Category: Politics

Circling the drain

I have posted on political topics quite frequently in the past, but over the past couple of years I find myself increasingly disinclined to do so. I think there are a number of reasons for this, particularly in the case of the UK.

The first of these, obviously, is Brexit. Six years after the referendum and three years after Britain left the EU, people are still going on about it. Interestingly, this is only the case in the UK. Everyone else has moved on and adjusted to the changed reality, but in Britain people are still trying to argue the pros and cons of this increasingly self-evident failure.

Even here, it isn’t as if there is any actual conversation going on. People are still going around in circles, making the same claims and counter-claims, still fighting the same battles over and over again. It’s tiring, it’s boring, and it goes nowhere.

Related to this (I think) is that politics has become a lot more performative. There has always been an element of left-wing thinking that values ideological purity over achieving solutions, but the Conservative party appears to have leapt into a full-on embrace of identity politics. The media doesn’t help and we end up with proposals and policies that can’t work, won’t work, will never be implemented and serve only to send signals to one group of supporters or the other.

And I have better things to do with my time than watch various gangs of trolls attempting to score juvenile points at each other’s expense.

Britain is in a mess and things are not going to improve until those at the top start addressing issues rather than pandering to increasingly paranoid fantasies. But there is hope, as noted by Gerhard Schnyder in his Brexit Impact Tracker earlier this week.

Together with the increasingly deep internal divisions that Chris Grey wrote about last week, there is hope that “Brexit is slowly killing the Conservative Party,” possibly making room for a less nasty, less corrupt, more modern centre-right party. That is something the UK desperately needs.

I have thought for a while now that this needs to happen. The UK Conservative party needs to collapse completely in order to leave the way open for a more moderate party to fill the gaping void in British politics that is doing so much damage to the country.

In power and out of control

I don’t want to descend into spending the next two months banging on about the UK Government’s inept shenanigans, so I will try to keep this short.

With Johnson trying to cling to office until September, the Labour Party has attempted to table a no-confidence motion in the Government. By convention, no-confidence motions are always accepted and prioritised.

This time, however, the government has refused to allow time for the motion.

David Allen Green explains how the government refusing a confidence vote subverts our constitution.

The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum

Well, it’s been a bit of a fraught week or so if you follow any of the ongoing meltdown that is the UK government. It all started last week (on Tuesday) when a former civil servant revealed — to no-one’s surprised — that Boris Johnson had indeed been lying about the most recent self-inflicted scandal to beset his administration.

I say that no-one surprised but Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, was so shocked by this news that he promptly resigned. This resignation was followed promptly — suspiciously promptly — with a resignation from Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. No further ministers resigned but, over the next couple of days, most of the rest of the government did.

By Thursday, Johnson finally realised that the jig was up and gave a speech… not exactly resigning, but acknowledging that even his own party didn’t want him in charge any more. Of course, Johnson being Johnson, he still tried to cling to his salary for as long as he could get away with. But the wheels were in motion and the Conservative Party eventually started the process of selecting a new leader. Once the leader of the Conservative Party is selected, he or she will automatically become the next Prime Minister and there really is nothing more Johnson can say or do about any of this.

And we now have a date to which we can look forward:

The U.K prime minister is set to step down from his role in eight weeks’ time, after a new Tory leader is elected in a ballot of party members ending September 5. Johnson’s anointed successor is likely to take over as Tory leader and U.K. Prime Minister the following day — Tuesday, September 6.

First we have a couple of weeks during which the Conservative MPs will vote and vote again until they are down to only two candidates. Then there will be a long drawn out summer while these last two candidates attempt to appeal to the few thousand reactionaries and lunatics that make up the wider Conservative Party.

This is going to get ugly.

Eight candidates have managed to scrape together enough support to make it onto the first ballot, and what is frightening is that they are all either genuinely bonkers or pretending to be.

In many ways, Johnson is a symptom rather than the cause of this disaster.

The red-faced Europhobe wing of the Conservative Party has been around since the 1980s, if not longer, fighting the same old fantasy battles against an imaginary enemies while the rest of us got on with our lives.

