theresa may: is her project subtly machiavellian or merely cunning, baldrick-style?

Just got back from a protest in Brighton, way bigger turnout than expected considering it was organised in ~24 hours. Think it's probably still going but I got kettling flashbacks and had to abscond before I turned into a quivering mess of anxiety.

https://twitter.com/trillingual/status/826187205051682818

https://mobile.twitter.com/telescoper/status/826191503399776258

lol

"down with that sort of thing"

monday's hansard is v readable

So is there any point to calling local representatives about this, like what the yanks are doing?

So did the budget mention brexit even once?

Apparently not.

Today, this thread seems appropriate..

Pretty impressive how easily the press can get them to cave even with no realistic prospect of them backing a different party.

And of all the items in the budget to cause contention?? A rise of a percentage point on self-employed taxation seems pretty innocuous compared to the evisceration elsewhere

well, a lot of people who are today counted as "self-employed" are basically unemployed (= zero hour contracts and not getting work): it's a regressive tax affecting a considerable number at the base of the scale (though the noise is coming from people much further up: most journalists are self-employed)

i suspect this was conceived as another osbournian elephant trap for labour, incidentally (as in trapping them into opposing the govt and limiting their own later room for manouevre re raising taxes): but increasingly these traps are actually making the ground unsafe for everyone, and narrowing if not entirely blocking any workable future for the govt also (cf brexit itself, dark lol)

Osborne's devious Machiavellian plan to get himself fired and be able to command fat wages from sinecures at foreign banks

cf line 3 in the OP: "osborne (perversely perhaps I don’t think he has been as damaged as the above)"

the brexalump trap brought down the govt (as well as labour)
other tory traps for labour are currently snapping round hammond's feet

(one* problem for the opposition right now: they are precisely designed for labour to find them hard to use)

*yes there are others

https://twitter.com/chrisshipitv/status/839962030618660864

Regardless of what he said, Cameron's been doing A LOT of comfort eating since June.

xxp tfw you get fucked up by unnecessary traps you laid for a labour party determined to destroy itself without any outside assistance

fat dave is my favourite dave

yeah kinda feel for him under the jackboot of spin doctors forcing him to keep his weight down like Ricky Hatton in the run up to another beating

he's gonna be cyril smith-sized within five years

"The word “Brexit” was not used once — apparently out of fashion among ministers who have been told that it now polls badly. “A new partnership with Europe” is the new preferred phrase, according to a senior government official who has seen the “Brexit Narrative” handbook which instructs staff on how to speak about Britain’s exit from the bloc."

http://www.politico.eu/article/brexit-hole-at-the-heart-of-british-budget-philip-hammond/

A new partnership with Europe means a new partnership with Europe.

Not quite as snappy.

world-historical blunder means world-historical blunder

not that it *is* world-historical, britain hasn't for some time been and will never again be that important

Talking of polls, post-Budget polls in the Telegraph today are brutal for the Tories. Though we'll see how long the disillusionment lasts.

i think my basic intuition -- since roughly the time i began this thread -- is that, smart or dumb, the tories have zugwanged themselves, that their high poll points are almost entirely the ppl of the uk thinking "ok we're fucked, but at least SOMEONE seems to have a plan, whatever it might be" i.e. really as brittle as this (tho not harmed by the sense that there are no rival plans on offer) (ie the centre has no plan and the corbyn front, if it has a plan, has not communicated it to, well, certainly not to the ppl of the uk as a whole) (shall we just say)

but in fact the moment the plan arrives it falls apart -- and i suspect the disillusionment is kind of already deeply there, lurking unexpressed, which is why its manifested so intensely on such a shallow-seeming pretext

That seems otm.

The vote doesn't have many places to go right now though, does it?

yeah, that's a strength till it's not any more -- it's the thinking that shafted nu-labour

This is pretty illuminating
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n06/david-runciman/do-your-homework

Her time in the coalition was remarkable for the number of bitter personal disputes she had with fellow ministers. Many of these were over the issue of immigration. She came into a department that was pre-committed by the Conservative manifesto to bringing annual immigration down to ‘the tens of thousands’ from the hundreds of thousands it had been under Labour. Her colleagues, including Cameron, didn’t seem to have thought about whether this was a realistic target and assumed that if it wasn’t it would have to be fudged. May had no intention of fudging it, to the increasing consternation of the people who had landed her with the task. It is far from clear she believed it was good policy. That wasn’t the issue. It was now her policy and she would see it through.

