Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Just read a piece in the FT and I'm not saying this is the source of all of our problems, but it is a part of it. The average age of civil servants in the Treasury (and maybe most other departments) is 27

[Josquius]

Just read a piece in the FT and I'm not saying this is the source of all of our problems, but it is a part of it. The average age of civil servants in the Treasury (and maybe most other departments) is 27

So many theories around why that could be.
The most worrying one is its such a cluster fuck most senior people have quit.

[Sheilbh]

So many theories around why that could be.
The most worrying on is its such a cluster fuck most senior people have quit.

I remember reading an interview with a former senior Treasury civil servant. He noted that it was only really since the 80s that the Treasury started hiring economists which is also not ideal.

But there were some interesting comments from him about why this might be an issue. One was that the civil service is hierarchical like a pyramid and the best jobs - in terms of status, prestige and pay - are the ones near ministers working on policy. That means there is a bias towards good people skills, a certain speed of thinking (being able to turn on a dime) and generalism rather than deep expertise or skills in a specific sector. I know someone who is I think a fast-tracker. Their similar age to me (so mid-30s with about ten years of working in the civil service) and I don't think they've stayed in a role or department for more than two years because unless you are specialising (like the diplomatic service), that's not what you do. You need to build a profile/experience across the civil service. And worth noting from that Treasury article I posted earlier that I think two thirds of the Permanent Secretaries in different departments started in the Treasury - so if you're looking to build a civil service career generally, then you basically need to do a stint there.

He noted this was a general issue across the civil service but particularly extreme in the Treasury because it has areas that really need deep knowledge. So the civil service found it difficult to accept the idea that, for example, someone in charge of the financial incentives in energy policy should be highly specialist and paid accordingly when they don't work with ministers - they're not on that path. So generally those roles are filled by more junior people than they should be to build their CV/experience on the path to senior roles - when they should be almost separate career paths. I imagine it's even worse on the operational side with things like IT.

With the Treasury specifically their education and their work experience would likely make them very attractive to basically any employer in the finance sector where they could make a lot more money (and the civil service is quite keen on people going into industry and then one day coming back - they think it gives them a broader perspective). But I think cluster fuck is part of it too - there is always burnout in the civil service like other sectors.

I imagine there, as everywhere else, that is 10 times worse if the leadership you're working for (by which I mainly individual ministers rather than government overall) is incompetent/there's no vision. I think it must make a huge difference if you're in a department with a minister who has a clear idea what they want to do and how to do it - this government has basically no-one who matches that profile (maybe Ben Wallace - and Michael Gove is always popular with his civil servants).

[Sheilbh]

So The Guardian has a feature called "Dining Across the Divide" where they basically match two people with different political views and pays for them to have dinner. A bit like the blind date features.

Today's version was dinner between someone who always votes Labour and is a passionate Remainer, and someone who also always votes Labour but isn't sure about Keir Starmer

[Sheilbh]

Two articles from two journalists mention some Tory MPs saying their party could do with losing the next election and having some time in opposition, and that 2023-4 would be a good election to lose.

Normally a pretty bad sign for a party when there's chatter like that. And remember there was a theory that 2010 would be a good election for Labour to lose - which didn't turn out great. So...

[Tamas]

Two articles from two journalists mention some Tory MPs saying their party could do with losing the next election and having some time in opposition, and that 2023-4 would be a good election to lose.

Normally a pretty bad sign for a party when there's chatter like that. And remember there was a theory that 2010 would be a good election for Labour to lose - which didn't turn out great. So...

Them losing in 2023 and doing nothing in the meantime would dump the economic crisis on Labour's lap - they would get the hit for fixing it, Tories could come back to claim credit for the rebound.

[Sheilbh]

Them losing in 2023 and doing nothing in the meantime would dump the economic crisis on Labour's lap - they would get the hit for fixing it, Tories could come back to claim credit for the rebound.

Yeah - that's one argument. A bit like the theory some in Labour had in 2010 that it was a good election to lose. There was no rapid recovery on the horizon. There'd probably need to be austerity policies which would be unpopular. And even after the financial crisis the Tories still couldn't win a majority and most of those Lib Dem votes would come home to Labour. Needless to say, 12 years on, that's not how things turned out.

