Interesting Links for 19-10-2022

[andrewducker]

1. The Simpsons explains why most people will be worse off than their parents

(tags:simpsons equality economics work viaSwampers )

2. Anti-trans bigots forced Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre into lockdown

(tags:Edinburgh rape bigotry LGBT transgender )

3. MPs back abortion clinic buffer zone law

(tags:UK abortion GoodNews )

4. Russians are very dependent on their trains, and sanctions are knocking them out of service

(tags:trains Russia viaDanielDWilliam )

5. I think Truss has been told that Hunt will reverse her idiocy, and she's to do nothing until she's replaced

(tags:politics conservatives epicfail )

6. Moving On: How the British Public Views Brexit and What It Wants From the Future Relationship With the European Union

(tags:UK Europe polls )

Comments

Truss

[danieldwilliam]

It is unclear to me what treats the Tory Party has to offer a former PM.

I'm not saying they don't have some but I wonder what they control or think they control that would be of interest to Truss.

Re: Truss

[andrewducker]

Being hired as a consultant by a party backer at a ridiculous rate for a few years?

Re: Truss

[danieldwilliam]

Well that sort of thing but that requires a) the Tory Party to control their backers and not the other way round, b) those backers not already having promised Truss their support over other factions of the Tory Party (go and do all that Tufton Street stuff for us and get rid of the One Nation lot) and c) that Truss doesn't have other offers independent of the Tory Party insider set.

I'm also wondering about things like heading off to the Secretary General of NATO a la George Robinson. IN some ways it would be very difficult for the Tory Party to put their shortest serving and obviously worse* PM in any sort of global leadership position.

*I think Cameron is the worst because his negligent management of UKIP and the EU referendum got us where are today but I think the public will think Truss is worse than Johnson, worse than May, worse than Cameron becuase of where the shit landed not because of how caused the shit to hit the fan.

Re: Truss

[andrewducker]

It's not that I think that the Tories control their backers, as their backers would presumably not want the party to totally implode, and would therefore be willing to pay Truss not to implode it.

I think that Truss has made the worst unforced error in the shortest time-period, which gets some kind of award.

Cameron clearly caused the biggest problems. If nothing else, he could easily have hung on for the rest of the term and made the landing outside of the EU a lot less painful than it has been.

Of course, if Brown/Blair had brought in PR like they promised then we'd not have had *any* of these issues!

Re: Truss

[danieldwilliam]

We might well have avoided Brexit with PR. Re-run the 2005 electiob under PR. UKIP would have won some seats off the Tories and Labour. Likewise the Lib Dems. The SNP and Greens do better.

So we get a different policy mix. Including some explicitly UKIP policies.

I'm not sure we avoid the 2010 financial crash or the fall out from that. I'm then not sure that we still aren't dumb enough as a country to blame the EU for that fall out and try to fix that by having a referendum on the EU using a dumb process and also missing how under pressure and unhappy many people were.

Re: Truss

[andrewducker]

UKIP would definitely have had some seats - but whether that would have affected policy overly much is a great question.

If the Conservatives could officially split into Centre-Con and UKIP, then you exile the worst of the Conservatives to the fringes, and the sensible remainder of the party can work with others in a much more sensible manner.

If the results were UKIP 20% (which seems to be where UKIP maxed out in 2015), Centre-Conservatives 30%, Lib-Dems 10%, Centre-Labour 25%, Left-Labour 15% then I'd be up for a Centrist Labour/Conservative coalition, in the style of the German grand coalitions, and no UKIP policies making their way into the government at all.

I'm sure any real results would be a good deal more complex than that, of course :-)

(And yes, we still might do stupid things, but they'd need to be unforced errors, rather than panicking about a few percent going to UKIP and that then controlling how your much larger party acts, which is definitely a big factor of how FPTP affects things.)

Re: Truss

[danieldwilliam]

I think there is a question in the counter-factual about how UKIP get on with being a political party with actual representation. Do they go nuts and demonstrate to the public that they are swivel-eyed nutjobs who shouldn't be trusted with sharp objects or do they settle down to being a more normal right-of-centre party?

Not all of the UKIP platform was unpalatable. I seem to recall some stuff in their manifestos that I wasn't appalled by but I can't remember what it was now. So I could see them being involved in passing some legislation and probably a vehicle for some political representation for the small town provincial England that now makes up a large part of the Red Wall.

But how it all might have shaken out or might yet shake out is very contingent I think. A significant number of Labour voters are pretty socially conservative in some way or other and I wonder which faction would aim to capture that social conservatism, the democratic socialists probably not but there's a section of the social democrats who like to centralise things and then some supporters of devolution.

I expect I shall be watching post-PR England develop with interest from the capital of the People's Democratic Socialist (But Not *Too* Socialist) Republic (Or Not No Pressure) of South Shetland and North Northumbria at some point in the 2030's.

Re: Truss

[andrewducker]

Yes, all sorts of directions things can go, and many depend on factors both complex and outside of our control.

Re: Truss

[calimac]

We may get an experiment in the general question you raise in your first paragraph, if the "mega-bozos" (as they've been called) like Herschel Walker in the US Republican Party win their elections this year.

"Centralise things" vs. "devolution" was the big philosophical difference between the SDP and the old Liberals. How the Lib Dems have resolved this dichotomy isn't clear to me.

Re: Truss

[danieldwilliam]

My experience of the Lib Dems is that they seemed generally in favour of devolving powers but I'm not sure it's been tested in government that much.

Re: Truss

[danieldwilliam]

Truss has made a pretty spectacular specific and impactful error in a very short period of time.

Cameron's cowardice is one of his least acceptable failings.

[cmcmck]

5. Although did you notice that she's already u turned on the u turn over the triple lock?

They always seem to forget that a lot of older folks vote and a lot of them vote Tory!

[calimac]

I would guess that Hunt's announcements regarding changing policy were the condition he required in agreeing to take the job.

Is it the case, as I've vaguely heard, that Truss holds up Thatcher as her model? If so, it's very strange that Truss's method of operating, even before appointing Hunt, seems to be to take Thatcher's famous line, "The lady's not for turning," and remove the "not."

[andrewducker]

I think the problem is that when Tories look at Thatcher in the rearview mirror, all they see is "She removed obstacles to companies doing what they want" and rather than looking at her destination they just get slicing, as if we hadn't already had over a decade of austerity measures.