Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[mongers]

Yeah the links of Bangladeshi politics and some parts of Labour is a problem.

Siddiq's spoken at Awami League rallies in the UK and has Awami League activists helping her campaign, plus her (fully declared) home is owned by an Awami League executive. Away from the latest allegations.

There's a Labour councillor (and former mayor of her borough) who's been on leave for months because she's basically in hiding. Her husband was a senior Awami League figure before their overthrow.

My understanding is that a significant part of the fight between Labour and Lutfur Rahman in Tower Hamlets had its origins in divides within Bangladeshi politics, with spoils going to different patronage networks.

From when I lived in Tower Hamlets though, I'd say one issue with raising or discussing it as an issue or even understanding it was a bit of negative polarisation. The only people who seemed interested were the right-wing press who were primarily interested in an Islamophobic kind of way (they only really seemed interested in being able to accuse people of being Islamists) - and if that's not you, you don't want to accidentally give that impression.

Yes, very complex.

It just seems a rather odd choice to have someone in your government, so closely linked to a dictatorship, it's bound to not end happily for you.

The islamophobia issue in this case seems restricted to the extreme right/ far right of tory party.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah I think the challenge will be Siddiq isn't a standalone example. I'd agree if this was like some random junior minister associated with, say, Azerbaijan's government.

Rather, I think she is an example of issues that come out of the wider entanglement of Labour Party politics in the British Bangladeshi community and Bangladeshi politics in their diaspora community. And I think that is complicated to explore.

My experience in Tower Hamlets was more that there were really really serious issues with corruption, communal politics, electoral fraud around Rahman and his party (he was removed as mayor and banned for standing for five years following a court decision on some of those issues - though he's back now). The only media really interested in that were basically just interested in it from the perspective of his ties (which exist) to Islamists. It was entirely framed in a way that I think was pretty racist and Islamophobic. Part of the problem was that I think discouraged other reporters from looking into the other very real issues or even talking about Rahman's problems because you didn't want to come across as being Daily Mail-ish.

Siddiq and the Awami League links might give an in for the media more widely to tell a story that focuses less on moody shots of a large mosque in East London.

I think negative polarisation is a bad thing and now care less about accidentally ending up with bad people on my side of an issue.

I'd add I don't think any of this is new or specific to the UK or British Bangladeshis. I think there's a lot of echoes of what I've read about US machine politics, but also the politics in some diasporas - and bits of it even remind me of what Liverpool politics were like before the rise of Militant, particularly with Irish voters. Similarly I live in an area where there are machine politics going on in other communities - to an extent I think it makes sense with migrants especially because it provides a way to get a seat at the political table that might oterwise take a very long time.

[Barrister]

I'd add I don't think any of this is new or specific to the UK or British Bangladeshis.

Indeed - it broadly sounds similar to some of what is happening in Canada and the Punjabi community.  Punjabis (who are mostly, but not exclusively, Sikhs) find it very advantageous to their community to be involved in electoral politics within the existing parties, which has led if anything for Punjabis to be over-represented in politics (over-represented compared to share of population).  Now there's nothing inherently wrong with that - immigrant and diaspora communities have done this for a long time.  But it can lead to more shady behaviour as well.

[Sheilbh]

Not getting more chill about Reform. One of the problems Farage has always had is he can't work well with others (still tbc) but also none of his parties have really become proper parties. They are vehicles for votes in specific elections/constituencies.

Ahead of the local elections later this year they've launched a £10 membership tier for under 25s, recruiting on TikTok and regional party conferences in all of the regions that'll be having local elections inviting people to come along if they're interested, if they want to volunteer, if they'd like to be candidates etc. All stuff the other parties do but here pitched more as planning for big organising/campaigning/movement politics (not a million miles from the sort of stuff Labour did under Corbyn). And they've just celebrated over 100,000 party members - which definitely puts them above the Lib Dems and possibly the Tories

It may not work but I feel like the main parties are just increasingly leaving a massive space for Reform to occupy - and our electoral system keeps third parties locked out, until it doesn't and they start benefiting from it.

Plus think there's a lot to this from a former Downing Street advisor under Blair and Brown:

Theo Bertram
@theobertram
I talk to many MPs who are nervous about Reform. Each has a different view about the scale of the threat & how to respond. I don't have all the answers but these 3 viewpoints are wrong:
1. social media is to blame
2. Reform voters are being conned
3. Farage is somehow 'cheating'
What I find troubling about each of these viewpoints is that (a) they don't require self-examination & instead blame someone or something else, & (b) essentially infer that the voter was wrong, if not actually stupid. It's condescending but there's more to it than that.
Here's a fact: the lower the level of education/training, the more likely someone is to vote Reform. This is what's behind some of those viewpoints. But here's another fact: you don't need higher education/training to judge what's best for you & your family when you vote.
The question for MPs to answer is not whether Reform hoodwinked the nation, but instead: what if Reform voters heard your arguments & those of Reform quite clearly, were as sceptical of Farage as you, considered their options reasonably, & still voted Reform instead of for you?
There are over 150 seats where Reform got more than 20% of the vote. It's a compounding mistake to see those voters as thick or misled. Instead we need to understand why they feel Labour or Tory governments are not working for them & to consider the ways in which they are right.

