Hacker News Reader

Comment by asplake | Hacker News Reader

In the UK I would say that the Iraq war, the credit crisis, and Brexit hollowed out politics and we were left with populists – Corbyn on the left, Johnson in the right – and a great loss of trust in the political process. There’s a shakeup happening right now (Corbyn gone and Johnson likely to follow) but it’s way too early to tell how long it will take for faith to be restored.

Maybe it’s just my politics, but it seems to me that whatever your politics, the lack of a functioning middle leaves us all worse off. I know a number of Americans that feel the same, though whether there are enough of them to make a difference I don’t know.

View on HN

I think it is very interesting that you think the lack of middle is the problem.

From my left-leaning view, the middle is exactly the problem. E.g. "the third way" that the Democrats, Labour and SPD in Germany were following. Or Blair going into Iraq based on lies. The financial crisis. To me, all these are a result of the middle. The leftist parties didn't do what they were supposed to do - oppose wars, regulate economy to ensure stability and fairness.

To me, the middle means that whatever we vote for, whoever is in charge, nothing really changes. Every time left parties manage to win an election, they start to compromise and don't actually do the things they promised.

If the left is unhappy that everything is to right, and the right is unhappy that everything is to left and the middle thinks it doesn't even exist, then I don't know what the hell is broken.

Modern governments just seem to fail at being a positive factor in peoples live. It's all crumbling, it's all cost overrun, it's all compromise that is worse than both competing ideas. I often feel like all the tings that were done during my parents time are just deemed impossible now. Like NASA used to be able to put people on the Moon, and now they don't even have a manned platform anymore.

Brexit did not result in populists. It is the result of populists latching on to the greatest intraparty political divide in generations.

It's unambiguously, purely a populist position, wilfully divorced from data and focussing on sovereignty and self-determination and Britishness. It never made a technocratic case for itself at all, and in general the core Brexiteers excelled in avoiding making a technocratic case -- it was always going to be hard Brexit because every technocratic argument was successfully shot down as appeasement.

Every single major sales pitch for Brexit was populist in nature; no convincing sales pitch for good governance, economic success or long term growth was ever made. It's always about being free of Them, which is an essentially populist position.

The hollowing out created the conditions for it, and another wave of politicians have gone, continuing the process

> There’s a shakeup happening right now (Corbyn gone and Johnson likely to follow) but it’s way too early to tell how long it will take for faith to be restored.

I was unemployed for 9 months (which drained me of my savings), couldn't visit my grandmother because of the instability created by the repeated lock-downs and uncertainty. It almost financially ruined me. I can't afford to fix my car, I had to get into more debt to just get my hot water running. At the same time politicians, media personalities and the like went out boozing, sleeping with their mistresses and doing exactly what they like. Everyone of them should be thrown in jail for what they have done.

There shouldn't be any trust put in the political process. I hope it won't be restored ever. People shouldn't trust any politician at all nor the democratic process. Time after time these people have failed the people (all the political parties) spectacularly. The system itself selects for the very people that you don't want.

> Maybe it’s just my politics, but it seems to me that whatever your politics, the lack of a functioning middle leaves us all worse off.

The "functioning" middle is what has led us to this place. There is a famous quote from Noam Chomsky which is apt:

> The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.

The idea functioning middle is sold to people because most people believe in being reasonable and fair minded. This unfortunately is misleading. What it really means is "business as usual". Business as usual brought up the Iraq war, endless wars in the middle east, financial crisis after financial crisis where everyday people get shafted.

I don't want to be represented by any of them. You also don't really get to choose who you get represented by anyway. You get a very small say in who represents you. If I wanted someone to represent me, I would hire someone myself.

I can't see faith in politics returning in the UK unless the successor to Johnson gets very lucky. The trouble is, right now we're facing a major cost of living and energy crisis that's the direct result of policies which had bipartisan support from the entire mainstream establishment, such as pushing for renweables in a way that actually just makes us highly dependent on natural gas whilst blocking any new natural gas sources in the UK or funded by the UK finance industry that could make up for the decline of the current ones, and trying to stop Covid without regard to the cost to the economy (which most people wrongly understood to just mean big corporations and the super-wealthy).

