Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

What you might have forgotten is that leaving the single market was confidently painted as a non-issue by the Leave side. They claimed that not only it would not cause issues, it would be to our advantage as we "hold all the cards". People might had known that ending East Euros coming in meant leaving the single market, but there was a lot of effort spent to convince them that's a non-issue with zero tradeoffs. In fact, nobody on the Leave side has acknowledged any tradeoffs until yesterday.

But I don't think Leavers only listen to or hear Leavers and Remainers only listen to or hear Remainers. How a campaign works is both side sell up their ambition and goals and points out the flaws in the other side. Voters hear both and make a call and lots of voters are quite changeable depending on the ideas they hear.

They definitely got an idea of the issues that might follow leaving the EU from the Remain campaign - I think most Remain campaign figures have now admitted that side of their campaign was a mistake (and learning too much from Project Fear in Scotland). In particular, George Osborne enjoyed it too much and so far his most dire predictions (on Treasury letterhead! ) didn't happen because they were based on the UK leaving the day after the referendum with no deal. I think that approach by Osborne has limited the effect of actual economic costs.

Also I could be wrong but I think Leavers have before said it would take at least a decade to see benefits from Brexit. And I don't get the idea that they didn't acknowledge trade-offs. They chose to leave the Single Market to end freedom of movement and for maximum divergence - they made trade-offs because they think they're either politically necessary (freedom of movement) or the long term benefit will outweigh the cost (divergence).

[Syt]

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-nireland-idUKKBN2GR4G3

Fix it or ditch it, UK's Johnson warns EU on Northern Ireland deal

BELFAST (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Friday that Northern Ireland's contentious post-Brexit trading arrangements could work in principle if they were "fixed" but warned the EU they would be "ditched" if not.

The Northern Ireland protocol was part of the Brexit divorce settlement Johnson negotiated with the European Union. But London has said it must be rewritten less than a year after it came into operation due to the barriers businesses are facing importing goods from Britain.

"We hope that we can fix this thing. This is not a problem that we wanted, I have got to stress that. I can't emphasize that more," Johnson told BBC Northern Ireland.

"The protocol could in principle work... It has got enough leeway in the language for it to be applied in a common sense way without creating too many checks down the Irish Sea."

But he warned it will come down to "fixing it or ditching it".

"What I am saying to you is I want to see a real negotiation. I want to see the EU come to the table with some serious proposals to fix it."

Brussels are due to respond in full shortly to a "command paper" put forward by London in July calling for fundamental changes to the protocol. The European Commission has rejected a total renegotiation.

The July proposals also once again raised the prospect of triggering "Article 16" of the agreement, which allows either side to unilaterally seek to dispense with some of the terms if they are proving unexpectedly harmful.

Neither side can scrap the protocol via these safeguard measures.

Asked if he would trigger Article 16 as soon as next week, Johnson said it depended on what the EU brings forward and "whether they are willing to negotiate seriously about removing the obstructions that we have currently got."

[Tamas]

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-nireland-idUKKBN2GR4G3

Fix it or ditch it, UK's Johnson warns EU on Northern Ireland deal

BELFAST (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Friday that Northern Ireland's contentious post-Brexit trading arrangements could work in principle if they were "fixed" but warned the EU they would be "ditched" if not.

The Northern Ireland protocol was part of the Brexit divorce settlement Johnson negotiated with the European Union. But London has said it must be rewritten less than a year after it came into operation due to the barriers businesses are facing importing goods from Britain.

"We hope that we can fix this thing. This is not a problem that we wanted, I have got to stress that. I can't emphasize that more," Johnson told BBC Northern Ireland.

"The protocol could in principle work... It has got enough leeway in the language for it to be applied in a common sense way without creating too many checks down the Irish Sea."

But he warned it will come down to "fixing it or ditching it".

"What I am saying to you is I want to see a real negotiation. I want to see the EU come to the table with some serious proposals to fix it."

