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May is (at least at the time of writing) our first populist PM. Whaaaat?!?!? A woman about whom it might be said that far from lighting up a room when she enters it, she trails gloom behind her, a populist? She has no charisma, no wit, no ability to charm or work a crowd, no followers, no chanting fans. She cannot speak – sometimes literally. She asserts, she repeats, she reprimands. She cannot persuade. In what sense then is she remotely a populist?
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There are arguments for or against another referendum as a way out of the mess we are in, but claiming that those arguing for are Enemies of the People is both ridiculous and frighteningly populist
"Mrs May’s statement in Downing Street last Wednesday, in which she pitched our country’s people against their parliament, was a new low: the most irresponsible words I can remember any prime minister uttering in my lifetime. And it is part of a pattern in which Mrs May has picked up the baton from Ukip in poisoning our political discourse and deliberately undermining public faith in the institutions that form the very fabric of our society.
In politics, and in the media, our judges have been condemned as “enemies of the people”, the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, was abused as a corrupt liar for suggesting Brexit might not be good for our economy, while academics are told that the UK no longer needs “experts”.
I know that Mrs May cares about her legacy. I urge her to realise that delivering Brexit, on whatever terms, will not secure a good one. Indeed, a no-deal exit would ensure that she goes down in infamy. Our electorate has not been united on much in the past two-and-a-half years, but a poll recently showed that more than 90% of voters think the situation we now find ourselves in has become a national humiliation."
Which seek to overturn previous votes before they've been implemented?
So next time there's a General Election and to our undisguised horror we find the winner had been, shall we say, disingenuous, we should have another vote to put it right?
I think the danger to British democracy is if i) the outcome of the Brexit referendum is not implemented in a way that gains reasonable acceptance and ii) if the British PM is seen as being removed from office at the behest of the EU.
Since ii) relies on panicking Tories, who will get slaughtered if/when they do, they will not only trash their own brand but poison future UK-EU relations, so I fear it may come to pass.
On Mrs May, I think I'll wait to see the fist her successor makes of this imbroglio before coming to judgment. She has faced a very difficult task and been found wanting. She still may be the least worst option available (and remains a lot more popular than her government, in particular among Conservative voters), so while there are no 'good' options for Brexit for Britain, there are only a series of increasingly disastrous ones for the Tories. And they deserve them.
That one?
I think there’s a lot of creative symbiosis going on here: May has a big problem because there’s a hung parliament; there’s a hung parliament because of May.
Although the EU have weaponised the Irish border, and their apparatchiks have made several entirely unhelpful and unwelcome interventions, I do believe they’ve negotiated to the red lines May set out. The Deal is as fair and as realistic a compromise as could be achieved and the UK achieved several important negotiating wins with it.
However, on any conceivable GE result (or keeping with the GE2015 Parliament) the PM of the day would have had trouble getting the Deal through across their own backbenchers and the opposition.
That really did demand bringing a broader spectrum of politicians, and the public, into the post Brexit debate, but that ship has sailed.
Your side has now broken cover and is now proposing we skip this step and go straight to revoke.
https://twitter.com/ByDonkeys/status/1092812700193906690?s=19
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-47678275
She said: "It must have been a cut and paste job. The dates were all wrong."
She should sue Guido if this is the case.
They were both the ones I thought might do so. Very politically engaged and anti-Tory. They were incandescent following Cameron’s unexpected majority win in GE2015.
One big problem revoke/remain have is that their base, and supporters, are so clearly left-wing, economically, culturally and socially. There’s a vast gulf in values between them and the Conservative Party.
It puts off the vast majority of Conservative Party members and voters from even considering that Remaining in the EU could even be vaguely in their interest, or the nation’s interest, and - with the EU having friends like those - shows how suspicious they’d be of any Conservative who said otherwise.
May is not a successful demagogue, though...
Politically, Mrs May’s statement in Downing Street last Wednesday was disastrous. But only because the MPs refuse to accept their culpabillity for being where we are.
MPs could have voted against the Referendum being called until it was known what happens if we voted to Leave. Their voting for it to be held in 2017 or 2018 would have allowed discussion of the complex issues around Leave they are currently unable to grapple with.