whole essay is really interesting -- runciman at ruminative length is generally v good value, certainly for an "insider"

i've never seen even the beginnings of a political point made of the fact that a political leader's forebears were in service (inc.a great-grandfather who was a butler): possibly bcz for some decades the idea had just become a dismissive joke abt the long-lost past (even tho it must be true of many ppl)

so just as brexit is the UK finally ruinously forced to reckon with empire and the delusions we've fostered to look well in its aftermath, may as pm is the UK reckoning with the hidden aftermath of the empire class structure at home? (not that runciman openly goes there, it's a point he makes in glancing w/o even quite noticing where it could lead, i think)

(what i'm getting at is the secret history of a class subculture entirely fashioned round getting essential things done effectively and INVISIBLY, by a sector within the amorphous idea of the lower middle classes as a whole, which is actually -- almost by definition -- culturally and affectively cut off from the rest of the lower middle classes, let alone the other classes) (i think you'd have to turn to fiction to really dig into it: remains of the day, dorothy sayers, lol wodehouse even: the revenant politics of JEEVESIAN RESSENTIMENT…)

This piece is terrific, just got to this part:

Within twenty minutes of her arrival in Number Ten, May had summoned Osborne to sack him. Accounts of this meeting differ. Osborne’s people say it was cordial. But May’s people, who include Fiona Hill, now safely back in the fold, let it be known that the new prime minister gave him a severe dressing-down, telling him he had overpromised and underdelivered on the economy. What is clear is that Osborne had little idea how much she loathed him. He had thought that their previous disputes were just part of the cut and thrust of high politics and easily put behind them. That’s precisely what she loathed about him. She hates the idea that politics is just a game, which is what she suspects the Cameroons have always believed. She dispatched Gove with equal relish, telling him she couldn’t stomach his betrayal of Boris Johnson in the leadership contest. In truth, this was the least of it: what she really despised was Gove’s long-standing habit of making it up as he went along. Many observers were surprised when she brought Johnson back as foreign secretary, given that they too had previous from his time as mayor of London, when they had fallen out over his attempt to usurp her authority by purchasing three water cannon from Germany to help keep public order in the capital. The difference is that Johnson never tried to put her in her place; if anything, it was the other way round, after she blocked the use of the water cannon and then told him off about it in the Commons, where he couldn’t answer back. The public tends to see Johnson as the ultimate clown politician, all stunts and no substance. That’s not the way May sees it. For her it was Cameron, Osborne and Gove who were fundamentally unserious, because they were the ones who made promises they couldn’t keep. Johnson had the advantage of never having his promises believed in the first place.

Good piece ty

Deciding that something is your policy and you are going to stick to it no matter what, regardless of whether or not you even agree with it, strikes me as a gigantic psychological flaw in a politician. Let alone one who is charged with leading the single most challenging diplomatic task the UK has made in half a century.

heath, thatcher, major and now may all leaders from a lower middle-class* background arriving with a degree of embedded contempt for those who would thoughtlessly and blithely consider themselves their "betters" (though all of them i think negotiated this complicated fact in different ways)

cameron was an outlier in modern terms, last toff tory leader was alec douglas hume, whose place in history is somewhere between footnote and joke (and cam may well join him here)

*i once heard a tory grandee on the telly describing heath's accent as "working class" which spun my head round a bit, but maps something out abt relations in the party -- and major's class background is famously hard to get a clear sociological read on

Interesting article - but it goes way off-track when it talks about her advantages and compares her to Trump:

...the question voters ask of any leader is: ‘Do I like this person?’ But it seems more likely that the question at the back of their minds is: ‘Would this person like me?’ Cameron did OK on that score – better than Ed Miliband – because many voters suspected he would at least be polite and try to conceal any awkwardness he felt. But May is a natural. Weirdly, she has this in common with Trump, with whom she perhaps shares more than meets the eye. Trump too, for all his manifold unpleasantness, does a good job of seeming to be non-judgmental when it comes to his voting public. He is unspeakable to his fellow politicians, to the press, to his employees, to immigrants and to the women who are unfortunate enough to appear to him worth coveting. But to anyone who doesn’t fall into those categories, he might seem like a good person to hang out with.

