That’s what transphobia will do to you. 
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Well, between elections, what just happened - the party will vote for a new leader and they become the PM…
Right? I mean, it’s like these assholes would literally rather burn it all down than ensure equality for any groups who have deal with forms of oppression… How can people be so cruel and stupid, not understanding how all of our well-being are interconnected now?
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SNP as the official opposition!? I want to see this! And also the dismantlement of the United Kingdom…
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But she had such high support from the tiny sliver of the population that chose her as PM.
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The Parliament can also call a vote of no confidence in the government which, if passed, would mean that elections would be called.
There is two problems with that at the moment however:
- Parliament is currently on recess and only the PM can call them back early. That’s not likely.
- Sufficient Tory MP’s would need to vote for the bill also and given that is likely to put them in opposition for a long time, that would be a hard sell.
The British system of Government is built around people behaving like ‘gentlemen’ (with all the ironic and historic loading to that word) and has very few ways of dealing with the PM going off the rails as we found out with Boris.
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Liz Truss is awful, but is she more awful than Boris? I think not. And did Boris ever have a 15% approval rating?
I’m not saying that Truss’s approval rating should be higher, but the fact that Boris’s wasn’t lower suggests that there’s something wrong here.
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So many things.
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Boris was a buffoon. He was like a dog chasing a car and once he caught it, had no idea what to do.
Liz is an ideologue and that makes her much more dangerous.
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I’d say Boris was more like a dog chasing a car, and then he caught the car but was too stupid to realize that he had caught it, so he just kept chasing the car while pushing it along, unaware that he was the one pushing it. And that is why Brexit never really ended.
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Also, because Boris didn’t have any policies or goals beyond the possession of power for its own sake, for the most part he left the mechanics of the economy alone, and let the (evil but still competent) apparatchiks working for the Treasurer keep the machine running.
Truss, it turns out, does have policies, only they’re deeply, deeply stupid ones (even by the standards of Tories), and she came very close to sending the British economy not just into a steeper descent than it’s been on for years, but into a flat spin, and it’s only because the autopilot at the Bank of England reacted in time that she didn’t fly the British economy into a mountain on her second day actually on the job.
Or:
“I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!”
— attributed to Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord
Boris is stupid (I mean, he’s highly educated, but he’s got that sort of highly trained incuriousness which is just stupid with a bigger vocabulary) and lazy, and so there was a limit as to how much damage he could do. (Except, well, if he accidentally found himself in a situation which required him to make an effort to do something, which it turned out he was absolutely incapable of doing).
Truss is of that most dangerous quarter, the stupid and industrious.
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I think much depends on how seriously the Labour party leaders treat the recent vote of the labour party members in favour of proportional representation.
Since 2014 I’ve thought it would be relatively easy to prevent Scottish Independence: All you’d have to do is stay in the EU, and switch to PR. It wouldn’t solve all problems (far from it) but it would have sorted so many of the structural issues that a huge number of potential Indy supporters would not have lost the belief that the system could at least act in the right direction, and would probably be enough to prevent a majority in favour of Independence. And quite apart from any questions of the Union, it would have been financially/culturally/democratically positive for everyone in the rest of the UK, too. Even if the Leavers didn’t like it.
Instead, it seens that the Tories are entirely willing to shoot the nation in its own face and, up until the last week, it looked like Labour would, too. If yesterday’s polls are to be believed, it will be hard to convince Starmer that he should give up such a pleasing (if stupid) majority. I watch wth interest from under my blanket. Partly from fear, partly from energy prices.
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But how would that have gone down in the home counties? From their perspective you are suggesting that all England had to do was give up any national sovereignty and centuries of parliamentary tradition to become wholly European in order to please you Scots.
(Obviously not my opinion at all, but I’m fairly sure it would have been theirs).
That is the fundamental problem here: Scottish and English views on good governance are fundamentally incompatible.
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It’s not even that they are necessarily “true believers.” They could just be true deceivers. They benefit every time there’s a tax cut. If the house is burning all around them, but their pockets are full, all they have to do is leave the house quickly. It’s your fault if you couldn’t grab as much as they could.
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Sounds like a Liberal Democratic manifesto…
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An expensive education is clearly no guarantee of an intelligent outcome.
In total agreement here.
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You’re absolutely right - that’s definitely how some MPs and papers would explain it!
I grew up in one of the home counties (though it was Oxfordshire, which was pretty firmly Remain-voting) so I can only speak with experience of that area, but it’s exactly what they would have gone for. I think that part of the world was quite firmly in the ‘I agree with Nick’ camp, at least back before he changed his mind to things people didn’t agree with any more, and then messed up the PR freferendum. I think most of the more dramatically-shifting opinions of the nation might be further north, in the battle of the previous ‘red wall’ areas, for instance. But I’ll admit my personal experience of those areas is limited, so I really wouldn’t know!
As far as the Scottish and English feelings on governance are concerned, I suspect you are increasingly right. Or at least have been for the last couple decades, at any rate. As I say, wonder about the Tory implosion and how the national mood might shift in the coming years, particularly regarding the balance of power within the Labour party.
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Yes, I did worry about that! Mind you, the Lib Dems have traditionally had a pretty decent vote around bits of Scotland, so maybe it’s not too far off the mark. Also I reckon the SNP in Westminster would get behind votes in favour of either of those two points. My local SNP MP has said as much, anyway: that even if it meant SNP lost power in Westminster he’d gladly give it up if it meant PR was adopted.
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(The Duke of Wellington had also served as Prime Minister between 1828 and 1830.) Consequently, the prime minister with the total shortest period in office was George Canning, whose sole term lasted 119 days from 12 April 1827 until his death on 8 August 1827.
Thou it was almost bojo, there was a count down time at one point to see if he would make it or not, he lasted about 3 months longer…
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Keir was often autocorrected to Keith on phones. Nothing would have happened other than the occasional mistake except his supporters made a big fuss about it, so left wing activists kept using it.
The Sir part is because Keir hates people knowing he has a knighthood. If he really hated it so much he could have turned it down, like many other people have.
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