Like in the US, democracy in the United Kingdom is faltering. Our first past the post electoral system means the Tories can retain power with a third of the (active) electorate voting for them. Labour believes first past the post serves them well, but it doesn’t, because they would have been leading a coalition government in the last several elections under Proportional Representation. Instead it requires Labour to be a very broad house, meaning Starmer struggles to take strong positions on anything because he doesn’t want to lose votes from different groups (mainly from the centre right based on his recent statements). In a proportional voting system each party can be more focussed on having a distinct set of policies and beliefs, which can be debated openly with other parties without fear of alienating a large proportion of their base. It is clear that this is the core problem in the UK, Brexit was a symptom of this issue because people felt their vote actually counted and they wanted to protest against the neoliberal establishment. Now that the implications are becoming clear, a majority want to return to the EU. If Labour win the next election their position will be very fragile, and I’m unsure they will get more than one term.
Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition. As a result, decisions that are undesirable by the majority are consistently made.
We are currently after an election but before forming a new government and as part of the coalition negotiations the upcoming government is trying to pass several laws to weaken Israel's democracy, including one that effectively strips the Supreme Court of its ability to override non-constitutional[1] laws and directives (and let's not mention the personal legislation).
I suspect then that the problem is not specifically in the voting system, and the voting system at best can be a contributing factor.
[1] - Technically Israel doesn't have a constitution and instead has "Basic Laws" that serve a similar function, let's not get into that :)
I subscribe to the idea that the most important aspect of democracy is to be able to kick out the incumbents (and less important is that every opinion gets direct representation). I think for all the challenges in the US, it does this quite well.
Re-election rates for incumbents in the US Congress are very high [0]. In the House, they haven't dropped below 80% for at least 60 years. The Senate is slightly less stable, but still way above 60% ever since Reagan was elected.
There are two components though. One is the ability to choose the party, the other is the pressure on a party to adjust so that it appeals to enough voters to elect it. If a party doesn't need to adjust to get some votes, as in proportional representation, then we (potentially) end up with coalitions that live or die based on narrow issues, which is what the original post I replied to alluded to. On the other hand, if you have two parties that fight over the votes, you come closer to having parties that optimize for broad appeal.
There are lots of problems with democracy (just fewer than the other potential systems as has famously been said). Imo a two party first past the post system can actually help regularize the will of the people by forcing parties to align with actually electable platforms and not dig in on single issues. Lots more to say about that, I just want to counter the usual rhetoric about how proportional representation or similar systems are somehow automatically better
Put simply, "when most of the thieving stopped, the thriving stopped."
Britain faltering is not "strange" and has little to do with political party, rather its ability to use violence to extract capital from productive outside entities and support its welfare state is nearing an end.
The Economist has a long history of avoiding the elephant in the room because the people running it are hopelessly biased.
This isn't quite right. U.S politics is much less party-centric than it is in many other countries. Basically, though you've got a vast majority of candidates for X or Y office who are either democrats or republicans, their platform tendencies can be quite diverse, even though they often go against the grain of their own party's nominal positions. It's somewhat subtle, but this detail of U.S party politics makes for a strong multi-party diversity of candidates even though there are formally only two parties that mean anything for votes.
This is how you can have, for example, a surprisingly moderate republican senator like Susan Collins, sharing the same party with someone like Trump. And then also in the same party, a Rand Paul type.
I put to you that it in fact does this terribly, because if the government shits itself midway through term there is no mechanism for removal or new elections, as there are in most other countries. Wait out the 4 year term (or two year cycle) and deal with the tribalism
The upside is that the regular cycle means elections are at predictable intervals. US mid-term elections already have low turnout. Snap elections after a vote of no confidence only would decrease turnout.
> I subscribe to the idea that the most important aspect of democracy is to be able to kick out the incumbents
In think you are wrong on both points. The most important aspect of democracy is that it produces a government that reflects the popular will; being able to throw out the incumbents—at which the US does exceptionally badly—has some instrumental value to that, but isn’t an independent goal. And the pervasive use of FPTP elections is a big part of why the US is bad both at tossing incumbents and at providing effectivelt representative government.
I agree. And I'll point out that in the US 200 years ago, the only federal office directly voted on was house of representatives (not the senate, not the president).
OK, but members of the House are "representatives"; members of the Senate are "senators". So if you're going to regard mushbino's statement as referring to only one side, it has to be referring to the House.
It would be a bit odd if the median term length were much longer, and if you look at an actuarial table you'll see why. I guess that's one advantage to electing the ancient: built-in term limits.
> Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition.
Now Benjamin Netanyahu is soon to be back in power. He's generally acknowledged to be a crook, but nobody else seems to be able to assemble a governing coalition. He's already been Prime Minister for 15 years.
Is there a minimum quorum a party has to reach before they can enter parliament?
In Germany they need to get at least 5% of the votes. This was introduced because many small parties had made the parliament of the Weimar Republik unstable.
When New Zealand went shopping for a new electoral system in the 1990s, we ended up with one based closely on the German model, including the 5% threshold. The Israeli parliament was frequently pointed to as an Awful Warning of what would happen if we din't have the threshold.
Until 1992, Israel had a threshold of only 1%. Since then it has been repeatedly increased, and is now 3.25%. The parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe (CoE) recommends such thresholds be no more than 3%. [0] (Many member states defy this recommendation. Israel is considered non-European for the CoE's purposes, and therefore isn't a member state, but it is an observer. New Zealand is neither a member state nor an observer, but it does participate in some CoE conventions.)
The aforementioned thresholds are "formal" thresholds, but there are also "effective" thresholds, arising from district magnitude. In the absence of a single "at-large" (nationwide, in this context) district, districts need to be large to bring the effective threshold down even to 5%. (It depends on the seat-allocation method, but it could be about twenty representatives per district for a 5% effective threshold, and over thirty for a 3% effective threshold.)
Where the effective threshold is higher than the formal threshold, the latter has no effect. But where a parliament has districts with different numbers of representatives, districts can have different effective thresholds, so any formal threshold could have an effect in some districts and not in others. I believe this is the case in Czechia, Poland and Turkey (but I don't know whether the formal thresholds there apply nationally or at district level). On the other hand, the Netherlands has no formal threshold and a uniform effective threshold of only 0.67%. The effective threshold of Israel's Knesset would be less than 1%, but still greater than the Netherlands'.
[0] "58. In well-established democracies, there should be no thresholds higher than 3% during the parliamentary elections. It should thus be possible to express a maximum number of opinions. Excluding numerous groups of people from the right to be represented is detrimental to a democratic system. In well-established democracies, a balance has to be found between fair representation of views in the community and effectiveness in parliament and government." http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-XML2HTML-en.asp?fil...
> Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition. As a result, decisions that are undesirable by the majority are consistently made.
Could you explain this a bit more? Surely if they are proportionally elected and have the numbers to outvote the current government, then they're representing the majority views, not minority?
In the UK, our government gets elected by winning 40% of the vote and therefore almost every decision it takes is against the wishes of the majority of voters.
A simple majority may not be enough in certain cases.
Let's imagine a parliament with parties with these shares of seats (proportional to electoral votes): A = 50%, B = 33%, C = 15%, D = 2%. (Note: Not an actual Israeli parliament!)
Even for cases where a simple majority is sufficient, A would be able to overpower all other parties combined, had it one more representative. But with precisely 50% (or, funnier yet, something like 49.75%), it has to seek a coalition with at least one other party, even if every A representative is going to vote the same way (which is not a given). The smallest party, D, voting in an agreement with A, can turn tables with a guarantee; D's representatives will be courted by every other party, but by A's most of all.
For cases where a qualified majority, like 2/3, is required, a coalition is a must. A + C would narrowly miss it, and again D has an outsized influence. A + B would definitely make it, but usually A and B are opposed to each other. Thus the votes of C are worth more than their modest 15% of electorate represented.
OTOH B + C + D is enough to block any bill requiring a simple majority.
So C and D, which collectively represent 17% of electorate, will be able to command serious concessions from both A and B, which collectively represent 83%, but are usually opposed to each other.
(And no, something like A = 87% may be even worse.)
> Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition.
Unless there are no minor parties outside of government, isn’t that offset by the risk of what they currently get from being in government being lost while the rest of government continues by bringing in one or more currently-out-of-government minor parties in exchange for prioritizing some of their priorities?
(Anyhow, there’s been extensive comparative study across established democracies and a number of positive outcomes, including greater public satisfaction with government, track with greater effecrivd proportionality.
You are correct in theory, it is certainly a technical possibility to avoid such a problem. In practice, this isn't done and isn't possible since the major factions are too at odds with each other to create such a situation. In particular, everyone in the center-left knows that there's no point in trying to cooperate with Binyamin Netanyahu because he is guaranteed to betray them and not uphold his part of whatever bargain they make. Everyone in the right knows that they can't cooperate with anyone outside of Binyamin Netanyahu because they'll be accused of being evil terrorist supporting leftists and will lose many votes in the next election.
The point I was making is that it is actually this dynamic (and the fact that it is legitimized enough that it is able to continue) that is causing issues and that whatever is creating it is the real problem. Proportional representation may be the superior system, but it is not the cure for the problems democracies are facing and so the specific system in use should not be blamed as the root cause of these problems and it is then in my opinion a contributing factor at best.
> In particular, everyone in the center-left knows that there's no point in trying to cooperate with Binyamin Netanyahu because he is guaranteed to betray them and not uphold his part of whatever bargain they make. Everyone in the right knows that they can't cooperate with anyone outside of Binyamin Netanyahu because they'll be accused of being evil terrorist supporting leftists and will lose many votes in the next election.
So, by your description, due to the polarizing influence of a particular personality (a—and I get that Netanyahu’s political longevity makes this east to forget—transitory situation) you have, despite (but not because of proportional representation) the dynamics of a two-party system with potentially influential potential defectors from a majority, rather than the normal dynamics of multiparty coalition building.
Guess what, that’s a fairly common state of FPTP independent of personalities; the potential defectors just aren’t conveniently marked with a different party label than the solid partisans.
> Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition.
If small parties' power is such a problem, why don't the big parties form another grand coalition? Or form Scandinavian-style pre-election pacts with the small parties?
[Edited to acknowledge grand coalitions aren't a foreign concept in Israel]
Simple, because you aren't going to form a coalition with parties radically different than yours, you choose those that are mostly aligned with you. But now any party within the coalition, even a small one, can force the coalition to listen to them, because the alternative is to form a coalition with parties even more at odds.
That's the dilemma the big parties face. By choosing not to deal with each other, they empower small parties. Without actual majority support, they (rightly) have to compromise with somebody.
What are the radical differences between Likud and Yesh Atid?
(In fact, they did form a government coalition in 2013, which lasted about two years. And then there was the 2020, where the two biggest parties in that election, Likud and Blue and White (of which Yesh Atid was a major constituent), formed a government. So it happens. I'm not sure the current two biggest parties, Likud and Yesh Atid, have a radical difference in policy platform. (the most radical things the newly elected coalition government is putting on the agenda are not really from Likus). They certainly are not going to form a government together this time, but I don't think it's because they are radically different, exactly.).
You're making the common mistake that these parties are about their platforms, not their leaders. It's not so much a difference between Likud and Yesh Atid so much as a difference between Netanyahu and Lapid, with Netanyahu's struggles to avoid a corruption verdict and Lapid's insistence that elected politicians must not continue to serve after indictment.
Lapid and other center-opposition leaders have all indicated a willingness to negotiate with a Likud without Netanyahu at the helm.
To add to this (which I feel is also a partial answer to lambertsimnel's original question here), if we look at politics as an iterated prisoner's dillema, the center-left parties have chosen a "tit for tat" strategy whereas Binyamin Netanyahu has chosen an "always defect" strategy.
Of particular note, at the start of the corona crisis, there have already been several failed elections. At the time, Benny Ganz's party ran together with Yesh Atid (and Telem) in a combined list, but since Yesh Atid refused to cooperate with Binyamin Netanyahu (after their own bad expereinces), Benny Ganz chose to split up the combined party and join Binyamin Netanyahu in the coalition, citing the importance of having a stable government for these difficult times (of COVID).
The coalition agreement stipulated that Binyamin Netanyahu will be the Prime Minister for the first two years and Benny Ganz for the final two years (elections in Israel are theoretically every 4 years). However, after two years, Binyamin Netanyahu disbanded the government (by manufacturing a disagreement so that the coalition could not vote together). Benny Ganz then learned his lesson.
(There are of course more disagreements and issues and a lot more nuance then what I can present in a short comment on an online forum, but hopefully this is a useful example to understand the sort of issues we are having)
Going back to my original post, I'm trying to say that the fact that whatever factors have lead to this sort of rotten situation (and that we stay in that situation continually) are the real problem, and not specifically the voting system. Even if we accept that proportional representation is the best system ever, it is not on its own enough to prevent the sorts of problems you see lately in democracies around the world.
I was replying to the comment, "you aren't going to form a coalition with parties radically different than yours."
But yes, it seems politics world-wide, the US certainly included, is increasingly more about personality, affect and identity/community -- and sheer competition for power between different players -- than it is about policy platform, agreed. Sometimes between parties which are actually not that different from each other. I think we may be agreeing with each other.
I think the reason that a "national unity" coalition government in Israel seems so unlikely currently may not in fact be that the major parties "are radically different from each other". (The coalitions formed may be, because of the outsized influence of minority parties on the flanks necessary to build the coalition, which is the whole topic of this thread -- why don't the major parties form a coalition to avoid that? I suggest the reason they don't is not that they are radically different from each other, disagreeing with the comment I was replying to)
This is interesting. Does Israel have parliamentary supremacy? In NZ we have MMP which is proportional but Supreme Court rulings on law do no "override" action as parliament is still supreme. So it can't override laws perse.
If you have a constitution (I'm not sure what happened after you rejected Australia's, but you're still in there and it's not too late to join) then the Supreme Court can override laws which it deems unconstitutional.
I think the issue is that recent governing coalitions' majorities in the Knesset (over and above what they need to appoint a prime minister) is smaller than an individual small party. Consequently, an individual small party could unilaterally bring down the government (or threaten to).
No, he's complaining that minority parties can join with the opposition to form a majority and consequently bring down the government (this can happen when government forms a minority government or relies on minority parties to form a government).
if the minority parties work together with the opposition to form a majority representing a majority of the public surely that's a great example of real democracy in action, it may be a 'peril' to the governing party .... but at that point they represent a minority of the populous - this is not 'shocking' this is how a democratic country should behave
I live in New Zealand we have a proportional representative voting system (MPP), since we changed we've had coalitions and minority governments .... but we haven't had dysfunction or anarchy, largely I think because our parties know that if they go beyond the pale they wont get reelected
The problem is not that the minority parties can cooperate with the opposition to bring down the current government, that's indeed a good thing. The problem is that every coalition in recent years has been so narrow that any individual party in the coalition, no matter how small, is still large enough to bring down the coalition on their own.
And my point in general was not that proportional represntation is bad because it has this specific failure mode, but rather that our political climate has put us in the situation where the failure mode happens consistently, and so the real problem democracies are facing (in my opinion) are the factors that lead to this situation rather than specifically the voting system (which at best is a contributing factor).
> our parties know that if they go beyond the pale they wont get reelected
Ours know that going beyond the pale won't cause them any problems, especially for the smaller parties ;)
Electoral systems are very difficult to change. The party with enough votes to lead the change isn't going to be interested, because it's the system that put them in that position.
Edit: So we're talking electoral systems, referenda have a big caveat. Usually you vote a goal, but you don't vote how it's going to be implemented. The brexit was sold as a measure against Brussels' regulation and taxes...
And also the adverts of sick babies who would not get the funding they needed if the money was spent on implementating proportional representation. A similar lie was used to sell Brexit.
> And also the adverts of sick babies who would not get the funding they needed if the money was spent on implementating proportional representation
Proportional representation and ranked choice voting are orthogonal concepts. A referendum for ranked choice voting doesn't necessarily implement proportional representation.
No, but it would likely be more proportional than the current system in the UK where the last time a single party won a majority of the popular vote was 1931 and yet parties usually have a majority in parliament. Proportionality is not a binary thing. You can have more or less proportional systems of government based on the selection / election mechanic chosen.
1. regulations around referendums (compared to general elections) are very poor and the "no to AV" campaign exploited this by running an extremely dishonest campaign [1]
2. turnout was < 50% of the electorate so one can somewhat facetiously imply from the result that the majority of the electorate don't care what the system is.
There was a referendum to change the voting system to Alternative Vote.
It's important to remember that the change on offer was itself deeply flawed. It was trying to apply a reasonable system for electing one person to elect a whole Parliament. However AV is not a form of proportional representation and would probably have resulted in an even less proportionate cohort of MPs at the following general election had the referendum result been the other way.
Some people were arguing at the time that it was a useful first step to establish popular support for the principle that FPTP had to go but others were arguing that AV was a poisoned chalice and voting for it implied that it was an acceptable alternative and would end the debate for a generation without really fixing the problem.
Worth remembering that the Tories only allowed the vote as part of the coalition deal, and then actively campaigned against it. The whole thing was a damp squib, and was designed to be
A lot of people who wanted PR saw the Alternative Vote referendum as a poison pill and voted against it. It's one of the reasons support for the Lib Dems subsequently crashed, as they were seen to have fundamentally sold out.
In any case, a referendum on whether to keep a fundamentally undemocratic electoral system is in itself undemocratic - there is no legitimate case for keeping an electoral system that effectively disenfranchises a substantial proportion of the electorate.
Democracy is remarkably robust and people fighting is not an indication that it is faltering. The UK has a long and proud history of tenuous balance between different groups that are all on the verge of doing violence to one another, the current era is remarkably peaceful and cooperative.
People are undercalling the effects of a multi-decade campaign against energy security in favour of environmentalist goals. The driver of the environment of cooperation post-WWII has been abundant cheap energy. That meant there was always a path forward where everyone was better off - which is no longer so obviously the case.
To be fair, it isn't just a policy problem. The UK is running out of fuel. But this article isn't going to the root cause of why people can't find an easy grow-the-pie solution to keep everyone working together.
The UK has the highest energy prices of any country in Europe and - not coincidentally - its energy companies make the highest profits.
The UK could have promoted renewables, and did for a while. But the current government - like you - is actively hostile to decentralised solutions that work, and prefers to promote corporate choke points over energy supply that have put the entire population at risk of fuel poverty.
It's been the same story across most of the privatised industries. The concept of the common good has been replaced with an oligarchic dystopia in which a few corrupt winners shake down everyone else.
The root cause is neoliberal dogma, which has been aggressively promoted to the population since the 1970s. It was sold as "freedom". But it's only ever been used to justify increasingly extreme economic apartheid and incredibly poor strategic planning.
The UK is not a poor country. It's not even an energy poor country. But it's on course to having the poorest working population in Europe.
That's not the fault of windmills and solar panels, and it's disingenuous to suggest it is.
Looking at the tabulated data [0], in 1965 the UK was roughly 200% the European average for per capita energy consumption. Now it is ~75% of the same. It has dropped in absolute terms too (dropped to ~75% of the 1965 figure). In fact, on a per-capita basis the UK is neck-and-neck with China. Nearly, actually it is slightly behind.
It looks a lot like an energy poor country.
> That's not the fault of windmills and solar panels, and it's disingenuous to suggest it is.
I'm not suggesting that. I assume it was decades of policy where people were asking "how do we kill off our cheapest source of energy", consistent with other western states. The UK - like everyone else - should have been focusing on how to secure cheap fossil fuels, how to bring down the cost of nuclear energy and loosening the regulatory state to accept that energy is needed despite NIMBYism. If the market says wind and solar are cheap then build those too, but only if they are cheap enough to make stand-alone economic sense.
Instead I suspect policy attempted to achieve an unachievable level of environmental non-interventionism and look like they are paying the price.
POSTSCRIPThttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_electricity_production... - mission success! Fossil fuels being phased out without a ready replacement. A country becoming energy poor in one graph. Of course there'll be some political tension with these sort of fundamentals.
