BoJo resigns; Truss fails; Sunak ascends

Why am I not surprised?

I'm surprised that Jezebel isn't crying misogyny over comparing Britain's third-ever female PM to a lettuce. I guess it's okay if she's a Tory.

There's not much inherently gendered about lettuce.

Celeriac, OTOH, that's meat in your mouth when you were expecting salad.

https://twitter.com/leftiestats/status/1676321819006050307?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

https://twitter.com/business/status/1682013531875442688?s=46&t=iYW3foyqIA6Tn8VWwn3nwQ

Muff cabbage. South Park made it so.

There's a lot of spin going around about the byelection results. Bad for the Tories, certainly. But they retained Johnson's seat and one of the two that they lost was to the LibDems. Sir Kid Starver's Thatcherite shit is not going down so well and if he wins the next election, it will be by default.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...er-potential-rejection?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-67843755

Like America, we really need to revise our systems to account for the fact that our politicians are no longer fit for purpose. One fuck-up getting in can do too much damage - in Truss' case, tanking the economy and now getting to appoint 11 of her biggest arse-lickers to lifelong peerages with the power to slow-walk legislation from Parliament.

"No one voted for Brexit so they could take their daily morning dump, safe in the knowledge that it'll be floating in the English Channel by tea time. Yeah, but look at these profits!"

Been a while since I had a nice slice of Pie

At this rate, England will be primed to be purchased by Tata within a year or three. Bow down to your new Indian overlords, EnglishForge!

Looking forward to the Labour election sweep in the coming year.

Will it matter?

Brexit is the problem, raising the cost of imports while slashing legal migration with no offsetting benefits (except for that blue passport, so nice, so worth it).

What can a Labour government do about that?

Not a hell of a lot in the short term, but perhaps having a government in charge that isn't trying to justify what seems to me a complete disaster and living in complete denial about it, will be an improvement. I doubt if the EU is any big hurry to take back the UK, but a Labour government may be more flexible in negotiating new treaties and the EU and more willing to deal with a new cast of characters. Of course, that's assuming that Labour puts together a more competent government than the Tories which is not necessarily a given.

The current Labour Party is a fucking turd. Best thing would be a hung parliament.

How very libertarian of you...

What's being hung, the building or the mps?

Legal immigration hasn't been slashed, it's increased, we've now got a wider pool to select from, which comes with its own pros and cons. Around a fifth of the official working population is now non-native.

There has been moans about reduced EU migration, but, along with moans about reduced people taking GCSEs in German and French, despite increasing numbers of bilingual people in global languages and increased interest in non-European languages up to degree levels, we seem to have a interesting modern artefact of unconscious racism - the Little Europeaner.

Most of the UK's current issues are structural - my sympathy for Sunak having to juggle decades of avoiding hard decisions would be somewhat larger if the Tories hadn't been in charge for the majority of the avoiding.

Although in terms of migration, ironically the abject failure to get a grip on it - a sizeable portion of the UK working population isn't working due to other problems, such as social care, the NHS and adult education, and immigration is being used to avoid its impact on being able to fill jobs - may end up being a good job out of a bad one. Half of Western Europe is starting to crap itself over demographics, and is having to figure out how to square the circle of massively increasing immigration whilst mitigating all the problems it causes around infrastructure, housing, and cultural clashes, which the natives have gotten thoroughly pissed off over during the last decade.

And the raising of import costs ought to have the government looking at internal costs, we've currently got a regulatory regime where cafe and restaurants have to print calorie counting, but a foreign welfare fund can buy up a utility using debt, mine it for profits, and expect the consumer to stump up for the consequences. Taking a good look at out regulatory landscape should give a good view which ones need strengthening, and which ones need a good haircut.

The EU's also getting over Brexit, once that plastic Napoleon of a creature, Macron, has gone, there are good chances there'll be a lot more flexibility, especially if Trump regains the US Presidency. We've seen the start of that already.

Labour have a lot to do, most of which I think Starmer will avoid. If Streeting gets his NHS changes through - something the Tories literally cannot as the NHS is almost treated evangelically in the UK, and its adherents seem to be blissfully unaware there is a whole spectrum of models between us and the US we can apply - it'll be worth a few years of another non-entity as PM. We've just about managed with Sunak, another non-entity, for the last year or so.

Not sure if you're being serious - a hung parliament is one where no party can command a majority by itself.

But also both of those.

2019 the Tories utterly crushed Labour, and look at them now.

Labour is likely to crush the Tories, but the lesson is don't piss the opportunity up the wall. Starmer is going to have play his cards well, Europe is seeing a resurgence of the right - mostly as the political classes are insulated from the consequences of their decisions, and seem surprised that those who aren't may want to vote for those who care, or at least give the appearance of caring, about that.

Various Green projects are going to have to come good - you can only immiserate your population and deindustrialise so much with little progress to show for it for so long. We ought to have been spending the last decade building nukes, parking electric arc steel mills next to them, investing in novel battery tech and figuring out how to use hydrogen instead of carbon to coke steel for pig iron. Instead we've held Germany up as some kind of wonderful energy model whilst they've been burning fucking lignite like no tomorrow and guzzling Russian gas.

When you've a nation with an energy policy that Trump has the correct measure of, they're something you avoid copying.

Over the next few years, that'll seep into the Tories brains.

https://bsky.app/profile/helenkennedy.bsky.social/post/3kmbevv6iok2d

A blissful lack of self awareness and/or sense of irony seems to be common to “conservatives” on both sides of The Pond

She's totally fucked in the head. Claims to have been brought down by communists. But I don't think there's many of those in the bond market.

She's gone off the deep end - you don't be in the vicinity of Bannon at a glorified TrumpCon and expect to be taken seriously.

From tackling the Turnip Taliban to... this. Oh dear.

I used to have a measure of sympathy for her. Her famous budget actually started out well, with the market responding nicely to her - right up until the penny dropped she expected the market to fund it all, and the pound swiftly followed... She also identified a few illnesses in the UK, but her medicine needed rather more than a spoonful of sugar to help it down.

If you tell everyone that Corbyn's Magic Money Tree will screw the economy, you don't actually have to prove it after you win the election.

The Tories are having more fun, last week we had an ex-Deputy Chairman decide to come out with some decidedly islamophobic commentary around "them" and "they" controlling London and it's Mayor.

Now Sadiq Khan is an utter shit - if he sold his soul to Satan, Satan would be checking the returns policy inside a week - but he's not an Islamist, or controlled by them, as he's a more professional Boris at heart - transactional, unprincipled, greased piglet, and a lover of the trappings of power, and wouldn't be beyond making use of Islamists for his own benefit. He'd be the one doing the controlling, if anything.

He's also not someone you cross unless you've got him considerably outgunned, he's a canny operator, so the Tories binned Anderson as soon as he refused to apologise, but Sunak has made the large error of not stating that the language used was certainly Islamophobic (which it was) even though he believed was Anderson was not, and was merely being clumsy in his language - cue up a bit of The Police's Do Do Do, we can all have a laugh, agree he's a bit of an idiot, and move on. Alas, not happening, and in a week where Labour had to eject its candidate in a by-election for anti-semitism, it's all going to be about Tory Islamophobia instead.

‘She still carries an aura of spectacular failure’: why hasn’t Liz Truss gone away?

Because there are well-funded ideologues who don't want her to?

What fucking year is this?!?!



https://bsky.app/profile/reuters-world-rss.bsky.social/post/3kppt44wy372y

Was I hit on the head? How long have I been in a coma?!?!