Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Richard Hakluyt]

I know it is a low bar but Sunak does have at least a basic understanding of what it is to be PM. That is a huge improvement over the past 3 years. Now we just have the problem that he is a Tory and espouses the same old tory bs that make this country less than it could be.

[Syt]

https://newsthump.com/2022/10/25/rees-mogg-delighted-to-resign-in-time-for-release-of-pc-game-victoria-3/

Rees-Mogg delighted to resign in time for release of PC game Victoria 3

Jacob Rees-Mogg has resigned as Business Secretary just in time to get some serious gaming in.

The Quentin Blake illustration made clear that he would be a willing part of Rishi Sunak's cabinet, but resigned when it became clear that Sunak would rather Rees-Mogg be a willing part of the unemployment figures.

"Still, just in time for Victoria 3," smiled Rees-Mogg.

"I've got a pretty hefty gaming rig at home with an RTX 3080, which is more than that game requires, but it's going to look banging on my 1440p monitors anyway.

"Victoria 3 is a game where you basically build Victorian England, set rules for land ownership, set tax levies, and tell peasants what to do. It's my version of pornography, and I'm delighted to have very little to do just in time for its release."

Simon Williams, one of the developers for Victoria 3, said, "We are very proud of this game, but absolutely mortified to learn that it's made Jacob Rees-Mogg happy."

 

[Josquius]

Oh no they didn't.

Though I suppose he plays the game very different to most of us. Where we take our country in a mad dash towards being a social democratic utopia for him the challenge is one of  looking at the start date world and declaring "THIS IS FINE. KEEP EVERYTHING AS IT IS"

[Richard Hakluyt]

Which is actually my plan once I have progressed beyond tutorial level. I shall rule Austria and maintain catholicism, conservatism and kaiserism (if that is a word) 

[Sheilbh]

I thought this was a really good, nuanced analysis from the Guardian on Sunak and identity:

Rishi Sunak's arrival as PM is historic but Britain still has work to do on racism
Aamna Mohdin
While new Tory leader's rise reflects positive progress, reality of life in UK for ethnic minorities remains complex picture


Rishi Sunak met King Charles at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday, where the monarch formally invited him to form a new government. Photograph: Aaron Chown/Reuters
Tue 25 Oct 2022 19.51 BST
Last modified on Wed 26 Oct 2022 05.12 BST

In 1969, the late Queen's chief financial manager, Lord Tryon, told a Home Office civil servant that "it was not, in fact, the practice to appoint coloured immigrants or foreigners" to certain roles within the royal household. People from ethnic minority backgrounds were, however, allowed to work as domestic servants.

The note was sent two months before Queen Elizabeth II invested her son Charles as the Prince of Wales. The UK's rapid social and political change in the half-century that followed is best described with the official pronouncement made on Tuesday: Charles, now king, received the Tory leader, Rishi Sunak, a British South Asian and practising Hindu, to form a government and become Britain's 57th prime minister.

Sunak attended a palace that would not have hired his grandparents – who arrived in the UK in the 1960s – into any important positions. His is a rise to provoke strong reactions. As he arrived at Downing Street in his car following his audience with the king, there were boos and heckles from the crowd. Others had waved to him.

Outside Downing Street, 31-year-old Bobby Alum said: "I think this is a brilliant appointment. I think he will bring more things to the table. I think he will uplift the nation ... it will give people of colour more hope.

"If people of colour can become prime ministers in this country, in a country when we thought there would never be a person of colour on the top, then maybe we have a chance as well."

Alum's 28-year-old friend, who didn't want to give his name, added: "Put politics aside, visibly having some sort of representation, someone who looks like us, who may not be from the same class background ... Perhaps his family went through the same struggle that we went through and knowing someone in that position can be in the highest level of office is something that is aspirational as a second-generation immigrant."

But 23-year-old Tyrek Morris, who helped lead many of the largest Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, had a different take. While he saw the importance of Sunak being a person of colour, he said it was also "a step back because of who he is".