I know I was speaking with BBoy about the whole "bowling alone" thing and I think there's truth to it - but I also think people do broadly want to join in and I'm not sure the older parties have quite worked out how to do it.

The parallel I find slightly concerning is the SNP who again turned the energy the referendum into campaigning to win almost all seats in Scotland and the first ever majority in the Scottish Parliament (which has an electoral system designed to avoid single party majorities).

[Josquius]

That's a pretty arrogant post.
Listing off these three things and implying those who talk about them believe they stand alone as the only reason thus they can be easily dismissed.
Those three factors absolutely are real issues behind the rise of the populist right.
Putting your fingers in your ears and pretending they're not is even less helpful than imagining any one of them is the only factor (which nobody believes).

No doubt some reform voters put this logical weighing up the pros and cons level of effort into it, but it's deluded and out of touch to think they all did.
The whole culture war, own teh libs, social media infused shit is very real amongst a not insignificant amount of people.

[Tamas]

The whole culture war, own teh libs, social media infused shit is very real amongst a not insignificant amount of people.

[Barrister]

That's a pretty arrogant post.
Listing off these three things and implying those who talk about them believe they stand alone as the only reason thus they can be easily dismissed.
Those three factors absolutely are real issues behind the rise of the populist right.
Putting your fingers in your ears and pretending they're not is even less helpful than imagining any one of them is the only factor (which nobody believes).

No doubt some reform voters put this logical weighing up the pros and cons level of effort into it, but it's deluded and out of touch to think they all did.
The whole culture war, own teh libs, social media infused shit is very real amongst a not insignificant amount of people.

I really don't see in the slightest how Sheilbh is being "arrogant" or "putting [his] fingers in [his] ears".

[Sheilbh]

In fairness if I was a Tory or Labour MP worried about the rise of Reform I would also prefer an analysis that basically meant that I was powerless and there's nothing I could do to stop it.

If you're in politics and your analysis all points at other people with nothing that you or your side could do to change things, I think that's just learned helplessness/trying to set an alibi before it all goes wrong. There is nothing the Labour Party could have done while Reform occupy the space of: welfare for the elderly in winter, higher benefits for families with more kids, nationalising utilities and domestic preference in public procurement to support (heavily unionised) industry

As I'm not that's why I absolutely hate people in politics coalescing around those theories. Plus I think they are condescending - and, because I believe in democracy, I think people are making what they think are the right decisions for them and their family.

Via David Austin Walsh, it's the US and different but saw a poll that showed 40% sympathy for Luigi Mangione, I assume that's broadly on the left, and obviously on the right you've got Trump. I think there's a massive crisis of legitimacy of our liberal societies norms, procedures, institutions and "rule of law". I find there's something bizarre and sort of ancien regime pessimistic about a lot of discourse on this (Rory Stewart especially ) - people are losing faith in what are self-evidently the best social arrangements imaginable and there's nothing we can do to re-gain it, o tempora, o mores etc etc.

[Josquius]

Except recognising these external factors doesn't mean you're powerless.
You can change how you behave to react to them, you can seek to use them yourself, when in government you can even try to tackle them-far from an easy thing to do.
Refusing to recognise that social media, lies, and foreign money are issues means refusing to do anything to meet these challenges, so their impact is even stronger.

[Sheilbh]

Okay but certainly in the US politics thread this feels like the point where the conversation turns to solutions and no-one really has any.

Maybe more fact checking and we change politics through hermeneutics.

I'd add that in relation to social media I don't fully understand why that is a tool that's apparently absolutely beyond the ken of mainstream parties. I think historically shifts in media can change politics in style, tone, the type of politician who does well etc. But I can't think of any example or any reason why it would only fall in favour of one political position.

FWIW - in a BBoy style checking my priors. I do think all of those points are vastly overstated and massively absolve mainstream political leaders and parties of responsibility (while, subtly, implying that maybe these elections aren't necessarily legitimate - and, I think taken to their logical end point, querying democracy). Having said that I think there are structural shifts that politicians probably are just at the mercy of but I think those are more to do with the economy/relative decline and the impact on different classes breaking apart what were once relatively durable coalitions and remaking them, like in the 70s. But I also that even within that context there's a fair bit of political space being conceded by Labour and the Tories (I'm increasingly struck by the feeling of Starmer as, in many ways, continuity-Sunak ) which they don't need to do - but changing that would mean a fight with other parts of their existing base.

Edit: And I would that I don't think mainstream politicians have covered themselves in glory which is a large part of why voters are looking at anyone outside of that group. It varies by country but I think there does need to be some degree of reckoning for: two failed wars, financial crisis, bank bailouts, decade plus of austerity, Panglossian energy policies (whether relying on Russia or whoever else), stalling quality of life etc. I think the inability to deal with that legacy of the "adults in the room" is a big part of why we are where we are.

