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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Uh, anyone in the UK willing-and-able to comment on this?

From my warped, media-driven perspective across the pond, like... it looks something like this.

  • Boris Johnson is a frighteningly intelligent person who managed to become PM and pull off Brexit, freeing the UK from the placid bureaucratic tyranny of Brussels but also from a variety of economically beneficial arrangements with the continent

  • During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Boris Johnson ultimately failed to heed Dominic Cummings, turning about-face on a number of lockdown policies which Boris did not, apparently, regard himself as bound by (channeling a lot of U.S. Democrats here)

  • The economy, predictably, suffers; whether this is due to COVID, Brexit, both, or neither, is a question that will help many economics professors secure tenure

  • Maybe there is some philandering by someone important in here somewhere? Recollection vague...

  • A bunch of people resign from positions in Boris' administration

  • Liz Truss becomes PM

  • Six weeks later, someone gets manhandled in the Commons over a vote?

  • Liz Truss resigns as PM

  • Maybe Boris is coming back?

It's just not clear to me, at all, how Boris managed to get himself removed in the first place; it feels like he was removed for little tiny stupid stuff after massively succeeding on all the issues that genuinely mattered to him and his supporters. He apparently should have heeded Cummings on COVID (and perhaps many other things, too) and it looks like Boris reaped the consequences without actually learning his lesson. But Truss is apparently just wildly incompetent, or maybe she's just catching the blame for what is really Boris' economy?

What's really happening, there. Help me out.

So, there's two key points here.

Partygate was by far the most important thing that happened to get Boris removed. But general 'sleaze' in the party didn't help, especially the way it was handled. Look up the Owen Paterson case in particular.

More critically however, the Tories faced some awful defeats. By-elections in seats which had formerly been ultra-safe True-Blue constituencies were electing Liberal Democrats, and Wakefield, a former Labour seat (though not by enormous margins) that went to the Conservatives, returned to Labour in fairly spectacular style, the margin being a crushing 17%, not far off the 2001 figure. Boris' personal figures were through the floor, and voting intention polling, though better, wasn't great either.

The responses below have already explained the scandals that brought Boris down, but another point is that Boris failed to get any credit in the bank; after the Brexit deal, his government basically achieved nothing despite a large majority.

There were plenty of external factors that Boris had no control over, for which he was pretty unlucky. Covid, of course. Even if Boris had stuck to the original plan of "let it rip" and herd immunity, the rest of the world is still going to lockdown, destroying supply chains and driving inflationary forces. British borrowing would be in a better place at least, but that wouldn't stave off inflation and a recession.

The invasion of Ukraine is probably still happening. In fact the response to this was one of Boris's few successes, so if it didn't happen he wouldn't be better off. And even if he had immediately commissioned a dozen nuclear power plants after the GE, there is nothing he could have done about the energy crisis which engulfed Europe, due to the blunders of Germany.

But there is plenty he could have done. Immigration was a major driver of Brexit, with voters eager for reductions to both legal and illegal migration. Yet the Tories responded to heavy reductions in EU immigration by massively expanding visa numbers to other nations. And they have seemingly done nothing for waves of English channel crossings that have occupied papers day after day.

Another big promise was "leveling up", spreading economic benefits to left-behind areas of the country that had switched to the Tories and reducing the dependence on London. Other than the continued lumbering forward of the HS2 rail line, I can't recall a single policy that might have done anything about this.

Other than the continued lumbering forward of the HS2 rail line

HS2 is a project to allow people to commute to London more easily. It has nothing to do with the north; that section won't even be built. You can tell because they started building it in London first. The intent is to cancel the northern portion once the part London wants is done, probably citing budget reasons.

HS2 is a project to allow more people to commute to London, not to allow people to commute to London more easily - the business case is utterly dependent on the idea that the main line between London and Birmingham is at capacity, and that the marginal cost of building the new line to high speed standards is low. If rail use continues to grow in the way it was growing pre-pandemic, then the existing main lines to Leeds and Manchester will be at capacity by the time HS2 reaches them. If it doesn't then the northern bit of HS2 probably won't get built because speeding up trains that already run at 125 mph is not a good use of anyone's money.

To me, the proximate cause of the shitshow is that Boris has character flaws which made him a bad Prime Minister (and would make him unsuitable for any kind of executive leadership in any organisation) but which never became obvious to the Tory grassroots. Boris is lazy, intellectually incurious and lacks attention to detail. He lies constantly, and thinks rules don't apply to him (or his mates). He is willing to beclown himself to get an attractive woman into bed, or to get invited to the right high society parties. And according to Dominic Cummings he has difficulty saying "no" to people, which is utterly fatal in an executive. To make matters worse, he found himself entering Downing Street with a ruinously expensive divorce and a ruinously expensive trophy wife, so he needed a side hustle on top of his PM's salary.

All this was familiar to people who had worked with Boris, including Tory MPs. Much of the dishonesty and sexual immorality was public record. And it wasn't just Labourites saying this - immediately after David Cameron resigns following the 2016 referendum Michael Gove publicly refuses to back Johnson, saying that he is unsuitable to be PM (and torpedoing has campaign, getting us Theresa May). Max Hastings (probably the most distinguished right-wing journalist in the UK, and Boris's editor at the Telegraph) wrote multiple articles calling out his unsuitability (this Guardian article being the best non-paywalled example). After the fact, Dominic Cummings notoriously brings receipts re. how badly these flaws affected Johnson's administration in practice.

