Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Tamas]

Did the OBR predict the current inflation correctly? If not then why we would listen to them now.

And don't come with the war, sure it accelerated it but inflation was going up well before February.

[Sheilbh]

That's some weak sauce for the meat of your conclusion Shelf

Maybe

But their numbers have collapsed and there's been a few polls - especially around Sunak - where Lib Dem voters are now closer to the Tories than Labour. I think there is a chunk of their vote that really didn't like Johnson or Truss but is relatively comfortable with a Tory government projecting itself as Cameron-ish.

It's probably not big enough to win the election but I think it's likely enough to save a few seats in the shires. Which is, maybe, as much as Sunak can do - lose with a bit of dignity and keep the Tory heartlands. I think that's also why Sunak keeps trying to tie Starmer to Corbyn (plus a trust angle) - to appeal to those soft Tory-Lib Dem voters in Blue Wall areas.

Did the OBR predict the current inflation correctly? If not then why we would listen to them now.

And don't come with the war, sure it accelerated it but inflation was going up well before February.

Noone did - but both the Bank of England and the OBR are predicting  fairly big fall in inflation and the Bank are messaging that rates aren't going to rise as much as the markets think right now.

And the war is key - the three areas most affected by the invasion are energy, fuel and food. Those are responsible for a huge chunk of inflation (and would be more without the energy cap - see the dotted line). Even before the war, Russia was cutting energy supplies to Europe in autumn 2021 - which, again, you can see. It didn't just accelerate it, in the UK about half of inflation is coming from those categories (up to two thirds without the price cap):

[mongers]

snip:

Shelf, you may be interested in this a short series start tomorrow on the history of communism in  Britain.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001f5fp

Little Moscow
Britain's Communist Thread




Historian Camilla Schofield explores a century-long thread of communism in Britain.

Like fascism, we often think of communism as alien – as an external threat – a threat to the British way of life. But what happens if we challenge that a little – and think about communism as a British story?

In the first programme we visit Maerdy in the Rhondda, one of the industrial towns known as Little Moscow between the wars. Maerdy illuminates an idea of communism rooted in local radical labour traditions and working class education.

It starts tomorrow at 11am or on bbc sounds catch up.

[Grey Fox]

Do you Brits not sleep? 🤔

[Admiral Yi]

Sunak is proving remarkably headline free.

[Sheilbh]

I found this article interesting. Maybe of interest to Jos

I was, as a metropolitan homosexual, naturally outraged when I read about the cuts to the ENO. But that was a little tempered when I saw their former music director say that they'd had their budget cut in 2010. In response they did a lot of questioning about how to respond. He argued, with others, for doing opera in a "different way" that was maybe more accessible/less big budget productions - but the board decided to bring in McKinsey who made a characteristically innovative consultants' recommendation: do less.

I also saw a bit of a pushback from writers in the North/Manchester about the way the story was framed. And I've seen today the Chair of the ENO saying the company will shut down rather than move to Manchester ("there is a lot of discussion around relocation to Manchester, and we have got to flatten that immediately. There is no relocation. This is closing ENO down. This is losing 600 jobs from London of talented and devoted and able people across all departments – so let's get this clear.") - so I feel fairly sympathetic to this piece:

The media's Manchester snobbery
Britain's newspapers only pretend to be national
BY Joshi Herrmann
Joshi Herrmann is the founder and editor of The Mill.
November 18, 2022

Late on Tuesday night, I was sitting on a bus back to Manchester city centre from Salford Quays, where I had just watched La Traviata at The Lowry theatre. I was the sole passenger on the top deck, except for one young guy in a hoodie sitting a few seats in front of me. He turned out to be an opera singer, studying at the prestigious Royal Northern College of Music. He leaned over to chat because he had heard me interviewing people after the show about the prospect of the English National Opera moving north — and wanted to give me his own views.

