Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[The Minsky Moment]

Well if a primary concern about the UK is not being rich, I would not turn to Nigel Farago, whose principal claim to fame is the policy that knocked about 5% off of the country's trend GDP.

[The Minsky Moment]

Well if a primary concern about the UK is not being rich, I would not turn to Nigel Farago, whose principal claim to fame is the policy that knocked about 5% off of the country's trend GDP.

[Josquius]

Well if a primary concern about the UK is not being rich, I would not turn to Nigel Farago, whose principal claim to fame is the policy that knocked about 5% off of the country's trend GDP.

For many of his supporters they've given up on their own situation becoming any better. If they can just make other people's situation worse though then its worth it.
Zero sum economics plays a part. But also just crabs in bucket spite.

[Tamas]

Well if a primary concern about the UK is not being rich, I would not turn to Nigel Farago, whose principal claim to fame is the policy that knocked about 5% off of the country's trend GDP.

For many of his supporters they've given up on their own situation becoming any better. If they can just make other people's situation worse though then its worth it.
Zero sum economics plays a part. But also just crabs in bucket spite.

Yeah that's a good point I am afraid it explains a lot of what's going on in the world. The left behinds (or the ones feeling left behind, in any case, economically or culturally) just want to drag everyone else back.

Now I don't begrudge a lot of them having valid economic concerns, but I wish they supported a movement that aimed to address them, as opposed to making sure nobody else (coloured people especially) having it any good either.

[Sheilbh]

Not to be mean but could we please prevent ourselves, before it gets too late, to discuss any assumptions that Farage is thinking about anything else but Farage. He is Johnson pushed to the extremes of lazy grifterness. He is bound to be a disaster because governing is more complex than attention-biting snippets of bigotry, he will have no persistence to deal with complex policy and he is surrounded by far-right businessmen and bellends.

I think we need to stop underestimating our opponents and losing.

I also think there is a strange association of moral or political worth with things like being interested in ideas, or being thoughtful, or planning ahead or displaying competence. Which I think is very weird given that many of the worst regimes and ideologies in history had plenty of smart people who were interested in things and intellectually capable, who were thoughtful or competent or thinking ahead. They were doing it in service of bad ideas and beliefs and in some cases I think they were doing evil. But being smart and strategic is no more a guarantee of good politics or morals than enjoying Mendehlson or Shostakovich. And I think states and the tools of state power and the practice of governing is broadly politically neutral. There's exceptions on the extremes (Nazis, Pol Pot) but I think most regime or political types can govern "well" on their own terms.

I should say an awful lot of them are not doing this deeply and are meretricious at best, especially on social media (although perhaps they're more "popularisers") but I think at the current moment, part of the reason the far and radical right in the West have been so successful is precisely because they're interested in ideas - and think they're in a battle of ideas with their opponents. I think a lot of the mainstream parties thought the ideas bit of politics was no longer relevant (the grand narratives had died/been killed) and what mattered was "what works". The scope of their politics narrowed from competing visions of society to technocratic delivery and policy choices because the big issues had been fought and won: liberal democracy, market economics etc. I think we won and engaged in unilateral political disarmament.

I think the consequence of that is that when that order came into a series of significant crises the far and radical right had actually been thinking about alternatives and could make their case as a solution to the crisis (while I think the radical left was basically demoralised and demotivated post-1990 until the crash). While I think that (still) many of the mainstream parties intellectually have "no alternative" (I think in a way Starmer really symbolises this in just thinking that there weren't fundamental problems, it was simply bad management that was the problem). When the conditions changed they've had the intellectual resources and ideas to take advantage in a way that the mainstream parties and the left didn't (I think the left are getting there and the mainstream parties are still browsing airport non-fiction and self-help).

In a way I think that interview was sort of an example of that - in other respects it wasn't good for Farage who was patronising. But the Bloomberg reporter saying (at the end of the interview on lighter stuff) she'd heard that he reads a lot and asking what he was reading at the minute. He then said Mr Balfour's Poodle which was written by Roy Jenkins (one of my favourite politicians), I think in the 60s, about the clash between the Liberal majority in the Commons wanting to pass Lloyd-George's "People's Budget" for which they had a democratic mandate, being blocked by the Tory Lords (or as Lloyd-George called them "Mr Balfour's Poodle") which resulted in the Parliament Acts and the principle that the unelected Lords cannot block legislation from the democratically elected Commons if it was in the government's manifesto. A deliberately suggestive choice that Farage is thinking about what winning might look like (I'm not sure it'd help him). I think the interviewer's slightly incredulous response was telling of the same point: "[from] the early twentieth century? Why were you interested in that? You're going back a hundred years to try and find the answers?" (As someone who occasionally enjoys history from before 1911 also felt a little attacked by that Separately also think this goes to the problems in higher education and public broadcasting of "relevance" and presentism.)