Given these handicaps, how does Boris get elected Tory leader (and therefore PM) in 2019? The vast majority of the Tory grassroots supports hard Brexit (i.e. the whole UK, including Northern Ireland, completely out of the EU Single Market and Customs Union), as do about 1/3 of the MPs, whereas Theresa May has negotiated a deal which leaves the UK in the EU Single Market for goods in order to avoid the need for a customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Some of the hard Brexit MPs vote against the deal, scuppering it. At this point there is a series of catastrophic election defeats for the Conservative party - it isn't obvious whether Tory voters dislike May's deal and prefer a harder Brexit, or if they simply want any deal to get done so that Brexit is over, the UK is out of the EU, and we can get on with life. But the Tory activists are clear that their problem is that May's deal is "not real Brexit", which allows the hard Brexit faction of the MPs to win the internal party debate. Johnson is elected leader because he is by far the most charismatic hard Brexit supporter, and the Tory MPs and members think they need a charismatic leader to rebuild the Party.

At this point, a kind of epistemic closure sets in among the Tory grassroots. The pro-hard-Brexit MPs and their supporters in the media know that supporting Johnson is the only way to deliver hard Brexit, so they don't talk about his character flaws. The pro-hard-Brexit grassroots won't listen to anyone else, because they interpret attacks on Johnson's character as a Remoaner plot to scupper Brexit. And Johnson delivers by negotiating a different bad deal to May (Johnson's deal effectively leaves Northern Ireland in the EU), lying to the voters that it is a good deal, fighting and winning a general election on the basis of his deal, and then promptly trying to rat out of it. At the end of January 2020, Britain leaves the EU. Brexit is now effectively irreversible (to reenter the EU would require a formal application process taking several years, and unanimous support from the other EU member states), but hard Brexit supporters remain paranoid about Remoaner plots to reverse it, so they still are not willing to take the issue of Johnson's character seriously. There is also an "evaporative cooling" dynamic going on, where Conservative activists who are not hard Brexit supporters drift away from the party. Something similar happens with the MPs, because a lot of remained MPs are forced out of the Conservative party during the shenanigans in late 2019 (and then lose their seats in the election) and almost all the new intake are hard Brexit supporters because activists control candidate selection in UK political parties.

Sometimes people with these flaws and sufficient charisma can be effective leaders. One way of doing it is to appoint good people who don't need managing, and then not manage them. This worked well at the Spectator (talented journalists are almost impossible to manage anyway) and tolerably well as Mayor of London (everything Boris got personally involved in went to shit, but the Greater London Authority is deliberately set up to stop the Mayor getting involved in the operational details of policing or public transport, which are the main things the Mayor is responsible for). It The other is to be a hands-off CEO who focusses on motivational speeches and appoint a trusted COO to actually run things. This worked as PM until Boris's sycophants (probably including his new wife) convinced him that he didn't need Dominic Cummings.

After Cummings is sacked in November 2020, Boris Johnson has to actually govern, and he does so poorly. In particular, we never learn what "levelling up" (the key promise to the new Conservative voters in the north of England) actually means, and there is no serious attempt to capture any benefits of Brexit. His supporters don't try to defend his record, they change the subject by saying he is uniquely able to connect with voters, and that he deserves the gratitude of the Conservative party for delivering Brexit.

Partygate breaks in December 2021, and Boris Johnson rapidly loses public support because he didn't obey his own lockdown rules. There are two disastrous by-election defeats to the Liberal Democrats. (Amersham & Chesham is an affluent commuter town outside London, North Shropshire is a rural seat). This is mostly because of Partygate, but there are also local issues, including the fact that the government has botched post-Brexit farming policy meaning that farmers (who are mostly Brexit-supporting Tories) feel betrayed. Around this time we also see football crowds chanting "Boris Johnson is a cunt" and Boris is booed by the (presumably Royalist and therefore Conservative-sympathetic) crowds outside the Queen's Platinum Jubilee service.

So we now have two problems both caused by Boris Johnson's character flaws: the scandals (of which Partygate is far from the only one, but it is the one which cuts through to ordinary voters) and the policy drift. Both are hurting the Tories with the electorate. Tory MPs can see all this because they have to work with Boris, and start moving against him. In June 2022 a formal confidence ballot is triggered, and 41% of Conservative MPs vote against Johnson - normally this would cause a party leader to resign because you need supermajority support to lead effectively, but Johnson carries on. Two weeks later there are another two by-election disasters (Tiverton & Honiton is another rural seat lost to the Lib Dems, Wakefield is one of the new "red wall" seats going back to Labour), and another scandal in which it becomes clear that Boris Johnson appointed a known groper as deputy Chief Whip.

At this point Boris Johnson is forced out of office by a series of co-ordinated ministerial resignations. The Tory grassroots still don't believe that the problem is character - they know Boris is unpopular, but they see the scandals as due to media bias, remoaner plots etc. and the real problem being the policy drift which is caused by Boris not being right-wing enough. If you think this, it obviously follows that any of the resigning ministers falls under suspicion of being some kind of remoaner plotter. So to be acceptable to the membership (who get the final say on the new leader, after MPs reduce the contenders to 2), a candidate must be sufficiently right-wing (which by this point mostly means promising tax cuts) and not implicated in the removal of Johnson. Rishi Sunak fails on both counts, so we get Liz Truss.

I don't need to repeat the other posts in this thread about how Truss fails, because it is all obvious and in public. The only additional point I want to make is that epistemic closure is a huge part of how Truss and Kwarteng screwed up - Truss was selected for being willing to treat accurate criticism of Boris Johnson's character as remoaning, and she selected her cabinet for willingness to go along with this. So it isn't surprising that she deliberately and publicly ignored all the possible sources of expert advice that might have told her the mini-budget was risky.

Boris is your usual populist idiot political toad. He is dumb as hell and has a mile long trail of stupid decisions, blatant lies, obvious hypocrisies and general ineptitude, but gets elected and even does pretty well sometimes because the opposition has swung so far away from populism their ivory tower is about to hit the moon.

Doesn't matter in the face of being a total fuckup though, which his handling of Brexit really showed. Shit or get off the pot, my dude.

You shouldn't feel bad about not caring much about the politics of a country on the other side of the world from you, and whose political system you don't understand. But you would do well to not embarrass yourself by publically rolling around in your own ignorance.

It also seems like everything needs to have some cutesy name like “Torrey” (which I assume is short for something like “tort”?).

