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Oh Britain, what have you done (part ∞+21)?

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wyjsar said:
There is a tendency amongst MPs to vote along party lines. Otherwise they lose the party whip and eventually their seats. This isn't a terribly difficult concept to grasp. Abstaining / voting against is slightly more tolerated in the Labour party than the Tory party.
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There's also a tendency amongst dead-eyed sociopaths and self-deluding fools to join parties that vote along those - fantastically right wing - lines.
 
Seanm said:
Yes, as are the others name checked by Matthew.

I very much hope one of them does get the leadership because what all this pining for a figure like Stewart shows is that the disenchantment of One Nation Tories and sensible liberals is not complete. They will need to be shown Stewart personally persecuting foreigners and the poor, personally setting fire to the country to save the Tory party, before they grasp the fact that a right wing ideologue is a right wing ideologue, regardless of kind eyes, Boy's Own past and sensible words. Stewart can no more return us to "normalcy" than Johnson, and that wouldn't be his mission: his mission would be the same as May's, which was to save a bigger fraction of the establishment than that represented by the ERG, no matter what the cost to the country.
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This is exactly the thinking that led us to Donald Trump of course. But overall the dis-ingenuousness of your post just makes me do a massive /shrug.
 
ks.234 said:
Rory Stewart’s voting record.

Seems pretty right wing to me?
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Typical of the breed. They always want to take money away from the worst off in society. “Make work pay” (but not too much). There’s far worse jockeying for the leadership- Raab is a far right deregulator who’ll scrap any worker’s and consumer protection he can get away with, same with Truss. They are more virulent than anything that floated in with Thatcher forty years ago. Hard Brexit is the grenade they want thrown into the building. It’ll make the paups sit up and pay attention.
 
matthewr said:
This is exactly the thinking that led us to Donald Trump of course. But overall the dis-ingenuousness of your post just makes me do a massive /shrug.
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Hey, what happened to civil discourse? :)

But anyway: you're seriously suggesting that not supporting a right winger who has no chance of finding themselves in a position of power anyway, when there exists a credible left wing party with mass support and a considered reform agenda, and absolutely no common ground with said right winger, is exactly the thinking that led us to Donald Trump? I don't think you can have thought this through. It looks like a centrist reflex action, where any criticism of your position is dismissed as a refusal to compromise, a failure of pragmatism, regardless of whether that actually makes any sense.

Instead of shrugging, why don't you tell us what Stewart would do to bring us back to normalcy, and what normalcy might mean, and why it wouldn't just lead to exactly the same situation that it did before?
 
Darmok said:
Indeed, see this below...


Led by donkeys should take this on the road,
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IMO this is the most significant nettle that any party to the left of Trump/Farage will have to grasp.
On a global scale to have a Foreign Aid policy that is somehow linked to reducing population growth in a compassionate but effective way. If they can it will turn this problem back on the Right/Religion nutters as they cannot condone birth control; as well as reducing the extra 3-4 billion people that are forecast.
And on national immigration the (Australia type) points based system is just a covert racist policy as it largely restricts immigration to well educated whites/far east asians with good English and cherry picks the rest. IMO EU immigration is far preferable as part of the four freedoms but can, for instance, our Labour Party articulate the case ?
 
Tony L said:
I suspect most are protected by a properly fair and proportional electoral system where reactionary extremes on either side are neutralised. The UK never has been, and worse than that it looks almost certain we’ll now end up with a vacuous alt-right popularist leader of the minority Tory government that will be crowned by whatever majority wins of well under 120,000 Conservative Party members, i.e. anything over 60,000 highly reactionary and xenophobic elderly white people may get to dictate the UK falling off the edge of an economic cliff and into recession for far longer than they are likely to live. Anyone who thinks this crap is democracy is utterly bonkers.
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I don't think the Hungarian system is protecting them from Orban. I saw this "memorial" earlier this year, it was erected overnight but at least the protest posters have remained. The revision of history is scary.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/ce...t-divides-hungarians-angers-jewish-community/
 
Marina Hyde has done a great article on the departure of T May in The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/comment...9FtbV13sYKauP7Gfd_-D5u9rCz1G8eQwkazGF_hcoBZBc

Here is a taste, in a manner of speaking:

"Like her cricketing hero Geoff Boycott, and also Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, May has spent weeks refusing to be given out. Multiple final gambits included a speech this week in which she served up her same withdrawal agreement for consideration yet again. Unsurprisingly, even her supporters declined this shit sandwich, which they believe is distinguished by being the sort of shit sandwich where the bread is also made of shit." :D

Jack
 
Some Tory on R4 yesterday morning was saying it would be either Boris or Gove as the party are likely to want some sort of big gobbed buffoon to go toe-to-toe with Toad Face, so the like of Hunt etc. don't stand a chance.

