Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Josquius]

Starmer sounds fine. Idiotic to find fault there.
Nandy on the other hand.... Yeah. Britain First... Way too trumpian

I think it's fine as a foreign secretary to say you'll put Britain first - that's literally your job to advance British interests. As opposed to, for example, taking Assad's word over chemical weapons usage or asking the Russians if they poisoned someone in Salisbury.

Edit: I also feel like it's just an issue for the centre-left if they can't even pretend to like the country they're trying to govern

Well it IS a horrible moist fascist infested boil on the face of the world :p

I haven't seen nandys speech. But speaking of always putting British interests first is something I'd disagree with. This doesn't mean doing whatever Russia says. It's possible to work in your country's best interests whilst not blindly believing anything that is British is automatically right.

[Maladict]

So some of it is really basic and difficult to fix - we're a high density country with high land value, so the countries we should probably learn from on this are places like the Netherlands

Or maybe not. The HS line to Brussels was completed in 2009 and we still don't have the trains to run the service.

[Tamas]

Momentum, the Labour group for Jeremy Corbyn supporters, has described Sir Keir Starmer's speech as a "missed opportunity". It made the comment in a statement from Andrew Scattergood, its co-chair. He said:

Keir Starmer taking the fight to Boris Johnson today is welcome, but after months of the leadership not commenting on policies, Keir Starmer's speech was a missed opportunity to show substance. If Starmer wants to appeal to working class voters, his pitch should be based on solidarity with the working class and defending their interests, not just slogans and platitudes.

74% of people want test and trace taken away from private firms yet Starmer was silent on the catastrophic failure caused by the outsourcing of test and trace, including to companies with links to the Conservative party, or of Labour's opposition to privatisation. Starmer also made no mention of a Green New Deal, Black Lives Matter, and the Tories' lifting of the eviction ban yesterday, unleashing a tsunami of evictions across our communities.

I had absolutely no idea Starmer is running for POTUS. 

[Sheilbh]

Yeah there's a lot of nauseating mandatory self-hate on the far left. There are steps between fascism and despising your own nation by default.

I am seeing that BTW also with the way people are trying to copy the US left's attitude to slavery and its local history. As big and terrible part it played in building the empire's wealth as it did, Britain DID lead a global effort to end it, and an approach referencing that and demanding that we continue that tradition by facing the shadier parts of history and its racism still living with us would IMHO work better than "SHAME! SHAME SHAME! REPENT FOR THE 1600s WHITE PEOPLE!"

I think on both the right and left in the UK people are very aware of what's going on in the US so they are both influenced by the discourse in the US far more than other European countries. This has positive and negative effects - there's been a lot of conversation recently about black UK activists for example being far more connecting to and communicating with US activists and discourse, rather than the really interesting Afropean activism in, say, Belgium and Germany. And I think there's positives and negatives to that - we have a more American conversation about diversity being a good thing and something to encourage rather than a more French/continental scepticism of "communitarianism". So there's focus again on the "Brussels so white" issue, and it's difficult to know because the EU doesn't collect statistics on ethnic or racial diversity (only gender diversity), but the estimate is that half of the minority aides and Eurocrats were from the UK which isn't because the UK has half of the EU's minorities but I think because we are more American.

One of the negatives is that I think both sides basically just import the conversation from the US, especially around culture war issues whether they apply or are subject to the same sort of polarisation in the UK. There are culture war issues in the UK but they basically relate to Brexit. So Sunder Katwala has done loads of research and polling on this but, for example, when it comes to statues most British people supported Colston's statue coming down, would have preferred if it went into a museum rather than the way it happened. Similarly very broad support for keeping Churchill statues, for Last Night of the Proms and for TV shows imposing more racially diverse line-ups on producers. Similarly even on trans rights there's broad, but quite nuanced support for a lot of trans rights in the UK. So basically unlike the US there aren't two really polarised tribe, there is a very broad middle. But  the UK right and left watch American politics so much they just bring those arguments across wholesale which enrage the other small tribe while the vast majority sort of shrug and move on.