Ah, it's so cute when the kids don't know history!

Explain first why the American political parties are a donkey and an elephant, before casting nasturtiums at other countries.

Anyway, the term is "Tory" (not "Torrey") and comes out of 17th century British and Irish politics. One derivation is that it comes from an Irish word meaning "outlaw", was first used to refer to dispossessed Irish Catholics who became outlaws and bandits, and then over the course of time was associated with the Royalist/Conservative faction in English politics (because the dispossessed Irish Catholics were of course anti-Oliver Cromwell and the Puritans in the English Civil War and anti-William of Orange and pro-James II during the Glorious Revolution), so the term was used to refer to the Royalists/Cavaliers as well, as a disparagement of them:

The term Tory was first introduced in England by Titus Oates, who used the term to describe individuals from Ireland sent to assassinate Oates and his supporters. Oates continued to refer to his opponents as Tories until his death. The word entered English politics during the 1680s, emerging as a pejorative term to describe supporters of James II of England during the Exclusion Crisis, and his hereditary right to inherit the throne despite his Catholic faith. After this, the term Tory began to be used as a colloquial term, alongside the word Whig, to describe the two major political factions/parties in British politics. Initially, both terms were used in a pejorative manner, although both later became acceptable terms to use in literary speech to describe either political party. The suffix -ism was quickly added to both Whig and Tory to make Whiggism and Toryism, meaning the principles and methods of each faction.

During the American Revolution, the term Tory was used interchangeably with the term Loyalists to refer to colonists that remained loyal to the Crown during that conflict. The term contrasts the colloquial term used to describe supporters of the revolution, Patriot.

Towards the end of Charles II's reign (1660–1685) there was some debate about whether his brother, James, Duke of York, should be allowed to succeed to the throne because of James's Catholicism. "Whigs", originally a reference to Scottish cattle-drovers (stereotypically radical anti-Catholic Covenanters), was the abusive term directed at those who wanted to exclude James on the grounds that he was a Catholic. Those who were not prepared to exclude James were labelled "Abhorrers" and later "Tories". Titus Oates applied the term Tory, which then signified an Irish robber, to those who would not believe in his Popish Plot and the name gradually became extended to all who were supposed to have sympathy with the Catholic Duke of York.

The Tories and Whigs eventually became/had descendants that became the Conservative and Liberal political parties. The Liberals were very influential and powerful, but waned and were replaced by the Labour Party (which was working-class representation, trades unions, socialism, some communism, and everything in-between). They declined over time until in the 1980s they joined forces with a new party, the Social Democratic Party founded by moderate ex-Labour party members. Eventually the two merged to become the Social and Liberal Democrats, then the Liberal Democrats, and are now a shadow of what they have been.

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And the Republicans have a weird name, too -- what the hell is a Gee-Oh-Pee? And why is the technically younger party the Grand Old One?

Actually the Democrats before the Civil War used the "grand old party" language as well, but obviously dropped it after the war. The Republicans started using it in the late 1870s, in midwestern states where Republican hegemony was under threat from populist movements. The term conjured up images of the Civil War - the main Union veteran's organization was the "Grand Army of the Republic," and "grand" was also sometimes substituted with "gallant" in the expression, an explicitly martial word - so the "GOP" language was part of the Republicans' tried-and-true tactic of "waving the bloody shirt."

Why would you expect people to know the history of what are effectively pointless political parties within a dead empire? I also don’t know the specifics of any of your soccer teams, and if their drama kept getting covered in the news, I would similarly be pontificating above why anybody cares.

I get it if you live there, I’m just saying that to me, from the outside, the UK reads like a reality TV show. Unfortunately it seems like the US is on the same trajectory, btw

Dude, if you're not interested in pointless minutia of politics you're in the wrong forum.

Dude, if you're not interested in pointless minutia of politics you're in the wrong forum.

That's a good point. I think it was just early and I wanted to rib the brits a little bit. Low quality post I'm going to delete anyway.

Assuming you're an American, your politics revolves around concepts with names like "gerrymander" and "filibuster", with the latter one, in particular, sound like nothing but a wacky children's show puppet character or something.

Yeah those are also really stupid names that sound kind of silly.

Fun story - "filibuster" comes from the same dutch word meaning "pirate" that gives us the other english word "freebooter." Only "filibuster", instead of jumping straight to english from the dutch "vrijbuiter" (literally "free plunderer"), went by way of the Walloons and French ("filibustier"), then the spanish ("filibustero"), then, through the timeless english tradition of chopping terminal vowels off of spanish words, into english.

Gerrymander was coined by a political cartoonist who mocked a Massachusetts district drawn under Governor Gerry by claiming that it looked like a salamander. Charmander, an OG starter pokemon, is presumably a portmanteau of "charring" (scorching with fire) and "salamander." So yes, it turns out that our political commentary and our pokemon have followed convergent lines of evolution, each descended etymologically from salamanders. Now you might argue with some justification that the cartoonist's image depicts a Charizard rather than a Charmander, but we have to respect that it was a different time; the finer points of pokemon evolution weren't understood by political cartoonists at that stage of history.

It's called the Labour Party because it began as a party for workers and socialists.

In particular, it was primarily started by trade unionists, i.e. workers' representatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)#Labour_Representation_Committee_(1900%E2%80%931906)

The etymology is actually pretty complicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tory

My view from continental Europe -- Brexit has been pretty horrible for Britain, and the lies to sell it (buses claiming 400 million a week were being sent to the EU) have been unravelling, so people were pissed at Boris, which meant the small-but-insulting blunders -- e.g. having big parties while other people couldn't visit grandma -- were enough to oust him.

Truss came in and made stupid destructive tax cut promises that even people in favor of tax cuts thought were stupid, and no one had her back, so apparently she's on the way out too.