> in 1965 the UK was roughly 200% the European average for per capita energy consumption. Now it is ~75% of the same. It has dropped in absolute terms too (dropped to ~75% of the 1965 figure)...
> It looks a lot like an energy poor country.
I'm not sure that follows. Couldn't you also say "it looks a lot like an energy efficient country"?
The Core i7 in my laptop uses a fraction of the energy of the Pentium III in a desktop a couple of decades ago, but I certainly don't want to go back to the P3 today.
Do you reckon you have reduced your energy substantially since the 2000s? With no lifestyle compromises? A 25% drop is a lot more than a Pentium.
They're poor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox#History covers most of the actual argument (and evidence) on why energy efficiency doesn't work that way. In an energy-rich environment the efficiency gains would go in to charging phones and tablets, or running extra cores and graphics cards. Or using electric vehicles. Something. Consumption wouldn't be dropping.
Double or triple glazing, insulation, mandatory energy efficient building codes, fuel efficiency standards, energy efficient light bulbs.... 25% reduction is certainly plausible. I'm surprised it isn't more, but I guess some industries remain high consumers. The lifestyle compromise is more expensive buildings, which hurts at least in the short term.
Personally, yes -- I have significantly smaller gas and electric bills despite being in a larger house in a colder climate as a result of better construction and insulation and more energy-efficient appliances. I also moved to a city where I can walk or bike for daily tasks so I fill up my (more fuel-efficient) car's gas tank about a quarter as often.
I'm not claiming this is the case generally across the UK -- I'm in the US and don't know the situation there. Just that it doesn't automatically follow that "I'm using less energy" necessarily equates to "less energy is available for me to use".
Heh, ouch. Hopefully that is a lesson to me in phrase my questions more carefully.
However, I don't think that is quite enough to show that Jevons' paradox has been avoided - you'll find that with the savings from paying less for heating and your car you have a bit more money left over - what happened to it? Because it represents the energy that was freed up. It isn't enough to say "Well I spent less energy on heating and petrol so total energy consumption went down". Maybe you consumed the energy as a capital good, or maybe it just got shunted to someone else to use.
It is really difficult to convince an economy to use less energy without some sort of legal or physical barrier. We'll find that you haven't actually caused a reduction in energy overall once the dust settles - because you haven't done anything to reduce the amount of energy production so it isn't obvious why it would have dropped.
The problem with your argument is that the energy cost of, say, charging a phone, is multiple orders of magnitude less than heating a room, and that in turn is many orders of magnitude from producing steel through recycling, and so on.
Comparable objects (a steel section produced in an arc furnace vs a steel section smelted from ore) have radically different energy requirements. If you legislate away the worst offenders (uninsulated houses) the raw drop in energy consumption is such that even if everybody starts leaving their lights on all the time, usage will still drop.
Here is a chart [0] of the UK's coal production over the last century+. And here is their oil production [1] forming the nice bell-curve-like plot of a country burning through their reserves. I'm sorry to be the one breaking the news to you, but trends like that have nothing to do with energy efficiency and everything to do with exhausting reserves.
In my opinion, they could probably have resisted this outcome by some judicious investment in making nuclear cheaper rather than getting distracted by the climate change nonsense. Maybe not, who really knows? Regardless these charts are the realities they face. The theory says they're running out of cheap energy, the stats indicate their running out of cheap energy. The decline in political quality suggest they're running out. Grumpy Brits flailing with things like Brexit suggest they're feeling some serious pressure to make changes. And unless something changes fairly radically, the UK has in fact become energy poor since circa 2008.
It could be worse, they'll probably survive. But coincidentally (<narrator: it wasn't a coincidence>), their GDP/capita has run in to a brick wall [2] and the effects from that'll be politically rocky. Democracy can cope.
I think we're talking at cross purposes here. I read GP as saying that energy usage will always meet whatever capacity you can generate. I don't think that's true: if the economic return from energy usage doesn't cover the cost of producing the energy itself, then production will fall.
I also don't think the UK's role as a fossil fuel exporter/producer is relevant at all. The UK was essentially de-industrialized in the 80's for political reasons, and the energy usage is inefficient, also for political reasons. Many countries have never been fossil fuel exporters, and do not have the UK's sky high energy costs.
The biggest single cause of waste (and thus high prices) in the UK is uninsulated homes. This is caused by a lack of sensible building codes, which in turn is caused by a lack of sensible politics.
I want to say - I did consider that as a counterargument but it is too weak. Moving closer to where your daily tasks take place is a reasonable way to make a lifestyle more energy efficient. It isn't necessarily a step down (why should we want to spend time in cars anyway?). It is potentially scaleable too, there are lots of examples of cities where people get packed in very tightly.
The issue is more that, while fader has demonstrated that they use less energy for heating and transport, they haven't actually demonstrated that they use less energy - what happened to the energy not going to those highlighted examples?
The key observation behind Jevons' paradox is that there is no reason for the aggregate energy production to go down just because some way of using energy gets more efficient. Since the payoff for the same amount of energy is higher, there is no economic incentive to produce less. Quite the opposite. Nothing in this example sits in contradiction to that, so there isn't a need to try and poke holes in a reasonable example of someone making their personal life more energy efficient to make the basic argument work. Plus there is the obvious practical evidence that economies only use less energy when there is an energy shortage, it is nigh impossible to find counterexamples that end well. The UK polity isn't acting like they have abundant free energy to play with.
except it really hasn't. America was dominant after WW2 and has mostly been costing downhill since. in the past 2 decades inequality has increased, life expectancy is stagnant, obesity is up, cost of healthcare and education is up. public transit is worse than it was in the 1950s. it's pretty hard too find a metric on which the US is doing better on than Europe at this point
There are some grass roots efforts emerging to convince people of the importance of purely technocratic improvements that society needs. In this case, cheaper energy and faster transportation.
Proportional representation also has its problems. Look at the Netherlands, which has 17 different parties in parliament and led to it becoming increasingly difficult to form coalitions, see:
I'm confused when you wrote "becoming increasingly difficult to form coalitions". Mark Rutte has been PM since 2010. Wiki says: "On 2 August 2022, he became the longest-serving Prime Minister in Dutch history..." Without specific examples that demonstrate a trend, the term "increasingly difficult" is editorial-speak. Also, look at NL economy for last 30 years. Looks pretty good compared to any other highly developed country. That is very difficult to do without a high functioning govt.
You might not approve of where the “center” is in the US, but Democrats absolutely represent the center left and republicans represent the center right of the actual American electorate.
Yes, but since the US is a more right-wing country than the rest of the developed world (healthcare, death penalty, taxes...), that would mean the Democrats are "centrist" and Republicans "right." Characterizing based on relativity to the developed world seems much more fitting, since we're discussing it between people mostly from other developed countries and in a thread about Britain.
When it comes to abortion, it's more of a wash. By one measure, US is now more decentralized, less federal gov., thus more right wing. 13 US states have complete elective abortion bans at all times, thus much more right wing. Most other US states have somewhat more lenient abortion laws, roughly ~6 weeks longer in general, thus more left wing.
If that's your best and only example, it only substantiates my case.
You brought up Canada, Canada being more left than US just furthers my point that US is more to the right than over developed countries. As to comparing European countries to the US on immigration; % of immigrants in the country
Switzerland: 29%
Sweden: 20%
Germany: 19%
Austria: 19%
Ireland: 18%
Belgium: 17%
Norway: 16%
Spain 15%
*US: 15%
Netherlands: 14%
UK: 14%
France: 13%
Denmark: 12%
Italy: 11%
US doesn't seem like any sort of above-average on your chosen metric either...
Didn't the Tories run on making things worse 13 years ago (austerity)? Thanks to COVID, Brexit, and the war in Ukraine, they have succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
Actually no, they did not run on that. They ran on a platform of “sharing the proceeds of growth”, and then changed their mind after getting into office. I believe the outgoing minister left a (lighthearted?) note saying “I’m afraid there is no money left”, which was used as a partial justification.
This was Germany's case for Tunisia's democracy. Tunisia ended up implementing a Proportional Representation system and I believe it's a good and well balanced system. On Paper.
Well, democracy in Tunisia imploded and exploded. So, yeah, be careful of things that look good on paper.
Honest question: did Germany have any say in Tunisia's voting system? Wasn't Tunisia a French protectorate? Do you mean more recently than 1956?
In any case, Tunisia is not the only country with PR. It's used a lot of places, including Germany (well, MMP, but pretty similar). Like any system it has advantages and disadvantages, but democracy in the Nordics hasn't imploded nor exploded...
> did Germany have any say in Tunisia's voting system? Wasn't Tunisia a French protectorate?
It's different, I think. Germany offered help (along with the EU) and Tunisia(ans) don't know any better so they took up the offer. Plus it was free help and free money. I don't think Germany or the EU had any malicious intentions, I think they truly wanted to help.
But big surprise: Tunisia is not a Nordic country! Apparently, what works there doesn't work here at all.
> Like in the US, democracy in the United Kingdom is faltering.
This is unfortunately not unique. India too has seen the rise of the right, and its democracy threatened and at a perilous stage. Many other countries have seen the rise of the right too. However, I feel this is a political pattern that can be observed historically and generationally, where the political spectrum switch between extremes of left and right, with brief periods of centrism. This can be observed in the last century too. The hard question is how long will this political effect last before we see it wane. Another question is how much the internet contributed to this and if we can do anything about it without trampling our rights.
"democracy is under threat when people I don't like are democratically elected." Is it invisible to you how such statements are, themselves, bad for democracy?
We treat speech differently based on context. Yelling fire in the middle of the ocean with no one around is legally distinct from yelling fire in a crowded theater.
I would argue that without the intent or ability to act in a dangerous manner that this speech is legally distinct from the same statement with those qualifiers.
The realities of limited resources in our judicial system and common sense require us to make these distinctions.
The difference here, in my mind, is that Hillary Clinton was not able or intending to spur a grassroots coup that was dangerous to our Democracy based on her statements.
You really are not grasping how ubiquitously this concept is used. Biden has declared democratically elected people like Georgia Meloni and Victor Orban, and candidates like Marine le Pen to be dangers to democracy. It certainly isn't restricted to Trump. The fact that you jump to him shows how blind you are.
Democratically elected people can absolutely be a danger to democracy. I remember when Russia democratically elected Putin. In 5 years, all opposition TV channels were owned by the government and the oligarchs that chose subserviency over prison. In 10 years, elections were so blatantly fraudulent that voting became pointless.
I don't see it as a bad comparison. Putin wasn't eating babies when he was first elected, either; but his background gave ample reasons for concern, which some people did voice at the time, and which was fully realized eventually.
The problem is that in many Western systems the people who gain power aren't democratically elected.
In a real democracy the big challenge should be how to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority. However most of us aren't even getting that far because the people who gain power often don't even have the support or even acceptance of the majority.
The grandparent is simplifying. The goal of a democracy is to respect the will of the majority while respecting the fundamental rights of the minority. If you're not doing the first step, respecting the will of the majority, then your democracy has already failed. A tyranny of the minority is strictly worse than a tyranny of the majority.
The whole point of democracy is that we don’t agree on what’s “the truth” and who is “right” and need a process for deciding what to do notwithstanding those disagreements.
We're talking about politics and democracy here. People will always have a diverse range of opinions on political issues where none of those opinions is objectively "right".
Hopefully one opinion that most would agree on is that in matters of fact any competent representative should pay attention to the knowledge and advice of experts.
> In a real democracy the big challenge should be how to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority.
Protection of minorities has nothing to do with democracy, and is often anti-Democratic. In the west, minorities are increasingly being invoked by elites as pretexts for strengthening anti-Democratic institutions and overruling majorities.
Can you give an example? I'd suggest protections against "tyranny of the majority"/"mob rule" are a cornerstone feature of any successful democracy. The point is to ensure that it's not possible simply by force of numbers alone to elect governments who then enforce laws and implement policies that could significantly disadvantage any minority group.
The US Supreme Court is a good example. It sits as an elite Guardian Council that over the last century has overruled the public on numerous issues, ranging from contraception to abortion to same sex marriage to the death penalty. These rulings are not based on law but rather moral philosophy—specifically the libertarian moral philosophy of elites.
Protection of minorities is not a necessary feature of democracy. It’s a feature of a specific type of democracy. In the American system, it’s a feature that initially arose because elites sought to protect their property rights from the masses through constitutional checks on democracy.
Roe overturned abortion laws ostensibly to protect the minority of women who choose to have an abortion. In doing so, the justices replaced the moral philosophy of the public with their own moral philosophy.
Well if you really believe that then I assume you think they did the right thing by overturning Roe, so it seems like (in your eyes) it has a self-correcting mechanism in place. Except I gather that it's now the case that right-to-a-legal-abortion does actually have quite firm majority support from the polls that have been done?
At any rate, I don't see either case as an example of the Supreme Court protecting minority factions against tyranny of the majority.
Protection of minorities has nothing to do with democracy, and is often anti-Democratic.
Exactly. And that means protecting minorities from abuse - particularly abuse caused by short-term or ill-informed policy making by politicians - is the big challenge facing any political system based on representative democracy. But before you can get that far you first need to have your representatives democratically elected in the first place and most of us don't right now.
In the west, minorities are increasingly being invoked by elites as pretexts for strengthening anti-Democratic institutions and overruling majorities.
Careful. Relatively few policies implemented by Western governments actually have a clear, verifiable majority of the public in support of them. For that you essentially need either a referendum or a clear result electing representatives on an explicit platform of implementing that policy and where that policy is known to be the deciding factor in voters' choice of representative.
For everything else in a representative democracy we elect our representatives usually based on some very narrow set of priorities and yet those representatives are entrusted with deciding on any government policy that requires a decision throughout their term of office. There is a very long tail of minor issues that can still profoundly affect the lives of many people yet where the representatives making the decisions certainly were not elected based on their position on those particular issues. Even on major issues situations will inevitably change during the term of office of elected representatives and their response to any emergency was almost certainly not something voters had an opportunity to consider before making their choice at the last election.
Representative democracy has obvious practical advantages over requiring direct democracy for every little decision any government ever makes but it also implies limitations on the democratic mandate granted to representatives and by extension on the legitimacy of any actions those representatives take on behalf of their electorate. Strong checks and balances are essential to keep representative democracy democratic. One common safeguard is to have constitutional rules about the most important policies where the powers of any current representatives to act in those areas are limited without going back to their electorate for a specific decision to change the foundational rules. Another is having a power of recall so that if the voters who elected a representative are unhappy with their actions then they can require a fresh election that might choose a different representative instead. Crucially both of those safeguards ultimately depend on an explicit decision by the entire electorate, which can and should be more powerful in a democracy than any decision by elected representatives.
Looking from outside, it honestly doesn't seem that's what's going on. Here in the Netherlands we have proportional representation, and while our democratic system does show signs of decay, it still feels way more healthier than the British one. Here we have 20 parties to choose from, which always leads to coalitions and compromises. Having to keep deciding between only two would feel incredibly constrained to me.
And I say this as someone who keeps voting, unsuccessfully, against our incumbent PM.
What you’re seeing in India is democracy in action. Modi has the highest approval rating of any major world leader, nearly 80%: https://morningconsult.com/global-leader-approval. What you’re seeing is the majority of Indians overthrowing the minority of British-educated secular liberals that have ruled India since independence.
This is an excellent analysis of what’s happening in India: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial... (“The last of the post-partition generations are passing on, to be replaced by an indigenous leadership class more parochial and rooted in the subcontinent. The modern Indian culture war is a reflection of the decline of a once-secure, outward-looking cosmopolitan Western elite in the face of a rising Hindu nationalist movement, one that is relatively insular and inward looking. India is maturing, becoming culturally more self-confident, and shedding its post-colonial skin.”).
> What you’re seeing in India is democracy in action. Modi has the highest approval rating of any major world leader ...
If you think democracy is only about winning elections, then Hitler was a great democrat too.
> India is maturing, becoming culturally more self-confident, and shedding its post-colonial skin.
You mean the current indian leaders prefer to live in the past, fantasising about its glorious history while preferring to blame all its misgivings on "foreigners" to repress their feelings of insecurity with an equally dysfunctional sense of superiority complex?
How would Starmer needing to accommodate for instance, the Lib Dems on every position, be an improvement on this? Take the issue of housing policy for instance. Britain urgently needs more houses, but the Lib Dems turn up at every local election and by-election on a NIMBY platform.
The same for building new energy infrastructure- the Lib Dems famously blocked the building of new nuclear plants ‘because they wouldn’t be online until 2021/22’. The evidence of the Coalitions we’ve had is that they overall lead to pretty terrible decision making, and indecisive government on the whole.
I feel your point on nuclear only paints half the picture. During their time in the coalition the Lib Dems did push for an expansion of wind power, with the subsequent ban on on-shore wind coming after their demise in the 2015 election. Also, the number of solar installations dived after the Lib Dems were dispatched with and the subsidies were removed.
In terms of "terrible decision making, and indecisive government" I believe this is a better description of all that has come to pass after the coalition with only a single party in power.
I understand your point.
'First past the post' may not be ideal for your country. For other countries, it is appreciated despite its inconveniences. Example: Québec. We inherited 'first past the post' from England. The results are obvious: small parties with significant numbers of voters in many ridings don't end up in parliament. But Québec is a rural province with only one city worthy of the name, Montréal, almost half the population of the province. That city has a demography very different to the rest of the province. In a proportional system, the will of the big city would simply sweep away the rural regions that don't have the same weight. People have learnt to accept 'first past the post' and any change would upset the balance that exists today.
I don't know if you've fully considered the alternatives here. Alternatives like Approval or even RCV (which admittedly has its own issues) don't at all weaken the rural vote here. Approval means all those rural parties can be voted for instead of having to be consolidated and also increases the chance that some city folk will vote for them. RCV allows rural people to vote for the longshot candidate they ACTUALLY want while making sure their vote isn't thrown away when their candidate does lose
This "balance" you're speaking of only benefits the duopoly that's developed BECAUSE of the FPTP system.
Organizations are like organisms. Organisms don't only have to replicate their DNA to be successful—they also need to replicate their environments (e.g. buffalo and elephants protected grasslands from being overrun by woodlands, pine forests making wildfires more common, etc). In this case these parties both have disproportionate power because of FPTP and are both interested in maintaining this "balance"
I appreciate your suggestions but would really need to see some simulations to digest the potential effects. Not that my opinion counts for much but it's always good to suggest alternatives when one criticizes.
That said, the duopoly isn't always so bad historically. Many cases of individual candidates who broke party lines or walked the fine line. It depends to a great degree on party discipline or the lack thereof.
you're probably asking for historical examples. Tbh I lack the knowledge of the specific politics of Montréal to think of the best comparisons, but if you want a more abstract toy to play around with the large variety of different voting systems available, I've made a toy just for that:
Maybe I will, but I've had this update pending (see preview here[0]) that adds some major algorithms that any self-respecting voting theory nerd would expect to see. I started my first software job right as I was wrapping that up though and never fully got through with it. Maybe this winter break I'll have time tho... I'd like to have that update out before sharing it more loudly
The problem with what you describe is that it doesn't merely prevent large areas from dominating the smaller; it actually allows the smaller areas to gang up and impose policies on the majority. Tyranny of the majority sucks, but tyranny of the minority is even worse.
In the case of my small example: I am the rural vote so I don't see our collective force as tyranny of course. As long as basic rights are respected. Ours is a case of a region with specific identity and interests not shared by the single metropole so a purely proportional result is not ideal from our perspective. But I understand your point.
If the goal is to prevent the metropolitan area from unilaterally imposing itself on the rest of the province, all you really need for that is some kind of veto power. For example, a bicameral legislature in which one chamber is elected through some proportional system and actually writes laws, and the other one that represents all the various interest groups (under whatever representation formulas people find agreeable) and approves them.
> But Québec is a rural province with only one city worthy of the name, Montréal, almost half the population of the province. That city has a demography very different to the rest of the province. In a proportional system, the will of the big city would simply sweep away the rural regions that don't have the same weight. People have learnt to accept 'first past the post' and any change would upset the balance that exists today.
