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A few days ago, I was worried we would have a Hung Parliament, as a resurgent youth-led voting public scooped up the free offers showered on it by the Labour Party Manifesto. Discussing this some days ago with people in a position to know better, the younger of the two contacts feared that the Conservatives were losing the youth vote (which they did) among other things by being tempted by targeted offers of free transport for the under 25s. He feared the whole of London was lost (most of it was) and that the Conservative leadership did not understand how people thought outside city centres (definitely not so). When we were on our own again my older contact said the younger one was too pessimistic, but the best we could both come up with as a prediction was a small working majority, and even then, it was best not to depend on it. Part of the reason was that in 2017 Labour under Corbyn did very well, which was a shock as their vote firmed up at the last minute, and was not predicted by the polls. Teresa May was a wooden performer, and her Manifesto contained unpopular things, for example a proposal which increased the chance that family homes would have to be sold to pay for social care.
This time the result was far better than expected. His majority is a “stonking” 80 seats, the best result since Thatcher in 1987. England voted Conservative, affronted by a Labour leader who was seen as unpatriotic, disloyal and untrustworthy. Boris was seen as a bit of a rogue, but charming and with a sense of humour. He passed the pub test: many voters thought it be fun to have a drink with him.
The Conservative election machine regained its reputation of being a machine, not a knitting circle. The guiding principle was that, if something was done in 2017, it should not be done again. The Manifesto was kept short, and short on promises, with no hostages to fortune. When Cabinet Members were even slightly off-target, and made comments that could be misinterpreted, for example, that it “was common-sense to leave a burning building” when discussing the Grenfell Tower fire, they were immediately side-lined and never seen again. “Get Brexit done” was repeated ad nauseum until even Labour repeated it. The repetitions became a joke, but it was deadly effective. Focus groups struggled to list what the other parties wanted but everyone, Leaver and Remainer alike, knew what the Tories would do. Lines of command in the election HQ were clear, and the focus on limited objectives relentless. It will be studied carefully in the US. Fear is a good motivator, and even those who were normally confident of victory remained terrified it would all go wrong, like 2017.
Scotland voted for the Scottish National Party, but curiously that does not guarantee they would all vote for separation. Currently they do well out of the Union. Being rebellious need not go the whole way. However, this is a problem.
Northern Ireland has moved closer to Ireland, with one seat moving to Nationalist (Irish) parties from the Unionist Northern Island (Conservative) cause. Wales moved closer to English Conservatism, dumping traditional Labour in several seats.
Northern Ireland has never been particularly popular with mainland voters. The English don’t like people who take politics too seriously, still less those who murder their countrymen because of politics. The English would be happy to be shot of Northern Ireland, and only defend them because they want to remain part of the United Kingdom. Nonetheless, they are seen as shouty and too fond of history and waving the Union Jack. Dumping them would be popular, but won’t happen.
Dumping the Scots would also be popular. Their Parliamentary leader shouts, sides with Labour, and was part of the obstructive faction that blocked Brexit. If Scotland doesn’t want to be part of the Union there is no enthusiasm for wooing them with more money. Who knows, in another decade or two Engerland might just be Engerland.
What are the pointers for the future? Never judge the electorate solely by the people they elect. Being elected goes to the elected’s heads. Some Conservatives believed they were capable of judging what the public really needed, and that what they needed was not what they voted for. They joined Labour’s “destroy Brexit by a thousand delays” plan. (Boris purged them, and they all lost their seats at the election, or did not contest it). Labour believed their own estimates of their personal importance. They promised to respect Brexit and then openly sabotaged it. The Liberal Democrats chose the policy of revoking Brexit. Unwise, undemocratic, unelectable.
The public were having none of it. Whatever they had voted in the 2016 referendum, in 2019 they voted to Leave, either out of conviction about Brexit or conviction that if Parliament asks the people for their opinion, in a once in a lifetime referendum, they should respect the results.
Boris made the difference. The character of the candidate matters. Boris is a Cavalier, not a Roundhead, close to Merry England, the alehouse, and buxom wenches. People understand that. They voted for the normal bloke who likes a bit of a laugh, not the perpetual protester and his pamphlets. Now the Boris team will have a chance to show the electorate that they are worthy of being supported five years from now. One person will be particularly keen to do that. A Share in two revolutions is living to some purpose. Dominic Cummings helped win Brexit 2016 and a Conservative landslide in 2019. The entire team will enjoy the new dawn.
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Please fix typo “Northern Island” for “Northern Ireland”.
Had spotted it and fixed it, but thanks anyway.