I think the outsider view of Brexit must be coloured by something, then. I certainly haven't noticed any kind of disruption in my daily life that could be said to be due to Brexit, for what it's worth. I think most people also feel this way -- Twitter with its hysterical #FBPE crowd is not real life.

FBPE?

FollowBackProEurope, how ardent Remainers identify each other on twitter.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Boris Johnson ultimately failed to heed Dominic Cummings, turning about-face on a number of lockdown policies which Boris did not, apparently, regard himself as bound by (channeling a lot of U.S. Democrats here)

Neither did Dominic Cummings consider himself bound by these lockdown policies, resulting in him being booted over a trip to Barnard Castle.

(1) Boris managed to get himself removed due to a series of scandals and blunders; the final scandal that toppled him was just the last straw that broke the camel's back

(2) I don't like Dominic Cummings and have no idea how he seems to have become so popular with "the rationalist community", but at least one thing he did was that he didn't seem to regard himself as bound by the lockdown policies any more than Boris did

(3) Regarding those lockdown policies, what pissed people off was the constant drip of "our leaders don't take this seriously" so while you had pictures of the Queen at her own husband's funeral observing mask and distance protocols so that she was sitting alone at a time of grief, you also had reports coming out of drinks parties being thrown by the Tories with no regard for masks or distancing

(4) The usual Tory party backstabbing and wheeling-dealing went on to find a successor to Boris, and I have to admit, I still have no idea how Liz swung it (her main rival was Rishi Sunak, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Boris, but Rishi managed some mini-scandals of his own over the fortune he married into)

(5) It wasn't just manhandling over a vote. For whatever reason, some genius (and I don't know if it was Liz herself) managed to turn the vote over Labour's proposed bill to ban fracking into a vote of confidence in the government

(6) Backing up on that a little - Liz becomes prime minister, she installs her own new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, and they do the usual sort of Tory tax-cut budget. Except that this time round, the 'cut taxes on high earners' panics the markets, the pound nosedives, the economy looks even rockier than normal, so Kwasi gets the boot and there's a new Chancellor who immediately reverses all the tax cuts etc. This new guy is a former Minister for Health, one Jeremy Hunt, who managed to make himself so unpopular his name was rhyming slang

(7) Liz and her merry gang are in such chaotic state, that the u-turn on fracking (they made campaign promises in the 2019 election that they were against fracking, then in power now changed their minds that fracking would solve the energy crisis) triggered a Labour attempt to make political gains on this (naturally) so Labour proposed a bill to ban fracking

(8) For whatever reason, it was decided to make this a vote of confidence in the government - losing the vote would mean that a general election would need to be called, at a very bad time because there is no chance that the Tories will win an election if one is called right now

(9) They are such a shambles, they can't even get this right. First, the Whips tell everyone this is a confidence vote, it's a three-line whip (the most serious one) which means everyone has to vote with the government on this one, no voting against or abstaining

(10) The problem is, several Tories including former and current ministers are against fracking, so there's a good chance of rebels anyway

(11) Compounding this comedy of errors, then the current climate minister, one Graham Stuart, tells the House of Commons that this isn't a confidence vote (the spin now coming out is that some unnamed 'junior official' from Downing Street mistakenly told him this)

(12) So now you have the Tory MPs milling around like headless chickens - can they vote as they wish? is there a whip in place? And the whips are yelling at them and everyone else, there are tears (allegedly, going by some reports I'm reading), cursing, shouting, shoving and (allegedly) manhandling i.e. dragging some MP or MPs into the lobby to vote for the government

(13) Despite all this, 40 MPs abstain or don't vote with the government

(14) The Chief Whip and Deputy Chief Whip resigned. And then they un-resigned. The Home Secretary definitely resigned, but she did it via her personal email account which is a technical breach of the rules, and apparently took some swipes at Liz Truss while she did it

(15) Liz is going to fight on. Then she has a little chat with the chairman of The 1922 Committee, which is all the Tory backbench MPs, and decides she is going to resign

(16) It's an entire steaming mess, and everyone is enjoying the hell out of the drama, because it's the best reality TV show currently on

(17) Not forgetting the head of lettuce which lasted longer than Liz did

Dominic Cummings was writing essays in 2014 describing the UK governance system as an omnishambles with a constant stream of daily disasters - he seems vindicated to me, since this govt is an omnishambles with a constant stream of daily disasters.

https://dominiccummings.com/2014/10/30/the-hollow-men-ii-some-reflections-on-westminster-and-whitehall-dysfunction/

The government was a lot less of an omnishambles before Dominic Cummings sabotaged it by fighting a successful referendum campaign based on lies and impossible promises, and then fighting a successful general election campaign on the basis that the failure to deliver these impossible promises was the result of a shadowy cabal of traitors.

Dominic Cummings is 100% to blame for putting Boris Johnson in power despite knowing that he was unsuited for it - Cummings is entirely open that he did know this, that he thought it was worth the risk in order to gain power for himself, and that he was making plans to remove Boris within days of putting him in power so he had an insurance policy in case he was sacked. Words have meanings and Cummings isn't a traitor, but I frequently struggle not to call him one.

So I can speak to this, given as I know a number of the players and did indeed work for the Tories directly in a previous life. Boris is smart, and not quite the buffoon he sometimes makes himself out to be, but he isn't a 150 IQ super-genius. He was sunk by a combination of breaking the rules his government set and probably lying about it on the floor. But that on it's own wasn't enough. The Tories can be a frighteningly effective political machine but they like the Skaven are often hamstrung by their chronic back-stabbing syndrome. A slight weakness was pounced upon which if the economy had been going well, would probably have not been a huge deal. There was also the Pincher scandal but again that is really just a pretext. Boris starts getting briefed against by his own side, letters of no confidence gets lodged with the 1922 committee and at that point it becomes a matter of time.

MPs usually won't go public with no confidence until they are fairly sure that a lot of their colleagues agree, so it usually goes from 3 or 4 to much larger numbers in what seems like a blink of an eye. Those that break cover first risk trouble if they are wrong but gain political capital if they lead the charge and win.

