General British politics discussion thread

breezy1985

Everybody in the UK should be asking for a pay "rise" because thanks to this useless government anyone who doesn't get a pay adjustment is infact getting a pay cut.

Sudden Valley

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120953695#Comment_120953695

I think you'll find MPs have had a 30% pay increase since 2010 while doctors have had a pay decrease in that period. So MPs are able to find money behind the couch to pay themselves an increase. Given the same government has been in power for that period, the government MPs have actually been responsible for the downturn in the economy yet have been rewarded while the doctors have been punished in the same period.

Water John

Who the fcuk cares if Lee Anderson is angry:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2023/aug/10/grant-shapps-tories-net-zero-energy-security-uk-politics-live

pixelburp

Moderate Tories beginning to find their voice? Or just some irrelevant figures halfway to retirement?

This small comment raised an eyebrow: anyone know exactly what implications there may be? Not that I imagine Sunak and his ilk give a fig about NI;

There are also legal implications for the Good Friday agreement and the the Brexit deal with the EU

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/13/we-risk-being-seen-as-the-nasty-party-again-warn-senior-conservatives

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120971680#Comment_120971680

That's a weird thing for the Guardian to just breeze over.

As for the moderate Tories? I think they know that Sunak can't guarantee their seats so there's not much point in staying loyal. They probably think the party needs a spell in opposition anyway.

Edit:

The GFA enshrines human rights in Northern Ireland. It says that any primary legislation passed by the Northern Ireland Assembly is subject to the European Convention on Human Rights, an international human rights treaty which the UK has been a signatory to since it came into effect in 1953.

The GFA placed a duty on the British government to incorporate ECHR rights into Northern Irish law. It says: “The British government will complete incorporation into Northern Ireland law of the European Convention on Human Rights, with direct access to the courts, and remedies for breach of the Convention, including power for the courts to overrule Assembly legislation on the grounds of inconsistency.”

Once the GFA came into force, after referendums held by the British and Irish governments, these rights were incorporated through the Human Rights Act (HRA) 1998. These ECHR rights underpin the GFA’s commitment to “the mutual respect, the civil rights and the religious liberties of everyone in the community”.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), based in Strasbourg, rules on possible violations of ECHR rights and can overrule laws passed by the Northern Ireland Assembly if they are incompatible with the Convention. People in Northern Ireland also have the right to remedy from the ECtHR for a breach of the ECHR. 

https://eachother.org.uk/good-friday-agreement-echr/

So, I think that that's what it means by "implications". We don't know exactly what since nobody's left the ECHR. I'm not worried because of two reasons: lack of Tory unity and lack of Tory competence.

ancapailldorcha

Cheeky piece from the Telegraph today:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/08/17/under-50-time-jump-ship-leave-britain/

https://archive.ph/iAzid

I say cheeky because this is one of the rags which is directly responsible for the ocean of fake news, disinformation and whataboutery that led us to this position. It doesn't really make much case of leaving though? Where would one go? The Telegraph aggressively marketed Brexit so that's 26 out of 27 EU countries out of the mix. Ireland has a similar set of problems though without the press barons and Tory party so there's that at least.

And the UK is not so much stagnating as it is fossilising. Fifteen years of anaemic growth mean that real wages are still below their 2008 peak – there are 30 year olds who have seen their entire working career go by without seeing meaningful growth in wages. The result is that countries we are used to thinking of as our peers are surging ahead.

Our GDP per capita, adjusted for actual purchasing power, is closer to Slovenia’s than it is to Denmark’s or Australia’s. American levels of prosperity are so far out of reach that we would need an economic Apollo mission to bridge the gap between us; the general manager of a Buc-ee’s petrol station in Texas is paid more than our Prime Minister.

Indeed. This is one of the papers that did its damndest to shield the Tory party and now it's acting as if it's somehow a completely separate entity. I saw a piece the other day in the FT stating that the UK without London has a similarly sized economy to Mississippi, the poorest state of the USA.

I doubt the Buc-ee's general manager decided to place barriers between their businesses and the customers.