That kind of argument always strikes me as too clever by half. While the situation generally might be crap the biggest thing in politics is that if you're in government you have levers to do things and shape the agenda. When you're in opposition, you're just a spectator.

I think there is more to the view by some that they're out of ideas and struggling to pass legislation with a majority of 80. If the Tories won again it would be an incredibly miserable five years (like Major's government) of constant parliamanetary battles to do anything, with no clear policy agenda to push forward and, probably, mounting scandals (as always happens after a party's been in office for too long). Given that that's their experience now with an 80 seat majority, it would be even worse with, say, a 10 seat majority.

So, the argument goes, better to lose the election - spend some time in opposition working out a new agenda and refreshing themselves. Personally I don't buy it but that's possibly because I'm a little partisan (just for the other side) so I hate the argument that being in opposition is good for anything. I think the attitude that it's not worth being in power is what leads to self-indulgence and factional fights

But the really striking thing is that we're at the stage when Tory MPs are openly talking in those terms - including to journalists.

[Sheilbh]

So good by Duncan Robinson:

UKSA! An obsession with America pollutes British politics
It leads to bad policy, dull conversation and homogeneous bookshelves
May 19th 2022

When in the home of a Westminster politico, why not play a game of Bookshelf Bingo? Head to their study and tick off what you see. Robert Caro's "The Power Broker", an account of Robert Moses's post-war reshaping of New York, earns a point, as does any volume of Mr Caro's weighty biography of Lyndon Johnson, the former president. Any of "The Big Sort", "Bowling Alone" and "The Coddling of the American Mind" also count. "Team of Rivals", an account of Abraham Lincoln's cabinet, is a must, as are all of Barack Obama's memoirs. A dusty dvd box-set of "The West Wing" completes the set and you win. House!

British politics is obsessed with America. mps, wonks and journalists gorge on American history and follow its politics in fine detail. They also ape its language. Local elections, when council voters decide who has the privilege of collecting bins and cutting services to pay for social care, are sometimes called "mid-terms". Parts of Britain are occasionally labelled "flyover country", even if 90% of the population lives within a four-hour drive of Northampton. Commentators ape the 1980s political slogan of "Let Reagan be Reagan" (mainly because it was repeated in "The West Wing"). Readers have been treated to "Let Gordon be Gordon", "Let Boris be Boris" and, worst of all, "Let Theresa be Theresa". The obsession leads to dull conversation. But it also leads to bad policy.

Britain's economic debate exists somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. British policymakers sometimes appear to think that inflation emerged from overgenerous government spending, as in America, rather than a supply shock, as their European peers accept. In America, a country the size of a continent, concepts such as "left behind" regions make sense. When economic tides shift, it is possible to be high and dry in the middle of nowhere, hundreds of miles from opportunity. In Britain it is seen as a socio-economic catastrophe that someone in Wigan may have to commute 20-odd miles to a job in Manchester.

Arguments over public policy are complicated by comparisons with America. Debates about the future of the National Health Service are polluted by the extreme and weird example across the ocean. The plethora of publicly funded health-care options in Europe is largely ignored. Liz Truss, now the foreign secretary, once campaigned against occupational licensing. It is a worthy aim, but the problem barely exists in Britain. In America a hairdresser faces at least 1,000 hours of training before being granted a licence; in Britain a fresh Kurdish arrival can set up shop and shear people for £8 ($10), communicating only with hand gestures. Worrying about occupational licensing in Britain is akin to an American senator having strident views on fox-hunting with hounds.

The same happens across the political spectrum. British campaigners alighted on a minimum-wage demand of £15 for little reason other than that American ones had demanded a $15 wage. "Abolish ice" (the American border force) became a slogan among left-wing Democrats calling for a less cruel immigration system; "Abolish the Home Office" was swiftly adopted in Britain. "Defund the Police" made little sense even in America, where law enforcement can call on enough munitions for a Latin American coup, let alone in Britain, where the police are largely unarmed. Fewer resources are the last thing the service needs.