Truss is a fairly reliable, right wing politician but nothing special, and not particularly principled in my experience, but Tory party members preferred her her to Sunak in the final vote.

Truss put forward a mini-budget which was going to cut taxes (expected for a Tory) and raise spending (not so much), creating so called "unfunded tax cuts". The markets went into freefall and the Bank of England had to step in to buy government bonds. She asked her chancellor to resign and u-turned on most of those changes but given they were her campaign promises the sacrificial Kwarteng did not appease the rest of her party. The same tipping point began and while the 1922 committee in theory can't get rid of her for a year, they could change the rules to do so if MPs agreed.

Then Suella Braverman (the Home Secretary, one of the big cabinet offices) resigns after (I am reliably informed) a screaming match with Truss. Truss, I am told wanted her to announce a liberalization of immigration rules, so that the economic benefits of increased immigration could be used by the OBR (Office of Budget Responsibility) to show Truss's approach (with her new Chancellor and old rival Jeremy Hunt) would be fiscally positive rather than negative. A political slight of hand if you will. Suella however is an immigration hawk to her bones. And refused to go along. She was forced to resign after she used personal email to send a confidential document to a colleague (which normally is a slap on the wrist kind of affair) and used her resignation letter to pointedly say that when mistakes are made the person making the mistake should resign.

In cabinet resignation letter terms, this is the equivalent of calling the PM a fucking idiot. With Truss already weakened she did the one thing you should not do. Lawyers say never ask a question in court where you do not know the answer in advance. In Parliament the equivalent is do not declare a vote a confidence motion unless you know you will win.

Labour had forced a vote to ban fracking (which they had no real chance of winning) and the Tory whips office (at the behest of Truss) declared this to be a three line whip vote. i.e. if you do not support the government you will have the whip removed and have to sit as an independent MP not a Conservative.

However, due to the previous issues there were apparently enough Tory MPs who were willing to take that risk, that just 10 minutes before the vote the decision was made that it was no longer going to be a three line whip vote. But that communication did not get through, the whips were still attempting to ensure all Tory MP's voted the government line. Whips are chosen for their ability to shout and get people in line and having one grab you and frog march you somewhere has happened before. This report is mostly a nothing burger I think, but a politically useful one for the Opposition.

Many Tory MP's abstain from the vote, including the Chief Whip and other party grandees. Truss is therefore finished. She resigns. The 1922 committee knows this looks terrible for the party so they are going to rush through a new process, hoping that MPs will agree on one single candidate (which will prevent party members having a say) but if not they will hold an unprecedented online vote for party members next week.

I don't think Boris will get the nod, he still was technically found guilty of a criminal offence but the problem the Tory party is that they don't have a good successor. Sunak is the favorite currently as he came second last time, but that still means he did not have the support of the Conservative party members. This is a problem. Hunt might have been able to swing it as he had enough influence that Truss had to bring him in as Chancellor in an effort to get his faction onside, but he has ruled himself out.

Honestly if I were advising any of the candidates, my advice right now would be, sit this one out. There is a good chance you will be out in 2-3 months either through an election or another internal issue. It is also worth noting that the Conservatives electoral success (swinging a number of working class Labour areas, as a result of Brexit/immigration) has also caused some problems. Just as Democrats have to contend with getting Joe Manchin on board, the new Conservative MPs for these areas know that their voters are not economic conservatives. One of the reasons Truss's budget got her in trouble is because those MPs are a new bloc that has to be appeased internally.

All in all a mess for the Conservative party, but one they are fairly used to.

He was sunk by a combination of breaking the rules his government set and probably lying about it on the floor.

This skips one and a half years of increasingly large rebellions from backbenchers over lockdown restrictions. This culminated in him breaking rules, responding to breaking rules by imposing new restrictions (some backbenchers regarded these rules as nothing but petty vengeance for boris being caught), and a rebellion so large that the only reason votes passed is that labour abstained. He then limped on with a powerless government for several months until a largely inconsequential scandal was used as an excuse to finally ditch him.

It was reported at the time that Boris privately instructed his loyalists to support Truss in the contest to be his successor, precisely because he thought exactly this would happen, she'd be a tremendous fuckup and pave the way for his own return.

If the mechanism by which her successor is chosen ends up being the MPs rather than the party membership, it'll probably be Sunak though. Because there's a greater proportion of rootless cosmopolitans among MPs than there are amongst party members, and rootless cosmopolitans can't sense the metaphysical catastrophe that a reverse-colonialism Sunak premiership would represent.

Because there's a greater proportion of rootless cosmopolitans among MPs than there are amongst party members, and rootless cosmopolitans can't sense the metaphysical catastrophe that a reverse-colonialism Sunak premiership would represent.

Please explain to a yank what "rootless cosmopolitans" means in this context.

Because usually that term is used as a euphemism for "Jews," and if that's what you mean, you should say "Jews," not use euphemisms. We're not on reddit anymore, and the advantage of that is that you don't have to use euphemisms, and the disadvantage of that is that you don't get to use euphemisms.

But perhaps I am misunderstanding you. I look forward to being educated about this "rootless cosmopolitan" faction of the UK Parliament.

Speaking as a non-Brit, it's not the Jews. It's South-East Asians, East Asians, Russians - look up Evgeny Lebedev and all those who want to/need to resign to spend more time with their family money. London runs on the financial services sector, so its interests are different to those of the rest of the country, and the perception is that those in power (usually the Conservatives) are more interested in keeping their business pals and old chums and party donors happy, and to hell with the rest of Britain.