It was David Cameron who, on discovering that he was unable to lead his own party, decided to hold a referendum to shut them up. And it was David Cameron who gave no thought whatsoever as to how this referendum should be organised, what question should be asked, or what the consequences might be if it all went badly wrong.

As we all know, it went very badly wrong indeed and Cameron promptly resigned.

Cameron was followed by Theresa May who — again, with no consultation or consideration of the consequences — not only rushed into starting the process of Britain’s exit from the EU, but also announced a set of negotiating red lines that set Britain on course for the insanely hard Brexit in which the country has found itself.

She could had invested some time in trying to build a consensus. She could have looked for a form of Brexit with which most people could accept. But instead, she decided to pander to the fantasist minority in her own party and, when she finally found herself facing reality, her party ousted her in favour of Boris Johnson.

Johnson didn’t even try to deal with reality. He simply lied, and lied again, telling the extremists upon whose support he depended whatever they wanted to hear.

Johnson’s lies and delusions have finally come back to bite him, but the end of Johnson does not mean the end of his toxic legacy. Under his premiership, the Conservative Party has become a hollowed out shell, comprising of English Nationalists and Libertarian Fundamentalists and one that has nothing to offer but imaginary battles and endlessly re-litigated feuds.

The sooner this party implodes, the better.

Here’s a song:

Schrödinger’s Brexit

I haven’t had much to say about the ongoing disaster that is Brexit, but a couple of articles caught my eye this week, so I thought it was worth making a brief return to the subject.

First of all, Vince Cable asks “Why have Remainers gone silent as the costs of Brexit pile up?” While I am less than convinced about Cable’s conclusions, he is right to point out that the country can’t start to deal with the consequences, or to find away forward, if everyone continues to pretend that Brexit isn’t a thing.

And Rafael Behr provides a reality check by pointing out that the Northern Ireland protocol isn’t the problem, Brexit is. Behr makes much the same point as Cable, that Labour (and, to a lesser extent, the Liberal Democrats) of being cast as unrepentant remainers that they continue to fall silent in the face of the Conservatives’ attempts to constantly refight the same Brexit battles.

It is a formula for perpetual crisis. The constitutional mess that Johnson has made of Northern Ireland is so far the gravest episode, but unlikely to be the last. The problem isn’t that the protocol cannot be made to work as written, but that it was written to enact a Brexit that doesn’t work.

The result is that we see Boris Johnson and his minions promising to get Brexit done. Again, and again, and again.

Brexit has happened. Britain has left the EU and the mandate embodied by the referendum has been discharged, and then some. It does need to be recognised, though, that this is not a trivial change and there will be many consequences from implementing such a change.

The country is not going to be able to deal with these consequences, however, until people start acknowledging that they exist.

Quote of the day: Boris being Boris

[A lot of senior government figures are] seemingly incapable of grasping that the entire executive taking on the character of this amoral and discipline-free man will end very badly indeed. It is precisely Johnson’s lack of discipline and moral courage that has resulted in this country having both the highest Covid death toll in Europe and the most unnecessarily long economic shutdown and loss of essential freedoms. Gloating that the voters don’t think they deserve better will not be the recipe for a great British future.

— Marina Hyde

The Grievance Machine

When it comes to Brexit, One of the more perceptive commentators around is Rafael Behr. So it is worth considering the following remark:

For the true believers, a good Brexit is one that keeps the grievance alive; that makes foreigners the scapegoat for bad government; that continues to indulge the twin national myths of victimhood and heroic defiance. Measured for that purpose, Johnson’s pointless Brexit is perfect.

The Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) is designed as an ongoing negotiation, with five-yearly reviews and I have tended towards the view that now Brexit is “done”, the whole issue can be toned down somewhat. The TCA framework can then be used to allow Britain to make the best of a bad deal by slowly and quietly re-aligning itself with the EU.

But what if I’m being overly optimistic here? What if the TCA turns out to be the start of a lengthy deterioration in relations. If the Brexiters continue to be unable to get over the fact that they have now achieved everything they demanded, we could all be looking towards endless and escalating confrontations.

