Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Tamas]

What's interesting and striking is that despite a right-wing government they are emphasising the more lexiteer sides of Brexit (wage rises, re-skilling, improving productivity by investing in workers/production here) rather than the more right-wing Brexit (Singapore-on-Thames, bonfire of the regulations, accept chlorinated chicken to do a deal with the US). I always thought the right-wing Brexit was a fantasy because it never had any popular support outside of a fraction of the Tory member (and a lot of their funders/donors) - it feels like that's playing out.

I apologise for being impatient but you are missing the point. This government never emphasised that lexiteer point until after the right-wing interpretation stopped being a convenient excuse for throwing the reins between the horses and just watching shit unfold. There is ZERO indication that their leftie turn is to be taken any more seriously than any other move of the goalposts since 2016. Taking this latest shit seriously is a big mistake and professional laziness from political journalists.

This is not a shift in policy, goals, philosophy, or approach. This is a shift in short term political circumstances which in their judgement required yet one more shift of goalposts to survive until next week in their chairs. That's all this is.

And since it's a silly unfounded idea with no basis in reality, this  new "policy" will be abandoned with nothing done to pursue it, at whichever point a new buzzword will be made necessary by events.

[Jacob]

Getting Ireland to leave the EU gets more attractive every day.

Johnson & co would love that as it would reassert their traditional "Ireland is just an appendage of the UK" assumptions.

[Zanza]

It's more likely that Northern Ireland leaves the UK than Ireland leaving the EU.

[Sheilbh]

I apologise for being impatient but you are missing the point.

Oh no worries - we're all friends here and I've done it to plenty of people

This government never emphasised that lexiteer point until after the right-wing interpretation stopped being a convenient excuse for throwing the reins between the horses and just watching shit unfold. There is ZERO indication that their leftie turn is to be taken any more seriously than any other move of the goalposts since 2016. Taking this latest shit seriously is a big mistake and professional laziness from political journalists.

I suppose part of the problem or a difference is that I don't see Brexit as something that had a policy agenda or an end destination. It was always possibilities and options that will increasingly narrow now we're living through it. But it was basically throwing everything up in the air with no way of knowing where it would end up. I think that is the nature of Brexit as a huge disruptive event - the process was also disruptive - which is reflected in the political chaos and churn of the last 5 years. My own view is that what Brexit looks like depends on the politics, so I have never thought that the right-wing Brexit was possible because I just can't see that there are enough political forces to support it.

I think the politics of lexiteer ideas - nationalisation, state aid, re-skilling - plus low immigration is more obvious and will appeal to as non-ideological a Tory as Johnson. But this is also why I think the imperial nostalgia piece is overblown. The generation of people who voted for Brexit came up in post-imperial, nation-building Britain of the 60s/70s and I think that's what they want they were nostalgic for - and with shortages and potential blackouts we're almost there already But more serious - nationalisation, state aid, national wages and prices policies, low immigration (and back then, net emigration) is also a strikingly 1960s/70s proposition. We just need to throw in the union militancy, which I think (and hope) is on its way.

Basically I don't think it is goalpost moving by clever, manipulative politicians in control of narratives and their own destinies who are shaping our politics. I think the politics of this country is on the move, that there's a structural re-alignment across the West and that there are shifts in people's material status. Politicians are trying to form their coalitions within that flux - Johnson is particularly nimble (shifty) and non-ideological (unscrupulous), which is an advantage.

To be honest I think there's an analogy with Brexit in general in that I think because of Brexit the UK is far more exposed to economic shocks because we don't have the buffer and the protection of the single market - so the price rises of everything is going to hit us harder, the global energy issues will hit us harder, global food prices hitting their highest level since the 60s will hit us harder. I think there's something similar with our politics because the Brexit vote burned like acid through traditional party loyalties/identities/ties - I think we are more exposed to re-alignment and the material factors driving it. So I believe that in 2010-19 (so four elections) over half of the electorate did not vote for the same party - voter volatility and people swinging from one party to another is higher than ever recorded (some of that's dissatisfaction as well as Brexit wiping out traditional ties plus wider trends). But I don't think we're at the end of that yet and it may not end. But it seems to me that one possible outcome if it does settle down by, say, 2050 is that Labour want to stay out and distant from Europe, while Tories want to use alignment with Europe as an external control to force competition etc, as in the 60s and 70s.

