BF2S Forums Where are all the whiny peaceful "Enlightened" European now?

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

this 'both sides are to blame' stuff i

At this point neither side can do much, all this distraction stuff is useful to prevent a revolution.

uziq wrote:

no one is pushing pronouns chat above any major geopolitical issue. it's daft. a total straw man.

the current conservative leadership race has barely addressed inflation/cost-of-living, brexit, or russia-ukraine. a startling number of column inches have been given over to the candidates' stance on transgenderism, though, and 'standing up for women'. why? even polls are showing that the conservative base simply do not give a fuck about this issue. even dyed-in-the-wool, true-blue home counties tories are not vexed by pronouns. it is an entirely confected, artificial non-issue.

why are the right wing like this? why are you like this, dilbert? strawmen arguments are not clever.

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

no one is pushing pronouns chat above any major geopolitical issue. it's daft. a total straw man.

the current conservative leadership race has barely addressed inflation/cost-of-living, brexit, or russia-ukraine. a startling number of column inches have been given over to the candidates' stance on transgenderism, though, and 'standing up for women'. why? even polls are showing that the conservative base simply do not give a fuck about this issue. even dyed-in-the-wool, true-blue home counties tories are not vexed by pronouns. it is an entirely confected, artificial non-issue.

why are the right wing like this? why are you like this, dilbert? strawmen arguments are not clever.

Why is the media filling their media with it though?

Last edited by Dilbert_X (2022-07-18 03:23:15)

Dilbert_X wrote:

I think Blair more than anyone abused his position as PM for personal gain combined with detriment to the country.

Sure the tories are shit and always have been, Blair took Britain into a war to underwrite his future income.

The​ Tory manifesto of 2019 promised to ‘get rid of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act – it has led to paralysis at a time the country needed decisive action.’ In March 2022 the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act came into force, repealing the 2011 Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, as though it had never been enacted. But the new Act purports to do rather more. Section 3 contains an ‘ouster clause’ which seeks to ensure ‘the non-justiciability of the revived prerogative powers’. In other words, no future Supreme Court will be able to strike down the prime minister’s use of his power to dissolve, as famously happened in 2019. The old ambiguity about when and if the queen could refuse a request to dissolve is apparently now ended. In future, the queen is to dissolve ‘on the advice’ of her Privy Council. She has no alternative. Prime ministers will have untrammelled power to dissolve Parliament whenever they fancy. Before 2011, they had, let us say, two-thirds of that power, but were bound by some conventions of decent behaviour. Not any more.

Another promise: ‘We will ensure that judicial review is available to protect the rights of individuals against an overbearing state’ – so far, so good – ‘while ensuring that it is not abused to conduct politics by another means or to create needless delays.’ Oh. Who is to decide which delays are needless, and what exactly does ‘conduct politics by another means’ imply? Naturally, once the election was won, there had to be some sort of task force to work out what these cloudy threats might mean in practice. The Faulks committee reported in March 2021 that, although there were one or two worrying cases, they couldn’t see much wrong with the system. This wouldn’t do. The attorney general deliberately misread the report and got going on the Judicial Review and Courts Act. As you might expect, while claiming to uphold the right of individuals to obtain remedy against unjust treatment, in practice the Act nibbles away at the individual’s rights of appeal and access. And it provides an unsettling precedent for further limitations, if hardliners come to think that this first Act hasn’t gone far enough. It is likely that ministers, emboldened by this new protection, will increasingly be tempted to include ‘Henry VIII clauses’ in future legislation, giving themselves sweeping powers to interpret their particular Act in any way they see fit. In the past, judicial review has deterred this underhand method of lawmaking. If there was ‘ministerial overreach’, there was a good chance that any dubious decision would be overturned in the courts. So here’s another way in which the Tory government is setting out to slash the trammels on its power.

British general elections have been remarkably free and fair for a long time – ever since voter personation and other dodges were finally eliminated in Northern Ireland. There has been no significant evidence of fraud at any recent general election. Yet the Tories’ 2019 election manifesto also included this pledge: ‘We will protect the integrity of our democracy by introducing identification to vote at polling stations, stopping postal vote harvesting and measures to prevent any foreign interference in elections.’ All this, now contained in the Elections Act, is an egregious solution to a non-existent problem. It can have one purpose only: to suppress the votes of poorer and less organised voters who are less likely to possess photo ID, just as the Republicans are doing in the US. When voter ID was made mandatory in Northern Ireland in 2002, the number of voters on the register dropped by 120,000, or 10 per cent. The suspicion of foul play is confirmed by a second pledge, to make it easier for British expats to vote in parliamentary elections, expats being thought far more likely to vote Tory, just as the worst off are more likely to vote Labour. It is hard to imagine a more flagrant rigging strategy. It may be that as holding voter ID becomes more universal over the years, the adverse effect will diminish. But it is clear that the motive behind the Elections Bill is to secure party advantage under the cloak of fairness.

