Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Sorry Swinson

(Although still - who?)

[mongers]

Sorry Swinson

(Although still - who?)

Exactly.

 I guessed it was an auto-correct error, so googled for the wiki page of someone I assumed would be a Lib-dem leader, saw their profile and still couldn't recall anything about them from their time as leader.

[Sheilbh]

I blame the irrelevance of Brexit for all this chaos.

But also - yes. Brexit opened up the possibility to completely re-draw the electoral map of Britain and to, in effect, build new party coalitions/re-align huge swathes of people.

The 2017 and 2019 elections suggested that, with the Tories winning seats they'd never held, but that had voted Leave and their strategy in those elections was right (though I think Johnson gets too much credit and May not enough). It's not enough to win an election or two to re-align politics - you need to actually deliver for those new voters to cement those shifts. Unfortunately for the Tories they entrusted that task to Boris Johnson.

So after a window of a Brexit re-alignment we now see Labour ahead in the red wall by 20-25% (and 15% nationally). Despite the chaos and (for the Tories/a pro-Brexit force, at least) opportunity of the last 7 years that was opened by the Brexit vote the old voting patterns and loyalties are, ultimately, re-asserting theselves.

Edit: And I've mentioned it before but a reminder that public opinion is still moving in the UK in a way it doesn't seem to in the US any more:

Lewis Goodall
@lewis_goodall
Snap poll from @YouGov
 
🔵 62% says Boris Johnson was right to resign as an MP.
🔵46% of Tory voters agree. 33% don't.
🔵72% of those polled think he broke more Covid rules than he's been investigated for.
🔵59% of Tory voters agree with that.

Also striking poll in the Express that of the public figures they pollled on Johnson is more popular than only Prince Andrew and Vladimir Putin. He's just behind Xi Jinping and Philip Schofield ().

You wouldn't necessarily know any of that from the right-wing press/commentariat. I feel like the Tory press is really helpful to them when the wind is in their sails, but actually really, really unhelpful once the mood has turned which is, in part, what we're seeing here.

[Sheilbh]

Separately that means there's three by-elections (and possibility of more) as some Johnson loyalists are also resigning their seats - no idea why.

But they should be interesting. Johnson's seat, Uxbridge and South Ruislip, was 52% Tory at the last election but is a Labour target and on current polling they should win.

Nadine Dorries' constituency, Mid Bedfordshire, went about 60% Tory at the last election. Labour are second but it feels very much like a Lib Dem by-election target (and I believe they've already sent out 6 emails since yesterday getting their activists ready). It's very much the sort of seat that they are great at flipping in by-elections (and often losing the following general elections) and it may be a bit of a test of how much we're in a 90s mood.

Nigel Adams has also resigned his seat, Selby and Ainsty, which also went Tory by about 60% last time. Former FT journalist and now Tory think-tanker Sebastian Payne (who I quite like) is trying to get selected as Tory candidate for this seat. This will be one Labour are targeting as, on current polling (and demographics), they should be neck-and-neck with the Tories at abotu 40% each. I believe the boundary changes at the next election will also make this even more of a Labour target, so it's probably a bit of a win/win even if they lose - best case scenario Labour win the seat, worst case they've got their activists out canvassing a target seat for the next general election. On the other hand, this is the seat that feels like it'll be toughest to take from the Tories and if Labour are winning this sort of North Yorks seat we're in for a very fun night at the next election

[Sheilbh]

Reaction of the Any Questions audience when the news broke:
https://twitter.com/NicholasPegg/status/1667558281047408641?s=20

That was being recorded in Presli Pembrokeshire - which is a Tory seat. BBC normally tries to get a representative audience - but maybe not always achieved. But probably not a great sign for the Welsh Tories.

[viper37]

Nicola Sturgeon was arrested this morning.

[Tamas]

Nicola Sturgeon was arrested this morning.

[viper37]

Nicola Sturgeon arrested in SNP finances inquiry

Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has been arrested in connection with the ongoing investigation into the funding and finances of the SNP.

