Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

The media has already reported on the story being inflated bigger than it is.

I mean that's great - now you can make it a 4 day story

[Richard Hakluyt]

let the criticisms of the media reporting that the story is over-inflated begin 

[The Larch]

I'd say there are a couple or telling and grating expressions used in the exchange that denote, if not overtly racist behaviour, at the very least a very demeaning one. The "really" in "Where are you really from?", as it implies that a black person can't be truly British when the original answer is that they're from London, and the "where do your people come from", as if they were a band of roving marauders that somehow ended up in the UK or a barbarian tribe in the late Roman empire. There's also the quite baffling "what part of Africa are you from", as if black people could only be African, and the downright bizarre line about the black woman's attitude being "a challenge", as if the whole thing was just a puzzle to be solved.

All in all, it's a clear sign that the old lady has truly earned her own retirement from the court at this point.

[Sheilbh]

So weirdly I think the "your people" bit lands badly in this context but I have an impession that's how posh people talk to each other - I feel like I've definitely heard them talk about "my people"/"your people". I think they mean it as family/background so this lady is living in Buckingham Palace (I assume) but "her people" are from Wiltshire.

It makes everything worse here but it's one of the bits I actually suspect wasn't meant in a judgemental way despite sounding most judgemental

Edit: Also sligthly resent this all being described as she needs to resign or has resigned - as if we should pretend that being a "courtier" is a job

[The Larch]

So weirdly I think the "your people" bit lands badly in this context but I have an impession that's how posh people talk to each other - I feel like I've definitely heard them talk about "my people"/"your people". I think they mean it as family/background so this lady is living in Buckingham Palace (I assume) but "her people" are from Wiltshire.

It makes everything worse here but it's one of the bits I actually suspect wasn't meant in a judgemental way despite sounding most judgemental

If she had said "your family" rather than "your people" it would not have sounded so bad, at least to me.

Edit: Also sligthly resent this all being described as she needs to resign or has resigned - as if we should pretend that being a "courtier" is a job

Call it hobby if you prefer. 

I mean, isn't the very concept of a royal court extremely out of fashion? Do any other modern monarchies have a court system in place?

Over here there's no court to speak of, as all that part of royal paraphernalia was ignored when the monarchy was restored after Franco.

[Sheilbh]

If she had said "your family" rather than "your people" it would not have sounded so bad, at least to me.

Oh 100% but it's a phrase posh people use.

I mean, isn't the very concept of a royal court extremely out of fashion? Do any other modern monarchies have a court system in place?

Over here there's no court to speak of, as all that part of royal paraphernalia was ignored when the monarchy was restored after Franco.

Yeah it's mad. As I say my suspicion is Charles will get rid of a lot of this after he's crowned. It's certainly been reported that he's wanted to get rid of a lot of it for the last fifty years and "modernise" the monarchy.

A lot of the weird old stuff around the British monarchy is I think tied to the fact the Queen was so old. The structure is what she had all her life. She grew up in an imperial household and I think what would be normal for her, looks rather different for the next generation who are leading a mostly national monarchy.

[Gups]

If she had said "your family" rather than "your people" it would not have sounded so bad, at least to me.

Oh 100% but it's a phrase posh people use.

Only to other posh people.

[Sheilbh]

That makes sense - in which case it's back to being as bad as it sounds.

Separately the Tories set a fortnight deadline for MPs to inform them if they intended to stand for re-election so that they can pick replacement candidates for outgoing MPs. A lot of very prominent/"rising star" MPs are choosing to step down. On the prominent front just today Sajid Javid has announced he'll step down, on the rising stars Chris Skidmore and Dehenna Davison are both stepping down.

I think someone did the sums and the average age of Tory MPs stepping down is in their 40s, while the average age for Labour is 70. Feels like that's never a good sign for a governing party when the people who would expect to be ministers or in the cabinet decide they'd rather just get out of it. It will also make party management even more difficult with demob happy MPs who can't be bribed with promotion any more.

On the other hand Boris Johnson has promised he will run again (he'd lose his seat on current polling) - which is a Boris Johnson promise so....

[Sheilbh]

Obviously this won't happen - but apparently that byelection result is basically in line with national polling which gives us this result on Britain Predicts' model

https://sotn.newstatesman.com/2022/11/britainpredicts

Disappointing to see the Tories crawl back into triple figures under Sunak (who still polls significantly better than the Tory party). And Starmer should still be very careful/cautious and take nothing for granted but it is promising

Zooming in, you could walk from Hastings to Morecambe without stepping in a Tory seat.

[Tamas]

Maybe I am just not following things eagerly enough, but so far it seems Sunak is using Johnson's "strategy" of making sure as little gets done as possible, including avoiding showing himself anywhere.