I think the next Tory shift is likely to be Johnson v Sunak over the next few years.

This is not a shift in policy, goals, philosophy, or approach. This is a shift in short term political circumstances which in their judgement required yet one more shift of goalposts to survive until next week in their chairs. That's all this is.

Yes-ish. I want to parenthesise the pandemic because I just think normal politics happened in those 18 months - and a consequence of the pandemic is this is the first conference after 2019 when a leader can set out their agenda/priorities having won power. I think it's difficult to move away from that without an explanation and a "what went wrong" analysis from the press.

They've made their pitch. They devoted the entire conference to this idea of levelling up plus higher wages together as build back better. This is what this government is about and for. That's now the benchmark - for the last five years every conference has been about Brexit and it sucked the oxygen from every other issue. These have been the first post-Brexit conferences and we're able to see the contours of post-Brexit politics for the next 2-3 years (in the sense of Brexit as a political issue rather than something we'll continue to feel long-term consequences from).

And since it's a silly unfounded idea with no basis in reality, this  new "policy" will be abandoned with nothing done to pursue it, at whichever point a new buzzword will be made necessary by events.

The last buzzword was "get Brexit done". I wouldn't write off this one entirely either.

Edit: Incidentally one policy I slightly wonder if will happen is that suggested by Lord Wolfson (CEO of Next) which is make visas very easy to get for business but have a, say, 7% of payroll "visa tax". It's a bit more market responsive than the Home Office permitting x number of visas per role/sector/whatever

Edit: Also - the Tory party should be very concerned by these numbers:


If the Tories aren't economically competent (if evil) and will raise your taxes then they've got very little going for them for many voters

[Sheilbh]

Lots I agree with and to think about in this piece. I think it slightly underestimates the potential impact of Reeves' radicalism at Labour conference: £300 billion capital spending on energy transition over a decade; changing procurement rules to invest domestically etc:

When others stay silent about the ills of British capitalism, liars like Johnson rush in
William Davies
For 30 years, politicians have ducked hard questions about our economy. Now the Tories promise to magic the problems away
Sat 9 Oct 2021 07.00 BST

Boris Johnson's latest wheeze is classical political economy. Faced with the chaos of petrol shortages, empty supermarket shelves and surging gas prices, Johnson offered an audacious response this week: this was all part of the plan. Britain, he explained, was merely transitioning out of a broken economic "model", based around low pay and high immigration, and into a new one, based around high productivity and high-wage job creation.

His conference speech was immediately criticised by the right, on the basis that by celebrating tighter labour markets it appeared to be actively inviting inflation. But on the basic gut level, to which Johnson only ever speaks, he appears to have got away with it. Britain's most exasperating economic policy riddle of recent decades – its sluggish productivity growth – was simply going to be magicked away, he announced.

Regardless of whether we agree with the Adam Smith Institute that his speech was "economically illiterate", Johnson's newfound interest in economic "models" tells us something about how this weird new Conservative party is operating. It is equally significant that Keir Starmer – in contrast to his two predecessors – shied well away from discussing the state of British capitalism. The terms of political debate appear to have flipped.

To some extent, Johnson was ploughing a familiar conservative furrow. The insistence that apparent economic failure is, on the contrary, merely a symptom of the medicine beginning to work has strong echoes of Margaret Thatcher's turbulent first few years in office. In 1981, Thatcher was famously criticised by 364 far more distinguished economists than those of the Adam Smith Institute in a letter to the Times condemning her attempts to tackle inflation through punitively high interest rates.

Thatcher posed as the strict nurse, painfully weaning the patient off its addiction to inflation. Johnson, by contrast, is suggesting Britain now needs to kick its dependence on foreign labour. No matter what apparent damage the Conservative party does to business or GDP, there is something about its status in British public life that grants its leaders the right to speak about the essence and direction of capitalism, in defiance of all economic logic and indicators.