Police confirmed a 52-year-old woman was taken into custody as a suspect and is being questioned by detectives.

It follows the arrest and subsequent release of her husband, ex-SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, in April.

A spokeswoman for Ms Sturgeon confirmed she had attended a police interview by arrangement on Sunday.

The former SNP leader, who stood down in March, was then arrested and questioned by officers who have been investigating for the past two years what happened to more than £600,000 of donations given to the party by independence activists.

The spokeswoman said: "Nicola Sturgeon has today, Sunday 11 June, by arrangement with Police Scotland, attended an interview where she was to be arrested and questioned in relation to Operation Branchform.

"Nicola has consistently said she would cooperate with the investigation if asked and continues to do so."

Officers searched Ms Sturgeon's home and the SNP's headquarters in Edinburgh on 5 April, with Mr Murrell being arrested before later being released without charge pending further investigation.

A luxury motorhome which sells for about £110,000 was also seized by police from outside the home of Mr Murrell's mother in Dunfermline.

Almost two weeks later, SNP treasurer Colin Beattie was also arrested and released without charge while further inquiries were carried out.

Mr Beattie resigned as party treasurer shortly afterwards.

Ms Sturgeon, Mr Murrell and Mr Beattie were the three signatories on the SNP's accounts.

Under the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 2016, police can release a suspect for further investigation, but they can be re-arrested at a later date.

A spokesman for the SNP said the party would not comment on Ms Sturgeon's arrest, adding: "These issues are subject to a live police investigation."

Ms Sturgeon served as Scotland's first minister for more than eight years after succeeding Alex Salmond in the wake of the independence referendum in 2014.

She announced on 15 February that she would be standing down as both SNP leader and first minister once a successor was elected, with Humza Yousaf winning the contest to replace her.

Ms Sturgeon said at the time that she knew "in my head and in my heart" that it was the right time to go, and has denied the timing was influenced by the ongoing police investigation.

She was Scotland's the longest-serving first minister and the only woman to have held the position.

Scottish Conservative chairman Craig Hoy said the SNP was "engulfed in murkiness and chaos" and called on Mr Yousaf to suspend his predecessor from the party.

And Labour's shadow Scottish Secretary, Ian Murray, described the developments as "deeply concerning" and said the police inquiry must be allowed to proceed without interference.

Police Scotland launched their Operation Branchform investigation two years ago after complaints were made about what happened to £666,954 that was donated to the SNP by activists for a future independence referendum campaign

The party's accounts later accounts showed it had just under £97,000 in the bank at the end of 2019, and total net assets of about £272,000.

Last year it emerged Mr Murrell gave a loan of more than £100,000 to the SNP to help it out with a "cash flow" issue after the last election.

The SNP had repaid about half of the loan by October of that year, but still owes money to Mr Murrell - although it has not said how much.

The timing might have come as a surprise.

But within the political bubble at Holyrood, most people have been wondering when, rather than if, the former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon would be asked to help police with their inquiries.

Operation Branchform, the investigation into the SNP's finances, has already seen her husband, Peter Murrell, the party's former chief executive and the SNP's former treasurer Colin Beattie arrested for questioning.

Both were released without charge pending further inquiries.

As the third signatory to the party's accounts, it seemed inevitable that Nicola Sturgeon would be required to answer questions at some point.

[Sheilbh]

To have one former leader arrested may be regarded as a misfortune; to have two looks like carelessness.

[Tamas]

I see Sunak is working hard to make sure no serious AI research projects will choose the UK as their home.

[Josquius]

Stugeon released with no charges.
Whether its due to no wrong doing or nothing provably illegal....
The damage is done with the arrest.