Sunak's ascent caps a dizzying number of firsts in Tory politics. When, in 2020, Sunak replaced Sajid Javid, a Conservative politician of Pakistani descent, as chancellor, it was the first time the great office of state had passed from one politician of an ethnic minority to another.

Javid was the first non-white chancellor and home secretary; the latter role was passed on in 2019 to Priti Patel, the first female home secretary of an ethnic-minority background, and then held by another, Suella Braverman. During Braverman's tenure under Liz Truss, there were no white male politicians in one of the four great offices of state. Kwasi Kwarteng was the first black chancellor – albeit briefly.

The significance of these firsts cannot be denied in a country in which "P***-bashing" was once a national sport for the far right. One only needs to look at this newspaper's archives to understand the sustained campaign of terror that was inflicted on ethnic minority communities throughout the 1970s and 80s, with regular reports of racists firebombing the homes of black and Asian families.

In 2008, Sunder Katwala had wondered whether the UK would see a British Obama. He is reluctant to say this is happening.

"It's not an Obama moment. If it is, it is an understated British version of the Obama moment because you are trying to have the Obama moment and try to not notice it is happening," Katwala said. "The prime minister himself has spoken from the steps and decided not to mention something we can all see."

What is behind Sunak's rise and the Tories' racial representation among upper echelons of the British government? There are no easy answers to this extraordinary phenomenon – especially from the Labour party, which has yet to have a female leader or one from an ethnic minority background.

But an 1983 election poster from the Thatcher era provides some clues: "Labour says he's black. The Tories say he's British." The poster came in two formats; one with a picture of an Asian man, a second with a black one.

It is this narrative of an open and humane Britishness that has endured among the Tories and it is what Sunak tapped into for his leadership campaign in the summer.

"Let me tell you a story about a young woman almost a lifetime ago who boarded a plane armed with hope for a better life and the love of her family," Sunak said in the opening of his leadership campaign video. The woman, who saved for a year to get enough money for her husband and children to follow her, was his grandmother.

His mother studied hard to run her own pharmacy while his father worked as a GP for the NHS. They settled in Southampton, where in 1980, Sunak was born. "It was Britain, our country, that gave them and millions like them the chance of a better future," he said. The message was clear: if we work hard, there is nothing to stop us from achieving.

This question of who belongs and who thrives is not exclusive to Britain. In 2018, on the 242nd anniversary of US independence, writer and professor Jelani Cobb pointed to an ongoing tension at the heart of the problems facing his country.

"The question of 'We, the people' has been our ongoing and unresolved conflict in American identity," Cobb said during a talk in western New York. "We've never sufficiently understood and defined who is included in that term."

Cobb described a boom-and-bust cycle of who belongs in the country and who doesn't – an expanding concept of 'we', followed by "a contracting, fearful idea of who 'we' should be", he explained.

This is true for the UK too. There is an ebb and flow, a feeling of hopes raised and hopes dashed, that is glossed over when Sunak discusses the country's history.

What followed after his grandparents' generation across the Commonwealth were encouraged to migrate to the UK and help rebuild the country in the post-war era? A declaration by former Conservative MP Enoch Powell in 1968 that a black person or Asian "does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman". Racial reckonings and riots, as well the passing of notable race relations acts.

The 2012 London Olympic ceremony presented a tantalising view of British multiculturalism, showcasing proudly the arrival of the Windrush generation in 1948. Yet, the summer afterwards, vans bearing the message "Go home or face arrest" were driven around London's heavily diverse communities, while thousands of people from the Windrush generation were suddenly targeted for deportation.

The pendulum has always swung; when the country takes a step forward, it is forced to take two back.

Sunak the contender vowed to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, slammed "woke nonsense" from "leftwing agitators", and railed against the felling of statues and the supposed replacing of the school curriculum with "anti-British propaganda".

The late Ambalavaner Sivanandan, one of Britain's influential thinkers on race and class, once said: "There are two racisms: the racism that discriminates and the racism that kills." On Tuesday it was clear that Sunak's entry to No 10 has dealt a blow to that first kind of racism – the nativist ideals of Britishness.