That's a very long-winded way of saying "some people's votes are weighted more than others", which is an inherently undemocratic principle.
“Democracy” isn’t a unidimensional system. It’s a balance of many competing concerns. In particular, a key variable is not merely who wins the majority, but who votes. It wouldn’t placate Ukranians to say that if they became part of Russia, their vote would count just as much as a Russian’s. Simply winning 50%+1 isn’t sufficient. People must be willing to be bound into a body politic with other people to begin with.
Different voting mechanisms, along with federal systems, are a way of balancing those competing concerns. They allow you to form a larger body politic that would not necessarily be willing to be bound together in a simple “majority rules” system.
> "some people's votes are weighted more than others", which is an inherently undemocratic principle.
Has there ever been, in the history of human civilization, any self-styled democracy that did not weigh the votes of some people more the votes of others? Whether by sex, gender, race, wealth, education, criminal status, party membership, age, or status as an elected official, I'm pretty sure every single democratic state has continuously subscribed to some non-uniform distribution of vote weights.
With modern technology, it maybe possible to create a truly direct and equal system where newborns have the ability to ratify trade deals, but this might not be desirable.
2015 was a disaster we never recovered from. Millions of voters voted for real change, and got ignored. But then the party who DID actually win the election pandered to those voters to try and win them over. We ended up with Brexit and a whole host of other related problems with populism, etc.
Isn't a parliamentary system effectively proportional representation? It's just prime minister that's first past the post, but from a proportional vote in parliament?
Labour is not going to save Britain. They are just going to redistribute money that is more and more and more "not there" anymore. The EU is not going to save Britain, they are having a crisis too. Nothing will save Britain, it is doomed for the next couple hundred years or so.
> Isn't a parliamentary system effectively proportional representation?
Not necessarily. Imagine a country with four parties. In each constituency, they respectively get 40%, 30%, 20%, and 10% of the vote. Under FPTP, parliament is made up of all reps from the 40% party, shutting out other voters. Under PR, depending on variety you'd get results closer to the distribution of the votes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
Imagine there were 100 constituencies, and in every one party A secured 51% of the vote and party B got 49%. Under our current system, party A would have all 100 seats, and party B would have no representation at all; whereas under PR, A and B would (simpisticly speaking)split seats 51-49.
Worse, imagine that in 51 constituencies A gets 51% of the vote, and in 49 it gets 0% of the vote. This gives A a majority in parliament even though voters as a whole prefer B nearly 3-to-1.
Because they do resemble the actual outcomes. The 2 major parties in the UK regularly get majorities in Parliament on far less than 50% of the vote. In the USA gerrymandering has been brought to a fine art. How can this not contribute to discontent, when the majority of people get a government they didn't vote for?
It’s not like they’d be content with a deadlocked parliament where the ‘government’ they voted for can’t enact any policies. It’s good that there’s two dominant parties, both fairly central, who continually moderate their policies to keep high levels of support, and after an election, one of them gets to actually govern.
OP is using the term loosely, but the issue is with FPTP a candidate can win with one vote over 1/n percent of the vote. So if there are 10 candidates the winner need only 10% of the vote plus 1 vote to win.
And so the big parties have a disproportionate advantage. That's why there's no push from either of them to change the system and why it ends up essentially being a scam for the big parties.
Sadly, while many of our governments readily adopted the concept of representative democracy, they retained other oppressive aspects of the ancient systems which they replaced. The old monarchies claimed a right to rule their subject peoples in perpetuity, deriving their power directly from God. Our modern governments claim the same thing! Instead of that divine right flowing directly from God to the state, it flows from God, through your forbears who created the government, to the state. Isn't that slick? They derive their legitimacy from man's divine right to choose his own government, while simultaneously denying that YOU have such a right! It's the 'ole divine right to rule with extra steps.
So while you can choose who controls your government via democratic means, you'll have a helluva time choosing a new government, since the old government will waive the crusty old document that your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather signed and say that you are committing treason.
See the Catalan independence movement[0], or the official position of the UK government on the most recent Scottish independence referendum[1].
Not saying it's worked out perfectly, but the US Declaration of Independence must count among those crusty old documents, and its preamble explicitly declares that throwing off such a government is the right and duty of the governed (admittedly preceded with some couching from "Prudence, indeed...").
True, true! I didn't mean to imply anything negative about old, crusty documents in general! Especially the ones, like The Declaration, that serve to clarify and bolster our common understanding of our natural human rights.
Also, look how narrow the margins are on that scale bar. Most of those regions would need to be further subdivided, and the whole of the UK would end up like Baarle-Nassau: Baarle-Nassau
https://maps.app.goo.gl/aRn73rm1cz2fHznt7?g_st=ic
The British Empire certainly did have a lot of experience of that, but it wasn't exactly good for the people on the ground where that had been done. One of those partition lines led to a 30-year low-intensity civil war that only ended in 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles
> If Labour win the next election their position will be very fragile, and I’m unsure they will get more than one term.
This is my expectation, the Conservatives will have been able to "clean house" and remove a significant number of MPs who now have too much baggage. I expect a Labour government to struggle through the end of a recession, and have significant infighting.
The conservatives will capitalise on that and could take back control.
I just really hope Labour push through significant electoral reform in their first term.
I believe this is a common trend through the west. Here in Canada the current Federal Liberals won the last two election with about 30% of the vote which when you take into account how many people even vote amounts to something like ~5 million people in a country close to 40 million. The kind of overarching policies and rhetoric coming out of government is widely disproportionate to that level of mandate.
Yup. In France Macron hold total power with less than 30% of voters and less than 30% of good opinion in polls. His "pension reform" has everyone against it, the unions, all political parties but his own, even the employers association, but it will be enforced anyway. Democracy is dead, and it even began to smell.
Curious to see what HN's opinion on mandatory voting is. We have that in Australia and the sense is that it tends to dull the extreme fringes of the party platforms since they need to broadly appeal to the mainstream.
It is hard to disentangle the temperament of the populace from the voting system.
The UK and all former settler colonies (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) all have very stable politics and that generally appeal to the median voter. None of them really have any extreme political incidents in living memory that I can think of. (maybe a few extreme incidents by their own standards but on a global standard they are still tame)
I thought it was implied but I meant former settler colonies of the UK specifically.
The USA could be included and does have overall remarkably stable politics compared to most of the world. I didn't include it due to the length of time it has been separate from the UK, however there was substantial emigration from the British Isles to the USA in the 19th century with the settling of the West (more British went to the USA in the 19th century than Canada/Australia/NZ/South Africa combined and served as a 2nd large wave of Anglofying influence on the nation). I would lump it in with the other nations I mention as having overall extreme stable politics and high adherence to political norms that can be broadly characterised as the "Anglo model of politics".
South Africa is a bit of a unique case. Due to the Apartheid system it never had any of the sort of political stability that characterises the politics of the other nations mentioned.
The political culture of Spain/Portugal is massively different from the UK (especially at the time of the colonisation of the Americas) and the model of politics in the nations of South America is very different as a result.
I'm always going to be against adding more force and coercion. People are way too quick to reach for that as a solution to every purported problem.
I also think many of the people who are forced to vote will do so with the least effort possible and will keep voting for the same party they (and probably their parents) have always voted for without thinking too much about it or doing any research.
Agree with this, the experience of workplace Covid mandates has left a permanent distaste in my mouth that will likely never leave.
I think the Greek way of choosing elected officials - randomly - within some reasonable sampling criteria, i.e. no criminal record, sound mind, at least >=X age would be better at this point. Professional roles such as city attorney can have corresponding pools of possible candidates.
It's like when you have an actively bad betting strategy, it would actually improve your performance to bet randomly.
Proportional voting doesn't have to mean tyranny. Make the very first option on the ballot "I don't approve of any of the candidates here", and if it wins another election is held and nobody from the prior ballot is allowed to be listed.
Mandatory voting in a proportional representation electoral system feels like the best way to me. You can't force people to vote when their vote can end up worthless like with first past the post.
Neither, it's essentially a type of ranked voting that is often referred to as "two party preferred" on the assumption that for any seat, it will go to one party or the other, and it's likely to be one with the highest first+second preference count (not exactly how it works, but you can find the details online easily enough. A fairly typical scenario is that the ALP might have something like 40% of the 1st preference votes and the Liberals 45%, but the 2nd preference votes overwhelmingly favour the ALP and they take the win). There hasn't been any serious discussion over the need to revisit mandatory voting (personally I don't think it should be over a certain age - there's an argument those over 75, who are making up an increasingly larger percentage of the population, have undue influence on selection of a government whose job should be to put forward policies etc. that determine the long-term future of our country, which is of far more relevance to those who'll be alive to see it. I imagine once I'm past 75 I wouldn't be so concerned with voting in every election on that basis. But I'll admit it's not something I feel particularly strongly about.)
It's simply ranked choice voting (aka IRV) for the house. "Two-party preferred" is a system used by polls and news to try to convey how they think the runoff voting will play out, by picking the two candidates most likely to come first and second and showing their expected final tally.
We need better representation, and for instance designate Senators from random draw from the voters pool to make it a proposition force.
Also we need to dismantle most of the constitutional changes of the past 30 years, which created several layers of pretend democratic assemblies (city, metropolis, department, region) that nobody understands nor care about, and are only useful to feed a large crowd of professional politicians.
And most important, we must dismantle the rampant control of these by the state through the nationalisation of taxes. Almost all local taxation which used to be defined and voted by the city councils, departmental assemblies etc have been taken over by the state, which nominally redistributes the money but keeps control of it, effectively killing all local democratic processes and politics.
> Instead it requires Labour to be a very broad house
This is a severe disconnection from reality, the Labour party is totally ideologically possessed. 52% of the population voted for Brexit and not a single Labour MP supports it. Not a single Labour MP would ever dream of criticising the NHS system. Not a single Labour MP said a bad word about BLM.
The Conservative party are so broad they have everything except actual conservatives.
Electorate has moved on since Brexit has actually happened, even if the number who would vote differently given what they know today is much smaller than you might expect given how few think it was done well.
Especially Corbyn, though of course he couldn't "support it" outright because that would mean agreeing with Tories (and he couldn't oppose it outright without angering a lot of Labour members)
Corbyn is a lifelong Eurosceptic who voted against every expansion of EU power that came before him in his entire ~30 year career as an MP pre-2016. He only "opposed" Brexit in 2016 because he had to.
Ben Page, the boss of Ipsos, a global research firm, points to what he terms the “loss of the future”, common across the West but acute in Britain. In 2008, as the financial crisis struck, only 12% of Britons thought youngsters would have a worse quality of life than their parents, Mr Page notes. Now that figure is 41%. As elsewhere, people worry about immigration and feel threatened by globalisation. All this makes Britain’s predicament seem less an inside job than part of a wider takedown of democracy.
It is remarkable, such a wordy article, could really begin and end with the above paragraph. We are in uncharted territory, new problems require new ideas but even now public discourse is entirely retrograde and focused on squabbling between two incompetent parties, personalities, scandals and self flagellation.
Like lemmings off a cliff.
I think I've never heard anybody in recent years even attempt to discuss the future of UK without simply falling back on whinging about Thatcher or Corbin or the sins of empire or god knows what. None of it relevant.
Imagine instead you are playing Civilization or Factorio, and this is day 0. Only looking forwards, how do you thrive economically in the 21st century under these current conditions with the cards you have to play?
As an aside, it makes me very uneasy to see grown adults be so infatuated with Disney IPs.
The quote from Alec Guinness about Star Wars in his autobiography:
“A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The first bad penny dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode.
'I would love you to do something for me,' I said.
'Anything! Anything!' the boy said rapturously.
'You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do,' I said.
'Anything, sir, anything!'
'Well,' I said, 'do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?'
He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. 'What a dreadful thing to say to a child!' she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.”
I think about that a lot when seeing the lengths many adults go to immersing themselves into these "cinematic universes"
`
> "living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.”
The trend of comics cum cinema, and wizards lording it over muggles, which has been incessant for at least 20 years now, has been so consistent that it begs the question of why.
The basic underlying theme of all these 'cultural' products has been to instill the idea that 'little normal people' are powerless victims, and only magical special people with superpowers not available to the common man gets to save the day.
This has the been the programming for the past 20+ years. I hinted at this a few days ago in a comment regarding the strange case of "cults of personality" and "savior hero politicians" in the West.
> this is day 0. Only looking forwards, how do you thrive economically in the 21st century under these current conditions with the cards you have to play
Counterpoint: how do you avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and learning from them by pretending they never happened?
Not pretending/perceiving that the memetic/reductive/imprecise/misinformative/incorrect way we describe them is accurate would be a good start.
Human communication in 2022 is a train wreck, and there are plentiful artifacts of that in this very thread, in this much more intelligent than average community.
It seems to me that Human communication declines the more it becomes divorced from the threat of physical violence.
The peak decline will be when the possibility of consequences (social, physical, legal, financial…) for communicating anything reaches absolute zero.
Human communication is a great tool but must be kept in check, the goal of communication is to produce useful outcomes, not merely deliver messages and opinions.
Your comment seems especially prescient if read in the context of the insane asylum going on in the "Twitter suspends pg's account" thread - what a time to be alive.
This isn't a new phenomenon, and, as the author mentions, is not peculiar to the UK. When I was a 13-year-old in 1992 an eccentric science teacher would remind my class nearly every week that ours was the first American generation that was expected to enjoy a worse standard of living than our parents had. (Going back even farther you could point to popular expressions like the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen;" people have been talking like this for a long time.)
I remember reading for the first time about the loss of the future as a frame of reference in this article, which I thought was very interesting but it now unfortunately seems to be only available behind a paywall: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/110330889900700102 .
Anyway, I think this sort of thing happens independently of the specific vagaries of politics and economics in any country: change is taking place quickly, on a grand scale, in societies where ordinary people are enjoined to think about the course of events over which they, individually, have little control.
It will only hit those nations in the West that succumb to it.
Eurasia is doing fine with stable and reliable power, continuing to both increase fossil fuel usage and build out nuclear power at the same time. Africa is ramping up. Latin America is the wild card. Most of the world is going to keep on using fossil fuels, looking at what happened to Europe as an object lesson of becoming so rich that you forget what is foundational, indulge in religious fantasies -- and commit economic suicide.
In this sense the energy sanctions, while destroying the British and German economies, are a blessing to the rest of the world, because it provides a very clear picture of what happens when you go down this road. This is why China, India, and Japan are rushing to secure long term oil and gas contracts, and many nations in Africa and Asia are joining them in prioritizing secure fossil fuel providers even as they seek to build out more nuclear in order to reduce dependence on foreign inputs. See https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/ieo/ for detailed projections out to 2050 of different regions.
Britain and Germany are the main object lessons in this regard, but it's certainly not "the world".
I don’t see what religion has got to do with it? Europe is hardly the most religious part of the world
Maybe Europe is just rich enough to be willing to sacrifice some of that to help others by reducing their emissions (or at least not harm them as much). Maybe Europe feels a certain responsibility, having started emitting carbon in the first place
It’s a government who’s been in power too long, whose talent base was massively thinned by a Brexit Purity witch hunt and the impossibility of delivering the Brexit fairy-tale, and who weren’t simply ejected at the last election because of Corbyn’s overwhelming unpopularity.
The article is part of the problem. UK politics and the media narratives around it have beeen utterly wrecked by the fight over Brexit and the attempts to give its creators the boot. For example, take this claim: "Investment is down and inflation higher than it would have been inside the European Union." The UK's inflation in the year to November 2022 was 10.7%, compared to 10.1% in the Eurozone. It just doesn't seem at all plausible that the UK would somehow have substantially lower inflation if it were in the EU, based on what countries actually in the EU have experienced, yet it's treated as so obviously true that only lying Brexiters would reject it.
This belief is boosted by the fact the British press only ever compares our inflation with France, which has the lowest inflation in Europe due to substantial nuclear generating capacity and energy subsidies funded through borrowing. Our government was attacked for attempting even a fraction of those energy subsidies to the point they did a U-turn because ultimately the public pays for it, but that downside is ignored when talking about France. They also also have substantially more national debt for obvious reasons... but luckily the UK national debt is usually only compared with Germany's.
I don't think people who say "UK inflation would have been better in the EU" are basing that on "in UK, it was 10.7% and in EU it was 10.1%", but rather on "since Brexit, wealth generated by export has dropped, wealth generated by import has dropped, wealth generated by EU migration workforce has dropped, ... which obviously means that the crisis can only be worse". It does not mean they are right, but even if UK had a smaller inflation than countries still in EU, you can still say that UK would have been better if you see that all indicators show that the cost of life was at the end globally affected negatively by Brexit.
I always think that comparing inflation or national debt to other countries is meaningless. A big national debt used for good investment is way better than a small national debt while the infrastructures fall apart, and the state and cost of the infrastructure can be very different in each country. And for the same level of inflation, the effects would be very different based on the resources and market characteristics of the country and which measures are taken.
(edit: and indeed, if you re-read the text around the quote you've extracted, this is indeed the reasoning: the author does not justify that with a comparison of the inflation rate, but with a list of where the Brexit made things worse)
> The UK's inflation in the year to November 2022 was 10.7%, compared to 10.1% in the Eurozone. It just doesn't seem at all plausible that the UK would somehow have substantially lower inflation if it were in the EU
10.7% v 10.1% is 0.6%. how long before that compounds into a sizable figure?
I never really bought into the doomsday scenarios. Just a slow slide of Spanish package holidays getting more expensive and people not connecting the dots.
It's still interesting to think about given America's current gerontocracy. My last position put me in contact with a fair amount of local and state level politicians in the US and I'm very concerned about the talent bases/pipelines of the political class here.
Locally the person that I know that was most heavily involved in politics, serving as organizer for a well known local non profit, campaign manager for a mayoral campaign, etc, finally reached the limits of their patience. Now they use their very considerable organization skills as a marketing exec at a startup.
Lessig proved tiresome in the later parts of his media campaign, but I don't think he was wrong about this basic asymetry: there's some political positions that are far more likely to receive substantial financial support, and this distorts nearly everything in our political system. The people who crusade against this are generally speaking, doing something irrational out of principle, meanwhile the people they're fighting just get more money and power.
Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump were all born within a year of each other, with Biden being 4 years older. There is a specific generation of politicians Born within a decade period who managed to get elected young and have clung to power in both parties very successfully, see John Bohner, Nancy Pelosi, and Ted Kennedy for other examples.
That's the question I always ask when viewing the gerontocracy.
In academia at least it's been very clear that the boomers were shameless about working long past the time they should retire, preventing gen Xers from rising to top positions.
Most broad statements including GenX really need to be qualified by noting its size (slightly greater than half) relative to either of the two pigs working their way through the python before and behind it. Three when you count GenZ.
Apathetic? Maybe. But even if we were all on the same page as a group (which we're not) I don't see how we have the numbers to force a systemic turnover on our own.
I am, of course, a member of GenX. Sometimes, as Planck said, progress has to happen one funeral at a time. None of this brings me any joy to observe.
I'm not an ideologue so I don't derive my identity from my politics, and therefore don't view political opinions as "impressing" anybody.
I don't like the GOP for many reasons (maga) and I think the current iteration of Democrats are horrifically inept with economics to a degree where they are a net harm for the people they strive to help. Belief in policies such as rent control is as anti-science as creationism.
Most Americans have fallen into the trap of lesser of two evils to a point where they don't hold their chosen side accountable at all and the result is predictable. Incredibly dysfunctional policy.
I don’t think overwhelming is the right word, his vote share was around Blair’s average.
Now that half of Tory MPs have been cabinet members, it’s harder to demand loyalty by dangling a job for votes. Especially the ministerial roles that the public are aware of.
The article seems to be avoiding the term "lame duck period". It reads an excessively selective set of opinions, and it's unclear who should be trying harder.
Blair got 35% of the vote after 8 years of power and the Iraq war, against a decent challenger and experienced politician.