Also, a lot of pressure on Johnson comes from the press and opposition claiming that any competent leader should be able to achieve things that are likely impossible and that no-one else in the Western world has, like solve the cost of living crisis, prevent large numbers of people from dying of Covid, and stop new Covid variants from coming into existence by vaccinating the world. It's amazing how many people falsely think the UK has the worst Covid deaths per capita in Europe rather than middle of the pack, just because all the headlines carefully cherry-pick whatever narrow figure makes the UK look worse. Then there's all the endless articles about how much other European countries are doing to protect people from high energy costs which mysteriously neglect to compare how much they're actually paying for power. And of course, the current vaccines can't stop new variants both because they don't stop Covid spreading nearly enough and because most of the unvaccinated global population already has natural immunity anyway, plus the UK doesn't have a pharmaceutical industry big enough to supply the world (we're not an empire anymore!) Any successor to Johnson will have expectations placed on them that they couldn't possibly live up to, which is probably why no-one is keen to try and take his place.

There's also been a lot of attacks on the government lately for "wasting" money by buying more PPE than ended up being used in the end. Imagine trying to do any kind of emergency planning when the political climate is like that.

> worst Covid deaths per capita

I think the point is that the countries that have worse deaths-per-capita are poor (eastern european states), conspicuously dysfunctional (Belgium), or both dysfunctional and unlucky (Italy).

The UK was positioned to do well (it's an island, has a national health service, very low vaccine hesitancy, had lots of warning), and yet did badly both on deaths and the economy. The story of the UK and covid was one of unforced errors, not of an impossible challenge.

PS: probably most importantly, the UK has a relatively young population (median age 40, vs Italy at 46, Germany at 49, etc).

One of those Eastern European states - the Czech Republic - was actually the big European success story everyone in the UK press pointed to as proof that the UK should've been able to do better if we had competent leaders. They ended up with the worst Covid deaths per capita in Europe until their neighbours overtook them, and yet I'm sure they still contribute to the belief the UK failed. In reality it seems like they were the ones who got lucky early on and had the chance to do well but failed to take advantage of that, with issues like poor vaccine uptake there. On the other hand, the cities which got hit next after Italy were New York and London, both of which had lots of travel from Milan due to Fashion Week right around the time there was massive undetected community spread there. That's definitely unlucky.

Well, that's the other thing: there was a time when the UK did have top-tier per-capita death rates, so that's where the idea came from that the UK was 'number one'.

In regards to CR, you would expect the Czech republic to do worse than the UK. They have an older population, somewhat poor state, and a horrible vaccination rate (63%).

The continuing perception also probably comes down to the personality of Boris Johnson. You can't go around shaking hands, calling it 'kung flu', party through the lockdowns, then expect people to see you as an ideal leader in an emergency situation.

> Well, that's the other thing: there was a time when the UK did have top-tier per-capita death rates, so that's where the idea came from that the UK was 'number one'.

I fully agree with this.

> In regards to CR, you would expect the Czech republic to do worse than the UK. They have an older population, somewhat poor state, and a horrible vaccination rate (63%).

But not this.

The Czech Republic began to handle Covid badly before vaccination was even possible; it's not sensible to blame their low vaccination rates for their troubles.

You only have to look at the speed with which things went wrong in Autumn 2020 (and the fact that their early autumn death rate peak was as bad as their mid-winter death rate peak, unlike most countries with mitigations in place) to see that their problem was fundamentally that they had failed to act politically in the quieter summer months; complacency is the issue.

This was pretty widely reported-on in the media at the time; people were very surprised at how the mask-wearing success story had messed it up so badly.

By that time even the UK was culturally better prepared for accepting restrictions; our autumn wave was considerably blunted by them.

Complacency is absolutely what did the damage in the Czech Republic, complicated by antivax sentiment later on. They didn't get lucky -- mask policy really helped -- but the political class then foolishly began to believe the worst was over.

Believing the worst was over, ignoring nascent evidence that it was not, and constructing policy around that belief, and then reversing it when the truth entered the chat also explains our lurching bouts of competence and incompetence in the UK.