Brussels are due to respond in full shortly to a "command paper" put forward by London in July calling for fundamental changes to the protocol. The European Commission has rejected a total renegotiation.

The July proposals also once again raised the prospect of triggering "Article 16" of the agreement, which allows either side to unilaterally seek to dispense with some of the terms if they are proving unexpectedly harmful.

Neither side can scrap the protocol via these safeguard measures.

Asked if he would trigger Article 16 as soon as next week, Johnson said it depended on what the EU brings forward and "whether they are willing to negotiate seriously about removing the obstructions that we have currently got."

This is so disgraceful. He signed the fucking thing.

[The Brain]

Why does he want to renegotiate? The UK doesn't feel bound by signed deals.

[The Brain]

If the UK wants to be taken seriously at all it will have to rid itself of this tiresome PM.

[Syt]

I admit that I'm mostly a casual observer of the UK political scene, certainly nowhere as informed as others here. But to this outside viewer the government of the UK in recent years has seemed incredibly ramshackle, uncoordinated and incompetent. And unlike Agent Orange in the U.S. they can't claim a lack of education in the field.

[Sheilbh]

I admit that I'm mostly a casual observer of the UK political scene, certainly nowhere as informed as others here. But to this outside viewer the government of the UK in recent years has seemed incredibly ramshackle, uncoordinated and incompetent. And unlike Agent Orange in the U.S. they can't claim a lack of education in the field.

I think that's fair - I personally would go wider in that I don't think it's a purely political issue - and I don't think it's a problem of this government or this prime minister in particular.

I think the "in recent years is key". In the last 20 years the UK military was in two wars and in both cases took on big, challenging missions (Basra and Helmand) and failed; the UK regulatory and policy world were blindsided by the financial crisis; the UK had what was considered (and rated by international organisations) an excellent pandemic preparedness plan and we had one of the worst experiences of covid in Europe, ir not the world; and, frankly, right now we have the scandal of the Sarah Everard killing - and the Met Commissioner has just had her contract renewed and received glowing recommendations and defences from Labour and Tory politicians.

Those weren't "political" failures they are institutional operational failures of the non-political bits of the state: military, civil service, scientific advisors, regulators, police. In each of those cases - noone resigned or was fired. They were all clubbable which is what matters in the British state so they continued to be promoted/moved to other regulators or quangos despite failures - you know the UK's financial regulator in the run-up to the crash who passionately promoted the virtues of his "light touch" approach, now chairs various (well-funded) international organisations advising on the energy transition.

There are political flaws that we can specifically point to - almost losing the Scottish independence referendum, the embarrassingly bad handling of Brexit. But I think it is a mistake to just see it as political failures or to do with this government since 2019, or governments since 2017 when these big failures have been a recurring feature of at least the last 20 years. I am not sure on whether the institutional crises are caused by political failures of the last 20 years or vice-versa, or if they both just reinforce each other.

The theory of the British state is that if the non-political bits fuck up then it's not on them; the minister takes responsibility (even if they had nothing to do with it) including, possibly, resigning. In exchange for that protection from politics and public accountability, the non-political bits keep their house in order and make sure they work well. In the last 20 years we've ended up with politicians and minister not taking responsibility and the institutions not having any accountability or way to course-correct. We've ended up with all the worst aspects of that theory, without any of the benefits. I don't want to say everything would be solved if we fired a few people - and that would be seen as "politicising" the army/civil service/regulators/police.

