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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The change in the parliamentary arithmetic since he became PM makes Johnson’s task harder
It is worth reminding ourselves that for all but two days of its life the Johnson government has been able to operate without the need to face parliamentary scrutiny. It has been able to control the media narrative and dominate the headlines. That all changes next Tuesday when MPs return after the summer recess.
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They can be loyal from the back benches the same as Major's bastards had to be when Maastricht was made a confidence matter.
https://twitter.com/ne0liberal/status/1166579120085581824
BoZo the Clown doesn’t.
Anybody else’s sub-samples posts = good
PB logic for you.
Interesting times are certainly afoot.
Mr. Tokyo, that's a very odd graph. Got to say it sounds dodgy, so I'm surprised the murder stats aren't higher.
Geoffrey Howe - The Sheep That Roared.
By a country mile. That speech!
So does Johnson think the DUP more necessary to his political survival than the Europhiles within the Conservatives?
They're a bit like a tennis player match point down, desperately sending stuff back up the court just in the hope of getting back to deuce. They have no collective vision of what victory looks like.
To torture the metaphor a little more most of them seem resigned to merely keeping the game alive till the tiebreak - an election.
What's constitutional in a long embedded parliamentary democracy such as the UK, is whatever has popular consent. And the mechanism for finding that out is a general election. The rest is noise.
The Ed Stone v.2 crowd, along with Stewart, Hammond and Co might be able to get a 90 days or 180 days extension through with some convention breaking practice. But if there's popular consent to Leave, it shall in the end be so.
The only reason the election isn't happening now is because Tory Remainers and anti-Corbyn Labourites want to indulge in both eating and having cake. Fair enough. Why have a cake if you aren't allowed to eat it.
But my message to such cake scoffers would be to put up or shut up and call a VONC, because all they are doing right now is delaying the inevitability of the decision and extending the period of uncertainty and rancour.
Meanwhile while they play their pointless games, the rest of us can sit back and get excited about the ticking countdown clock, which now stands at only 76 days. I talk of course about the launch of Disney+ and The Mandalorian, starring the irrepressible Pedro Pascal!
Their hearts seek to remain (or at least pretend thus) but they pussyfoot around.
Holding a general election is a bit like pulling the handle of a fruit machine. You’d have thought the Conservatives would have learned from 2017 that they can end up with two lemons and a cherry. But perhaps they need a refresher.
Bingo! We’ve now reached the point that it’s Remainers’ fault that Leavers voted for Brexit. We’ve reached peak Leaver today.
It is the bastards who are now in government who undermined the government, refused to vote in favour, generally trashed the government's negotiations and behaved in an utterly two-faced and unprincipled way.
Whatever solution emerges will have to be on an entirely different basis now. That sea has been rejected on all sides.
What are you going to admit to?
Be advised that competition is extremely stiff, even for the hourly version.
Both sides are good on tactics but have no strategy. What you say is right for opponents of no deal. But it also applies to the No Dealers. Once Britain is out without a deal, what then? No Deal ever with the EU? What if the price of such a deal is precisely what they reject now? What if other countries won't do a deal with Britain until they know what it's long-term relationship with the EU will be? Etc etc.
There has been no strategy at the heart of the parties' offerings for some time now. It's why the country is bouncing around from wall to wall just getting battered and bruised.
Or a recognition that Brexit, whether via Mays Deal or No Deal, opens the door on an era of trade uncertainty.?
Brexit just accelerates existing trends and makes the problem worse.
The responsibility for that is simply the onewe have had for ages, your industries cant exist withing the EU without a level playing field on workers rights. It means multinationals can close all their UK operations at a fairly low costs and wiith no hassle and transfer the work seamlessly elsewhere. The system practically demands it.
He takes the view - as I and others do - that there is no mandate for Leave on a No Deal basis and that if this is what the Government should do it should get an explicit mandate to do so at a GE and spell out exactly what No Deal means and what happens afterwards i.e. in the weeks, months, years afterwards not just in the first 24 hours. That it should be honest about what it is offering, something the ultra-Leavers have singularly failed to do.
Expect major fireworks
Indeed it sounds as if you are advocating a stronger role for the EU in regulating workers rights and corporate tax.
The only way to resolve the issue is a further referendum. Everything else is continuing paralysis.