That said, it’s only a month since the transition arrangements came to an end. I can still hope that people become bored enough of the whole mess that no-one wants to hear the Brexiters any more. And, once the process becomes as dull as it should be, things can start to improve again.

But it may be worth preparing for the worst.

Unfriended

So here’s a bit of news from Australia, where legislation has been published to make Google and Facebook pay news publishers. The main response to this has been from Facebook who decided to show their displeasure and, presumably convince everyone that they are too important for legislators, by blocking links to news websites in the country.

This didn’t go quite to plan:

But when Facebook implemented its ban, an online bookstore, charities, and even a domestic violence support service saw their Facebook presences erased. Australia’s national Basketball and Rugby bodies also saw their pages sent to the sin bin.

According to Facebook, this is because the law doesn’t spell out clearly enough, for them, what is news and what isn’t.

This leaves Facebook in the interesting position of telling advertisers it offers superior micro-targeting services, while telling the world it is unable to tell the difference between a newspaper and a bookshop.

When I saw this story, I was close to posting the above quote and leaving it at that. But then I read on and, while the reporter notes that:

Having woken up to a news-free Facebook, your Australia-based correspondent can report that that sky has not fallen in and it remains possible to be well-informed and entertained down under.

Which is as it should be. Facebook, ultimately, is just a website and one that I have been quite happy to ignore since I deleted my account in 2012.

But then there’s this:

I’ve seen other complaining that they liked Facebook as a news aggregator and miss that aspect of its service but will instead visit actual media websites even if that’s a bit fiddly.

Apologies in advance to anyone reading this who gets their news from Facebook, but this is madness.

Facebook uses an algorithm to determine what to show you. Obviously, I have no insight into how this algorithm works — which is a problem in itself — but we do know that it tends to simply deliver more of the same, dragging users of the Zuckerweb into ever more polarised echo chambers.

There is a better alternative. It’s called RSS.

This is a technology that saw it’s heyday in the first decade of the 21st century and allows you to aggregate all of the content, across the web, that you want to see. You would visit a website, add their RSS feed to your preferred reader and, from then on, all of their content is delivered straight to you. It really is that simple.

RSS has fallen out of favour somewhat with the rise of social media and its algorithmic timelines took hold, even though the technology itself still underpins much of the modern web. I still use it, however, and I honestly don’t know how I would manage without it. I can see what I want, when I want, and organised how I want.

So, rather than having to constantly keep up with the latest online drama, I can take twenty minutes, two or three times a day, to check up on issues and subjects that interest and concern me. And then I can go back to focussing on whatever else I’m supposed to be doing.

Although RSS has fallen out of favour, it hasn’t gone away. Many news sites, most blogs and many other sites continue to deliver RSS feeds. The Guardian, for example, offers a feed not only for the site as a whole, but also a separate feed for every individual writer and subject. And, of course, there are still plenty of aggregators out there.

I have been happily using NewsBlur since Google Reader was killed off, but many other options are available.

Quote of the Day: Will the Brexit government take responsibility?

The full effects of Brexit, now that the transition period has ended and the TCA has kicked in, are still only beginning to be felt. Every single one of them discredits the claims made by Brexiters, including the idea that there was no need to extend the transition so as to allow a genuine implementation period. There’s no point in them continuing to deny these effects, or continuing to try to justify the false claims they made. Now, it is their responsibility to work to mitigate, so far as it is possible, the worst of the damage they have created.

— Chris Grey looks at some of the many ways in which Brexit is coming apart at the seams .

Quote of the Day: Everything Possible

The trade barrier in the Irish Sea was Boris Johnson’s policy (which he reversed from his predecessor), which he agreed with the European Union and for which won a mandate in a general election, and that he then ensured was enacted into domestic law.

There was nothing more Johnson as prime minister could have done for there to be this trade barrier in the Irish Sea.

–David Allen Green provides Four examples of Prime Ministerial power – how Boris Johnson in fact ‘did everything he could’ for there to be a trade barrier down the Irish Sea