So to take the example of people in the 17th century - in the polling there is broad support (about 70%) for more education about Britain's role in the slave trade and Empire, for removing statues of slavers but putting them in museums and for identifying sort of wealth or institutions in the UK that did derive money from the slave trade, but also for still playing Land of Hope and Glory at the Proms. Neither side are particularly happy with that, but it's far less polarised than the US (or France) on these issues. I think, it's because maybe the polarising issues are different but we're so engaged by American discourse that we just copy and paste, or it may be that there's less divide between communities, or there's more "common" space - NHS, remembrance day etc.

A really good example was the Adele Notting Hill Carnival post which got huge traction on the internet. But when the morning programs were asking for someone to speak about it and cultural appropriation they were dialing someone in from Pittsburgh, while prominent black and community figures in the UK and in Notting Hill (Adele's from Tottenham after all) were defending her

So I think there's a tendency for people on the left in the UK to think that the people they're fighting against are the worst excesses of the American right and vice versa, when actually there's this broad constituency of 70% of people who are slightly bemused and neither.

Well it IS a horrible moist fascist infested boil on the face of the world :p

So, fine, I'm just not sure it's the best message for swing voters

[Sheilbh]

I had absolutely no idea Starmer is running for POTUS. 

Also I hate the obsession with policies. We are 4-5 years from an election. It isn't the job of the opposition to be coming up with policies at this stage (they need to do that as the election gets closer) at this point your job is to make life difficult for the government.

If the opposition announces a policy now it will either be: bad, in which case everyone gets to laugh at it and the government gets a day when they're not the main story on the news; or good, in which case the government will quietly steal it. This happened all the time with Ed Miliband. The opposiiton isn't meant to be a think tank and no-one cares about policies except for the ultra-geeks, but especially not this far away from an election.

[Tamas]

Good points Sheilbh. Seeing this big influence of US culture here, I honestly think the US could turn us their European Puerto Rico with not too much effort in a decade or so, especially after Brexit.

[Sheilbh]

Unrelated but interesting piece by Stephen Bush from the New Statesman on why the first black British PM is likely to be a Tory which I think does flag a couple of other issues with why you can't just transplant the US discourse into the UK (e.g. the Tory party gets 30% of BAME votes, which I think is higher than the GOP):

Why the first black British prime minister is likely to be a Conservative
The great secret to the Conservatives' increasingly diverse parliamentary party is their even greater institutional health.
By
Stephen Bush

Theresa May's official portrait has been added to the wall of pictures of previous prime ministers – the second woman to be included, and the second Conservative woman.

This reminded me of something I've long believed: that the first black British prime minister will be African-British, and will also be a Conservative. In the spirit that you should write down your most stupid opinions so that you can learn from them later, here's why.

That Theresa May is not even the first female Conservative prime minister underlines the party's remarkable near-monopoly of political firsts – the first ethnic minority prime minister in Benjamin Disraeli; the first female prime minister in Margaret Thatcher; the first British Asian to run for the role of prime minister in Sajid Javid, who also became the first British Asian to occupy the roles of chancellor and home secretary; the first Muslim to attend cabinet in Sayeeda Warsi; the first Asian-British woman to be home secretary in Priti Patel; the first ethnic minority to serve as chair of either main party in James Cleverly. So the Conservative Party has a history of breaking these records, and therefore I suspect is likely to break this one, too. 

People often attribute this to the British right's different view of diversity and opportunity, whether as a positive (the party doesn't care about identity, but hard work or merit) or a negative (the party tends to view success through the prism of whether the exceptional can achieve, rather than the rewards that flow to the merely average).

I think both views are precisely wrong: across the world, political parties with intellectual traditions very similar to those of the Conservatives have much worse records on diversity, including those that do better among ethnic minority and female voters than the Tories. Political parties with similar intellectual traditions and approaches to diversity as Labour have much better records on diversity, specifically in selecting and electing parliamentary candidates from a diverse background.

The reason the Conservatives have been more successful at hitting these historical firsts has little to do with their political views about diversity, which are, in any case, complex and conflicting. There is no single Conservative Party view on how to increase diversity, or even what it means to "increase diversity", and that division is also present among the party's minority MPs.

The reason the Conservative Party has been more successful at hitting these historical firsts is because it is more successful in general. From the party's exit from the Liberal-Conservative coalition in 1922 until the rise of Tony Blair,  every Conservative Party leader also became prime minister. One reason to believe that the first black British prime minister will be a Conservative is because the British prime minister is almost always a Conservative.

