [1]. Or, because why not, to get rid of the election process - completely or partially.
He already has been for years. See the Black Spider memos he secretly sent to ministers, and all the secret carve-outs the Queen had. They have their grubby fingers in politics, but are just clever at hiding it.
Not necessarily the end of the monarchy. Parliament would just choose a new monarch as it did in 1688 when Charles II tried to choose an heir that Parliament didn't like.
It's been settled via the civil war and the Glorious Revolution, power in the UK rest ultimately in the House of Commons not the monarchy.
I seriously doubt that interfering in politics would do the monarchy any favours whatsoever. Constitutional issues aside the intersection of conservative and royalist is famously large. Why would he piss off the people most likely to support him?
You make it sound like it isn’t happening all the time already. It’s been fairly well reported on and has been very beneficial to that family. See other links in this thread.
I think the idea that the king would buy time for the monarchy by doing that is highly speculative. I very much doubt anyone knows what would happen given that the atmosphere is so febrile and it hasn't happened in centuries.
He doesn't have any authority, in practice. It has been that way since 1414. The second the monarchy tried to exert control over politics would be the second it was abolished.
Charles exerted lots of control behind the scenes while he was Prince of Wales, lobbying, receiving lobbyists, getting inside information, accepting huge donations, etc.
Influence is not the same as authority. I'm sure he has influence - but then so do lots of people. And at least as public figure he has a degree of visibility. Governments don't exist in a vacuum.
This is true, and yet there are plenty of other unelected people with far more influence than him. The US also has lots of rich, powerful and unelected people who exert vastly more political influence than the average citizen. That's not to say that I approve of Charles's lobbying activities, but he's hardly the worst example.
There's no 'intended message' to be found there, just some isolated incidents of dumb police officers arresting people for silly reasons (as acknowledged by their subsequent 'de-arrest').
Police arresting political dissidents in the name of an ostensibly powerless monarch is just one of those quirky things that happens in real democracies. Nothing to be concerned about.
Police can arrest people at their discretion. If these people were actually being prosecuted, I'd see your point. Otherwise, yes, it was wrong to arrest them, but you can find people being arrested for stupid reasons in any country. It doesn't require any kind of establishment conspiracy for that to happen. If you are raising a legitimate issue here, it's the broad powers of arrest that police have, not anything to do with Britain being a monarchy rather than a republic.
did you perhaps mean 1914? i’m not a historian but i DID watch Hamilton a few times and it really seemed like King George had quite a lot of power and authority…
I often wonder if George was merely the figurehead for colonial frustrations. After all, Parliament precipitated the revolution by insisting that they had the power to tax the colonies.
Other possible choices are 1708 (last example of the monarch refusing royal consent to an act of parliament, Queen Anne on the Scottish Militia Bill), or 1834 (last example of the monarch dismissing their government, William IV sacking the Whigs; he had to have them back in 1835 as the Tories he installed couldn't command a majority of the Commons).
Or you can point to things like the Kerr Sacking (in Australia, but using (vice-)regal power) and say it's not quite done yet, though in decline for centuries...
> a general election would be the obviously correct solution
As much as I'd love a GE and to see Tory MPs swept from power en-masse, that's just not how a Parliamentary system works. Everyone in the UK voted for (whether they think it or not) an MP to elect them for five years. Those MPs get to choose who leads them.
Technically yes, but if they can’t form a government the King can and will call an election.
I think there is a very high chance they will be unable to agree on a new leader and will therefor be unable to form a government. Even if they do elect a new leader, if that leader can barely control the party that would not a functioning government, and they should call an election.
At some point Tory MPs need to grow some, call an election, and except that it may mean loosing their job.
By "the continent" I assume you are speaking about the rest of europe, and in that case I don't think you can say anything coherent about their systems.
I think whoever is elected as the next Conservative leader needs to call a general election immediately. There is no mandate for a government formed by yet another Tory leader.
The world is such a different place to 2019, there is no way they can argue that they are a continuation of the previous mandate.
Do I understand correctly that you're saying the people who control the gov't right now should choose to call an early election that they're almost certainly going to lose? That seems unlikely.
Historically in Westminster systems that hasn't actually been that unusual when the majority party has lost as much public trust as this one seems to have. At a certain point, presiding over an unpopular rump can be more damaging in the long term than letting go and regrouping.
That doesn't seem to be the way current conservative parties operate though.
Will they? No. But when the current government would surely lose an election is exactly when an election ought to be held, assuming the government is meant to reflect the will of the people.
Yep, looting the country for private gain as much as possible before they get kicked out seems a more logical course of action.
Some would suggest that has already happened and they would have got away with it if it wasnt for those pesky international financial markets trying to limit their exposure to the impacts.
"Mandate" is a convenient fiction for political commentators. We should talk only of power. They are in power and will remain so until they choose to exit or 2025.
On one hand I'd love a general election, but on the other hand I feel what's most needed now is a kind of stability and level-headedness that has been lacking with the last two PMs.
From what I can tell, Sunak might actually do a pretty good job there; and for the time being that may be preferable over the delays and uncertainty of a general election. At least for now, considering the state of things.
He didn't do badly in the last election. He doesn't have the full support of the party, but neither had Truss, and who really does in the first place, especially when things are not going so well?
With Sunak as PM? Yes. He pretty much called Truss's plans stupid in so many words, and predicted the effects during the last leadership election. This is not really an especially high bar to clear as many people said so. The question isn't whether Sunak is the best possible PM, but what the best possible option is right now given the circumstances: a somewhat stable and "normal" person as PM vs. a general election?
It's easy to say "Tories bad, they got to go", but it's not that simple.
The big question is whether he can unify the Tories, or at least gain the majority backing him, which I doubt as the current members seem hell bent on their own power gains and increasing their own wealth no matter the cost to our economy. The real danger in another indeterminate period of this farce.
He, and many others, actually does seem to have the support of a lot of the party. Liz Truss didn't - she just had the support of the current party leadership.
They made the mistake of putting up two incredibly unpopular candidates for PM to the party members in the most recent PM selection process. I'm not sure they will make the same mistake again.
At the same time, they did just have an election, so it's not like they are going to be interested in having another one. Labour-aligned folks are calling for one for obvious reasons.
He, and many others, actually does seem to have the support of a lot of the party. Liz Truss didn't - she just had the support of the current party leadership.
This is pretty much the exact opposite of true – Truss had the support of the membership, and did not have the support of the "leadership" or the parliamentary party. Sunak was the other way round.
At the same time, they did just have an election, so it's not like they are going to be interested in having another one
There's not really another choice, though it's possible that only one candidate will stand, in which case an election is avoided.
Labour-aligned folks are calling for one for obvious reasons.
They're calling for a general election, not a Conservative leadership election.
Perhaps worth adding that right now, according to polls, a large majority of UK folks are labour-aligned, a complete U-turn compared with how they voted in the 2019 general election.
The current prime minister was voted into position by just 0.2% of the population (conservative party members only - unlike the USA, very few people are registered members of any party in the UK). That was not just a vote for a person, it was a vote for their radical change of policy direction as well, which they set out before the vote.
Yet another prime minister voted in by 0.2% of the population who are particularly unrepresentive, to enact policies diametrically opposed to the formal manifesto pledges at the last general election, is about as far as you can get from what the people appear to want.
Cynical but I think it's worth considering that the last couple of PMs to leave might have been offered a comfortable retirement by people around the party in order to not call an election. Not in the "here's a bag of money" sense but pretty close, as in "listen I'll make sure you'll always be on the after dinner circuit".
This will be the fourth unelected PM in six years (okay, Boris Johnson did actually win a GE after being foisted upon us, if you think that counts).
It's time for an early General Election. This lot need to go. Every trace of the Tories must be obliterated.