The UK is not an island in any meaningful sense, because we have many of the the busiest airports and we are functionally dependent on imported food.

The idea we could close borders unilaterally before anyone else did is, I'm afraid, nearly delusional. It is a populist fantasy.

We have the worst deaths per capita largely because of the interconnectedness (not the density) of our populations; it is not how many people live in one place, but how many people live in one place and work in another.

This is for example part of why the Czech Republic, which is not at all a poor state -- it has a very low rate of poverty, low unemployment and high rates of GDP growth -- did so incredibly badly, after an initial phase of successful mask-wearing. No matter what you do, when your population is so heavily interconnected within itself and with its neighbours, complacency kills.

Median age plus the proportion of multigenerational families and homes in multiple occupation) is what made things so bad for Italy. The latter -- multiple families and multiple generations in single dwellings -- is also one of the complicating factors for the north of England vs the south.

Japan is also not 'an island in any meaningful sense'. Yet it seems like when it came to coronavirus, it was an advantage. It's obviously easier to control borders when everybody needs to go through passport control to enter or exit.

Japan is surely far less of an international transport hub, for one obvious difference?

Many things in Japan were advantageous (a culture that leans more towards collectivism and social thinking) but considering it's now abundantly obvious that SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne virus, I suspect it will come down more to pre-established habitual mask-wearing and the higher-tech air conditioning that Japan needs to function.

We could never have closed our borders in a meaningful sense for any meaningful length of time, and this is mirrored in the fact that most of Europe kept its borders open to us for long periods of time. We could have been isolated from the start, but in practice that was selective.

> We could never have closed our borders in a meaningful sense for any meaningful length of time

I've been traveling in and out of the UK throughout the pandemic, and my observation is:

  - You don't have to close borders to have strong controls. The 'PCR test before travel' + 'test on day 2 and 8' would have been pretty robust if implemented at the right time.

  - These measures were consistently implemented at the wrong time. For instance, when the delta wave was starting, there were no restrictions. When it was peaking in the UK, there were strong controls, even when you were coming from a country with a low incidence rate.

My general opinion is that the UK did the right measures[0], but consistently with the wrong timing. It's generally been the case that border controls have been harsh when they were most unnecessary, and weak when they were most needed. It's stupid to have to quarantine for ten days when you're traveling into a country that has multiple orders of magnitude higher infection rates, and no mask mandates - but that's what I was doing last year.

[0]: across the board, not exclusively in regards to travel.

> My general opinion is that the UK did the right measures[0], but consistently with the wrong timing.

Absolutely this.

The reason is Boris Johnson. I mean, quite literally. There is a cycle of him lurching between different Churchillian aspects -- freedom-and-damn-them-all-to-hell to fight-them-on-the-beaches and back. And he only ever changed to the latter position after the evidence was unavoidable, because he's psychologically incapable of thinking about anyone but himself and how history would perceive him personally.

He is absolutely the fundamental reason why this country can only act out of expedience and urgency.

So, you take easter european states (half of eu), and choose Belgium and Italy with 'caveats' to make the UK look bad. I think this is exactly what the gp was talking about.

I just checked, the deaths per million, the difference in the UK and France is of 0.03% (yes, 0.03%, basically 300 more people/million died in the UK than France).

ps: not even British, but hate selective cherry picking.

Sheesh, you don't like "selective" data but you just say "0.03%" without a bigger context.

For fiction's sake: if France only had 50 deaths/million and according to your "only 300 more people/million more" the UK would have 350 deaths/million, that's "only 0.03% more" but geez, 7x more deadly in the UK than in France!

According to [1], the UK has so far 2351.99 deaths/M and France has 1868.02. The rate of death is 26% higher in the UK.

And that's 0.186% vs 0.235% rate of death. 0.049% (or even 0.03% from your data) is still a big jump.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...