That political success cannot be separated from their greater diversity. It's not that diverse leadership is, in and of itself, more likely to produce more effective leadership; it's that effective leadership is more likely to produce greater diversity. If you have more open recruitment and fairer internal progression, then you will have more talent, and inevitably more diversity, be it of ethnic background, religion, career or outlook (though the latter can be less of a priority for political parties).

The main reason the Conservative Party has contributed so many historic firsts is not because of its particular attitude to diversity, but because of its institutional health. The Conservative Party is one of the most successful political parties in the democratic world, and has consistently been more effective at reacting to changing times than its opponents. 

We can see evidence of that with its diverse parliamentary party. The modern Conservative Party is reaping the fruits of David Cameron's political strategy, which was, to put it crudely, based on a simple problem: that a bunch of people from a variety of ethnic minority backgrounds, who looked identical to reliable Conservative voters, had similar incomes and attitudes and so on, were not voting Tory. And part of his tactic to tackle the problem was to improve the recruitment of candidates from those backgrounds, which he and his party did very effectively.

So it's not just that the Conservatives are more likely to provide Britain's first black prime minister because they are electorally successful; their electoral success is, in part, the product of the things they do well and that make them more likely to produce Britain's first black prime minister.

Another part of that success comes in how the Conservative Party uses its safe seats better than Labour has tended to in recent years. One reason black men are now much better represented in the parliamentary ranks of the Conservatives than in Labour, is that Labour has been fairly reluctant to run ethnic minority candidates in majority-majority constituencies (that's to say, constituencies where the majority of people are white British). Of the Labour Party's ethnic minority MPs, just two – Mark Hendrick and Sarah Owen – sit for constituencies that are not majority-minority, or at the least where no ethnic group has a plurality.

An underrated dynamic in parliamentary democracies is that the losing party is always, almost by definition, drawing from a smaller talent pool: they have fewer parliamentary seats and therefore they are fishing in a smaller pond when they put together their frontbench and leadership team.

Using your safe seats well – so that, even if you are wiped out outside your strongholds in the south of England, as the Conservative Party was in 1997, you still have some MPs from Scotland and the north of England – is a big part of your political success. That happens to manifest itself in this specific area with a parliamentary party that is also more ethnically diverse, but it has a number of other benefits.

It's not simply that the Conservatives' parliamentary party is increasingly more diverse; it's that the third of ethnic minority voters to back the Conservative Party are also better represented within that diversity. There are socially conservative but economically centrist ethnic minority MPs, there are classical Thatcherites – almost the whole tapestry of the Conservative vote can be found. The same is not true for Labour.

That's the other reason I feel safe in my prediction: because predicting Labour will provide the first black British prime minister, as it stands, involves making quite a big political bet, not only about the party's electoral viability, but also that it will do so under a specific faction.

Theresa May's own ascension is illustrative here. She became Conservative leader partly for want of anything better: the referendum defeat brought the premiership of David Cameron to an abrupt end, and alongside it destroyed the hopes of his preferred successor, George Osborne. Division between the two senior Vote Leave candidates, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, detonated the campaigns of both men, leaving the relatively inexperienced Andrea Leadsom between May and the leadership.

Her elevation is a perfect example of how, if you have enough qualified female candidates floating around, eventually one will get through. Had May done something foolish, Leadsom might have become prime minister instead. Her leadership was the product of a political argument she herself advanced in her role setting up Women2Win: that the presence of viable women candidates at entry-level, in this case parliament, and a willingness to promote them by the organisation's leader, in this case Cameron, leads to women taking the top jobs sooner or later.

Frankly, the Conservatives have done a much better job not only of recruiting ethnic minority MPs in recent years, but doing so in a more "faction-blind" way. If I told you that the next Labour leader is going to be a British person from the Indian subcontinent, you would be able to make fairly specific predictions about what the political trajectory of Labour would be, simply because the pool of available candidates fitting that description is smaller.