Sam Freedman pointed out a section of Cummings' blog which I think is hard to disagree with:

In summer 2019 I wrote about how the British state would fail in the next crisis. Nine months later I was in the Cabinet room watching what I had said would happen actually happen. Do you see any serious attempt to learn now? No, we have a PM and ruling party desperate to reinvent history and forget. Those officials who wanted to use the disaster as a catalyst for a reboot have been left in no doubt that such ideas are "career limiting". Instead of learning those with power have blundered straight into a predictable and predicted petrol shortage because they cannot build the most basic early warning systems and execute. (And over the past 48 hours in the UK the opposition party has supported the ruling party in defending the permanent bureaucracy after a horrific kidnap-rape-muder by a police officer after which nobody in the senior management has been removed. This episode shows what I'm talking about above: a) the permanent bureaucracy will prioritise defending itself in virtually all circumstances, and b) the legacy parties reflexively defend it even when the public is united in clutching their heads - the politicians are so programmed not to govern they struggle to grab the power to govern even in dramatic circumstances.)

As ever with Cummings I think his diagnosis of institutions/politics is basically correct (if occasionally hyperbolic), anything he says on political campaigns is worth llistening to - but his solutions tend to be incredibly naive simplistic. His basic take is always that there are systemic issues (which I agree with) and the solution is to get the right people in the right jobs (which I think is a very individualised approach to solving systemic problems).

It is striking to me that vaccine procurement which was successful was deliberately placed outside the remit of the Department of Health and run by someone with outside experience. A sign of how bad things have been is that vaccine procurement, the Olympics and UK Sport are about the only things I can think of in the last 20 years that have been succesfull in a pretty unalloyed way.

I'm seeing no signs of any lesson learning from the pandemic so far which is the latest and biggest failure.

Edit: As an example I see the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter, on the news saying it's too early to say whether the Afghanistan campaign was a failure. He was the commanding officer in Basra. He was then promoted to commander of ISAF in the South of Afghanistan. He was then promoted to Commander Land Forces, then Chief of the General Staff before his current post. In that time he received consistent (anonymous) criticism from Americans who were working with him and from defence sources for failing to adapt. He's been a leader in the British Army involved in every failure of the last 20 years, but just keeps gliding up the ladder

[Tamas]

Fuel shortages are getting worse in some parts of the country, in particular London and the south-east, the chairman of the Petrol Retailers Association (PRA) has said.

Brian Madderson warned the shortages remained a "really big problem" in these areas.

In contrast the PRA, which represents nearly 5,500 of the UK's 8,300 petrol stations, said Scotland, the north of England and parts of the Midlands had experienced a "distinct improvement".

Madderson told BBC Radio 4's Today programme of the fuel problems: "In London and the south-east and possibly parts of eastern England, if anything it had got worse."

Advertisement
The government and retailers say there is enough fuel at UK refineries, but a shortage of drivers has slowed down the transport of it to some petrol stations.

On Monday about 200 military personnel, including 100 drivers, will start deliveries to offer "temporary" support.

No fuel today at nearby Shell, that's for sure.

[Zanza]

Britain ended a privilege for EU citizens, which were so far allowed to enter with just ID cards, instead of passports like the rest of the world. Which in itself is of course a sensible policy especially as Britain no longer has access to the shared criminals databases. The new policy affects 200 million EU citizens.

As truck drivers going from Lisbon to Helsinki do not need a passport, it can be assumed that among these 200 million Europeans without a passport there might be truck drivers as well. Which reduces the pool of European truck drivers available to deliver goods from the continent or apply for this new visa scheme.

Everything goes hand in hand in a single market...

[Tamas]

Yes but an unimaginably rich overgrown child stuck in the 18th century, a Russian agent, and a walking caricature of a dumb person's idea of an educated person told us its a better idea to leave the single market because we get rid of Europeans and save tons of money.

[Syt]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/the-labour-party-is-britains-lost-opposition

The Labour Party Is Britain's Lost Opposition

Boris Johnson's government has been a reckless failure, but Keir Starmer, Labour's new leader, hasn't offered a convincing alternative.