Corbyn got 32% — as the opposition — against an incumbent who’s approval ratings at the time were underwater and who led an unpopular party who’d been in power far too long already.
He did superbly in granting a massive majority to Johnson. If that was his goal (“win the argument” but not the election) then you can’t really fault him.
Corbyn got 202 MPs in 2019, Blair in his 3rd term got 355
Corbyn wasn't just deeply unpopular across the country outside of student areas. I spoke to life long remainer lib dems in the Tory/Lab marginal seat of Crewe and Nantwich who were voting Tory to stop Corbyn. Across rural areas in Cheshire people were voting Tory because they were scared of Lib Dems backing Corbyn.
Due to the way that FPTP works, his concentrated support in student/young urban areas was wasted, with the result being a Tory landslide.
This describes me. Luckily I was able to meaningfully vote LibDem, because I really could not see myself voting for BoJo or Corbyn in the last election. Neither Starmer nor Sunak would be my first choice, but in contrast I could hold my nose and vote for either of them if I had to.
> I spoke to life long remainer lib dems in the Tory/Lab marginal seat of Crewe and Nantwich who were voting Tory to stop Corbyn.
I spoke to many who similarly voted to stop Corbyn - they were stopping Corbyn because of his vow to reintroduce gas chambers and exterminate every Jew in the land. I am not sure that was his actual policy but many were adamant it was.
I'm no fan of Corbyn but there was a politically motivated character assassination leading up to the election, where all major newspapers reported him and his party for anti-Semitism. The media all parroting lines fed by the Government with no critical analysis is complicit in Tories, and whoever wants to play the dirtiest, to remain in power and do whatever they want.
The naive elector sees Corbyn pissing off the Jewish groups on front pages everywhere, and or course they do not want to associate with people of that ilk. The majority trust newspapers and politicians too much, so get routinely played like a fiddle, and the best liar always wins.
The similar shit show is going to play out next election with Reform UK if the liar extraordinaire Nigel Farage decides to front it.
There's this view amongst Corbyn supporters that everyone would have voted for him if it wasn't for the evil newspapers.
Setting aside that in 2019 under 15% of the country read a newspaper, it's a moot point. Part of the job of being leader of a political party, just like any business, is to handle public relations. Corbyn's team was awful at this. It's no good whining about it, you have to handle it.
Personally his pro-wealthy attacks on making the care system fairer were one major thing that turned me off. He spent a lot of political capital trying to defend the right of millionaires to not pay for their own care (and thus increasing everyone else's tax burden).
Corbyn's proposal to actually tax millionaires failed dramatically because of his inability to handle the media.
Despite it being a policy supported by all sorts of economic think tanks from the IFS to Adam Smith, and has support from the Green party to the LSE, somehow he managed to completely bungle it and push the cause back a generation. Another thing I can't forgive him for.
The problem is more extreme than that - there is not being able to handle the media, and there is Corbyns problem. "Informed voters" are able to precisely articulate what they believe the oposition party (Corbyns) policy is, and what they articulate is not based on any reality that exists on the time space continuum.
I recall at some point last election cycle an interview with a very passionate gentleman in the north who was adamant that we had to "Vote for Change, its time to get Corbyn and his failed policies out of Downing Street". He was utterly certain that Corbyn had been prime minister for the prior four years and the terrible state of the country was down to him.
I am no fan of labour but that environment is not good for anyone and has ultimately (ironically) destroyed the Conservative party.
If you think that's bad, you wouldn't believe all the crazy stuff people believe Donald Trump did while in office. If you took the name off and got rid of all the self-promotion and bombastic media stuff, people would think of him like an obscure post-Civil-War president you have to know for school and can forget after that.
I'm astounded people are STILL burying their heads in the sand about Corbyn. But I suppose that is a large part of the reason why labour was losing for so long they kept denying the obvious reality that the electorate just did not like Corbyn but wouldn't get rid of him for internal political/ideological reasons.
It's also a word most people learned thanks to the fictional Malcolm Tucker character in The Thick of It (Season 3, episode 6 when he's yelling at Ben Swain)
I reject the idea that I'm burying my head in the sand, if that's your reaction to my post. I'm wary of expanding on it on HN. The short version is that there were genuine policy reasons to dislike him (even from a POV left of Blair), overwhelmed by the media and the Labour party disinformation. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62226042
Do you know who the article is saying should try harder?
Democracies elsewhere can learn a thing or two from recent election rounds in the US, the UK, and elsewhere. Basically, we've seen a surge in populism and irrational sentiment dominating politics and being translated into actual policy with disastrous results. The lesson there is that you can win an election and then loose an empire.
I don't think it's a British problem either. We've had populists dominating politics in quite a few countries in recent decades. France just had a close call where a neo fascist came close to winning the elections. The Austrians have actually gone there. My home country the Netherlands has had populists come close a couple of times as well. Italy just elected a populist. The issue is that the type of policies populists preach tend to not involve a whole lot of carefully considered long term planning. Big gestures that are supposedly popular and then all hell breaks loose when reality and fantasy meet.
Brexit sounded great to people with no clue about how economies work. Now they are dealing with inflation, lots of failing policies, and the notion that they might soon have to rename their country as it is won't be great or united anymore if Scotland and Northern Ireland cease to be a part of it. I don't think anyone voted for that in England. But it would be a direct consequence of what they did vote for.
Like you, all of my political opponents are stupid or evil, often both! It's so convenient…
Is there no one you disagree with politically who is just popular instead of populist, knowledgeable and yet disagrees with you? If you can't think of any then I'd suggest the problem lies within you.
By the way
> as it is won't be great
Great is a geographical term. Just as British people remain european after leaving the EU, they (those on the island of Great Britain) would remain part of Great Britain.
But do continue to regale us all from up high with your superior knowledge about economies and such, knowing things like why Great Britain is named as it is, that's just a trifling fact for plebs.
"Brexit sounded great to people with no clue about how economies work. Now they are dealing with inflation"
As is pointed out in every single one of these threads, inflation in the UK is no different to inflation in the rest of Europe. Like elsewhere, it's created by money printing to pay for lockdowns and other COVID measures, along with embargoes against Russia.
It's really quite impressive how often this claim about inflation and Brexit comes up on HN, despite it being so easily disproven by looking at the numbers. It seems to happen on literally every single thread about the UK. The idea that Remainer-ism is a bastion of economic logic and common sense doesn't fit with the frequency with which bad economic claims in support of EU membership are made.
> whose talent base was massively thinned by a Brexit Purity witch hunt
How many MPs were removed in this witch hunt? And why is it a witch hunt if the electorate is told "this is the most important question for at least a generation", they vote on it, and the representatives in parliament do their damnedest to prevent carrying out the thing voted for, and thus the electorate decide to remove some of them?
That sounds like democracy in action to me (and anti-democracy by those who tried to stymie Brexit).
The “witch hunt” refers to the actions taken by the incoming Johnson government, who kicked a bunch of generally respected, experienced parliamentarians out of the party because they weren’t “Brexity” enough. We’re not even talking about anti-Brexit people - just the ones that resisted the obviously broken approach that was being taken.
The result was a government forced to bang on about how great an objectively bad process was because nobody was left to say “if you’re going to do this then you need to be realistic about the cost”. And implementing a known-bad policy while trying to pretend it’s great completely fucks a government.
My first question would be, respected by whom, and my second would be, whose respect matters? My guess would be that it was the voters who were most important as they provided a majority to the next most important people, the executive. Do you think those voters respect those MPs? Let's see.
21 Tory MPs had the whip removed for defying the party line and signalling their intent to defy Brexit:
- Kenneth Clarke, sniffed the political winds and stood down. Got given a golden handshake to the Lords.
- Philip Hammond - you must be joking, right? Still managed to get a seat in the Lords though.
- Rory Stewart. Do you think those who voted Brexit respect him? Might win in a contest with Hammond over who is disliked less. So well respected he couldn't even keep his campaign for mayor of London going to the start line, even with London being a remain stronghold.
- Dominic Grieve would not even beat Guy Verhofstadt in a contest voted on by leave supporters over who is liked less, as evidenced by losing his seat to his Tory replacement. I half expected Guy Fawkes day to be renamed Dominic Grieve day. Still could.
- David Gauke has an instructive Wikipedia entry[1]:
> Gauke stood in his constituency as an independent candidate, and came second with 26% of the vote, by far the best result of any of those former Conservative Members who sought re-election as independents.
That'll make the rest of the list an anti-climax but let's have some fun drilling the point home:
- Antoinette Sandbach, stood as a LibDem and lost.
- Sir Oliver Letwin, didn't stand again. I don't know anyone that respects him[2].
- Justine Greening, did not stand. Why not? She was savvy enough to see what was coming.
- Sam Gyimah, stood as a LibDem, lost seat to Conservatives, coming third behind Labour.
- Guto Bebb, didn't stand. Previously managed to gain much respect by bullying a man with Asperger's[3].
- Anne Milton, lost seat in 4th place. Tories kept her seat with a leave supporter in her place.
- Alistair Burt, Caroline Nokes, Greg Clark, Sir Nicholas Soames, Ed Vaizey, Margot James, Richard Benyon, Stephen Hammond, Steve Brine and Richard Harrington had the whip restored. Soames didn't stand at the next election, Harrington, Vaizey and Benyon got bumped up to the Lords where they love remainer Tories. Stephen Hammond and Steve Brine kept their seats with much reduced majorities.
Jo Johnson and Amber Rudd also resigned from the cabinet in support of the rebels and stood down at the next election. Johnson was bumped up to the Lords, because there aren't enough anti-democratic lords, apparently, though their record (and entire structure and history) would suggest otherwise.
I'm impressed at the amount of effort you went into arguing against something I said that was pretty tangential to your point. An entertaining read though – thanks. I think it goes to demonstrate quite tidily the utter mind-rot on the part of some people in the UK right now.
> The “witch hunt” refers to the actions taken by the incoming Johnson government, who kicked a bunch of generally respected, experienced parliamentarians out of the party because they weren’t “Brexity” enough. We’re not even talking about anti-Brexit people - just the ones that resisted the obviously broken approach that was being taken.
That was half of your comment, the opening part, and in response to my comment, yet somehow, going into detail about
a) why it wasn't a witch hunt, and
b) refuting the premises upon which you relied
is somehow pretty tangential to my point?
> I think it goes to demonstrate quite tidily the utter mind-rot on the part of some people in the UK right now.
Do you always respond to cognitive dissonance with personal slights, and do you know that this is HN and not Twitter?
The way we elect a prime minister (i.e. we don't) plays a large part here I think. Parties themselves select the leader.
Johnson, Corbyn, Truss, Sunak - all voted in by relatively small numbers of people (e.g. 80k in the case of Truss IIRC), yet they are somehow the leader of the party and potentially even PM.
This is where labour shat the bed I think with Corbyn - totally obvious that he would be terrible as a PM yet the favourite of the popular vote of self-selected labour party, who of course are too extreme to represent the common person on the street.
No, Labour isn't a popular vote. It is a popular vote AND a union vote (and the PLP, although they have never mattered in practice, they tried to oust Corbyn three times iirc...didn't work).
Corbyn had popular support but, like Miliband, relied relatively heavily on unions...and one union at that: Unite (and btw, his popular support was always overstated hugely...in late 2019, you had a sizeable minority who thought he would walk it, he was massively popular in the Westminster bubble...this is despite him being regarded as a totally odious figure under Blair when he was a backbencher).
The Tories have never had this issue because their electorate is relatively diffuse, and MPs have been quite willing to stab their leader in the back at the first sign of trouble.
Blair (like Thatcher) was an accident. I agree with your point but the Tories have been generally able to produce more effective leaders with their constitution.
The Labour vote was a popular vote, it just happened to include union members and 'registered supporters' who weren't party members (but would have had the same outcome in 2015 without them). The electoral college system was abandoned by Miliband, and Starmer has given up trying to bring it back in some form.
The Tories haven't got to worry about having self-styled radical socialists on the ballot but have had exactly the same problems: candidates that appeal most to the Tory selectorate like Iain Duncan Smith and Liz Truss are neither in touch with the public mood nor competent.
Not sure that a presidential system with a public vote would necessarily do better though. The public loved Johnson and liked May at first.
Corbyn and McDonnell were essentially communists and therefore unelectable.
Blair took the realistic route: Socialism does not work, let's have a market economy create wealth that can then be used to finance social programs. A flavour a social democracy.
I think a reason Corbyn was so popular among the young is that enough time has passed so that this generation has no idea what socialist countries in Europe were actually like.
The problem with Blair was that he lost the right on EU/immigration and lost the left on everything else.
Brownites sound good but say nothing specific...often the specific stuff is bad too. I agree with you in that there is a route in the centre, but Labour aren't. The party is fundamentally broken. Starmer isn't it, Reeves isn't a leader, Streeting is a joke. Obviously, they have moved to the centre on immigration and crime but...the party are just mad, and it doesn't seem authentic at all (Starmer was a human rights lawyer, getting rid of ECHR is the only course...you would have to be an idiot to believe he would do that, it just isn't credible).
The ambiguity of Labour is causing part of these problems. For example, their position of ambiguity on healthcare...clearly, it is broken...but they decide to be ambiguous (again, classic Brown) so their polling numbers stay up. There needs to be some kind of cross-party move towards reform but it is impossible when one side just wants to score points as the "protector of the NHS" (and it will end up with Labour winning, then finding out they are neck deep in trouble trying to do reforms that don't work...it will never be fixed).
The problem with that argument is where the money comes from. If you look at government tax take relative to GDP we aren't paying in much less tax than at any other time in most of our living memories. If anything it is the other way around.
We'd all like public services that do everything for everyone but few of us would be willing to pay what that would actually cost and many of us literally couldn't afford it. Meanwhile expectations of government services are rising and in many areas demographics are against us. If you rule out reform of government services then you don't have a lot of options left to square a lot of circles.
It's important to consider that "reform" is not the same as "cutting standards". For example if we could redistribute the available resources for health and social care to focus more on prevention than cure then many problems might be detected and dealt with earlier resulting in lower overall costs and crucially also
better outcomes for patients. Of course there is so much firefighting happening in the NHS now that it's hard to see how any radical reform could happen without a huge injection of both cash and trained medical staff over a period longer than a single electoral cycle and that makes it a political problem as much as an economic or healthcare one.
The NHS has been in continuous reform.
Thatcher / Blair / Brown / Lansley / Hunt.
Most of these reforms have included injecting private sector and internal markets into the system.
You may agree or disagree with these reforms, but it's difficult to argue that they don't incur overhead. Outsourced contracts need administration, legal frameworks; private parties take profit or else they wouldn't exist.
I'd argue it is likely that most of the extra funding is seeping out through these reforms, plus the legacy of not nationalising the whole health system - GP surgeries, pharmacy, generic drug manufacturing - when the NHS was formed.
I agree with you on the prevention aspect.
but my thought is that a more joined up system including GPs, pharmacy and especially social care, would manage a lot of lifestyle related issues much better.
I expect you're right about all of this. The famous "joined up thinking" at a national scale across a whole government is frequently what is missing. Sometimes it's missing within "only" one area such as health and social care but that area alone is already huge and almost unbelievably complicated to run.
There are probably a lot of real costs in our current healthcare system that never make it onto the books as well. For example in many parts of the country it is impossible for an adult to register with a dentist as an NHS patient right now. There are zero dental practices within a reasonable distance of many people willing to accept new NHS patients. That appears to be because the deal governments currently offer to NHS dentists makes no sense financially so it's hard to blame the dentists. But the effect is the same - many of those people are not getting regular dental check ups and preventative or early treatments. The ones who are went private and paid themselves.
That's money going into private healthcare not from the tax man but from the individual patient but that still means the individual patient no longer has that money to be able to afford higher taxes that could better fund the NHS. Unfortunately the lack of huge public outcry as this frog has been boiled only proves that a government strategy of slowly eroding even essential healthcare provision to encourage privatisation by the back door can be effective.
The NHS is the largest employer in Europe. 1.7 million employees for 141,000 beds. I believe it is fundamentally irreformable, but clearly it needs reform.
> The problem with Blair was that he lost the right on EU/immigration and lost the left on everything else
Yes, that's a good point, but it's not only the right. All the traditionally Labour constituencies in the North (but not only) which voted for Brexit did so largely because of immigration.
Immigration control is not traditionally right wing only. The left has also been in favour of control and restrictions in order to protect workers' wages.
Their wages are low because they're British and live in a failing country.
Immigration raises wages; more people = better economy. That's why every other Anglo country is doing better than them. And has food that isn't brown slop.
Immigration doesn’t lower wages. Telling people this usually doesn’t convince them because they just want an excuse to complain about immigrants, but nevertheless it’s true.
In particular Australia’s population is 1/3rd immigrants. Australia’s minimum and median wages are both significantly higher than the UK. Does that mean there are so many immigrants they’re taking each others jobs instead?
There's a very big assumption in your claim, which is that immigration is balanced among 'social classes', skills, jobs,etc. In that case, indeed overall demand grows along with overall supply. Australia has an immigration system aimed at achieving that.
Things do not work out so great if immigration isn't balanced.
In the UK there has been a huge influx of unskilled or low skilled workers from Eastern Europe that has put a big dampener on wages at the low end of the spectrum.
One of the reasons the UK has a productivity issue is that cheap labour.
The papers I linked are empirical evidence, not assumptions. There’s two specifically on the UK that find no evidence of this.
They also find that skilled immigration systems don’t always work, because all immigrants tend to be unusually highly educated anyway, but also significantly downskill the jobs they choose after arriving. So you’d expect them to always compete with low end natives, but in fact they don’t because they mainly compete with other immigrants instead. And “compete” isn’t how labor works anyway, since all workers are also customers.
They weren't essentially communists, that is taking the Tory press talking point. They were further left than any other recent popular politicians. Left in the form of worker rights, unionism that sort of thing, not communism.
Given how far we've gone into a low wage and poor rights economy I don't think a hard left leadership would have been that bad, especially as it would have been tempered by the rest anyway. However, I don't like Corbyn's extreme passivism.
> What do you call nationalising companies and handing control to the workers? (It's in the manifesto)
There is a confusion here between the situation we have and how we address it.
My water supply - water being that thing that falls from the sky on to the top of my house, and humans die if we don't have any within 3 days - is owned by a Hong Kong investment fund that is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
If you asked the person on the street then they would say that this ownership model is radical, and public ownership of water is conservative.
However, if you instead ask them to comment on taking water ownership from a private company into the public domain , they'd say that was radical.
The issue is that we've moved so far in terms of financialisation of nearly every aspect of our lives, that any attempt to address that will be seen as radical.
I'm the first person to criticise McDonnell and Corbyn's radical postures, but the idea that Labour's manifesto proposal to renationalise the railways, Royal Mail and some utilities is communism is utterly laughable.
Somehow we managed state owned railways and utilities for basically the entire Cold War without ever once feeling tempted to join the Warsaw Pact, and the Royal Mail was a government agency for nearly 400 years...
Nationalisation with control handed to the workers.
And of course there's also the little thing about McDonnell and Corbyn being Marxist and socialist.
Again, too many people still seem not to be willing to see what's not even hidden. History should really be compulsory over the whole of secondary school.
Edit: they had hinted it very strongly but did not mention it in the 2017 manifesto apart from calling to promote coops. But in the 2019 manifesto it is explicitly written that nationalised utilities would be "run by service-users and workers".
McDonnell is a Marxist and so, obviously, he wanted a Marxist economic policy in which nationalisation does not mean state capitalism but really indeed workers in charge of the means of production.
I'm not sure the italicised bit conveys quite the sinister undertones you intended.
Consider the following: if you consider communism to be a bad thing which people should be vigilant against, arguments to the effect that the defining feature of communism is having rail decisions made by employees of a state railway company rather than the boards of Abellio and Arriva[1] probably aren't going to help. Firstly because there's a wee bit more to communism than that, and secondly because the consensus of British rail users is that decision making concerning our railways is currently crap.
There are plenty of decent arguments that Labour's 2019 nationalisation plans wouldn't solve the fundamental problems of those services, but the idea that it's basically Marxist-Leninism isn't one of them.
