Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Tamas]

Here's a Guardian comment which echos my own view very well, it was under this article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/15/conservatives-danger-levelling-up-complacent

There has been much written recently about Johnson's political "philosophy". Much fevered discussion of Thatcherism giving way to a One Nation, Macmillan paternalism.

And how the Tories seem to be loving the attention paid to this battle for the "heart and soul" of their party .... with each side twittering photos of the covers of their favourite books. Nozick , Hayek and Popper on one side, met with a salvo of Putnam and Pabst on the other. Look everyone, we're not just a bunch of reactionary blowhard opportunists, there's still such a thing as Conservative intellectualism. We actually READ!!!

However, neither the Tory Party nor Johnson should be accorded the respect that these discussions in the media imply. This article by Andy hits much closer to the mark. The twitterings of Steve Baker and Danny Kruger are a smug, complacent indulgence and the reality is a lot simpler.

Johnson is nothing but a cakeist who serves only his own purposes. He seeks the easiest possible short term answer, the consequences and feasibility of which be damned. This isn't an approach that merits much analysis. It is merely the lifelong habit of the idle, the selfish and the reckless. And inevitably, upon contact with reality, it is an incoherent mess with massive collateral damage.

In Johnson's world government promises big things. Level-up .... get Brexit done .... remold the economy to a high-skilled, high wage one .... go green. But as soon as there are problems, it is simply neither the fault of government, nor its role to intervene.

Is this a dastardly new-fangled Schrödinger's politics, with government being both "is and isn't" at one and the same time?

No, because when you open the box and peer inside, it is completely empty. Just like Johnson himself. That this big box of empty has succeeded in befuddling the opposition and wowing the electorate is a reflection of the degradation of public life in the UK in recent years.

There's nothing very new going on in the Tory Party. Johnson isn't a One Nation Conservative. He is an indolent chancer. It's long past time that everyone should have begun treating him as such.

[Sheilbh]

Hasn't that always been the case with the Tory Party though? My big one idea explanation of why they're probably the most successful political party in the (mostly) democratic world is precisely that there's nothing there. They don't have a core philosophy or set of philosophical texts or guiding ideals - they are entirely adaptive and reactive. In a way they are the ultimate "party of power" - they will always make the adjustments they need to win power. There's a reason why in their entire history only three leaders failed to become PM (Hague, Duncan-Smith and Howard) which is that the party was in an unusually ideological post-Thatcher hangover.

But they werent' wedded to the role of the church or the monarchy so they adapt to mass politics; they aren't wedded to free trade so they become the party of imperial preference; they're not particularly attached to a minimalist state so they become a party of welfarist consensus, but they don't really care about that so they can become the party of free markets and privatisation. The list is endless - and I think that's why they're successful while other, more ideological, parties of the right in Europe and North America have over the last 150 years risen and fallen so much - while the Tories just kept going and kept winning.

The norm for the Tories is that famous Oakeshott line - in his criticism of "rationalism" (which I've always liked) that: "In political activity [...] men sail a boundless and bottomless sea; there is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place nor appointed destination. The enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel; the sea is both friend and enemy, and the seamanship consists in using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion." And I think Johnson's pretty good at it - but I think his schtick is popular with a section of the country, at some point (I don't know when and I don't know what will provoke it) I think that will turn and when it does it will turn rapidly and strongly against him and his schtick. And the Tories will stab him in the back, throw him overboard, elect a new leader and move on

I quite like the idea, I think by Chris Dillow, that the only enduring principle in Toryism is the preservation of private sector hierarchies. Labour will spend their decades in opposition debating, say, whether Labour governments are a good or bad idea. The number of times I've gone to a lefty meeting and heard someone say "we need to get the analysis right first" and I just want to cry Tories just move on, make the changes they need to get a new majority coalition and win again.

Having said that there are strands within them of ideology. So Baker's "this is what we believe" Tweet is on the one hand profoundly irrelevant because he's just a backbench MP who accidentally became important because, between 2017-9, there was a minority government - but on the other it's reflecting the libertarian/Thatcherite right's discomfort with a lot of what Johnson is talking about and doing. British politics is always incredibly self-referential but it's just a reference to Thatcher repeatedly interrupting an overly wet presentation by a colleague by taking out Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty out of her brief case and banging it on the table to remind him that "this is what we believe"

And there's tension between that, their stated goals and also their political imperatives - the reason they're talking about "levelling up" is because they won lots of seats in areas they're not used to winning so they need to work out what the practical offer is to those constituencies and it's going to be a challenge to make that gel with their existing constituencies that tend to prefer low spending and low taxes. This might change but at the minute I'm not convinced Labour matter, so the important content of politics is going to be the fight between factions and interests within the Tory party.