So, first, I used [1] this which show 2304 in uk vs 2002 in France. I don't have an account so I can't check sources, but find the difference between your dataset and mine for France quite significant and not sure which one to trust. (this difference has nothing to do with your reply, just find it strange)

So, based on your data: Country | total deaths | population (mm) | % death France: | 125,269 | 67.06 | 0.186% UK: | 157,194 | 66.83 | 0.235%

I don't care so much about the % higher when we are dealing with these kinds of numbers. Is the same as 'eating red meat increases your changes of colon cancer by 10%!!!!` and then you see it increased it from 0.01% to 0.011% (or something like that).

For me, you can find a million explanations for that small difference in the numbers, and I doubt it can be attributed to UK's government handling of the situation.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111779/coronavirus-deat...

Shrugs, I should've learnt trying to debate people on the Internet is useless, they come up with their justifications why they were right in the first place.

I guess I should start saying my net worth is about 0.1% lower than Jeff Bezos', on the 10E+16 scale or whatever the correct number maybe, I should ask you, you're better at maths.

> pushing for renweables in a way that actually just makes us highly dependent on natural gas whilst blocking any new natural gas sources in the UK or funded by the UK finance industry that could make up for the decline of the current ones

Is there a decline in the amount of gas? "We" have been exporting vast amounts of natural gas, and over the past two years the amount has increased enormously - I say "we" in quotes because it's exported from the UK but not sold by the govt, rather it's not regulated so the private companies which extract it are free to sell to whoever they want.

https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/blog/uk-exporting-gas-despit... https://www.energylivenews.com/2022/01/31/how-did-the-uk-man...

On the contrary, Boris got considerable leeway from the public over the difficult decisions he had to make around COVID, both the stuff that was understandable but flawed like delaying certain decisions and the arbitrariness of some of the implementation to the decisions that were staggeringly inept (reopening schools for one day in January 2021, thereby maximising educational disruption and the opportunity for COVID spread) because his government got one big thing right (accelerated vaccination programme) and was more generous than people expected in providing benefits. Even now his government polls well in COVID handling. His Brexit deal which delivers few of the promises he made and even he insists needs renegotiating is popular with people that voted for Brexit too. The public would probably have shrugged off him seeing the cost of living crisis as a good time to push a flat tax (NI) increase were it not for the issue of lockdown parties he attended and continues to insist didn't break any rules because of the special nature of his home/workplace and staff: which ultimately is the exact same populist dynamic "the politicians think they're better than you" he rode to power.

I agree it'll be hard for an immediate successor to recover in the polls, but it was populist anger at his personal behaviour (and related self-inflicted wounds like responding to his MP being censured by the committee that investigates Parliamentary standards by throwing out the committee) that saw him and his government nosedive in the polls in the days that immediately followed the revelations and his reaction, not the difficulty of navigating COVID for the last couple of years.

Most of the pressure on Johnson comes from

a) the inevitable consequences of his utter, careless incompetence, fuelled by his psychopathic narcissism,

b) the impotent rage of uninformed populists who were misled by his purely selfish, transactional, expedient choices (including his documented, arbitrary position on Brexit) and who are doubling down on the nonsense he sold them rather than kicking him to the kerb,

c) and those of us in a broad left/right consensus who recognise a) and b), and who have been trying to tell those who do not for literally decades that this man belongs nowhere near power because he believes in nothing but himself and will lie to anyone to get power for himself.

In other words: the pressure on Boris is all about the failings of Boris.

One of the big questions I think people should begin to ask is: what if there is no successor to Boris in the sense of those who came before? What if whoever comes after him arrives in a system that bears little resemblance to the system in which, for example, Margaret Thatcher or even Tony Blair operated? What if the many outcomes of his inverse Midas Touch are so severe that Britain as a political entity ceases to exist and England becomes a corrupt, undemocratic state with a Prime Minister who comfortably operates independently of parliamentary scrutiny by default?

Our system is failing very quickly, and the only people who can remove Boris Johnson from power are experiencing the exact same frog-boiling of their ethical codes that happened to the GOP.

How many chances has he had? And does anyone telling us earnestly that he is on his last chance really believe it?

Corbyn's no populist. He's often described as a populist; but in fact he is and always[0] has been on the left wing of Labour, a centrist party. Socialism != populism.

[0] He's been a Labour backbencher since 1983, and his policies didn't change much over the intervening years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com