Even Britain's idiomatic constitution is viewed through an American lens. Michael Gove, the minister responsible for devolution and an American history buff, has suggested calling the heads of new regions "governors". America's complicated separation of powers is invoked without regard for Britain's centralised system of government. This leads to the absurd spectacle of liberal critics demanding that Boris Johnson should be impeached, when the benefit of a parliamentary democracy is that MPs can hoof a prime minister from power whenever they like.

Self-perception is distorted by the mirror of America. When the Archbishop of Canterbury recently criticised the government's asylum policy, one mp complained that Britain separated church and state long ago. Wrong. When it comes to religion Britain, which gives bishops seats in its upper chamber and whose head of state sits atop the established church, is constitutionally closer to Iran. A sturdy right to free speech, à la First Amendment, is taken for granted when Britain is actually one of the few democratic countries where it is possible to be jailed for being "grossly offensive"—in effect, for being rude.

Okay by me in America

It is on social issues that America looms largest. A common language allows American ideas to inject themselves into the British discourse with alarming speed. Twitter, a Silicon Valley service to which Westminster has a chronic addiction, is an intravenous drip for doctrine. "Woke", originally an American term, now regularly crops up in the House of Commons. Concern about ideological excesses on American campuses is reflected onto British ones, where they are less present.

Already delicate debates, such as on race relations, are confused by America's extreme experience. Some of this is harmless. American vernacular, such as "people of colour", is now common in the British debate. Some of it is harmful. Britain's history of race is a tangled tale of empire and voluntary post-war immigration, which is quite different from America's. Yet the stories are often mushed together, blurring an understanding of Britain's past.

Comparisons between countries are healthy, but America is not the only benchmark. British politicians and policymakers can learn from nearer neighbours, too. France, a post-imperial power with the same level of population and wealth, offers an obvious analogue. Yet although the typical inhabitant of SW1 could regale someone with the life story of a 1950s planner from New York, he probably thinks Georges Pompidou was a painter. Bookshelf bingo needs new rules. ■

As he went on to say on Twitter about France - they've got an over-mighty capital, centralisation, post-imperial legacy. It's our twin and we should really be looking at their politics. Instead our political class obsess about the US (and for six months - Denmark)

[Jacob]

Well, Denmark has a bunch of good things going for it I think....

[Sheilbh]

I don't disagree - so does the US for that matter - but all we got out of it was Cleggmania at around the time of Borgen

Separately - and I know it's just one poll etc etc - but as another example of why I don't think Johnson's got away with it new YouGov poll still has the Tories at about 30% and Labour at about 40%. The anti-Tory vote of Labour, Lib Dems, Plaid, Greens and SNP is at 64% which seems to be the highest it's ever been (previous high was around 60% in 1997). When I was young and everyone wondered if the Tories would ever form a government again, it was generally assumed that 30% is their floor (and Labour's) - which we may be about to test if Johnson stays. Voters tend to be incredibly sophisticated in voting tactically and getting the result they want - at those levels all the other parties get out of each other's way and just batter the Tories everywher: red wall, blue wall, Scotland, Wales

Inccidentally just read another article that actually makes a similar point, specifically about race, by Tomiwa Owolade - it's an excerpt from his upcoming book so I think tales off without a conclusion - but is really good. He recently wrote a similarly interesting piece on the re-invigoration of churches/Christianity in London by British African communities (the borough I live in boasts of having more West African churches per capita than anywhere outside Lagos) - which was something I was aware of because of where I live, but not quite the scale. So the number of churches in London has doubled since 1979 which was a bit mindblowing - and not unrelatedly, London's the most socially conservative area of the UK on issues like homosexuality or sex before marriage which doesn't play into its image as England's Sodom

It also gets to the point of why BAME is no longer a very useful category, a point also demonstrated by Sam Freedman's tweet comment on this piece:

Sam Freedman
@Samfr
This is great and I'm really looking forward to the book.
The point about the difference between US and UK black experiences has often struck me when discussing education policy in the US. They simply cannot comprehend that the black African pop in the UK is high performing + does better on average than the white population.
And of course even within countries experiences are very different. Here pupils of black Carribean origin do worse, on average, than those from black African families. Generalising misses a load of complexity which is important for policy/support.
(This has great political significance too you cannot generalise across racial groups re voting behaviour because of huge cultural differences.)