On the plus side if you’re left with just England & Wales you can get rid of the meh Union Jack and replace it with something cooler.
My nomination:
A Russian with the audacity to call the Union Jack “meh”, the post-Soviet Russian flag is as “meh” as it gets, it is just a standard masonic tricolour and not even a particularly nice colour combnation. At least the Soviet flag was sort of cool in a kitschy sort of way.
“Scotland voted for the Scottish National Party”: or, rather, 45% of those who bothered to vote did.
If we were to take a Hillary Clinton line that means the SNP lost.
Scotland voted for the Scottish National Party or, rather, 45% of those who bothered to vote did.
What I would be mildly interest to know is how on earth Labour managed to cling on to Edinburgh South. Students and academics?
To stretch a comparison a little far, perhaps, the Country Party won and the Court Party lost.
“Boris is a cavalier and not a Roundhead”.
– Been peeking in the Portcullis House showers, eh?
The Russian flag is just a standard, boring flag with no pretenses. The Union Jack tries to cram too many things into one place, comes off as very cluttered.
Totalitarian regimes generally have good aesthetics, Nazi flag is also great.
Although I’d like to see the Union Jack gone for nationalist reasons, is it fair to call it ‘meh’? I’ve been surprised how many European girls and boys, from Italy to Czechia to – yes – Russia, that I’ve seen wearing clothes with it on as a fashion accessory. Can’t say I’ve seen that of any other European flag.
I don’t like that one with the small dragon; but I can imagine some kind of combo of the Welsh dragon with the Saxon dragon that’s become a symbol for English nationalist pagan LARPers might look cool enough to continue to be a fashion statement.
I agree with the other poster the Russian flag is the definition of ‘meh’. I even preferred the one with the paler blue that was first used post-USSR (why was that changed?) , at least it was a bit different…
Please correct ‘be shot of” with ‘be shut of’.
From the Oxford English Dictionary:
The page linked below has a discussion on the common misuse of ‘shot’ or ‘shod’ in the above sense:
http://www.wordwizard.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4742
I keep expecting Mutti Mullah Merkel to introduce a new German flag for her Caliphate. Something like this is a good start, but it probably needs German colors.
PEACE 😇
But some people wear it well. How about Billie Piper from Doctor Who?
PEACE 😇
The upcoming Labour civil war while the Tories turn a firehose of cash on the NHS and Northern infrastructure will be hugely entertaining.
In terms of votes rather than seats, the Lib Dems made the greatest gains despite large numbers of their voters mistakenly backing Labour tactically. In England the LDs may have gained 2x as many votes as the Tories.
In Wales and Scotland there was a, probably permanent, shift of the LD vote to nationalists. The Irish political groups, not the government are preparing a platform for discussions to make sure that when the border poll comes, there will be an explicit deal to vote for. The Westminster government can block Welsh and Scottish referendums and will do so. It can’t stop a properly constituted border poll. In 2022, the majority of NI voters will be Catholic.
The Tories gained 2.5% across the whole of GB. Not really impressive considering the previous leader was Theresa May.
Labour lost 8% it’s worse than that because 6% were probably LD tactical voters especially in the South and West of England and city seats. This was clearly an election that Labour lost rather than the Tories won. Labour is trapped into socialism by its membership. ‘Save our NHS’ has nothing to do with patient care. It is to do with trade union control of the workplace.
The right way up too.
Blair doubled NHS spending but received very little credit for it.
Perhaps it’s down to my being something of an Anglophilic American, but I’ve always thought that the Union Flag was by far the best flag in the world. Whenever I’m in Britain and see it flying, I know that I’m in a real country. Or what used to be a real country, at any rate.
I disagree completely. The Union Jack’s pretty cool, and it possesses tremendous nostalgic potential, which I’m sure will become more apparent as the demographic picture darkens considerably over the next few decades.
Dominion variations on the Union Jack are pretty cool too. I am very partial to the Australian flag. I dread to think what cuckfag design Australian republicans intend to replace it with.
Cool Euro flags:
* Sweden, and all the Scands too, but particularly Sweden
* France
* Italy
* Switzerland
* Commie Yugoslavia (modern Croatia and Serbia not bad either)
Uncool Euro flags
* Poland
* Commie Czechoslovakia
* Turkey (ewww) (not really Euro anyway, but just including them so I can rubbish it)
* N. Macedonia (srsly?)
* Bosnia (just lol)
* Albania (has potential, sorta kinda, but nah)
That’s great to hear. I love it when a plan comes together.