So you get a lot of financial scandals and allegations about misuse of non-domiciled status, offshore financial centres, tax avoidance/tax evasion, taking large donations/'gifts' from foreigners/foreign governments/go-betweens and the rest of it, including why Rishi Sunak got into a spot of bother (and he's currently front-runner to succeed Liz Truss, having lost out to her in the last selection of prime minister):

In early 2022, newspapers reported that Sunak's wife Akshata Murty had non-domiciled status, meaning she did not have to pay tax on income earned abroad while living in the UK. The status cost approximately £30,000 to secure, and allowed her to avoid paying an estimated £20 million in UK taxes. Following media controversy, Murty announced on 8 April that she would pay UK taxes on her global income, adding in a statement that she didn't want the issue "to be a distraction for my husband". On 10 April it was announced that a Whitehall inquiry had been launched into who had leaked the details of her tax status. On 11 April 2022 The Guardian wrote, "Keir Starmer has accused Rishi Sunak of taxation 'hypocrisy' on the grounds that he is putting up taxes for ordinary Britons while his family has been reducing its own tax liabilities."

Reporting around this time also revealed that Sunak had continued to hold United States' permanent resident status he had acquired in the 2000s until 2021, including for 18 months after he was Britain´s treasury Chancellor, which required his filing annual U.S. tax returns. An investigation into both his wife's tax status and his residency status found that Sunak had not broken ministerial rules.

So the former Chancellor of the Exchequer is the son of African-Indian immigrants, married to the daughter of an Indian billionaire, and held permanent resident status in the US due to his previous business career:

Sunak worked as an analyst for the investment bank Goldman Sachs between 2001 and 2004. He then worked for hedge fund management firm the Children's Investment Fund Management, becoming a partner in September 2006. He left in November 2009 in order to join former colleagues in California at a new hedge fund firm, Theleme Partners, which launched in October 2010 with $700 million under management. At both hedge funds, his boss was Patrick Degorce. He was also a director of the investment firm Catamaran Ventures, owned by his father-in-law, Indian businessman N. R. Narayana Murthy between 2013 and 2015.

I might describe myself as a "rootless cosmopolitan", as someone who travelled a fair amount and has a pretty international family. I don't associate the word to jews, tho according to Wikipedia it seems to be that way originally. If I use it it would be semi-ironic, because I'm aware it has (mild) negative connotations, I just don't think that those connotations are particularly warranted.

I'd consider it somewhat equivalent to "citizen of the world", tho that version has a positive spin to the point of sounding haughty.

Because usually that term is used as a euphemism for "Jews,"

Uhhh, what?

It's usually used to refer to the "Anywhere" thinking people from the "Anywheres and Somewheres" concept; https://thinktheology.co.uk/blog/article/anywheres_and_somewheres

I've literally never seen it used to refer to jews. Ever.

I've literally never seen it used to refer to jews. Ever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rootless_cosmopolitan

Not that guy, but I've been seeing it somewhat often here, and to me, while it could still refer to Jews as it once did, it could also refer to the "globalist" class also referred to as the "anywheres:" they may be born in the first world, but they'll happily travel to wherever, so long as it's a shiny city somewhere exotic (or at least modern enough to accomodate a luxurious lifestyle); they exist just as easily in LA or NY as they do in Dubai, Paris, or Shanghai.

This is 💯 a caretaker-manager situation. Sam Allardyce will be the next PM, do just enough to keep the U.K. up, and get replaced over the summer.

Boris has a reputation for taking whatever position will benefit him personally. Before the 2019 election, half of Tory voters were threatening to switch to the Brexit Party, and winning them back was a matter of survival; thus Boris stood as a populist, and won a large majority.

After a while, though, Boris came to view his personal interest as having fun, and keeping his wife and friends happy. Thus a series of scandals where he broke rules over Covid or defended bad behaviour by MPs, while simultaneously pushing unpopular policies that were clearly designed by his wife.

One of these, by itself, he might have survived, but both together was fatal. Many of his supporters had considered his personal behaviour a fair price to pay for what they wanted, whether that was populist policies, or just a strong lead in the polls. Now, though, they weren't getting any of that either.

His replacement was, in the final vote, chosen by Tory members, who are not very representative of Tory voters as a whole. Truss's plans to cut taxes and borrow were unpopular with both the public and the markets, but the members weren't concerned about any of that.

So Truss becomes PM, cuts and borrows harder than anyone expected, and refuses to publish forecasts of what it would do to the economy. The markets understandably freak out, the pound tanks, there's a pensions crisis, and the public are extremely unhappy.

Her authority draining away, she executes U-turn after U-turn, until today finally realising she can't go on. The new PM will be chosen next week, and while it's possible it could be Boris, it seems unlikely; the reasons MPs wanted him gone haven't changed.

The current favorite would be Rishi, who got the most votes from MPs, has a reputation for economic competence, and quite accurately predicted all the ways in which Truss's policies would blow up. Right now the bookmakers put him on a 50% chance, though, so it's still all to play for.

These are all my observations as a britbong.

When the UK voted to leave the EU, this caused a political stalemate in the UK's lower chamber that lasted 2 years. Theresa May, who became PM after Cameron resigned, did not have the numbers required to pass her deal and invoke Article 50, which was to agree to a settlement with the EU and terminate all other aspects of EU membership. This was unpopular with those parties to the left of the Tories, who wanted to remain part of the EU and those on the right of her own party, who wanted to leave the EU without any concessions offered. She quit in the spring of 2019, after a third failed attempt to push her deal through the House of Commons.

Boris wins the resulting leadership election. His plan, partially concocted by Dom Cummings was to force a GE and campaign on the basis that, if given a majority, he would end the deadlock and leave the EU under a repackaged version of May's deal. In December, he won an 380 seat majority, and passed A50 just before the new year.

In 2020, the coof hits. The original plan of the UK government, which is to encourage individual measures such as handwashing and voluntary distancing, is thrown out for the lockdownist policy that originated in China and was copied by countless other nations. Cummings is of the impression that, if we had done this earlier, we could have reduced the number of deaths. I disagree highly, the UK does not have the culture, geography, nor the dystopian panopticon required for the results seen in east asian countries and its primary hobbies consist of Greggs and Alcoholism, but that is another topic for another time. I also do not think it is the reason he was eventually knifed.