But for Kimberly McIntosh, an author and race campaigner, there has been a distinct lack of focus on the latter – the systemic and institutional racism and economic inequality that blights the lives of the average person from an ethnic minority background.

"For the majority of people who are from an ethnic minority background, the election of Rishi Sunak will make no difference materially to their lives. So I find it very difficult to celebrate that and what he is likely to deliver to those communities is more violence," she said.

I'm a little dubious if the UK (or any other parliamentary system) can have an "Obama moment" - or for that matter a Trump or Macron moment because our politics operates in and through parties. I think the ability for an outsider in one way or another to come and win a personal mandate is just very limited, so it will always feel less transformative/important than a presidential election (even if Sunak were to win the next election).

Also some interesting pieces on the different experience of different waves of migration to the UK of British Asians with East Africa and "direct migrants" looking rather different. Couple of interesting points though - which I think are important warning lights for Labour.

One comment was that apparently the Tories lead Labour by 8 points at the last election among British Hindus and Sikhs - one of the comments was that Labour still tends to see "British Asian" as a broad category rather than the different experiences and perspectives of different communities within that label. I wonder if there's something similar going on with the black British vote because my understanding is there are early signs that the Tories are starting to do well with African voters (now the largest community of black Brits) and have a number of prominent politicians (Cleverly, Kwarteng, Badenoch, Afolami etc), while Labour still have a massive lead in the Caribbean vote. I believe there are also early warning signs for Labour about the British Bangladeshi vote in outer London.

The other point which I thought was interesting was that British Indians aren't all massive fans of Modi, but they feel they get a more positive picture/more recognition of India as it is today from the Tories. So it mentioned that when Tories talk about India it's always in the context of massive trade deal that'll be great, or India as a rising democracy, or "shared history and values", or even (to use Modi's phrase) the "living bridge" of British Indians. There's a sense that the Tories are telling a positive story about India - and British relations with India. On the other hand they article quoted people saying that basically they felt Labour only talked about India in the context of condemning human rights abuses and Kashmir. The person quoted (I can't find the article) said there were absolutely were human rights abuses but it seemed to dominate the way Labour talked about India. I think that may be something Labour should address and not just in relation to India.

Plus I'm not a fan of Priti Patel (though astonished that Truss and Sunak have conspired to find someone worse as Home Secretary). But I feel like this visibility does help and matter for the Tories, but is also broadly good for the country. In the same way as I think it's good that you can have openly gay Tories posting photos of them at Pride or with their partner, I think it matters that you can openly have your (non-Christian) faith in this way on the conservative side of politics:

Priti Patel MP
@pritipatel
As one-year closes, another begins.  I wish everyone a wonderful Hindu New Year  #Diwali2022
#Saal-Mubarak 🙏🏼🪔

[Josquius]

Key to Obama wasn't just that a mixed race guy (in American black) was now president, it was that a majority of the country had voted for this, that a country which historically had such problems with racism had decided they had no issues with a black guy as president.

In the UK with Sunak....Well, firstly being a PM isn't being a president. Its a far inferior position with it just being head of government. Also factors of the UK being less historically racist- racism is a thing in the UK of course, but it has never been our number one problem even at the height of Enoch Powell and all that.

But most importantly reducing this being an 'Obama moment' is that only a few hundred MPs voted for him. He is PM by default and the population wasn't given a choice. He's just sort of fell into the job and there's none of the pomp and ceremony that even an election winning PM gets never mind a US president.

As to this being a good thing....yes, to an extent. Though I do fear knowing the Tories being who they are they'll find a way to turn this into creating more division- Labour love muslims who are the arch enemy of hindus and everyone should vote tory cos islamofascists , etc... etc... Given recent events in Leicester the rise of Hindu Nationalism is a big concern and I can definitely see the tories getting on board with this.

[OttoVonBismarck]

On the flipside a large swathe of America decided to embrace fascism in response to the horrors of an uppity black President.

[Sheilbh]

I wasn't fully aware quite how rapid the change had been - I think because politics lagged behind society. So the first minority cabinet minister was Paul Boateng under New Labour. The first British Asian cabinet minister was Baroness Warsi in 2010 and the first MP was Sajid Javid in 2014(!).