The hilarious part is, the way that polling stands right now, a General Election would result in a strong Labour majority with the Scottish National Party in opposition, the Lib Dems third, and the Conservatives a distant fourth :-D
To say they have not been elected is a complete falsification of our parliamentary system. The UK general populace has never voted for a PM. Party members do, and every single prime minister (bar some few exceptions) have been elected by their Party in some way, shape, or form. The four PMs you mention were voted into power by Conservative voters. Conservative members decide who to lead their party, not the anyone else. This is why you don't get situations like you do in the US, where the President can be of a different party to most of those in government (and little ever gets done because legislation gets caught in either house or senate as a result).
We vote for MPs, not Parties. The PM could lose their seat if their local constituency votes them out, even if every other person in the country voted for them. An example of that is the 1906 election [1], where Balfour lost his local vote and the Conservatives had to scramble to come up with a new leader. This is why top MPs are given safe seats by their respective parties. Of course, in practice, the vast majority of people vote for their Party not their local MP when they go to the polls during a general election. That isn't how the system is designed to function though. Most people couldn't even name their local MP - the one who is actually meant to represent their personal interests - which is an utter travesty and the source of most of this countries political woes.
Ah come on, when someone says this everyone knows what is meant and that when it happens there's a risk you could end up with a prime minister who is popular within the party but disliked by the electorate (Gordon Brown or Liz Truss).
So yeah you don't vote for a PM ... but there's a clear, well-understood difference between being the leader and the very visible face of your party when it wins the general election, and winning in one constituency then charming enough party members to become PM a couple of years after the General Election.
> It's time for an early General Election. Every trace of the Tories must be obliterated.
Sounds like completely unbiased opinion. /s
More seriously, I'm only interested in hearing the arguments for a general election from nominal conservative (Tory) supporters. All arguments from leftists are just "we want to win" in disguise so are completely untrustworthy.
From what I understand of UK politics, Johnson won the last election on policy (he was already PM) and lost his seat because of COVID shenanigans so presumably the Tories still have public mandate to continue the same policies (maybe not the Lizz agenda though).
> All arguments from leftists are just "we want to win"
The argument is that the party is being eviscerated in opinion polling, they’ve lost the support of the public and that since they're effectively doomed they're free to do what we know they love to do - attempt to secure themselves a role in the private sector for after the election. Given that this it the Conservative party, it's not exactly a secret that they'll try their best to gut the state in order to do so.
And the idea that Labour in 2022 is “leftist” is laughable. The party threw an election and enacted a campaign to remove members it considered left-wing (“trot hunting”). They’re not the left, they’re just probably not going to actively fuck up the country quite as severely as the Conservatives seem hellbent on doing
They are far beyond momentarily unpopular right now. A policy blip that would lose the Tories a few dozen seats - VAT or income tax hike - is one thing. What they’re facing is an extraordinary collapse. They’re polling as if they’d just enacted prohibition and banned football
They're not doing "momentarily unpopular things", they are deliberately destroying the country to make themselves a bit of cash.
Conservatives are all - without exception - junkies. Addicts. Criminal junkie addicts, who will steal all they can to sell off for a bit of cash for their fix, although in this case the fix is the cash.
> All arguments from leftists are just "we want to win" in disguise so are completely untrustworthy.
I don't understand how you can argue for an unbiased situation and then disregard the entire left side of the political spectrum. How can election results represent anything other than the will of the public?
I 100% support direct democracy but don't really see the point of having general election (i.e. electing representatives that then vote instead of you) ahead of schedule.
It's an extremely biased opinion, and I make no apologies.
I think every single living member of every Tory cabinet present and past should be strung up in Parliament Square. I'm not in any sense unclear about my views on them.
We have had twelve years of disastrous Tory austerity that has comprehensively destroyed the UK's economy. What's the plan? Let them keep trying until they get something right? How long is it supposed to take for their austerity policies to work, to get the economy back to a sensible state?
This viewpoint is both evil (literally wanting to kill people... like the "best" politicians of the 20th century! /s) and delusional (UK had approximately 0 GDP growth since 2010, like other main European countries - so I doubt it was Brexit or Tories)
Gordon Brown selling off our gold reserves wasn't the smartest move. But as you mention, the UK hasn't seen growth in our GDP since 2010. Which Party has been in power since May of 2010?
You seem to conveniently forget that Tories in parliament won him that vote. All the usual Tory rags (the Sun, Dailies Mail and Express and the Times) were all extremely hawkish, as we’re the leading Tories.
It's important to note that in the UK we do not vote for a PM we vote for an MP in the seat we live in.
I'm not a labour supporter, but I'd like to see a general election as it's obvious that the conservatives can't agree internally on a policy platform or candidate to lead. They are split between an authoritarian group and a libertarian group who don't want the same things at all.
Johnson lost due to repeatedly lying to parliament, plus a large number of unforced errors where he ended up having to perform U-Turns after choosing badly and then being forced to change by events. Covid was part of that, but far from the only part of that.
Ideally the UK should have a system of proportional representation, so that the bits of the different parties that actually agree on policies could form their own parties (Labour has similar split problems to the conservatives, but along different axis)
There's a difference between the running mate - the defacto deputy taking over in a foreseeable move and the nth choice person taking over after the two previous incumbents have been forced out.
That's a pretty patronising comment. Also, I think in practical terms that a lot of people do vote for the Prime Minister rather than their consituency MPs now, whatever the niceties of the UK poltical system are supposed to be.
I thought that people on HN didn't resort to ad hominem when they're being so visibly sanctimonious.
I know that, in theory at least, people vote for the party, not the leader. The Blair-Brown transition wasn't unprecedented, but equally morally and ethically questionable. The difference here is that the Tories, who currently have a significant majority, are in complete disarray and are clinging to power that, if the latest polls are to be believed, would see them all but wiped out.
Nor when May took over from Cameron, when Major took over from Thatcher, when Callaghan took over from Wilson, when Home took over from MacMillan, when Churchill took over from Chamberlain or when Chamberlain took over from Baldwin.
It's extremely common in British politics for the prime minister to change without calling a general election. In fact there were only two PMs in the entire 20th century (Heath and Attlee) who both entered and left the premiership as the result of an election.
Anyone who complains about "unelected PMs" needs to read more history.
Every time I think the USA is completely ruined, I remember how much worse the citizens of the UK have it. I remote worked for a London based CTO for years, with a science Phd, and to hear him discuss UK politics gave me an insight how effective propaganda and being immersed in a culture impacts one's judgement.
Rank choice and optional preferential voting have their own special tyranny. I just voted for a council election where I had to order at least 5 alderman out of 55 listed candidates. No parties, no voting guides. It was a lot of reading for me.
Right or wrong, it is fair to assume many will cast their vote without doing the reading in such a system. Speaking from a German perspective, I sometimes think how inefficient it is to count 60M votes - just counting 1M votes will give you the exact same result, iff you get the sampling right. What if we could choose a subset of 1% of citizens at random for every election (still far too many to directly bribe), giving them some pride in their responsibility, make sure they have some/better access to the candidates etc.. Again, if the sampling is sound, this won't change the outcome (other than the average voter being more motivated/informed). Of course, I see the problem that people will not feel represented if they, by chance, never get to vote in their whole life ...
Is there a way to guarantee that you "just get the sampling right?" Even if there is, is it possible to explain it to someone with a high school education such that they understand it?
Even if you could do both of those, will it hold up when the populist candidate loses and starts railing about how they have so much support, the best support, and the election was stolen from them by the elite-chosen sample?
Well I did vote and I did read all 55 pitches from the candidates. They only recently made the voting compulsory so that's going to make things interesting for all the people out there who don't do any reading and want to avoid the fine.
Yeah, parties do make that sort of thing a lot easier.
In Netherland we have elections for "waterschappen" ("water council"), apparently our oldest governmental body and responsible managing surface water, dikes, etc. So obviously very important in a country like this, but I have no idea what the actual issues involved are, and yet I have to vote for these people.
A weak executive would seem to reduce representation in government though?
As each member of parliament must necessarily represent the biggest groups in their constituencies.