Dom Cummings is exiled from the government as he and Boris' wife Carrie took huge dislikings to each other, resulting in interfactional squabbles until Carrie's faction won. He is now on the outside looking in.

During the winter of 2020 while the country is in Lockdown and the common citizen is denied freedom of association, Boris and his colleagues host several parties at Number 10. This is leaked to the press a year later around the time a fourth lockdown is being proposed. After several months of political obstructionism, Boris is eventually fined, issues a weak apology and moves on.

In the Spring/Summer of this year, a story emerges about a sex pest in the Tory party having molested several people at an event. It is revealed that Boris ran interference and prevented action from being taken against this person. Tory MPs, sick and tired of having to defend the actions of the PM and his inner circle, propose a VoNC, which he passes with the worst numbers for a PM to date. His cabinent shortly resigns in quick succession, and he gives up the ghost and resigns.

After his own leadership election, Liz Truss wins. Liz Truss is, as was discussed on the subreddit, extremely stupid. She appoints longtime ally/adultery partner Kwasi Karteng as Chancellor (chief money guy), who unveils a budget with tax cuts and spending rises funded by borrowing. This is the event that caused the pound to crap itself and nearly killed off the pension industry. Truss eventually U-Turns and replaces Karteng with Jeremy Hunt, who immediately undoes the budget and replaces it with one reminiscient of the pro-Austerity Cameron government. Her position still awful, she elected to resign today.

Boris is being suggested primarily as a replacement for Truss by the membership, who are rural pensioners with opinions far to the right of even the populist public.

To expand on and agree on why this is, it's the most accurate reflection of how things look to us Greggs-devouring, Alcoholic commoners.

I will never be as floored as I was when CNN ran this post-leadership article singing Liz Truss' praises, and painting her as the New Thatcher she so badly wanted to role-play. The perception overseas of what happened is... alarmingly off.

[And I am especially amused to note that the current CNN article, with the same exact URL is now 'updated' to be about the resignation. I'm curious as to whether someone in the news room pointed out how well that particular milk/lettuce had aged.]

/images/16664394201168134.webp

The original plan of the UK government, which is to encourage individual measures such as handwashing and voluntary distancing, is thrown out for the lockdownist policy that originated in China and was copied by countless other nations. Cummings is of the impression that, if we had done this earlier, we could have reduced the number of deaths.

Huh. For some reason I thought Cummings was the architect of the original approach, and that the draconian lockdowns marked the beginning of the end for Cummings. But maybe that was based on my impression of his comments to media when he broke lockdown to be near relatives when his wife got sick.

Oh, that piece he did 'apologising' was so bad. He clearly had nothing but contempt for the whole idea, and his 'excuse' that he had to travel halfway across the country with his family, while his wife was sick with Covid, was that they needed the grandparents to look after the kids while she was sick.

What, you can't manage to look after your kids yourself, Dominic? Or hire nannies/au pairs/agency staff to do so?

This at a time when ordinary people can't leave their houses, can't visit their sick grannies, are told that if they do anything at all they will be responsible for spreading a deadly plague - and then this guy breaks rules with gay abandon because hey, rules are for the little people.

Correct, rules are for little people. The modern rejection of this idea has lead to the "little people" suffering the most...

In a sense, sure. The benefit of rules is most easily and obviously observable with "little people", people with less margin to burn. "Big" people can flaunt rules longer and harder without suffering obvious consequences.

Only, can you actually get "little people" to follow rules that "big people" won't abide by? I think the evidence pretty clearly shows that you cannot. "Rules are for the little people", in the colloquial sense, results in everyone worse off.

Humans are a monkey see, monkey do animal. Big people, especially those in positions where they are likely to be seen frequently by little people, need to have a sense of noblesse oblige and make sure they follow the rules so that the little people can imitate them. Indeed I think this loss of noblesse oblige in the west is directly hurting the little people right now.

It's basically a form of charity from the people at the top towards those at the bottom if you ask me (instead of giving them money the people at the top are are giving them direction). Big people should be strongly encouraged to follow the rules just like how little people are, but not for the same reasons, and when they don't follow the rules the charge against them should not be "you broke the rules" but rather "you set a bad example for everyone else" and if anything the punishment for this should be more severe than the punishment for "merely" breaking the rules.

What isn't good is pretending big people and little people are the same, which is what the West is doing at the moment in its mass collective delusion.

Correct, rules are for little people. The modern rejection of this idea has lead to the "little people" suffering the most...

Ironically your continued presence, and it's deleterious effect on the Sub would seem to support this claim.

@ZorbaTHut, @TracingWoodgrains, Et Al. Perhaps you'd like to offer a rebuttal?

Inasmuch as I have a rebuttal, it's that I would strongly prefer not being pinged into old feuds you choose to dredge up out of context, particularly given that you've also indicated my continued presence here is undesirable. Leave me out of your fights, please.

I wrote a whole thing about debate forums which value free expression and what I think would be deleterious to them, but I hit some link just above my keyboard and lost it all. So I will just say that I don't care if you are right, you should delete this post.

The media has an awful habit of memory-holing or reversing positions taken by various figures in March 2020. It's even harder to decipher the exact manuevering that took place because the published minutes don't match public statements. According to Sunak, SAGE minutes are manipulated to suppress disagreement, which is plausible because, taken literally, nobody supported lockdowns until after they were in place.

Cummings wanted to replicate China's lockdowns, it seems. This is likely more from a sheer contrarian streak than any rational reason, as the pre-2020 consensus was lockdowns being somewhere between bad and unthinkable - so unthinkable nobody even considered to call them bad because nobody was ever suggesting them. Perhaps also a bit of mysticism about East Asian healthcare.

The trip to Barnard Castle made Dominic Cummings a national laughing stock, but that was survivable as long as he retained the support of Johnson. It was falling out with Carrie that did for Cummings in the end.