The Elections Act also introduces a new structure for the Electoral Commission, which has always been independent of government and covers everything from the limits on campaign finance to the actual conduct of the polls. The commission asserts, quite rightly, that ‘this independence is fundamental to maintaining confidence in our electoral system.’ In future, the government will be able to set a strategic direction for the work of the commission. The change has been driven by Tory Brexiters sore about being accused of having broken the law during the 2016 referendum campaign, an accusation of which they were eventually cleared. To people not much interested in politics – which is most of us – these measures may sound relatively modest and technical. But once the government has power to reset the rules, it can progressively squeeze the shape and size of the electorate, make it easier to fiddle constituency boundaries and the rules of campaign finance. This looks as if it’s just the beginning.

Then there is the Nationality and Borders Act. Among other provisions, it removes rights of family reunion from some categories of refugee. With the stated aim of deterring desperate families from crossing the Channel in small boats, it submits them to ‘offshore processing’ in a third country (though it’s not clear that this will be an effective deterrent). Several cash-strapped nations had already declined the privilege of playing this part before Rwanda opened its arms in April 2022. Small and dismally poor, it is recovering from a hideous civil war, and its human rights record is widely criticised. The idea that it can provide the ‘humane treatment’ that the home secretary, Priti Patel, promises is laughable. Not since Sidmouth’s day, when English prisoners were jammed together out at sea in rotten hulks, has a British government displayed such a callous and dehumanising attitude.

Critics of the scheme can be divided into those who think it unworkable and those who think it cruel and inhumane; some people think it is both. In his Easter sermon, the archbishop of Canterbury called it ‘ungodly’ – for which he was duly pilloried by Tory hardliners, who love it. Clause 10 of the Act allows the home secretary to strip individuals of their British nationality, in some cases without even notifying them. The UNHCR has declared that the legislation breaches the UK’s obligations under international law and the refugee convention.

People can protest against all this, or can they? Steaming alongside in this flotilla of illiberal legislation has been the enormous Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, all three hundred pages of it. The meat of the Act is the power that it gives police to shut down and criminalise public demonstrations for being too noisy, including even a protest by a single individual. The police are of course to be their own judges in the matter of what qualifies as excessively noisy. Along with extending powers of stop and search without any visible cause for suspicion, the Act gives an ill-disposed police commander free rein to prevent people doing almost anything in the street of which they disapprove. To fill in the gaps in the new Act inflicted by the House of Lords, the government is now bringing forward yet another Public Order Bill, further extending stop-and-search powers and imposing fresh penalties for protesters who ‘lock on’ to immovable structures.

We might note in passing that, in case there’s any trouble restoring order, Priti Patel has recently empowered special constables for the first time to carry tasers – sabres by another name. Shades of Peterloo. Nor will there be any shortage of storage space for the noisy. The government boasts that it has embarked on the largest prison-building programme for a century.

These five Acts of Parliament were all in force by the end of April. Each of them is intended to increase government control: over Parliament, over elections, over the courts, over immigrants and over public demonstrations. How it all brings back the dear dead days of 1819 – the hulks, the sabres, the bastilles, the transportation of illegal males without a chance to say goodbye, let alone take their families with them. For Johnson, the outrage that these Acts have generated in lefty circles is not a drawback but a brilliant success. The whole thing is a deliberate strategy to enthuse his core vote and heighten their sense of imperilment.

To give himself further elbow-room, Johnson has recently loosened the ministerial code of conduct, so that breaches of it are no longer automatically matters for resignation, and in his own foreword to the code he has also removed the stern references to the need for honesty and integrity. In recent weeks, too, his anti-corruption adviser John Penrose and his ethics adviser Christopher Geidt have both resigned in despair. Peter Hennessy once declared that, in the absence of a written constitution, the UK has had to rely on the ‘good chap theory of government’. But what happens if the prime minister no longer even pretends to be a good chap?

We may wonder whether John Bew, now ensconced in Number Ten as Johnson’s adviser on foreign policy, detects these echoes of the Castlereagh years. He will already have run into one of Downing Street’s newer recruits, David Canzini, a former colleague of Lynton Crosby. Canzini’s instructions to his cohorts have a daunting clarity: ‘Find the wedge issues in your department and hammer them.’ The concept of the ‘wedge issue’ has been familiar in Australia and the US for twenty years or so, but is rather new in the UK. The trick is to find a policy which repels the minority who were never going to vote for you but which will harden and broaden your support with the majority, who are no longer the silent majority because you are speaking up for them. This is the technique practised by populists everywhere – Trump, Bolsonaro, Erdoğan, Orbán. Whether the proposed policy actually works is beside the point; the question is whether it drives the wedge into the right place. Lord Sidmouth would have understood perfectly. He only lacked the name for it.

Last edited by uziq (2022-07-18 06:58:28)