But I am still looking to spend my energy in decentralised, fully-encrypted networks, I'm still banging on about the sham that is our democratic Western world, and researching modern technological ways to protest against the status quo (agorism, etc.)
It's small but honest work, yet the vast majority of people, here included, think working with the system and the thieves is better than accepting we've been lied to for decades.
But the point is, we are powerless against any decision Westminster does. We are all waiting to vote the other party next year, and do you truly believe they will step back from this bill? After all, they too care about the children, and it is us that want to harbour pedophiles.
(I am thoroughly disgusted by how major newspapers have framed this law as a win, or relegated it to a footnote.)
step back? they're criticising the government for not doing more/watering it down.
if anything the next government will strengthen these rules, not water them down.
Child safety laws are the Trojan horse of surveillance.
Nice to know that Bravermen and the rest of them are protecting us from harm.
For example, in yesterday's Guardian [1]. Meta introducing encryption "will let child abusers ‘hide in the dark’".
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/20/meta-encr...
As some have said, people are apathetic about protesting over this issue—and I'd add many other issues as well—as it does no good. I'd essentially agree, protesting is damn hard and thankless work especially so given that it's effectively banned in most anglophone countries.
Seems to me little or nothing can be done until the political climate changes, when or if that will be is anyone's guess.
One issue that may tip the balance after backdoors are added to encryption is when politicians are caught out by their own law—as, no doubt, sooner or later they will be. Imagine the impact of a political scandal like the Profumo Affair after having been exposed by a backdoor hack. Only then will politicians realize what they've actually done—so too will the GP.
For those not old enough to realize how huge the Profumo scandal was here's the Wiki (I remember it being headline news for days and I wasn't even in the UK at the time): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profumo_affair
I can imagine it. It would be declared to be the personal failing of the persons concerned and the political ship would sail on without so much as a shudder.
In ways I agree with your assessment as I've been around long enough to witness those changes. I can only add that unless we citizens insist on changes that actually benefit us and not the Establishment/Ruling Elite then we'll end up imprisoned in a totalitarian dictatorship.
At some point the current trend/movement will have to stop or that's where we'll end up by default.
Those two together seem to have been the key to shifting public opinion.
The terrorism threats started as racist fear mongering before shifting to highlighting threats from internal nationalist groups.
This combination gives every political leaning something to fear and someone to demonize.
Counter-economics? Get infatuated with anarchism, the free-market variant, mutualism, read up on agorism (on my reading list is "How to Opt-Out of the Technocratic State" by Derrick Broze), understand that cryptocurrencies, with all their problems, could be the only tool to take down a capitalist system from the inside the more our rights are stripped away. People, and the market itself, do not care about laws or prohibition. For the first time in history, we have a way to exchange value that does not respect borders or physical constraints. Even mainstream economists such as Milton Friedman believed such an invention could radically reshape the world. [1]
That's an open discussion, nothing I can go over in a forum comment, and there is no panacea. I'm simply exploring the option that it might be possible to have a fairer world, while collectively we have decided this is the best we can do, and point and laugh at whoever tries to dispute that. We have lost the idealism of the thinkers of the last two centuries, those that fought tooth and nail for civil and worker rights. Now all you get is a pin saying "I voted!"
Feel free to email me to discuss any of these topics.
But over the years I've developed an actual underlying seething rage at how removed politicians are from us. They operate in a way that they're almost entirely unaccountable and that we are subordinate to them, rather than the actual fact that they are our employees, they work for us, we pay them to do our bidding. But the structures have developed in such a way that this is now reversed. The system has set itself up such that we only ever get variations of the same people who do whatever it takes to keep protecting the system that protects them.
If you look at a party like AfD in Europe, I have no love at all for right wing populism, and I don't support AfD themselves, but I actually do support some of what their manifesto stands for. Far more accountability to people and much more direct democracy, more referendums and so on.
- affording heating
- affording food
- affording their mortgage
- being kicked out of their rented accommodation
- unable to find somewhere to rent
- unable to afford somewhere to rent
- badly maintained rented properties
- bad public transport making commutes miserable
- increasing petrol prices
- unaffordable nursery fees
- long NHS wait times
- unable to find an NHS dentist
- crime
Please explain why and how privacy can rank above this on a day to day basis about things they have the energy to care about. You kind of acknowledged this but then disregard it
- Make the practicalities of everyday life extremely miserable
- Make the population worn down and apathetic because things are so bad, a better life unattainable for all but a few
- Then, no one will notice while we pass bills that heavily restrict your liberty and vastly entrench our power
- Profit
It's a sinister genius, and smacks of contempt for the governed.