So a decent size group scattered across many dozens of constituencies into relatively tiny groups would simply never get taken seriously without a strong executive.
No, you've got that exactly backwards. Parliament is the representation. Because of proportional representation, parliament represents all groups in the country, and not merely the majorities in each district.
You're right. Parliament represents only the entire electorate. And only really those opinions that are shared by enough people to be worth an entire seat. Still, it's far better representation than you get in a district system, where only local majorities of the electorate in each district are represented.
Uhm, what? I think UK politics is pretty sane actually. It has a lot of problems, but definitely not this almost civil-war-like type of language that you have in the USA. And although the UK is getting worse and worse, there are European countries that still have a worse political environment.
I'm not sure that just the force of rhetoric used is a good measure for how sane politics is.
You can be polite, and still be insane or evil (see: Brexit and all of the politicking and --from what I can tell-- outright lies that were sold to people). That whole process was mostly civil and polite, but not necessarily healthy.
The UK and US systems share a lot of similarities, which is not surprising considering the history, but UK politics seems better (or rather, less bad) to me? Both Boris and Truss were forced to resign by their own party, whereas the GOP's relationship with Trump is... well, different. Plus in spite of the first-past-the-post system there are actually candidates of alternative parties being voted in, even if we ignore the regional parties like SNP, DUP, etc. The Lib-Dems have a chequered history, but it's better than nothing.
> Boris and Truss were forced to resign by their own party, whereas the GOP's relationship with Trump is... well, different
Different in the sense that Trump remains extremely popular with Republican voters, independent of his actions. If Trump weren't so popular, his own party would have tossed him out long ago. They only grudgingly allowed him to become their leader in the first place because to oppose him meant almost certain defeat in their own next election.
I am from Brazil, at least you don't have "Electoral Judges" that will happily fuck with the elections and ignore constitution to make sure their preferred candidate win.
The Electoral Judges in Brazil, are censoring actual facts, because despite being facts, they consider it "misinformation", it go so bad that a former supreme court judge of ours got censored for explaining something technical... Despite the fact our constitution explicitly bans any form of censorship. (ironically, as defense against US... our constitution promotes free speech to prevent CIA from subverting the country again).
> at least you don't have "Electoral Judges" that will happily fuck with the elections and ignore constitution to make sure their preferred candidate win
Lets revisit this observation in 2024 when the next US Presidential election is held. Many localities have been electing people to oversee their local election process who are 2020 deniers, and who supported overturning Biden's win in order to keep Trump in office. I think 2024 could be interesting.
This might sound crazy... but if the UK is already de facto ruled by financial markets, in the sense that the PM has to step down if the markets don't like what they're doing, maybe it's time to try prediction market-based governance for real?
What would've happened if instead of simply announcing the proposal, Truss had described the proposal and the government had sponsored a conditional prediction market on the economic effects?
She could've run prediction markets for dozens of proposals, and selected a policy that was popular with both the markets and the public.
(Lest this idea be seen as overly capitalist: there's no reason not to run a prediction market for "degree to which this policy will reduce inequality", and incorporate the result into decisionmaking as well. Imagine the irony: a bunch of rich hedge funds trying to figure out the best way to reduce inequality!)
In watching Canadian parliamentary proceedings over the last few years, there have been many an amusing moment where I've realized most of the people constructing proposals, debating issues, or doing interviews, are always either out to deliberately screw us, are actually just not very intelligent, or are somewhat brazenly out of touch and think they're really going to nail it this time. In years prior, I would have assumed that parliamentarians are doing some sort of complicated work that's reserved for those few brilliant and lucky individuals who make their way to the top power positions. But alas, only some are brilliant, maybe about as many as in the general population.
That's not the same as what he's suggesting though is it? He's suggesting a market based approach where you present possible policies to the market and arrange it so that the best one for your metric (e.g. reducing inequality) is also the best one to invest in. Then you enact the policy with the highest price.
Essentially you enlist the modelling skills of all those extremely highly paid quants to figure out which policy is the best.
I imagine it would be quite hard to set up - especially in a way that keeps the incentives you want intact - but I think it's a very interesting idea and deserves to be tried.
I think the reason I'm excited about prediction markets in particular is because I think the average voter, justifiably, does not have the time necessary to familiarize themselves with all the details of a proposed policy and related research on its likely economic ramifications.
I see the kind of in-depth analysis of financial assets that hedge funds currently do as being somewhat wasteful. I would prefer that they switch to policy analysis in the public interest, by betting on which policies will deliver for voters.
This is an interesting idea. Although if anyone has enough money to single-handedly move the market price, it devolves into a dictatorship of that person.
Presumably in a prediction market you're only being paid out if you were right. Someone who sways the market significantly and then ends up being wrong will lose a lot of money.
Based on the abstract, I think the essential argument is that a market manipulator acts as "dumb money", attracting "smart money" who are happy to profit by bringing the market back in line with reality.
I think what I got confused by is the idea that a proposal that is “popular with the market” is popular because it reduces inequality and not because it has good financial returns.
Take the inequality example that you mention. Reducing inequality might require large government spending, like free higher education, or extensive government-provided healthcare. This requires funding which pushes up interest rates.
Someone in the prediction market might agree that free higher education reduces inequality but might also think that it will increase the government’s cost of financing its spending. The latter is what usually gives politicians trouble with financial markets. How would a prediction market resolve this issue?
>Someone in the prediction market might agree that free higher education reduces inequality but might also think that it will increase the government’s cost of financing its spending. The latter is what usually gives politicians trouble with financial markets. How would a prediction market resolve this issue?
One approach would be to have multiple markets, that track endpoints like inequality and interest rates separately for any given candidate policy.
In the best case, prediction markets could give you accurate forecasts on a large number of candidate policies, and you could select a policy that the market thinks does a pretty good job according to lots of relevant endpoints. (My hunch is that our current system is bad at searching for such win/win policies, preferring instead the drama that comes from clashing over win/lose policies. For example, you mention free higher education, but how much does the average college grad really use or remember from their degree? I'd argue there is a lot of territory in apprenticeships that is currently unexplored, and smart policy could facilitate this -- especially if we start with small-scale experimentation.)
You're absolutely correct that the market can't help with moral questions such as how much government spending is justifiable in pursuit of reduced inequality. Robin Hanson proposes eventually moving to a system where the job of elected officials is to manage metrics related to what voters want out of government policies, and markets decide the rest. In slogan form: "Vote on values, bet on beliefs." https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html
Her government proposed an unfunded budget that caused a gilt market panic. Part of the mortgage market dried up. Variable mortgage rates exploded. Pension funds had to resort to emergency measures. The Bank of England had to intervene.
Don't the groups in the gilt market, mortgage market, pension funds, etc., have lobbyists that would be able to communicate their concerns and fears ahead of time?
For that matter aren't there Whitehall staff that could easily have said something?
There are all sorts of processes to say to her that this was a bad idea. She ignored them. It's a very Chernobyl kind of process: in order to run your experiment, first ignore all the safety alarms.
Because the UK in 2022 is not the US in 2017. One had high growths and low rate expectations. The other had high inflation raising rate expectations, so the borrowing cost more.
Lost the confidence of the market for UK government debt pushing up borrowing costs for government and for others (as well as causing problems for pension funds who own that debt).
She did this by launching a series of unfunded tax cuts and doing so without an assessment of the impact on the UK's finances.
> She did this by launching a series of unfunded tax cuts
Another interesting difference between the US and UK. Republicans do this routinely in the US, and have done for many decades now.
The last Republican president who didn't do this was George Bush (the first one). After promising "no new taxes" during his campaign, he later agreed to do the fiscally responsible thing and raise taxes in order to offset spending increases. He was not re-elected. That was ~30 years ago, and to my knowledge no subsequent Republican president has made that mistake.
US can run jaw-dropping debt-to-GDP ratios that are the envy of other nations thanks to $ being the world's reserve currency. US protects this privileged status religiously by any and all means - economic/diplomatic/political/military.