It’s not as if the push factors are lacking. The housing market has passed beyond dysfunction and into catastrophe. Record numbers of adults still live with their parents, trapped by surging rents and unaffordable house prices. Those who do strike out can expect to spend well over 20 per cent of their incomes on housing costs, double the proportion that baby boomers spent when they were young. The average deposit on a family home would take that family around 19 years to save, compared to three years in the 1980s.

Young people wanting to start families are finding things previous generations took for granted to be effectively out of reach. It’s hard not to connect this dysfunction with the birth rate reaching record lows. Fertility intentions – the number of children women want to have – have been pretty much at replacement level in Britain even as the number of children they actually have has fallen.

Yep and whose fault is this? An entitled older generation who often vote entirely on screwing over everyone else and then complain when they can't spend as much time as they like in Benidorm when they get back. I'm generalising of course but the sheer lack of self-awareness here is something to behold.

It's no wonder these problems persist when we have publications like this doing to the well what water companies are doing to British rivers and lakes.

For the love of God, do not look at the comments.

serfboard

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120989512#Comment_120989512

And if the under 50s get out of the country, who are going to look after that older generation, many of whom voted for Brexit? That would be immigrants. But I thought that the country didn't want immigrants? How to square that circle? Hmmm ...

Nody

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120990271#Comment_120990271

Duh, robots obviously! We've seen how robots revolutionized the fruit & veggie pickings for farmers and removed the need for temporary labour to be hired from the other side of the world etc. through the brilliant enabling policies of the Tory government; it was a true watershed moment.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120990594#Comment_120990594

Don't forget those robots also saved the Good Friday agreement by seamlessly searching all cross border Irish traffic with their x-ray eyes

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120990271#Comment_120990271

Sadly, long term thinking doesn't seem to be their strongsuit. Recall that surge in searches for "What is the EU?" on the 24th June 2016.

silverharp

everyone is making it sound like a bad thing , a culturally and economically weaker britain has accelerated a united Ireland by years, even unionists must be having doubts as to what they are united to lol

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121003746#Comment_121003746

Indeed, you could argue that Brexit has been great for Ireland (and for the EU itself). The Brexiteers have sabotaged their own country and left it much weaker.....but predictably are in extreme denial about the damaged they have caused.

PommieBast

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121003932#Comment_121003932

These days a united Ireland is really down to whether Irish taxpayers actually want the place back. Bit in the FT a few days ago about how both Labour and the Conservatives would be all the happy to get shot of the place.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121003746#Comment_121003746

Conversely: Northern Ireland currently has no government, and sectarian division the most pronounced thanks to its most pro DUP shedding the mask of civility..., since and because of Brexit. There's only circumstantial evidence the vague concept of "United Ireland" has legs beyond talk of White Papers and border polls.

Brexit has forced more cross border overlap, something that's openly causing conniptions within the DUP... but the translation to open UI support is, imo, exaggerated.

CelticRambler

There's no reason to think that a UI is going to happen next week, or even next year, but equally there's still an awful lot of Brexit road to be travelled. Assuming the Tories are relegated to the opposition benches in the very near future with just enough seats to keep them in the role of the Official Opposition, they'll start manoeuvring pretty quickly to get their red-white-and-blue ducks in a row for a future return to power.

I can see a situation where Labour do Labour and think they can get away without putting electoral reform into practice. So I think it's conceivable that the Tories will get a FPTP win in two elections' time, say in about ten years. Ten years is a long time for the EU to introduce new rules and regulations for which the Labour government will have to constantly be thinking "how does this fit with the GFA? and our plans for divergence (or not)" while the Brexiter Tories are heckling them about doffing their cap to Brussels and not being True Brits.

That'll keep the partisan sores open in NI, but at the end of the day, the citizens of NI will have had ten years of an endless supply of real time comparisons of what Brexit means for businesses and ordinary people, and I reckon they'll have decided to elect a somewhat more moderate government of their own by then. If (when?) a gang of Hard-Brexit Headbangers take Westminster in 2034 or thereabouts, and the only thing stopping them from getting a True Brexit done at that stage is the GFA, then I think we'll see that the newly appointed Minister for NI will decide that "the conditions are met" for holding a referendum, with a fair bit of not-so-subtle messaging reminding the population of NI that there's no orange in the Union Flag.

silverharp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121003977#Comment_121003977

there is only one direction it can go though at some point , future border polls would also depend on there being less "castle catholics" for example , all Ireland can do is be the strongest economy it can be and look like a decent country to hitch one's wagon to (which is debatable we are doing).