Boris is not intelligent, particularly, as far as I can tell. Nor is he particularly conservative, so some of the party will always have wanted his head. What everyone I know suspects is that his run-in with the coof scared him, and he let his hysterical new wife have too much sway over him -- turning him from Brexit man into running a government based almost solely on what his wife thinks and how policies polled. His coof episode made him give into safetyism. As this is no way to run a corner shop, let alone a government, he was eventually ousted. Truss is just the prize moron slash Lib Dem sleeper agent who picked up the fallen banner.

Boris hosted a party shortly after he left hospital, I doubt he was that shaken by it. I think most of his COVID policy was motivated by public opinion and the media response.

Boris is intelligent. Unfortunately many British politicians studied PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics) at Oxford, which is notoriously an easy subject. (Why doesn't a PPEist get up in the morning? Becuase then they wouldn't have anything to do in the afternoon) Boris studied Greats, which is basically a broad-based course in Ancient Roman and Greek society based on reading the primary sources in the original languages. It is traditionally seen as the hardest course Oxford has to offer, although the mathematicians and physicists naturally disagree. His tutors said he could have got a First if he applied himself.

Boris's vices are laziness and incuriosity, not stupidity.

Boris's vices are laziness and incuriosity, not stupidity.

I would say that the first two lead to the second.

How one can be stupid but still have a high IQ is an interesting question. You can be intelligent but lazy, intelligent but incurious, but how about an intelligent ignoramus? Laziness and incuriousity can lead someone into becoming an offensively ignorant person, would we call that person offensively ignorant yet intelligent? It seems there are more paths to stupidity than low IQ.

There's actually a far more interesting example than Boris: Kwasi Kwarteng, the recently departed chancellor.

Kwarteng has a double first & a PhD from Cambridge, and was a Kennedy scholar at Harvard. Unlike Boris and most other politicians, his degrees weren't in PPE and other broad subjects, but in economics, so he should have been primed for a position as chancellor. He even had relevant experience in hedge funds, rather than just being a former journalist, again like so many other politicians.

Kwarteng might well have the most impressive academic achievements of anyone in the House of Parliament today. And yet he blundered terribly with his mini-budget, seemingly unaware that the markets would not look kindly to low-tax and high-spend in the middle of major economic turbulence.

How exactly did someone who is probably top 1% in intelligence and in a relevant area for his skillset perform so poorly? At least with someone like Robert McNamara you can point to the Vietnam war being a very complex and difficult issue.

People can use a high IQ to better convince themselves and others of wrong positions, rather than seek correct positions.

People can use a high IQ to better convince themselves and others of wrong positions, rather than seek correct positions.

People can also use a high IQ to play slick verbal games which cover up for a lack of knowledge. The way Oxbridge teaches humanities subjects (you have to write a weekly essay, which does not affect your grade, but which you are expected to discuss for up to an hour with an academic specialising in the subject) is noted for training this skill. So does competitive debating (which Boris also did). Boris is one of the best people in the world at this particular form of bullshit.

You can also have a high IQ and pretend to be stupider than you are in order to appear relatable to midwit voters. Boris is good at this too.

Well, I said as far as I can tell, because he's never demonstrated his intelligence that I've seen.

If a genius only orates in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, why should anyone believe he's a genius?

The dude can apparently recite a significant chunk of the Odyssey (or was it the Iliad? I can't remember) in the original ancient Greek, which was impressive to me. Maybe I'm an easy mark. He also debated Mary Beard for IQ2 on "Greece v. Rome," taking the side of the Greeks. I don't know...which American national politician could do that, even at the level he's doing? He may not be great shakes by academic standards, but measured against the bog-standard politician he sure seems smart to me.

Ted Cruz was literally a national debate champion and Elizabeth Warren was literally a professor at Harvard. Maybe not classcists, but they're clearly both very smart.

I don't know how debate was in Cruz's day, but given that nowadays it's been "optimized" into speed-shouting bouts of "how much can you filibuster and call everyone in the room every trendy -ist and -ism you can think of in the time provided (oh and the time limits are probably racist too)?", that debate championship does not, on its face, impress me. And as for Warren, there is evidence that her placement at Harvard was significantly assisted by to her...convenient "family history" of being part Native American. Affirmative action hires do not impress me (though "The Two-Income Trap" was a pretty good pop-policy book in its day - pity she's more-or-less abandoned that thread in her current political career).

Maybe I'm an easy mark

Maybe. Are you American?

I realise that question comes across as the peak of European snobbery, but ancient languages are still taught in (posh, high-tracked) schools here. The upper echelons of power are lined with men who went to such schools, and the classics lose a bit of their mystique because of it. I don't regret having been taught three years of Greek and six of Latin one bit, I genuinely appreciate what I learned there, but epic poetry was designed to be easily recited and after high school + Oxfordian education on the matter, Johnson had damn well better be able to recite what he's learned from memory. That's how it's supposed to be.

Maybe. Are you American?

Guilty as charged. I've always been jealous that in my dad's day High Schools offered greek and latin, but now...well....gestures helplessly at the universe.

About to go pick up the kids, so I'll have to be brief, but what did for Boris was his personal conduct, especially the lies. The two big scandals were Partygate and the Chris Pincher scandal. In both instances, Boris was perceived to have been dishonest and incompetent. This was on top of a general atmosphere of sleaze that had permeated his government, and very poor relations with his MPs.

Liz Truss was an omnishambles of a PM. Her mini-budget was a shitshow that had real painful impacts on the UK's international financial position as well as ordinary family finances. She then responded by firing her Finance Minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, trying to make him the fall guy for the whole situation. This backfired horribly, and it became clear she had to resign.

We are now entering even more interesting times. Boris could come back (20%), but more likely it'll be Sunak (40%), or possibly Mordaunt (15%). The Conservative Party have promised a replacement will be in place within a week, and that party members will be consulted, though details are still emerging about procedures.

Chris Pincher

Nominative determinism is my favorite type of determinism.

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