Even when the result was known, they could have voted to trigger Article 50 in 2018 or 2019.
They are likely to be equally paralysed when they have to respond to the "indicative" votes.
There were many placards castigating the ERG, May and Corbyn, but the marchers were anti-Brexit, not anti-Tory. Of course in the last election a clear majority of 58% voted for non Tories.
The vast numbers of marchers were the demography that was once the bedrock of the Tory party, but have been abandonded by it.
Islington.
30-40 years ago, my peer group of the professional middle-class (save for academics and those really immersed in the public sector) would have been overwhelmingly Conservative.
Today, that isn't the case, and hasn't been for some time. The middle-class have definitively drifted to becoming socially liberal, internationalist, pro-higher taxation, re-distributive, economically soft-left in all other ways, and embrace identity politics with both arms.
This is *not* the case for those over the age of about 50-55, but very much is for those beneath, and is even more pronounced amongst females.
Actually this is a Wise move.
https://twitter.com/PolakPolly/status/1109462611647758336?s=19
It caused a militantly European cultural identity to appear in the UK in the way that 40+ years of membership of the EU and its progenitor organisation never did.
Some excellent points in the header. It feels like spring today, the Sun has just gone into Aries, the frogs at the bottom of my garden are making some encouraging noises, and I think the pack is about to be reshuffled.
As far as I can tell, the Conservatives have done well at bringing sanity to the national finances and drastically reducing unemployment, where the tax and welfare reforms at the lower end have been decisive. They've also made some helpful reforms to pensions, put a little bit more rigour into education, and helped prop up the housing market.
However, they've done nothing to bring down immigration, resolve our long-term discomfort with the European project, and have embraced New Labour social policy (identity politics) with both arms, making no stands for free speech, new community dialogue, social integration and have left fashionable shibboleths unchallenged. Their steps on marriage and the family have been entirely tokenistic. The NHS reforms were misunderstood and entirely muddled. They blew their chance on rural and country issues. And the Big Society achieved virtually nothing to strengthen our civic institutions.
Perhaps that's what the next generation want, but for me it's very depressing. If all Conservatism means is just good stewardship of the national finances and day-to-day administration and otherwise abrogating any leadership of the national debate (and I admit, to many, that's all they want) then politics no longer holds any real interest for me.
The Pensioners' Party has some thinking to do.
I'm not in the mood.
I'm in my mid-30s myself and get all of that, indeed, I agree with it. There's something much deeper and more fundamental going on here.
I would also argue also that the Tories are still yet to recover from Blair. They still look a bit old fashioned and out of touch.
Nothing makes me more angry (go on, call me a Gammon) than when I see a Briton march with the yellow and blue flag. It brings out of all my innermost fears and demons.
I voted Brexit to try and bring a stop to that and to restrengthen our believe and pride in our nation and its democratic principles, and to set an example to Europe and the World of how else it could and should be done.
It hasn't exactly worked out like that.
Entirely in character, I suppose.
I'll wait for a serious poster to turn up before engaging next time.
Ernie was a comedy genius.
At previous turning points, a leader has appeared and seized the national mood: Thatcher, Blair, Cameron at a pinch. There’s no sign of one right now - failing the very unlikely outcomes of a Labour split (in favour of the Jess Phillips/Stella Creasy tendency) or a LibDem revival.
A fear of democracy has done it. Good little EUropeans that they are.....
Listen to Heseltines speech for that patriotic pro EU view:
https://youtu.be/Y8oWrF2CXF8
https://uk.yahoo.com/news/calls-grow-public-inquiry-brexit-141330868.html
People who lost the vote and like the EU want us to stay in the EU. One might say nothing has changed.
This is at the heart of the issue. This is *why* we're all here.
I am a Conservative voter (or at least I have been up to now) but I don't want radical attacks on the welfare state, indeed the harshness of the reforms on disability for example offend me as does the incompetence with which UC has been introduced. I certainly don't want the equivalent of US Evangelicals having any say on social policy. I am not up for another wave of privatisations, the recent experience of private sector involvement in the provision of public services has not been a success on any measure. What do I want?
* Sound public finances and reduced government debt (as a share of GDP).
*Efficient and effective public services which are adequately funded to meet the challenges we have given to them.