MacDonalds are going to run out of milkshake at this rate.
 
tiggers said:
The EU told us not to waste the extra time they gave us and we seem to have gone out of our way to be doing just that. We're a joke of a country as far as the rest of the world is concerned and by the time these imbeciles in power realise that it will be too late. No deal is now more likely than ever and the stupid will have got what they wanted. The only thing I am going to enjoy is listening to them whinge and moan as their narrow little world falls apart and I remind them why!
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As odd as it may seem, I don't think the Tory Leadership election is wasting time. If they select a No Deal Brexiteer, as seems likely, it has reduced the options from three (No Deal, the agreed deal with the EU and Revoke) to just two. It wouldn't surprise me if the EU has accepted that there will be no deal and that we should be pushed out on 31st October.
 
i.j.russell said:
As odd as it may seem, I don't think the Tory Leadership election is wasting time. If they select a No Deal Brexiteer, as seems likely, it has reduced the options from three (No Deal, the agreed deal with the EU and Revoke) to just two. It wouldn't surprise me if the EU has accepted that there will be no deal and that we should be pushed out on 31st October.
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If we get a no deal brexiteer why will he or she wait until October?
 
Seanm said:
Instead of shrugging, why don't you tell us what Stewart would do to bring us back to normalcy, and what normalcy might mean, and why it wouldn't just lead to exactly the same situation that it did before?
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By being a normal right wing politician instead of a Johnson, the ERG or Farage. My point, obviously, is not that people should support him but that if he was the right bound of our politics we would be in a much better place.

I didn't think this was controversial to be honest, but there you have it.
 
matthewr said:
By being a normal right wing politician instead of a Johnson, the ERG or Farage. My point, obviously, is not that people should support him but that if he was the right bound of our politics we would be in a much better place.
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Sky wheeled out some ancient fossil from the Thatcher cabinet to comment on May’s resignation who later argued that as soon as a two-party system stops ping-ponging between centre-left and centre-right democracy as a concept basically dies. Something he’d apparently read in a book somewhere, though I was barely paying attention so I’ve no idea what. I’ve not thought about it for long enough to know if I agree with him, though almost certainly not as my favoured system is PR which by design reduces the stranglehold of just two dominant parties.
 
Seanm said:
Hey, what happened to civil discourse? :)

But anyway: you're seriously suggesting that not supporting a right winger who has no chance of finding themselves in a position of power anyway, when there exists a credible left wing party with mass support and a considered reform agenda, and absolutely no common ground with said right winger, is exactly the thinking that led us to Donald Trump? I don't think you can have thought this through. It looks like a centrist reflex action, where any criticism of your position is dismissed as a refusal to compromise, a failure of pragmatism, regardless of whether that actually makes any sense.

Instead of shrugging, why don't you tell us what Stewart would do to bring us back to normalcy, and what normalcy might mean, and why it wouldn't just lead to exactly the same situation that it did before?
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If you had an instrument to measure the Left, Right and far Right of a patients political spectrum by tapping into their brain, where would yours come out?

If the patient thinks Rory Stewart is normalcy, where then would the needle point?

img
 
Tony L said:
Sky wheeled out some ancient fossil from the Thatcher cabinet to comment on May’s resignation who later argued that as soon as a two-party system stops ping-ponging between centre-left and centre-right democracy as a concept basically dies. Something he’d apparently read in a book somewhere, though I was barely paying attention so I’ve no idea what. I’ve not thought about it for long enough to know if I agree with him, though almost certainly not as my favoured system is PR which by design reduces the stranglehold of just two dominant parties.
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It was Kenneth Baker. I heard him too. I thought it was an interesting point, and there’s probably some
validity. I think a better way of expressing it may have been that if the different sides are too far apart, politics and democratic governance cease to function because the pendulum is swinging too far. I remember discussing this and looking at different methods of historiography when I did A Level History. Marx would probably have agreed with it. Beer far enough to the left and the right will cease to be of interest. I don’t think the practical experiments in this field have proved him right though.
 
Tony L said:
Sky wheeled out some ancient fossil from the Thatcher cabinet to comment on May’s resignation who later argued that as soon as a two-party system stops ping-ponging between centre-left and centre-right democracy as a concept basically dies. Something he’d apparently read in a book somewhere, though I was barely paying attention so I’ve no idea what. I’ve not thought about it for long enough to know if I agree with him, though almost certainly not as my favoured system is PR which by design reduces the stranglehold of just two dominant parties.
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I don’t know what centre left and centre right look like any more.
 
matthewr said:
By being a normal right wing politician instead of a Johnson, the ERG or Farage. My point, obviously, is not that people should support him but that if he was the right bound of our politics we would be in a much better place.

I didn't think this was controversial to be honest, but there you have it.
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Look, it's very clear what you were trying to do with your original post, and that is police the line between friend and enemy, acceptable and unacceptable politics. That's fine. But all this "How is that controversial?" when at the same time you're saying that anyone who disagrees with you is virtue signalling or Trump enabling is just classic centrism, isn't it?

Where the line is drawn is always controversial. For you it’s between the floridly right wing nutjobs and ordinary decent agents of austerity and the Hostile Environment. For me those differences are largely cosmetic and they all belong in the same camp, so to speak. There just is no such thing at this stage as reasonable conservatism: it’s a fantasy and I’m disappointed but not surprised that the whole May experience hasn’t made that clear once and for all.
 
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