I don't think anyone would think she's "a natural" . Her basic appeal for those who like her seems to be, as Mark S flagged, is that she has the image of having a 'plan' (whatever that might be) and an aura of hard-work and 'getting on the the job'.

yes i was going to say, the trump comparison seems weirdly strained -- he's looking to explain TM's sky-high polling obviously, but of course trump's polling ISN'T sky-high (especially in the UK, tho that's not really relevant to his point)

there's an element of the usual self-loathing westminster-bubble overcompensation here (runciman IS an insider after all): can't we pointy-headed elitists grasp that here is a pol that connects with [whatever the current buzzword for "real people out there who never munch" is]?

She has a lot in common with Major, not least that they made PM without having to face the electorate, but that in many ways they are the platonic ideal of a certain class of Tory. Workmanlike, unpretentious, small pleasures (Major's cricket/May's gardening) rather than flashy Blair/Cameron cosying up to cool Britannia, Tracey Emin et al.

*i once heard a tory grandee on the telly describing heath's accent as "working class" which spun my head round a bit, but maps something out abt relations in the party -- and major's class background is famously hard to get a clear sociological read on

assume this is from the Michael Cockerell documentary, iirc the grandee is an Oxford contemporary who, when asked about Heath being an atypical Oxford undergrad due to his class background, says something about him having "a pronounced cockney accent, which of course he retains to this day". I think this is followed by Cockerell relating this to observation to Heath and asking for his opinion, Heath seems visibly amused but doesn't go further than diplomatically/gently saying that he would not describe his accent as such.

I also remember reading a quote by someone to the effect that non-posh ppl of Heath's generation who made it to Oxford quickly tended to either attempt to assimilate and adopt the accent, mannerisms, dress sense etc of their upper-class collegues, or do the opposite and defiantly assert and empahsise their background, whereas Heath was unusual in that he did neither, didn't try to cling to his lower middle-class origins but also never seemed ashamed of or tried to disguise them. idk if being congenitally disconnected from humanity in general made it easier for him to adjust to being disconnected from his class via upward mobilty?

yes, you're quite right, it was was the documentary and it was "cockney accent" -- which is equally head-spinning of course

"was was the" s/b "was that"

heath, thatcher, major and now may all leaders from a lower middle-class* background arriving with a degree of embedded contempt for those who would thoughtlessly and blithely consider themselves their "betters" (though all of them i think negotiated this complicated fact in different ways)

Is being a vicar's daughter lower middle class?

According to Wikipedia, lower middle class = Hyacinth Bucket. That's useful.

I had a month of doing a liftshare with a middle-aged lower-middle-class conservative lady, it was quite a good experience in terms of hearing her explain her viewpoint and the reasoning behind it - not because this viewpoint is unrepresented (it most certainly isn't) but because it's so ubiquitous in the countryside in the south east that nobody ever feels they need to explain it from inside rather than outside.

Her assessment of Theresa May was that she seemed like a decent, professional person who was taking her job very seriously, working hard and standing up for the majority of people in the country. She had not heard anyone say that she was much worse at policy detail and negotiation than at internal party maneuvering. For my part all I could do was tell her my personal experiences of dealing with TM's immigration policies, how they had wrecked a year of my family's life for no conceivable reason, but not sure I made much headway - there are deeper prejudices underlying everything in this country, and I suspect that having a foreign wife and children makes me to some extent an outsider and an intruder, my experience less important than the majority who just want to get on with their lives and not worry about things changing.

I didn't tell her that I hate TM more than anyone in the world right now, though I do. Aside from everything she has done to me, she reminds me of a manager I had who steamrollered through "projects" with no regard to either peoples lives or measurable success. I find these sort of people the most insufferable on the planet, and would genuinely prefer a manager who was incompetent, didn't turn up or even was nakedly money-grasping.

xp
"economically secure, without being well-off" could probably describe some C of E vicars - I notice TM's old man had a side-gig as a chaplain. Probably a decent little 2nd income when you are already living rent free.

Vicars earn like £17k which is below a lot of entry-level office jobs but yeah it's hardly a precarious existence nonetheless.

low pay, free house, help with bills etc., flipside is that if you have to leave your job (or are squeezed out) you lose your house. it's a bit of an anomaly

i had may's grandparents in mind when i said that tbh: vicar is quite hard to place class-wise (as ppl note they're not paid much)

same as music hall performer/garden gnome purveyor maybe

could it be.. hear me out, now... that there was a time when social status was not entirely tied to income and/or wealth

i had may's grandparents in mind when i said that tbh

I did think that. Was it at an ILB FAP I was talking about my great-grandfather's strange double life as water board inspector/theatrical entrepreneur?