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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31259 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.

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.

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