The UK government has made the practicalities of everyday life extremely miserable through a combination of
(a) ham-fisted political decisions (Brexit referendum held for party-political reasons, followed by the multi-decade car crash that is still ongoing); plus
(b) plain and simple not giving a single shit about the majority of the population, because it isn't in the personal interests of most of the current set of ruling MPs to give said shit.
There's no overarching devious plan to enslave us all, here. It's just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence and disinterest.
As long as extreme wealth inequality exists, politicians will keep being bought and sold by the minority for their own interest at the expense of the majority.
Not that our other options at the moment are a significant improvement.
Even if the political class don't rationally understand everything they do, they are very good at dressing their apelike dominance-pleasure in saleable words instead of naked aggression, because modern politicians are essentially just trained PR mouthpieces. What they are doing feels right, and that's enough reason to continue because they are addicted to power, one of the most addictive things we can experience. It's perverse and we're all trapped in it.
I present Liz Truss as a counterexample.
The current government have largely given up on that goal - they're so disastrously far behind in the polls that they're facing a historic defeat and staying in power is a near-impossibility. They've fallen back on a damage-limitation strategy, using culture war wedge issues to try and secure their base and set a lower bound on how badly they'll lose. They're positioning themselves well to the right of the median voter, because they simply don't have the credibility to fight over the middle ground.
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/20/uk/uk-sunak-climate-targe...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/world/europe/uk-rishi-sun...
That's not incompetence. The rich are in charge.
At least the overarching-plan theory has a boogie man to attack. This is preferable to the alternative of nobody being directly at the helm and all these transgressions are done for a purely political game of chess that awards the person responsible with marginally more power than they had prior.
Honestly, that reality terrifies me more than some secretive cabal.
Oh but there is such an overarching plan: some people have power, and they want to keep it. It’s not even a secret, see how increasingly plutocratic governance is becoming across the whole West. Problem is, the known methods to thwart that plan (that is, taking power from those who currently have it), tend to be unpredictable and deadly.
Our Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology is a woman called Michelle Donelan. She graduated with a BA in history and politics, and her career outside of being a career politician was in marketing, including a time working on Marie Claire magazine and for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). How in the world is she qualified for to run the nations tech initiatives? If she was appointed as CEO of a tech company, the stock would sink like a rock over night. Dare I even get started on Michael Gove, who originally wanted the role. Let's compare this to some other comparable countries to the UK:
Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry; François-Philippe Champagne. Ex Vice-President and Senior Counsel of ABB Group, as well as Strategic Development Director, acting General Counsel, and Chief Ethics Officer and Member of the Group Management Committee of Amec Foster Wheeler.
Taiwan's Minister of Digital Affairs; Audrey Tang. Tang was a child prodigy, reading works of classical literature before the age of five, advanced mathematics before six, and programming before eight, and she began to learn Perl at age 12. On CPAN, Tang initiated over 100 Perl projects between June 2001 and July 2006, including the popular Perl Archive Toolkit (PAR), a cross-platform packaging and deployment tool for Perl 5.
South Korea's Minister of Science and ICT; Lee Jong-ho. Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Seoul National University. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2016 for contributions to development and characterization of bulk multiple-gate field effect transistors.
Australian Minister for Industry and Science; Edham Husic. Husic worked as a research officer for the member for Chifley, Roger Price. Husic was first elected as a branch organiser in 1997. In 1998, he was elected as vice-president of the Communications Division of the CEPU. From 1999 to 2003, he worked for Integral Energy as a communications manager.
I can do the same peer-to-peer analysis when looking at our agricultural, education, health, and transport secretaries. Our government is criminally incompetent when compared to the majority of other first world countries. It's a fucking embarrassment.
1. Appoint Evgeny Alexandrovich Lebedev to House of Lords as Lord of Siberia. His dad is a Russian oligarch and owns evening standard.
2. Handing out billions in PPE contracts to Tory donors to companies that were literally registered yesterday.
3. Privatise rail. Allow massive dividends from private rail companies. Spend 3.5 billion bailing out the same rail companies.
4. Allow 80 billion in dividents to be extracted from private water companies. Legalised dumping of raw sewage into rivers by water companies. Infrastructure is not maintained and most of water is lost to leaks. Enter talks about bailout with water companies.