- I think in this instance it was partly the fact that they didn’t seem to be interested in the fiscal position and didn’t publish an assessment because they thought it was bad - so the markets assumed the worst. Don’t think any U.S. president has gone quite so far - happy to be corrected!
While they do, I'm not sure they ever have in quite _these_ circumstances. The UK is (a) seeing some of the highest rates of inflation in the developed world and (b) needs to massively subsidise energy costs due to the energy crisis caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, I'd argue that borrowing enormous amounts of money to give a tax break to the upper-middle-class is almost _never_ a good idea, but it's particularly not a good idea in the current climate.
> After promising "no new taxes" during his campaign, he later agreed to do the fiscally responsible thing and raise taxes in order to offset spending increases.
That is an extremely charitable parsing of the events. The more accurate (realpolitik) version is Bush said the no new taxes quip, and Democrats subsequently laser-focused on making him (slightly) raise taxes, showing he is a "liar".
My take away is to learn not to promise overly optimistic outcomes when your political rivals have a significant stake in seeing you either be a success or a failure.
Edit: Not sure why this was flagged. Did not mean to come off as hostile or aggressive. Anyways, cheers.
> The more accurate (realpolitik) version is Bush said the no new taxes quip, and Democrats subsequently laser-focused on making him (slightly) raise taxes, showing he is a "liar".
These days I think a Republican president in the same position would be a lot more likely to refuse to sign it, even it if meant shutting down the government. But politicians (and voters) really were much less divided back then compared to today.
> My take away is to learn not to promise overly optimistic outcomes when your political rivals have a significant stake in seeing you either be a success or a failure.
Over-promising is the bread and butter of campaign rhetoric; candidates do it all the time (certainly in US presidential elections at least). If it was really that much of a problem in practice, you'd see more election winners who hadn't previously promised all kinds of things they have no chance of delivering.
Announced a lot of unfunded tax cuts financed by borrowing - these have now been walked back on. The main issue was not really that she cut taxes, it's the unfunded borrowing to cover. Borrowing with the current high interest rates was always going to be risky and the market didn't have confidence that the cuts would lead to growth. This caused the value of the pound and of UK gov bonds (gilts) to plummet. Several large pension funds (which usually hold large numbers of gilts) were in danger of being margin called, which would cause them to have to sell gilts to cover the responsibility, which would drive down the price further, causing more sell offs. To prevent this the Bank of England (BoE) announced that they would be buying up to £65B of UK gilts - which calmed the markets and prevented a sell off (for now). But it has significantly worsened the economic outly for the country, buying your own bonds at a premium during a period of high inflation is a horrible position to be in.
The gov also declined to get the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) to check the impact of the plans. This is something the OBR does before every budget and it's very unusual that they didn't do this - even though it turns out they offered to before the budget was released. It didn't help that a lot of the taxes cut were targeted for high earners - It's hard to argue how cutting the top 45pc tax rate for earners over £150,000 and dropping a cap on bankers bonuses would help people in the short term (or dare. I say, the long), when the majority of people in the UK were struggling with the massively increased cost of living. It almost seemed as if the conservatives were trying to force through a list of long desired for tax cuts for the wealthy without the proper mandate (as Truss was only. elected by Conservative party members, rather than the general electorate) - and this made her gov monstrously unpopular.
Introduced a set of deep tax cuts. The markets reacted negatively to the implied increase in governmental borrowing. The pound had hit an all time low against the US dollar.
“Her resignation as Prime Minister will become effective upon its acceptance from King Charles III.” [1], does this mean she’ll have access to the king now too?
Only 45 days in the post; shortest in UK history. She tanked the economy quicker than anyone before. It's quite impressive how you can mess up this bad. Borrowing money to pay for tax cuts for the rich... Unbelievable.
The sad part is that there's a can of worms just like her in the Conservative Party. She's merely the one that got sacked for it, but the next Tory PM will most likely have the same agenda, although he / she will most likely tread more carefully.
After leaving the EU the UK economy has become extremely unstable, with strikes occurring almost on a weekly basis, just like we had in the 60's and 70's before the UK became a EU member state.
Mind you that the UK isn't self-sufficient in terms of food (hasn't been for more than 120 years) and economic dire straits could actually lead to food shortages and famine!
> Mind you that the UK isn't self-sufficient in terms of food (hasn't been for more than 120 years) and economic dire straits could actually lead to food shortages and famine!
Let's be realistic, this is never going to happen.
A significant number of Brits will have to chose between heating their living space and food.
Kids will go hungry.
People who used to support food banks now need to rely on them. Food banks, which have to cut down on services because they can't afford them any more.
While it's a stretch to argue that the UK as a whole will run into famine it's hard to argue that 14 years of austerity and the mess the Tories made in their time in government will not lead millions of people into literal poverty.
1) I really like that in the UK system if the leader is crazy the party can just kick them to the curb rather than basically having to support them even when they do terrible things.
2) The US system of open primaries where anybody can vote that we adopted in the 70s seems like a mistake in retrospect and there's a good reason no other country does things this way. The UK Conservative party's system, adopted in the 2010, of allowing people who pay party fees to vote in primaries seems like an even worse idea in terms of candidate selection though it does have the advantage of raising money for the party.
If I wasn't living in this timeline, the current Republican politics would be HILARIOUS.
In short [0], the idea of republicanism is that the people cannot be trusted to make political decisions; you need elder statesmen to do that. In other words, you need grown-ups. To this end, we have the electoral college, which is supposed to block any egregiously populist president. Well that is not how it worked out.
0. So short that it is misleading. I won't defend anything I say here, even though I believe it in principle.
If you don’t have any intentions of defending your beliefs, why do you put them out there?
It’s like throwing a punch with no intention of getting in a fight. You’re just bound to get your ass kicked.
Not only is the UK not a republic but Republicanism isn’t about needing a grown up, it’s about time. Understanding the implications and reading through a 150 page proposal on the bill is not possible for the majority of the population.
US parties _can_ do that, too (and notably did with Nixon). The refusal to do it with Trump was a moral failing of the Republican leadership, not an inherent systemic limitation.
There’s also a large quantity of people that feel he did nothing wrong. It’s generally the left, some independents and a few republicans that think he’s horrible.
Primary election participation varies by state. The U.S. does not have a blanket open primary system, and the federal government cannot adopt one without an amendment to the Constitution.
I don't know this meme, so I can only assume the lettuce has already been harvested? If from seed, you can still have fresh lettuce at around 44 days. :)
I think it's now down to the public to hold a general strike until a general election is called. Otherwise we're just going to suffer again with the Tories infighting between centrists and far right.
I think he's ambitious for his own sake but I don't think he really cares about the country long term. I base that on the fact that his wife didn't pay tax here until it threatened his career and that he retained a US green card as a "plan B" for after he'd finished being in power.
Would he want it now? I'm not so sure. I thought they were gunna keep Truss in over winter and replace in the new year when the worst of the energy crisis has passed.
There you go. But took the opportunity to buy the pound after it crashed at one of it lowest levels and made a killing out of it, rather than screaming here over a lettuce.
Everyone saw that resignation coming after the rejection of their tax cuts by the markets.
I guess we should count ourselves lucky that once MPs are done selecting their next vacuous blowhard, it won't go to the smooth-brained party members who were responsible for the final vote to install Truss.
Imagine rising to the ranks of prime minister of one of the most influential countries ever and for your legacy to be a head of lettuce out-survived your reign.
That the Queen literally died the day after meeting you.
Britain, Brazil, Australia, Philippines, India, Turkey, U.S … it is mind numbing that of all the good, talented people these countries have, only the dumbest, worst of the worst end up in positions of power. Depressing.
At this point, we can just randomly pick a citizen to be President or PM. We might have better chances that way
It's not surprising though, who would really want to go into politics, in a country where no matter what you do, you'll have almost half the populace hating you? Anyone who has the skills to do well in politics could do well in business and lead a better, more private, more rewarded life. And I think that's exactly what happens.