Britain's Labour Party has been out of power for eleven years. The Party's most recent Prime Minister was Gordon Brown, a complex, often frustrated figure, who coped admirably with the 2008 financial crisis but lost a general election, in 2010, to a coalition of the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Since then, under three successive Conservative leaders, the British population has undergone a self-defeating program of austerity, the tedium and discord of Brexit, and the unnecessary loss of thousands of lives during the government's incompetent handling of the pandemic. Even before covid-19, life expectancy had flatlined in the United Kingdom for the first time in a hundred years. This fall, as the brief British summer flickered and flared out, daily life has become increasingly dysfunctional. Grocery stores have been hit with supply-chain problems, caused by a combination of the pandemic and a Brexit-induced absence of immigrant truck drivers. A number of small energy suppliers have gone bust. Wholesale electricity prices have tripled in Britain in the past twelve months, and there is currently a national gas shortage, caused mostly by panic buying. On October 6th, the government plans to cut around a hundred million pounds a month from Universal Credit, a benefit payment received by some six million people. The future looks hard. Earlier this week, David Morris, a Conservative member of Parliament, told the BBC that the country's present atmosphere recalls Britain's "winter of discontent" in 1978, which is political shorthand for a season of chaos, strikes, and a terminal feeling of malaise. The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is a shirker. Sixty per cent of voters do not trust him.

And yet Labour remains peripheral. In December, 2019, under its previous, left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, the Party suffered its worst election result since 1935. Corbyn was succeeded by Keir Starmer, who was meant to bring Labour back into the mainstream. Starmer, who is fifty-nine, comes off like a centrist action figure. Before he became an M.P., he was the chief prosecutor for England and Wales, and a human-rights lawyer. He won a big case against McDonald's; he helped to abolish the death penalty in Uganda; he has a happening hair style. The hope projected onto Starmer was that he would somehow marry the radicalism and energy of the best parts of Corbyn's agenda with a greater sense of patriotism and better suits. It hasn't worked out that way. In local elections held in May—the Party's first test under Starmer—Labour won thirty per cent of the vote, ten points behind the Conservatives. As it did during the Brexit campaign of 2016 (when the Party opposed leaving the E.U.) and in every election since, Labour continued to shed voters from white working-class communities, who reliably voted for the Party throughout the twentieth century but who have been put off by its metropolitan and liberal turn—a trend that began more than a decade ago, and accelerated under Corbyn. So far, Starmer has seemed unable to undo the damage. Eighteen months into his leadership, opinion polls still put the Conservatives, and their program of national disarray, five to seven points ahead of Labour.

Starmer's supporters argue that he has been hampered by the pandemic, which has made it difficult for him to get his message across. In recent days, thousands of Labour members, activists, politicians, and hangers-on assembled in Brighton, on England's south coast, for the Party's annual conference. It was a chance for Starmer to relaunch himself. Before the conference began, he published a fourteen-thousand-word essay, called "The Road Ahead," which sought to lay out his vision for the country. As with most things that Starmer says, there was little to disagree with. He described a recent listening tour he had taken around the country, to understand voters' priorities: "I have been struck by the complicated, sometimes contradictory way people are feeling. It is not rare to encounter optimism, worry, joy and reflection all during one chat." There was no sign of the clear, but sometimes outlandish, policy ideas of the Corbyn era: a transaction tax on financial firms, free broadband for everyone, the nationalization of railways and utilities. But there was nothing to replace them, either. "The Road Ahead" offered ten principles for a future Labour government, including: "If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be rewarded fairly." Writing in the Guardian, Rafael Behr congratulated Starmer on identifying "opportunity" and "security" as two promising themes with which to attack Johnson's unstable government, but despaired of the vague padding around them. "Two cleverly chosen words at the heart of Starmer's pamphlet stake out a viable position," Behr wrote. "The problem is in the other 13,998."

