Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[HVC]

But do the Irish communicate like the english or the italians?

[Richard Hakluyt]

Can't be density of population, if that were so then the Dutch would be even worse 

[mongers]

I don't think Brit's are necessarily dishonest, just their communication is built on a lot of subtext. Which can be confusing in cross cultural communication.I blame a class system and a repressive religion


*edit* actually, reminds me of southerners. Bless your hearts.

Not sure I can buy the repressive religion point when we're talking about Anglicanism and comparing cultural communication to, say, Italians

I worked for a very big international law firm and I think everyone had the "cross-cultural communication" but it's always stuck with me because it was quite funny (and also true having worked in global English companies).

But I remember the guy saying there were basically five axes of direct to indirect (e.g. use of humour, use of idiom, politeness etc) and Brits are on the extreme indirect end of basically all of them

FWIW and I have no idea if there's anything to this but years ago I read a book by an anthropologist on English behaviour. One thing I remember is that they talked about polling on social attitudes - things like politeness, privacy/private space or public/private divides - and on loads of areas the country with the closest attitudes to the English was Japan. And I think that's also probably true on extreme indirect communication. I think class is part of it but I also wonder if part of it is just being quite densely populated and socially dense islands.

And not dissimilar climate, latitude and island geography have a big impact.

[Valmy]

Both island nations are devolving into dystopias...but to be fair they share that in common with several places these days.

[HVC]

What's wrong with Japan? Besides the lack of baby making.

[Valmy]

What's wrong with Japan? Besides the lack of baby making.

That's just the beginning.

Xenophobia and a 30 year stagnant economy don't help.

[Sheilbh]

Long extract from upcoming book on Starmer's premiership. This is by Gabriel Pogrund (one of the journalists a Labour right thinktank did oppo research on and then passed to the intelligence agencies to make vague allegations about Russia) and Patrick Maguire - both are very well-connected with Labour.

These books are basically a bit of a tradition in the UK - I think they're most similar to Jake Tapper on Biden (except they get published while they're relevant). But these are the latest in a line that was Andrew Rawnsley in the New Labour era through to Tim Shipman for the Tories and now these two.

But not hope-inspiring:
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/keir-starmer-gabriel-pogrund-absent-prime-minister-brhh752k2

Some excerpts:

The passive premiership

[...]

Reading time. That, as much as the deathly hush, was the biggest mystery of the new No 10. For hours Sir Keir Starmer sat alone, rigid with monastic intensity, moving word by word through paper after paper. Rishi Sunak had done the same. The last prime minister subjected every document he could find to the microscope, as if searching for a miracle cure to his own political mortality. From his long and lonely hours of research he would emerge demanding action — seized not only of urgent conviction, but a desire to share his latest remedy with advisers, with the cabinet secretary, with anyone prepared to listen and challenge him. Starmer was different. He read everything, then said nothing. "It's just so odd," said one senior official who observed Starmer closely, awaiting instructions that never came. "It's a very oddly passive premiership."

The winter fuel debacle

After 14 years of estrangement, the Labour Party had reintroduced itself to the people in the worst possible terms. On Sunday July 7, aides from No 10 and the Treasury were mustered in the Cabinet Room. None had expected to inherit the kind of riches the last Tory government had bequeathed its Labour successors in 1997. But what they heard surprised them all: £22 billion in public spending was unaccounted for. Something drastic would have to be done to avoid a run on the pound, or some other implosion on the markets.

Starmer was not there. Nor was his chief political adviser, Morgan McSweeney. The decision fell to Rachel Reeves alone. The chancellor had arrived at the Treasury in a straitjacket of her own choosing. The most significant line in Labour's manifesto had been a vow of abstinence: no increases in income tax, no increases in national insurance and no increases in VAT.

[...]

Scunthorpe and Runcorn

In April 2025, British Steel's plant in Scunthorpe teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. The Chinese owners had declared themselves content to close the blast furnaces and thus end virgin steelmaking in Britain.

Starmer, just as the Brexiteers had done before him, had promised to reindustrialise hundreds of towns just like this one.

Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, refused to sit back and accept what Beijing's moneymen said was inevitable. The forbidden word of New Labour — nationalisation — re-entered the lexicon of government. "We are doing this," he told civil servants, insisting the government would have MPs return from their holidays for a weekend sitting of the Commons if necessary. "I have 400 friends that I will get to London on a Saturday to back me up if we need to."