Also just as an aside I think Farage and Johnson are very, very different. The first party Farage voted for was the Greens because they were the only party committed to leaving the EEC (as it then was). He's then spent his entire political life basically taking over or setting up new parties on the fringes of politics. There have been many, many right-wing Tories who basically thought he was one of them and have tried to get him to just defect and become a Tory. His entire political project is to destroy and supplant the Tory party. I think that's an entirely different mindset and trajectory than someone like Johnson (or Cameron for that matter) who envisioned and rose in politics by attaching their career to the Tory party, which is historically one of the most electorally successful political parties in the free world and a "natural party of government".

Well if a primary concern about the UK is not being rich, I would not turn to Nigel Farago, whose principal claim to fame is the policy that knocked about 5+% off of the country's trend GDP.

I think my argument is actually that a lot of the problems (from a policy perspective) in Britain is because we're not rich and we're not growing, but that a lot of our political dysfunctions comes from a (mistaken) complacency that we basically are. To an extent I think Farage's success is part of that.

Although I think this is a bit like Trump in that we're slightly in the "fuck around and don't find out" world. With Brexit the impact was broadly as you say and in line with Bank of England projections. It was not the what George Osborne in the Treasury and the Remain campaign were saying would happen. They said there'd be a recession, hundreds of thousands of jobs lost, house prices collapsing b up to 20% etc - which didn't happen. Similarly Trump's tariffs are bad but so far the impact is less than I'd anticipated or the worst predictions of the impact and, so far (according to Goldman Sachs), US companies are eating over 50% of the cost (I suspect this varies by market/susceptibility to political pressure). In both I think catastrophe didn't follow, the markets didn't act as avenging furies - they adapted, perhaps more robustly than anticipated. Despite all of that, for example, the UK still has an economy that's growing faster than the Eurozone or most other big European countries - which I think should be embarassing for everyone.

But I think it's why we need to go back to making the argument for the thing we want and against what we don't because there is no external punishing force for violations of liberal norms and politics isn't a morality play where the bad are punished and the virtuous rewarded. Or to the extent there is (as I think these are often bad policies/ideas) the impact is too slow motion and gradual for politics to just sort of thermostatically respond.

For many of his supporters they've given up on their own situation becoming any better. If they can just make other people's situation worse though then its worth it.
Zero sum economics plays a part. But also just crabs in bucket spite.

Also, to Duncan Weldon's point, and not just the UK (maybe more for the population decline thread) but I don't know what democratic politics looks like with an ageing population who are effectively post-economic. They often have fixed steady incomes but don't really care abou growth or unemployment - what matters are asset prices (particularly of homes, their biggest asset) and low inflation. They prioritise short-term spending on immediate needs like pensions, healthcare, social care over longer term spending like education, childcare, infrastructure. And they turn out more than any other group. I can't help but look at Europe in general and think there is something of the politics of the retirement home about it. Just leave us alone with our pensions and our holidays and our recyclying our way to net zero while the rest of the world is engaged in transformative projects of muscular state capitalism.

Again it's why, for all of his flaws and failures, I still sort of admire Macron for trying to break Europe out of that.

Also I think economics is increasingly zero sum both domestically if you're a society with relatively low growth - it is socialism as the language of priorities taken to an extreme. But also I think globally when you're returnin to great power politics, external shocks to supply chains to finance etc. I think an example is Europe suddenly moving into the LNG market after Russia's invasion of Ukraine when we literally paid so much money for gas that tankers that were on their way to their original buyers (particularly Asia, and particularly Pakistan) turning around to come to Europe leading to gas shortages and an even more severe cost of living crisis in some of those parts of the world than Europe. That's an example in Europe but we saw similar in covid, we've seen the US banning tech exports to China, China now restricting exports of processed rare earths. I think we're in more of a zero sum world and where things are made, where they come from, who makes them and who controls them matters more than it did in the past (or, arguably, it always mattered we just stopped caring/paying attention).

I also think all democratic politics is ultimately zero sum. I have a set of beliefs and a view of society that is similar to some people's and different to others. If we win, they will lose and vice-versa.