Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

This is quite the briefing from Rayner allies on her new role (shadowing Michael Gove) she's also Shadow Secretary of State for the Future of Work - which, of course, isn't a department. Shades of John Redwood's time as Shadow Secretary of State for Deregulation

It doesn't sound like her and Starmer have made up

[The Minsky Moment]

Man the rhetoric on Starmer sure changed quickly.

Nothing fails like failure.

[Tonitrus]

Man the rhetoric on Starmer sure changed quickly.

Nothing fails like failure.

Not to mention when one doesn't handle said failure very well.

[Sheilbh]

Especially when your whole pitch is you'll be better at winning than the previous guy and you're more competent than the other guy.

Edit: Amazing anecdote in the Time indicating the degree of factional paranoia in Starmer's team:

[Richard Hakluyt]

It looks like there is a cult of personality developing, but with a leader who doesn't have a personality 

Poor England, held in thrall by charlatans and mountebanks and with no viable alternative 

[Josquius]

Not a great article, but nice to see this getting attention. It has been bugging me a while:

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/video-hartlepool-voters-tory-labour-jill-mortimer-268639

Otto English says "deep-rooted political illiteracy" is allowing those in power to remain popular after footage showed two voters in Hartlepool blame Labour for police and hospital cuts.

Despite being out of power for more than a decade the two men seemed to confuse national political decisions for those being made on the ground in local constituencies.

"You can sort of think for yourself"
In the BBC Breakfast clip, the voters are asked to reflect on the Hartlepool by-election and how they reached their decision.

One voter said: "I suppose for Hartlepool and electing Labour it stems back to your granddad, your dad, and it's passed onto you, 'you vote Labour because we're working class'."

He added: "Now we're getting to a stage where you can sort of think for yourself – we've had enough of Labour. They've just wrecked it, everything.

"The hospital, we haven't even got a cell where we can lock someone up on a night. We haven't got a court, where we can take them to court. What's that all about? You've got to have these facilities, [such as] police."

The other voter said: "We had the option to give birth to our second son in Hartlepool but we decided against it, because there is no doctors, no [hospital] theatres, and if anything went wrong, God forbid, we would have had gotten off to Tees."

NHS and police cuts
According to GMB figures released in 2019 some 23,500 police staff jobs have been lost in England and Wales since 2010, when the Conservatives were voted into government.

The figures include more than 7,000 cuts to Police Community Support Officer roles (PCSOs).

Rachel Harrison, GMB National Officer, commented at the time: "The Tories talk tough on crime but in reality they've spent the last decade denying police forces the resources they need to keep the public safe.

"They have put lives at risk every day."

At the start of the pandemic, John McDonnell said that ten years of "cuts, weak growth, and widespread insecure work" left the UK in a "vulnerable position" to a shock like the one the country faced with the escalating coronavirus.

Some 150,000 people are thought to have perished due to the virus in the country.

New MP Jill Mortimer repeatedly blamed Labour MPs for Hartlepool's state
Jill Mortimer, the newly-elected Tory MP for Hartlepool, has repeatedly blamed Labour MPs for Hartlepool's state.

Speaking on LBC this weekend she said the people of Hartlepool "wanted change and voted for positive change".

But LBC's Nick Ferrari stressed several times that it is the Conservatives who have been in power "for quite some years".

He said: "You talk about opportunities being missed, they have clearly been missed by the government which you're now a member of".

Jill Mortimer disagreed and blamed Hartlepool Labour MPs – and got the maths wrong, saying they have been in power "for the past 57 years" – but the constituency has been in place for 47 years.

She said: "The people of Hartlepool aren't daft, they knew that their Labour MPs have not been doing their best for them, and that's why they wanted a change.

"They failed to act to secure the opportunities that they could for their town which is what I will be doing.

"All I know is that we went out, we ran a good campaign, we told people our message of what we wanted to do here and they put their trust in us."

[Josquius]

And in more significant news of the country continuing to go backwards....

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/may/09/government-to-change-english-voting-system-after-labour-mayoral-victories

Ministers are pressing ahead with changes to electoral law that could make it easier for Conservatives to win future mayoral elections, as Labour claimed 11 of the 13 posts being contested across England.

The UK home secretary, Priti Patel, has already unveiled plans to switch all future English mayoral elections from the existing supplementary vote system – in which the public ranks their two favourite candidates – to the first past the post system used in elections to the House of Commons.

Prof Tony Travers, of the London School of Economics, said analysis of Thursday's polls suggested this change could open a potential route to victory for the Tories in cities such as London.

"It's likely that first past the post would make it somewhat easier for the Conservatives to win if they could come up with a really good candidate," he said.

Labour's Sadiq Khan won the London mayoral contest comfortably against his Conservative rival, Shaun Bailey, once voters' second preferences were taken into account. But Khan beat Bailey by only 40% to 35% on first preference votes, as some leftwing former Labour voters shifted to the Greens and other smaller parties.

Travers said Labour faced the joint challenge of finding a message that lets them take on the Conservatives at a national level while also stopping leftwing voters in major cities moving to the Greens.

