UK Political Thread, part the second

Beaker was Danny Alexander- the Lib dem who was the deputy to Nick Clegg (He of facebook fame) - so a dogsbody to a dogsbody for David Cameron.

Dross is just the shiny faced football linesman who can’t decide whether he’s annoyed at Boris or not.

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We Got Troubles Two? More Troubles?

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I’ve been saying it for a long time, but anyone even slightly leftwing needs to abandon the Labour party and join another party or start a new one.

Sadly the Tories won here and have completely taken over the Labour party, theres no longer any way to save it in my opinion. :frowning_face:

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People have tried, and every time it fails.

The only successful split I can think of was the SDP (Now merged into the Liberal Democrats), and that was a centre right party funded by people with proven connections to the CIA.

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They are English and Scottish. They are not Indian or Pakistani so I can’t like that.

Also England couldn’t have given two shits about the partition of India, that was the problem.

Mountbatten was an incompetent with blood on his hands as well as a paedophile rapist.

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Up until around 2016 my attitude was that if you lived in Britain, wanted to stay here and identified in some way as British then you were British. Today, I don’t identify as British even though I was born here and I don’t know why anyone else would want to.

Richi Sunak is a %100 British bastard. So are Priti Patel and Suella Braverman. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

I will not make a judgement on Humza Yousaf yet, but, again, he is British at least until Independence Scottish.

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Erm, it worked in Scotland.
If you’re talking exclusively about Labour party splinter groups, then fair enough, but if we’re talking about people leaving labour for other parties, well that huge majority of Scottish seats held by the SNP in both Holyrood and Westminster were nearly all safe Labour seats not that long ago.
I suspect there’s no shortage of people in Wales who would have no problem dropping Labour for Plaid under the right circumstance. We’ll find out soon enough depending who we end up with when Mark Drakeford retires, if they bring in someone more closely aligned with the Westminster party I have no doubt that Cymru will drop Labour like a bag of flaming dog shit.
What we need from Labour members and activists who are stuck in England is pressure on the party to stop being such dicks about Scotland and accept the necessity of working with the SNP to get the damned tories out.

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Sunak is English and Humza is Scottish, sure, but one is a Hindu of Indian heritage and the other a Muslim of Pakistani heritage (and a republican and a Celtic supporter) so the irony of them fighting over the partitioning of Britain definitely still stands.

The SNP has been an established party for years, and there was no other party focused on Scottish independence. I also remember when the SNP were called the Tartan Tories, a socially conservative party full of Calvinist attitudes towards everything with a small left wing progressive faction, that only really changed in a significant way in the last 25-30 years.

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My usual attitude is that you are what you profess to be yourself. I call Sunak English rather than British as his, English conservative, perspective on what British is, is an imperialist one which seeks control over Scotland for example, without respect. Hiding under the name British allows the Conservatives to elide the nature of their imperialist project behind a term that others choose to represent multicultural Britain with.

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The trouble in England is partly related to the lack of devolution there. The Scottish parliament and the Senedd were set up with (partly) proportional voting systems which allow for the growth of smaller parties, but Westminster is still stuck with the FPTP system that means any new party of the left runs hard into the spoiler effect.

That isn’t going to happen. Labour in Scotland have never really recovered from the SNP overtaking them, and instead of reacting rationally to the situation, have passed into a seething hatred of the nationalists and anything to do with them. Over the last 20 years anyone to the left or anyone pro-independence has already left for the SNP or the Greens, so all you’re left with is a rump of Blairites and fanatical Unionists, who are perfectly fine with forming coalitions with the Tories, and will never vote for any motion put forward by the SNP, even if they support it ideologically.

The nationalists have always been a bit of a fractious big tent kind of party, who only agreed on one thing. They were originally formed as a coalition of two previous pro-independence parties, one left wing and one right wing. The key change happened during the 1980s, when a faction of the party made a deliberate attempt to drag the party leftward, to match the Scottish electorate. Also, Scotland itself underwent a huge degree of liberalisation and secularisation from the 1970s to the 1990s, going from being generally more socially (small c) conservative than the rest of the UK, to being relatively more socially liberal.

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Maybe, but what other approaches are there left? Voting for a slightly less evil Tory party wearing a Labour badge is not going to fix anything.

The party is lost at this point, voting for it fixes nothing :frowning:

The things that do seem to fix these issues seem to be feets on the streets, and actively organizing from the ground up. There is a history of those things working, even in the face of violence leveled at people. Let’s not forget what the roots of the labor party are - a working class party that was built out of a longer history of labor activism in the 19th century.

But also people finding ways to drop out and build alternative structures to meet their needs could help. The system thrives on our engagement, so starving it of that might be helpful.

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Feeling a lot more confident in Humza Yousef today, I just watched a few segments of his First Minister’s questions debut, and he’s been absolutely nailing it. He’s Far more passionate and erudite than I’ve seen any indication of previously. I expect some of it will be turned into short clips over the next few hours, but I skipped through the Guardian live feed after it finished on YouTube, and just from choosing bits at random I could see he was handling himself impressively.

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Angry Hate GIF

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What I take away from that - is that they’re no longer sleeping together.

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