[Sheilbh]

Agree with a lot of this by Patrick Maguire:

Only Keir Starmer can save the Johnson legacy
At the next election, the manifesto closest to the 2016 Leave campaign and 2019 Conservative offer will be Labour's
Patrick Maguire
Monday June 12 2023, 12.01am, The Times

Two townhouses in Bloomsbury explain everything. They stand yards apart on Doughty Street. This is not yet a neighbourhood inked into the folklore of British politics, as Frognal Gardens, Chipping Norton and Notting Hill were. More's the pity. Readers who still think Sir Keir Starmer unknowable should start here, at No 54, where in 1990 the young tyro of the liberal Bar began his long mission to defend the defenceless, to change the law and the state. Nine years later, two doors down, Boris Johnson arrived at No 56 to edit The Spectator.

Did the thirtysomething Keir, toiling late into thousands of weeknights, hear glasses smashing in the garden up the road? Did he pass Boris shambling down the street? Did he read The Spectator denouncing as a nanny state the egalitarian country of codified rights he strove to build? Starmer hates all of that. His words, not mine. "Johnson and I really loathed each other. It was obvious," he said this February. Perhaps it started there, in those two houses on Doughty Street, each with its own vision of what Britain and its rulers ought to be — and who they ought to be.

No 56's Merrie England story ended abruptly at 8pm last Friday night, with Johnson's resignation from the Commons. Buried beneath the invective — much of it aimed at Harriet Harman, another leftie lawyer — is the line that now reads less as threat from Johnson to Rishi Sunak than plea: "We need to deliver on the 2019 manifesto, which was endorsed by 14 million. We should remember that more than 17 million voted for Brexit."

We? Here is some pro bono advice for the former prime minister. Don't bother with your own party. Only Sir Keir Starmer can save your legacy now.

Neither man will enjoy reading that. Now, as then, the Labour leader defines himself against all that Johnson is. "He didn't stand for anything, he had no principles, he had no integrity, he lied through his teeth and he brings everybody down with him," Starmer has said of the man he was elected to oppose. "Is there anybody who's had any relationship with Johnson — in any sense of the word — who hasn't ended up in the gutter?"

In early 2020, I watched him tell audiences of Labour members: "I really do think that man is dangerous." What Starmer has never said is just how personally offensive he finds the former prime minister. The public contrasts between the two men are as obviously drawn as those between the high and low churchmen in Trollope. But only those closest to Starmer, those who see focus groups note his knighthood, hear the Received Pronunciation and see an aristocrat, understand that Johnson triggers his private insecurities, the acute class and self-consciousness of the scholarship boy within.

"He is working class, from an unfashionable town," a close friend of Starmer reminds me. "He got to where he is through talent, chippiness and sheer, bloody hard work. People like Johnson, whose life of privilege means they can afford to be lazy, arrogant, entitled, wasteful, are an affront to him." The same could and should be said of Rachel Reeves, his shadow chancellor, who tells the story of her own journey from a Bromley comprehensive to Oxford, the Bank of England and Westminster in similar terms. And yet, for all this righteous indignation, it was Johnson, like Disraeli before him, who spoke to and for the voters Starmer, Reeves and many others on the Labour right see as their people.

By 2019 the inchoate disaffection of voters had found new expression in a prime minister who, if only for five minutes, stood ready to borrow to invest in infrastructure, to reindustrialise and reform the planning system, to turn the page on the old consensus. "Not good, not good," said Seumas Milne, of all people, to colleagues in Jeremy Corbyn's office as Johnson first addressed the nation as prime minister. "He's stealing our lines."

And, yes, we all know the punchline. But even by the autumn of 2020, with the bill for Covid already in the hundreds of billions, Johnson was promising "to do better: to reform our system of government, to renew our infrastructure; to spread opportunity more widely and fairly and to create the conditions for a dynamic recovery that's led not by the state but by free enterprise". He announced a £12 billion "green industrial revolution", powered by provincial industry.

All of which, give or take the emphasis on the role of the state, we have since heard from Starmer and Reeves. This understated Labour leader is never more animated, say those who travel the country with him, than when wearing a high-viz vest on a building site. Like Johnson he relishes the transformative potential of grands projets. Addressing the GMB union last week, he uncharacteristically ad libbed a complaint about the use of overseas materials in the construction of a new nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point.