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121003932#Comment_121003932

Nothing about sabotaging the UK and making it weaker confers any benefit on Ireland or on the EU — quite the contrary. Ironically, that's the kind of zero-sum thinking that characterises the Brexit movement.

serfboard

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121005600#Comment_121005600

Don't agree that there's no benefit for the EU from what has happened to Britain. The exiters around Europe such as LePen and Salvini quickly changed their tune when they saw what happened to Britain.

Sam Russell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121005996#Comment_121005996

Yes, but Poland and Hungary, and possibly Italy are now the awkward squad making unanimity hard for the Commission and Parliament.

The right wing in most EU member states is on the rise - which is not good for anyone.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121006144#Comment_121006144

Not to be glib or facetious, but given Italy's notoriety / tradition for rotating its government and/or PM every couple of years, my worry about Meloni's little fascist return isn't especially great right now. She hasn't wasted time introducing some socially right-wing policies, but let's wait and see. Hungary remains the largest, most illiberal state closest to out-and-out autocracy right now; not even sure how and where that square gets circled.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121006144#Comment_121006144

I'm not convinced they are - they seem to draw most of their support across Europe from uneducated over 50s (very different to what was happening in the 1930s). It seems older 'left behinds' or conservatives have become more extreme and reactionary in their politics, but they don't appear to represent the future.

Water John

This is a good analysis of the view of citizens not deeply tuned into politics, which is the majority;

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/23/tories-too-pungent-politics-labour-blandness

Tom Mann Centuria

Sunak guilty of breaking Parliament's code of Conduct but it was probably accidental, so no harm no foul apparently.

https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/sunak-found-to-have-breached-parliaments-code-of-conduct-355268/

breezy1985

Sunak could turn out to be unusually corrupt even for a Tory PM.

PommieBast

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121020377#Comment_121020377

After Peter Cruddas I stopped paying attention to anything on the corruption front.

Timberrrrrrrr

Dorries FINALLY resigns

https://twitter.com/NadineDorries/status/1695477448861757833?t=0VFI_b-yvCH_KRDKizsVSA&s=19

Water John

Sunak has fresh, conflict of interest, to deal with in trade agreement talks with India;

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/26/rishi-sunak-faces-fresh-conflict-of-interest-row-over-india-trade-talks

Peregrinus

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121030592#Comment_121030592

Actually, it's not clear that she has resigned.

She has written a 1,800-word resignation letter beginning "Dear Prime Minister" and sent it to . . . the Daily Mail, who have published it in full, God love them.

Has she also sent it to the Prime Minister? We don't know.

Even if she has, that would not effect her resignation; the Prime Minister is not involved in the resignation process for MPs. If an MP wishes to resign, they ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer to appoint them as Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds. Being appointed to that office disqualifies them from membership of the House of Commons.

So, has Dorries asked to be appointed to the Chiltern Hundreds? In the letter she (possibly) sent to the PM, she says she will ask, which means that, at the time she wrote the letter, she hadn't asked. Has she asked since? Buggered if I know. I mean, I know she said she was about to, but last June she announced her resignation "with immediate effect", and she's still around, so you'll forgive me if I don't place implicit reliance on her promise.

Robert Hutton, the Parliamentary sketch writer of The Critic has read the whole letter so you don't have to, bless him. You can read his take on it here.

rock22

@Peregrinus Thanks for link to Robert Hutton's article.

"Actually, it's not clear that she has resigned."

The Guardian reported on 26th Aug that the treasury confirmed they received Dorries intention to step down. So one less idiot MP to worry about.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/aug/26/nadine-dorries-formally-resigns-as-mp-after-11-week-delay

mazdamiatamx5

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121005600#Comment_121005600

Completely agree but it must be said that Brexit has completely vindicated the Irish political establishments long term plan to make our economy much less dependent on and tied to theirs. Thank f*** the eurosceptic movement never got serious traction here