Global media ask what's happened to Britain
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Our institutions are reliable. Our parliament, judiciary, civil services, while weakened by decades of under-funding, remain essentially sound and held together by great hard working people with a deep ethic of civic duty. Our electorate are pretty well educated, active and dutiful. Our elections are fair and well attended. We have a multi-chamber carefully segmented government with plenty of checks and balances to steer a path between conservative and progressive courses.
On the face of it we should have a model democracy and a prosperous nation.
But "politics" in the UK is a seedy, corrupt selection mechanism to find the worst possible human specimens and put them in power. It rewards childish, irresponsible, petulant, mean-spirited, greedy and corrupt little bullies who are vain, shallow, dishonest, weak-minded, cavalier and self-obsessed. And I'm being charitable here.
The era of the statesman is over. No matter how excellent our systems are they cannot function if staffed by incompetent hooligans.
A massive improvement to British politics could be made simply by selecting the cabinet and prime minister randomly from the population and then voting only on policies.
Agree with your general points but would add that print media heavily influencing uneducated people allows any narrative to be justified.
Populist leaders are unlikely to fund schools properly, because it's not in their interest to do so, it's not in their interest to have an educated voting base, and on it will go.
I guess eventually, a champion will come from someewhere and help rectify the situation, but who knows how long this will take.
It would be better to acknowledge that they have real concerns, which ought to be addressed.
The post Brexit vote polling indicated that a great many people had no idea that this was a binding referendum rather than some "national poll of the feels", many were not at all clear on the actual pros and cons, they were swayed by emotive nationalistic propaganda that simplified the question down to "are you proud of your country or not" .. which was almost entirely orthogonal to the reality being voted on "do you want to be part of a free trade union or not" (simplified of course but more accurate).
IMHO on this the EU put ideology before pragmatism in 2004 and the British government has also massively screwed up by being the only country (ok, also Ireland) not to put any restrictions when that was possible.
Then, obviously Merkel's open door policy in 2015 did not help at all...
Note that the result of the referendum was not binding. But it did not matter: democratically and politically you cannot organise such a referendum then ignore the result because you don't like it.
It's remarkable isn't it, just how fragmented non-broadcast mass media had become at this point? Huge swathes of people in London had no real idea that an important vote was taking place, or what it meant - being busy working and distracted by social media frivolity. The fact that their chosen 'channels' simply did not 'feed' them vital information allowed millions to be hoodwinked.
We still need a postmortem on "Brexit" as a kind of nation healing. All of us, on both sides, were victims of information warfare/abuse of one kind or another.
Arguably the practice of conflating university degrees with education is harmful. Increasingly universities seem to focus on anything but education.
That's an interesting claim - do you have evidence to justify it?
Not disagreeing entirely that degree holders benefit from EU membership based on the type of work degrees lead to, but in reality so do people without degrees if the economy is growing. There's really no economic argument for leaving the EU; it seems like it was purely ideological.
I didn't say exactly that degree holders benefit from EU membership. Although they are more likely to want to move abroad than non-degree holders the numbers of Brits who do so are just overwhelmingly trivial. It's just not a factor in Brexit either way; freedom of movement was always more of a theoretical issue for wealthy Brits and a practical one for those in the trades due to competition from the east.
There were actually lots of economic arguments for leaving the EU, that's one of the primary themes I remember about the debates. EU being overly regulation happy, unconcerned with growth, protectionist, etc. But I noticed that this is a common pattern with the pro-EU people. They don't say, "I disagree with argument X" they aren't aware the arguments existed at all.
No coincidence then that the latest batch of fuckups were all Eton educated.
Eton gets a bad rap, but Tories aren't helping it by over-promoting idiots just because they're EU separatists.
Rubbish. You cannot meaningfully talk about Tory party policies without understanding that they are rooted in brexit, and rooted in Brexiteer denial of reality, of purging the unbelievers from their party until nobody competent was left, of thinking "we'll promise voters pie in the sky and voters will love us for it", which selects for people who truly believe their own fantasies, and which worked for a while, until the bill came due.