Veterans of Labour's most recent government emphasize how far the Party has fallen. "The emphatic nature of that defeat in 2019 underlines the enormous change that Labor has to go through to become acceptable to the electorate again," Pat McFadden, a Labour M.P., told me. McFadden was an adviser to Tony Blair and a minister in Brown's government. His constituency is in Wolverhampton, a former manufacturing town and Labour stronghold in the west Midlands. In 2019, two of the town's three seats fell to the Conservatives for the first time since the nineteen-eighties. "We were almost wiped out," McFadden said. "And you could tell a similar story in other working-class parts of the U.K." McFadden is part of Starmer's economic team, which has been noticeably reticent during the extraordinary spending and fiscal expansion that has accompanied the pandemic on both sides of the Atlantic. Johnson's government is on track to borrow around five hundred billion pounds, and speaks constantly of "levelling up" the country—correcting decades of regional inequalities with a wave of public investment. In response, Labour has focussed primarily on government waste and allegations of sweetheart deals and corruption, rather than on how it would spend the money. The Party remains traumatized by the Conservative critique that it overspent while in power and helped cause the financial crisis. I asked McFadden if it was frustrating to stick to such a cautious script, even while the world had moved on. "It's just a recognition of where we are," he said. "Economic assumptions have changed over the past decade. They definitely have, and we understand that. But the task of winning people's trust is still there."

You can see history passing the Party by. Since Labour lost power, British politics has undergone two great upheavals—Brexit and the rise of Scottish nationalism—both of which have been motivated by questions of identity and belonging. Labour has yet to formulate a convincing response to either. In "The Road Ahead," Starmer acknowledged the skill of the Conservatives in riding these changes. "The strength of the Tory party is in no small part due to its ability to shed its skin," he wrote. Embracing Brexit and falling in behind the chummy nationalism of Johnson, the Conservatives have managed to assemble a broad but fragile coalition that stretches from wealthy, tax-shy commuters in the London suburbs to postindustrial communities in the English northwest, who are crying out for investment and support.

Labour, by contrast, doesn't seem to know which way to turn—even though millions of voters seem to have already made up their minds. According to Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, political scientists at the University of Manchester, it was at some point between 2010 and 2015 that university graduates and ethnic minorities overtook white voters without college degrees among the Party's electoral support. Although the actual level of support for Labour among the population did not change greatly, its voters did. "The situation was akin to filling a bath with cold water, then opening the plug and turning the hot tap on at the same time," Sobolewska and Ford write, in their recent book, "Brexitland." "The level of water remains static, but the temperature of the water changes rapidly."

Corbyn's Labour Party wooed its urban, progressive base constantly, championing tax raises for the rich, and policies to address the climate crisis and the high cost of living for young people. So far, Starmer's only definitive move has been to jettison those ideas—which has infuriated the left wing of the Party, who feel betrayed by his earlier apparent sympathy for them. (Starmer served as Corbyn's Brexit spokesman.) "Keir won in the Labour leadership election on a promise of sticking with, let's call it, eighty per cent of Corbynism," one of Corbyn's former advisers told me. "That was entirely a false prospectus." At the start of the conference in Brighton, Starmer made a surprising move to modify Labour's election rules, which were blamed, in part, for his predecessor's takeover of the Party, in 2015. "They are systematically going to try to change the rules to prevent Corbyn ever happening again," the former adviser said. I hadn't reported on Labour's internal machinations for a while, and I had forgotten how vicious the factional infighting can be. The official described Starmer's team as "a Blairite tribute act" and Starmer as an empty vessel. "What are the key ideas that define him? I mean, the answer is there aren't any," the official said. "It's awful."

Starmer took the stage around noon on Wednesday, to give his first leader's speech, in person, to the Party. It was, by a distance, the most pressured moment of his political career. But he appeared relaxed, smiling broadly. "Here we are at last, and I can't tell you how good it feels," Starmer said. "I've waited seventeen months, twenty-five days, and two hours to appear in front of you." Then he spoke for an hour and a half. Starmer is nothing if not thorough. Unlike most other British politicians, he has a meaningful backstory. He talked about his mother, who was a nurse and suffered years of debilitating illness. Starmer quoted W. H. Auden's "Horae Canonicae," which it is difficult to imagine either Johnson or Corbyn ever venturing to do, when describing his father's dignified work as a toolmaker:

"How beautiful it is, / that eye-on-the-object look."