The narcissism of America's race politics
The realities of black British lives were eclipsed by BLM
BY Tomiwa Owolade
@tomowolade
May 20, 2022

The Romans loved their Saturnalia. For one week, every year, social customs were overturned in the spirit of carnival: gambling was permitted and slaves were treated as kings. The literary critic Northrop Frye was fascinated by this festival, and saw its potential to set off social revolution. In his 1957 book, The Anatomy of Criticism, he argued that Shakespearean comedy is typically characterised by a three-part formula: the "old world" of authority and conformism gives way to the "green world" of saturnalian ebullience and energy before the "new world" emerges. Elements of the old world and the saturnalian world synthesise, to produce a new social order.

Many of the protests in the summer after the death of George Floyd looked like festivals; people swayed as they sang. And at a time when actual festivals were banned, the events possessed an especially transgressive allure. We were breaking out of a recently organised old world of restrictions into a new one where the cause of racial justice transcended the obligations of social distancing.

The rules, the protestors affirmed, should not apply to them. In the first month after the murder, over 14,000 American protestors were arrested. In Washington DC, cars were burned down and bathroom stalls were spray painted with the "Amerikkka". A fire was lit in the nursery of the parish house of a church called St John's Episcopal Church, which is known as the "church of the presidents", because every American president has attended it at least once since it was built in 1816.

But the nature of the protests constituted a break at a deeper level too, a new paradigm shift in racial thinking, both in America and across the rest of the world. There were protests in over 60 countries and all continents — including Antarctica. Now, racial justice is a matter of reflexive urgency; there's no time to consider national or cultural context. Many expressions of anti-racism look like religious revivalism, any analysis of the complex realities of black people obscured by penance and sanctimony.

The basic outline of what happened on the evening of May 25, 2020 was reported in every major newspaper on the planet. A middle-aged black man called George Floyd was choked to death in Minnesota by a police officer named Derek Chauvin, because Floyd was suspected of using fake money to buy cigarettes. His Name Is George Floyd, a new book by Washington Post journalists Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, substantiates this outline with a glut of information. It is a detailed investigation into the life of Floyd, the nature and context of his murder, and the impact of his death on wider American society.

The authors conducted over 400 interviews for the book. They interviewed Floyd's siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, lovers and friends. We get a solid picture of the man. We also learn a lot about Floyd's ancestors — who they were, what they did, and where they fit within the narrative of America's vexed racial history.

But there is very little in the book on the global impact of Floyd's death. The authors do not have a lot of interest in the wider world, nor do they seem to have a great understanding of it. In one historical passage, for instance, they write that Scotland was a country that was dominated by "the British". Colonies always know more about the metropole than the metropole knows about the colonies; faced with such American ignorance, it's easy to conclude that the former colony has become the coloniser.

Culture changed so rapidly in America in the wake of that summer of protests, and we in Britain soon followed suit. Many American publications, for instance, started to capitalise the b in black —  including the New York Times, Washington Post and the Associated Press. Many British publications swiftly did the same: the b in black is now capitalised in the London Review of Books, for example, and the Times Literary Supplement. It's become de rigueur so rapidly in British publishing that, when I submitted a proposal for my book, about the way American race discourse influences Britain, in 2021, I had to explain why I didn't capitalise the word black.

Lori Tharps makes the case for capitalising black: "Black with a capital 'B'", she writes, "refers to a group of people whose ancestors were born in Africa, were brought to the United States against their will, spilled their blood, sweat and tears to build this nation into a world power and along the way managed to create glorious works of art, passionate music, scientific discoveries, a marvelous cuisine, and untold literary masterpieces. When a copyeditor deletes the capital "B", they are in effect deleting the history and contributions of my people." Unlike Tharps, though, I am not American.