"We're back to the usual problem of the fragmentation of the left, while the centre-right vote is much better at holding itself together," he said.

Despite Labour's dominance in London, there are signs that the decades-long Conservative decline in the capital may have been arrested or gone into reverse. In some areas of the capital, Bailey outperformed Khan on first-preference votes, while the Tories have also been buoyed by growing support from Hindu and Sikh communities.

The government will have to pass fresh legislation to change the voting system, which would also affect elections for police and crime commissioners. Labour has pledged to oppose the changes but the Conservatives have a large majority in the Commons and the party is expected to rely on a vague manifesto commitment to the first past the post system as a justification to push it through the Lords.

Although Labour won most mayoral elections across England easily – with Andy Burnham receiving a landslide 67% of votes in Greater Manchester – under the new voting system it would be likely to lose others such as the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough mayoralty.

There is evidence that voters are confused by the use of the supplementary vote system. Almost 5% of ballots cast in this year's mayor of London election were rejected, mainly because voters had voted for too many candidates.

Conservative candidates won two of the mayoralties that held elections on Thursday: Andy Street in the West Midlands and Ben Houchen with a landslide in Tees Valley.

Street and Houchen narrowly won against the odds in traditional Labour-voting areas when their positions were first contested in 2017. However, this week both candidates were reelected with substantially increased majorities, having trumpeted their ability to win funds for their local area from a central Tory government in Westminster.

Elsewhere, the incumbent Labour mayors Steve Rotheram, Marvin Rees, Norma Redfearn, Paul Dennett and Ros Jones retained their respective roles in the Liverpool city region, Bristol, North Tyneside, Salford and Doncaster respectively. The party's Tracy Brabin also won the first-ever West Yorkshire mayoral contest.

Huge echos of Thacher and the metropolitan counties. One of her less remembered though ultimately most impactful crimes.

[Tamas]

 

Can you name a thing that is bad in England currently that cannot be traced back to Thatcher or Churchill? Just wondering.

[celedhring]

Marmite.

[Tamas]

Marmite.

I'd wait on Tyr's input on that before jumping to conclusions.

[Josquius]

Can you name a thing that is bad in England currently that cannot be traced back to Thatcher or Churchill? Just wondering.

Churchill?

Sure, there's plenty wrong in the UK that pre-dates Thatcher. However its simply a fact that she stripped the metropolitan counties of their powers with various awful results.

[garbon]

I see photo ID is now to become mandatory for elections.

[Tamas]

I see photo ID is now to become mandatory for elections.

I am not sure if Labour should bite or not. Its quite clearly another attempt to import the American culture war.

On the other hand, if you want to link universal suffrage to a requirement, you must provide that requirement. I don't see how you would have a photo ID in this country without a driving licence or a passport.

Have mandatory ID cards and I will be 100% on board with photo ID for voting. Until then this is BS.

[Sheilbh]

I see photo ID is now to become mandatory for elections.

Yeah which is just a huge dog-whistle.

And another example of just transplanting politics from the US because, in actual fact I think it is likely to hurt the Tories most as the largest group without any form of photo ID is the elderly. They are also the most likely to vote and the most likely to vote Tory - so they will be the people being turned away. I've no issue with it in principle if we have universal photo ID that is more or less free or very cheap for everyone. To Tamas's continued outrage, we don't - so it's wrong.

There are signs of Tory discontent about it though - David Davis, back on the backbenches, has already called it an "illiberal solution to a non-existent problem". On the other hand something that will be very bad for Labour - and unclear if it'll pass in time for the next election) is the next constituency boundary review

Not a great article, but nice to see this getting attention. It has been bugging me a while:

I think this has always been true and always been something that the Lib Dems were especially good at taking advantage of - "Yes, as Foreign Secretary he negotiated peace between West Poppistan and the Big Hat Islands. But has he done anything about the graffiti on the Frinton Road bus shelter, eh? Exactly."

On the one hand, it's a weird neo-feudal take on the role of an MP - that they are the local lord who should be fixing things. On the other, if you've elected one part for 60 years and it's gone to shit and I think you might as well try voting for someone else. Especially with a government as committed to pork barrel spending as this one.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Yeah at what point is Labour no longer viable as an opposition? They marched leftward with Corbyn and now have marched rightward with Starmer only to see their hold on power decline.

It seems pretty bad to be a party called Labour and have your leader conceding that you've "lost the trust of working people."

As I keep saying this is a commom problem for the left in developed countries because ina historic sense they have won. The economic policies they fought for when they have been formed have been adopted by all sides, in Europe at least and only their extent is up for debate.

Couple that with the progressive cultural messages a lot of the working class is ambivalent or rather hostile toward (ethnic minorities among working class included) and you have quite an uphill battle.

Arguably even in the U.S. which never went as left economically as Europe, this is happening. While they take pains to avoid supporting open ended programs that could be labelled "socialist" one of the defining elements of the Trump-era GOP is ever greater embrace of basically large hand outs to the electorate. Josh Hawley who hopes to be the leader of the next generation has been on board with a lot of stuff that would be fiscal heterodoxy in the 90s or even 2000s era GOP.