The conference hall, like the Labour Party, was not entirely rapt. There was some heckling from disgruntled left-wing activists, which Starmer seemed to relish—as an opportunity to show that the Party was moving on from its protest days, under Corbyn. "Shouting slogans or changing lives?" he responded, to applause. "We can chant all day." Starmer described Johnson as trivial and a showman. But when he articulated his own suggestions for how to mend Britain's many differences—the worn fabric of everyday life—they weren't substantial, either. Starmer referred to "a contribution society," which is one of those techno-junk political phrases that you hope never to hear again, alongside a pitch to improve mental-health services and a plan to insulate people's homes. He enunciated his values—"work, care, equality, security"—and cycled back to Auden again. Starmer is as convincing as anyone when talking about the ills of the nation and how much he wants to put them right. But, when he talks about what a Labour government would actually do, he sounds like he is still reaching in the dark. One of the more insightful things that Starmer said was perhaps more memorable than he meant it to be: "In a way, the more we expose the inadequacy of this government, the more it presses the question back on us. If they are so bad, what does it say about us?"

[Josquius]

Really fascinating how different outlets are taking totally different things away from this

[Sheilbh]

Britain ended a privilege for EU citizens, which were so far allowed to enter with just ID cards, instead of passports like the rest of the world. Which in itself is of course a sensible policy especially as Britain no longer has access to the shared criminals databases. The new policy affects 200 million EU citizens.

As truck drivers going from Lisbon to Helsinki do not need a passport, it can be assumed that among these 200 million Europeans without a passport there might be truck drivers as well. Which reduces the pool of European truck drivers available to deliver goods from the continent or apply for this new visa scheme.

Everything goes hand in hand in a single market...

Yep - of course the success of the visa scheme is whether it fills all of those positions, not that it fills them with European drivers which isn't relevant.

But we are going to be so much more exposed to shocks, external and internal, without access to the single market as a stabilising factor/buffer. The government continue to position this as a transitional stage - and that's probably true - but as Iain Martin pointed out it's making them sound like Thatcher facing down the miners except they're facing down bosses; the difference is Thatcher spent years preparing to take on the miners so that line was based on extensive preparation and not a plausible defence of issues from a lack of preparation.

Having said that it'd also be nice if Remainers/the Left could think more than one step ahead. There is a possibility that we have a chronic rolling crisis that never really ends. It seems more plausible to me that we may end up with the logistics issues becoming pretty marginal and there's tens of thousands of new British HGV drviers being paid pretty well for skilled work (similarly I saw in Reuters that wages for warehouse workers have increased by 30% and John Lewis are also offering a £60 bonus for nigh work). There is an argument against that situation - but it's fundamentally about efficiency and keeping inflation/costs low - which are quite right-wing arguments and I'm not sure that's where Remainers/the Left want to end up.

All I'd like is for everyone in British politics to think more than one step ahead.

One of the more insightful things that Starmer said was perhaps more memorable than he meant it to be: "In a way, the more we expose the inadequacy of this government, the more it presses the question back on us. If they are so bad, what does it say about us?"

That line reminds me of - and I think was a deliberate reference to Blair's last conference speech when he was handing over to Brown:

The first rule of politics: there are no rules. You make your own luck.

There's no rule that says the Tories have got to come back.

David Cameron's Tories? My advice: get after them.

His foreign policy. Pander to anti-Americanism by stepping back from America . Pander to the Eurosceptics through isolation in Europe. Sacrificing British influence for party expediency is not a policy worthy of a prime minister.

His immigration policy. Says he'll sort out illegal immigration, but opposes identity cards, the one thing essential to do it.