[1]incidentally entities which are wholly owned by governments, just not the British one
Firstly that involving workers in the ownership and running of a company is a successful model that is working in German for example.
Focus on short term shareholder value is not good for employees or the company.
You are posting on a site that has a large percentage of people working in start-ups. Comments like your kind of goes completely against the audience.
Secondary, I've heard McDonnell describe himself as a Marxist. but he is also a politician. Unlike Corbyn he was the one to (incorrectly in my view) seek compromise and common ground with people who were seeking to undermine him.
He was the key player in getting Labour to adopt a policy of second referendum, something that an ideological Marxist would certainly not go anywhere near, let alone drive.
There's no actual Marxist I know that would go anywhere near the EU.
In English "run by the workers" have a very different meaning from "involving the workers". So your point is a strawman.
Yes a large portion of readers probably works in startups, the pinnacle of market and financial capitalism and should in all logic despise Corbyn and McDonnell... although that's irrelevant to the discussion.
McDonnell and Corbyn are indeed life long euroseptics and very satisfied with Brexit, which made it even more ridiculous to see so many students cheering them.
Youre both wrong. under marxism public utilites would be owned and run by the workers i.e. the people in total, not just the workers who happen to work at the utility. this is because union ownership of public utilites is a recipie for failue and cannot be compared to successful for profit coops
The young like it because they don't have much skin in the game.
"Tax the rich!" Is great when you are not rich, and most young people are not (yet) rich. Coming out of uni saddled with debt and doing entry level jobs etc, it is easy to just think selfishly and say "The rich should pay for more! Not me!"
Eventually you run out of other people's money though.
As a (lamentably) no longer young and (luckily) fairly rich person in London, “tax the rich” is a fucking brilliant idea.
I have received over the past several years a number of stupid tax cuts and energy bailouts that have had precisely zero effect on my family’s well-being or future prospects. Except now I can’t get a fucking doctor’s appointment, the local church is setting up a “warm bank” so that me neighbours don’t die, and my kids will have to pay tens of thousands of pounds for education.
> The young like it because they don't have much skin in the game.
This is completely backwards, they have the MOST skin in the game. They are the ones that are going not going to have things we take/took for granted like: living and working in the EU or being able to enjoy a pension.
It's a deeper problem than simply being in power for too long. They have been in power that long because the alternative offer was worse as you mention.
I agree. In a pattern that seems to be repeated globally and frequently, dissatisfaction drives polarization, which in turn pumps up the dissatisfaction, and also encourages actions which are ideological rather than pragmatic and at least as rash as they are bold - and when they go wrong, it gives objective reasons to be even more dissatisfied.
Two party polarized systems, aside from the murky money enabling shadow control of both parties, enables centralized control of policy because rather than on a per-issue consensus decision, it enforcesstrictly "party line" votes.
... the "party line" being decided by the small cabal in charge of making the "party line", usually the ones with the most access to monetary funds.
But the inability to see even 10% of party legislators deviate from party lines in various votes means that not only is rational policy not being well served, regional representation is being undermined since adhering to the party line does not optimize for the policy for their region/district.
And in the US house/senate, the seniority system is another undemocratic institution. Why should changing representatives reduce your effective power in a legislative house? I can't think of a system where codified seniority was a good thing
Maybe I am reading something into your comment that isn't there, but I don't think this is particular to two-party systems. Israel is explicitly not a two-party system (it uses proportional representation), yet it seems to becoming increasingly and strongly polarized.
Judging what is "worse" is tricky. Of course, if the alternative is proposing policies that don't fit with your ideology, you are going to judge them badly ("how can they be good politicians, they haven't even understood what is obvious to me"). But it does not mean they are worse, it just means that they are not representative of your ideology. In a healthy democracy, the community should accept that there will be people with different ideology, and that there will therefore be political parties representing them.
I think this is the problem: politicians representing the ideology X can afford to be mediocre because they have some room before "voting for mediocre politicians that still agree with what I believe is the best" is worse than "voting for non-mediocre politicians that disagree with what I believe is the best". If a party ends up with mediocre politician, it is its own failure, and the other parties (even if they themselves have bad politicians) are not responsible: the other parties represent other people. If the party that represents your ideology is managing to put forward mediocre politicians, then, it is your failure for letting that happens or accepting this situation.
(I'm not saying that you are incompetent: you may have failed because it was impossible. Still, it's certainly not the responsibility of people who have a different ideology)
In short, in a healthy democracy, there will always be a "worse" party. It cannot take away the responsibility of the party you have voted for for being bad. It's a bit like having giraffes and lions at the zoo, and having the lions saying "the meat is full of maggots and really bad quality, but the alternative is having the vegetables that suits the giraffes, so, it's the giraffes' fault".
Except pretty much everyone agrees, even within Labour, that Corbyn was unelectable... in part because his team and policies where squarely on the far left. A repeat of the Micheal Foot days in the 80s.
So, yes, in the end people may have had issues with the sitting government but they concluded that they were the "least bad" option.
> Except pretty much everyone agrees, even within Labour, that Corbyn was unelectable... in part because his team and policies where squarely on the far left.
That does not make of him a bad politician (he can be, but you keep saying "he is a bad politician because I don't like his ideology and his ideology was not popular enough", which is NOT a criteria to decide if it's a bad politician or not). In a democracy, every ideology must be represented, even if they don't correspond to the majority and are therefore unelectable.
But again, that is not my point: Corbyn was shit, unelectable, whatever, ... And yet, the other party had bad politicians. Corbyn is not the one putting those politicians there. Corbyn supporters neither. Neither Corbyn or his supporters have any say in this, because they have a different ideology and therefore cannot build a good-politician party that defends an ideology they don't agree with.
The fact that the restaurant A serves expired food is not a good excuse for going to the restaurant B, eating slightly less expired food, pay your bill, leave without complaining about restaurant B, and conclude that the main reason is that restaurant A was bad. Restaurant A is bad, and we can, and should, complain about it, but when there is an article about restaurant B explaining that they are failing to serve correct food, you cannot bring in restaurant A as an excuse for the failure of restaurant B. The MAIN REASON restaurant B serves bad food is BECAUSE RESTAURANT B IS FAILING.
You may even be centre-left and chosen Tories for the first time just because you did not like Corbyn. But as soon as you vote Tories, the quality of the politicians in the Tory party is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. If you vote for them, you are part of the process that reward their choice of bad politicians. (I use "you" as the "hypothetical you", not you in particular)
Also, your idea that what matter is the electability is really bad for democracy. Basically, it implies that minorities should never be represented.
> A healthy democracy needs a credible opposition.
If your definition of "credible opposition" is "an opposition that I would have maybe voted for", you are dead wrong.
In a healthy democracy, when you have two main parties, one in power, one in opposition, then, there is one party that you should think is okay, and one party that you should think is shit (it's more complicated than that, but it is to illustrate). If you like all the parties, it just means that you have just one ideology represented.
The government in power from 2010-2015 was very different than the one today. For starters it was a coalition with the Lib Dems, but even comparing today's rump with Cameron's second ministry shows massive divergence in competence as well as policy.
From the outside looking in, was the opposition worse?
On the one hand, labour seem really similar to the Tories - disunited, dogma over common sense and oddly out of touch.
Their policies _were_ opposite to Tory policies but they are trying to be an opposition so…
Yes Corbin was a leftie (corduroy elbow patches and all) but he’s a leader of a left wing party. It’s like complaining that Thatcher was a bit right-wing.
It seems like the core issue is that the voters want something like Tory-lite. Blair did that and no one wants to go back to it. So this is what you’re left with
There are massive systemic issues in the country. Lack of housing, regional inequality, geographical inequality, falling real terms wages, chronic underfunding of R&D. Basically everything is falling apart. 40 years of financialisation of public services and nearly every aspect of our lives (there's virtually nothing you can do as part of your daily routine that doesn't trigger a transfer of wealth from public or household money to the top).
The Brexit vote itself was partially a reaction to these issues.
These things need real solutions and real ideas. Any ideas that even start to address them let alone reverse the issues will look radical, and Labour 2017 / 2019 was barely doing that just offering a mild social democratic platform that would not be out of place in Northern Europe or indeed in the 1983 SDP-Liberal manifesto.
Adding to that we would have had a planned and controlled Brexit, with certain Eu agreements being replaced with equivalent things with different names.
All of this is mostly academic though as the first restrictions in the pandemic would have given the key to removing a Corbyn government by an effective establishment coup.
> Corbyn was a leftie ... but he’s a leader of a left wing party
Corbyn was hard left in a distinctly centrist country whose "Left Wing Party" is (despite its roots) very much left-leaning centrist, and who's only ever seen real success while occupying the middle-ground.
> voters want something like Tory-lite. Blair did that and no one wants to go back to it
If nobody wanted to go back to it then we'd have Rebecca Long-Bailey as Leader of His Majesty's Most Loyal Opposition, not another centrist.
The policies were popular. 2017 saw the reversal of decline in Labour votes that started under Blair. Labour got more votes than any Blair election other than 1997.
There is a large constituency against the status quo in the UK. We have proof of that in the 2016 Brexit referendum, where 17 million people voted strongly against the establishment line and effectively against an economic model that we had had for 40 years. People voted in part to take back control, and what is nationalisation of basic aspects of our lives like water / housing / energy / drug manufacturing / transport etc if not taking back control?
Since the pandemic, the implementation of a chaotic version of Brexit, and the cost of living crisis. The underlying aspects of the 2017 / 2019 Labour policies are even more starkly relevant. Everything has been laid bare, and for some reason the two main parties are now completely devoid of ideas or vision.
Corbyn is a hardcore anticapitalist whose aim is a socialist society (soviet block style). He is in favour of Brexit, too, for this reason. Same goes for McDonnell, a Marxist.
That's very far left and is opposed by most people including in the Labour Party. Basically, those guys were the Communist Party and unsurprisingly people did prefer to keep the Tories...
It was the same in the 80s when Labour was essentially unelectable. Blair saw that the centre left was politically the best bet, and pragmatically that social policies needed the private economy to produce wealth.
Hadn't Starmer already replaced Corbyn by the last election? I don't think you can blame this on him. I don't think he's really the most unpopular element of Labour either. Even after most media was slandering him as an "antisemite" and all that other garbage because neoliberals have captured all of the institutions in the UK.
The accusations were partly based on him cosying up with terrorists, from Hamas, Iran, etc. Is it too much to ask that a candidate for Prime Minister should respect the Rule of Law?
There's also his support for Chavez/Maduro, his suicidally naive pacifism which helps the enemy, etc.
Oh, and the episode with the mural, where he was too stupid to understand why a picture of fat people with hooked noses oppressing "the workers" would be offensive to a certain group. And what kind of adult sees the world in that way anyway?
[edit] Whatever. Downvote me. You people will never win in the real world.
Boris Johnson met ex-KGB oligarch and made his son a member of the House of Lords[1]
He said "let the bodies pile high" about his plan for COVID, a plan which ended up killing ~100,000 people.[2][2.5]
> "Oh, and the episode with the mural, where he was too stupid to understand why a picture of fat people with hooked noses oppressing "the workers" would be offensive to a certain group."
Is the certain group Jews? Were they offended by Boris Johnson's book with rude Jewish stereotypes?[3] Or his other racist public writings?[4]
> "Is it too much to ask that a candidate for Prime Minister should respect the Rule of Law?"
Is it too much to ask that the actual Prime Minster respect the law? Partygate, for example[5]
What's that saying "with Conservatives, every accusation is a confession".
Is the goal here to make Corbyn look good by comparison to Johnson? The median voter seems to think they are both unfit to lead, so it’s probably not an effective argument.
The goal is to refuse to let Conservatives leave that kind of spin uncontested.
Everything the comment accused Corbyn of doing leading to "you people will never win in the real world" was done by BoJo, and it didn't stop him winning in the real world.
Some of the stuff you listed happened after Johnson won (or came to light after his victory), and before he resigned in disgrace, so doesn’t particularly serve the point you are making.
he wrote Seventy Two Virgins (the book having a character who loved money, had a hocked nose and jewish name) in 2004. he continuously wrote racist, sexist and homophobic comments in his articles since.
His relationship with Jennifer Arcuri and public spending implications was out before 2019.
It was all out in the public domain.
It was the media's jobs to ignore this and pretend the main issue was one case where Corbyn liked a photo on facebook that he later claimed he hadn't paid enough attention to and apologised for (Johnson has never apologised or been called on to apologise)
Mostly seems to be that British press is entirely opinionated tabloids who choose to "find out" that a scandal happened a year later based on whether they like the guy it happened to or not.
I'm based in Ireland, and travel regularly to both Britain and California with work. I've always been shocked with the poverty and sense of systemic decline I witness in San Fran. Visiting London and being part of the tech industry can insulate you from just how grim things are in large parts of Britain as well though.
Not saying Ireland is some sort of utopia by any means, and we have our own enormous challenges with regards to things like housing and healthcare, but life is noticeable better here for the average citizen than it is in Britain. Which is such a turnaround from the 80's and 90's.
Ireland's prosperity is built on a house of cards to do with low corporation taxes. I wouldn't be surprised if Ireland faces serious economic challenges and maybe even decline in coming years as governments are getting increasingly serious about not allowing corporations to only register profits in overseas jurisdictions with low tax rates.
It was the initial incentive, but it's the only English speaking country in the eurozone (aside from Malta) and there's a huge number of companies who have massive capital investments (pharma/biomedical). Now there's a very active tech scene, it's tightly linked to the US so it actually feels quite sustainable.
Maybe. I suspect playing tax haven for the largest corporations in the world plays a much bigger role in the generalised prosperity than anything else but I suppose we'll see.
Why is low corporate taxes a bad thing? I want countries to compete on efficient government and low taxes. Otherwise it’s an endless cycle of stealing from private enterprise until there is nothing left.
As a former inhabitant of England, I always thought that those in charge suffered from a uniquely wide 'competence gap' which I would like to define as the difference between someone's self-perceived competence and someone's actual competence. (The term is probably useful more broadly...)
Maybe it is the historically class-based society alluded to in the article, but it always stunned me how those at the top, and in particular politicians, were pushing through policies without even a modicum of consultation. See for example the 'kamikwasi' budget of last month: in which other European country would this have been done so thoughtlessly?
I personally think that the problem is that our political class consists almost entirely of humanities-educated politicians. People (who presumably have humanities degrees) will say things like "politicians don't need to be experts" and the even more facile (well, I am really paraphrasing here) "why do you need an understanding of the subject matter to decide what actions to take".
If you look at COVID-19 and climate change you really understand that politicians really don't know how to raise a number to the power of the other (i.e. understand exponential growth). I still vividly recall the ludicrous argument a friend (now studying philosophy at Oxford) attempted to advocate to me, which is that "we should not do anything now so that if we need to fight it later the economy is strong enough" (they did not understand exponential growth). Simple mathematics suggests that if you have some crisis which is going to get exponentially worse over time, and you can mitigate or stop now it's probably better to do something now, rather than later.
Ex-minister Rory Stewart said that (paraphrasing from memory) ministers don't know what they are doing because they don't stay in the job long enough. By the time they get to the point they start to understand what they need to do they are either sacked or promoted to another ministry.
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."
A competence gap is a very polite way to put it. In Britain we live in
an inverted meritocracy which rewards smug stupidity, elevates
bullshit, while punishing and marginalising our most talented people.
I thought this was going to be another cynical Economist hit piece
like the earlier "Europe not pulling its weight" [1] but was surprised
how on-the-money it is. Some well chosen quotes;
"A family with the wrong members in control" wrote George Orwell of
the English.
Or, a country that "institutionalises lying" ruled "by chancers and
cranks" sums it up nicely. We've had a profound leadership crisis in
Britain for several decades now, and it's not just party politics.
It's endemic to all institutions and industry. We positively celebrate
corruption because we mistake it for power.
We keep selecting incompetents to lead, in all areas, because we
confuse their psychopathic cunning with "leadership". I believe that
the recent visibility of "imposter syndrome" is tactical smoke to
distract from the fact that there really are an extraordinary number
of actual imposters in charge everywhere. Are they're getting
scared? Exposure is coming.
George Carlin put it best I think. He said the definition of real
terror is waking up in mid-life and realising that all those pricks
you went to school with are now running the country. But yes, it's our
fault. We built a system that selects for them. And we continue to
allow it to stand.
What worries me is that, if tomorrow our country came to its senses
and asked genuinely competent people to take the helm, it would
already be far, far too late.
From the outside, the most painful part of UK politics to watch is this instinctual reaction of "well, that didn't work, so let's do anything else." It takes a lot of luck to do that and land on a good idea.
Again, from the outside, the UK looks like a country that has a lot to lose but it's acting quite desperate and it's hard to see why.
> What worries me is that, if tomorrow our country came to its senses and asked genuinely competent people to take the helm, it would already be far, far too late.
I agree with much of the post, but it's this kind of statement that worries me. I think there is a lot of room for incremental improvement in the UK, the dull work of growing in competence, but the appetite seems to be for sweeping measures.
> worries me... the appetite seems to be for sweeping measures.
Yes that is concerning. Desperate voters will follow any crazy with
bold promises.
> I think there is a lot of room for incremental improvement in the UK
Way I see it, I've lived through about 30-40 years of decremental
decline, so if we started "incremental improvement" tomorrow, we'd be
back where I started in the 1970s just by the time I die. I suppose
that's better than watching ones country decline through all your
life, like for Russians. Or disintegrate, as for ex-Yugoslavians for
example.
However, in the era of climate crisis, and myriad other threats, a
sense of urgency is in the air which we cannot ignore. Unless rational
and courageous minds take the lead someone else will.
> the dull work of growing in competence.
Knowing where to even start... how to counter the conditions that are
causing us to lose competence... we need to plug the holes in the ship
before charting a new course.
> George Carlin put it best I think. He said the definition of real terror is waking up in mid-life and realising that all those pricks you went to school with are now running the country.
Not too worried about that; didn't attend Eton. :D
Pretty sure if you went to school with folks running a country, you're probably in the big club he talks about regular people not being in, so you're unlikely to wake up in terror
That jackass kid who would stick a compass in his hand for giggles,
set fire to cats or drink a bottle of antifreeze is now, by pure
devious guile and rotten luck for everyone else, the mayor of your
city.
You studied hard, went to college, served your nation, designed a
better widget, raised a decent family, bought the dream... and have
fuck-all say in what goes.
It's nothing to do with elite schools, prominent families or
money. That's what makes it even more horrifying. The race is not to
the quick etc... How arbitrary it is. I think that's Carlin's point.
I'd like to suggest you take a look at almost everything done in power by George W. Bush, Donald Trump, François Holland, Paul von Hindenburg, Silvio Berlusconi, Brian Cowen, Jair Bolsonaro... the list could go on... and compare and contrast and then ask if this is subjectively a phenomenon truly unique to the UK.
Bad leadership of the type you describe has shown itself in every country in the World at some point.
the Kamikwasi budget was the end goal of a section of the Tory party who had been planning every single part of it for well over a decade in think tanks, dinner parties and meeting rooms across London and party conferences. Truss told everyone in the party what she was planning to do as part of her campaign for leader. They voted for it because they believed it was the right thing to do for the country. She and her chancellor then went ahead with executing it, and the markets told them to get it in the bin, pronto.
To paint it as a uniquely insane thing to do based on the class system playing out is an odd thing to do to me. It was a political ideology that was planned, plotted, wargamed and ultimately voted for.
It all points to a need for the UK to be rid of the Tories for a generation or two, but I can't see the relationship to a unique and rabid myopic stupidity evident in it that you seem to.
I would like to stress that the gap I speak of is not about stupidity or competence in itself; instead it is about being oblivious to one's own incompetence.
For example, I think that people like Trump, Berlusconi, Cheney, etc. are not in the same class. They are certainly bad leaders, but largely because they are selfish grifters who care little about their country. On the other hand people like Cameron, Rees-Mogg, Johnson and Truss seem to really believe that they are destined to lead the country (to greatness) and that, for them at least, it "cannot be that hard".