Idk, maybe start with the 8 people who own more wealth than 3.6 billion people combined? 3 own more wealth than half the US. Probably freaking them?!? I really hope this is rhetorical.
>There's no overarching devious plan to enslave us all, here.
Of course not... Enslaving us is not the goal, just the best means to infinite wealth/power accumulation. The US is built on free labor, from slaves to the prison labor we use as slaves today.
>It's just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence and disinterest.
Laughably naive. You're describing the apathetic's contribution, the banality of the evil, not the people who really drive decisions who rely on that apathy.
This guy? "Boris Johnson Libya 'dead bodies' comment provokes anger"
"There's a group of UK business people, actually, some wonderful guys who want to invest in Sirte on the coast, near where Gaddafi was captured and executed as some of you may have seen."
"They have got a brilliant vision to turn Sirte into the next Dubai."
"The only thing they have got to do is clear the dead bodies away," he said, before laughing.
- Profit
Everything else is a mere side effect of that rather than a plan to end up there.
And we're worried about AI alignment, lol. Bring on the grey goo.
manufacture a crisis that creates the scenarios which are most pliable for the policies you want to impose.
or as chomsky called it "manufacturing consent"
UK has had 15 years of getting battered with elite-imposed financial austerity, and the outcome.....brexit. says it all.
And I'm not saying that someone worrying about affording food and energy bills should prioritize privacy over it, but the way I see it there is apathy on all levels of the society. I have friends who are very firmly in the top 1% of the British society and they also don't care too much about it, it's just yet another thing that they feel doesn't affect them so why worry about it. It's very different feeling to the one you can get in the US or in Germany or Poland, where even people who are theoretically not affected by surveillance laws are upset about them and will be very vocal about them.
Like I Said in another comment - on a personal level all I want is my friends, colleagues and family to say "this kind of thing is unacceptable in democratic society and I don't agree with it" instead of "meh I don't care".
The UK is not a EU country. Just to remind those which think they can be in and out at the same time.
And yes, this distinction is important. The british people have democratically decided to leave the EU.
With that out of the way, you should read "EU" as being in parentheses.
What a nice excuse. I dont buy it. No decision is ever made by "the people", every poll will end up being discussed in some parliament, and politicians will have the final say.
But the british people voted to exit, and that is what happened. I really dont know why supporters of democracy have any problem with that.
All European countries? I think you might have some rose (or, blue and yellow starry) tinted glasses on.
With your specific mention of EU I would hazard a guess you’re thinking of GDPR. Don’t be fooled be the existence of it. It mostly doesn’t apply to government and law enforcement. GDPR was some great PR by the EU I tell you.
I’m on mobile atm but I’d be happy to do some quick research in to how various EU countries invade their citizens privacy in the name of crime prevention
I said many, not all.
And no I'm not thinking of GDPR - my other home(Poland) is turning into a radical right wing hell hole yet people are active politically and will vocally opose the idiotic government and its policies. I don't see any such fervour in the UK, people are generally happy to go with whatever the government comes up with as long as it doesn't bother them too much.
I'll presume good faith and assume you are not aware the EU Commission are planning similar, indeed more far reaching laws applicable to all member states. And various other states want to do it themselves.
https://www.wired.com/story/europe-break-encryption-leaked-d...
Perhaps you are only familiar with the anglosphere.
The purpose of anti-privacy laws is to make sure that such activity is fully monitored and dealt with in proper manner before they can become a problem. The rise of new political parties is in particular important to keep in check, and that is impossible if people have private communication and unchecked travel.
This why and how privacy rank above those issues. Naturally most people are not political active, and most who are do not threaten to partake or create competing political movements.
Nobody is going to SAY this basic truth and give disaffected men a chance to make a moral decision, instead we are going to enslave the entire planet, to ensure security and freedom for Anakin's new Empire (lol).
Want a NHS dentist? Ok, the Government finds another way to tax you to fund that. Now the Government taxes landlords on their rental income. Landlords exist the market en-masse. Rents go up, availability goes down.
Want somewhere to rent? Oh dear, the Government just taxed those "greedy" landlords out of the market.
Want "better" public transport? Let's introduce a top 50% rate on the most "mobile" and tax paying part of the electorate to fund that as well. Then they leave the UK or offshore their accounts etc., just like in the 70s. Maybe Australia will reintroduce the 10 Pound Poms again.