[mongers]

Britain can finally reclaim it's title of ...

Sick Man of Europe.

[Tamas]

I wasn't fully aware quite how rapid the change had been - I think because politics lagged behind society. So the first minority cabinet minister was Paul Boateng under New Labour. The first British Asian cabinet minister was Baroness Warsi in 2010 and the first MP was Sajid Javid in 2014(!).

This is great but I wouldn't read too much into it yet. Since 2016 the mainstream retreated, especially from the Tories, and the fringe had the chance to move in. Now whether they were fringe on merit (being a nutter) or purely on racist grounds we can't know yet for all of them (although for most it is quite clear). But once people actually want to be in government again, we'll have a better conclusive view on how big a barrier skin colour and heritage is.

[Sheilbh]

This is great but I wouldn't read too much into it yet. Since 2016 the mainstream retreated, especially from the Tories, and the fringe had the chance to move in. Now whether they were fringe on merit (being a nutter) or purely on racist grounds we can't know yet for all of them (although for most it is quite clear). But once people actually want to be in government again, we'll have a better conclusive view on how big a barrier skin colour and heritage is.

There is a big shift - and Cameron deserves credit for it both in terms of the number of women, gay and minority Tory MPs. The also took a very strong approach to identifying future leaders and nurturing them. So Sunak was first elected in 2015 (succeeding William Hague), but, say, Javid, Zahawi, Kwarteng, Patel were all elected first under Cameron as part of his strategy to get the Tory party to look more like the country.

It's why you have the weirdness of Labour's parliamentary party being far more diverse, but the Tory leadership and cabinet being more diverse. But there is also, I think, within that, a weirdness to Cameron's legacy which is that he was (and this sums up Cameron I think) absolutely indifferent to ideology. So he used the A-list candidates and the levers the party had to increase diversity, but not to strengthen his wing of the party/his politics (which is how Blair used party ability to influence candidate selection).

[Zanza]

Britain can finally reclaim it's title of ...

Sick Man of Europe.

How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe
© The Atlantic
The past few months have been rough for the United Kingdom. Energy prices are soaring. National inflation has breached double digits. The longest-serving British monarch has died. The shortest-serving prime minister has quit.

You probably knew all of that already. British news is covered amply (some might say too amply) in American media. Behind the lurid headlines, however, is a deeper story of decades-long economic dysfunction that holds lessons for the future.

In the American imagination, the U.K. is not only our political parent but also our cultural co-partner, a wealthy nation that gave us modern capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. But strictly by the numbers, Britain is pretty poor for a rich place. U.K. living standards and wages have fallen significantly behind those of Western Europe. By some measures, in fact, real wages in the U.K. are lower than they were 15 years ago, and will likely be even lower next year.

This calamity was decades in the making. After World War II, Britain's economy grew slower than those of much of continental Europe. By the 1970s, the Brits were having a national debate about why they were falling behind and how the former empire had become a relatively insular and sleepy economy. Under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, markets were deregulated, unions were smashed, and the financial sector emerged as a jewel of the British economy. Thatcher's injection of neoliberalism had many complicated knock-on effects, but from the 1990s into the 2000s, the British economy roared ahead, with London's financial boom leading the way. Britain, which got rich as the world's factory in the 19th century, had become the world's banker by the 21st.

When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, it hit hard, smashing the engine of Britain's economic ascent. Wary of rising deficits, the British government pursued a policy of austerity, fretting about debt rather than productivity or aggregate demand. The results were disastrous. Real wages fell for six straight years. Facing what the writer Fintan O'Toole called "the dull anxiety of declining living standards," conservative pols sniffed out a bogeyman to blame for this slow-motion catastrophe. They served up to anxious voters a menu of scary outsiders: bureaucrats in Brussels, immigrants, asylum seekers—anybody but the actual decision makers who had kneecapped British competitiveness. A cohort of older, middle-class, grievously nostalgic voters demanded Brexit, and they got it.