So I sense a real difference here, and introducing the "competence gap" was my way to try to make it precise. But maybe there is a better way to formulate it. Arrogance perhaps? (And of course such personalities are not unique to the UK, but I did find them more widespread there.)
I want to be clear about the argument you're making, as I think this is where our difference arises.
You think Trump, Berlusconi, and so on are selfish grifters but do not believe they are truly destined for greatness?
And you think Cameron, Rees-Mogg, Johnson and Truss are _not_ selfish grifters but are in it for the "greatness"?
I think you should do more research on both groups. Trump and Berlusconi (and many others I mentioned), seem to choose their actions based on self-interest fiscally and for their ego. They are over-confident in their ability to make good decisions because they feel they have been "chosen", and are "special". Their distaste for due process and the rule of law is evidence of this, I feel.
But so are the British leaders. Go do some digging, find out how they made their money and built their relationships in Parliament. Find out about the Bullingdon club, find out about Rees-Mogg's money, find out about the Institute of Economic Affairs, and more. You'll find every single one of the British leaders you named had the exact same profile of grifting and ego-driven self-belief that Berlusconi, Bolsonaro, Trump, W. Bush, and others have shown.
Your argument that there is something unique to Britain about this is weak to my mind. I can find identical behaviours of corruption, idiocy, grifting, ego and incompetence in recent history of every G20 country, every NATO member, every EU state, every democracy.
Writing this makes me feel cynical, but the good news is that there is plenty of evidence of competence and "greater good" style leaders around everywhere too - in Britain, as much as anywhere else.
What would be a politician's ideal outcome of a stint in politics?
I think that Trump and Berlusconi and Cheney and Netanyahu all aim for maximal wealth (and minimal imprisonment) for them and their buddies - and they do very well on this front! So are you sure they are unable to make "good decisions" from that perspective?
On the other hand, I think that people like Macron and Merkel, but also May, Truss and probably even Johnson, are more motivated by their legacy and truly would like to improve the status quo of their country - and they believe that that is their path to greatness.
So I think this sets apart the UK politicians from the "real" grifters. But at the same time I think they are also easily distinguished from people like Macron and Merkel and even Von der Leyen, because the British leaders are just so spectacularly bad at it. Starting at least with Cameron's referendum decision we have witnessed a remarkable sequence of massive unforced errors by UK politicians, the likes of which I have not seen in other "Western" countries or the EU (despite your insistence to the contrary).
Maybe "terrible governing by people who nevertheless care" captures it well.
So I guess where you see "evil" I see "haplessness" as a defining factor among UK leaders. A competence gap was my way to explain its origins.
If you think the referendum was an unforced error, I’m not sure you realise the factors that led to it. Grifting writ large for all the players, including Cameron and Osborne, but especially Rees-Mogg who was forcing the hand somewhat.
I don’t think they’re any more or less money oriented than others or any more or less hapless.
Even Johnson was about the wealth, the Churchill allusions were a sideshow.
Sorry, Trump cares little about his country? Say what you want of him, and he definitely has a big ego to say the least, but I can't think of a more patriotic world leader of late than him. In fact, he's rightly aligned with the nationalist trend in politics that Brexit can be argued to take part in. "America first", remember?
2000-odd words, goes into great detail talking about politics, psycho-analyzing the Tories...it is all because they went to Eton...of course...the Brexit, the bankers...it is all so simple.
A brief sentence is expended on planning, no mention about supply-side problems, the productivity crisis in govt (which is now 50% of the economy)...nothing.
I will say this another way, you can measure the intelligence by looking at the gap between how often they talk about Brexit and how often they talk about economic reform. People who talk endlessly about Brexit have nothing to say about any economic reform...beyond reversing Brexit (and then say, without self-awareness, something sniping about the "religion" of Brexit). There is no content.
The UK has many problems but the worst is an elite that is almost totally preoccupied with arguing and rutting with other members of that same elite. Recursive, insular, almost no connection with reality.
That was the problem from the 20s until Thatcher (with exceptions, there were a few good men on both sides...Labour just totally imploded first). That crept back into the Tories in the early 90s, and crept back into Labour with Brown (I will ask you this: Brown oversaw one of the most catastrophic bailout programs that actually brought down healthy institutions...he is still advising Labour, how...he devised not one but two constitutional programs that imploded...he is STILL advising Labour on a third one, how...the article talks about people leaving politics, if people leave how is this unflushable turd still there).
All of the Tories who left after Brexit were some of the worst, most incompetent people in politics. All they did by the end of 2019 was argue with other politicians, they had no connection with reality. The current Cabinet are fine, there are lots of very obviously competent people attempting to deal with massive structural issues (Home Office has gone feral, Justice has gone feral, Health is beyond repair...again, the article mentions not one word about this...why might that be?). Look at Labour...they have Starmer (not wholly competent) and Reeves (who is risking a coup by meeting the Tories on policy)...again, the biggest issue is the profound lack of progress made on massive structural issues and this comes down to a failure of political leadership, not a failure of voters.
I disagree. I voted against it, but to properly have an informed enough opinion on it really required a good understanding of our economy and how it interacted with that of the EUs.
I believe Brexit was such a complex issue that most normal voters could not be expected to be able to be informed enough to actually weigh up the decision by any useful means other than relying on superficial emotional decision making or their historical political leanings.
I think there were possibly advantages of leaving had we made the most of them. (Not enough to persuade me, but the outcomes didn’t have to be all bad). Clearly we didn’t make the most of these potential upsides though and we were never going to because the gvnt was clearly not competent enough to see such a complex transition through successfully.
Having said that, after some cursory reading on the topic, outside of the normal media spin, I believed that we were better in then out. But I disagree that it was trivially obvious for the average voter to determine this. Especially with the ridiculous campaign promises and misdirection of the leave campaign (and I think the remain campaign didn’t do great either).
And even with my background reading, my vote to remain was based largely on a gut instinct rather than a deep conviction or understanding that I was taking the correct side. I think a lot of voters would say the same.
And I know many leave voters who almost immediately regretted voting that way. Such was the “coin toss” decision making for so many people.
Saying that Brexit was obviously a massive con (and the associated implication that leave voters did not sufficient inform themselves) is to risk drastically oversimplifying it.
I will agree that it is very obvious in retrospect that it was a terrible idea.
>I believe Brexit was such a complex issue that most normal voters could not be expected to be able to be informed enough to actually weigh up the decision.
I agree with that and a lot else you say. But the crazy promises being made by 'leave' (£350 million per week for the NHS, being only one of many) were just obvious lies (a con) from day 1.
> Having said that, after some cursory reading on the topic, outside of the normal media spin, I believed that we were better in then out. But I disagree that it was trivially obvious for the average voter to determine this.
That might be true, but
> Clearly we didn’t make the most of these potential upsides though and we were never going to because the gvnt was clearly not competent enough to see such a complex transition through successfully.
Would have been a lot easier to determine, and was all that was needed to work out which way to vote.
...failure of a sad bunch that deserve everything they voted for and didnt vote against.
They DIDN'T pay attention, and they still don't. The only winners here are the politicians, but given the recent and not so recent turnovers, i fear even they've given up.
Bye, Britain- you were great when i was young and the only, only thing i wish for is your Armed Forces keep their shit together, and far away from the cunts in power.
"Economic reform" is just the latest soundbite. Half hearted acknowledgement that current tory policies have failed so by necessity the next thing being pushed must be branded as a change. Hence "reform".
I have yet to see anything of substance fly under that banner.
It isn't (the indicator for this is that Reeves is saying exactly the same thing).
It is hard to be brief but:
* Financial services - totally fucked, most of the VC funding in the UK comes from overseas investors because pension and insurance rules (that were largely adopted from Europe) mean that they have to own large amounts of govt bonds...the recent problems indicate how wise that was. Everything isn't working: retail, savings, banks, it is all not working.
* Planning - obviously...lots of countries have versions of this problem but it is becoming very problematic. Iirc, there was a recent infrastructure project that had to do a new environmental assessment (costing tens of millions) for every km of work they did...it isn't just housing, it is everything, it is all fucked.
* Healthcare - obviously...not going to say anything more but it is at the point where it is impacting the economy.
* Labour - again...do I need to say more? Look at what is happening right now.
* Education - again...do I need to say more? We have massive issues producing people with skills that employers require. There are other issues around this that relate to poor management and immigration, but schools are just bad (this is mentioned in the article to be fair but only from the perspective of too many politicians being from Eton...why can't they just...find people from journalism, who work at...the Economist say?).
* Housing - separate from just planning, there are specific rules within the housing market that cause distortions above the planning system failing to produce enough supply. For example, rent controls in Scotland...that caused a 40% drop in rental supply in two weeks, this is economic mismanagement on a grand scale.
* Local govt - needs fundamental reforms in multiple areas. Social care, planning, a lot of the new environmental rules are very dangerous (if people from outside the UK can believe it, some local councils are introducing rules which mean you will be fined if you exit your neighbourhood in a car to go to another part of the same city).
* Transport - almost everything isn't working properly. Road, rail, it is all gone. Almost all due to problems in other areas above but which will now require structural changes.
Btw, I don't know what planet you have to live on not to notice this stuff. I am in my mid-30s, every single job I have had things that impacted my ability to produce more output because of govt intervention. Every one. Once you see this stuff, you realise how bad it has become, every level of govt, every institution, it is everywhere.
I'm not from the UK, but from a distance (the other side of Europe) it looks like UK's ongoing economic implosion seems to also have been caused by the people over there going all in on "the service industry!" sometime in the late '80s - the '90s, and leaving aside almost anything that involved making physical things, from roads to steel to stuff like that.
Imo that might work for a very small country or for a city-state (like Hong Kong or Singapore, even though these also used to make actual stuff), but I don't think you can base the economy of a country as big and developed as the UK is entirely on services. At most you get a pseudo-city-state, which is what London looks like, surrounded by economic "blob". It's not London that built modern UK, but the likes of Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and, yes, Newcastle and the North-East of England. All those cities might as well not exist now, from an economic pov.
Of course, I might be totally wrong on this as I don't live in the UK, but I've got most of that by reading David Edgerton's The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History [1] recently. (a Economist editorial from a couple of weeks ago was also quoting David Edgerton, if it matters)
But it wasn't an active choice. By the early 1980s, most forms of manufacturing had become uneconomic because of union activity. And, amazingly, this is still the case (there is a refinery near me, was bought by Ineos, they had a multi-decade package of investment based on an agreement with the union not to strike, deal closed...union went on strike almost immediately, Ineos never put another pound in, invested heavily in Europe where unions are more co-operative, they are now beginning to shut down the refinery...it is that simple).
The only exception to the places you have listed is Manchester: towards the south of the city, they have built up a really competitive ecomm hub (with the airport, with the port, and with the support of local govt to build warehouses)...inflation has totally destroyed this industry (China subsidizes international shipping, most of these companies fulfilled orders for Europe/US out of the UK...the rise in air freight finished them). Glasgow is largely retail/govt-based, the North-East is seeing very promising investment in the free port but is very troubled, Birmingham muddles through.
The problem with things like manufacturing is that it overlays several areas that are problematic for the UK: planning, infrastructure, labour, labour mobility, energy...none of this stuff works anymore. For example, not many people know that one of the first modern CPU was made in Scotland (this was when Intel were making a similar chip for the first calculator in the early 70s)...but the industry just died in the 80s.
Again, people will talk a lot about deindustrialization but far less about why this happened. In the 60/70s, the govt invested heavily in local production, almost all of these companies failed or were sold to foreign buyers who could manage them properly (Rolls-Royce is the only exception I believe). There was no active choice, all other options were just removed by repeated failure.
I think it was kind of possible to go so hard on services, as part of the EU Single Market. It was a place where the EU concentrated lots of its finance industry, for instance.
> * Housing - separate from just planning, there are specific rules within the housing market that cause distortions above the planning system failing to produce enough supply. For example, rent controls in Scotland...that caused a 40% drop in rental supply in two weeks, this is economic mismanagement on a grand scale.
Umpteenth reminder that England is the only place on planet Earth where people earning a top 10% salary, that is 70K£ pa, are at constant risk of eviction and live in houses and flats with mice and bed bugs and where children die of mould. Incidentally it is also the country with the least regulated private rental market.
The problem with unsuitable housing is a side-effect of lack of supply. If you make it harder to evict, you make it harder to foreclose, make it harder to buy houses (because landlords can only sell to other landlords)...it is very bad news.
This happened almost immediately after Scotland brought in their rules...because politicians there have been blocking new builds for decades (and favouring social housing so people are more dependent on the state).
What is amazing is that this stuff happens, you see the complete failure of a set of economic ideas, and then the next day you have people suggesting the exact same thing...and people wonder why Britain is in the state it is in? The country's elite have vigorous support for ideas that are economically damaging, the voters love it, the journos love it, the lobbyists love it...not surprising.
No, it isn’t. The current state of affairs in England (even Scotland and Wales have different regulations) only causes misery and an immense waste of resources on housing. Or do you think Germans or Frenchmen spend 3 months a year doing house viewings?
Nowhere in the civilised world you can evict a family that doesn’t have rent arrears and nowhere in the civilised world you have a homelessness problem comparable to the English (maybe San Francisco being the exception).
If somebody can be evicted with a 2 month notice, are they going to complain about the lack of repairs? The answer is in the abysmal quality of the English housing stock. I mean, would you risk making your child homeless when the law says you are right but there’s nothing you can do to enforce it?
I’ve rented in London for 12 years and I wouldn’t wish that experience on a serial killer. In Italy or Germany, not even people on the dole live as bad as a private tenant in the UK, regardless of their income. (Thankfully the company I used to work for completed its IPO 3 years ago and now I can live like a normal person).
Knowing the law is useless when the law doesn't protect you.
As a student my landlord wanted to do electrical work that required me and my partner to vacate the property. The law states that he has a duty to provide alternative accommodation. We brought this up and the response was simply that we'd be evicted instead.
Fuck private landlords. They can go do actual work for a living instead of leeching off of society.
The reason you spend that time is because of the rules.
Actually, the homeless rate in Edinburgh (which actually has an eviction ban and, even, rent controls now) is 3x the rate of SF...the reason why is that most of the rental market disappeared because eviction control meant that landlords could only sell properties at the end of rental periods (and when these came up in September, they all just removed properties from the market because house prices are going to be lower next September).
The law of unintended consequences. The govt tried to take control, and it has made the problem significantly worse. This is the economic problem that the UK faces in a nutshell: voters want things that are economically damaging (the situation with housing is probably 10x Brexit), they don't understand why they are damaging, and when the damage comes they blame someone else (and btw, the most amazing thing is that if you look at a city like Edinburgh...the people are VOTING for the people who are promising not to build any housing WHILST they are complaining about a lack of housing...it is the kind of thing that makes you realise that people are getting what they are asked for).
In continental Europe it is practically impossible to evict a tenant without arrears, yet the rental market is larger and there is less homelessness (and, yes, there is plenty of public data on homelessness).
Real world outcomes aside, that is less homelessness and a better functioning private rental market, evicting families with children is just uncivilised and should be allowed just because of that.
You need to find the data yourself. There is no public source that makes this comparison.
I have lived in Edinburgh for two decades btw. Most people who work here have absolutely no idea how many homeless people live there (it has been in the thousands for years) because almost none of these people live on the street or have substance abuse problems (and Edinburgh has very effective segregation so the wealthy don't have to see the poor or their problems). They are just normal people who have been evicted for whatever reason, and have nowhere to live because the city doesn't have enough housing. So they get put into hotels or B&Bs (but, because of the refugee situation, these have largely been exhausted now too...I remember a few years ago when they were trying to house Syrians, the council said...literally no room, we are overloaded beyond belief...since then refugees worth about 2-4% of the population came...the council has been telling poor people they have to leave now, go to England, go to the Highlands, they don't care, just leave...people who have been paying rates for decades).
Last year (i.e. before the latest crisis got very severe) there were 20 thousand people on the council's waiting list...this is in a city of 400k people (and, obviously, significantly less households).
The numbers are absolutely staggering and, again, people who live in Edinburgh have no idea because most people who work there have no contact whatsoever with "locals". They vote for brownfield-only building, they love the Cockburn Association intervening on every planning decision, they vote for the green belt, etc.
I'm sorry but I call BS on this. You claimed a specific figure 3x.
I'm not claiming things are particularly great in Edinburgh, but people on the council's waiting list are not necessarily homeless.
You literally said it's x3 the homelessness. Also, there is a world of difference between being a real SF homeless in the streets; and being B&Bed temporarily by the government in Edinburgh.
Most homeless people in SF aren't living out on the streets, but instead living somewhere invisible like crashing on a series of couches or in their car or RV. So you do have to look at the numbers.
And of course they also aren't bussed in from other states and on drugs or whatever the common story for not building them housing is.
> Umpteenth reminder that England is the only place on planet Earth where people earning a top 10% salary, that is 70K£ pa, are at constant risk of eviction
Reminder that London is not England. Top 10% earners in most other parts of the country live very comfortably.
Data on the average annual gross salary percentiles in the United Kingdom in 2022 showed that the bottom ten percent of full-time workers earned an average of 19,403 British pounds a year, with the top ten percent of workers earning around 62,583 pounds a year.
That is a perfect example of what I mean by reform chatter being thin on substance. Impressive listing of problems. Incredibly hand-wavy on what to do about it:
>which will now require structural changes.
>needs fundamental reforms in multiple areas.
Everyone can see the problems. Everyone agrees there is need to reform. Actual viable game plans on how to fix it seem to be in short supply though. Current political elites (of all shades) are all about "we promise to make it better" rally slogans like increase trade, reduce redtape, boost growth etc. Those are aspirations not plans.
Reform UK (the party) in fairness has more precise language (and numbers) in their policies than labour/con, but even there it goes fuzzy on key aspects that determine viability. Funding for the very specific spending promises comes from very nebulous sources like "reduce wasteful spending". Not that it matters - small opposition parties can promise unicorns for all. By the time they reach enough votes to get to implementation the unicorn has morphed to a donkey with a superglued on horn.
Perhaps I'm just jaded & expect too much from politicians...
None of this stuff is hand-wavy. There is just no mandate to do structural change because voters vote for things that are directly opposed to each other, and there is no political leadership to actually push this through without voters. For example, healthcare...Javid did an interview the other day where he said explicitly...it is not possible to reform this, the public don't want it but the system is collapsing (and, ofc, this plays into Labour's hands...this is the only area they are strong on despite Streeting seeming to advocate for every position simultaneously).
You have quoted transport and local govt. Both relatively complex areas.
The main structural change in transport is linked to the planning system. All environmental assessments need to be removed, appeals processes need to be time-limited, lawyers removed totally, and (very likely) you need to remove all planning authority from local govt. This is probably the toughest area because central govt will fuck it up, but you could un-delegate it and then re-delegate to a new local body (but not like education pre-academies, it would be something like local infrastructure bodies that raised money from local taxes).
Local govt...where to begin. Social care needs to be moved out, likely some degree of tax devolution, planning needs to be moved out, massive levels of waste...I have not actually seen how this gets solved because unions and nepotism is so embedded (the Tories introduced new disclosure requirements, the media just don't seem to report this stuff...you can see massive levels of not only waste but what looks like graft...nothing), more powers for councils to create economic growth locally (the lobby group against this goes to the heart of govt, some councils like Warrington have created massive growth locally with so few powers...the Civil Service is violently opposed to this)...big picture is: remove powers that have externalities (healthcare, planning) and hand over economic powers (one idea would be local corporation tax).
Reform and SDP are specific. But what people don't understand is that "reduce wasteful spending" is specific...everyone knows the area in which money is wasted. But what they don't say is quite simple: you try to reduce spending, the civil service unions will stop all work across all departments immediately, they are militant. If you look at what is happening at Home Office or Justice, no-one is explicit about that because, frankly, voters don't want to hear it. That is what "structural change" means...the Home Office needs to be burned to the ground (and btw, the Tories have been trying this, the Border Force is still failing...the public doesn't realise that their senior management has been put on measures multiple times, they have brought people in from the MoD, the army...nothing works, they literally restructured the whole thing to get it away from the Home Office MULTIPLE times...it still doesn't work).
