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The strange case of Britain’s demise

economist.com

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Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#111

Post by skippyboxedhero »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #79
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Labour isn't a popular vote. It is a popular vote AND a union vote (and the PLP, although they have never mattered in practice, they tried to oust Corbyn three times iirc...didn't work). Corbyn had popular support but, like Miliband, relied relatively heavily on unions...and one union at that: Unite (and btw, his popular support was always overstated hugely...in late 2019, you had a sizeable minority who thought…

Corbyn and McDonnell were essentially communists and therefore unelectable. Blair took the realistic route: Socialism does not work, let's have a market economy create wealth that can then be used to finance social programs. A flavour a social democracy. I think a reason Corbyn was so popular among the young is that enough time has passed so that this generation has no idea what socialist countries in Europe were act…

The problem with Blair was that he lost the right on EU/immigration and lost the left on everything else.

Brownites sound good but say nothing specific...often the specific stuff is bad too. I agree with you in that there is a route in the centre, but Labour aren't. The party is fundamentally broken. Starmer isn't it, Reeves isn't a leader, Streeting is a joke. Obviously, they have moved to the centre on immigration and crime but...the party are just mad, and it doesn't seem authentic at all (Starmer was a human rights lawyer, getting rid of ECHR is the only course...you would have to be an idiot to believe he would do that, it just isn't credible).

The ambiguity of Labour is causing part of these problems. For example, their position of ambiguity on healthcare...clearly, it is broken...but they decide to be ambiguous (again, classic Brown) so their polling numbers stay up. There needs to be some kind of cross-party move towards reform but it is impossible when one side just wants to score points as the "protector of the NHS" (and it will end up with Labour winning, then finding out they are neck deep in trouble trying to do reforms that don't work...it will never be fixed).

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#112

Post by mytailorisrich »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #111
mytailorisrich wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corbyn and McDonnell were essentially communists and therefore unelectable. Blair took the realistic route: Socialism does not work, let's have a market economy create wealth that can then be used to finance social programs. A flavour a social democracy. I think a reason Corbyn was so popular among the young is that enough time has passed so that this generation has no idea what socialist countries in Europe were act…

The problem with Blair was that he lost the right on EU/immigration and lost the left on everything else. Brownites sound good but say nothing specific...often the specific stuff is bad too. I agree with you in that there is a route in the centre, but Labour aren't. The party is fundamentally broken. Starmer isn't it, Reeves isn't a leader, Streeting is a joke. Obviously, they have moved to the centre on immigration…

> The problem with Blair was that he lost the right on EU/immigration and lost the left on everything else

Yes, that's a good point, but it's not only the right. All the traditionally Labour constituencies in the North (but not only) which voted for Brexit did so largely because of immigration.

Immigration control is not traditionally right wing only. The left has also been in favour of control and restrictions in order to protect workers' wages.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#113

Post by mmarq »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #110
mmarq wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Housing - separate from just planning, there are specific rules within the housing market that cause distortions above the planning system failing to produce enough supply. For example, rent controls in Scotland...that caused a 40% drop in rental supply in two weeks, this is economic mismanagement on a grand scale. Umpteenth reminder that England is the only place on planet Earth where people earning a top 10% sa…

Hardening eviction rules is economic suicide. The problem with unsuitable housing is a side-effect of lack of supply. If you make it harder to evict, you make it harder to foreclose, make it harder to buy houses (because landlords can only sell to other landlords)...it is very bad news. This happened almost immediately after Scotland brought in their rules...because politicians there have been blocking new builds for…

> Hardening eviction rules is economic suicide.

No, it isn’t. The current state of affairs in England (even Scotland and Wales have different regulations) only causes misery and an immense waste of resources on housing. Or do you think Germans or Frenchmen spend 3 months a year doing house viewings? Nowhere in the civilised world you can evict a family that doesn’t have rent arrears and nowhere in the civilised world you have a homelessness problem comparable to the English (maybe San Francisco being the exception).

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#114

Post by notahacker »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #23
mattlondon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way we elect a prime minister (i.e. we don't) plays a large part here I think. Parties themselves select the leader. Johnson, Corbyn, Truss, Sunak - all voted in by relatively small numbers of people (e.g. 80k in the case of Truss IIRC), yet they are somehow the leader of the party and potentially even PM. This is where labour shat the bed I think with Corbyn - totally obvious that he would be terrible as a PM ye…

No, Labour isn't a popular vote. It is a popular vote AND a union vote (and the PLP, although they have never mattered in practice, they tried to oust Corbyn three times iirc...didn't work). Corbyn had popular support but, like Miliband, relied relatively heavily on unions...and one union at that: Unite (and btw, his popular support was always overstated hugely...in late 2019, you had a sizeable minority who thought…

The Labour vote was a popular vote, it just happened to include union members and 'registered supporters' who weren't party members (but would have had the same outcome in 2015 without them). The electoral college system was abandoned by Miliband, and Starmer has given up trying to bring it back in some form.

The Tories haven't got to worry about having self-styled radical socialists on the ballot but have had exactly the same problems: candidates that appeal most to the Tory selectorate like Iain Duncan Smith and Liz Truss are neither in touch with the public mood nor competent.

Not sure that a presidential system with a public vote would necessarily do better though. The public loved Johnson and liked May at first.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#115

Post by AtlasBarfed »

mannykannot wrote: post #21
mytailorisrich wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a deeper problem than simply being in power for too long. They have been in power that long because the alternative offer was worse as you mention.

