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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.

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.