But there is masses of very specific policies in every area that can change things. The problem isn't politicians but that there is no mandate (largely due to Labour successfully selling the public repeatedly on bags of magic beans).
> because pension and insurance rules (that were largely adopted from Europe) mean that they have to own large amounts of govt bonds
Let me help you with the brevity - you mean Solvency II. So you're fine with governments bailing out the financial system with our money, but not happy if they put (admittedly heavy-handed) measures in place to stop the casino mentality.
No, I mean Solvency II amongst other rules. There are many others (pension regulations are even worse). Let me help you with complexity (financial regulation doesn't happen to be particularly simple, it won't yield before your mighty intellect because you had a thought, you have to do the work).
Er no, the reason Solvency II exists is to bailout govts (and insurance companies, it is a tacit way of decreasing competition). That is the beauty of these regulations: you have poor people in Europe who are getting absolutely rinsed by this stuff AND they will actually fight for it (the "casino mentality"...is that something that European Commissioner tells you to say?).
It does nothing to increase systemic safety: look at Europe, almost every large bank is functionally insolvent, requires massive zero-interest loans from the govt, almost all new loans in some of the large economies are now govt-guaranteed...is this what a safe system looks like.
If you take a country like Germany, which has gone the farthest down this route, savers have net financial wealth equal to Greece. Look at Allianz's market share, they own everything. It is tragic. Removing these regulations will be massively beneficial for consumers, the reason they exist at all is to limit competition and choice.
Btw, this isn't hard. The US made these changes in the early 70s, that is why they fund most VC activity in London. Consumers need choice, they don't need to have their money trapped in govt bonds subsidizing govts that can't repay their debts in a free market, the only result of this is lower returns for consumers.
Actually key parts of Solvency II (Matching Adjustment - drafted by the U.K.) specifically favours corporate debt over government bonds which is in part why actually U.K. insurers don’t hold much government debt at all. Really odd that you should get this so wrong.
This isn't the case. Solvency II treats govt bonds as essentially risk-free, corporate bonds are not treated as risk-free, and there are substantial capital requirements for non-bond investments. UK insurers have substantial holdings of govt debt (really odd that you should get this so wrong), they are one of the largest non-govt investors in the market (obviously).
> (if people from outside the UK can believe it, some local councils are introducing rules which mean you will be fined if you exit your neighbourhood in a car to go to another part of the same city).
Oxford. Another town announced they were looking at this. I would also point out, this is one measure in a long string of similar measures: LEZs, that wasn't enough so now they are doing ULEZs, banning cars from some cities (York)...near me the council put a traffic calming measure near a school, this was so effective that the school was unable to receive food deliveries...all this stuff came in during Covid (my local council went into an "emergency session" during Covid, passed all these measures without votes or public enquiries...funnily enough, these were all measures that they had proposed before Covid but which failed public consultations).
I live in York, cars have not been banned. Some central streets have been pedestrianised for a long time. Inner roads around the city center can be extremely busy.
* We do not have enough houses in economically productive areas - look at the OxCam arc, London. NIMBYs keep sapping every attempt at building more houses.
* Terrible childcare - we have to pay about 1-2k per kid for childcare. Go figure out how to have children in a climate where it's cheaper for a parent not to work (if you're on the average income).
* Healthcare - as a naturalised brit I will never understand the sacrosanct nature of the NHS. We plough a ton of money into something that is very equitable but is terrible for outcomes. Most folks who have money I know always tend to go private rather than dealing with a 6 month wait for a routine check up.
Economic reform
* Investment wise - we are funding out deficits by selling our assets to foreign investors. Most of the country's financial assets are seen as safe dividend givers. We have a decent startup ecosystem, but we should invest far more into research, infrastructure to actually ensure there is a boost to the economy.
On the structural - few things come to mind, but can't articulate them super clearly. Hope that helps
> * Healthcare - as a naturalised brit I will never understand the sacrosanct nature of the NHS. We plough a ton of money into something that is very equitable but is terrible for outcomes. Most folks who have money I know always tend to go private rather than dealing with a 6 month wait for a routine check up.
The deterioration of the service is intentional and fairly recent. A large part of that "ton of money" is funnelled straight into private hands thanks to the initiatives put in place by our criminal government.
"Right to choose": Public money funding private healthcare instead of being put towards expanding the capacity of the NHS in that area.
Private consultants: Paying a private company to poach NHS specialists who are then contracted back at a much higher rate.
Agency nurses: Paying nurses so poorly that they leave the profession, resulting in a staffing shortage. Then paying a private agency double to triple the wage of a staff nurse.
Private providers: Preventing the NHS from providing services under it's remit and instead handing public money over to private enterprises.
> Most folks who have money I know always tend to go private rather than dealing with a 6 month wait for a routine check up.
I don't get this - if it's a routine check up you'll have one per year, so your GP will be booking it in for you, and they are paid money to do so.
If you're talking about a routine check-up for the worried well who don't have any health problems but who just want a doctor to tell them that they don't have any health problems, well, those checks cause harm and do not prolong life so you'd want to delay them as much as possible.
This has become my gauge of how serious someone is. Planning reform is both incredibly necessary and incredibly unpopular and if you won't talk about it you are just dancing around the edges of the problem.
The Economist has covered the disfunctional planning system several times recently, so I suppose that's why they only devoted a little to it this week. https://www.economist.com/britain/2022/11/07/the-real-reason... (There was another article about planning in Manchester but I can't find it right now)
This planning problem, or probably more accurately rent-seeking by those profiting by scarcity, seems endemic to English language countries for the past 50 years. At least with housing, which is the root of many problems, economically.
Edit: and I think that the inability to talk about this is highly connected to the lack of other honesty in politics, as well as the perpetual outrage machine that results in things like Brexit.
Because those countries have planning systems which put planning authority in the hands of local govt. It is nothing to do with the language they speak but fairly obvious consequences of how the system is designed.
All the UK needs to do is un-delegate authority for planning to local govt. I think it is accepted, amongst those advocate for this heresy, that local areas need to retain control over the design of houses (this is something that doesn't work today btw). But the structure of the system needs to change: if you buy land, you can build whatever you want on it.
Wherever local govt has had a say on this kind of thing, it has created massive societal costs. The solution is obvious.
I don't mean that the literal English language is the problem, but rather the entire legal system, cultural norms, and evolving attitudes about housing that spread through English language countries with cross pollination of media.
They don't share legal system, cultural norms, or attitudes towards housing...what they share is delegated authority on planning and high levels of population growth. There are countries in Europe with identical systems but do not have the same issue because population growth isn't high enough.
There is nothing to generalize from. You don't need to construct a weird theory about the media (you will notice the other replies, for some reason, have this very odd theory that all English-language countries are the same...the UK doesn't even have one legal system in the country).
Japan is a relatively Anglicized country, had its government structure imposed on it by America, etc, and doesn't have this problem because they simply don't allow local control of zoning or planning.
(Also notable that when America rebuilds another country's government we never give them the American form of government.)
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones bennefiting from a brain drain of americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreing talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT.
It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Here in the Valley, I actually noticed an increase in number of international hires coming from commonwealth countries in the last few years.
I've mainly seen Canada be used to park people there who can't immigrate to the US because the system for that is too backed up. Being in the same timezone as SV is pretty helpful for collaboration.
I think that can be true, but from knowing many people that did take that route, I don't think that's a stable kind of immigration though. i.e. people who do that would rather be in the US but couldn't and are often just waiting around for the right opportunity to go back. Some stay forever, sure, but I think the two countries offer entirely different lives, specially for career-driven people.
There was an interesting reading a while ago, trying to find. It basically boiled down to "The Canadian dream is move to America". Canada is a middle-class, "middle-all", in fact, country with, in my opinion little excitement. But then again, that's just my personal opinion. Factually, yeah, the US offers more purchase power, better salaries and better mobility.
My point is: if you have to leave the US due to immigration, frankly I'd rather go to Britain than Canada. At least I get an exciting change in lifestyle. Canada is too close to America in what it tries to do but fails. UK is f* up, but at least it's Europe
Just to be clear: competent people exist everywhere, in the USA, Canada, UK, New Zealand, India, Japan, China, Argentina, Korea, Luxembourg, Sweden, and everywhere else.
What matters is where these competent people want to go.
When people want to leave, that means there's something lacking at where they are currently.
My opinion is that every place must create an environment where their best brains want to stay there (without being forced to, of course!). The whole world could be better due to that.
Yes, Murdoch is probably the single person with the greatest responsibility for the current mess. The sooner he shuffles off his mortal coil, the better.
Do you mean Brexit? Otherwise I don't recall the last time that the Murdoch press has had any influence on any policy in either the EU or the United States.
The Murdoch press was for Sweden-style COVID-19 policies and deescalation in Ukraine. If it had been listened to, we'd have low gas prices and economic prosperity now.
Instead, Biden pumped up the stock market with COVID-19 relief funds handed out to his interest groups and sent Kamala Harris (who did not know what Ukraine was) to the Munich "peace" conference, where liberals Stoltenberg et. al. escalated further.
So, apart from Brexit, which Murdoch opinion has been implemented in the past decade?
> I don't recall the last time that the Murdoch press has had any influence on any policy in either the EU or the United States.
Are you discounting Fox News as being part of the Murdoch Press? Because they definitely have an outsized influence on US policy, at least on the GOP side.
>Some at the top still benefit from unearned deference.
Indeed. Quote a bit of Latin in a posh accent at most British people and they seem to completely take leave of their senses. A bit like the tonic immobility you can induce in some animal by turning them over and stroking them. This is why we have had ridiculous figures like Johnson and Rees Mogg in positions of power.
There was a time a proper English accent earned one instant respect among Americans. We fixed that by taking some Englishmen and letting them talk on cable TV.
> There was a time a proper English accent earned one instant respect among Americans.
I don't think this exploit was ever patched. The caveat is that it does need to be a proper English accent, e.g. RP. Nobody is impressed with a chav talking like Ali G. But if somebody on American TV is talking like David Attenborough, it boosts their perceived credibility immensely.
There was a previous comment about the "native population" that is now marked dead that I wanted to respond to. The commentator really needs to read Defoe's "True Born Englishman". I offer a quote that is a little longer than the usual given:
The silent nations undistinguished fall,
And Englishman's the common name for all.
Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;
Whate'er they were, they're true-born English now.
> It has nothing to do with multiple large ethnic groups that tend to cause tension in the long run, see Israel and Donbas for example.
Please elaborate. As somebody from the East of Ukraine (and, incidentally, as someone who lived in Israel for some years too), I am curious what I am supposed to learn about ethnic tensions from these two examples.
You don't have any cultural power if you're worried about that. Let someone into America and they're eating cheeseburgers and driving a pickup truck in 5 years flat. It's impossible to avoid becoming an American.
The UK used to rule the world. It took resources from every continent, brought them to the UK and turned them into goods, which it shipped back out to the world. The industrial revolution occurred in the UK and by the time it occurred elsewhere, the UK had a world dominating navy.
The rest of the world has to try weaning itself off oil. Imagine how hard it is for the UK to be weaning itself off the resources of the entire world.
British people, despite now all being born after the collapse of this empire, still seem to believe they are special and entitled. Certainly they live among evidence of a great culture.
But what does the UK do now? First they let their manufacturing go overseas, because who needs manufacturing when you have great science. But the manufacturing paid for the science and universities. Then they had the "brain drain" as all the scientists moved to the USA (me included). Well that's ok, because we have a great service economy. Oh, wait, no that's gone abroad too. Well finance? We got finance? Uh, Brexit.
The UK is now basically a tax haven, or rather the City of London (which has different laws than the rest of the UK). It also has a side business selling weapons to dictators, and another in olde worlde pageantry, though whether Charles can keep the tourism dollars flowing is another matter.
Now small islands in the carribean make good tax havens. Not a lot of people to support. But the UK thinks it can afford things like the NHS, schools and universities, when it is nothing more than a third world country surrounding the City of London.
If it wasn't for modern communications, the UK would privately be having a dark ages, like what followed the collapse of the Roman Empire. Nobody would know, because nobody would go there. Instead, we get to see the shit-show, live.
For Boris Johnson truth was there when convenient, otherwise just lie. He lied to the british people. That's not the problem. The problem was too many people wanted to hear nice things so swallowed what he told them uncritically.
Liz Truss... say no more. But she was chosen (by a small subset of the population I agree) but she was chosen. Some people still think her damn-the-torpedoes policies were a good idea, even after the (rapid!) economic effect was evident.
Problem is the electorate, too many of whom who duck their responsibility of thinking for themselves.
To the downvoters: please complement your downvotes by explaining where I'm wrong in my analysis. In a democracy people get the leaders they deserve (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre slightly misquoted but still valid). If true, how can I not take aim at the electorate for their failure?
Didn't down vote but, on the point of the electorate being responsible, you are correct.
What many observers fail to realise however is that, in our two-party system, we are usually voting for the least worst candidate rather than the ideal.
Next time around we have a rather unique situation where the 'least worst' is going to be hard to pick and many voters will, instead, simply abstain.
Thanks. I'd rebut by saying the two party condition actually isn't - there are several inc. middle-ground lib-dems for example. That they are a small party is - I think - because of the tribalism of the electorate who self-polarise. So that's still a problem with the electorate I'd say.
About 'ideal' there's no such thing for everyone. To some Truss was ideal, to others, Corbyn. They're not my ideal.
BTW I'd say Truss was clearly going to blow things badly cos she was plain stupid, but she got picked anyway. There were less-worse candidates available.
Yes, there are other parties, but, aside from tactical voting, most people accept you're going to get a labour or conservative government no matter what.
A recent exception may have have been the Con/Lib coalition but it was a union of unequal partners at the best of times.
Where you see some inevitability "...you're going to get a labour or conservative government no matter what", I see choices not taken. It's if you're implying political free will doesn't exist. It's very hard for me to understand where you're coming from (no offence!).
I’m going to name the English language as one of the suspects.
A common language with the US makes many of the political and business elite focus on the U.S. It also makes them less inclined to put the effort in to engage with Europe politically and culturally.
That in turn helped to fan the flames of Euroscepticism that in turn led to Brexit.
It’s no accident that the focus of trade deals post Brexit has been with English speaking countries of the former Empire.
English is the lingua franca within Europe as well. And last I checked Europe displays a similar obsession with US politics as the UK does. How many Germans bother to learn Polish or Greek or whatever, who do not have family ties there?
The reason british people don't learn languages is that it is not economically beneficial for them to do so. But otherwise, I don't think it is the case that in Europe everybody is enlightened and aware of each other's national politics and culture and Britain uniquely is somehow ignorant of other countries.
Most people in the UK have at least some familiarity with European languages. Many civil servants, a point mentioned in the article, studied Classics so are quite familiar with speaking multiple languages (and our diplomatic service doesn't work the same way as the US, so some civil servants come from the diplomatic service knowing 5-10 languages fluently). And in Europe, many people speak English. Proceedings at Brussels are largely conducted in English, almost everyone will understand English (they often do not speak it publicly, but are able to understand and speak it).
People who talked about Brexit were talking about East Asia and the Commonwealth countries, not the US only. I can't really think immediately of anyone with strong links to the US in the current govt (the only minister in recent memory was Liam Fox, and he hasn't been in govt for close to a decade iirc).
- Brits are famously monolingual compared to the rest of Europe.
- How many senior British politicians speak a European foreign language fluently - Johnson perhaps - I can think of perhaps one or two others.
- Lots of key members of the Eurosceptic movement have deep links to the US. Hannan, Farage, Fox (he was the Brexit Trade Minister in 2019 btw so not close to decade).
- The 'Britannia Unchained' group of Kwarteng, Truss etc all looked strongly to the US.
I speak from experience in UK business and in Brussels.
It's not the only factor certainly but it's contributed.
I have no idea how you measure fluency, but most of the population we are concerned with learned a foreign language until the age of 16. Brits are "famously monolingual" because the country only speaks one language (unlike almost every other European country).
I don't know, I haven't tried to talk to any of them in a language that isn't English. Again, your supposition that this must be true is based on what? It must be...you heard this thing about Brits...
Right and two of the people you mention have never served in British parliament. Hannan has links to the US...and is the same person advocating heavily for a Swiss deal with EU...that couldn't be right though? You said he had "links". He wasn't the Brexit Trade Minister (that is a fictional position).
Truss and Kwarteng didn't look "strongly" to the US...I have no idea where this is coming from. Do you just not like the US so you think this other group of people you don't like must be allied to them? Truss was Trade Minister and did deals with the Commonwealth, there was no real focus on the US at all (because of Biden). Britannia Unchained is famous in the UK for being particularly adulatory towards East Asia, not the US.
>I have no idea how you measure fluency, but most of the population we are concerned with learned a foreign language until the age of 16.
I live in the UK and I am struggling to think of more than 1 or 2 British born people I know personally that speak anything other than English with any fluency.
There are quite a few, it's just that none of them learned it from two hours a week between the ages of 11 and 16. (Mostly they learned it because their parents and many members of their local community speak Welsh or Punjabi or Urdu...)
> I love this place. People speak with total authority about stuff they clearly do not understand.
Well if I lack the authority to comment on my own education, please feel free to share your greater understanding of the years and hours my classmates and I devoted to learning a second language. Perhaps you can even convince me my A* GCSE made me fluent and not utterly incompetent in it!
I think its just a return to normal service after a spectacular period in the 90s and early 2000s. Back then everything was close to perfect, economy, music, politics UK became the best at everything. Now its kinda back to how it was in post war era which is fine but not great.
I think it's worse than that, it feels like the end of the exponential part of the massive growth S-curve that started after WW2 with rebuilding, tech breakthroughs, the transistor, electronics, computers, globalization, etc. Now all that is finally in steady state and the structures that built up around the growth are falling in on themselves. People try to blame whichever government is currently in power or whatever but it's mostly irrelevant.
Agree, and it's sad because indeed Britain in the early 2000s was the coolest place to be. I mean, if they had stayed in the EU it'd still have a lot of its appeal. Now it's just a sad island with tough immigration and not much to offer. London used to be the kind of place young Europeans would head to, without plans. Now not sure whey are people going.
Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, Madrid - there aren't any good affordable capital cities any more. Maybe Berlin? It has the advantage its rebuilding after the cold war still.
I don't think the scale of Empires is anywhere near the same to make the two particularly comparable. Remember that Great Britain effectively bankrolled one side of the money incinerator that was the First Great War alone (at least for the first two years) which somewhat demonstrates the exceptional zenith of its power.
They also don't have the same size. Portugal has around 10million people. Would you say the British empire was x6 times larger than the Portuguese one?
To me this sums it up. The political kayfabe is in part constructed to make it appear like the government is in control of state affairs, but Blair's legacy was to remove power from government and spread it thinly through an increasingly overweight bureaucracy that answers to itself and only sings the governments tune when it empowers itself.
"Britain seems trapped in a doom loop of superannuated governments which, after a term or two of charismatic leadership and reformist vim, wind up bereft of talent, sinking in their own mistakes and wracked by backbench rebellions; in office but barely in power"
That's not just Britain, the entire West has this problem. IMO the rise of professional politicians who've never worked outside of politics is a major cause of this problem. Modern politics does not select for the best of the best, it selects for those with a lust for power and control & the ability to camouflage this with a professed desire to serve the public.
Is the West really stagnating? If anything, I'd say it's at the peak and continuing to climb. The bulk of the West's power is united under a single language, on a continent that's practically invincible, and it has constructed a system in which the brightest minds from around the world come to the US to work for Western companies and study in Western universities. Sure, China is catching up quickly, but that's because it is heading down a path that was already first cleared by the West - I'd expect diminishing returns to its strategy.
I think it's really quite different from what you describe. In my eyes, the game is over, the West already won, and the best that other powers can hope for is to join the West in victory - it's a fool's errand to try and supplant it entirely.