But if I told you that the next Conservative leader would fit that description, well, it could mean anything: it could mean the Tory party had been spooked into action and gone for the candidate best placed to neutralise Keir Starmer's strengths (Rishi Sunak); it could mean the Conservatives had grown tired of Johnson's heresies and gone back to a more authentically Thatcherite approach (Sajid Javid); it could mean they had opted to double down on the Johnson approach (Priti Patel). Or it could mean that an implosion at the top of the party had left someone plausible enough as the last secretary of state standing (Alok Sharma).

This dynamic is also true of black British politicians in both parties. There are simply more available candidates, regardless of faction or ideological tendency, from a black British background in the Conservative Party. We don't have to make a particularly bold prediction about that party's ideological or political trajectory to predict it will elect a black person as leader – we do in the case of Labour.

Why the specificity of British and African? Well, because as the Runnymede Trust has shown, the Conservatives' in-roads among black voters are strongest among black Brits whose parents or grandparents have come from Africa, as opposed to those whose parents or grandparents have come from the Caribbean, and your ability to recruit talent is inextricably tied to your appeal among that group. We can see this in the area where Labour has racked up many more firsts than the Conservatives – LGBT representation.

All this underlines why I think the Conservatives are likely to hit this particular first: because an organisation's ability to succeed on diversity is inextricably linked to its overall organisational health.

Stephen Bush is political editor of the New Statesman. His daily briefing, Morning Call, provides a quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics.

[Josquius]

Fair points. Not sure on some of his facts though. Newcastle Central has a black MP and its a very white city. Incidentally she is local and wasn't just parachuted in for diversity purposes.
As this is what the torys largely did I believe? The torys can count far more reliably on tribally tory areas than can Labour so it can afford more liberties with safe seats. With labour that sort of thing was widely criticised and is often blamed for labours decline in the north (albeit with non minority folks)

With minority tories I do think theres a bit of a thing there when if you come from a disadvantaged group and succeed a lot of people will tend to somewhat turn on their group. Stating the issue is clearly they didn't work hard enough in the way the succesful person did.

[Tamas]

Very interesting, I think he is making good points.


On the other hand, if I wanted to play devil's advocate, there's an other much meaner spin, isn't there: Maybe Labour is more white-dominated because  conservative values are more in line with the values and views you are likely to pick up from a family with Asian or African heritage? A combination of less developed / more traditional politics in their origin countries coupled with the can-only-rely-on-yourself attitude an immigrant is likely to have or pick up and then pass on to children, would have an easier time within the Tories than Labour which seems still heavy on the workers solidarity, which means a collective conscience of worker class in Britain dating back to things like Churchill being nasty in the 1920s. Unless you are at least 3rd generation British you would simply not have a "family tradition" that links you to that sense of community and belonging.

The Tories seem much more about individuals fighting it out to rise high enough to ignore everyone else, so less of a deep-rooted communal identity meaning less of a cultural entry barrier? 

[Duque de Bragança]

So some of it is really basic and difficult to fix - we're a high density country with high land value, so the countries we should probably learn from on this are places like the Netherlands

Or maybe not. The HS line to Brussels was completed in 2009 and we still don't have the trains to run the service.

I guess that leaves Belgium but Germany has high density as well.

[Sheilbh]

As this is what the torys largely did I believe? The torys can count far more reliably on tribally tory areas than can Labour so it can afford more liberties with safe seats. With labour that sort of thing was widely criticised and is often blamed for labours decline in the north (albeit with non minority folks)

Yeah - so I feel Labour uses safe seats to settle factional battles. So under Blair they would parachute in ethnically homogenouse Oxbridge graduates who had worked as special advisors for ministers or for New Labour think tanks. Similarly I think Corbyn tried to parachute in a few Corbynite (London based) spads etc into safe seats.

Since Cameron the Tories use safe seats to improve their number of women and BAME MPs. Something that's always struck me is that Cameron doesn't seem to have cared about the factional/ideological bit at all. So a lot of his A-listers then became campaigners for Leave or turned out to be not very Cameroon, they were far more Thatcherite or socially conservative. This may be unfair but I think it just reflects his arrogance that he probably basically assumed that him and other Old Etonians who live in Notting Hill could keep running the party/country without having to worry.