My suspicion, and I could be wrong, is that the story of the rest of this parliament is going to be fights between the Treasury and Number 10 (and the Treasury v the "spending departments"). Unless something shifts my guess would be that the Treasury will win because they normally do because the only thing with a tighter grip on power than the Tory party is the Treasury

Edit: And I would point out all of that cyncal trimming of the sails isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's why the Tories have now moved to a position where they universally support gay marriage, it's why they're now winning something like 25-33% of the BAME vote and possibly will become the main party for British Indian and British African voters and have the first non-white PM, it's why they care about climate now. It's a big contrast with, for example, the GOP who have huge intellectual frameworks and structures around them that the Know Your Enemy podcast is so great at talking about. Buckley and Strauss and ideological moorings matter to the GOP. The Tories would be suspicious of such pretensions as vaguely continental and "rationalist".

[Sheilbh]

Very worrying news that Essex MP Sir David Amess has been stabbed multiple times at a constituency surgery. Hope it's not too serious and that he's okay

[Tamas]

 

[Sheilbh]

As has been pointed out online, Andrew Pennington was killed trying to protect Nigel Jones at his constituency surgery. Stephen Timms was stabbed at his. Jo Cox was shot leaving hers.

MPs generally have no police protection and do these surgeries week in-week out, which must leave them feeling vulnerable. I really hope we don't become a society where either of those things have to change

[Caliga]

Very worrying news that Essex MP Sir David Amess has been stabbed multiple times at a constituency surgery. Hope it's not too serious and that he's okay

News reports he has died.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Yes, BBC has confirmed that he has died; this is terrible 

[OttoVonBismarck]

As has been pointed out online, Andrew Pennington was killed trying to protect Nigel Jones at his constituency surgery. Stephen Timms was stabbed at his. Jo Cox was shot leaving hers.

MPs generally have no police protection and do these surgeries week in-week out, which must leave them feeling vulnerable. I really hope we don't become a society where either of those things have to change

We don't even give congressmen / Senators any protection out in the world in the U.S; the Speaker, and the Majority / Minority leaders of the House / Senate receive Capitol Police protective details, although the scope of when those details provide protection I think is variable.

However at least none of the Congressmen or Senators I've had can you schedule a regular meeting with them 1:1 in person like you can at a British constituency surgery. You can certainly go to their office and do something similar, but it will always be with a constituent services staffer.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Yeah, there are 650 MPs for 66m people; so about 1 for every 75,000 electors. With hard work it is just about possible for them to meet with any constituent who has a gripe. The numbers per representative/senator would make this impossible I guess.

[Caliga]

What's with the term 'surgery'?

[The Brain]

What's with the term 'surgery'?

You don't have chirurgeons in Kentucky?

[Sheilbh]

What's with the term 'surgery'?

I think it's from a GP's surgery. You've got a problem you go to your MP's surgery, like you go to you GP's surgery if you've got a health problem?

[Sheilbh]

Yeah, there are 650 MPs for 66m people; so about 1 for every 75,000 electors. With hard work it is just about possible for them to meet with any constituent who has a gripe. The numbers per representative/senator would make this impossible I guess.

Yep and I think most MPs do a few sessions a week in different bits of the community (this was in a Baptist church hall in Leigh-on-Sea), because despite their reputation most are genuinely hard working community minded people

[OttoVonBismarck]

It's unfortunate because for the (most likely) mentally deranged person who did this, and others like them...the more incidents like this occur the more I think it becomes something people with mental illness might fixate/think about and become self-perpetuating.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Concerning tweet from an ITV Reporter:

https://twitter.com/AnushkaAsthana/status/1449009694303981577?s=20

One MP says they were sitting with colleagues recently and so many of them had examples of people actually in prison because of serious death threats against them - they says police tell them to not go public but describes it an "epidemic"