There is more of this to come in a speech on the green economy next week, which will seek to recast the £28 billion-a-year programme of climate investment dramatically scaled back last week in terms of jobs and national security.

Put this crude comparison between Johnsonism and Starmerism to the leader's confidants and they embrace it. "Which party's manifesto will look most like the 2016 Vote Leave and 2019 Tory offer?" one of Starmer's closest aides put it to me last week. "It's ours."

They are convinced they have inherited Johnson's electorate too. When the dust settled on last month's local elections what most delighted Shabana Mahmood and Morgan McSweeney, masterminds of Labour's campaign, were the countless victories in Tory seats with higher than average numbers of Leave voters without university educations.

Maybe they underestimate their Conservative counterparts. Maybe, as one shadow cabinet minister complains, "reassurance will trump transformation", and Starmer's agenda ends up filleted by his shadow Treasury team. Looming by-elections in Uxbridge, outer London, which even Tony Blair could not win, and the coalfield towns and Tory villages of Selby & Ainsty in North Yorkshire will test the strength of Starmer's claim to Boris Johnson's voters.

Nobody, however, is thinking as hard about them — and the agenda for which they voted in 2019 — as Sir Keir Starmer. As was the case back on Doughty Street, there is much less distance between the Labour leader and Boris Johnson than he would care to admit.

I think there's an argument for it in the US too - you wanted to pull US troops out of expensive, pointless foreign wars, to confront China and "Infrastructure Week" then you've got them from Biden even if they were initially Trump's lines.

Stugeon released with no charges.
Whether its due to no wrong doing or nothing provably illegal....
The damage is done with the arrest.

Her husband was released without charges it doesn't mean there won't be any charges.

I think it's maybe because of procedurals but arrests don't automatically mean charges. It changes the powers and responsibilities of the police (so they will have had to do the UK version of Miranda rights) - in particular I think it means that they can compel you to attend police interviews. Without an arrest it would be voluntary (even if under Sturgeon) to attend an interview and she could leave.

Also it gives notice to her and her solicitors of what the charges are because the police have to identify what grounds they have for arresting someone and why it's necessary. It also means that reporting restrictions are in place now so the press won't be able to write much beyond the bare facts in police statements.

She's not been released and there are no charges but "released under investigation" so the investigation will continue and she can be re-arrested.

[Sheilbh]

And why Johnson resigned as an MP - the report would still require a vote by the Commons but it's very unlikely the Tories would have whipped their vote for Johnson:

Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament on partygate, MPs find
Privileges committee rejects defence of lockdown parties in No 10
Steven Swinford, Political Editor
Monday June 12 2023, 10.20pm, The Times

Boris Johnson deliberately misled parliament over the Downing Street parties scandal, a committee of MPs will find on Wednesday after rejecting his central defence.

The former prime minister claimed that he was advised by senior officials that both Covid rules and guidance had been complied with at all times in No 10 during the pandemic.

However, the privileges committee, a parliamentary standards body that has investigated Johnson, has concluded that officials did not advise him that social-distancing guidelines had been followed, despite him repeatedly making the claim in the Commons. One of his most senior officials in fact warned him against making such a claim on the basis it was "unrealistic".

The committee of seven MPs, which includes four Tories, also found that Johnson was misleading during a public hearing with the committee at which he claimed that leaving drinks he attended without social distancing were in line with Covid guidance.


Boris Johnson at a leaving drinks for his director of communications in November 2020
ITV NEWS

Johnson formally quit as the Tory MP for Uxbridge & South Ruislip on Monday, before the report's publication. He has accused the committee of mounting a "witch-hunt" and behaving like a "kangaroo court".

The committee's report will state that Johnson would have been sanctioned with a suspension of more than ten days, enough to trigger a by-election. It is also expected to state that criticism of the committee should be considered contempt of parliament after Johnson and his allies repeatedly castigated members over the investigation. They were offered increased security after being inundated with messages from Johnson's supporters.