More than half the population, probably. Also, for the last few years the UK media have been doing something obnoxious where they take decisions where all options have some downside and present only the downsides of whatever the government has chosen, making it sound like the obvious wrong choice and something only a complete incompetent would pick - which is particularly obvious when the government does a u-turn and suddenly everyone discovers the problems with whatever they'd been presenting as the obvious right choice. The BBC is a particularly consistent offender. This of course makes it seem to everyone who follows the news like they could easily do better than the idiots in power.
One example HN might be familiar with is the smartphone-based Covid contact tracing app in this country. When the government was going with an app that didn't use Google and Apple's contact tracing framework, the BBC focused hard on the inherent problems with not using it and made it sound like no-one other than the government thought that decision had any advantages at all. Then the government U-turned and literally they day the new app launched, all of that was forgotten and the BBC suddenly discovered the fundamental, well-documented disadvantages of that framework they'd ignored before and found some experts who made it sound like that was worse than the original app. They've been doing it with almost everything though.
Well, one might reasonably assume that the government has the means and motive to put forward their side of the case. Selling policy is kind of the main job of a politician, after all, and the government has a considerably large megaphone to do it with.
We need to figure out a different system of politics, where the elected officials aren't paid for their position, and accepting money from non-publicly-visible donations is illegal. I don't know how to accomplish that, but there needs to not be monetary incentive for politicians to be politicians. It's a huge responsibility, not a job. Ever since politicians could become "career" politicians, government has been worse for it.
> Britain, Brazil, Australia, Philippines, India, Turkey, U.S
I know it is fairly popular on HN to say that any party that is coded ring-wing is terrible. But, I genuinely think that there isn't a single person with enough nuanced knowledge of even 3 of those countries at the same time to make any kind of sweeping political statement about them.
What makes you think that countries or opposition parties with less spotlight have more competent leaders? Name a country of any decent size and I'm sure citizens of those nations will flock to the comments talking about how messed up their political system is. Politics is messy, by definition.
> dumbest end up in positions of power
The hubris of us highly-educated workers to think that degrees or 'elite coded appearance' are what define intelligence. The likes of Boris and Modi are political geniuses with carefully cultivated identities and a keen understanding of the landscape.
> randomly pick a citizen to be President or PM
I know you mean this in jest, but political power doesn't come merely from titles. They'd just end up manipulated by the same 'powerful politician' anyway. I picked on this strawman because it demonstrates that politics is not a vice that can be eliminated from positions of power, it is the very mechanism by which struggles for power function.
>> The hubris of us highly-educated workers to think that degrees or 'elite coded appearance' are what define intelligence. The likes of Boris and Modi are political geniuses with carefully cultivated identities and a keen understanding of the landscape.
Exactly, when I was a young lad, I used to think, if only well educated people got into politics. But now I understand, it is those who are connected on the ground to people's issues or at least have an understanding of them are the ones who get elected. Being educated or not is immaterial. In fact the more educated you are, the more you may not understand people's issue.
1) People have a kind of illusion that their rulers are (or at least should be) good. But historically speaking, this was almost never the case. Most of the time the rulers thought only about themselves, how to keep power, how to benefit from it and so on. Even most of the things they were commanded on were done of selfishness, too.
2) The people who should actually go into politics never will. Some of them are very active in their local communities, though, but have no desire to participate in this ridiculous show trying to sell themselves to millions of unknown people. Moreover, they have the humility of knowing they can't promise the crowds anything - the opposite of what the crowds expect.
It would be a mistake to think those people "dumb", IMO. Worst of the worst, possible/probable, but even the bubbliest of ding-dongs in pop culture did not get to their positions by being "dumb". The narrative is designed for deception to garner their objective: sales, votes, distraction, etc...
Yes. A talent for winning elections is something. It isn't a talent for governing or evidence of policy wisdom, but it is a talent. Sometimes a lack of scruples or shame can be a talent, too.
It's the same in many other countries. They just ain't that big and language barrier prevents from looking deeper into BS that is going on there.
Overall the issue is that this career route does not pay well. E.g. in my country a mid-level developer earns as much as parliament member. Specialised constructions workers can make as much too. Why the hell would you pursue career in politics if you can easily make as cushy living with much less stress? You must be either narcissist or... not that bright to make a living in other ways.
I'm not sure if it's pure idealism. It feels like in previous era politicians much more prestigious career. And people were valuing prestige over €€€ much more.
Sort of like clothing. Now people want to be comfy and go in tshirts. Previously people were much more invested in community functions.
He didn't have a college degree, but from nobody to becoming a pm with a full mandate for two terms in a country of billion is not something a dumb person can achieve.
Setting money aside for a moment, one can do much more good in a government position that as a private entity (unless you have Bill Gates level wealth, but that is a different conversation). My dad worked for a nationalized bank - we were poor, but my dad helped tons of people thanks to his job with the government. His pay was shit, he had nothing to show for his 33 years of work money wise, but he was so happy helping marginalized and poor villagers.
I on the other hand - my starting salary matched his last salary. I have nothing to show achievements wise - all I have done is attend meaningless meetings and write CRUD code for soulless companies.
While the government job situation today is much worse that it was during my dad's time, I still think one can do a lot of good as civil servant than as a highly paid developer for a wall street firm.
I agree with you on the topics of politics though.
Because a person is a person through other people.
Because despite the rhetoric of cynics, good governance is both possible and valuable.
Because one is not content to merely be critical of current governance from the sidelines.
Because one supports the mission; it is necessary.
Because the mission is challenging.
Because one values service to their fellow citizens.
Because their fellow citizens value that person's talents and service.
Because even if someone believes that everything is fungible and nothing matters but themselves, it's possible to find challenging, well paid, highly regarded work in government.
It's an extension of "if you can't, teach" I think. Perhaps there's a second verse to it, like with "Jack of all trades, often better than master of none".
If you can't, teach, and if you can't do that, go into politics.
There is somewhat established, half serious, idea in political science to pick a random citizen instead of a general election, I can't remember the name though.
Over time the two systems would converge, and it's much harder to exert undue influence over the candidates when it really could be anybody.
It's one of those ideas that's worth taking seriously even if it's never implemented anywhere.
I'd like to see a system where parliament is basically like jury duty. Get a random assortment of 300 people, pick them among geographic buckets and give them a support system where employees tell them how the mechanics work (like court clerks / police do for jury duty).
Actually in a lot of problematic cases the elections were "rigged", in different severity stages of "rigged" of course. Gerrymandering, restricting voting so that some groups are excluded, electors, for-life politicians (lords), and so on. And of course the usual dirty manipulations in the worse countries.
I think if somehow true democratic voting was magically implemented world wide, then a lot of assholes would be voted out and quickly. Even in countries where people are electing sociopaths.
> At this point, we can just randomly pick a citizen to be President or PM. We might have better chances that way
I have a wild idea. What if we try to select people based on their respective expertise in an area, rather than based on just popularity? If they have a science/knowledge background, even better.
Since it's based on skill and governance, we can call it something like "tekhne kratos", taking inspiration from the Greeks because why not.
A true technocracy would mean a lot of oxygen wasters will lose their jobs, money, livelihood and influence.
It will probably work out better for the citizenry, but I don't see how we'd ever end up there short of a violent revolution - the current system is self-serving first and foremost and will never allow itself to be replaced even if that is the true will of the citizens.
The popular members of the conservative party were not on the ballot during Truss's election. Conservative party leadership effectively chose her, not the people.
This is squarely on the Blair/Bush party of big government and tax cuts, which is a deeply unpopular position in reality.
> That the Queen literally died the day after meeting you.
I like the hot take that historians a couple of centuries from now will see that the Queen died and a couple of days later the currency crashed and say "even in the early 21st century the monarch had immense covert powers and the death of one was an existential crisis for these democracies."