Thatcher, of course, was deadly serious and a living embodiment of the work ethic that she was advocating. Johnson is neither of those things. Thatcher nearly paid a hefty political price for her intransigence, whereas it's hard to imagine Johnson risking his position for a mere ideology. For Johnson, it's safe to say, this is more bluster that "works" to the extent that it allows him to spin a good yarn. Theories of capitalism now join ancient Greek myth and rugby metaphors – all simply ways that Johnson chooses to navigate an interview.

Starmer evidently views Johnson's recklessness as an opportunity to position Labour as the party of business. "Good business and good government are partners," he told Labour conference a week earlier. While his speech was understandably hostile to Conservative economic policies, which he blamed for low wages, it contained nothing as drastic as changing the entire model of the British economy. In the tradition of New Labour, it largely fixated on extolling the benefits of what (good) business can do.

It is a strange juncture to have reached, when the character of British capitalism is now being questioned for wholly opportunistic purposes by a showman such as Johnson. But this is what happens when more honest politicians duck difficult questions about the workings of capitalism, or get punished for asking them by the media – which is precisely what has transpired over the past 30 years.

Among political economy scholars, interest in "varieties of capitalism" blossomed during the 1990s, at the same time that liberal democracies were abandoning the question of "capitalism or socialism?" in favour of a question about which kind of capitalism. Before winning power, New Labour was tempted by Germanic visions of "stakeholder capitalism" proposed by Will Hutton, but Gordon Brown came to the conclusion that Britain's flexible labour market was too valuable an asset, especially given stubbornly high unemployment on the continent at the time.

The economist David Soskice, whose 2001 book Varieties of Capitalism (edited with Peter Hall) is still the handbook for this mode of analysis, supposedly convinced Brown that he was far better off streamlining Britain's existing, flexible "model" than seeking to impose a set of constraints upon the labour market in search of a new one. Before long, the entire question of economic "models" fell by the wayside. Brown, meanwhile, rolled out a system of tax credits, that brushed the social consequences of a low-wage economy under the carpet.

It wasn't until 2011, with capitalism in crisis and the bookish Ed Miliband leading the Labour party, that such questions were resuscitated. In place of New Labour's usual bland paeans to "business", Miliband sought to draw a line between the economy's "predators" and "producers" – a truthful recognition that British capitalism had become a playground for asset-strippers, speculators and monopolists. It was shot down in the press as evidence of "Red Ed's" dangerous Marxism.

From 2015-19, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell upped the ante, developing a left populism that accused the super-rich of "rigging" the economy. In their eagerness to side with the majority of workers, they went into the 2019 general election promising to target just 150 "billionaires": not so much a failed economic "model" as a tiny parasitical clique.

By retreating back to the New Labour tactic of praising "business" and promising "economic prosperity" in general, Starmer has abandoned any such critique. The manifold differences between, say, a private equity fund extracting profits from a care home by squeezing wages and a family-owned exporter of machine tools, become obscured all over again. In his bid to look economically serious, Starmer has had to avoid making serious economic distinctions. In a public culture that rewards mendacity, a liar such as Johnson ends up with more licence to raise such topics, so long as and he doesn't do so with any serious intent and Labour remains silent about them.

Economic reality cannot, of course, be wished away altogether with bluster and humour. But among the dysfunctions of Westminster is the fact that economic outcomes may eventually be determined by two policy areas that are no longer up for democratic debate: Brexit and monetary policy. Johnson can bluff about productivity and immigration all he likes, but neither he nor Starmer will stand up in public and highlight manifest connections between Britain's chosen Brexit deal and logistical chaos.

And he can troll the Confederation of British Industry all he likes by celebrating wage increases, but if inflation runs above 2% for long enough, the independent Bank of England is duty bound to respond by raising interest rates. The effect this may have on an already-inflated housing market may pose him far greater political problems than wage inflation, but that's how Britain's economic model works. If he really wants to change it by design, and not merely revel in the current chaos, he's got his work cut out.

    William Davies is a sociologist and political economist. His latest book is This is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain

I can't find it now but there was an incredible line - I think from a cabinet minister - about Tory conference (I think for tomorrow's Sunday Times). Basically they said the Tories didn't really believe passionately in free trade but they embraced it in order to kill off the Liberal Party, they don't now really believe in interventionism but they'll use it to kill off the Labour Party.