My ancestors were not brought against their will to the country where I'm currently living. In fact, most black British people are now black Africans, which means recent immigrants, or the children of immigrants, from independent African nations. The particular historical relationship between the transatlantic slave trade and black Americans does not neatly apply to the contemporary black British population. Pretending that it does would be to deny the history of my people, to borrow the argot of Tharps. Black people in Britain are essentially immigrant communities — the average black American, by contrast, can trace his ancestry further back than the average white American.

But in the aftermath of Floyd's death, the catch-all framework of "Black Lives Matter" was imported to every corner of the planet, even though race relations are not the same throughout the world. They are instead mediated by a country's unique history and culture. Now as then, insufficient attention is paid to the different contexts of the black people who do not live in America; we are simply put in the mould of black Americans.

It was bizarre, watching the majority of liberal democracies use the example of America to make sense of race in their own countries. People on the streets of central London were screaming "hands up don't shoot". British university students were passionately denouncing discrimination against BIPOC people — black, indigenous people of colour — without recognising that speaking for the interests of indigenous people in Britain makes one sound more like Nick Griffin than 20-year-old Molly studying History at Bristol University.

Robin DiAngelo's book White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi's How To Be an Anti-Racist monopolised the nonfiction bestseller's charts in Europe for many months. And this trickled down to social media. Instagram listicles stipulated you needed to read those books if you wanted to understand the condition of black people. Not black American people (though these books are not even useful for that) but black people in toto.

And, while the liberal democracies were committing penance, countries with distinctively worse human rights records swooped in like hungry vultures. The supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, said dark-skinned people face the prospect of being killed "within minutes" whenever they walk down the streets of America. The Russian Foreign Ministry condemned America's human rights abuses.

Another patron saint of anti-racism, Layla Saad, was born and raised in Britain and now lives in Qatar. She has never lived in America in her life. Yet her book, Me and White Supremacy, is explicitly targeted at an American audience, and reached number five in the New York Times bestseller list in the summer of 2020. There is no mention in the book that she lives in a country that imports slave labour; there is a lot about the devastating toxicity of microaggressions. Although she doesn't live in America, Saad lives on the internet (she has 650k followers on Instagram) and being on the anglophone internet is like inhabiting a terrain utterly dominated by America. The Atlantic writer Helen Lewis compared it to being in a room with a giant rhinoceros.

What is lost in all of this is the specific circumstance of Floyd's death — aggressive policing, economic deprivation, the fraught relationship between black American communities and the police, drug dependency, and America's war on drugs. And herein lies the value of His Name is George Floyd.

Samuels and Olorunnipa tell us that George Perry Floyd Jr — known simply as Perry to his family and friends — was born in October 1973 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to George Floyd Sr and Cissy Floyd, two people who wanted to make it as singers. North Carolina was their native state, but Floyd Jr grew up in the Third Ward of Houston, Texas, a poor and largely black area. He attended schools that were racially segregated and underfunded. His high school, Jack Yates Senior High School, has a student population that is 90% black and 10% Hispanic. This kind of education and upbringing is inconceivable for a black British person.

As a kid and teenager, Floyd wanted to be a rap star, a pro football player, and a supreme court justice. His life turned out very differently. He was arrested more than 20 times in his life by the police, often for dealing drugs, and he spent almost a third of his adult life in jail. He suffered from high blood pressure, anxiety, depression and drug addiction.

He moved to Minneapolis from Texas in 2014. A year earlier, he had been released after serving four years in prison for aggravated robbery with a weapon, a charge he personally denied but nevertheless accepted as part of a plea bargain for a reduced sentence. In Minnesota, he wanted a reset in his life. He worked variously as a security guard at a nightclub and as a truck driver. But he lost those jobs during the 2020 Covid pandemic.

You cannot show genuine respect to a group of people if you do not acknowledge their context — their origins, their distinctive lives, the communities and cultures they inhabit, who they are rather than what they represent. Expressing solidarity to communities victimised by racism is a good thing. But the global conversation about race went past the expression of solidarity after the death of George Floyd. And this heightened pitch is reflected in Britain to the detriment of black people, as we lose sight of the fact that they are not all the same — which of course should be the very first insight of anti-racism.