In the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain's government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one. The predictable results are falling wages and stunningly low productivity growth. Although British media worry about robots taking everybody's jobs, the reality is closer to the opposite. "Between 2003 and 2018, the number of automatic-roller car washes (that is, robots washing your car) declined by 50 percent, while the number of hand car washes (that is, men with buckets) increased by 50 percent," the economist commentator Duncan Weldon told me in an interview for my podcast, Plain English. "It's more like the people are taking the robots' jobs."

That might sound like a quirky example, because the British economy is obviously more complex than blokes rubbing cars with soap. But it's an illustrative case. According to the International Federation of Robotics, the U.K. manufacturing industry has less technological automation than just about any other similarly rich country. With barely 100 installed robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers in 2020, its average robot density was below that of Slovenia and Slovakia. One analysis of the U.K.'s infamous "productivity puzzle" concluded that outside of London and finance, almost every British sector has lower productivity than its Western European peers.

Thus, the U.K., the first nation to industrialize, was also the first to deindustrialize. Britain gave rise to the productivity revolution that changed the world, and now it has some of the worst productivity statistics of any major economy. What was once the world's most powerful globalized empire has now voted to explicitly reduce global access to trade and talent. Since Brexit, immigration, exports, and foreign investment have all declined, likely reducing the size of the U.K.'s economy by several percentage points in the long run.

Americans who have visited the U.K. may not recognize the portrait I'm painting. That's probably because they're familiar with London, not the country as a whole. As the economics writer Noah Smith notes, London's financial prowess has concealed the overall economy's weakness in innovation and manufacturing. Or, as the economic analyst Matt Klein puts it, "Take out Greater London—the prosperity of which depends to an uncomfortable degree on a willingness to provide services to oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union—and the UK is one of the poorest countries in Western Europe."

Today, Britain seems trapped between a left-wing aversion to growth and a right-wing aversion to openness. On the academic left, the U.K. has lately been home to a surging movement called degrowtherism, which asserts that saving the planet requires rich countries to stop seeking growth. On the right, the electorate is dominated by older voters who care more about culture wars than about competitiveness. "In 2019, when Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party won a big majority in the House of Commons, most people of working age did not vote for them," Weldon told me. "I'm pretty sure that's the first time that's ever happened. You have this post-economic, older, economically insulated voting bloc that could afford to be anti-growth almost as a luxury, because they don't have to care about economic outcomes."

The U.K. is now an object lesson for other countries dealing with a dark triad of deindustrialization, degrowth, and denigration of foreigners. Having offshored industry in favor of finance, its economy wasn't resilient. The resulting erosion in living standards made the public desperate for something to blame. Blame-seeking conservatives spotted bogeymen abroad. Brexit cut off the economy from further growth and set the stage for a rolling political circus.

The U.S. has a different menu of problems from the U.K.'s. But here too, politicians are navigating an industrial sector in structural decline, a political left that is often skeptical about the virtues of economic growth, and a political right that is organized in part around hating foreigners. Enemies of progress can criticize the legacy of industrialization, productivity, and globalization. But the U.K. shows us what can happen when a rich country seems to reject all three. Rather than transforming into some post-economic Eden of good vibes, it becomes bitter, flailing, and nonsensical.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/uk-economy-disaster-degrowth-brexit/671847/

[Sheilbh]

Unsurprisingly, the racists are out in force in response to this - but I think this is a fairly lovely moment and probably important to many:

Rishi Sunak
@RishiSunak
Brilliant to drop into tonight's Diwali reception in No10.

I will do everything I can in this job to build a Britain where our children and our grandchildren can light their Diyas and look to the future with hope.

Happy #Diwali everyone!

[Admiral Yi]

Terribly sorry if I've asked this before, but can you give me the breakdown in the UK of Muslim South Asians and Hindus?

[Josquius]

Britain can finally reclaim it's title of ...

Sick Man of Europe.

Lots of here.
I was saying much of this pre brexit as why we absolutely had to stay in... And then people decided to make our problems worse instead of fixing them.