Whoever thought of this (not I) was brilliant. Seems almost certain to happen, probably because of (not despite) the sheer volume of contemporary commentary.
Yep, she was so reprehensible the queen died! And then off that great distraction she did the job that baldy she almost tanked the world economy. Now falling on her sword and claiming the shortest tenure in British history.
I would feel very poorly about the tory gang in London if I were say from the North Irish area or Welsh, or Sottish at the moment.
This isn't good for European stability either. Hopefully the money and support continues to flow without issue to Ukraine.
I think she is one of the best politics speedrunners. Managed to rack up a lot of attention for a lot of different things, finishing with a grand exit. She will be enjoying that lettuce now.
Unfortunately, if you want to shake things up and introduce even moderately radical policies, you better have the stamina and political will and skill to push them through and keep at it.
Britain's first female prime minister had that. The third one didn't...
The forthcoming Italian government could last much less, with Silvio Berlusconi trying to achieve negative duration by alienating allies before a prime minister is nominated.
There's a scene in "The Naked Gun 2 1/2: The Smell of Fear" set in a jazz club and the camera pans across photos of various disasters ... The Hindenburg ... The Titanic ... and finally Michael Dukakis (1988 Democratic candidate for U.S. President, epic fail).
The chaos is just beginning. I know that what Liz Truss did - by blowing up the finances with a massive uncosted cut to taxes was the main cause of this, but one massive problem that the Tory party is going to have to face in the next few weeks is the Suella Braveman problem. Suella is on the right of the party, she wants immigration down to the 10s of thousands, and she's correct in saying that was actually a manifesto commitment in 2019. She's basically willing to go to war for this, but the left of the party absolutely don't want this. Similarly, the right of the party absolutely do not want to increase public spending, but the left of the party will absolutely not vote to cut the things necessary to reduce public spending. The right of the party want to frack, the left absolutely do not. Yesterday, 40 Tory MPs abstained from a whipped vote to prevent a complete ban in fracking. That's right, 40 Tory MPs defied their party, refusing to allow fracking in principle even though everyone knows that fracking can't happen in practice anyway.
There is no set of policy goals that the whole of the tory party can now support, and there's no one with the legitimacy to force them into line. They can't face a general election because they know they'd lose. So their best case scenario is they do nothing for the next 2 years and hope that nothing blows up in their faces. But in reality sooner or later something will happen that will either cause the right wing of the party to blow up the party, or the left wing of the party to defect to Labour. I think at this point the most likely scenario is Boris Johnson returns, a large chunk of MPs defect to Labour, and either Johnson loses his majority or is forced to call an election anyway on the basis that he needs a new mandate to actually get anything done.
Yes, this is basically because it's undeliverable without doing some absolutely unbelievably stupid stuff. It'd skewer any idea of a trade deal with India (as Truss demonstrated), it would collapse our higher education sector which is heavily subsidized by international students, and it would cause massive worker shortages in both the City of London and the NHS.
It's one of those "people want lower taxes" - "Ok, which public services do you want to cut?" things. They want immigration down to the 10,000s, but no one actually wants to prevent any individual migrant.
What the UK really needs is proportional representation. The conservatives do not belong together in one party, but because of the election system any internal differences are allowed to happen informally via whips within the party constitution instead of the formal, national constitution. Labour has the same problem, as does the US FPTP system.
PR would allow different factions to negotiate under formal rules like in other countries, where when a support party loses confidence, they topple the government and cause an election. PR of course also has whips but there's the prospect of dissenters starting their own party.
For a look at how that works follow the Danish election that's coming up in a couple of weeks. The old PM quit and formed his own party, another of the old ruling party did the same, and both look to be grabbing quite a large share of votes.
I always thought Truss was more like an Android than anyone I've ever encountered. Lack of emotive expressions, eyes that seemed to stare rather than scan, and so on.
Maybe later we'll find it was a failed A.I. experiment by Cambridge Analytica/Facebook !
The Daily Star (a fairly low-rent tabloid newspaper in the UK) has been live-streaming a video of a lettuce for most of the week, as a competition to see whether Liz Truss will resign, or the lettuce reach its best-before date (10 days) first.
In addition to other comments, I suspect that the livestreamed lettuce was a reference to an earlier article saying describing Truss as having effectively had seven days in power before everything fell apart, saying "That is roughly the shelf-life of a lettuce." - various other media outlets seemed to pick up & run with the lettuce reference.
Someone set up youtube stream with a picture of Liz Truss and a lettuce. People in the chat could discuss what was likely to last longer, the lettuce or Liz Truss.
I’m not sure what is more of a shit show: the GOP seeking to control every aspect of a woman’s life and undermine democracy or UK governance. It’s insane. What’s next? They bring back Boris?
Another disappointing result for conservative politics worldwide. While her character may be in question, her policies were on point. I do hope that we're not starting to see a whiplash effect where people are against good, reasoned, conservative policy for the sake of a few bad calls.
Her policies were terrible. Gutting the tax base, subsidizing energy demand in an inflationary environment. Almost all conservative policies are terrible but these ones were so bad that there was a run on the pound. I'm glad you're not running the country i live in
This seems hyperbolic and doesn't really fit with the HN guidelines. As most HN commenters lean conservative, I recommend reading the room first.
In addition, every leader on the world stage enact primarily conservative policy because it's effective. While there are some outliers, it's easy to see just from reading the news and listening to independent thinkers what the inevitable outcome will be.
HN does lean conservative, I don't. Are you telling me I shouldn't express my views on here because people would disagree with me ?
"In addition, every leader on the world stage enact primarily conservative policy because it's effective". Do you have any sort of proof for this claim ? Who are the supposed "independent thinkers" you listen to ?
Now if only there was an instrument to create legitimacy for leaders, something where the entire population could make their own choice heard in a binding way. We could call it election.
The entire population was able to vote to elect the party, and the party then elected her as PM. Her position was 100% legitimate, whether you like it or not.
It would be a reasonable comment if Conservative MP's - who are elected by voters - had chosen her. However, Rishi Sunak was their choice. Instead she was chosen by a bit more than 100k members.
Although legally fine, there certainly is some lack of legitimacy when PMs are elected by party members after the predecessor is axed, because the voters never had a chance to assess the person they end up with (in this role).
The larger issue is that the new Tories' procedure for producing candidates leads to a winner that has a large majority of parliament against her.
There is now a problematic mixture of parliamentary and Tory voter legitimization. That would be resolved by a true general election.
Not the only meaning of "legitimate". There's also "Authentic, real, genuine" and "Conforming to known principles, or established or accepted rules or standards; valid." (Wiktionary) There's a question of acceptability involved here, I feel.
I never claimed otherwise. I just answered to the comment stating that she was illigetimally in her position, as if the UK was a dictatorship, which isn't the case.
I think that there is a bit more nuance needed if you claim 100% legitimacy.
Winning an election on one manifesto, being chosen by 100k members, and then ripping the manifesto up and trying to implement a set of completely different policies would strike most, I think, as not 100% legitimate even if it's legal.
And just to add that she campaigned with members on ripping up the manifesto.
The word legitimacy can be interpreted in either a normative way or a “positive” (see positivism) way. The first meaning refers to political philosophy and deals with questions such as: What are the right sources of legitimacy? Is a specific political order or regime worthy of recognition? As such, legitimacy is a classic topic of political philosophy.
While I agree with you that it would be incorrect to baldly dismiss Truss' premiership as illegitimate, I feel that uniqueuid's comment was using the term according to the above usage, suggesting, perhaps, that the law of the land is anachronistic, or less than optimal according to democratic principles.
I don't think this fits - she didn't become prime minister in this crisis - At least whatever state of crisis existed became so much worse that it is its own crisis now because of her ideological bent decisions.
She didn't jump, she was pushed. The resignation happened immediately after a meeting with the chairman of the party's "1922 Committee" - that's the body that (to greatly simplify) gets to make the rules about how they get rid of their leaders.
