Rolling Brexit Links/UK politics in the neo-Weimar era

PMQs is like Newsnight; it doesn't matter because it has a huge audience but because all the politicians and journalists watch, and it sets their agenda, which it turns feeds the national agenda. If you can't cut through there, you don't get your 20s clip on the 10.

Running away from the wreckage surely?

(May is also very bad at PMQs and not good at being put under pressure generally, so it's also a missed opportunity to make her look worse)

Corbyn is routinely praised for PMQ performance - but I guess this depends who you follow

Are you following Seumas Milne perhaps? Now the government and the opposition are hopeless at PMQs can we just call the whole thing off?

it sets their agenda, which it turns feeds the national agenda

i am no longer convinced this is true re PMQ: it continues to a pretext for punditry but i don't believe anyone could transform the situation from its platform -- which possibly you could once upon a time

what i'm getting at is that in days gone by it was a simultaenous test of two things -- mastery of the detail of your brief and your project, and mastery of the arts of parliamenary banter

but that partly depended on a preponderance of journalists -- even partisan ones -- who were able to get their heads round the first and judge the content, setting it against judgments about the effective theatre

i don't think such a preponderance now exists: there's a handful, peter oborne, stephen bush, but they're fairly marginal, newsnight doesn't have any (tempted to say the satanic reign of paxman saw them off, as i am quite anti-paxman, but it was more to do with editorial decisions probably)

I mean the collapse of a singular national agenda is partly to blame for all the bullshit raining down on us right now to my mind, so that PMQs has a smaller impact on what's left of it would naturally follow I guess

as significant: the collapse in a layer of trusted (and trustable) expertise

>>> Running away from the wreckage surely? <<<

yes, I agree, the metaphor which feels compelling to me in one way, seems wrong in others -- you could say that she is pressing the ejector seat rather than crashing the car.

But there is something about what she has done which is: responding to a crisis by creating ANOTHER crisis -- and she is almost literally the ONLY person who could do this (the Lords, or NI Assembly for instance, evidently can't) -- and I have found this temporarily liberating, because the ONE slow-motion car crash crisis that we follow every day had seemed (and indeed is) so inescapable -- when the NEW Scottish crisis pushes it sideways or diagonally in some way, that is some relief.

Put yet another way, Sturgeon seems to be the ONLY person who has any capacity for leverage over the Brexit people, ie can do anything that actually scares or bothers them; and I cannot help admiring her for this.

Yes I feel the same way!

I'm not sure she does have much leverage in the commonly understood way, and that leverage is perhaps not the point - her aim is not to overturn Brexit, it's to secure independence - and the government would be torn apart from within if it were seen to be offering her too much ground (maybe any ground).

Where she might have leverage is over the date of the referendum - she can perhaps get May to agree to the referendum as long as she promises not to hold it at a crucial stage in the Brexit negotiations.

i think as well there's leverage at a symbolic level: brexiteers enjoying the thought that soon things will all be back as they were in the golden times confronted with something which absolutely doesn't belong anywhere in those golden times, viz a uk w/o scotland -- as in, "you have no grasp of what you're going to get"

the threat of it screws w/ppl's warm nostalgia fore the comfortably familiar -- and actually helps dramatise what a radical step is being taken

Also quite a lot of satisfaction in the (fair few) Brexiteers who were all "this will make Scottish independence even LESS likely!!" and "there will be no second referendum" becoming all spluttery. Tiny taste of what's to come when the negotiations begin.

come home to somebody on PM gently making the case for war crimes being OK. this is the really scary shit, the steady retreat of civilization.

the metaphor which feels compelling to me in one way, seems wrong in others -- you could say that she is pressing the ejector seat rather than crashing the car.

It could be both: she is pressing the ejector seat so that she flies clear of the wreckage while allowing her car to crash into the existing crash

Yes, that is a good way to put it, too.

I am essentially in agreement with Mark S's post above. And stet's though I did not know that people thought this would make Scottish independence less likely; I would have thought the opposite.

Mark S says

"ppl's warm nostalgia fore the comfortably familiar"

-- I am surprised, does anyone actually see the Brexit future that way?

For me, of course, it's the opposite: UK in the EU is what I am already nostalgic for.

It could possibly be that some people who are older than me do have that nostalgia for a pre-EU UK but it seems hard to believe they have really kept that nostalgia going for 40-50 years and are not remotely nostalgic (as I am) for anything since.

does anyone actually see the Brexit future that way?

I think there was a fair bit of nonsensical thinking along the lines of 'let's turn the clock back to before we joined the EU' - both from people who didn't experience the UK in the 60s and the 70s and, this is more bizarre, people who did and who are largely the same people who never stop going on about how terrible Britain was in the 70s.