I have serious doubts that any real good is going to come of Brexit. I don’t at all imagine it will be horrible, but I can’t see it being of any serious value of itself, not in the short run, anyway.
Indeed. The Scots voted against independence in 2015, but they elect SNP MPs in order to stick up two fingers to Westminster. If their leader continues treating the English as the enemy and asking for another referendum, the English might decide that we want an independence referendum of our own.
The *only* thing that dirty bastard Tony Blair did was to import HUGE numbers of immigrants to the UK ensuring its future as a black man’s country.
Blair doubled NHS spending
Since the NHS was founded every government has increased spending on it by more than inflation except the late 70s Labour government.
Of those increases were any as spendthrift as the bonkers pay deal that Blair’s government handed to the GPs? Perhaps only the wildly expensive PFI deals that his Chancellor Brown wanted and got?
Also on Blair: why did he muck up the dental service? I never understood what he was up to with that. I was browned off when my NHS practice suddenly became a private practice.
Conclusion: doubling spending may be a lousy idea if you do it stupidly.
happy to be shot of
shet
shet (ʃɛt)
vb
1. (tr) obsolete to shut
2. (intr) dialect US to be free of something
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014
My Grandmother spoke in the Scotch-Irish dialect and she was always telling me she was going to be shet of this or she wished she was shet of that.
Man czechoslovakia and czechia is the same flag.
Albania is good, Turkey too. Macedonia is literally retard tier but what else can be expected of a retard tier invented nation, Bosnia is that x10 (name a single god damn country that has blue, white and yellow that isn’t a total shithole or an american colony)
Yugoslavia is hot garbage simply due to the yugonostalgic commies.
But really really terrible flags are the US state (and generally all local) flags. Like, who the fuck designed them, I want them made immortal then impaled for soiling the planet with that trash.
Also I think there’s a higher percentage of English people in Edinburgh than Scotland as a whole, who are unlikely to vote SNP. Same goes for Aberdeen, which is full of English people because of the oil industry.
Steven Hsu has a post about Dominic Cummings at
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2019/12/now-it-can-be-told-dominic-cummings-and.html
and it includes a link to his role in the Brexit referendum as well.
Dominic Cummings has an interesting blog.
He understood the weakness of the EU system – and he understood, how much it already annoyed people. He made the step from utterly abstract EU-criticism to – – – a working strategy – first in the Brexit referendum, now in the election. Impressive – and interesting.
(I was waiting for the name Cummings to appear in James Thompson’s article. – A long wait – but then!)
What a horrid monstrosity. I’d rather keep the Union Jack thanks.
I think the Union flag is actually very cool and very aesthetic, and I say that as an Irishman.
I’m a great admirer of the Canadian maple leaf flag. If you’re going to change your historic flag it’s a good idea to choose a fine design as its replacement.
How on earth did we stray onto the subject of flags?
” targeted offers of free transport for the under 25s. ”
We had that in Illinois for senior citizens; it cost taxpayers a fortune.
Glad you waited.
I’ve just watched a Lisa Nandy speech on youtube: she is (presumably) a candidate to be the next Labour Party leader. She spoke rather well, making much of her background as a humble provincial girl from Lancasheer. She also made much of how unfamiliar the Commons had been to her as a newbie, a den of Privilege.
Aye, but her grandfather had been a Peer, sitting in the House of Lords, and her mother had been (if memory serves) a parliamentary librarian. Politicians, eh?
This being an IQ blog perhaps it’s worth commenting on the near conspiracy of silence about one of Mr Corbyn’s failings. He’s a dim bugger. WKPD lists his good start in life i.e. his “privilege” as some people like to say.
When Corbyn was seven, the family moved to Pave Lane in Shropshire, where his father bought Yew Tree Manor, a 17th-century country house which was once part of the Duke of Sutherland’s Lilleshall estate. Corbyn attended Castle House School, an independent preparatory school near Newport, Shropshire, before, at age 11, becoming a day student at the Adams’ Grammar School in the town.
But then it tells us how he did in the three A-levels he attempted.
and achieved two A-Levels, at grade E, the lowest-possible passing grade, before leaving school
Latter, it informs us, Corbyn began a course in Trade Union Studies at North London Polytechnic but left after a year without a degree after a series of arguments with his tutors over the curriculum.
Of course, you might say that not everyone who puts in such a lamentable performance at school is dim. True: some youngsters just aren’t much attracted to abstract ideas and knowledge. But his dimness is apparent every time you see him on the telly. My point is that his dismal academic performance suggests that it’s not just inarticulacy that you are witnessing. It’s not just a chap more interested in practical matters that you observe. He really is rather stupid.
