Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[The Larch]

I was no BoJo fan but I frankly found his downfall to be one of those weird things that highlights how despite similar language and a lot of cultural exchange, Britain and America are fundamentally very different. Someone elected with such a massive electoral mandate being hounded out of office over what would not even be a scandal in the United States ( a gathering in the White House of friends and colleagues.)

You truly did not pay attention then if you think that's what happened.

I'm still amazed that 2 months after being ousted he may just waltz back like nothing happened 

While being on holidays in the Caribbean during the interim. 

[Zanza]

That's also why I've found it very frustrating is because these have been a series of bad Tory governments - and I think they've been there for the taking for at least the last 5 years. People talk about the UK having a "good chaps" theory of government I don't really buy it, but I do think we have a "good opposition" system. For most of the last six years we haven't had one, as soon as we do things start falling apart.

Back to blaming Labour for shitty Tory politics? I guess I will never get that argument. Corbyn did not exactly stop the Tories from good politics. They did that themselves.

But I look at Republicans electing people who deny election results and want to fiddle them, or the decline of losers' consent in the US; or the types of authoritarian constitution fiddling by PiS and Orban - and I just don't think the UK was ever in that territory. We just had a Tory government often trying to do things that are bad but that the Tories have wanted to do since 1997 (and generally they've failed because they're also bad at government).

There were some rather authoritarian moves during the Brexit endgame with prorogation of parliament or seeing judges as enemies of the people. Was rather disheartening to see and not a good look for British democracy. 

[viper37]

[Sheilbh]

While being on holidays in the Caribbean during the interim. 

He's calling MPs from his holiday promising there'd be a different culture in Number 10 this time

Back to blaming Labour for shitty Tory politics? I guess I will never get that argument. Corbyn did not exactly stop the Tories from good politics. They did that themselves.

Opposition really matters - it's how you have political accountability and it sharpens the threat to the government if they fuck up. It's why even during the war when you had a government of national unity, a group of Labour MPs were designated as "the opposition" and there was still a leader of the opposition - so there were still people in parliament to hold the government to account even if it was a coalition of all parties.

Periods of weak opposition are, I think, generally also periods of hubristic, arrogant, complacent governments often with factional in-fighting because the government v opposition politics stop mattering, so intra-party fights do.

I think these have been bad governments partly for structural reasons (I don't think the post-Brexit Tory coalition is stable), partly because I think Brexit introduced a chaos element within the internal politics of the Tories and Labour because it cut across party lines, and partly because of a general dearth of quality in the party. But I think they've been allowed to be bad governments because they've not had to face (until the last two years) a real political threat/competitor/opposition.

There were some rather authoritarian moves during the Brexit endgame with prorogation of parliament or seeing judges as enemies of the people. Was rather disheartening to see and not a good look for British democracy. 

Prorogration of parliament is fair and I agree - but it was ruled unlawful unanimously by 11 judges (including a now retired judge who is, it turns out, very pro-Brexit) and undone within about a week.

I don't like many Daily Mail frontpages and that was no exception. But with a lot of the creeping authoritarianism - I'm old enough to remember New Labour (which I supported) and it is still the most authoritarian government I've lived under. So I came up with lots of stories about David Blunkett's "war" on "judges who don't live in the real world" and kept on trying to overturn government policy, particularly on immigration, based on "spurious" human rights objections. I also think Theresa May, of recent leaders, was the most authoritarian PM and has a really grim, bad record as Home Secretary.

More generally I think it's legitimate for the media (and politicians) to criticise decisions by courts and judges particularly when there's a high profile case. The more high profile and the more politically sensitive the topic, the more judges are likely to face public scrutiny, I think that's right - it goes for central bankers and regulators and other "independent" but non-democratic actors. I think it's arguably the trade off - they're protected from democratic accountability/easy dismissal but should be subject to pretty robust scrutiny and debate.