Ditto, people who say, let's go back to when the Commonwealth was our main trading bloc and we put Commonwealth citizens first, but who did nothing but moan about Commonwealth immigration at the time.

i think "take back control" makes no sense as a successful slogan if there wasn't a "back" people felt warm towards

when exactly it existed is a different thing (let alone if) -- there was a poll i saw people responding to that suggested people felt it was 30 years ago that they felt on top of their lives (which as one respondent said means they were basically saying "let's get back to the year the happy mondays released "squirrel and g-man etc" -- viz really really not a time that overlapped well the imagined past that is somehow being conjured)

but memory is strange like this: i can remember times i myself enjoyed very clear and what i enjoyed about them, and then when i try and map them onto public events find i must be several years out somewhere (but not able to work out where)

so i don't think it's impossible that largish numbers of people are saying "let's get back to the times when i was in control of my life and all will be well" and then associating that with quite another time (probably an earlier one) when the various dynamics that gathered to put that life out of control had not yet visibly started and assuming the good things will come again and the bad things that knocked them off course will not begin gathering

to be fair most people who moan about the terribleness of the 70s are not complaining about the lack of workers' rights or ready access to Polish lager

TomD: That is interesting and curious.

It strikes me as oddly parallel, though, with what you might think a somewhat more rational idea: ie: Nostalgia for the UK before Thatcher! (In line with the standard leftist line that she ruined everything)

In effect, the time before Thatcher is the time before the EU!

Mark S: there seems to be a surprising conflation between 'a good time for me personally' and 'a better time for society and politics' there. Even those of us, for our sins, very interested in politics probably wouldn't often conflate the two.

The 70s in this country certainly didn't look like a barrel of laughs but these guys are actually nostalgic for the 50s and 60s and those really *are* viewed as a golden age of sorts so maybe what people are nostalgic for is the social-democratic consensus. Obviously not in the Tory party.

The 'take back control' point is a good one, it's a bit like Make America Great Again, er, when was that exactly?

Mark S: there seems to be a surprising conflation between 'a good time for me personally' and 'a better time for society and politics' there. Even those of us, for our sins, very interested in politics probably wouldn't often conflate the two.

― the pinefox

Yes but you must allow that this is a very guilty board

i'm too sleepy to put this clearly i think but no, i wasn't saying people are conflating "a good time for me personally" with "a good time for society" -- i was saying that people in this time of crisis remember "a good time for me personally" (and that afterwards things went wrong) and feel that in order to return to this good time personally, the clock will have to be reset years previously, in order that the things which caused the good personal time to go bad to even *start* happening

i think people think like this precs=isely bcz they know NOT to conflate their own good times with societies as a whole

i also said, which did not help my clarity, that people often somewhat misalign the timing of their good time with what they think of as the precise time it happened in public terms, but this is a different phenomenon

I'm not sure how much "a good time for me personally" comes into it - this seems to be more common among the centre-"left" who really blatantly just want it to be the '90s again - but the industry of nostalgia for the '50s and '60s (and before) aimed squarely at people way too young to have been there has been going on for some time. So on the one hand you have the aesthetics of colonialism, of '40s fashion, of village fêtes and twee cupcakes and GBBO, creating this illusion of a golden age, but crucially on the other you don't have an education system in which Britain faces up to the atrocities it committed worldwide in the name of maintaining that golden age.

I mean, there are probably many different forms of nostalgiae working in parallel, I guess

if there'd been no "good times for me personally" (where "me" is this person we're trying to imagine and explain) then there'd be no real investment in the past at ANY point, as opposed to the possiblities of the future, say -- weaponised nostlagia is a consequence of things shifting (personally)* from "seeming to get better, give or take" to "seeming to get worse"

it's because things were once OK for person X (say at time B) and then began to go awry (at time C) that person X is looking back beyond time B to time A, when the forces that came together to make C bad for them hadn't (so they think) at all started

the Bs and the Cs are probably all over the place -- which is one reason that A needs to be more or less at the start of our shared memory time

*i'm not ruling out a depersonalised (which is to say public and politicised) sense of better and worse in operation also, but i don't think that's primarily in operation in this instance

i literally cannot write to save my life today -- you can blame either rachel maddow or the scary bumblebee that got into my bedroom at sun up

PMQs is like Newsnight; it doesn't matter because it has a huge audience but because all the politicians and journalists watch, and it sets their agenda, which it turns feeds the national agenda. If you can't cut through there, you don't get your 20s clip on the 10.

Nostalgia for those days.

https://www.theguardian.com/global/2017/mar/15/second-tory-reveals-police-investigated-him-over-spending-allegations

i was just about to say "£70,000 seems cheap to buy a close election" but it sounds like somebody in the CPS was way ahead of me

"Politics is not a game" is becoming the go-to line for when their own game-playing gets called out.