Want shorter NHS waiting times? Let's bring in more doctors and nurses, which of course is more of a cost to the NHS. So the NHS needs even more funding, which comes from... more tax. Of course fewer people would reduce NHS waiting times, but apparently we're not allowed to say that.
I honestly don't see taxation in the UK coming down for a generation at this rate.
This country currently has an addiction to wanting the Government to pay for everything, whilst blaming it for everything, because it is involved in everything. Maybe Thatcher was right about the State being small.
My point is - a lot of people would say "but Germany can have a working public transport and functional police force and not tax its citizens to death". Like...yes, they can, but they have a functional economy which can support most of the country not just Berlin. If UK had a working local economy then councils would get funding from local businesses operating where they are - but right now most of the industry is gone or barely functional.
On the other hand, when it comes to legislation, MPs and committees consider only the legislation under question.
Nothing on that list suggests that privacy should be deprecated.
Honestly, I don't think we get out of this hole until demographic churn (ugly phrase yeah) rebalances the electorate.
If we look at the 1992 election there's a 13% gap in conservative votes between the youngest and oldest brackets [1]. By 2019 that's a 36-46% gap [2].
[1] https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-1992 [2] https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/26925-how-britain-vot...
“Britain: striving for mediocrity”
People are run down, fed up and have no idea what to do about it because as a nation we have culturally been conditioned (over generations) to accept our lot.
Striving for better (not just individually but societally) is sneered at and things going badly is shrugged at as the norm.
I sometimes feel we have this idea that the the UK is feature complete. Any new infra project is protested, new initiatives to try to improve things are eye rolled at - even talking about new ideas leads to back lash.
I honestly don’t think it’s some top down grand plan for control, I think it’s just incompetence, lack of leadership and fear of the above points.
So yeh, heads down, carry on and hope for the best (well, hope for “not too bad” really).
So I don’t think it’s blitz. It’s an older trait of avoiding internal confrontation (which doesn’t seem to extend to the Irish who on a number of occasions throughout British history decided to either leave Britain for greener pastures, or were more willing to be a bit more aggressive).
The Brits do internal confrontation, behind closed doors in private, and in negative inferences/sarcasm/irony in public.
What Brits don't do, is go against the establishment, which is what most foreigners bump into on day one. And brits have the concept of something being 'not the done thing'.
So you end up with a society that agrees on most things and has a fine line of disagreement that is invisibly negotiated...
Good luck!
I always preffered Russel Crowe in Master and Commander as the ideal image of Brits, rather than a dressed up car salesman.
Hammond and May are spiffing, but Clarkson too often, only shows up to the job and doesn't follow meaningfully through.
What a world we live in where an Australian actor and director (Peter Weir) in Master and Commander put on a more realistic image for British values, than Clarkson's hundred-million-pound productions...
No, just as people post all those "good thing/bad thing" graphs that diverge in 1971 for the US, the big political scar across the UK is the Winter of Discontent (1978/79) and subsequent Thatcherism. Middle-class voters chose suppression of internal dissent and a retreat from social policy, up to and including effectively abandoning cities that weren't London to their own devices. ("Managed decline" for Liverpool, Glasgow etc)
But remember: the suppression of dissent is a popular policy. Nobody in the marginal voter class wants to think, engage, be challenged, or deal with real problems. They want to retreat into Facebook boomer nostalgia instead.
There's also another breakpoint in how the introduction of student loans and fees in the late 90s means that a large section of the middle class under 40 is much poorer and to the left - permanently, as a cohort effect, not an age effect. Hopefully this will push the pendulum back.
I know the narrative is that the Brits are sinking into darkness (or whatever)... but they are a ray of hope for a world that has sane heirarchies and can satisfy consciousness.
IF you value keeping porn out of children's eyes and keeping philosophy managing experience, instead of expereince trying to manage philosophy... you could do worse than a sometimes-sarcastic and ironic, Brit.
In the long term we have the superpower of faith in our institutions, education and timeless ideas.
But day-to-day, it's all the more painful to watch everything torn by opportunists, narcissists and criminals who have displaced genuine leaders and decimated our institutions.
We have a lot of rebuilding to do as a nation.
What do you do?
I'm not unsympathetic to the plight of migrants, but I didn't think that was the purpose of the ORG, so I stopped donating.
I'd really rather they focus their entire resources on internet privacy/democracy, instead of spreading their limited resources thinly on a bunch of other - however important - issues
That's not true. Maybe the Times HE isn't "mainstream" any more, but I just wrote a scathing piece which is leading the magazine this month, about how we got the Online Safety Bill as the wages of technical ignorance and abandoning basic digital literacy for three generations.