With minority tories I do think theres a bit of a thing there when if you come from a disadvantaged group and succeed a lot of people will tend to somewhat turn on their group. Stating the issue is clearly they didn't work hard enough in the way the succesful person did.

I think this goes both ways. I remember a really awful Guardian piece noting that a number of the British cabinet (including Priti Patel and others) come from a Gujarati-East African background and it then basically went on about how they were middle-men in Empire - merchants, traders etc so they didn't really experience the negatives of Empire and basically they're not really like other ethnic minorities. Which feels a bit to me like a left wing "good immigrant" myth - to be a "good" migrant you need to vote Labour and have a class-based analysis of society etc.

The Tories seem much more about individuals fighting it out to rise high enough to ignore everyone else, so less of a deep-rooted communal identity meaning less of a cultural entry barrier? 

One thought I have is that the parties do well with different communities - and it's worth noting most BAME voters vote Labour and actually there were more BAME Leave voters than Tory voters. But the Tories do better with British Indian, East Asian and African communities, while Labour do better with British Caribbean, Pakistani and Bengali. This may be nonsense but I feel like Labour do better with communities that have had a large presence in the UK for a longer time and I wonder if that's part of it - they were the communities that dealt with 1940s and 1950s British racism while the Tory voting communities came later and maybe had a different experience because of anti-racism work done by those first communities (and many Labour MPs/groups - not all but many)?

I guess that leaves Belgium but Germany has high density as well.

It's about half the English level. So population density in England is about 425 per square km, in Germany it's about 232 per square km. And I think that does just have an impact on land value and different rights over land. There's lots of other stuff we can learn from German approaches to infrastructure maybe though (the only German infrastructure project I'm aware of is Berlin airport so I don't want to be too definitive, despite Germany generally doing things better ).

[Duque de Bragança]

I guess that leaves Belgium but Germany has high density as well.

It's about half the English level. So population density in England is about 425 per square km, in Germany it's about 232 per square km. And I think that does just have an impact on land value and different rights over land. There's lots of other stuff we can learn from German approaches to infrastructure maybe though (the only German infrastructure project I'm aware of is Berlin airport so I don't want to be too definitive, despite Germany generally doing things better ).

Well chosen example. 
The part with each Land pushing for its own station, even if not really rational, is a nice warning as well. Hallo Montabaur!

[Sheilbh]

Fair points. Not sure on some of his facts though. Newcastle Central has a black MP and its a very white city. Incidentally she is local and wasn't just parachuted in for diversity purposes.

Interestingly he picked up on the Chi Onwurah example on Twitter. According to the 2011 census that seat is about 70% white but obviously a lot can happen in 10 years and it's one of those slightly odd seats in that the demographics change a lot depending on whether students are there or not because student populations tend to be far more diverse and tend to live in city centres. So it's probably still majority-majority but it fluctuates - I imagine there's something similar in, say, Bristol West which becomes significantly more ethnically diverse during term time.

[Barrister]

Unrelated but interesting piece by Stephen Bush from the New Statesman on why the first black British PM is likely to be a Tory which I think does flag a couple of other issues with why you can't just transplant the US discourse into the UK (e.g. the Tory party gets 30% of BAME votes, which I think is higher than the GOP):

There's a huge historic difference in the history of those minority groups in each country though.

The biggest minority in the US are african-americans, whose ancestors came to the country as slaves.  They've historically been an oppressed group and economically have not done well.  You also have hispanics, some of whom descended from economically disadvantaged people who entered into the country illegally. 

In the UK though you have immigrants who legally entered, mostly from former colonial possessions, generally for a chance at a better life.  They would (I think) be more receptive to a Conservative message of hard work an opportunity.

You can see this dynamic in Canada - our Conservative Party has done pretty well in appealing to our South and East Asian communities.  With First Nations communities (who are historically disadvantaged) we get nowhere.

[Sheilbh]

Oh absolutely. But I think there's also a choice by the GOP on this - I mean in recent elections they only get about 20% of the vote of Asian Americans, in the 90s that was closer to 50/50 (even as late as 2004 it was 60/40, something appears to have changed in 2008).

I think the UK Tory party and maybe the Canadian conservative party have decided it's worth trying to get a base of support in minority communities as the country changes. The GOP don't seem to have made that decision.