This is standard in parliamentary democracies; when the PM knows that they're about to be removed, they'll leave. If she hadn't resigned, she'd be going anyway.
Even in non-parliamentary democracies, see Richard Nixon; he made a lot more fuss, of course, but he did, in the end, resign.
Over a long enough period of time it swings back and forth and the divide is somewhere near the middle.
However, the right leaning Conservatives have fucked up everything for such a long amount of time starting with Brexit it's pretty much guaranteed that left leaning Labour will win the next election in two years.
Some just because of the news, but Tories still on power and still have no clue of what they are doing. It will need a bit more stability and a better plan to fully recover.
I think the relevant question is, why did a Thatcherite monetary policy collapse overnight in 2022 when it didn't in the early 1980s?
One reason is that the British nationalized services that Thatcher sold off to private investors in the 1980s (railroads, electricity, etc.) no longer exist, other than the national health service, which the British public would riot over if it was privatized. With nothing left to cannibalize, there was no way for the government to boost the financial markets, leading to the collapse of the pound.
This is good news, as it signals that the era of neoliberalism, with all its intellectual hypocrisy and disastrous outcomes, is suffering one death blow after another, and will finally be discarded on the dustbin of history once and for all.
In essence, the sell off and loosening of financial regulation expanded the credit but where do you go from there. You can't resell off, there is limits to how far you can loosen regulation. In fact her tax cuts meant more borrowing, especially given she ruled out budget cuts (perhaps not in real terms as inflation was essentially cutting it anyway). Even the remnants of Thatcher's government considered it ludicrous.
She and her chancellor announced a series of tax cuts at a time when inflation is running at 10%. Even worse, they sidestepped the usual processes on fiscal responsibility and declined to explain how the tax cuts would be funded. The bonds market then panicked as a result, with the Bank of England having to step in and bail the market out to prevent gilts from entering a death spiral, which would have bankrupted pension funds.
Not all the tax cuts announced were bad or badly received.
Especially, I think that the cancellation of the rise in corporation tax was very welcome and in fact economists now say that the rise to 25% will make the recession deeper and longer (unsurprisingly, frankly).
The issue was that the other cuts, especially abolishing 45p income tax rate but frankly also the decrease of the basic rate, were not discussed, not funded (which is what spooked the markets since we already borrowed and spent like crazy during Covid), and frankly everyone agrees that they were useless. Of course abolishing the 45p rate now was also extremely bad symbolically (though in fairness it only exists since 2010-2012).
I think the plan has shifted from "pro-growth, nevermind inflation" to "a good recession will solve inflation". And a 'good recession' along with higher interest rates, the incoming budget spending cuts, and maybe tax increases is also going to be quite painful for the people.
> Not all the tax cuts announced were bad or badly welcomed.
Not a tax cut per se, but I'm curious what will happen with the energy bill support scheme? That seemed like a good thing to implement, one for which Truss and her cabinet got a lot of critics from a certain part of the media.
Granted, I'm not from Britain so maybe I'm reading the room wrong and that support scheme was, in fact, not liked by everyone involved, I wouldn't know.
Frankly, this energy support scheme is a blank cheque to the energy companies.
It guarantees that the energy companies will fully profit from high energy prices, all in effect funded by the taxpayer, and Truss also rejected any windfall taxes on energy companies.
I think it makes sense to limit it in its current form to this winter instead of 2 years (which is the latest status). It'll still be possible to reassess the situation next year and perhaps come up with a more targeted scheme if needed.
Edit in response to reply:
Truss had formally said in Parliament that there would be no additional taxes on energy companies when the £2500 price cap scheme was announced.
The current windfall tax was implemented by Boris Johnson and considering it taxes energy companies at 25% instead of
the normal 19% when the plan was, and again is, to tax all businesses at 25%, it's more spin than anything else.
Basically, the Tories had already placed a windfall tax on UK oil and gas before Truss even became PM that's almost identical to the one that Labour have called for, and no-one has proposed removing it. (To some extent, it looks like Labour copied the existing Tory tax.) The main reason why Truss' original proposal required so much more taxpayer funding was that her price cap lasted for two years rather than six months - Labour were relying on windfall tax revenue from well before the start of the price subsidy to make their numbers add up and still couldn't quite do it, so there's no way to extend it for longer without massive government borrowing.
Most of the media coverage didn't explain this at all, they just repeated Labour's claims that all that government borrowing was because the Tories were in the pockets of energy companies and rejected a windfall tax. Nor did they explain the practical consequences of the price cap ending in April. All of the numbers thrown around for the cost of Truss' longer price cap assumed energy prices would still be unaffordably high by then, but no-one pointed this out and what it would mean for households. Of course, the moment the government annouced their energy support would end in April there were headlines everywhere about the huge bills this could cause for households.
The concept is well-liked, but there were several issues with the execution:
1) Lack of targeted support - the scheme announced by the Truss government, covers everyone in the country - both rich and old. Using taxpayer money to subsidise costs for the rich isn't popular with a lot of people. That would have been OK in the short term (until a better targeted scheme could be implemented), but the original Truss/Kwarteng plan was to have the scheme run for 2 years.
2) Borrowing - Labour favours funding energy bill support through a windfall tax on gas and oil companies who have been making big profits due to the war in Ukraine. The Truss government was opposed to such a tax, and was instead prepared to borrow tens or hundreds of billions of pounds to fund it (related to #1 - borrowing a lot to give rich people support with bills isn't popular, as everyone will be paying it back through taxes.).
The borrowing wasn't received well by conservatives, and sending more money to the rich energy companies wasn't liked by the left.
Of course, this was all on top of the other borrowing to cut taxes and so on that was announced and then de-announced.
Now that the rise in corporation tax to 25% is back, the UK press are of course pushing claims by economists that it will make the oncoming recession deeper and longer. That narrative was nowhere to be found prior to the u-turn though, with the media consensus being that of course lower corporation tax wouldn't help grow the economy and only ideologically-driven right wingers who ignored the evidence believed otherwise. It's another one of those scenarios where whatever the government is doing at the time is the wrong choice.
That narrative that the rise is hurtful to businesses, and thus the economy, has always existed. Of course what changes is what the media choose to report, but you'll note that in any case it certainly isn't making a lot of noise that economists are not keen.
It's quite a hike and it sends the UK among the highest taxed countries in Europe...
The issue is that it'll send the UK up the chart and among the higher rates in Europe at a time when the economy is not going well and when the country needs to sell itself while outside of the EU and single market.
Btw, the US's the federal rate is 21% (which is also about the European average) but I suppose states may add their own on top.
She was terrible. She introduced a dramatic tax cut for the rich, which immediately crashed exchange rates and the stock market, and was even criticised by the rich it was meant to benefit.
2/3 tax cuts she suggested were actually supported by labour previously.
I think the mistake is more a massive communications and timing issue. She really should have announced these cuts in a staggered way, with better communication for the markets.
It would have been fine.
But she really screwed up on getting the political communication right.
And more importantly she was announcing these policies at an exact time when the Bank of England was trying to raise interest rates and sell bonds to fight inflation. So you have the government and the central bank pursuing contradictory goals: one trying to jumpstart consumption by borrowing and spending and the other trying to cool it by raising the cost of borrowing and reducing spending. This lead to a lot of wasted time, money and efforts and really destroyed the government's credibility.
The sect Truss belongs to considers that aggregate demand is solely a matter for the central bank to sort out, and that it has to respond to the fiscal setting of the government. Not the other way around.
This is enshrined in law at s11 of the Bank of England Act 1998.
"In relation to monetary policy, the objectives of the Bank of England shall be—
(a)to maintain price stability, and
(b)subject to that, to support the economic policy of Her Majesty’s Government, including its objectives for growth and employment."
The BoE had to completely flip its policy to rescue pension funds which were getting margin calls because of Truss and Kwarteng's mini-budget destroying the gilt market, so I guess you're right.