I don't like the frontpage and I don't agree with it - but they're public figures, ruling on an issue of high political importance. It's absolutely legitimate in a democracy for the press to cover that as they see fit (which will depend on how they view the issue itself).

Edit: Although I should say I have been radicalised against judges since I started working for a (lefty) media organisation. While I get everyone gives their best example the restrictions on genuine public interest reporting are ridiculous and really shocking as an outsider - and they come from a line of case developed by judges, not parliamentary legislation. Putting on my lefty hat - I'd note that most of them seem aimed at protecting people with a similar class background/position as judges from public scrutiny.

[Sheilbh]

I still think Johnson will win - he has a lot of grassroots support and I reckon many MPs will nominate him on Monday once they have heard from their local party office and their constituents.

On this - I can see it but I think this point is really true and why I suspect Johnson will "reluctantly" decide not to run in the national interest but heavily imply he would've won if he had:

Matt Chorley
@MattChorley
The spinners are doing a great job, and lazy hacks and stenographers are doing their best.

But if I was a self-styled election winning machine, who would inevitably be held aloft by his colleagues, I'd like to have persuaded more than 1 in 10 of them to come out publicly by now

The numbers of endorsements from Sky:
68 - Rishi Sunak
36 - Boris Johnson
17 - Penny Mordaunt

And even Guido Fawkes' list, which includes 17 anonymous supporters of Johnson, has Sunak on 82 supporters to Johnson's 62. I don't mean to slander esteemed parliamentarians but the list of public Johnson supporters is disproportionately fucking mental.

It feels like the reality check problems with Johnson coming back have been circulating a bit more today.

[Duque de Bragança]

I'm still silently rooting for Penny Mordaunt if only because she has a surname that seems out of a villain in an Arthurian legend, coupled with "Penny".

It's a villain's surname in the Three Musketeers sequel actually.

[Duque de Bragança]

Are they really the laughing stock of the western world? They have a lot of competition these days.

I am afraid that even Jupiter and his cronies are outmatched this time. The current prime minister is mostly non existent, politically.

[The Larch]

He's calling MPs from his holiday promising there'd be a different culture in Number 10 this time

If somebody believes him, they have nobody to blame but themselves.

[Sheilbh]

Only tangentially related to Britain - but really interesting piece on the "up the 'Ra" controversy. It's these trends within Ireland that I think is going to cause unionist opinion to harden (including soft unionist opinion) and make unification even less likely in the near/medium term:

Ireland grapples with singing of pro-IRA chant
Country debates whether chant is legitimate expression of national pride or an affront to victims of the Troubles
Rory Carroll
Rory Carroll Ireland correspondent
@rorycarroll72
Fri 21 Oct 2022 13.44 BST
Last modified on Fri 21 Oct 2022 17.29 BST

A chant with five syllables, dating from the 1980s, has roared back to divide Ireland, anger British politicians and subvert history: ooh, ah, up the 'Ra.

The chorus of Celtic Symphony, a song by the folk group the Wolfe Tones, celebrates the IRA with a catchy, upbeat rhythm. For years it has been belted out in pubs and sporting clubs across Ireland, but usually in semi-private, away from the limelight.

That changed on 11 October when members of the Ireland women's football team were filmed singing it in their changing room as they exulted qualifying for the 2023 World Cup.

The footage went viral and triggered a row about glorifying the IRA's campaign during the Troubles that has left Ireland grappling with fraught questions about national identity, pride and history.

The controversy swelled when Celtic Symphony topped Ireland's iTunes charts and people were filmed chanting the chorus at a Dublin airport pub.

Northern Ireland's unionist leaders asked the taoiseach, Micheál Martin, to use his influence to curb the practice, calling it an affront to those injured and bereaved by the IRA. John Baron, a Conservative MP, told the House of Commons it marked a "low point" in relations between the UK and Ireland.