Why would you "assume for the sake of argument at least that Brexit itself is not one of those foolish Tory policies" when that is starkly untrue: Brexit is not only the most foolish Tory policy, it is the father of the rest of them.
Brexit is a root cause.
1) Ian Dunt "the terrible, inevitable end of the Brexit adventure"
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/were-now-witnessing-the-terrible...
2) Chris Grey: "This isn’t just a crisis, it’s a Brexit crisis"
https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2022/10/total-disar...
3) The Guardian: "this is where Brexit has inexorably led"
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/02/whispe...
4) David Frum: "The problem is that you’re not eligible for the (UK Tory party) captaincy unless you agree it was a brilliant idea to scupper the ship in 2016- and can convincingly act baffled why it has been sinking ever since"
But really budget issues are due to the Covid response and so are many economic problems right now. Inflation is partly caused by Covid, also by the strong Dollar and the 'energy crisis'. Most of the 'energy crisis' is actually the result of decades of policy choices.
So IMHO Brexit is only marginal is the current 'top of the agenda' issues.
How ever Brexit, and the consequent need for people in power in the UK to be unrealistic at best, as is stated in the David Frum quote, very much shapes the _UK_'s ability to deal with these shocks in a realistic way.
Have you not heard the criticism that "these are serious times, and they are not serious people". it was said about Johnson and co in 2021 (I think) but it hasn't gotten any less true, quite the opposite.
If you're going to compare how the UK is facing these challenges vs. other comparable countries, then Brexit and its adherents is a factor, if not "the" factor.
That is certainly an option, but is not a serious one:
> Get Brexit Done was a political slogan frequently used by the British Conservative Party and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the run up to the 2019 general election. The slogan reflected the party's pledge to, if re-elected, facilitate the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union by the end of January the following year.
"We can have our cake and eat it too"
"Borrowing 45 billion to finance tax giveaways to the richest will spur growth and make us prosperous"
There's just so much utter shit sold as reality to a populace dumbed down by an extreme press and politicians who have zero qualms to be utterly dishonest if it serves their agenda or pocket book.
In my mind there's no doubt that this separation from reality was accelerated by Brexit.
E.g. I'd be very curious how a scenario went where the Brexit vote went as it did, but you didn't have the ERG et al forcing a hardline course. (Which they still do, if I saw right they were in the media again just now about how they'll not let a new PM weaken the stance on Ireland, despite all the mess that has been).
A big part of that success has been "getting Brexit done".
Inflation might be slightly worse because of the Pound but the main causes are the Dollar and energy. The latter is very largely caused by successive policies (or lack thereof) over the last 40 years. The UK has access to its own gas reserves and could be almost completely insulated from the current 'energy crisis'.
Economic policy is significantly impacted by Covid. There are profound disagreement within the Tory Party and Brexit does play a role there but this is not a desperate situation, either.
Brexit is not done, we have many more years of it to come!
This conspiracy is actually pretty well documented through leaks although it didn't get much airtime: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/23/unprecedented-leak-...
The UK media barons also preferred to see the country self destruct before seeing a socialist win as well, so they closed ranks and went on a character assassination extravaganza. Corbyn put their investments at risk with his policies. They didn't like Boris at all but they still painted him as a strong, capable leader even when he hid in a fridge. The public bought it.
When Corbyn lost the election, party expelled him to consolidate power and the media serially repeated the story you just did to try and make sure this socialism/peacenik thing never took hold and threatened their portfolios ever again.
The real irony is that we were serially promised years of absolute chaos and a return to the 1970s with stagflation and a wave of strikes if we voted for this guy: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/08/09/corbyn-dragging-...
Now here we are. The dark future we were promised spurred by an energy crisis Boris helped make happen by pressuring Ukraine into canceling peace talks: https://uawire.org/ukrainian-media-johnson-tells-zelensky-to...
