Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Interesting results which I find counterintuitive 

The British state has hardly covered itself in glory in recent years.

Perhaps a shared hatred of the tories is bringing the country together 

It does make you think of all the chin-stroking pieces and think tanks launched because of the huge swing of over 60% of the population to "English identity" in the 2011 census. That's been entirely reversed in the 2021 census with a swing back to British identity (in England - where it's now back to 80%+). Also in 2011 the first tick box on the list was "English" (which the ONS thought might distort results) while in 2021 they reverted to "British" at the top of the list.

What was the 2012 identity crisis about?

My guess: Olympics plus Scottish independence referendum in 2014.

[Josquius]

Interesting results which I find counterintuitive 

The British state has hardly covered itself in glory in recent years.

Perhaps a shared hatred of the tories is bringing the country together 

It does make you think of all the chin-stroking pieces and think tanks launched because of the huge swing of over 60% of the population to "English identity" in the 2011 census. That's been entirely reversed in the 2021 census with a swing back to British identity (in England - where it's now back to 80%+). Also in 2011 the first tick box on the list was "English" (which the ONS thought might distort results) while in 2021 they reverted to "British" at the top of the list.

Whether they do a census or not in 2031 is up in the air but there is indeed such a tendency to tick the first one you see. Clearly they need to randomise the order.
Though my memory is hazy, did it not let you tick more than one?

[Sheilbh]

Whether they do a census or not in 2031 is up in the air but there is indeed such a tendency to tick the first one you see. Clearly they need to randomise the order.
Though my memory is hazy, did it not let you tick more than one?

Yeah - you can tick multiple and I think it's one of the optional questions too. I think in a way it shows the fluidity and lack of strong attachment one way or the other. So in 2011 19% identified as British only, while 58% identified as English only; in 2021 those figures were 55% and 15%

Separately English and British only, non-UK only and UK and non-UK identities all increased a bit too.

Also I think in 2011, the ONS did it, from my understanding, because the Scottish and Welsh census have Scottish or Welsh at the top, while the English one had British at the top. Which I think is part of the problem more generally that British in effect functions as a soft-Englishness for people who don't like to say they're English, rather than a more truly shared identity across the British parts of these isles.

I can't see why they wouldn't do one in 2031. From what I've seen there's calls to do an interim mini-census in 2026 because there's lots of questions about the reliability of 2021 given that it was still in the middle of the pandemic. But also Scotland delayed theirs to 2022 because of covid, but an unfortunate consequence of that was that because it was out of sync their response rate is low which again is a problem.

[Sheilbh]

Separately, RIP Frank Field - not someone I always agreed with but an interesting figure on the Labour right. Especially because the Labour right very often are characterised (and soemtimes come across) as basically cynical. All too often their positioning is about electability or the need to compromise with the electorate, while the Labour left have a monoppoly on the moral side of politics. I think Field's an interesting example as someone with a very strongly moral flavour to his politics on ending poverty and especially child poverty and holding companies to account, but which led him to the Labour right/centre-left:

Frank Field obituary: free spirit devoted to helping the poor
Maverick Labour MP and influential backbencher was known for his robust and sometimes right-wing views

Lord Field of Birkenhead was an expert voice who enjoyed great respect at Westminster
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL
Wednesday April 24 2024, 8.15am, The Times

Frank Field lived alone, never married and had no partner. He did not drive or own a television until 2005. His few indulgences included chocolate, a bottle of Cloudy Bay wine, and visiting a different church each Sunday for the music.

A devout Anglican and Labour MP for the struggling Merseyside constituency of Birkenhead for 40 years, making him one of the longest serving members of the House of Commons, he instead devoted much of his life to the twin issues of welfare reform and alleviating poverty. As a government minister he enjoyed little success in that regard, but as a backbencher Field wielded considerable influence. Media-savvy, possessed of moral fervour and unafraid of ministers or party whips, he was a free spirit who readily challenged both Labour and Tory governments.

He used his position as chairman first of the social services select committee, and later of the work and pensions select committee, to advance his robust and sometimes right-wing views, and more than 50 pamphlets and booklets. Field was the ultimate unbiddable maverick, a genuinely independent and expert voice who enjoyed great respect at Westminster.

He was ascetic, proud, obstinate and principled, a loner who did not have many close friends — but he had a surprising one in Margaret Thatcher. Both were grammar school products from modest backgrounds who shared a firm belief in self-reliance, self-improvement and getting the poor off welfare.