Just a cross with some Crayola colouring, most of those anyway.
Sword points up for victory, second one wrong.
Katar, Talwar & Deg.
Punch Dagger, Sabre, Cauldron.
Deg Teg Fateh
Cauldron Sword Victory
Glory to the Khalsa which protects & feeds poor.
Not sure how we got to the subject of flags either but I think that the Red Ensign looks better than its replacement which is a bit logo ish.
It does say something about those who comment on the Unz review that when we discuss the breakup of the United Kingdom the talk quickly turns to how they will change the flags. I like that kind of flippancy.
Brussels, the Gentle Monster: or the Disenfranchisement of Europe, 2011 by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 81 pages.
It is a concise feature. Enzensberger spent some time in Bruxelles and Straßburg. His essay is a great read and astonishing predictive power. Enzensberger asked for a “rückbau” (deconstruction) of the EU, because it had since years suffered from a systemic overreach and delved into a dysfuntional grwoth routines (cf. Cyrill Parkinson/ Niklas Luhmann). Enzensberger has lots and lots of great examples to support his claim. Still a great read! Not least for Dominic Cummings readers and Brexiteers.
Straßburg: did the EU give up the notion of prohibiting the ß?
Talking about flags is more meaningful that UK break-up.
The hypothetical scenarios around any break-up are premised on being able to join the EU. Except, Spain has made it absolutely clear they will veto any breakaway joiners. Thus, we know that:
— Scottish and Welsh breakaways cannot happen without immediate descent into poverty and ruin. And, the people living there understand the consequences.
— North Ireland would have to unite immediately with Ireland. Any such attempt would reignite The Troubles.
I doubt the readership would have a similar reaction to a more meaningful EU break-up discussion.
MERRY CHRISTMAS 🎄
North[ern] Ireland would have to unite immediately with [the Republic of] Ireland.
Why? Why not just let two or three counties (or whatever it is) transfer themselves to the Republic and leave the rest as a shrunken NI?
A Welsh “breakaway” would be madness and no doubt most of the Welsh know it. As for Scotland, as a recent article in the Times argues, it’s all forty years too late. I dare say that a majority of Scots know that too. What the country needs is an English Parliament – it could use the HoP in London – and a British government based in Berwick-upon-Tweed or, better, Carlisle. Or, even better, Workington.
Once a month some England & Wales MPs and Scottish MPs would rendezvous there for a week to act as British MPs. NI MPs too if they have a wee parliament of their own. It might mean abolishing the House of Lords. So be it. Naturally the Supreme Court – to be renamed the Common UK Court – would be moved to Workington too. In fact it should probably move first with the UK parliament to follow when the parliamentary scheme has been approved by referendum and the necessary building work has been completed.
How attractive: they can all be beside the seaside with the Lake District Fells at their back, and a court far easier for the Scots lawyers to reach. Can’t see any flaws myself.
Perhaps a Labour deal with either the SNP or the Tories for them to run dead in Edinburgh South while Labour ran dead in a less desirable [for Labour] outer suburban or rural Seat?
His father seemed to have a high IQ profession, and his siblings seem intelligent enough. I suspect he didn’t pursue schooling seriously, and his career as politician requires some level of intelligence. I would say he comes across smarter than Alan Johnson, who does come across as dim, which he wouldn’t if his A Level results really accurately reflected his intelligence.
You pose a different question than the one I was addressing. At a macro level, a partial succession from NI to join the EU/Ireland is theoretically viable.
That being said, How would you sell it to the Protestants as an improvement? They have a built in bias against Catholic migration making NI smaller. I have doubts you could get your proposed partial succession past legitimate Protestant fears of defeat via Catholic incrementalism.
PEACE 😇
Spain can’t block Scotland and Wales from EFTA/EEA. That’s the single Market. Greece hasn’t kept Turkey out of a Customs Union either.
How would you sell it to the Protestants as an improvement?
You’d point out that it saves them from being ruled by Rome, as they might see it. I assume that northern Protestants still remember the ethnic cleansing of southern Protestants from the new Irish Free State in the 20s.
If the common market was an effective solution… Article 50 would have been easy. The UK would have joined the market.
In practice, the current members have optimized the market arrangement for themselves. New members will immediately experience higher cost and bureaucracy. The rules will limit new members versus incumbent, rules writing, participants.
Worse yet, it could cause friction with much larger trade flows between current UK members and the new, small, isolated nation.
I cannot say that it 100% would not work. However, it is a very high risk approach without viable contingency options if “Plan A” fails.
MERRY CHRISTMAS 🎄
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