It probably wouldn't work, he said. The audience for opera is in London. I told him I disagreed. We had both just witnessed first-hand a large and enthusiastic audience for opera in Greater Manchester, after all. Not only could the move work, but it would also be a great thing for the UK to have a leading company operating out of one of its most central and fast-growing cities. Allied with Opera North, whose production we had just watched and who tour the entire region from Leeds, it would make this part of the country a global opera powerhouse.

By the time I got off the bus, my companion was telling me how a Manchester ENO would allow talented musicians like him to stay in the North after graduating, rather than feeling forced to move to London, or overseas. "I'm just surprised that you are the only person making the argument," he said.

The reason nobody has heard the case for a Manchester ENO is that the media coverage of this important arts story has been laughably, atrociously London-centric. "English National Opera fights 'absurd' plan to relocate to Manchester," ran the headline of a story on the BBC. It quoted the ENO's chief executive Stuart Murphy calling the move "insane" but didn't counter his analysis with a single northern voice.

Several newspaper reports accepted, apparently without fact-checking, Murphy's comparison of London's "9 million people" with "Manchester's half a million". It seems neither the reporters nor the editors on those papers could see the mistake the ENO chief was making, although it seems that Northern readers pointed out the problem to the Guardian. The paper has removed Murphy's misleading quote and replaced it with "a more accurate comparison between the greater metropolitan populations of London and Manchester". (The population of Greater Manchester is almost 3 million.)

The ignorance didn't end there. The Observer's classical music critic Fiona Maddocks said the ENO plans "certainly make no sense" because Manchester is already "well served" by Opera North — a company that is based in Leeds and usually only comes to Salford for one week every year. Maddocks, perhaps, was straying a little outside her area of expertise: the Observer's classical desk, as one of my readers emailed me this week, "pretty much exclusively writes about things staged in London". The reader went on to point out that whereas Opera North's headquarters, at Leeds' Howard Assembly Room, are an hour and a half's drive from central Manchester, "the ENO is about six minutes' walk away from the Royal Opera House, so who is best served?"

It's understandable that the art world is shaken by the idea of the ENO moving. It is a loss for most of the people making and writing about opera, because they live in London. And it makes sense for an industry to fight against imminent job losses, and to complain that the decision has been made without proper planning or pitch-rolling in the North. What is unforgivable is that the media acted as a supportive chorus for London-based vested interests. I've yet to see a story in the national press that doesn't frame the ENO funding decision as a disastrous folly or a betrayal of the arts. (Melvyn Bragg, also in the Observer, described the Arts Council decision as "stealing arts cash from London", as though the capital is entitled to as much as it likes from the national coffers.) And it's not just me who clocks this London-centricity in British journalism — and hates it.

"It's all been reported as 'London is losing this thing'," says a journalist from a national newspaper who I spoke to this week (who asked me not to use their name). "So they fucking should," they went on. "Why should that be in London? If that's taxpayer funded, if it's the 'National Opera', why shouldn't it be in Manchester? Why should Manchester residents have to travel to London?"

That journalist is one of the very small cohort of national newspaper correspondents not based in London, covering a patch that can only be described as "the rest of the country". Of course, that's impossible. "You're not covering the country — you're covering what Londoners want to read about the rest of the country," this person told me, pointing out that the tabloids are better staffed out here in the wilds than the broadsheets are.

As the coverage of the ENO story makes clear, we don't have a national press. We have lots of London newspapers whose claim to be national ranges from wafer thin — the Guardian has a staff of four in Manchester — to arguably fraudulent. Most of the national newspapers in England have fewer than five staff correspondents outside London. Some "nationals" don't appear to have a single one.

"They call themselves national because they are sold in a shop in Cumbria, but they're not national," one northern editor told me this week. The papers that claim to speak for the whole country are, in the view of this seasoned reporter, clever variations on the London Evening Standard.