Empty promises, it seems, can sustain a party for years. But not indefinitely.
That's kind of surface level. A large contingent of people were told that Brexit would be amazing and were told that Britain needed a good, strong, competent leader like Boris who would "get it done".
The reality is that the media barons (Rothermere, Murdoch, etc.) that wanted more than anything for the socialist NOT to win, made sure Boris was painted as the strong and competent leader who could deliver a brighter future even though privately they knew he was an idiot.
The UK public bought it.
The media only started saying what they really thought about Boris after the socialist wing of the opposition was throughly routed. The sheep have now "woken up" to Boris being a dangerous idiot even though it is as obvious now if you paid attention as it was when he demonstrated his leadership credentials by hiding from journalists in a fridge.
The media barons now desperately want a Labour government, of course, now that an unthreatening corporate stooge has consolidated power over the party. Starmer will be painted as the strong, sensible leader this country needs to avoid chaos.
Actually, I think many people on the right/Conservative/Brexit side are unhappy for the opposite reason: things have gone on unchanged instead of implementing change that Brexit allows: Immigration, tax, etc.
A different energy policy over the last decade could have made the crisis slightly better or worse but it was in essence as unavoidable in the UK as it is in France or Germany. France, with its aging fleet of expensive nuclear reactors may even suffer more.
The only way to absolutely avoid the energy crisis would have been to avoid getting embroiled in the proxy war.
It's not that the crisis could have been made slightly better: The UK could have been pretty much insulated from the energy crisis. Yes, hindsight is great but the UK's energy policy has really been awful for decades and disaster was coming one way or another (for instance because of EVs taking the grid down...)
They are now trying to use the current crisis to push for fracking because the north sea cant produce nearly enough.
The deep unpopularity of this move even in the context of an energy crisis is partly why this government lasted a few months.
If this is what you mean by "potential that should be exercised" then you're basically politically on the same page as the shortest reigning PM in history.
But on the other hand the ban on fracking in Europe is ideological and does not make sense, either. Of course impact should be assessed on a case by case basis but domestic production trumps imports for such a strategic commodity. In the meantime the US are now the largest gas exporter.
The current party is absolutely hopeless and outdated, but it's essentially been a one party rule since the end of WWII. There are no real opposition, only factions in the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan.
It's scary and sad stuff.
Still it was motivated by independence from EU insanity in law and push for fast federation with Germans ruling it. I am pro united Europe but it is pure madness to expect entities (countries here) with interdependent history (of hostility) and opposite business expectations to unite in some theoretical ASAP. In my opinion 1k years is good timeframe, assuming everything will go positive all the time.
Maybe faster but true integration is not just laws on paper, it is whole continent societes integration so no constatnt backstabbing is default modus operandi.
So, IMO, Brexit is not Britain exiting rest of the Europe countries club forever.
And plan for lowering taxes was a good thing, just not something what can bring effects in just few months. Why not abolish VAT for example ? Transactions monitoring ? LOL
What would a "well-executed brexit" even look like?
The problems are that, in order to have a "well-executed brexit", you would need pragmatic, realistic people to execute it. Who are also pro-brexit. and
a) I don't think that those exist much. It's a Venn diagram with no meaningful intersection. The realists aren't pro-brexit, and the brexiteers aren't realists.
b) Brexit is fundamentally a populist "over-promise to the people" project. Theresa May tried to pitch a reasonable compromise, and got shouted down in favour of more outlandish promises. Realistic versions can't be sold as "the real thing". What existent thing can accurately be sold as the "the real thing" I do not know or care: it's not my problem to polish that turd.
There is little doubt that the economy is going into recession, though. And raising corporation tax is only making things worse...
The dark irony is that it's from someone (Truss) who wasn't originally in favour of brexit.
The FT described her economic strategy as "cakeism" - getting to both eat and have your cake.
https://www.ft.com/content/f8f8d943-35e9-423a-9a9a-b6074a6cf...