I watched the Parliamentary committe on Bridgend yesterday and the chief weasel from Ford simply summed up again the problem we face.
Easier to hit the brits so lets dump them and their taxpayers cxan pick up the bill.
As far as I can see, the Brexiteers' response is to throw them a bit of temporary charity in order to keep them off the front pages and then ignore them as per usual while they sign up for a deal allowing mega-US agri-businesses to destroy them completely.
Just like Kraft did when the EU was in charge. Plus ca change, eh......
You may well have a point about the effect of some of the EU's policies. But that does not mean that Brexit - let alone Brexit on the basis on which it is now being offered - is the answer. Dislike of the EU is not enough to come up with a sensible alternative. And yet that seems to be the entire basis of the government's current policy.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2019/aug/27/greatest-cricket-test-of-all-headingley-2019-ashes
Being broad-minded, we had an unbeliever to stay the weekend. At some point on Sunday afternoon I yelled out of the window: “You’ve got to come and see this! It’s the most astonishing game!” A languorous, world-weary voice replied from the garden: “Cricket! Always astonishing. Always historic. Always unprecedented.” She never budged...
For these people the choice is the the guaranteed continued disintegration of their communities ( no hope ) versus the chance that things might improve with a shock to the system. Its a perfectly rational choice from where they sit.
And no, that is not rational.
The DUP doesn’t. Indeed, outwith the nutter wing of the minority Conservatives (which seems to be most of them these days), the DUP is Johnny No Friends.
Only one side is going to win on the Backstop.
Do you think it might have anything to do with the free trade regime of goods/capital/people the UK has had with much lower income countries, as required by three of four of the EU's famous pillars?
Do you think the fourth pillar (free services) is something that primarily helps a) the low skilled in Sunderland, or b) lawyers in London?
I wish for just a day everyone on both sides would just stop and try and understand why half the country voted in the opposite way to them. There are nuanced economic and political driving forces behind this whole thing, this language of cultists is just so one dimensional.
To respect the referendum result is the way to move on, why people think it is ok to ignore it is completely beyond me. We must leave.
1. Get an election and win it.
2. Scrap May's red lines and negotiate a deal including customs union and not too fussed about free movement - effectively Norway.
3. Offer it to the people in a new referendum as a reasonable option, with Remain as the other reasonable option. Accept either outcome without quibbling. Face down the extremists who want a damaging No Deal or other lunacies.
4. Conduct a socialist government.
And some additional points which matter. Don't flirt with suspending Parliament to get our way. Don't treat opponents as traitors, merely as people we disagree with but will work with as the Parliamentary arithmetic dictates.
Does it mean left-wing policies? Sure. Would it mean a cooler relationship with the US? Under Trump, yes. Might it have all kinds of problems? Undoubtedly. But it's a coherent democratic socialist alternative, and not one that treats Parliament as a suspendible annoyance or obsesses with Brexit while the country rots. It seems to me *obviously* better than what we have now.
As for rationality it remains as ever the inability of remainers ot understand that what seems rational to them may not be rational to others.
If youve been ignored for years and see no change on the horizon then kicking the tables over and demanding a new start makes sense. The Left has been kicking over tables and for years as a way of getting change on the agenda.
The Brexiteers are using them and will dump them. Of that I have no doubt. The sheep farmers know they are going to be sold down the river by the Brexiteers. The people who are keenest on this hard Brexit are precisely the hedge funders and others in London and the South-East who will take advantage and who then hope to deregulate and remove whatever protections the poor and left-behind still have so that they can create their free market nirvana.
There is a tension between those who voted for Brexit because they hoped for something better (a return to a more stable, protected, guaranteed life, which I sympathise with) - and those who want it because they want to complete an ultra-Thatcherite revolution. That tension has not resolved itself and when it does the results will not be pretty for the disintegrating communities you talk about.
The ideological pure Axis alliance lost.
Food for thought for Brexshiteers.
And it might be quite attractive, Nick, were it not for your leader and his close allies (who do seem to treat internal opponents as traitors, for instance) .......
But I have to get to work now.
So till later all.
On this board we tend to be people who are the exception to the UK average rather than the rule. Most people just dont care that much.
You generally given the impression that you know something about the world and then you write this. It's now people in London and the South East that are the keenest on a hard Brexit??
With control returned to our voters at national elections if our form of Brexit or governance doesn't work we can elect a new government.