That's the paper where I spent the first five years of my career, by the way. I'm a southerner who values the capital's diverse and noisy journalistic scene. What's annoying isn't that the London media exists and is strong and argues eloquently and passionately for the protection and extension of London's privileges — it's that it does those things while pretending to be the national media. It makes total sense that newspapers whose editors and reporters almost all live in a single city would reflect that city's interests and blind spots. But it doesn't make for very satisfying coverage for those of us living elsewhere.

When I asked my Twitter followers for their favourite examples of London-centric media coverage following the ENO debacle, the answers came thick and fast. One theme was the assumption that everyone lives in London. There was a piece in the Sunday Times property section about moving to York which listed one of the downsides as: "It's so far away." There was a column in the New Statesman in which a well-meaning political journalist wrote: "In my view, every journalist should make a New Year's resolution to get out of London more."

Lots of replies to my tweet mentioned weather coverage, from the trivial — snow coverage tends to kick in when it's snowing in the South East — to the rather sad. "When the North East had awful weather early last year, some areas of Northumberland had to wait weeks for all utilities to be restored," one person wrote, noting that the story and its impact on millions of people was sparsely covered in the national news.

What shocks me, as a relative newcomer to the North, is how bad the public transport is — and how little I'd been prepared for it by reading the national (sorry, London) newspapers. There is no way that the current state of the North's railways — appalling; unbelievable — would be allowed to continue if it were happening in the South East. It's often journalists personally experiencing things that lead them to prioritise a story, and very few of them are experiencing the 23 cancelled services every day from Manchester to Leeds.

Imagine if this kind of disruption took place anywhere near London — actually, we don't have to imagine: remember the Southern Rail strikes, reported as if it were a national emergency — the editors who frame our national debate would be firing off angry emails to their columnists and news editors from freezing platforms. The stink would be so great that ministers would be forced to drop everything and fix it within days. And yet up here, month after month, despite the attempts of local politicians to raise the issue, the crisis drags on, paralysing large swathes of the country.

After Brexit there seemed to be a moment of self-reflection in the British press, from certain columnists at least, regarding the abject failure to understand the brewing feelings and major demographic shifts that drove a seismic political event that few in London saw coming. But the reason for that short-sightedness was structural, not something a few fleeting trips to the high streets (never the more-important suburbs) of Northern towns is going to fix.

The structural problem is that if you have 95% of your workforce living in one world, you are going to miss a lot of important stories in all the other worlds that make up this country. "You have got an insane number of people sitting together in the same room with the same lives and talking about the same experiences," as one Northern correspondent put it to me. "It's utterly bizarre."

I'm writing this article from The Mill's office on Cross Street, over the road from where The Manchester Guardian used to be based. That building has long gone and is now a Boots, with a small plaque on the outside wall marking its former use. Within walking distance there used to be massive northern newspaper offices for the Daily Express, the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail — an ecosystem, referred to as "the other Fleet Street", that lasted for half of the twentieth century.

Technological change put an end to those operations and drove a radical centralisation of our media in London. But the technology we have now means that any news organisation can quite easily have dozens of reporters spread across every region. Suddenly, we would see a different kind of journalism creeping into the papers — one that tells us less about meaningless jockeying between random 20-something political advisors in Westminster, and more about how government policy is impacting people's lives; how people hundreds of miles from the centre of power are experiencing the British state. The benefits of de-Londonising the media will flow far beyond journalism into policymaking and the nation's understanding of itself. The newspapers could decide tomorrow that they want to represent this country properly again. And if they want us to call them nationals, they should.

Absolutely love the dissonance of Londoners who think it would be a good thing for the rest of the country to thrive as London has, that subsidising an opera company is an important part of a big, culturally important, ambitious city and that a one week residency is quite enough for England's second city

I've been really struck by people online posting the journey planner/cancellations of major routes like Liverpool-Leeds or Manchester-Leeds and how little coverage the huge problems Avanti and Northern Rail are having compared to, as he says, a strike on commuter trains around London. I get there's lots of vagueness about "levelling up" on the one hand and I think a resistance (in London circles - like the civil service) to do things until we've got a "holistic" plan that addresses everything - but it feels like just making sure there's a functional rail service would probably be a good start

[Sheilbh]

Shelf, you may be interested in this a short series start tomorrow on the history of communism in  Britain.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001f5fp

[...]