[Sheilbh]

Maybe I am just not following things eagerly enough, but so far it seems Sunak is using Johnson's "strategy" of making sure as little gets done as possible, including avoiding showing himself anywhere.

I'm not sure I agree.

There's bits of legislation progressing, although he's pulled the vote on one big bill. But it is back to politics as normal. The government working legislation through parliament and trying to have a bit of a comms strategy

We see less of Sunak because it's a more normal government. With Truss there was a new disaster every day, with Johnson two years of covid and then six months of his premiership dying following partygate with new revelations every other week. I think both of those premierships saw an unusual amount of the PM on the evening news either deliberately or by accident

I think projecting professional managerialism might work for a bit - it's why I think Sunak polls so much better than his party - but at some point he'll need to come up with some vision/dividing line with his opponent. And much the same goes for Starmer (and I think it was a similar process for him post-Corbyn).

[OttoVonBismarck]

There are basically two places a black person in the UK can be from, Africa and the Caribbean.

TFW Yi is a full blown idiot.

Do you think there is something about having black skin that means you can't be birthed on the British Isles? That the baby of two black parents, born on British soil, immaculately comes out white as a sheet?

[Gups]

Obviously this won't happen - but apparently that byelection result is basically in line with national polling which gives us this result on Britain Predicts' model

Shows how ridiculous FPP is when the Lib Dems lose a quarter of their vote share but more than double their MPs but woudl still feel pretty hard done by.

I actually wouldn't dismiss the possibility of a result like this. Labour are nowhere near the force they were in 1997 but the Tories are in a much, much wose place than they were then. Aside from an act of God (or war), I can't see how they dig themselves out of this mess particulalry when they have no unity (with new fault lines over pro and anti growth MPs widening) and can't get any legislation of any importance through.

[Tamas]

Related to the census data on so-called mixed ethnicity households:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/dec/02/joys-trials-britains-increasingly-mixed-race-households-census-2021

Jonathan, a white British surgeon born in Scotland, who is married to a British Asian woman born in St Albans, said his three children "have all been asked 'where are you really from?', very much like the woman at Buckingham Palace.

"Lots of what some would call 'ignorance' I would call racism. It has really angered me that my children or wife can never be from St Albans if they are brown. They are always made to feel slightly 'other'."

People living in mixed households contacted by the Guardian spoke of the joys of cultural exchange between extended families, sharing different cuisines and languages as well as tensions over differing social norms – from views on the acceptability of inviting yourself round to expectations about which gender should be the main breadwinner.

In one home, siblings of the same parents ticked different boxes: one white British, the other black British because that is how they saw themselves. There were people who just wanted to answer British, and others who couldn't see a box that covered their children.

"It's such a crazy range of options," said Keisha Davy-Barlow, 27, who has parents of Jamaican heritage and whose husband, Adam, is a white British man. "It's not how we talk about ethnicity now ... If you ask me, I am British."

Rachael Carden, 57, an academic in Brighton with an Indian father and white British mother, who is married to a white man with whom she has two children, said: "Culturally, educationally, I am white British, but I look brown."


She says she gets "fed up with survey questions and sometimes I just put white British", adding that she knows "lots of mixed race people who have done the same thing". Carden said that being asked to define different ethnicities in the same family felt intrusive and wasn't a discussion white families were asked to have.

She also noted: "Mixed race people have been subsumed into the agglomeration of the contested term BAME, which absurdly would suggest that all people who are not white (ie black, Asian and minority ethnic) are somehow the same."

Life in one of Britain's growing mixed ethnicity households is "for the most part plain sailing", said Keisha, but added: "You get the occasional odd feeling from somebody. You can see the questions in their minds."

Her husband, Adam, said: "You might get people saying things like, 'Oh my God you are going to have the most beautiful brown babies. That's a common one."

There have been moments when Adam learned the hard way about the bias faced by black people. "What got me was the first time you noticed a security guard following me round Sainsbury's and you were livid," said Keisha, who said she had experienced that often.

James, a white British man in a Derbyshire village married to a Chinese woman, said their experience of racism has been limited to a couple of occasions such as "an old man asking if she is feeding chop suey to the ducks in the park".

"All my family and friends were so bowled over by her personality that if they had any prejudice it was soon defeated," he said.

[OttoVonBismarck]

"What is your family's ancestral background?" is a fairly inoffensive way to sate one's apparently impossible to suppress desire to know "what type of black / Chinaman" a given minority is. The phrase "where are you from?" is intrinsically loaded because it suggests you can't be from "here", especially if you tell them where you live and they "correct" you by saying "No no, I mean where are you really from?"