Edit: And the other point on economics is that the withdrawal of covid support measures, plus tax rises, plus potential interest rate rises due to inflation is not a necessarily auspicious policy mix

Edit: Not a cabinet minister a Downing Street adviser: "Conservatives didn't actually use to believe in free markets. It was a Liberal belief. We adopted it and we killed them. Now we're adopting Labour ideology and it's killing them too."

[Sheilbh]

Separate from Brexit etc. But this is shaming - but sadly not surprising. If you click on any Tweet by Sadiq then the comments are just an open sewer of Islamophobia both from people in the UK but also globally, you'll see Americans and Indians join in etc.

But when Johnson was mayor I saw him more than once cycling around town without any security. So it's really grim that this is what life's like for our first Muslim mayor

Sadiq Khan's 24/7 security challenges our notions of non-racist London
Nick Cohen
London's mayor needs heavy security to guard against extremists but who protects him from the new rightwing politics?


London mayor, Sadiq Khan, flanked by security guards. Photograph: Dawe/Crystal Pix/Backgrid
Sat 9 Oct 2021 19.00 BST

Today, as every day, police protection will be at its highest around the Queen and the prime minister and around a politician who in normal circumstances would barely need guarding. Fifteen armed officers, trained in counter-terrorism and emergency medicine, will be on alert solely because a brown-skinned Muslim, caught up in a global wave of hatred, is the mayor of London.

The level of threat Sadiq Khan must live with challenges the self-congratulatory claim that "Britain is the least racist country in the world" and many other complacent cliches.

British society tells immigrants and their children that all will be well as long as they assimilate. No family could have tried harder than the Khans. Sadiq's father, Amanullah, and mother, Sehrun, emigrated from Pakistan in 1968, the year of Enoch Powell's "rivers of blood" speech. When his son became a Labour MP in 2005, that time of racial intimidation and violence was meant to have passed into an unmarked grave.

I am not damning with faint praise when I say that if Khan were a white politician, there would be nothing exceptional about him. Since the voters made him London's mayor in 2016, he has not shown a trace of sectarianism or religious intolerance. He has described Pride marches as a highlight of his year. When Jeremy Corbyn was in charge of Labour, Khan spoke out against anti-Jewish hatred with more political courage than many of his colleagues could muster. As if to prove the point, the first threats he received did not come from neo-Nazis but from Muslim radicals who condemned his support for same-sex marriage.

Khan is a modern social democrat. He might be the progressive mayor of any large European or North American city or a leader of or minister in any centre-left government. Yet how many of his contemporaries have experienced the following?

The police took a bomb threat in February so seriously Khan was conducting online meetings while dogs sniffed for explosives in the mayoral office, his staff told me. Last year, police put 24-hour surveillance on his family home because of credible threats against him and his wife. Without publicity, the authorities also sectioned a Nazi sympathiser from Surrey, who threatened to "do something" to Khan, which would mean "we will see him in the news". So great is the hate staff in City Hall's public liaison unit are offered counselling to help them cope with the volume of racist, Islamophobic, violent and abusive messages they see, and pass on to detectives.

A second myth follows the assertion that the assimilated have nothing to fear in the world's least racist country. Whenever far-right terrorists spoil the national image by murdering Jo Cox or threatening to murder Khan, conventional conservatives jump up to say we cannot call them "terrorists". They are "mentally ill" loners, in the Lee Harvey Oswald mould, who do not represent darker forces in wider society.

You could forgive Khan for replying that he has enough "loners" after him to fill a stadium. As Brenton Tarrant prepared to massacre 51 people in Christchurch mosques, he found the time to urge his supporters to show their commitment to a "white rebirth" by removing the "Pakistani Muslim invader [who] now sits as representative for the people of London". "Why would a terrorist in New Zealand know about me?" Khan asked. His answer comes from the great reactionary year of 2016 that pushed conservatism rightwards. As he was preparing for the May election in London, Boris Johnson and his Vote Leave team were swinging the Brexit referendum with the lie – and there is no other word for it – that Muslim Turkey with its population of 76m "is joining the EU". At the same moment, US commentators were dismissing the presidential run of Donald Trump and did not see that he would win in November on an anti-Muslim ticket.