It starts tomorrow at 11am or on bbc sounds catch up.

Thanks - I'll definitely give it a listen (and probably end up furious at the soft-soaping of mid-century Communists :blush).

[Josquius]

I found this article interesting. Maybe of interest to Jos

I was, as a metropolitan homosexual, naturally outraged when I read about the cuts to the ENO. But that was a little tempered when I saw their former music director say that they'd had their budget cut in 2010. In response they did a lot of questioning about how to respond. He argued, with others, for doing opera in a "different way" that was maybe more accessible/less big budget productions - but the board decided to bring in McKinsey who made a characteristically innovative consultants' recommendation: do less.

I also saw a bit of a pushback from writers in the North/Manchester about the way the story was framed. And I've seen today the Chair of the ENO saying the company will shut down rather than move to Manchester ("there is a lot of discussion around relocation to Manchester, and we have got to flatten that immediately. There is no relocation. This is closing ENO down. This is losing 600 jobs from London of talented and devoted and able people across all departments – so let's get this clear.") - so I feel fairly sympathetic to this piece:


Absolutely love the dissonance of Londoners who think it would be a good thing for the rest of the country to thrive as London has, that subsidising an opera company is an important part of a big, culturally important, ambitious city and that a one week residency is quite enough for England's second city

I've been really struck by people online posting the journey planner/cancellations of major routes like Liverpool-Leeds or Manchester-Leeds and how little coverage the huge problems Avanti and Northern Rail are having compared to, as he says, a strike on commuter trains around London. I get there's lots of vagueness about "levelling up" on the one hand and I think a resistance (in London circles - like the civil service) to do things until we've got a "holistic" plan that addresses everything - but it feels like just making sure there's a functional rail service would probably be a good start

Yep. A lot of truths in there.
Whats even more painful is from where I'm sitting I look to Manchester as especially privileged and getting way more than other places could ever dream of.

Its a huge problem that so many have this UK=London idea and just don't consider there's a whole country out there.

And 100% agreed that fixing public transport is the absolute key to fixing the north. Proper working trains for sure in there but as a quick win just setting up working locally owned bus services. I posted in the youtube recommendations thread a documentary from 30 years ago where they were speaking of the various obvious brewing problems with the privatisation of the busses....and everything they are saying and which is being denied has turned out to absolutely true.
Climate change adds another spin that makes fixing public transport such a no brainer.

[Sheilbh]

I find the framing of this story by the Guardian a little odd - unless you're using the line about a gaffe being a politician accidentally telling the truth. From my reading it reflects pretty badly on Mike Bloomberg and fairly well on Johnson (aside from the general grubbiness of post-PMs earning hundreds of thousands on after dinner speeches):

Mike Bloomberg forced to apologise after Boris Johnson speech criticising China
Exclusive: Ex-PM said to have described China as 'coercive autocracy' in speech to Asian businesspeople and diplomats
Pippa Crerar Political editor
@PippaCrerar
Fri 18 Nov 2022 17.49 GMT
Last modified on Fri 18 Nov 2022 21.49 GMT

The billionaire financier Mike Bloomberg was forced to apologise to hundreds of guests at a major Asian business event in Singapore this week after complaints about a speech by Boris Johnson that robustly criticised China.

The former UK prime minister, the after-dinner speaker at the flagship Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore on Tuesday, was said to have described China as a "coercive autocracy" to about 500 Asian businesspeople, investors and diplomats.

While his comments would not be regarded as controversial in the UK, where there is concern over Beijing's human rights record, approach to Taiwan and closeness to Russia, the majority of Asian countries are much more favourably inclined towards China and share strong economic and diplomatic ties.

