UK Politics Thread part II

[Moonlight]

It's all political posturing to the braindead masses you know, not one of these pillocks has the knowhow to fix the mess that they've caused. We're all going to get screwed whoever gets to run the country, so just batten down the hatches and accept your fate.

I'm more interested in who's not going to run the country than who is, the Independents, currently there are 17 of them, will it increase or decrease. I've seen the witches brew stewing and the witches ball as well, it was showing flashes of the future, it's too early for a definite answer because Magmar came back into the room, I think the Independents are going to increase, by how many, I know not.
We shall see on Friday if the snippets of the future I saw was enough to make an informed decision, it wasn't enough to bet on the winner though.

[Jimbuna]

^ Yeah, we are in one hell of a mess with no end in site

[Rockstar]

Over there your journalists are writing puff pieces describing to you how Americans wish we had a government like yours.

Over here our journalists inform us just how screwed up things really are over there.



Brexit Backlash: Brits Now Regret Their Populist Revolt

As the U.K. heads to the polls next week, a majority thinks that leaving the EU was a mistake and has delivered few benefits—and new problems.

By
Max Colchester, David Luhnow and Josh Mitchell

June 28, 2024

In 2019, Boris Johnson rode to a big election win on a promise to “Get Brexit Done” and finally strike a deal with the European Union for Britain’s departure. Next week, the Conservative Party that delivered Brexit goes to the polls again, this time facing a deficit of more than 20 percentage points and almost certain defeat by the opposition Labour Party. The only question, it seems, is the scale of the wipeout for the hapless Rishi Sunak and his Tories.
Eight years after the referendum, it is safe to say Britain has a serious case of “Bregret.” About 65% of Brits say that, in hindsight, leaving the EU was wrong. Just 15% say the benefits have so far outweighed the costs. Most blame the decision itself, others blame the U.K. government for not taking better advantage of it, and still others say Brexit suffered from bad luck: It took effect shortly before the pandemic and Ukraine war, both of which distracted the government and damaged the economy.
In the years since 2016, Britain’s economy has slowed to a crawl, growing an average 1.3% versus 1.6% for the G-7 group of rich countries overall. By putting up barriers to trade and migration with its biggest trading partner, Brexit slowed trade and hurt business investment. It caused years of political turmoil as Britain debated how to untangle itself from the EU. And it deeply polarized the country, half of which saw it as a unique chance to regain British sovereignty and half of which felt it had to apologize to Europe for jumping ship. It has left Britain exhausted and its self-confidence dented.

“I’m angry,” says Steve Jackson, a burly taxi driver and part-time construction worker in Boston, a town of 70,000 in eastern England. Boston is known in England for having the country’s tallest parish church, as the birthplace of several founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and as the country’s euroskeptic capital, with 75% of voters having chosen, eight years ago this month, to leave the EU.
But many people here who backed Brexit feel betrayed. Jackson said that none of the promises made by politicians who lobbied for Brexit have come true: higher wages, cheaper food and energy, more money for healthcare, and less immigration. “We’ve been lied to—lock, stock and barrel.”
Despite the disappointment, polls show that only a slight majority of Brits want to rejoin the EU and fewer think it is realistic, not least because the bureaucrats in Brussels are unlikely to welcome back their troublesome former partner with open arms. They would probably insist on new conditions like joining the euro single currency and a guarantee that Britain wouldn’t simply leave again in another decade or two. In both London and Brussels, there is a sense that Britain should now do what it does best: Keep calm and carry on. Labour, the likely election winners, say they just want to make Brexit work better.
Brexit was the first in a series of populist earthquakes to rock western politics, followed soon after by the election of Donald Trump. Both will go down in history as revolts by those who felt left behind by globalization, taken for granted by traditional politicians and looked down on by urban elites. Both set in motion forces that are still playing out.
The sunlit meadows
Those who championed Brexit said that it would allow the U.K. to take back control over issues like trade, regulation and immigration that it had ceded in joining the EU decades earlier. Johnson promised voters a Britannia unchained from a slow-growing and bureaucratic continent. “We can see the sunlit meadows beyond. I believe we would be mad not to take this once in a lifetime chance to walk through that door,” he said. A month later, 52% of the country agreed.
Brexit meant different things to different people. For many working-class Brits, it offered the hope of less immigration and less competition from low-wage workers. For some in business, it offered the prospect of a capitalist Britain charting its own course—a Singapore-on-Thames. Many in Europe openly worried that Britain might actually succeed and provide a blueprint for other countries to quit the EU.