No funding and incomprehensible timing of abolishing the 45p rate were IMO fatal for the markets and public opinion. worryingly it also seems that nothing was discussed with the BoE beforehand.
But keeping the corporation tax at 19% was the right move, IMO.
"Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." - Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
UK politics became intellectually bankrupt in 2016. Promises no longer needed to have a connection to reality. Isolationism could be sold as "pro-growth" etc.
The disconnect has been growing gradually. The voters loved the pie-in-the-sky promises. So each leader's promises were more unrealistic than the last. They selected for ever more ideological belief, over pragmatism and admitting the downsides of choices. But who would be holding the can when the bill came due?
The responses that "She was terrible" are not wrong, but you have to also ask why such a charmless, incompetent-and-unaware-of-it character came to be in power.
This is the culmination of the Brexit ideology, make no mistake.
Because she caused fast, massive damage to the UK economy with her economic plan on which she was already advised was untenable even during her leadership race with Rishi. Yesterday there was a vote on banning fracking with a three-line whip on Tory MPs to vote no, but which many Tory MPs are very much for, which was very controversial, with bullying and forced voting using physical means (physically pushing the MPs into the side to vote no by force). Suella Braverman yesterday also resigned as Home Secretary leaving a letter calling out the UK government as basically incompetent...
The Fracking thing was just simple tactical incompetence and thus definitive proof Liz wasn't up to the job.
I think this might cause some second thoughts, at first for Tories, about whether it's actually a good idea to ask their membership who should be Prime Minister.
Many of these MPs knew Liz wasn't fit for this post from the outset, but their own party's rules said they should allow ordinary members (a few thousand people who are disproportionately old, white and male IIRC) to decide from the best two put forward by MPs. The members, in effect, picked the woman who said the things they wanted to hear, even if those things were nonsense. If those members were your general electorate, then arguably the country gets what it deserved - but they're not, they're just the party members. If you thought US party primaries were a bad idea, well, yeah, that.
Every day that politics has been operating since she took office has been one crisis after another. The first disaster was the mini budget that everyone pointed out and how poorly it was handled, but the nail in the coffin was the chaos in parliament yesterday.
In short, the opposition called a vote on fracking, which is supported by Truss' "pro growth" government, but was opposed in the conservative manifesto. The government declared that anyone who voted against the government (and for what they promised to their constituents when they were elected) would be kicked out of the party. MPs who then tried to vote against the government were reportedly manhandled and assaulted to force them to vote with the government.
There is a whole load of other chaos that happened in the last 24hrs that was just ultimately impossible to recover from.
I think the last 24hr has just proved even to her final supporters that she is completely incapable of leading a government.
This is very not-typical and the details are still in flux. That being said, towards the end of a long run of a party in power, things do tend to get rather bumpy.
It's clearly time for a general election and end of the Conservative tenure in government.
On top of all the economics stuff, the final choice for Tory Leader is voted on by the Conservative party membership, who tend to be more right-wing than the soft righ, Davos-man Tory MPs.
I think they do? The UK's electoral system is far from ideal, but it's at least very straightforward. No-one outside of Boris Johnson's constituency saw the name 'Boris Johnson' on their ballot paper, so you'd hope it would be clear to averagely intelligent people that they weren't voting directly for him.
From what I saw it was Truss and Kwarteng who caused the immediate issues, so not really a fall person, so much as the people who caused the problem leaving.
They came up with the disasterous "mini-budget" which kicked it all off, they dismissed a senior treasury civil servant right before that, they didn't co-ordinate with the bank of england.
Sure there are deeper problems that are not of their making but they made them a lot worse.
I think it's arguable that the minibudget overreaction wasn't remotely rational reporting or accurate as the cause of the gilt coupon drop. Certainly that day a load of people made money on them as it was very obvious they'd be fine. But in the cloud of noise that followed, with even the nations top economic journalists regurgitating nonsense... i doubt 0.5% of the adult population could even tell you what happened to any degree of accuracy.
I'd argue she shouldn't have been choosen as she is weak in media terms, always has been, and was always going to be an easy target for the screaming minority of people.
And yes, timing was unlucky, but a prudent leader would have seen that
I'd say that all economics at a national level is about confidence. If the markets have confidence in what you're doing they don't react badly, if they don't have confidence in what you're doing, they react badly.
By not laying the ground properly for their "mini-budget" they (Truss and Kwarteng) caused the markets to lose confidence in them, causing the problems that occurred.
It doesn't really matter what most people thought of it, as they don't run the financial markets :)
I think you are quite accurate in everything you say.
I worked on an FX LP desk for nearly a decade. A happy place to be in times of turmoil. The more turmoil, the wider the spread, the more money we made. The mini gilt crisis made millions for my mates in fixed income. Confidence collapse is brilliant when you know others don't understand the markets. You sense the fantasy
We've had two female Prime Ministers before her, one of whom was quite successful as a politician (bloody awful for the country though).
It wasn't sexism, she is genuinely completely useless. Fractally shitty, in that if you examine any part of her stint in politics it is every bit as shitty and inept as the whole.
It's been clear for a long time that she's totally incompetent, the part that mystifies me is why Tory MPs gave members the choice of her or Sunak. That outcome was also obvious, for obvious reasons. Some of the other candidates were at least unknown quantities and at least one even gave the impression of being not entirely mad.
Not just sexism. I mean, I'm sure it doesn't help but the UK has had many important female politicians, and will have more, it's just that XX doesn't magically make you competent.
Boris knew the facts and lied about them. He knew where he was last Wednesday (in your bed, fucking your wife) and he's got enough smarts to figure out that a confident lie about having to work late will help him. That's not a great feature in a leader, but hey, he's at least got some idea what's going on. A liar, a cheat, a real piece of shit, but not the least competent person ever to be elected.
Liz has no idea what the facts are, and seems oblivious. Where was she last Wednesday? She's hoping you will remember because she already forgot. Why did her own constituents elect her? What was she running against? Was it the lettuce?
Why can't the Tory party do better, that's the real question. How is it that Liz Truss was on offer to the party members as Prime Minister in the first place ? They only have to send two candidates. Send two serious options, if you can't do that, why are you pretending to be a party of government?
Also, if you look at Scotland, we've had Nicola Sturgeon as First Minister for six years or so now (in which time she's seen four Tory PMs come and go), and she is so popular in the last-but-one Scottish Parliament elections her party got an overall majority, in a voting system designed to prevent any one party getting an overall majority.
I am really sick of this UK drama. They’re really the Kardashians of the world politics at this point. Trying to stay relevant constantly. Just go away.
> Truss's premiership has been in turmoil since her mini-budget last month, which rocked markets and was later scrapped by her new chancellor
Interesting that the train was set in motion by economic trouble, particularly inflation and a miscalculation about a response.
The strong US dollar is exerting effects around the world and will continue to do so. This is unlikely to be the last incident in which the dollar's strength contributes to instability in other countries.
There have been many calls for the death of the dollar. Inflation will kill it. It will be killed by countries wising up that they don't need it and can trade with each other using their own currencies.
And yet here we are. US CPI growth north of 8% and a dollar that's rocketing higher. Meanwhile countries like Britain and Japan are desperate to find a way out of an acute dollar shortage, tanking currencies, and uncontrollable inflation.
I'm referring to the parliamentary sessions in which, even though they're savagely roasting each other, they're doing in a way that feels somehow good-hearted and doesn't lay bare the naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA.
Also, less amusing but still inspiring, has been articulate criticism from politicians and pundits who seem to actually care about the thing they're talking about; on this side of the Atlantic, it's easy to get the sense that anyone in front of a camera has a pile of talking points on a set of index cards in their lap that they pull out to memorize during commercial breaks.
Charles Walker, giving an impromptu interview, seems to care about a thing: https://youtu.be/Dimw572twfk
Parliament roasts Truss: https://youtu.be/Zc_9Ty_-PrQ