The Football Association of Ireland and the women's team have expressed shame and apologised, but that has only fuelled debate in Ireland, where many defend the chant as a legitimate expression of national pride by a generation that has reclaimed and refashioned traditional republican tropes.

"They get used so regularly as to be rendered cliche, they are performative tropes with the original malevolent meaning stripped out," said Paddy Hoey, a lecturer in media, culture and communications at Liverpool John Moores University. He compared the "Ra" chant to England fans singing Ten German Bombers or Two World Wars and One World Cup.

Irish people in their 20s carry no baggage from the Troubles, said Hoey. "In the post-peace process era there is a level of playfulness, the naughty schoolchild, attached to singing these songs. There's a certain degree of depthlessness or ironic banter."

Criticism tends to backfire, added Hoey. "It's the Streisand effect. The more you draw attention to this kind of stuff and try to police what people have to say, the greater chance of it rebounding."

The phenomenon coincides with the ascendance of Sinn Féin. Once an IRA mouthpiece with fringe support, it is now Ireland's most popular party and appears poised to lead the next government.

A recent poll put combined support for Sinn Féin and smaller leftwing parties among people aged 18-34 at 73%. The party's promise to fix a housing crisis and redistribute wealth has driven the surge, but many supporters also adopt the party's defence of the IRA campaign. "As Sinn Féin grows, past violence is retrospectively endorsed," one commentator, Newton Emerson, wrote in the Irish Times.

Opinion in Northern Ireland, where Sinn Féin has become the largest party, has shifted: in a recent poll, 69% of nationalist voters agreed with the party that there was "no alternative" to violent resistance during the Troubles – a reversal from 1998 when 70% of Catholics rejected republican justifications for violence.

Eunan O'Halpin, a Trinity College Dublin history professor, said ostensibly pro-IRA chants reflected partly a desire to "wind up older generations" and partly Sinn Féin's success at framing the Troubles through the lens of the 1981 hunger strikes, security force killings and state collusion with loyalist paramilitaries. "The recital moves seamlessly from one pile of bodies killed by British forces to another pile killed by British forces."

The Sky News presenter Rob Wotton prompted widespread indignation when he asked an Ireland player if the row over the team's chant highlighted a need for education. Commentators called the question patronising and hypocritical given British ignorance about Ireland.

O'Halpin, however, said some secondary school history texts hopscotched through the Troubles, which claimed 3,700 lives between 1969 and 1998, and underplayed the fact that the IRA and other republican groups were responsible for 60% of killings, with loyalist paramilitaries being responsible for 30% and British security forces 10%.

Making History, a standard text, illustrates those statistics in a pie chart and notes that the IRA killed "many civilians", but its 21-page chapter on the Troubles gives scant detail about bombings and shootings, focusing instead on internment, Bloody Sunday, hunger strikes and political developments.

The Guardian interviewed 12 randomly selected Trinity undergraduates about the Troubles. Asked to estimate the total death toll, most declined, saying they had no idea. Those who did guess gave answers ranging from 50 to 20,000. One correctly said the figure was between 3,000 and 4,000.

Estimates of the IRA's proportion of killings ranged from 10% to 60%, with several correctly guessing it was around half. However, they assumed security forces, rather than loyalist paramilitaries, accounted for most of the rest.

Most defended the "Ra" chant. "I think it's harmless. It has come to mean an Irish victory against the odds, an underdog mentality," said Allanah Ryan, 19, a law and history student. "It's like a joke, a school chant insulting the other team."

Lucy Murray, 21, said the chant expressed pride, not malice. "It's not derogatory. It's not anything anyone takes seriously."

Three of the 12 said the chant was inappropriate even if used to celebrate Irish nationalism, not the IRA. Ciara McNamee, 21, said the Sky reporter's question was infuriating, coming from an English person, but justified. "Many Irish people don't really know about the Troubles, they don't know how terrible it was."