Today no one in Europe loses much sleep over that threat. Goldman Sachs estimates that the British economy is 5% smaller than it otherwise would have been without Brexit, though it is hard to untangle the effects of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a U.K. think tank, estimated that Brexit has resulted in a lost annual income per capita of £850 (over $1,000) since 2020.
After the 2007-08 financial crisis, investment spending in the U.K. had recovered faster than the combined average of the EU, U.S. and Canada, according to research by Nicholas Bloom, a British economist at Stanford University. But from 2016 through 2022, U.K. investment was 22% lower than the others. Businesses spent years unsure what new regulations they’d face and whether they’d still have export markets in Europe. Many held off spending to wait for clarity.
“Suddenly, Brexit happens, it goes sideways,” says Bloom. “You’re in a race, and the cars are going around the track, neck and neck, and then your car gets a flat: That’s U.K. investment.”

Investment is now finally picking up again, but businesses still face hurdles. Early this year, the U.K., after four years of delay, released a set of rules on border checks for European imports, including inspection requirements for food. But shortly after, shops like German Deli, a specialty shop in east London, had trouble finding inspectors with the time to certify the imports, forcing it to cut back on everything from liver pâté to German meatloaf, says Susann Schmieder, the shop’s account manager. Sales in March fell by 25%. “We had the first sausage delivery from our usual supplier in May after it took them four months to sort everything out—the paperwork,” she says.
David Frost, a former British diplomat who spent months in Brussels negotiating the free-trade deal Britain struck with the EU back in 2020, says that he gives Brexit a score of “6 out of 10,” and argues that it is still too early to pass judgment.
Britain is joining the Trans Pacific Partnership, an Asia-based trade club. It is introducing regulatory reforms to bolster its financial center, including axing an EU cap on banker bonuses. It is overhauling its agricultural subsidies and introducing tweaks to labor-market rules to lessen administrative burdens on employers. It hopes to have a lighter regulatory footprint than the EU on artificial intelligence.
Frost says that Britain should have gone further. “Overall, the wish was to change the way things have been for the last 20 or 30 years. And we haven’t really done that,” he says.
Loss of faith
Beyond the economic hit, Brexit has become a byword for unkept political promises and poor governance. Britain wrestled back control but then struggled to exercise that power. Politicians could no longer simply point the finger at faceless EU bureaucrats.

Perhaps the most surprising policy response to Brexit was the U.K. government’s decision to allow a sharp increase in legal migration to help prop up the economy. In the last two years, 2.4 million people have been allowed to come and settle in Britain, dwarfing

any such influx before. The government is now tightening rules, but for many who voted for better control of the borders, it has come too late.
Disappointment is palpable here in Boston, where Polish supermarkets and delicatessens inhabit old Victorian buildings and teams of migrant workers in high-visibility vests work the nearby fields. In the last generation, Boston’s population increased by a third, largely as Eastern Europeans came to work and live there. According to a 2021 census, 20% of the Boston population describes themselves as not British.
Anton Dani, who runs the Cafe de Paris in Boston’s main square, enthusiastically backed Brexit. Dani is an immigrant himself. Born in southern France to Moroccan parents, he moved to the U.K. decades ago and set up his own business. He wants a more competitive Britain and likes immigration but thinks that too many people enter the U.K. to take advantage of government benefits.
Today Dani says he is angry. Migrants have continued to come from Europe to Boston, he says, pointing to a group of Romanians walking past his cafe. Life in Boston meanwhile hasn’t noticeably improved, he adds. “We have achieved nothing,” he says. “You learn what you already knew: That politicians are liars.”
Today a record 45% of British people “almost never” trust the government to give priority to the nation’s interest, up from 34% in 2019, according to a 2023 poll by the National Center for Social Research. “Some people will say Brexit’s been an absolute economic disaster,” says Raoul Ruparel, a director at the Boston Consulting Group who advised former Prime Minister Theresa May on Brexit. “I think it was actually a much bigger political disaster.”

Matt Warman, the local Conservative lawmaker, won 76% of the vote in Boston in 2019, campaigning on the message “Get Brexit Done” and a promise to “level up” forgotten places around the country by improving their social and economic prospects. Today he is fighting for political survival. Some polls show him losing the district to an upstart anti-immigration party called Reform UK.
Sitting in a hotel bar on a recent day, Warman concedes that his party dropped the ball on immigration, but he says there were real trade-offs after Brexit. The local farming industry continued to need cheap labor to function, and the local hospital needed nurses, he says.
Politicians can say “I have a great idea, it is really simple,” says Warman. “And if you then turn out not to be able to deliver your really simple solution, because the solution isn’t really simple, people wonder whether they weren’t lied to in the first place.”
Problems that remain
Brexit has become an example of what the American political scientist Aaron Wildavsky called “The Law of Large Solutions.” As he saw it, big policy solutions intended to fix a big problem often just create a bigger problem, which then “dwarfs the [original] problem as a source of worry.”
For years, Brexit engulfed the British government. In 2018, lawmakers spent 272 hours debating the EU Withdrawal Act, while a full third of the U.K. Treasury’s civil servants worked on Brexit-related matters. The opportunity cost meant that other problems festered while British talent and resources were all aimed at untangling the relationship with Europe.
“If you think about Britain’s big problems, Brexit solved none of them: the crumbling public services, weak economic growth, a shortfall of housing and a need to modernize the energy infrastructure,” says John Springford, an economist at the Centre for European Reform think tank in London. “We’ve lost eight years.”