The former prime minister has already rejected the findings of the committee, which were sent to him last week. In his 1,000-word resignation statement on Friday he accused the committee of "egregious bias" and said it was carrying out a "political hit-job".

He also escalated his war of words with Rishi Sunak over his resignation honours list, accusing the prime minister of "talking rubbish". Sunak suggested that Johnson had asked him to bend the rules by overruling the House of Lords Appointments Commission (Holac) and giving four Tory MPs peerages. "Boris Johnson asked me to do something that I wasn't prepared to do, because I didn't think it was right," Sunak said.

Johnson responded: "Rishi Sunak is talking rubbish. To honour these peerages it was not necessary to overrule Holac but simply to ask them to renew their vetting, which was a mere formality."

The Times has been told that Johnson also pressed Sunak to give his father a knighthood after he was cut from the resignation honours list. No 10 was said to be concerned that allowing Johnson to elevate his father would carry significant reputational risk.

A spokesman for Johnson declined to comment. A No 10 source insisted that Downing Street had not intervened to remove Stanley Johnson from the honours list.

Aides warned against Johnson's claim

Johnson's defence against the claims that he misled parliament when he said that Covid guidance and rules had been followed "at all times"centred on his assertion that he had been given "repeated assurances" they had.

However, Jack Doyle, his former director of communications, appeared to contradict the claim in written evidence to the committee. He said: "Don't think I advised the PM to say that — I mean that the socially distancing guidelines — to say they were followed completely, they are difficult things to say."

Martin Reynolds, Johnson's principal private secretary at the time, advised him in December 2021 that he should remove a claim from a statement to the Commons that "all guidance had been followed at all times". He questioned "whether it was realistic to argue that all guidance had been followed at all times". Johnson removed the line from his opening statement but repeated the assertion during a debate in the Commons less than half an hour later. The Times has been told that the committee views this as evidence that Johnson deliberately misled the Commons.

The former prime minister's comments at his March hearing with the committee have also been deemed misleading. Johnson said his attendance at several No 10 leaving drinks, where staff consumed alcohol without social distancing, was a "necessary" part of his working life as prime minister.

He said he did not believe for "one second" that rules had been breached because the guidance only required workplaces to distance as far as possible. This claim has been rejected by the committee, which has highlighted guidance stating that where social distancing could not be followed businesses "should consider whether that activity needs to continue for the business to operate". The committee has concluded that leaving drinks were not essential to the operation of Downing Street.

On the honours list point, it is difficult to know who to believe out of Rishi Sunak who has not been notably dishonest in the time he's been a public figure and Boris Johnson who has a lengthy and well-documented record of routine lying for at least the last three decades.

Interesting also that Sunak's line was in part because Tory MPs are pushing him to confront Johnson. Basically every time Johnson pops up on the news, it's bad for the Tories - they think that one way to solve the problem is by Sunak responding a bit more forcefully rather than being overly polite.

Also striking that the favourite for Tory candidate for Mayor of London, a very staunch Johnson ally (he was in Johnson's government of no talents when he was trying to resist the 50+ resignations) and the minister for London, didn't even get on the short list. Instead they've gone for Daniel Korski, who is a Danish born child of refugees, reporter, tech investor who was in Cameron's Number 10 (and has had a few advisor jobs for the Tories); Susan Hall who is more right wing former leader of the Tories in the Greater London Assembly; and Mozammel Hossain KC - who is apparently a criminal defence barrister but who no-one seems to know anything abouut

If it was Labour we'd be talking about purges, the unions would have weighed in and you could already here the factional memoirs being written - as it is it just feels like the Tories doing their standard thing and moving on.

[Gups]

Stugeon released with no charges.
Whether its due to no wrong doing or nothing provably illegal....
The damage is done with the arrest.

It just means the investigation is ongoing but they are not yet in a position to charge.

[Josquius]

This article epitomises Britain's inability to build. Such remarkable nimbyness.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-65874170.amp

This is exactly the sort of project we need (only more than just the south east please). Rather than building in random fields build off railway stations.
But nope...