Khan experienced the new rightwing politics in the campaign of the Conservative contender, Zac Goldsmith, a member of the upper class, who showed how the mainstream could exploit the lunatic fringe. The Conservatives sought to widen communal divisions between London's Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. Khan was a Muslim, they maintained, and if not quite a terrorist then a "Labour lackey who speaks alongside extremists". I remember thinking at the time that the dog whistles were so loud, you couldn't hear yourself speak.

During the 20th century, anti-Jewish hatred was Janus-faced. On the one hand, it exploited resentment from below by pretending that a Jewish elite controlled the capitalist banks and media, along with (and don't ask how) the Soviet Communist party. On the other, it exploited resentment from above about immigrants with an alien religion undercutting wages and stealing jobs. Today's far right plays both sides when it says the global elite is replacing white people by flooding the west with immigrants. Khan lives with danger because he has become the first prominent Muslim politician it can claim is a member of the elite.

Trump may be deranged but he is hardly a loner. He was president of the US and may be again. He endorsed Katie Hopkins, who pretends that Khan has allowed no-go areas in London where sharia law rules. You can see the same cry echoed on Twitter to this day.

Conservative newspapers know their readership and understand that putting Khan's name in a headline guarantees angry clicks. No attack on Khan is too trivial to dismiss. They will generate traffic by seizing on criticism of him from figures as obscure as Piers Morgan's son.

Khan said he had kept quiet about the dangers he faced because he did not want to deter people from minorities from going into politics. Then he realised that black footballers did not duck the issue of racism for fear they would put the young off sport. They wanted to fight it and so should he. Silence "normalised extremism", he told me, and he had had enough of keeping quiet.

The mayor of our capital city needs 24/7 protection because of his faith. If you appreciate the consequences of the threat he faces, you must conclude the world's "least racist country" is not anti-racist enough.

Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist

Edit: Having said that - and this may just be because things have got worse recently - I was stood opposite Sadiq on the Tube in 2017. I mainly remember because I was visibly shocked at how small he was But he diddn't appear to have any security around him. He was just stood in the door on his phone like a normal person.

[Tamas]

Told you so. The EU accepts demands over NI, so the British government quickly come up with new ones:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/oct/09/trade-war-looms-as-uk-set-to-spurn-eu-offer-on-northern-ireland

Fears that the UK is heading for a trade war with the EU have been fuelled by strong indications from the government that proposals to be unveiled in Brussels on Wednesday over Brexit arrangements do not go far enough.

The Brexit minister, Lord Frost, will use a speech in Portugal on Tuesday to say that scrapping its prohibition on British sausages to resolve the dispute over the Northern Ireland protocol do not meet the UK and unionists demands.

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The peer will call for "significant" changes to the post-Brexit agreement he negotiated, including over the role of the European court of justice, something the EU is highly unlikely to concede to.

"Without new arrangements in this area the protocol will never have the support it needs to survive," he will warn on the eve of a significant move by the EU to resolve the row.

Ireland's foreign minister, Simon Coveney, reacted with incredulity at the UK's "red line" and its timing just days before what he said was a "serious" offer from the EU.

He tweeted: "EU working seriously to resolve practical issues with implementation of Protocol – so UKG creates a new "red line" barrier to progress, that they know EU can't move on.... are we surprised? Real Q: Does UKG actually want an agreed way forward or a further breakdown in relations?"

The EU's Brexit commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, will table four papers on Wednesday on the subject of how the Northern Ireland protocol can be improved – which he has described as "very far reaching".

Maroš Šefčovič
EU urges UK to drop rhetoric in Northern Ireland Brexit row
Read more
Included will be a proposed "national identity" exemption for British sausages from the EU's prohibition on prepared meat from a third country, sources said.

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But Mujtaba Rahman, the managing director of the Eurasia Group consultancy, warned in a note to clients on Saturday that the absence of concessions on the ECJ will give Frost the justification for triggering article 16, the mechanism for putting the Northern Ireland protocol into formal dispute process or putting it into abeyance by disapplying the arrangements altogether.