In remarks that may alarm Rishi Sunak's government and bolster his own support among Conservative MPs, Johnson is also said to have announced that he was taking a "temporary hiatus" from the frontline of British politics, suggesting he still harbours ambitions of returning to power.

Bloomberg, who invited Johnson and whose organisation was hosting the event in partnership with the Singapore government, acknowledged at the conference on Thursday that some attendees may have been "insulted or offended" by Johnson's remarks.

But the businessman, a former mayor of New York and friend of Johnson, clarified that they were "his thoughts and his thoughts alone". He added: "To those of you who were upset and concerned by what the speaker said, you have my apologies."

Johnson's remarks came the evening before Sunak was due to hold a surprise meeting with Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Bali. The talks were cancelled, but would have made him the first UK prime minister to meet the Chinese premier in person for almost five years.

Downing Street had said Sunak wanted to recalibrate the UK's relationship with Beijing by trying to have a new "frank and constructive" dialogue. But it was interpreted by wary Tory hawks as a thawing of relations between Britain and the Asian superpower, after Liz Truss's more overtly hostile approach.

According to the former prime minister's spokesperson, he told the audience: "Let's look at Russia and China. The two former communist tyrannies in which power has once again been concentrated in the hands of a single ruler. Two monocultural states that have been traditionally hostile to immigration and that are becoming increasingly nationalist in their attitudes.

"Two permanent UN security council members that back each other up and enable each other and which are willing to show a candid disregard for the rule of international law, and two countries that in the last year have demonstrated the immense limitations of their political systems by the disastrous mistakes they have made."

One guest at the Singapore dinner told the Guardian: "Boris was typically funny and charming but he was also pretty belligerent in his criticism of a bunch of foreign governments, especially China and Russia, which he described as coercive autocracies. In Britain it would have been absolutely fine to single out China. But in Asia it wasn't."

Another added: "Boris was very, very critical. The speech was pretty shocking. People clearly people felt uncomfortable. He used very undiplomatic language about China, at a conference in Asia. A former British foreign secretary and prime minister should have known better."

The response from attendees at the dinner in the five-star Fullerton Bay hotel, believed to include some Chinese businesspeople, prompted Bloomberg to apologise in person. He told the conference: "Some may have been insulted or offended last night by parts of the speaker's remarks referencing certain countries and their duly elected leaders.

"Those were his thoughts and his thoughts alone, not cleared in advance by anyone nor shared with me personally. Bloomberg and NEF's forums are a diverse group of views, and the presentation was meant as after-dinner entertainment rather than serious discussion of important controversial and complex issues.

"And I'm sure you know based on many years of interaction with us that our respect for all points of view and those that serve in government is complete and heartfelt. To those of you who were upset and concerned by what the speaker said, you have my apologies.

"And if you weren't upset, perhaps you've enjoyed Boris Johnson – he is who he is, ... he's very controversial but also very entertaining. He was trying to be amusing rather than informative and serious, and I think we need to give him a little bit of credit for that."

A spokesman for the former prime minister said: "Mr Johnson is robust in his criticism of authoritarianism and autocracy – including in Russia and China – and will continue to be so. He will continue to make the case for freedom and democracy on the world stage".

A spokesperson for Bloomberg declined to comment.

Since he was ousted as prime minister, Johnson has been topping up his MP's earnings by touring the world for a string of lucrative speaking engagements. The latest MPs' register of interests shows he was paid £276,130 plus expenses for a speech to insurance agents in the US. His latest trip to Singapore took place while the House of Commons was sitting, though he was back for Thursday's budget.

Johnson's political career has been peppered with a string of damaging diplomatic gaffes. In 2013, he suggested that a rise in the number of Malaysian women attending university was down to their desire to find a husband. Two years later, he claimed the "part-Kenyan" US president Barack Obama had an "ancestral dislike" of the UK, prompting an international outcry.