His energy policy. Nuclear power "only as a last resort". It's not a multiple choice quiz question, Mr Cameron. We need to decide now otherwise in 10 years time we will be importing expensive fossil fuels and Britain's economy will suffer.

He wants tax cuts and more spending, with the same money.

He wants a bill of rights for Britain drafted by a committee of lawyers. Have you ever tried drafting anything with a committee of lawyers?

And his policy for the old lady terrorised by the young thug is that she should put her arm round him and give him a nice, big hug.

Built to last? They haven't even laid the foundation stone. If we can't take this lot apart in the next few years we shouldn't be in the business of politics at all.

The Tories haven't thought it through. They think it's all about image. It's true we changed our image. We created a professional organisation.

But if I'd stood in 1997 on the policies of 1987 I would have lost. Period

Needless to say a fair few of those points stand up fourteen years later

I think the comment on policies is a little unfair accorrding a New Statesman analysis Starmer has actually announced more policies than any other opposition leader by this stage - the issue is they haven't generally cut through and I think the pandemic is a huge part of that. It's really difficult to get attention as the leader of the opposition - Starmer's first few months were the first wave and that's normally time a leader of the opposition spends lots of time doing speeches to activists on their big vision, and this is his first conference 18 months after he was elected. It may be that, unfortunately, the public have got used to him without having got to know him. But also I think Rachel Reevves economic ideas are interesting - £28 billion per year of borrowing for the next decade to invest in the energy transition etc.

My criticism of Starmer isn't that he lacks policies but that he hasn't, yet explained how they link together into a vision - he hasn't identified a strategy yet. Or defined what Labour is for - what's its purpose/goal? With Blair you could easily say - it was about modernisation and change; Cameron, ultimately, about restoring order to the public finances after the crash; Johnson got Brexit done and it's now about levelling up the country. I'm not sure with Labour yet.

And there is, at the back of my head, that niggling fear that Labour are a zombie party propped up by the FPTP voting system that makes them the main opposition/best vote to oppose the Tories but no longer really a living party that's representative of many people (it's just the non-Tory party). That, maybe, it's just hanging on but will eventually be replaced by something new

Edit: Also I think on the supply issue etc - there's a lot to this thread by Gaby Hinsliff:

gabyhinsliff
@gabyhinsliff
To grasp why Tories still polling well while petrol runs out, count number of references in coming days to wages rising. It is obv hogwash that Boris backed Brexit to deliver high wages BUT when his answer to every shortage question is 'firms shd pay more'...
..it makes it sound like this was somehow part of the plan, rather than chaotic consequence that he has no idea what to do about. It's hard for Labour to oppose (you'd rather people got paid less?) & recasts mess as short term pain for long term gain..
...& not govt's problem to solve, while locking in Tory working class vote (expecting pay rise) & telling leave voters they did a good thing. Who wants to be the nerd saying 'actually sustainable wage growth requires economic/productivity growth?'. Obv it's..
...cynical, opportunistic, & Tory business types will hate it. (Much like Brexit itself).Not Labour's only problem obv but they have become the boring economic realists while Boris is kind of 'Fun Dad' who shows up intermittently bringing sweets.
Final thought; wage divide between lots of public sector (pay frozen) & some parts of private sector benefiting from post-Brexit wage growth due to labour shortages is one to watch as inflation rises.

With "wage restraint" in the public sector it may be those workers (who vote Labour normally) who bear the brunt of inflation too - while those of us in the private sector see wage rises too which would, politically, work for the Tories.

[Tamas]

This "high wage economy" nonsense should not be analysed by the press as some Tory policy. Yesterday was the very first time anyone in the Johnson government spoke of trade offs when it came to Brexit.

[Sheilbh]

Fucking hell

Andy Hughes
@SkyAndyHughes
BREAKING: A Metropolitan Police officer who was in the same unit as PC Wayne Couzens has tonight been charged with the rape of a woman in September last year. PC David Carrick, 46, will appear in court tomorrow morning.