A few miles north of Boston, Will Grant, who runs Fold Hill farm, spends a sunny afternoon driving around his flat fields of wheat. He voted for Brexit because he believed Johnson was credible, and he was impressed by the business leaders who advocated for the project. “I am not going to apologize for voting for it. But I am not proud of voting for it,” says the 35-year-old. “To think about what we wasted. All that oxygen talking about it, all the words written, all that time spent,” he says. “And this is the result: Something that is minorly bad.”
Once outside the trade bloc, Britain had to in-source a lot of administration that had previously been handled at an EU level, from trade to food and medicine regulation. Since Brexit, the U.K. civil service has expanded by around 100,000 people.
The British government copied and pasted nearly 50 years’ worth of accrued EU laws into its own statute books, pledging to amend or remove unsuitable ones. It first estimated there were some 2,000 laws it needed to import. The actual number sits at 6,700 and rising. Just a third have been amended or jettisoned.

Even Brexit’s central aim of reclaiming national sovereignty proved complicated. To quit the EU, the U.K. agreed to place a customs border through its own country to avoid inflaming sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland. The U.K. province of Northern Ireland remains aligned with EU law in some areas to ensure goods can flow without customs checks between it and the Republic of Ireland, an EU member.

Politically, Brexit is now coming full circle. In 2016, when then Conservative leader David Cameron called the referendum, it was in part to neuter euroskeptics in his own party and another upstart politician: Nigel Farage, a cigarette-smoking populist with a big grin who had launched the UK Independence Party, drawing millions of votes from the Tories on a platform to quit Europe.
Now Farage is back, with a campaign charging that Brexit has been betrayed and immigration left unchecked. His Reform U.K. party will likely siphon hundreds of thousands of disillusioned Brexit supporters from the Tories. Farage says he wants to then engineer a reverse-takeover of the party.
The man whom Brexit was supposed to sideline now wants to run to be prime minister when Britain is due to hold its next election in 2029.

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

^ Yeah, we are in one hell of a mess with no end in site

Since you and millions of other UK voters have been voting for the last 30-40 years, you have a part in this mess. Sad to say.

Markus

[Jimbuna]

The same could be said of every voter in the free world Markus.

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

The same could be said of every voter in the free world Markus.

Indeed they could-We have a responsibility when we vote.

Markus

[Jimbuna]

Totally gobsmacked at the result of this poll but on second thoughts....it is the Express.

Express readers vote for their favourite UK political leader - the result was a landslide

As the general election approaches, Express readers have given their opinion on their favourite party leader in UK politics.

The General Election will be held this week on July 4 following Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's announcement on May 22 to dissolve parliament.

Labour leader Keir Starmer said in response to the announcement that the election is the "moment the country's been waiting for", as the Conservative party has been the primary governing party since 2010 in the UK.

In a recent Express poll asking our audience who they deemed to be the most likeable UK political party leader, Nigel Farage emerged with an astonishing 65 percent of the votes, gaining the approval of 8,013 readers.

Farage's party Reform UK has been poaching furious Conservative voters and was recently found up one point to a whopping 21 percent compared to last week in an exclusive poll.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who garnered 22% of Express readers' votes, has openly criticized Nigel Farag for suggesting Ukraine should enter peace talks.

Trailing behind, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer obtained only 5% of our audience's approval, standing at 567 votes.

Despite his unpopularity with Express readers, Starmer's Labour is expected to win a majority on July 4, according to several polls showing that Labour may win by an even bigger landslide than Tony Blair in 1997.

Speaking at an event on Sunday 30 June, Starmer said: "We'll need a clear mandate for this change, don't doubt that. And if you don't believe me, take a good look at the Tories. Chaos under Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, two politicians who never had a clear mandate."

"Don't forget what they have done, don't forget Partygate, don't forget the Covid contracts, don't forget the lies, don't forget the kickbacks, don't forget the cronyism, don't forget the division, the scapegoating of minorities, the failure to invest, the trips to the bookies, [and] the decimation of your public services.

"Telling working people 'we're all in it together', the people who hurt your family finances, swanning around the House of Lords, after giving tax cuts to the richest one per cent that crashed our economy. Don't forget any of it."
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other...3367d15c&ei=37

[Moonlight]

I don't know anyone who reads that rag, they must be the far right Tory nutcases I've heard about.