*The application of our laws to all and for all. Having some of our citizens treated as second class because of "cultural sensitivity" is unacceptable.
*A society that is, so far as possible, left to get on with their own lives without politicians thinking we need new laws on everything all the time.
* A society that is compassionate about those in need.
I accept it is not the most ambitious list. One might say it is almost conservative.
You too have sympathy with some of the arguments I'm making.
The importance of those principles hasn't gone away.
In all seriousness, though, yet again one of your tips will have made me money.
I'm very grateful for that.
And still, despite all the developments, European federalism in the UK is still very much a minority taste.
On a more general point, thanks to Ms Cyclefree for another useful and thoughtful survey of our rather depressing current political situation.
They are working and marrying more internationally, and are far less connected to the communities they grew up in these days.
Like I say, I'm far from convinced this is healthy. We are two nations. Or, to put it another way, one desperate to get the nation back, and the other to supersede it as anachronistic.
I think Britain has always struggled to take populists seriously, even if it has frequently fallen in thrall to populist ideas. Brexit (a populist idea that the public voted for) versus May (a populist politician that the public won't vote for) are the latest examples. If we ever produce a populist that really cuts through ("Tommy Robinson" is probably the most successful to date but will also fall short I think, thank God) we'll be in real trouble.
Three or four years ago their typical FB feeds were almost completely apolitical. Today they are filled with the spiciest placards from yesterday's 1.2 million strong march.
"Whatever we did, whatever we said, we didn't mean it. We just want EU back for good." was my favourite.
To use that argument reinforces mine that the EU is becoming one.
Maybe I'll go focus on her instead.
Laters.
The political settlement of Scotland has, in broad terms, been around for three centuries. More recently, power has devolved from the centre to Holyrood. The exact opposite process is happening with nation-states and the EU. Those are two very significant differences.
Not only that, we've had two public votes about the fate of Scotland in the UK, and the UK in the EU.
"We are here, now, on the right side of history. In a shrinking world, of global terrorism, international tax avoidance, millisecond communication, giant corporations, superpowers, mass migration, climate change and a host of other threats, our duty is to build on our achievements, to maintain our access to the corridors of world power, to keep our place at the centre of the stages of the world"
So, it has to be a referendum repeat. A straight Leave versus Remain is merely a second go for the losers and could end in a disaster. So it might well be a May deal versus Remain which clearly ignore Leavers who prefer a no-deal Leave or a softer Brexit. A fiddle, in other words. And if 48% voted leave still, surely their wants should be taken into account? After all, that was many Remainers' demand after the first one.
A three-way or four way option to include the other options se is likely to end in no side having 50%. That will suit some Remainers as long as they win; after all, they know they're always right and the other voters deserve to be ignored. Is that what Remain want?
And this decision is being pushed onto younger people by the older generation. Brexit with the younger generation at the forefront would IMO been much easier to stomach . I would have been far less anti Brexit.
I’m afraid to say that your attempts to restrengthen belief and pride in the nation won’t end well . I wonder how many will admit to having voted for Brexit in the coming years .
The reality is of course no lessons have been learned and a return to the EU would simply be business as usual for them, while the underlying problems bubble hotter and come to the surface in another way.
So good, in fact, it prompted this...
Tim Montgomerie @montie The BBC has become Remain’s propaganda vehicle. https://twitter.com/bbcpolitics/status/1109502078005714945
A good header, but there is a simpler explanation. Mrs May isn't a very good politician but she is consistent - a little like 'ol Bonehead in Labour tries to be. She remains at heart a Remainer, but possibly a little shocked by the referendum result, has genuinely decided to honour it.
Her negotiations yielded her what seemed to be a result acceptable to both sides. However she underestimated the extremism on the ERG side and the ambition of the Remain side. The former want a clean break, the latter to reverse the referendum result. She also under-estimated Labour's aim to prevent her claiming any credit.
As we probably agree, she's a bad politician. That doesn't make her bad, merely naïve and unsuited to the job
Have we agreed yet roughly how many were at yesterday's Meaningful March/Pointless Protest? My guess would be about half a million, but that includes dogs, Russian stooges and tourists just trying to find their way to Fortnum & Masons.