"There is a huge amount of cynicism in the EU about what the government's actual objectives are. Is it to fix substantive issues in Northern Ireland or is it to keep an ideological fight with the EU rolling because it serves certain sections of the Tory party?" said Rahman.

"The French president and the German chancellor and the European Commission president cannot wake up every single day to a new argument with Boris Johnson. At some point they need to send a stronger simpler message.

"Use of a termination clause within the trade and cooperation agreement itself can be triggered unilaterally and would fully suspend the zero tariff/quota trade deal between the two sides."

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This cross-retaliation mechanism allowing trade penalties for breaches of the withdrawal agreement was agreed by both sides but others think the EU will not be so keen to go nuclear.

Catherine Barnard, professor of EU law at the University of Cambridge, believes short sharp shocks in the form of tariffs on iconic British products such as Scottish whisky or salmon are more likely.

She also said that the ECJ is not a significant issue in relation to the trade of goods. Its annual report cites just 24 cases relating to customs union laws currently pending, among more than 1,045 in total.

Frost also told delegates at the Conservative party conference last week that the rules required the EU to be "proportionate" but said he still hoped to come out of negotiations with a fresh deal.

Retaliatory measures are unlikely until next year, with the EU expected to respond with infringement and legal proceedings as its first response to any suspension of the Northern Ireland protocol by the UK.

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The protocol, designed to avoid a hard border between the UK and the single market operating in the Republic of Ireland, placed a border in the Irish sea, enraging unionists who see checks on goods coming into Northern Ireland from Britain as an attack on the integrity of the UK and their British identity.

The EU is expected to propose eliminating checks on goods destined to remain in Northern Ireland, with checks only on those products that are intended for sale in the republic.

Both sides have said they expect to go into a period of intense negotiation, which Frost put at three weeks, after the EU's response to the UK's demands are published on Wednesday.

But one school of thought is that Frost and the home secretary, Priti Patel, are being used to keep the Brexit pot boiling to show how the UK is sticking up against "EU bullies".

Others think the fight over Northern Ireland is more fundamental. One former Downing Street official said he had been told Boris Johnson "was going round telling people he had been misled" over the protocol and was determined it would have to be rewritten.

Frost will say on Tuesday that "the UK-EU relationship is under strain" but if the two sides can put the protocol "on a durable footing we have the opportunity to move past the difficulties of the past year".

[Tamas]

Good reactions from Labour, I guess the problem is such comments won't reach as much people as Johnsons' empty blusters.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/10/energy-firms-not-expect-much-help-treasury-kwasi-kwarteng

Energy crisis: Treasury slaps down Kwarteng over help for firms claim
Source close to Rishi Sunak accuses business secretary of 'making up' talks over support for manufacturers

Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng (right) speaks to the BBC's Andrew Marr
Business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng (right) speaks to the BBC's Andrew Marr on Sunday. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/AFP/Getty Images
Jessica Elgot Chief political correspondent
@jessicaelgot
Sun 10 Oct 2021 14.16 BST

Treasury sources have hit back at the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, after he suggested Rishi Sunak was involved in negotiations over aid for struggling manufacturers hit by soaring energy bills.

In a highly unusual slapdown, which occurred during a round of broadcast interviews with Kwarteng, sources close to the chancellor cautioned the business secretary against making any promises to companies and said there had been no approach to the Treasury.

Representatives from key industries including steel and paper firms are said to have told Kwarteng at a meeting on Friday that many are "days away" from having to halt production because of spiralling costs.

Kwarteng had suggested that struggling companies would not get much more support from the Treasury, saying he was liaising with the chancellor but did not expect billions more in subsidies.

One Treasury source said it was "made up" to suggest the pair were in discussions about potential support. "Kwasi was mistaken. The facts are that, to date, the Treasury and the chancellor have not been involved in any talks on this topic," one source said.


Labour said the cabinet split showed there was no direction at the top of government to help business in crisis – as it was also revealed that Boris Johnson is to spend the next week holidaying in Marbella.

"In the teeth of a crisis of its own making, the government has put its out-of-office on. The prime minister has gone on holiday, no one knows where the chancellor is, and this morning we understand the business secretary has entered the realms of fantasy," said the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Bridget Phillipson.