In January 2017, the then foreign secretary was caught on camera reciting a colonial-era poem by Rudyard Kipling in front of local dignitaries while on an official trip to Myanmar. Johnson, who was accused of "incredible insensitivity", had been inside a sacred Buddhist temple at the time.

Later that year, he was criticised for making incorrect statement that the jailed British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been "teaching people journalism" rather than being on holiday in Iran. His comments were later cited as proof by Iran that she was engaged in "propaganda against the regime".

Also interesting from Shashank Joshi of the Economist who noted that what Johnson said would be par for the course at foreign policy events in Singapore and that it's less offensive because it's in Asia/Singapore and more reflects a "particular self-serving & parochial part of the business community that is desperate to avoid offending Beijing at all costs."

[Josquius]

Isn't Johnson still meant to be a working MP?

Really hope his constituents have their heads screwed on right come election time.

[Sheilbh]

It's a real sign of how catastrophically short Truss' premiership was that it didn't even last long enough for the customary surprise trip to Kyiv
https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1593958572085288965?s=20&t=i3_5xoq3UEPNT2nUmxXMUg

[Tamas]

Isn't Johnson still meant to be a working MP?

Really hope his constituents have their heads screwed on right come election time.

Nobody seems to care. He is truly our Trump in the sense that somehow he so embodies true cultural values that everything sort of directly humiliating people (by not keeping to the rules he declared on people) is forgiven of him.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I'm happy to stick the boot into Johnson on almost any occasion, but I'm not sure that the increasing idea that an MP should act as a social worker for their constituents is a good one. For things like drains contact your council or councillor; for social services ditto. We can hardly expect government ministers, for example, to put yet more of their valuable time into trivial issues.

(Of course the likes of Truss do not have valuable time; but i would not trust her to sort out my drains/bus service/whatever either).

[Tamas]

I'm happy to stick the boot into Johnson on almost any occasion, but I'm not sure that the increasing idea that an MP should act as a social worker for their constituents is a good one. For things like drains contact your council or councillor; for social services ditto. We can hardly expect government ministers, for example, to put yet more of their valuable time into trivial issues.

(Of course the likes of Truss do not have valuable time; but i would not trust her to sort out my drains/bus service/whatever either).

For sure, but its not about Johnson not being on the spot in his constituency all the time to deal with minutiae - he is seldom to be found in the country since he resigned. He isn't really doing the most basic function of him which is to press the button he is told to press during votes. Sorry, forgot they don't use technology , I mean to yell what he is told to yell.

[Sheilbh]

Nobody seems to care. He is truly our Trump in the sense that somehow he so embodies true cultural values that everything sort of directly humiliating people (by not keeping to the rules he declared on people) is forgiven of him.

I'm not sure what rules he's supposed to have broken here

MPs can have other jobs or other engagements as long as they declare them (and so far he has been declaring them - that's why we know how much he got paid for the speech in Colorado). It's up to local constituents if they care about it/think it's disqualifying - though Johnson's a London MP and his seat would go Labour if the current polls hold up.

I think the party whips tend to be involved with that stuff/sign off things like this so they know they can reach someone and get them to the Commons if essential (they can normally be paired). I have less of an issue with Johnson doing these sort of events which is now standard for ex-PMs (and I think it is generally good for ex-PMs/cabinet ministers to stay in the Commons) than with his regular holidays during sessions

I think it goes back to what sort of MPs we want. There used to be a fairly solid group of, for example, barristers in parliament who never stopped their legal career even though they were MPs, same with businessmen and, on the Labour side, some union officials. It's not just for them but I think it's part of why parliament used to have a working culture that was incredibly hostile to normal people with families treating it as their job. From the 19th century throught to the late 20th/early 21st it used to be relatively normal for parliamentary sessions to open at 5pm and run through until 1-2 in the morning.

That tradition is still sort of there with councillors though - only a few councillors are full time. Many council meetings happen in the evening, most councillors are part-time and there is an expectation that employers should allow someone time if they're also a councillor.