[Sheilbh]

Find the point here on the WASPI women slightly alarming given senior Labour figures in opposition were happy to sign up to their campaign

Reform UK's left turn is a wake-up call for Keir Starmer
Suddenly it's Richard Tice who is calling for renationalisation and saving steel — Labour can only pray its growth comes soon
Patrick Maguire
Thursday December 19 2024, 5.00pm, The Times

One uncontroversial compliment we can pay Sir Keir Starmer is that he always does his homework. As a young barrister, toiling away in a grotty flat above a brothel on north London's Archway Road, he was so engrossed in his notes he did not notice a gang of burglars making off with his television.

Old habits die hard and last month he prepared for the arrival of Kemi Badenoch at prime minister's questions with the same monastic intensity. Like a football manager, he spent the preceding weekend studying every clip of the Conservative leader addressing the Commons he could find. Labour colleagues who had shadowed her found the prime minister's name flashing on their phones. The man who cannot bear to be beaten left nothing to chance.

It would be wrong to say that Starmer and his strategists no longer worry about the Conservatives. Let's just say that after a few weeks on the receiving end of her questions he now feels confident enough to measure his prep for Badenoch in hours rather than days.

And though it's too early to say the next election is a straight fight between Labour and Reform UK — looking at the polls, with three parties bobbing listlessly in the mid-twenties, it's innumerate too — the most difficult questions Labour is likely to face in the coming months aren't coming from the Tories.

By now we know what the prime minister has to say to Reform on migration. That rhetoric is as robust and uncompromising as any of Nigel's lines. That's enough of him, though. Let's consider Richard Tice instead. Somebody has to, and soon that somebody may well be Rachel Reeves.

Pay attention to what Farage's deputy and economics spokesman says and it isn't difficult to imagine a near future in which Reform is outflanking Labour on the left as well as the right. That, as the many of the social democrats retiring hurt throughout the West might tell you, is a threatening place for a populist party to be.

In recent months Tice has said two things that Labour cabinet ministers have not. The first: under no circumstances should the struggling British Steel plant in Scunthorpe close. Its Chinese owners are at loggerheads with Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, over how much government and private cash should go towards its rescue. While open to nationalisation as a last resort, Reynolds views state ownership as "the least attractive option". Tice, on the other hand, makes no bones of arguing that the site is of strategic importance to the British economy and ought to be in public hands if foreign capital is unwilling to foot the bill.

Then there is Thames Water. During the election campaign Labour stressed it did not intend to take that into public ownership either. On this, at least, they have been good to their word. This week the High Court kept alive Thames Water's hopes of avoiding temporary nationalisation via a £3 billion loan from its biggest lenders. Should that deal fail — and it might yet when the courts revisit things in February — the utility will be on the brink of collapse by March.

Ministers do not want that to happen because, to coin a phrase, full-fat nationalisation is the least attractive option to this Labour government. Not for Reform. Tice argued last week that Thames Water should be "put out of its misery", allowed to fail, and sold to the taxpayer for £1. The alternative, he says, is a scenario in which City moneymen — this former asset manager knows whereof he speaks — "rip off consumers even more" with sky-high interest rates paid off, in the end, by hard-up households.

That intervention sent a chill down the spines of what's left of the soft left in and around the cabinet. One of their number ominously describes Reform as "gaining economic sentience".

Until now Labour politicians have tended to console themselves with the notion that Farage and his boys are little more than the Sealed Knot of Thatcherism: re-enacting old battles in pinstripe armour with little heed for whether their voters think it's all a bit weird. Sometimes Farage can't help but affirm their prejudices: recall the election debate in which he suggested the "NHS model isn't working". Privatising hospitals is not what his people want to hear.

But what about nationalising monopoly utilities? Wielding the National Security and Investment Act to take steel plants and semiconductor factories into state ownership? Campaigning against the takeover of Royal Mail by the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky? Reminding voters that most of the utilities for which they pay through the nose are owned by funds in China, Canada and wherever else? The Reform leadership is in private discussions about all of that. It is thinking more seriously about what it says in public too. Note, for instance, that Farage and Tice chose not to run their mouths off and pledge to compensate Waspi women this week.

On utilities and strategic industries, Reform is going where No 10 and No 11 won't. There are countless reasons why not — most of them to do with the government balance sheet — but the sum of it all is a vast expanse of political space to the left of Starmer and Reeves. If they don't want to fill it, somebody will. And that somebody is likely to be Reform.

Little wonder so many Labour MPs are up in arms and moaning to ministers about this week's proposals to carve up English councils and create new mayoralties. Those in places such as Kent fear, probably rightly, that ministers are building bully pulpits for the populist right. Just look at Lincolnshire, where Dame Andrea Jenkyns — late of Boris Johnson's fan club, now Reform's one-hundred-thousandth member — will be promising to nationalise Scunthorpe's steel.

From inside No 10 the rebuttal is simple enough. If Starmer and Reeves fulfil their promise to grow the economy, greater generosity to voters will follow. But again: cabinet ministers examining another month of anaemic GDP figures aren't quite as optimistic. Already their departments are paralysed by the looming spending review. Even small outlays of state cash have been paused as ministers await its judgments. All the while Reform's tanks are rolling on to what used to be Labour turf. They can only hope the growth figures beat them to it, or Starmer might not have time to catch up.