Field spent 40 years as MP for Birkenhead
TIMES NEWSPAPERS

They were close enough that Field felt able to visit her privately at 10 Downing Street just after her pyrrhic victory in the first round of the 1990 Tory leadership contest and to urge her to resign with dignity. He continued to visit her long after she left politics. In 2009, in one of her last public appearances, she attended a party to celebrate his 30 years in parliament. "Mrs T", the veteran Labour MP said, was "in a league of her own".

Frank Ernest Field was born in London in 1942, the second of the three sons of a father who worked in the Morgan Crucible factory in Battersea and a mother who worked as a teaching assistant. Both were working-class Conservatives who believed in the virtues of strong character and pulling oneself up by the proverbial bootstraps.

He gained a place at St Clement Danes, then an old-fashioned, rather authoritarian grammar school based in Hammersmith, and began his political career as a 16-year-old Young Conservative. He was, he admitted, quickly "shoehorned out of the party because I began handing out anti-apartheid leaflets" and joined Labour instead. Several times in his subsequent parliamentary career the Conservatives sought in vain to persuade him to rejoin them.

Field went on to study economics at Hull, the first member of his family to go to university. After graduating in 1964 he took a teaching job at Southwark College for Further Education, and won election to Hounslow borough council.


Field challenged both Labour and Tory governments
GETTY

Two years later he ran for parliament in South Buckinghamshire but was defeated by the Tory incumbent. Three years after that, in 1969, he became director of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), which is where, over the following decade, he made his name as a highly effective campaigner. "He made poverty sexy. That's a hard thing to do," Virginia Bottomley, a former CPAG colleague and future Tory MP, said.

In 1974 Field founded and became head of the Low Pay Unit as well, but resigned from both positions after becoming MP for Birkenhead in 1979. He won the seat with a majority of nearly 6,000. As a southerner in a northern seat, and a right-winger at that, Field was soon targeted by Militant Tendency, the Trotskyist group that sought to infiltrate the Labour Party in the 1980s. He faced constant abuse and hostility at constituency party meetings, and repeated attempts to deselect him.

The last was successful until Field forced Labour's national executive committee to order a new ballot by producing a thick dossier on Militant's infiltration and threatening to run as an independent. Sometimes he vomited with fear before facing his foes, Field later admitted. His nightmare was "sitting in a smoke-filled room confronted by rows of staring eyes and faces contorted by hatred."

Ironically, he was one of the 35 MPs who nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour Party leadership in 2015, thereby facilitating another attempted takeover by the hard left. He claimed he did so simply to "widen the debate". Three years later he quit the parliamentary party, saying that under Corbyn it had become "a force for antisemitism in British politics".

After losing his seat in the 2019 general election he was made a crossbench peer, Lord Field of Birkenhead. Two years later, Molly Meacher, a friend and fellow crossbench peer, read out a moving statement on his behalf in which he revealed that he was dying and wanted to voice his support for the Assisted Dying Bill, which would allow terminally ill adults to seek help to end their lives. For years he opposed it, largely on religious grounds. "I changed my mind on assisted dying when an MP friend was dying of cancer and wanted to die early, before the full horror effects set in, but was denied this opportunity," he said.


David Cameron, then leader of the opposition, with Field in January 2010
GETTY

At Westminster, Field served briefly as a shadow education spokesman under Michael Foot, and as a shadow health and social security spokesman under Neil Kinnock, but he was too independent, too rebellious and outspoken to thrive in the party hierarchy. He instead became chairman of the social services (later social security) select committee in 1987, holding the position for a decade until Tony Blair's election.

Field's views on poverty were not abstract or theoretical. They were informed by his Christianity, and by his experiences in Birkenhead, a constituency ravaged by unemployment and other social problems after the collapse of its docks and shipyards.

He believed more in helping the poor to help themselves than in the conventional, altruistic solutions offered by the welfare state — solutions that in his opinion degraded those they were meant to help and created a benefits-dependent underclass. There was something Victorian about his views. A BBC Radio 4 profile in 2014 suggested his idea of pleasure was "to retreat into his book-lined flat, listen to classical music and write another policy pamphlet, or maybe for a special treat read about the 19th-century evangelicals or social reformers he most admires".