Meaningless hardly covers it.

There should be a tougher penalty than this, the seat should be invalidated and put out to by-election.

they may yet be

"Given the range of technical errors made by a number of political parties and campaign groups, there also needs to be a review of how the Electoral Commission's processes and requirements could be clarified or improved."

"Your honour, given that other people have broken the law in the past I think we should change the law."

This first surfaced a while ago, thought it had been forgotten about, as I'm sure the Tories had, but looks like the Old Bill might have been working on it all along.

No wonder the police were complaining about being dangerously underfunded the other week.

re: nostalgia and taking back control

happiness depends not on your circumstances but how your circumstances compare with your expectations. I think perhaps the biggest driver of the lingering crisis of national identity lies in how the way the country feels about its future has changed. to look back now on the 60s is to have it backwards. this isn't the future people expected, no one saw it coming, it doesn't even have an architect. to the extent that looking at things in terms of these very general underlying sentiments makes any sense - poignant pause - the EU has been a scapegoat at times, onto which all the unease and uncertainty people have felt with the future over the last 40 years has been projected. the future of the EU was always deliberately and necessarily vague, I think ppl underestimated how unappealing those features were to the british public

it's not a coincidence that ppl like me & the rest of lefty ilx who would feel more unease at reverting to the past also have no real positive sense of national identity or a national future. there is something to the point about being a citizen of nowhere, it also makes it v difficult for the left to sell anything as part of any coherent vision at a national level

couple of interesting things in this (interview with bill rodgers, the member of the gang of four who no one can ever remember)

http://www.newstatesman.com/2016/01/bill-rodgers-it-s-very-difficult-very-painful-leave

not the we-were-right-it-was-painful stuff (you were wrong, i'm glad it was painful, at least for you, bill) but his comments on what the party was always like -- just constant internal arguments since the 1950s, as bad then as now, and (implied) a succession of solutions which, as means to unite successfully, just didn't take (there was a backlash against wilson as against blair)

but also -- against this -- his apparent ultimate belief in the lasting resilience of the party

ogmor otm in the post above btw

I ask myself when the Blairites modernized the constitution - abolition of Clause 4 etc - did they leave anything that resembles a set of core beliefs? a broad coalition of interests is one thing, but without core aims and beliefs what do get? Electability?

I don't buy vague comparators to the status quo as aims or beliefs btw - "fairer", gtfo

The Labour Party is a democratic socialist Party. (This is either untrue or a lot of members, including the majority of the PLP, don't belong here.) It
believes that by the strength of our common
endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone (meaningless rhetorical platitude),
so as to create for each of us the means to realise
our true potential (meaningless ontological platitude) and for all of us a community in
which power, wealth and opportunity are in the
hands of the many not the few (many/few is sufficiently vague but I struggle to think of many recent policies that aim in this direction) ; where the rights we
enjoy reflect the duties we owe (meaningless authoritarian platitude) and where we live
together freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and
respect. (KUMBAYA)

there are no politics in the Labour Party's Aims and Values, good work everybody

clause four: "To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service"

there's a bit of fluffle here -- "most equitable… possible", "best obtainable" -- but on the whole it's admirably direct, and i LOOOOVE the phrase "workers by hand or by brain" (and also think it was politically important, insisting on a sense of equality that 's badly gotten away from us)

adopted 1918, 99 years ago

yeah exactly. I'd forgotten/didn't know that Clause 4 was rewritten rather than scrapped, but the comparison between the 2 tells you everything about the party from the death of Smith on. it also says to me that people like Rodgers were never honest adherents of the party's core aims - they were the entryists all along

Fabians innit (but they were there from the start): party was always an uneasy coalition (background as much in Methodism as Marxism blah blah)

lol this i did NOT know till just now: "The Fabian Society was named [“]in honour of the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (nicknamed "Cunctator", meaning the "Delayer"). His Fabian strategy sought gradual victory against the Carthaginian army under the renowned general Hannibal through persistence, harassment, and wearing the enemy down by attrition rather than head-on battles"

that bit I did know

I guess I'm being unfair to the old-school Fabians in that as far as I remember most of them were not opposed to the nationalized industries staying nationalized, at least pre-1979, so they could argue they did have a relationship to the original Clause 4.

second punic war was a topic of great interest to me as a child so was familiar with him but always assumed they'd got their name from elsewhere, that's curious, kind of a great way to troll the revolutionary left

something something "rivulets of blood"

main SDP planks were europe, arguments over how the leader was selected (not just over union involvement, tho they thought this was too great), and distrust of tony benn

(haha this makes them sound much more justified than they were)

privatisation was not something they were actively pushing or against -- in the sense that being pro it wasn't why anyone split w/labour i wouldn't say