The OSB is essentially a good thing. It's designed with a good heart, and addresses many abuses of technology that government should rightly legislate on.
The implementation is garbage.
It was written by people who were not competent to do so, since they were advised by deceptive and self-interested parties, and were not able to distinguish computer science from wishful thinking.
The Times article places some of the blame on our crumbing university system (which is now run by professional managers instead of academics and no longer serves the public interest).
UK universities now provide only expensive training certificates and no longer strive for education of the kind that produces leadership.
As a result we get Michelle Donelan serving as Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, because there nobody else to fill the post except someone with a degree in History and a career in Marketing.
Besides, government and the state institutions cannot compete with Big Tech, and so we cannot recruit conscientious and technically capable people to key roles (Sunak plays up to the "tech savvy" persona, but is another PPE grad who blags his way by association and bluster).
And I'm confident this is intentional, and happening all over; on the one side we live a dystopia where more and more people have to worry about themselves, what they'll eat next, whether they can pay the bills, etc. That leaves them with no headspace to look beyond themselves. On the other there's entertainment and distractions everywhere.
But then there's the endless torrent of shitty policies and noises. Take Donald Trump; one thing he did was post something outrageous on Twitter pretty much daily, so all the media outlets homed in on that, pushing less interesting but no less important things down the list of things that demand your attention. And another thing was to push far-right ideas, and keep pushing them, so that on a long enough timescale, the less extreme ideas gain more support because "well it's not as bad as proposed".
Of course those things should be prevented.
As usual with the UK government, there's a guy at the bottom of the pile that "knows tech" and can make a real world assessment and comes up with a pragmatic approach. That is then diluted by the increasingly tech-ignorant layers of the Civil Service, to the point where they might as well not have bothered, and we get our Dear Leader promoting a "safety bill" that isn't fit for purpose.
On the plus side, I expect we'll see an uptick in Mullvad subscriptions in the UK.
I emailed my MP a while back when I first heard of this, I'll let you know when she gets back to me.
Short of a 1-man protest (is protesting still legal?) I got nothing.
Whether it is by carefully curated news articles aimed at pushing a specific agenda via complex algorithms, or just the complete omission of important current events (London Riots, anyone?) we have all been getting moulded into apathetic sacks of flesh and bone, spending the majority of our lives accruing tax bills to pay the salaries of those whom avoid tax altogether.[0][1]
We have allowed ourselves to get into a situation where a paedophilic monarch walks freely and part-takes in elaborate, televised, celebrations while those whom call him a paedo end up being arrested.[2]
We are in a situation where our most vital services are underfunded, their staff are grossly underpaid/overworked and our government have the audacity to tell people to go outside on a Thursday night and make some noise for them. All the while refusing to pay them what they are worth.[3][4]
We are in a situation where a young girl gets kidnapped, raped and killed by a police officer which then leads to protestors being arrested[5]
How can the 'will of the people' be enacted when 'the people' are constantly lied to and manipulated?
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/09/rishi-sunak...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-64360260
[2] https://www.insider.com/heckler-arrested-after-calling-princ...
[3] https://www.england.nhs.uk/long-read/information-for-the-pub...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/28/clap-for-our...
[5] https://theconversation.com/sarah-everard-vigil-shows-the-ur...
I’d prefer it be zero, of course…
And I would add to your list the arrest of the anti-monarchy protestors before the coronation. That was awful.
* I say ‘we’, I’m watching on from Australia these days. Unfortunately they’re our bloody royals too.
Mainstream media is just another name for propaganda at this stage
- Descended from the very rich (and therefore still very rich),
- Descended from people who said "meh, what are you going to do" and didn't move to America.
This bill has cross party consensus. The opposition once said it didn't go far enough.
There's nothing you can do. The blob cometh.
Its hard to fathom for me, true that I was raised in a labour strong-hold; but the decimation of industry, housing and the selling of previously nationalised infrastructure has had long reaching and devastating consequences for a large contingent of the population.
But people keep voting them into office, literally the worst of all alternatives. (except maybe UKIP/Brexit/Reform which is the same party that keeps rebranding)
Of course not, and his excuse will be "the Tories will use that to paint us as anti-children", when in reality, the surveillance state is older and more engrained than any party.