In 1997 the incoming Labour prime minister gave Field a chance to put his ideas on welfare reform into practice by making him minister of state under Harriet Harman, the social security secretary. Blair invited him to "think the unthinkable" but the experiment was a disaster and he was dismissed 15 months later. "The problem was not so much that his ideas were unthinkable as unfathomable," Blair wrote in his autobiography.


Tony Blair refused to make him secretary of state and considered him unsuited to high office
DAVID BEBBER FOR THE TIMES

Field clashed repeatedly with Harman and Gordon Brown, then the chancellor. He produced options including restrictions on benefits, greater use of private pensions and more emphasis on personal responsibility that Blair found unpalatable or politically unsellable — Alastair Campbell, Blair's spokesman, described Field's green paper as "crap". He returned to the backbenches the following year after Blair refused to make him secretary of state and he turned down two lesser posts elsewhere.

In his resignation speech Field declared: "If the last 15 months have taught me anything it's that the biggest of all reforms requires not only an executive position for a person with convictions about welfare reform but also the whole of the cabinet, and especially the chancellor, to share beliefs about that common endeavour." (Blair disagreed. "Some are made for office. Some aren't. He wasn't. Simple as that," he wrote.)

Thereafter Field remained on the backbenches, but not silently. In 2006, long before Ukip and Brexit, he warned that the influx of immigrants was unsustainable and would "if not addressed, cause sweeping political changes". He supported the Leave campaign in the 2016 referendum on European Union membership.

In 2008 he led a successful revolt against the abolition of the 10p tax rate by Brown, his old nemesis, because it would have hurt five million low-income families. He urged Brown to step down as prime minister before the 2010 general election, suggesting that a man of such volcanic temper was not fit to be prime minister.

He sought to become Speaker of the House of Commons in 2009, but withdrew due to a lack of support from his party. Some Labour MPs considered him a closet Tory, a suspicion fuelled when David Cameron made him poverty adviser to the new coalition government in 2010. His call for new ways of measuring deprivation, including life chance indicators and appropriate remedial steps, went unheeded.

In 2015 Field became chairman of the work and pensions select committee, which afforded him another moment in the spotlight. He issued a blistering report into Sir Philip Green's plundering and sale of BHS, putting 11,000 jobs at risk and leaving the company with a £571 million shortfall in its pension fund. "It adds to the gaiety of life," Field blithely responded when the furious billionaire threatened to sue. Within a month Green had offered £300 million to plug the pension hole. Being a minister was not the be-all and end-all of politics, Field would maintain. "I do think select committees putting the spotlight on them and people feeling inadequate when they have to give their answers in public is a pretty powerful stimulus to changing behaviour." He proved that time and again.

In the summer of 2018, Field resigned the Labour whip over "excuses for the party's toleration of antisemitism". He also spoke of a "culture of intolerance, nastiness and intimidation" in the party and declared that, "from now on" he would describe himself as an "independent Labour MP". Some of his colleagues reflected wryly that that was what he had been all along.

Lord Field of Birkenhead, former Labour MP, was born on July 16, 1942. He died of cancer on April 23, 2024, aged 81

Edit: I feel like if he was in the US he'd be the type of Senator lots of American Languishites would like.

[Sheilbh]

Once again looking at Germany with envy for their Green Party

jonn elledge
@JonnElledge
I'm trying to wean myself off my recent addiction to being mean to Greens on Twitter, but one of them has just put out a campaign video listing 35 reasons to vote Green and one of them is "zero murders" and come on

Not really sure "zero murders" is a policy (also has "zero road deaths" which again is very much not a policy). It's not like murders happen because Sadiq Khan isn't opposed to them.

[Gups]

SNP has ended their coalition with the Greens. Apparently concern about the Greens pathetic reaction to the Cass report has played a major part.

[Josquius]

I'm not getting the Cass Report.
Gender care, especially for kids, is crap.
This was well known before, though the proof for it is useful.
But the transphobic culture war zealots are celebrating as if it proves everything they say right?- care being shit doesn't mean improve care it means...don't have care?

[Sheilbh]

Also apparently the Greens are furious at the SNP dropping their carbon targets ("the most stretching in the world"), which have been missed most years and are, from everything I've read, not possible to meet at this point.

Feels sadly indicative of the type of politics we have - especially on climate - which feels kind of decadent to have big rows over whether the "legally binding targets" are strong enough or not, as opposed to what policies you need to even come close to hitting them.

Politics of enshrining in law, declaring rights, "legally binding" targets and goals and consultations - and very little politics of actually doing.