This is a Financial Times article from a hard right winger (Reaganism is great!) which is pretty withering also.
I put up the Irish Times syndication as FT is a bit harder to read without a sub.
Just being selfish yet again those shits have been so extremist right wing nutbags and so profoundly incompetent as well as corrupt to the core that they make ours seem reasonable to most people. They are not reasonable. They are hard right shitheads who completely ignore reality in favour of their extremist hard right ideology. No matter how hard it doesnât work. Again and again.
Rogue regimes like those in the US and Britain really have an outsize role in reshaping the Overton window around the world.
Absolutely. They donât know that though because they do actually believe there is a libertarian strain in conservatism. A solid dose of critical race theory would cure them of that misunderstanding but they absolutely refuse to engage in critical thinking. Lots of them are out and about these days defending the British Empireâs approach to slavery. Unbefuckinglievable where we have got to.
Why does Britain think that it can, too? Donât blame imperial nostalgia. (If it were that, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal would show the same hubris.) Blame the distorting effect of language. Because the UKâs governing class can follow US politics as easily as their own, they get lost in it. They elide the two countries
A good point
You would think from British public discourse that Earth has two sovereign nations. If the NHS is fairer than the US healthcare model, it is the worldâs best. If Elizabeth II was better than Donald Trump, monarchy beats republicanism tout court. People who canât name a cabinet member in Paris or Berlin (where so much that affects Britain, from migrant flows to energy, is settled) will follow the US midterms in November. The EU is a, perhaps the, regulatory superpower in the world. UK politicos find Iowa more diverting.
This is one of my personal bugbears and arguably one of the main contributors to Brexit. It works the other way, too. Ask an American to picture a castle and they will picture an English one (maybe Scottish if their ancestors are from there). Ask them about European healthcare and they picture the NHS. England (and I am not saying Britain or the UK on purpose) is the default for thinking about Europe. Again, it is language which is the main culprit.
Yeah I appreciate that but the English Tory version of âlibertarianâ is explicitly pro police state, imprisonment without trial, military subjugation, and expropriation of other peopleâs property and land. It doesnât even have the fig leaf that American âlibertarianismâ has.
I know, We had to listen to Nigel Farage claim to be a libertarian for years while often advocating extreme authoritarianism in the same breath.
The London Anarchist Bookfair also had to throw out the Libertarian Alliance a few years back as they werenât anarchist or related to anarchism, and were explicitly told that they werenât welcome. They still came along and hijacked an empty stall for about half an hour.
This seems to be a general problem across the board in modern politics. A new kind of far right winger has emerged that is bigoted, incompetent with money, awful on foreign policy, and as you note, deeply corrupt. And they seem to make the regular old far right seem okay by comparison (think Liz Cheney here in the US - not sure who the equivalent would be in Ireland or the UK?). But the âmoderateâ far right should be opposed as strongly as the fascist far right⌠But in my more conspiracy theorist moments, I do wonder if unleashing these monsters on the world was just to make their less obviously fashy, but still just as odious policies seem more palatable to the general public. Of course, that kind of shit always backfires!
It wonât be 100%, there are Tory safe seats where it is nearly impossible for them to lose, but we are probably looking at the Conservatives having their worst election since 1906, when they only got 156 MPs (this included Ireland and the university seats too).
However you look at this, it is catastrophic for the Conservative Party.
ETA:
It looks like a bug in the Electoral Calculus site caused by the massive increase in potential Labour voters. I still stand by my claim that it will be the Conservatives worst election since 1906, or maybe ever.
I liked the line that we all knew the Queen had only hung on in order to make sure that Boris Johnson had gone. Turns out that if sheâd lasted another three weeks, she might have seen the back of Liz Truss as well.
Itâs worth noting that tactical voting will be a thing this time around too, as it was in 1997. The two recent by-elections showed that people understood which party to vote for to beat the Tory. So although it is true that in reality Labour canât possibly win everything, Iâm coming close to being prepared to lay money on the LibDems winning maybe even 40 seats (when projections show them only winning around 15.)
And, of course, weâll have new constituency boundaries as well, which will impact the âincumbencyâ benefit in quite a few places. That may skew the model somewhat too.
But yeah, however you look at it, the Tories are fucked. After 1997 it took them four leaders before they found someone even vaguely electable and Cameron only scraped a majority once by bending the rules so far that even the Electoral Commission noticed. I am willing to concede that âBorisâ did get a hefty result, but itâs increasingly clear that wasnât actually a vote for the Tories (it was mainly a Brexit vote combined with anti-Corbyn hysteria.)
Which should be a constitutional crisis for me. I mean playing Toryball for several months was a disaster for Britain last time out, canât see it being an improvement this time. The alternative of bringing back the serial liar to the people, parliament, and queen is obviously a constitutional crisis too as he was ousted for being unfit.
ETA
Conservatives should see those numbers and put in some kind of proportional representation before the election.
It has been noted that Labour were polling at >50% in 1990, which was two years out from the fiasco of 1992. Having said that, of course, the situation isnât remotely comparable. Because John Major took over, and by comparison to the seven Tory leaders after him, he was a towering colossus who understood politics and party management at an instinctive level, even if he was a charisma free vacuum. And god knows I respect Neil Kinnock but he was monstered in a way that even Corbyn barely matched, meaning that he was doomed.
The reason neither Labour nor the Conservatives want to change the electoral system is that Rupert Murdoch doesnât want it changed. He canât threaten a party in anything like the same way if they are merely part of a coalition⌠So heâd rather see Labour with a huge majority thus ensuring they wonât be tempted to change things.