"The two key government departments responsible for the current cost-of-living crisis have spent this morning infighting about whether they were in talks with each other. What a farce. If government ministers can't even tell the truth about each other, then what hope do we have for the challenges facing our country?"

The Sunday Times had reported that Kwarteng was preparing to ask the chancellor for billions for a manufacturing industry bailout, for steel, ceramics, chemical and glass companies who are facing having to halt production.

The companies are reported to have requested potential subsidies, as well as putting forward suggestions for a cap on gas prices, though it is understood both the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Treasury see that suggestion as far too complex.

However, Kwarteng said on Sunday he had not asked for significant further support from the Treasury. "I've not asked for billions. We've got existing schemes. I'm working very closely with Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, to get us through this situation," he said. "I've been very clear we're not going to bail out failing energy suppliers."

Kwarteng hinted that help could come for some industries that were extremely energy-intensive, such as steel production, saying he was "looking to find a solution".

But speaking on the BBC, when he was asked if it was definitive that those industries would get more support, Kwarteng said: "No ... we already have existing support and we're looking to see if that's sufficient to get us through this situation."

Kwarteng told Sky it was clear some businesses did need short-term help. "What I'm very clear about is we need to help them get through this situation – it's a difficult situation, gas prices, electricity prices are at very high levels right across the world and of course I'm speaking to government colleagues particularly in the Treasury to try and see a way through this," he said.

"I can't come on your programme and say we're going to have a price cap because we're trying to work out what the nature of that support might be."

After Treasury sources briefed that Kwarteng was overreaching with his comments about negotiations with Sunak, the business secretary told Times Radio there had been no specific request. Kwarteng said he had not "asked him for anything" but that "we are always in conversation with the Treasury and we're always talking about how we can support British business".

The price of wholesale gas has risen 250% since January, leaving many businesses in crisis because many have not fixed their purchase prices and there is no energy price cap for companies, unlike for consumers.

The chief executive of Energy UK, Emma Pinchbeck, told Sky News's Trevor Phillips on Sunday programme that energy-intensive users and retailers would suffer unaffordable costs and that more energy suppliers would go bust, putting pressure on bigger companies.

She said: "We are expecting more retailers to go out of business this winter. We had around 50 suppliers when we started, and we're expecting to see more leave the market ... The issue is how many are failing at once and whether or not our mechanisms, which are in place to look after customers when that happens, are up for that many failures in one go."

Pinchbeck said the government could be forced into a situation where more support was necessary. "For us in the energy industry, the thing we're still very worried about is domestic retail, I think that's where we'll see more failures in the coming weeks and what we do about the costs of that for individual consumers paying their bills."

Kwarteng said he believed the lights would not go out this winter and said he would not give advice on the personal precautions people should take to save money on energy bills.

"Some people feel comfortable wrapped up in lots of different clothes, others wear relatively little – I think people should be sensible. I think people should do what they feel comfortable with," he told Sky. "My job as an energy minister is not to tell people how many layers of clothing they should wear, that's not really my job."

[Sheilbh]

Yeah. I'm always a little uncomfortable with attacking politicians for going on holiday or for certain "expenses". I think part of the reason "normal people" don't go into politics is because you will get attacked for doing normal things like holidays or some expenses etc.

The main thing is most people don't hear political messages from either part, because most people ignore politics which is why they need to be repeated ad nauseum. People make up their own mind - 66% are worried about inflation, the biggest blame for shortages is going to the government at 45%, which is double the numbers blaming the next two (media, business or Brexit). No-one knows what levelling up means and only 37% noticed any news about the conferences. Those numbers aren't good for the government but a good response from Labour now is meaningless - they need to hammer it every day, every media outing they've got and have a consistent line so it starts to cut through (I saw one old New Labour hand being shocked that only some of the Labour front bench speeches talked about the "Tory shambles" ).

The other interesting thing is how this cabinet is briefing against each other. Obviously there's clear splits around what policies they want (interventionism v a traditional Tory Chancellor; libertarianism v law and order) but it's becoming really open now. Here it's the Treasury briefing against Kwarteng, but I also saw a story that Patel wants to create a new criminal offence of "public sexual harassment" and the Home Office are briefing that Johnson personally is blocking them. It isn't entirely unusual but it's probably a sign of dysfunction if you've got the Treasury briefing against BEIS and the Home Office briefing against Number 10 - they've not got much of a grip.