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by mapuc

Indeed they could-We have a responsibility when we vote.

Markus

Why Markus, you’re beginning to sound like a populist.

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Rockstar

Why Markus, you’re beginning to sound like a populist.

I myself haven't voted since 2002. Reason the politicians can't be trusted and they make a mess or have made a mess.

When I wrote responsibility I meant that either you don't vote or pick a politician who work for the countries best.

Markus

[Jimbuna]

A second Reform UK candidate has defected to the Conservatives, saying the "vast majority" of party nominees are "racist, misogynistic and bigoted"

Georgie David, standing in West Ham and Beckton, denies Reform's senior leadership is racist, but says she does not want to be "directly associated" with its candidates.

Reform chairman Richard Tice accuses the Conservatives of "dirty tricks", saying they are offering candidates "jobs and safe seats" to defect.

Earlier, Rishi Sunak denied he has given up on victory and warned of what he called the "dangers" of a Labour government.

But Wes Streeting said people would be better off under Labour, while being pressed on how the party would pay for its pledges.

Meanwhile, Royal Mail insists there is "no backlog of postal votes" after some people said their ballot had not arrived.

[Jimbuna]

[Jimbuna]

I never thought I'd see this during my lifetime.

The Sun backs Labour saying it's 'time for change'

The Sun newspaper has endorsed the Labour Party in the general election, declaring "it is time for a change".

In an editorial, external the paper, which has backed the Conservatives at every general election since 2010, said Rishi Sunak's party had become "a divided rabble" and needed "a period in opposition to unite".

The tabloid said there were "still plenty of concerns about Labour", including its immigration plans, but leader Sir Keir Starmer had "fought hard to change his party for the better".

The Sun has only ever backed the party to get the most MPs at every election, going as far back as Margaret Thatcher’s first victory in 1979.

However, its influence has been diminished in recent years as newspaper circulations have fallen.

In 1997, when the paper backed Tony Blair's Labour Party, the Sun sold four million copies a day.

Now its daily print readership is believed to be around 600,000, although it does not make these figures public.

Sir Keir said he was "delighted" to have the paper's backing.

Taking questions from journalists on a campaign visit in Scotland, the Labour leader said: "I think that shows just how much this is a changed Labour Party, back in the service of working people."

In its editorial, the paper said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak "has many policies which we support".

However, it added: "Taxes have ballooned to the highest level since World War Two. Plotting against the leadership has been endless. Sleaze scandals - most recently gambling on the timing of the election - have broken public trust.

"Put bluntly, the Tories are exhausted. They need a period in opposition to unite around a common set of principles which can finally bring to an end all the years of internal warfare."

It said the ideas of Nigel Farage's Reform UK party "struck a chord with millions" but said it was "a one-man band which at best can only win only a handful of MPs and can never implement its policies".

"The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, are a joke - with a leader who has spent this most depressing of campaigns pulling ridiculous stunts," the paper said.

"Which means that it is time for Labour."

The paper praised Sir Keir for his support for Ukraine and Israel, his efforts to tackle anti-Semitism within Labour and his focus on economic growth.

However, it also voiced concerns about the party, claiming it did not have "a clear plan for getting a grip on immigration" and would put up taxes.

"[Sir Keir] has a mountain to climb, with a disillusioned electorate and low approval ratings," it said.

"But, by dragging his party back to the centre ground of British politics for the first time since Tony Blair was in No10, Sir Keir has won the right to take charge."

Sir Keir was England and Wales's chief prosecutor in the run-up to the trial of senior staff accused of phone hacking at Rupert Murdoch's News International, the predecessor to News UK, which is the publisher of the Sun.

Former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie suggested, external this was one reason the paper had not given an early endorsement to Sir Keir's party.

In previous elections, it has declared its backing to parties much earlier. This time it has left it until polling day, when the printed edition of the newspaper will hit the streets.

The paper's front page endorsement for Labour, external does not mention the party's name or its leader.

Instead, it alludes to criticism of England manager Gareth Southgate, declaring: "As Britain goes to the polls, it's time for a new manager (and we don't mean sack Southgate!)"

Over the weekend the Financial Times and the Sunday Times, which is also owned by News UK, joined the Daily Mirror, the Guardian and the Independent in backing Labour.

The Scottish Sun, which has previously endorsed Labour, the Scottish National Party and the Conservatives, has also come out in support of Labour, external.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Express have backed the Conservatives.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd1751vv0z7o

[mapuc]

A change to what ??

If your politicians are the same as in every democratic countries-The changes will most likely be raised taxes and extra taxes on climate change improvement

Markus

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by mapuc

A change to what ??



Markus

That is the million dollar question Markus and one I doubt anyone knows the answer to.