20 years ago America and Europe dominated the world - today the US is growing increasingly perilous politically and Europe is little more than a museum, irrelevant by the day.
The collective economies of Canada, Europe and Australia haven’t grown since 2008. 15 years. The US is the only “western” economy which has actually shown real GDP growth.
A staggering number of academics and researchers are now opting to either stay or return home - because home is a better place to live than the West, unlike 20 years ago.
By the year 2040, there is only going to be a single “western” country among the worlds 10 largest economies.
It’s basic math. China is just the start - there are 4-5 new chinas emerging over the next 2-3 decades
What you are saying is respectfully a highly incorrect and somewhat sheltered perspective.
If it's basic math, how come China and India haven't ruled the world forever, since they have the largest populations? There's a lot more to it than what you say.
Um, they did - China was the global superpower for most of human history. Western (read: caucasian) dominance is a relatively recent phenomenon.
And even that dominance is thanks almost entirely to the Islamic golden age that preceded it.
And just like the ignorant muslim empires in 1200 who assumed they would rule the world forever, Westerners haven't realized the rest of the world has caught up to them and the European age is over.
Allegedly, long before my time, politics was seen as a calling, a way of giving back after a successful career. Not sure how much of that is based in reality, but from what I’ve read the option of politics as an entire career, without doing something productive first, has only existed for the last ~40 years
I would argue that politics has been primarily a "professional" occupation for most of human history. And there were certainly plenty of generational political families in Western countries before the past 40 years.
I suspect that the only thing that changed is the PR. When mass media is mostly centralized, dominated by a few large radio/TV channels and newspapers, it's not hard to manufacture a public image.
Because of our first past the post system, the choice at the next election is effectively just:
Conservative. Mostly talentless crooks who are looting the country as fast as they can. But are able to present a fairly united front, no matter how much they hate each other.
Labour. A party that should probably be 2 parties. A left party and a centre party, who are unable to conceal their hatred for each other. Currently led by Starmer, an apparently decent man, but of questionable vision and political instincts.
It's not a great choice. The Conservatives deserve to lose in a landslide. But a victorious Labour party will probably spend most of it's energy fighting amongst themselves. Time for proportional representation?
When you have the left getting 35% of the vote, the centrists getting 19%, and the right getting 30%, the right isn't working, by all means, compromise and try the centrists for a change. Why the left/Labour is unable to understand this, (throwing their weight to the centrists closer to their aims) and instead getting the right elected is astonishing.
The centrists of the Labour party conducted literal purges after intentionally
smearing their own party with fabricated allegations of homophobia and anti-semitism which they spread through the media[0]. Not to mention sabotaging campaign activities by directing resources away from swing seats.
There is certainly animosity from the left but largely due to the ironically Stalin-esque tactics employed by Labour centrists.
I find it frankly perplexing that people can characterise the leftist elements of the Labour party as the aggressors in these circumstances.
That link is not happy reading. I guess it is not surprising that the centrists hate the left back. However saying someone is “truly repulsive” or “literally makes me sick” is not necessarily racist, just because they are from an ethnic minority (note: I don't know the full context).
I have wondered how real the accusations of anti-semitism in the Labour party were. Is it a deliberate conflation of anti-Israel with anti-semitism by political opponents (who I assumed were Conservatives, rather than Labour)?
If we had PR it would probably be better for the Labour party to split into 2 parties. I don't see that happening under FPTP though.
> I have wondered how real the accusations of anti-semitism in the Labour party were. Is it a deliberate conflation of anti-Israel with anti-semitism by political opponents (who I assumed were Conservatives, rather than Labour)?
This is precisely what seems to have happened. Unelected officials on the right of the Labour party appear to have been at the forefront however.
I don't doubt that there are some people in the Labour party that might harbour anti-semitic views. Those people should be removed. However, the only word I can think of to describe the reaction at the time is "Hysteria".
The thing I find most disturbing about this is the willingness of those in power at the Labour party to target at least 35 Jewish members with claims of anti-semitism[0]:
> An 82-year-old Jewish woman, who is being investigated by Labour for alleged antisemitism for the third time in less than three years, is threatening legal action against the party, claiming it has unlawfully discriminated against her based on her
belief in anti-Zionism.
[1]
> The Labour Party has expelled one of its most prominent Jewish members – by telling a right-wing newspaper first, and allowing a journalist to leak it.
[2]
As an outsider, but generally appreciative of British culture's influence on me, I was (and continue to be) flabbergasted with Britain's inward outlook.
For the vast majority of British history, Brits were only wealthy when they traded outside. The trade took various forms such as East India company, trading outposts, industrial trade outside the island, colonization, financial capitalization etc. Britain ruled the seas (and still does behind America), and established English as the lingua franca of world business.
Yet, people keep voting for inwardness. Brexit, tax cuts for the rich, stopping skilled/semi-skilled immigration. This is completely and astonishingly backwards.
The only way Britain survives the competitive world is by trading more and making itself a hub of education, engineering, finance and global businesses. Constantly voting for restrictive trade, restrictive borders and disconnect from the rest of the world takes Britain closer to North Korea than to USA, China, Singapore, Australia, Canada - who are all trying to forge more relationships with the world.
UK is NOT trying to emulate North Korea. This is a bad faith statement. Those countries (USA, China, Singapore) you mentioned are not in the EU Common Travel Area either.
Britain's been decaying since at least 1940. Basically everyone left alive here knows only failure. The idea of any success is as alien and revolutionary as suggesting we all convert to a new religion or give up private property. So any time things look like they might be succeeding, people, from voters to PMs self sabotage.
The press helps by giving people plausible deniability. Letting them pretend they didn't know. Politicians help by enacting terrible policies they know will fail just to stay in power for 6 more months. And other groups help by blaming each other (the hard left blames the centre left, right wing nationalists blame right wing free traders).
That's why people looked at the expert advice (that we would be prosperous and successful and might end up part of a world super power of we kept this EU business up) and immediately quit. That's why people were so willing to accept the bullshit and pretend it was real (like that we could leave the EU and stay in the EU).
Brexit is but a symptom of this, a big one but just one. It infects every aspect of our national identity. From the housing market to jobs to education.
Until things get a lot worse people won't be ready to try succeeding. So here we are, 5 years into a(nother) lost generation.
The price of Britain surviving WW2 was losing their superpower status.
During WW2, the US assimilated all of the British technological and organizational advantages. The Tizard mission is an example of this.
After the Suez crisis, they lost their superpower status, and now they are now a vassal state.
Then they had a second opportunity by remaining a part of the EU, and by strengthening the Commonwealth. They left the EU, and now with King Charles we will have to see what happens to the Commonwealth.
There is a really interesting and seemingly important conversation going on about how globalization will evolve. This touches everything from trade agreements and financial unions like the one Britain exited to restrictions on technology export (e.g. to China) and data harvesting (e.g. EU server requirements) to new thinking about immigration (usually restricted) and labor (expanding benefits and improving wages, more often promised than delivered).
There are credible arguments for clear answers on aspects of this debate, for example that fear of immigrants is almost all xenophobia, as opposed to genuine protection for labor and the poor. (I’m not saying this, but in corners of the broader conversation, you can credibly make these sort of arguments.)
But I don’t think there’s a credible argument that this whole global conversation has some pat clear answer and this article seems to just be simplistically saying we need to go back to a wholesale embrace of globalization. It’s pretty polarizing, for example calling Jeremy Corbyn (a heroic figure to some in the left) an example of Labour losing its mind. It treats Brexit as unalloyed bad. No acknowledgement I can see of why so many people felt compelled to support it.
It feels to me a hard conservative opinion presented as The Truth. Compelling I guess if you agree but given how under siege globalization is right now feels odd to read something so unabashedly one sided. Even in The Economist.
The way I think it works is each government starts with a finite amount of political capital after there is a change in majority. This is expended and used up over time, slowly in a growing stable economy, much faster when there are destabilising events.
Delivering Brexit and mitigating Covid were massively destabilising events that required an enormous amount of political capital to deliver. On top of that you then have scandal after scandal which drain that political capital.
Ultimately the Conservatives are out of political capital. They can only regain it by not being in power for a period of time.
For both to do so at once—as happened when, amid recent Tory convulsions, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left throwback—is a calamity.
haha yes somehow the problem is (the unelected!) Jeremy Corbyn. Good grief.
No Corbyn was in fact the light out of the tunnel, and it's in particular because he was backstabbed and dragged down by his supposed allies that the country continued to double down on the Conservatives' bad policies that things have continued to slide into worse and worse places.
> Brexit has also institutionalised lying in British politics,
Lying is institutionalized long before Brexit. That's why the British is called "Perfidious Albion".
Look at how Jean-Jacques Rousseau said in 1762: "The people of England regards itself as free, but it is grossly mis- taken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.The use it makes of the short moments of liberty it enjoys shows indeed that it deserves to lose them."
"The Russians, a Cambridge don noted, ‘consider the English as a mercenary nation’ and one of their princes publicly declared that ‘in England there is not an individual, patriot, or placeman, who is not saleable to the highest bidder’."
Citing from "Cultures Differ Differently" by SN Balagangadhara, Routledge, 2022.
I don't normally downvote so I want to explain why I did it - I think your Rousseau quote is very specific to the historic events and discussions that it came from. He is essentially arguing that democracy is not as good as what we would now call a dictatorship of the proletariat - "The Terror" that he is implimenting in france.
It's not really useful for understanding French attitudes to the English at that time, and it isn't particularly about their honesty.
This... context blindness makes me wonder if you are an algorithm or something. It's hard to believe a human would be reading a book about that period and think "this is a good quote to show the British have always been considered untrustworthy".
There are many examples of historic British untrustworthyness. I'll pick one - the fate of Duleep Singh. I'm sure that you can come up with others. Why these?
We shut down the entire economy in indecisive confused fashion for covid and the bill comes due. War with Russia towards the end of that has not helped.
Both of those look far more significant than leaving the EU to me.
Leaving the EU is structural issue, the war and the pandemic are disasters that will yield their damage and go away.
The significance of the structural issues is that it defines you and your limits. It’s bit like, being victim of a car crash can be life changing but choosing not to go to a University defines you.
In my view, it started with Cambridge Analytica and the knock on effects of targeted political propaganda to stir up intense emotions in people on social media. Then Brexit and the knock on effect from Trumpism in the USA, which we were subjected to in the news everyday. Essentially, the people caused all of this. As more random people in the UK started to get into political thinking for possibly the first time in their lives (from Brexit), they thought they had a clue. But they didn’t, all they were was datapoints to mess around with by experts in their field. Facebook gave data to experts (Cambridge Analytica) who created essentially a tool of war for mass psychological warfare. That’s my 2 pence and I am saying this from a perspective of a person who knew social media was terrible for society as far back as Myspace.
The neoliberal publication fails to mention "neoliberalism" as a cause. Shocking. Probably the worst thing it says is this:
> For both to do so at once—as happened when, amid recent Tory convulsions, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left throwback—is a calamity.
Corbyn was only "hard-left" in the sense that he wasn't anti-labor. Lots of people like give lots of different reasons why Labor was eviscerated in the last election. The truth is, it was Brexit. Specifically, Corbyn refused to take any position on Brexit nor back a second referendum or otherwise espouse any kind of Remain position or policy.
So the 48% of voters who voted to Remain really had no one to vote for in that election and the Conservatives won in a landslide. What followed was a revolving door of PMs because the Tory vision was based on lies and unworkable. Northern Ireland seems like it will inevitably reunify with the Republic of Ireland (which I personally support in any case).
I've been skeptical that Scottish people would want a hard border with England if they vote for independence and to rejoin the EU but now I'm not so sure, particularly with a worsening economy and rising inflation. If in the next election the gap narrows and whichever party forming government needs the SNP to form a majority, a second referendum seems inevitable. Currently the Tories have a huge majority but that seems unlikely to survive.
London's position as the financial capital of Europe now seems under threat given Brexit. Lies about "saving the NHS" and protest votes about Polish immigration may well have killed the golden goose. Finance really was and is the beating heart of the UK economy.
The financialization of housing is a particularly big problem in the UK too.
Well Corbyn is also a completely hopeless politician. They really should have kept him safely tucked away in Islington north. It's not his political ideology which was the problem, it's that he (not to put too fine a point on it) lacked any modicum of political ability).
One of the problems is that the UK democracy is not very strictly encoded (which Tory politicians will happily tell you is one of the wonders of the British consitution and then a whole bunch of drivel about freedom vs tyranny) - whereas e.g. Germany and France have things encoded that politicians shouldn't be allowed to do (bribery, corruption, etc.) the UK has this very weird theory that politicians should be allowed to self-police and have this ludicrous "no rules were broken" based on investigations carried out by civil servants (e.g. Sue Gray report) which in reality should be carried out by the courts (although I guess Dominic Raab has managed to blow such a big hole in the justice system that we should just be thankful that we at least still nominally posess one).
> So the 48% of voters who voted to Remain really had no one to vote for in that election and the Conservatives won in a landslide.
The Liberal Democrats were unabashedly pro-remain. They did terribly.
If the reason why so many remain folks didn't vote lib-dem was out of a fear of splitting the vote or that they were deemed "unelectable" due to historic reasons, well then the problem here is clearly FPTP, which induces all sorts of nonsense "strategic" voting and yields inflated false majorities.
Ever since I heard this podcast[1], I've thought the best way to think of what's happening is at a macro level -- Our institutions were mostly created when liberalism first came to be and kings and queens went out of fashion. Those royal institutions no longer served the world, as it had changed so much, and so some tumult and chaos ensued and liberalism's institutions came to bear.
Now those institutions no longer serve the world we find ourselves in. This feels like the same thing, and we are just in that tumultuous time in-between the next set of institutions.
The economist engages in the usual Brexit bashing, drowns the reader in irrelevant historical references and artfully omits multiple elephants in the room.
It's planned destruction by bought and paid for politicians from both Labour and Conservative working on behalf of agents of foreign governments. Hell, two of our most recent Prime Ministers have citizenship of a foreign power and no one sees that as something that should stop them from being Prime Minister.
It is quite surprising how cheaply Conservative MPs can be bought by business and foreign powers. I'm thinking of buying my own Conservative MP.
The Labour party isn't immune from this sort of corruption either. A lot of them have taken money from that old scourge of the working classes, the gambling industry.
There are several obvious culprits, here's the timeline:
1) Promoting the proxy war in Ukraine and impeding diplomatic negotiations, plus pushing for the expansion of NATO, had the result of pushing gas prices through the roof, driving record inflation (and enriching a few gas suppliers). This is the primary cause for the recent economic slump. The Neoconomist magazine is not going to address this issue, however.
2) A poorly managed Brexit. Maintaining a regulatory level playing field with Europe on issues like food safety standards would have facilitated trade. If Brexit had been better focused on pushing back against neoliberalism (halting the export of manufacturing jobs, limiting the import of cheap labor, controlling cross-border capital flows at the nation-state level) it would have worked out better. However, here's what gave impetus for the push for Brexit:
3) Privatization of national resources since Thatcher, and the resulting increase in costs for basic services. Railways, electrical suppliers, etc. were all put in the hands of wealthy interests who steadily raised rates to enrich themselves, leading to increasing poverty and the destruction of the British middle class. This growing wealth gap sparked national anger, hence support for Brexit.
Face reality: the ~40-yr neoliberal program has been an absolute disaster, and should be thrown on the scrap heap of history immediately.
Pushing for the expansion of NATO and promoting a regime change operation in Ukraine that resulted in a government that attempted to ban the Russian language and which had an undeniable neo-Nazi element affiliated with it was not such a good idea in retrospect, was it?
Imagine if a regime came to power in the USA, and it attempted to ban the Spanish language, eliminated Spanish-language versions of government documents, etc. Maybe many regions of the USA - such as much of the American Southwest - would not want to be ruled by such a government?
Similarly, how do you think the USA would respond to Chinese military bases and nuclear weapons being based in Mexico, or Russian military bases and nuclear weapons being based in Cuba (oh, we've already seen what kind of response that triggered, back in 1962-1963, wasn't it)?
Yikes, this is a terrible lie. Source: the Ukrainians in my household who were primarily Russian speaking up until February.
Your comment has no basis in reality, is just regurgitating the propaganda of a genocidal autocrat which is attempting to extinguish Ukrainians as a language.
Repeating lies like this is somewhat despicable, and though I'm trying to remain polite because of HN rules, such ridiculous propaganda that you are spouting is beyond the pale and in real life would be close to fighting words.
Ukraine had no realistic prospect of joining NATO any time soon (that may change since the invasion).
Without the expansion of NATO it might have been the baltic states that were on the recieving end of a 'special operation' long before now. And they would have been much less able to defend themselves than Ukraine has been.
Pretty much every country has a 'neo-Nazi element'. Including Britain and the US. It isn't clear to me that Ukraine was any worse in this respect.
>in a government that attempted to ban the Russian language
One of the things I've learned as an outsider while trying to distinguish between propaganda and reality vis a vis Ukraine is that the Nazis are pretty deniable.
It is quite a good marker! However, given the history of oppression, pogroms, and anti-Semitism not only in Ukraine but also Poland, Russia, and all of Europe, the lack of anti-Semitism in today's Ukrainian nationalism is a remarkable change from the past. The anti-Semitic statements regularly coming from Russian officials is quite a contrast. The Jewish people at Maidan that ironically referred to themselves as Judeo-Banderistas is quite a comment on this shift in Ukraine.
In fact, the first audience question in this talk by historian Marci Shore speaking to a Judaic Studies audience about the war and Zelenskyy, was "where's the anti-Semitism?" (1:03:00):
And her answer is that a civic identity is being developed in the nation, separate from ethnicity.
Also quite interesting is the assertion that this lie about modern day Ukrainian neo-Nazism came from the same propaganda factory that created the Hillary Clinton pizza pedopholoa conspiracy, and led to the whole Q thing.
One of my favorite lectures I've seen in the past months, if the topic grabs you.
Speaking of weird, I don't think there's a single person banging on about how the presence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine justified the invasion that wouldn't have enthusiastically defended the actual Nazis in the 1930s...
Some people are just confused by what comes out of Russia, because when Russians say "Nazis" they mean "enemies of Russia". They don't care about the anti-Semitism or anything; Russians are also anti-Semitic and didn't bother learning about the Holocaust. They just remember WW2 as that time Germany attacked them. So it's perfectly straightforward that Ukrainian Jewish people like Zelensky are also Nazis.
In the US. The waiting lines for specialists are outrageous, a minimum of months to easily half a year for several types of specialists. And that's with devoting a massive amount of our GDP to healthcare, and receiving bad outcomes for it.
Folks have touched upon this already but a real issue is the chattering classes can simply not get over Brexit. Everything is seen through the prism of either supporting remain or leave. Throw in some confirmation bias. The Economist is particularly guilty here. I don't follow this relish in talking your country down and having such click bait doomer titles - "Britain's demise". Such a bore.
I am not super optimistic in the short/medium term (5+ years) at least. There are clear structural headwinds which anyone would be foolish to deny. This doesn't mean the country is ending. The country will still remain a fantastic place to live in the grand scheme of things. Once inflation settles down, a lot of the current issues will settle down (strikes et al). The inflation while exasperated no doubt by Brexit is primarily caused by energy crisis + lockdowns.
On tribalism, it is tricky. Most of the discourse I find in the Anglosphere is similarly negative and tribalistic. Cutting down on news overall is a good tactic I won't lie + reading comments sections (HN is my vice, clearly). I stay away from Guardian and the Mail who love to wind up their audience.
On thriving outside of the UK, the UK needs to forge strong trade deals and have a visa system which supports skilled immigration (they are making good progress here). More funding/support in place for commercialising the great innovations happening in many of the UK universities (a significant advantage). More competitive taxation rates. Unfortunately, Truss totally messed this up which means we are probably saddled with high taxation without corresponding supply side reforms for a good period.
Domestically, the NHS needs to be reformed and a system found on the continent followed (note: not the awful US model).