He had pored over the Civil Contingencies Act, the law — never used by any government — that gave ministers extraordinary powers to requisition property in the event of a national emergency. Its high thresholds, chief among them an imminent risk to life, had not been met. He would have to legislate to take British Steel into government control himself. At 9am that Friday, Reynolds went to No 10. Around the cabinet table, surrounded by officials and advisers, sat Starmer, Reeves, and Yvette Cooper, the home secretary. Cooper supported the plan. Reeves had found the money. But what did the prime minister think? Without his licence, no action could be taken. And so a circular discussion began. Starmer said there were no grounds to trigger the Civil Contingencies Act, and recalled it had not been used even during the Covid pandemic. Reynolds knew as much already. On and on it went.

"Keir really wanted to know what the right answer was," recalls one person present. To everyone else it was clear that there was no right answer: only a question of political judgment. Starmer needed to agree to the ends, then will the means. But there they were, again, confronting the obvious as their leader sought refuge in a winding maze of process. Eventually, Reynolds snapped. He needed to know what Starmer believed — what he felt to be right. "We have to decide whether we're going to let British Steel go down or not," he said.

That afternoon, Starmer went on television and with conviction. Announcing an emergency Saturday sitting of parliament, he said: "As prime minister, I will always act in the national interest to protect British jobs and British workers." He went on: "I've been to Scunthorpe. I met the steelworkers. I know how important steel is — not just to the region, but to the whole country. It's part of our national story: part of the pride and heritage of this nation. And I'll tell you this: it is essential for our future." Only a handful of his ministers knew that, hours earlier, he had appeared to have no opinion at all.

[...]

A man of little compassion

By the autumn of 2025, MPs began to wonder aloud how long he would last. The prime minister was running out of other people to blame.

Cabinet ministers and No 10 advisers strained for loyalty. But it proved too difficult for some. "He is," said one influential aide upon their departure from Downing Street, "the least intellectually curious person I have ever met." Said another politician upon whom Starmer relied heavily: "He can only prepare by reading briefing books for hours on end. He doesn't brainstorm. He has no fixed views on anything. There's no clarity because there's no belief. There's no belief because there's no understanding. There's no understanding because there's no curiosity." Said a senior civil servant who observed him closely: "He is not a compassionate man. He's careless about people around him. It's just not warm. He just doesn't think very hard about other people." A once-close adviser, witheringly: "I don't think he has a theory of power. I don't think he's ever sat down and read any history, or has any idea of how power works. I just don't think he would be attracted to the kind of historical figures who got stuff done."

McSweeney was depressed. As the wreckage of the welfare rebellion smouldered around him, he had told an old friend over dinner: "I'm drowning out here, I need help." The riptide of the prime minister's urge for self-preservation began to pull him away from the Irishman. In McSweeney's weakest moments, he confessed to those closest to him that Starmer remained unknowable. In the hours before Lord Mandelson's sacking as the British ambassador to Washington in September, McSweeney told one intimate that his guess was as good as anybody's as to where Keir would "end up" on a given issue.

"It's definitely not a relationship where the chief of staff is the voice and the eyes and the ears of their principal," a colleague of both men ruefully concluded. "The room where decisions are taken doesn't exist. You would think that it was a deliberate thing, that Keir thrives in chaos. But it's not, and he doesn't. It's very, very strange."

On the night of the September 2025 reshuffle, the cabinet retired to Ed Miliband's north London home, streets away from the house to which Starmer had never invited them. The prime minister and his chief of staff were not present. Before long the ministers were talking about the leadership, and how long their prime minister might last.

Cooper v Reeves showdown

The 2025 budget offered the government a stay of execution. If the prime minister could not tell the country who or what his premiership was for, his chancellor could show them.