I agree. In a pattern that seems to be repeated globally and frequently, dissatisfaction drives polarization, which in turn pumps up the dissatisfaction, and also encourages actions which are ideological rather than pragmatic and at least as rash as they are bold - and when they go wrong, it gives objective reasons to be even more dissatisfied.

Two party polarized systems, aside from the murky money enabling shadow control of both parties, enables centralized control of policy because rather than on a per-issue consensus decision, it enforcesstrictly "party line" votes.

... the "party line" being decided by the small cabal in charge of making the "party line", usually the ones with the most access to monetary funds.

But the inability to see even 10% of party legislators deviate from party lines in various votes means that not only is rational policy not being well served, regional representation is being undermined since adhering to the party line does not optimize for the policy for their region/district.

And in the US house/senate, the seniority system is another undemocratic institution. Why should changing representatives reduce your effective power in a legislative house? I can't think of a system where codified seniority was a good thing

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#116

Post by sealeck »

prof-dr-ir wrote: post #35

As a former inhabitant of England, I always thought that those in charge suffered from a uniquely wide 'competence gap' which I would like to define as the difference between someone's self-perceived competence and someone's actual competence. (The term is probably useful more broadly...) Maybe it is the historically class-based society alluded to in the article, but it always stunned me how those at the top, and in…

I personally think that the problem is that our political class consists almost entirely of humanities-educated politicians. People (who presumably have humanities degrees) will say things like "politicians don't need to be experts" and the even more facile (well, I am really paraphrasing here) "why do you need an understanding of the subject matter to decide what actions to take".

If you look at COVID-19 and climate change you really understand that politicians really don't know how to raise a number to the power of the other (i.e. understand exponential growth). I still vividly recall the ludicrous argument a friend (now studying philosophy at Oxford) attempted to advocate to me, which is that "we should not do anything now so that if we need to fight it later the economy is strong enough" (they did not understand exponential growth). Simple mathematics suggests that if you have some crisis which is going to get exponentially worse over time, and you can mitigate or stop now it's probably better to do something now, rather than later.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#117

Post by LarryMullins »

justin66 wrote: post #93
hermitcrab wrote: post #82

>Some at the top still benefit from unearned deference. Indeed. Quote a bit of Latin in a posh accent at most British people and they seem to completely take leave of their senses. A bit like the tonic immobility you can induce in some animal by turning them over and stroking them. This is why we have had ridiculous figures like Johnson and Rees Mogg in positions of power.

There was a time a proper English accent earned one instant respect among Americans. We fixed that by taking some Englishmen and letting them talk on cable TV.

> There was a time a proper English accent earned one instant respect among Americans.

I don't think this exploit was ever patched. The caveat is that it does need to be a proper English accent, e.g. RP. Nobody is impressed with a chav talking like Ali G. But if somebody on American TV is talking like David Attenborough, it boosts their perceived credibility immensely.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#118

Post by trasz2 »

epistasis wrote: post #98
krona wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Face reality: the ~40-yr neoliberal program has been an absolute disaster, and should be thrown on the scrap heap of history immediately. I still prefer NHS waiting lists to breadlines.

In the US. The waiting lines for specialists are outrageous, a minimum of months to easily half a year for several types of specialists. And that's with devoting a massive amount of our GDP to healthcare, and receiving bad outcomes for it.

No post body was provided.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#119

Post by notahacker »

hermitcrab wrote: post #104
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea how you measure fluency, but most of the population we are concerned with learned a foreign language until the age of 16. Brits are "famously monolingual" because the country only speaks one language (unlike almost every other European country). I don't know, I haven't tried to talk to any of them in a language that isn't English. Again, your supposition that this must be true is based on what? It must…

>I have no idea how you measure fluency, but most of the population we are concerned with learned a foreign language until the age of 16. I live in the UK and I am struggling to think of more than 1 or 2 British born people I know personally that speak anything other than English with any fluency.

There are quite a few, it's just that none of them learned it from two hours a week between the ages of 11 and 16. (Mostly they learned it because their parents and many members of their local community speak Welsh or Punjabi or Urdu...)

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#120

Post by jodrellblank »

ogogmad wrote: post #19
jrsj wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hadn't Starmer already replaced Corbyn by the last election? I don't think you can blame this on him. I don't think he's really the most unpopular element of Labour either. Even after most media was slandering him as an "antisemite" and all that other garbage because neoliberals have captured all of the institutions in the UK.

The accusations were partly based on him cosying up with terrorists, from Hamas, Iran, etc. Is it too much to ask that a candidate for Prime Minister should respect the Rule of Law? There's also his support for Chavez/Maduro, his suicidally naive pacifism which helps the enemy, etc. Oh, and the episode with the mural, where he was too stupid to understand why a picture of fat people with hooked noses oppressing "the…

Boris Johnson met ex-KGB oligarch and made his son a member of the House of Lords[1]

He said "let the bodies pile high" about his plan for COVID, a plan which ended up killing ~100,000 people.[2][2.5]

> "Oh, and the episode with the mural, where he was too stupid to understand why a picture of fat people with hooked noses oppressing "the workers" would be offensive to a certain group."

Is the certain group Jews? Were they offended by Boris Johnson's book with rude Jewish stereotypes?[3] Or his other racist public writings?[4]

> "Is it too much to ask that a candidate for Prime Minister should respect the Rule of Law?"

Is it too much to ask that the actual Prime Minster respect the law? Partygate, for example[5]

What's that saying "with Conservatives, every accusation is a confession".

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62068421

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-pms-former-adviser-confi...

[2.5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/26/ons-figures-sh...

[3] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/boris-johnson...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2008/jan/23/london.race

[5] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-60124162

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