I'd note that the Treasury are trying to keep their fingerprints off this issue and the Home Office are trying to portray themselves as law and order crimefighters being blocked by Johnson - neither of those things would necessarily hurt Sunak or Patel if they were planning leadership bids when Johnson goes

[OttoVonBismarck]

I'm hearing a lot of talk heating up about the Johnson Administration taking some unilateral actions on Northern Ireland.

It makes me honestly wonder what the future is for Northern Ireland. I don't really understand the jumbled approach to it that has been taken, I think there needs to be a decision made--Northern Ireland is as integral to the United Kingdom as London or Manchester, and thus its border with the EU is the land border with the Republic of Ireland, not the Irish Sea that separates it from the rest of the UK, or Northern Ireland is not integral to the UK. In that latter case, frankly, they should be preparing to transfer the polity over to the Republic's control. This in between bullshit seems some emblematic of basically everything I as a foreigner perceive to be the British political character these days. This is a country that lacks decisiveness or clear direction, and frankly I think it has for most of my lifetime. It's weird what a proud history this country has, because when I look at it with an outsider's eye, all I see is weakness of character and weakness of will. The UK is a weak country made up of constituent parts that have less allegiance to it than Texas does to the United States, which is a shocking statement considering Texas is often hyperbolically noted as having an independence streak, and fought a war of secession 150 years ago.

[Josquius]

Northern Ireland isn't integral to the UK. Its always been a weird semi UK place that sort of does its own thing.
One of the main things the good Friday agreement delivered was effectively making it operate as semi part of the UK and semi part of Ireland. The weird halfway place is where it has to be for peace.

[Tamas]

We were wondering how Cressida Dick could keep her job:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/10/uk-met-police-reportedly-speak-prince-andrew-accuser-virginia-giuffre

Met police drop investigation into Prince Andrew in Virginia Giuffre case
Officers made decision after reportedly talking to Giuffre and a review of documents

[Tamas]

Lol just realised Johnson wen to Marbella, where Orban's eldest daughter moved with her family recently. Apparently it is the Southern capital of organised crime and money laundering.

[Tamas]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2021/oct/11/boris-johnson-holiday-energy-crisis-politics-live?page=with:block-6163e6298f080812a1e2095f#block-6163e6298f080812a1e2095f

No 10 backs Kwasi Kwarteng in dispute with Treasury
At the Downing Street lobby briefing the prime minister's spokesman effectively backed Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, in his dispute with the Treasury over what he said in a TV interview yesterday.

After Kwarteng said he was engaging with the Treasury over help for industries affected by the spike in energy prices, a Treasury source told the media Kwarteng was making it up.

Sam Coates Sky
@SamCoatesSky
🔥Shortly after Kwasi Kwarteng says he's engaging with Treasury over ways they can help industry, a Treasury source said:

"This is not the first time the BEIS secretary has made things up in interviews. To be crystal clear the treasury are not involved in any talks"

But this morning the PM's spokesman said:

As you would expect, ministers from BEIS [the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy] are working across government, including with the Treasury, on this important issue, the challenges currently facing industry in light of global gas prices, and that will continue.

The spokesman also said that he did not accept that the Treasury and the Department for Business had fallen out. They were continuing to work closely together, he claimed.

When it was put to him it was not just Treasury "sources" disparaging Kwarteng, because a Treasury spokesperson subsequently released an on-the-record statement saying the Treasury had "not been engaged in talks on this", the No 10 spokesman said he could not speak for the Treasury, but that he thought that comment referred to just specific talks on a finance package. But officials across government were engaged on the issue generally, he said.

[celedhring]

Lol just realised Johnson wen to Marbella, where Orban's eldest daughter moved with her family recently. Apparently it is the Southern capital of organised crime and money laundering.

I have seen it called "the UN of crime" due to the sheer number and national diversity of criminal groups operating there.

It has always been the sleaziest city in Spain. Think Boardwalk Empire with sun and beaches. There was a big crackdown in the 2000s but it has come back with a vengeance.