I think the challenge is that if you want unification, while you may not consider it derogatory or serious, a bit chunk of the people living in the territory you to unite with do. I think as Ireland looks more likely to have a Sinn Fein government which believes the armed struggle was necessary and justified, you will have a very strong reaction against that in unionist communities which will set back the cause of unification.

You see it popping up fairly regularly online when a Sinn Fein TD (rarely an MLA) or branch of the party tweets an in memoriam for some young man who died in the 1980s, in their 20s. There's then almost immediate pushback from unionists online tweeting, for example, that they were shot while trying to bomb a bus - or that their bomb misfired and set a fabric shop on fire killing the (Catholic) shopworker.

Edit: And it's interesting on the historical memory for peacetime people. I remember seeing it in this country's politics when you'd see strong Corbyn supporters claiming that actually he wasn't someone who supported the IRA but was really helping the peace process along - keeping lines of dialogue open etc (I'd always wonder to whom? It's not like Maggie was using him as a back channel). Seamus Mallon - the first Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, a pillar of the SDLP and non-violent nationalism, a man whose fingerprints are all over the GFA - pushed back on this and basically said Corbyn had zero relevance to the peace process and was, at best, a useful idiot and at worst a fellow traveller of the men of violence among nationalists. That basically attracted no attention and changed no-one's minds.

It struck me at the time that it was a sign of a very post-Troubles society that was used to peace. I think there's something similar here but in an Irish context.

[chipwich]

Can someone concisely explain how Prime Ministers lose power when their party has large legislative advantages? This palace intrigue surrounding BoJo and whoever this lady was is word salad to me.

[Sheilbh]

Can someone concisely explain how Prime Ministers lose power when their party has large legislative advantages? This palace intrigue surrounding BoJo and whoever this lady was is word salad to me.

They're PM because they can command a majority in the House of Commons. They lose power when they lose support from their own party because that party has a majority and if they no longer have its support, then they no longer command a majority in the House of Commoons.

The reason PMs lose support from their party is normally fundamentally down to one thing: they're losing public support and the leader is becoming a liability. If public opinion turns then, at the next election, many of the MPs  who they rely on for their majority will lose their seats.

[Sheilbh]

Sunak now has the 100 supporters necessary to make the contest.

So far only Mordaunt has launched her campaign.

[Valmy]

Can someone concisely explain how Prime Ministers lose power when their party has large legislative advantages? This palace intrigue surrounding BoJo and whoever this lady was is word salad to me.

This also seems to be something the UK parliament seems to do more than the others. In the UK this seems to happen all the time. Whereas in Canada it is much rarer. I vaguely recall Kim Campbell and Martin coming to be PMs this way, but much more often they just lose the election. Whereas in the UK it is a little unusual for a PM to survive from an election victory all the way until their party loses their majority.

[crazy canuck]

Can someone concisely explain how Prime Ministers lose power when their party has large legislative advantages? This palace intrigue surrounding BoJo and whoever this lady was is word salad to me.

This also seems to be something the UK parliament seems to do more than the others. In the UK this seems to happen all the time. Whereas in Canada it is much rarer. I vaguely recall Kim Campbell and Martin coming to be PMs this way, but much more often they just lose the election. Whereas in the UK it is a little unusual for a PM to survive from an election victory all the way until their party loses their majority.

It actually happens fairly often - particularly in BC.  It is happening right now, except the Premier voluntarily stepped down because of health reasons.  It also just happened in Alberta where the Premier was forced out (well technically he voluntarily left) and a new leader has taken the Premiership.

[Jacob]

This also seems to be something the UK parliament seems to do more than the others. In the UK this seems to happen all the time. Whereas in Canada it is much rarer. I vaguely recall Kim Campbell and Martin coming to be PMs this way, but much more often they just lose the election. Whereas in the UK it is a little unusual for a PM to survive from an election victory all the way until their party loses their majority.

Happens in Australia a fair bit too, I believe.