Reeves delayed it until the end of November — going long, in the hope that the UK's negligible rates of economic growth would rise and inflation might fall. But she faced what she described bitterly as "an impossible set of choices". Some were of her own making. In a fit of opportunism as shadow chancellor, she had lionised the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the budget watchdog whose pessimistic readings of the public finances sharply constrained her room for manoeuvre. Its economists refused to say that her embrace of planning reform to stimulate housebuilding and desperate wooing of the European Union would boost Britain's growth, and with it the national current account. Other concessions were forced upon her by mutinous Labour MPs who refused to support her on welfare, on the hated two-child benefit limit, or on anything else that made them feel uncomfortable as loud and proud progressives of the kind McSweeney had once derided as insipid librarians. Cabinet colleagues provided little comfort.

In June, tense negotiations over the spending review that preceded the budget had ended in bitter recrimination. Yvette Cooper asked for more money to fund the new police officers promised in Labour's manifesto, and to fulfil pledges to halve knife crime and violence against women and girls. The home secretary came to the Treasury to set out her position to Reeves and Darren Jones, then chief secretary to the Treasury. The discussion was scratchy and fractious.

"The truth is, Yvette," Jones said, "you should have never promised to increase police numbers in the manifesto when we didn't know how things would look in government."

Cooper had not come for a dressing down. "I'm sure everyone made promises in the manifesto that look a bit more difficult to stick to in government," she replied, archly. "But we are where we are."

Reeves exploded. She gathered her papers. "This meeting is over," she said, storming out of her own boardroom. As she left, those present heard her complain that Cooper was "trying to lecture me on economic strategy".

Jones, rising to leave, declared: "Well, that's it." Cooper persisted, continuing to explain her position to a Treasury official frozen in their seat by second-hand embarrassment. Jones ordered the official to get up. He turned to the home secretary: "That's it, the chancellor has asked you to leave, you need to leave."

A lot rings pretty true - and actually the description of Starmer needing lots of "reading time" where he sits in an office on his own reading briefing notes, plus the British Steel meeting suddenly made it make a bit more sense to me. Because that description chimes with a certain type of barrister I've met. I think you see something similar in the way Starmer's been reaching decisions on Iran - he's got the right decisions just not for the right reasons

Similarly consuming lots of detail but lack of interest is something that is really striking. I think I posted at the time that there were briefings about this because it's so weird. We've had PMs before who demand so much detail that it leads to a decision paralysis and nothing happens (Gordon Brown, Rishi Sunak - strikingly both powerful ex-Chancellors). The description of a PM who just passively read what he was given, but didn't really seem to take an interest or really have a focus was striking because it was so strange - I can't think of any other PM I'm aware of who would be described in that way by senior civil servants and staffers.

But also the "careless about people" struck me. One of the things I dislike most about Starmer is the extent to which he blames other people - people in his office, working for him who can't answer back. I think it's a really, really unattractive trait and the two are linked. The example I always give is the "islands of strangers" speech which Starmer gives. There's a lot of controversy over that line (I think wrongly) and shortly after Starmer gives an interview where he says that someone else wrote the speech, he didn't believe it and wouldn't use those words and he hadn't read it properly in advance because he'd been at a NATO summit. And I think basically every bit of that line is fundamentally unacceptable in a PM - you have to take responsibility for what you say, you can't blame the speechwriter (to an extent you shouldn't even really be acknowledging - they need to convincingly ventriloquise a leader) and it was a really major speech, briefed widely to the press so it's just mad that he was not really involved in the drafting, the framing of the argument until the night before he delivered it. We still see it in every scandal - what matters is not whether decisions are right or wrong, but whether correct process was followed and ultimately the buck never stops with the Prime Minister even for decisions he has to take.

I'd add that bit with Reeves is striking too - again I think there's something quite brittle in her manner on some of these things. I remember that FT profile following her for a week. She did a meet and greet with I think small business leaders and someone asked an aggressive question and she snapped "I'm the Chancellor. Talk to me with respect" and was apparently really laughing with her team about it afterward (her perception was no-one would speak to Gordon Brown or George Osborne like that). But that rings with the Yvette Cooper story - someone who would have been exposed to Gordon Brown's temper over the years so has form. I can't help but wonder on the perceived sexism point if it's because there's so few "firsts" left for Labour after recent years (Tories on their fourth woman leader, second leader of colour, had black, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist Home Secretaries of all genders etc). So Labour maybe overestimate the impact to the rest of the country of the ones that are still outstanding. I've seen Labour mention a few times that Reeves is the first woman Chancellor, which I think is very important for Labour - but literally only for Labour.