The voting patterns point is interesting as there are signs that the Tory support is growing in British African communities - while British Caribbean are still strongly Labour. A bit like the growing Tory support among (non-Muslim) British Indians and some signs of growing support among British Bangladeshis as well. Which again is just a far more diverse experience than is covered by BAME - especially as it's likely to increase given general immigration trends. I also wonder if the European communities (Poles, Romanians, Lithuanians) will also start to become a constituency in elections - and studied by sociologists as a new, distinct community. I have slightly wondered if part of the British moves on Ukraine are motivated by the fact that we have a large Eastern European population who have been at the forefront of organising collections for refugees, for going to protests etc

[Josquius]

Two articles from two journalists mention some Tory MPs saying their party could do with losing the next election and having some time in opposition, and that 2023-4 would be a good election to lose.

Normally a pretty bad sign for a party when there's chatter like that. And remember there was a theory that 2010 would be a good election for Labour to lose - which didn't turn out great. So...

Them losing in 2023 and doing nothing in the meantime would dump the economic crisis on Labour's lap - they would get the hit for fixing it, Tories could come back to claim credit for the rebound.

It will be a tricky spot. The name of the game will be making sure things don't get apocalyptic rather than actually improving ought. And we saw how that worked for brown....


And yes. The UK has too much of an American obsession. The problem is we fundamentally don't get what culture is. We see America has the same language and of course we watch all their movies so we think they're the same.... We ignore the other north Europeans who are actually far more like us than those weird Impolitely polite  religious aliens over the Atlantic.


I didn't know they had occupational licensing in America though. Oddly that seems to be an area where they're more European than us.

[garbon]

@Sheilbh - Americans don't use the term BAME

On the other hand, I still do feel othered by some white people in Britain.

[Sheilbh]

@Sheilbh - Americans don't use the term BAME

Of course - although does BIPOC serves a similar role? There's two things that I think are part of the argument which I kind of conflated.

One is that it's probably past time for British discourse around race to move beyond BAME, or before it ethnic minority because those communities are diverse. There's different geographies, different educational attainments, health outcomes etc. Looking at a collective "BAME" group is not helpful in addressing that or in understanding modern Britain/where we're going as a society.

At the same time there's a risk because we speak English, because America's so culturally influential, of replacing that flattening discourse with one that flattens the experience in those communities in a different way, by applying the American history. The experiences within groups but also between the US and UK are different - again there's possibly more for us to learn from other European countries.

On the other hand, I still do feel othered by some white people in Britain.

Yeah - I can believe that and that's the pushback I have mentally against wanting to resist American discourse. My general view is that the UK is about 20 years behind the US on race, so perhaps leaning into the way America is looking and thinking about race will speed things up here. I'm not sure.

[Josquius]

I wouldn't say we are behind America on race at all. Rather we are on a completely different path. The parallels between the two are loose at best.
One thing that I have seen annoying far right people (albeit for disingenuous reasons in their case) and I can kind of see their point is how much the UK puts such a focus on black people when speaking about minorities and ignores Asians, especially Pakistanis, unless it's something negative. This is an area where our London centrism really shines.

[Sheilbh]

Mentioned in the OT thread about Australia's elections but again it feels like there's lessons there for us - I imagine our political parties will be sending aides to chat to the Australian Labor Party and the Coalition on what went wrong/right.

Looks like a hung parliament with Labor as the biggest party - but they could squeak a small minority. It seems their vote held up - but lost a votes in some areas to Greens and independents.

But also striking are the Teal Independents doing their thing. They were well-financed, integrity and climate-focused campaigns who ran against the Liberals in rich seats with lots of graduates - and they've been pretty successful. A Liberal Senator saying they've "decimated the part of the Liberal party that they held most fondly" - the more liberal, centrist end.

It's not an exact cut and paste but enough echoes to probably be of interest for UK parties and papers.

Edit: Obvs not direct but I really hope those parallels hold up