The Tories have ruined the country, but I wish people stopped seeing them as pure evil against the pure good that is Labour, which is far from the case. They're all rotten in their own way, and it's not them pulling the pervasive surveillance strings. I wouldn't know who is for certain, but it's a combination of being in the Five Eyes, our friendship with the USA, the very favourable media, and the cultural fact that British people have been OK with total surveillance for decades.
We all lose.
That's why "starmer is a red tory" doesn't jibe with me, Blair is also a "red tory" and is/was painted as such; but he won by a landslide on that.
The media was so against Corbyn, progress away from conservative ideology will be long and it requires people to show determination to move away. Even if it's little by little.
Even now there are millions of people convinced that this is better just as there are millions still convinced that Brexit was worthwhile.
As HL Mencken said, Democracy is the theory that common people know what they want and they deserve to get it good and hard. The UK really did have an alternative and they chose to be ruled by psychopathic, greedy incompetent old Etonians.
If you want somebody to blame you need to look at the British media barons. Lord Rothermere, etc. They were the ones who manipulated two rather pathetic warring tribes into existence and played them both like puppets against each other.
The alternative that possibly could have happened was a sanely negotiated Brexit, which would have been fine (lots of countries aren’t in the EU but have extensive trade relations etc.) but no brexit wasn’t really going to happen at the time.
You'd think the head of the Remain campaign might deserve a little blame? Totally blameless for their failure apparently. The actual strategy of the campaign is never even discussed. It's just "how dare Corbyn cause Brexit! The Fiend!" How about all the other names and faces leading the Remain campaign? Cameron, Osborne? Nope. He gets more blame than fucking Farage.
I have no respect for anyone that pushes this shit. It's just disgusting post-factual factional lying crap. Stop it.
Corbyn is a long way from blame for brexit, but he was part of the lunacy.
No need to go "what about Osborne or Cameron?" I know they're tw*ts and nowhere in my comment I went to defend those reprehensible pillocks, nor I placed all the blame at Corbyn's feet.
Again, you're taking it a bit personal here, for some reason.
However, politics do exist beyond elections. Strikes have again become common, which could build up to larger campaigns and even a general strike. The organised working class can force even a Tory government to act or face the beginning of revolution.
I think for the last 50 years, possibly excepting one Labour leader, the wider electorate have seen Labour as literally the worst of all alternatives. That's why the Conservatives are consistently voted in.
The problem isn't really either of our two terrible main political parties though, it's the absence of any realistic competition. If there were an obviously better alternative I believe that despite any historical affiliations voters today on all sides would leap to it. We've had that 50 years to find an alternative and there's still nothing palatable waiting in the wings.
Why this is, I think is more debatable. Maybe the answer is PR, maybe we need to pay MPs more in line with historic rates in real terms (and more than some recent software dev grads), maybe it's something else. But it's pretty clear to me that as much as people don't want the Conservatives, they really don't want Labour either.
Which, given the UK's insane voting system, is very unlikely.
> the UK's insane voting system
Rather predictably this means the number of votes a party gets has no relation to the number of seats they get in parliament. Since the number of seats per party is far more important for the political course than who gets elected for each party this is undesirable.
This gives weird results like the Scottish nationalist party getting 3.9% of the vote and 48 seats, while the libdems got 11.6% of the vote and 11 seats.
And the post 2019 Conservative Party effectively is UKIP - they were thoroughly infiltrated and most of the old school tories left the party
I would prefer UKIP victory - it would be brief, exciting and painfull, and a lesson that lasts. Like this isn't a slower burn with greater total damage.
So this slips in and most peoples reaction if they know about it at all is "this is not legitimate because the people enforcing it are so weak"
Basically it's set up to be ignored - a populist press release dressed up a legislation.
Worrying
Whole I agree with everything you said, it's actually worse... nobody really believes the next (Labour) government will improve things either.
Traditional conservative economics don't seem to be on offer in the UK these days.
Money was given to ordinary working people (whose outgoings, being essentials, didn't change much), and then went straight to the landlords etc (whose outgoings, being more discretionary, were massively cut during the pandemic). So everyone who hasn't significantly increased their wealth over the pandemic in nominal terms (and many did, we had rising stocks and housing prices.. during a pandemic!!) is today poorer than before.
That said I'm a bit meh as it's unclear how well it will work if at all.
Governments have legislative control over the companies which provide you an internet connection, physical infrustructure which your connection runs over, and network/IT hardware which is allowed to be sold and imported in your country that makes the internet possible, as well as the vendor which made and sold you your device you use to access the internet.
There is no way to win against this.