UK Politics

Just wanted to share this brilliant video from Led By Donkeys.

Liz Truss has been abusing her position as a (short-lived) former prime minister to support Donald Trump’s campaign to win back power. She says she “desperately” wants to see Trump back in the White House - despite his racism, misogyny, authoritarianism, cruelty, incoherence, lies etc.

So tonight we dropped in on the latest leg of Truss’ speaking tour..."

This is peak "rich fucker tries to appear relateable".

Nobody's favourite meal is "sandwiches". He didn't even say a specific kind of sandwich, just sandwiches.

Some of my frustrations:

• The stratification of society
    ◦ The agglomeration of private business in to large multinationals who can outcompete or buy-to-neutralise smaller companies.
    ◦ That capital begets capital without any kind of tax on capital to taper the ‘positive’/runaway feedback-loop that develops.
        ▪ That the capital necessary to reach this position is out of reach for me.
    ◦ That the poor are sent to live away from the more affluent
        ▪ This helps perpetuate their distinctness and their lack of privilege
    ◦ That education leading to qualifications doesn’t by itself lead to getting on in life. It seems more like a system designed for laundering inherited privilege and justifying elitism than anything else.
    ◦ Inheritance of wealth/privilege/property
        ▪ Corresponding massively unequal distribution of assets
        ▪ That certain companies (and their assets) are exempt from inheritance tax.
    ◦ That I have mental health/adjustment issues and am broadly left to fend for myself.
        ▪ Someone is profiting by this and I, along with others, suffer the externalities which are manufactured for their benefit.
    ◦ The hierarchical work environment.
        ▪ The sense that it’s to be expected that leadership relies on manipulation and lying to those under your command.
        ▪ That you must tolerate being, often transparently, lied to by higher ups.
        ▪ That you should expect to be screwed over at some point by your employer.
        ▪ That for some reason everyone has to work 7+ hours a day, 5 days a week taking up so much of our willpower to someone else’s ends.
        ▪ That, for the most part, work is stultifying and at odds with personal growth.
        ▪ That we pretend that because you don’t have to go through this if you’re rich or well connected, we have a ‘free’ society.
    ◦ The terrible inequitable distribution of land (amongst other assets).
    ◦ That 40% of people in G7 societies haven’t seen any improvement in living standards since 1985 (and some have seen decreases in living standards).
• The inequitable bias of newsworthy items by the press.
• The misleading, divisive and fundamentally inane nature of political discourse.
    ◦ It completely misses considering what is necessary for a good life. Should this not be what politics is for?
• The idea that the current socioeconomic system is somehow natural or inevitable.
• That I am fighting a constant uphill futile battle
    ◦ That I will be the most likely victim of it.
• The inability for me to fit in/feel at-one with the bulk of the population – or even to find the part of the population which I can feel at home with.  (Brave New World style)
    ◦ The feeling that I am wrong for being different.
• The idea that I, and only I, am to blame for the problems I face. 
    ◦ I am clearly not a product of my environment at all. 
• The personal isolation I feel.
• The political corruption.
• The political incompetence (with potential indistinguishable elements of corruption)
    ◦ That the help-to-buy scheme cost the tax payer almost £100bn and achieved results opposed to the alleged aims of the scheme (some Lords report from 2022).
• The rent-extraction by a financial system encouraged by Government support and regulation.
• The idea that we laugh at the USSR for its attempts at a planned economy, but we happily arrive at similar ends through the use of gigantic multinational asset management companies (and yet do nothing about them).
• The advertising and ubiquitous corporate speak designed to incrementally and ever-so-slightly misdirect. 
• The impotence I feel to be able to change anything.
• The fear I feel when considering speaking out about these issues.
• That the idea of there being too few people for available jobs is seen as problematic – surely it is to be expected in any sufficiently complex society? It’s just about prioritisation (i.e. appropriate use of resources). 
    ◦ Should we really be having more children to support economic growth? Surely that would be the cart leading the horse? Shouldn’t an economy adapt to serve whatever the populace chooses to do? Is our society really so brittle that it can’t cope with change? 
• That we have a system that is unable to successfully prioritise how and where people should work.
    ◦ Should we really have so many people working in advertising, PR, gambling, blockchain, AI bullshit machines, etc. when we don’t have a sufficient number of doctors and nurses to look after the health of the nation? 
        ▪ Yes, not everyone has the same interests and abilities, but this is a bit ridiculous. People are to an extent shaped by the choices available to them; make it more attractive to work in healthcare and more people will want to become people who are good at working in healthcare. 
• That an industry can end up holding a whole economy/people hostage and have to be bailed out. Externalise the risk, privatise the profit. And that said system is in the same position of control 16 years after such a crisis.
• That politicians chase the votes of the marginal voters to the exclusion of all others. 
    ◦ That so many votes are thrown away in a systematic pursuit of turning a minority of votes into a majority Government. How democratic.
• That we seem to continually arrive at the notion that we are powerless to change any of this. So much expert advice and predictions are predicated on nothing fundamentally changing and to me, that reinforces the notion that nothing can change. 
    ◦ I suspect this is why people are allegedly sick of ‘experts’.

It felt good to write this down, and thought it might feel good to share it - but I do expect to be told I'm a complete idiot at least once.

If the projected landslide is correct this would be the worse defeat of the Conservative party since 1906!

The shadow home secretary says confidence is waning in the police following recent failings.

Note – I authored this piece, discussion and criticism more than welcome, thanks!

I have been seeing Lab MPs resigning, and articles calling for more of them to do so, and calling "a vote for Labour a vote for genocide". Nothing I've read explains why resignation is the preferred strategy, and it's not very clear to me how it helps. What do they hope to achieve by resigning, and am I wrong in thinking that these resignations only play into the hands of Conservatives? Sorry, I'm very naive about UK politics generally and I don't get how this isn't pointlessly self destructive.

Acknowledged that there are appalling things happening, in Gaza and with the party leadership, but I'm interested in learning the logic for this specific response.

Sunak’s ‘spiteful’ sale of land intended for HS2 dashes hopes of revival

Prime minister’s move criticised as ‘salting the earth’ so Birmingham-Crewe line cannot be built

Helen Pidd North of England editor

Thu 5 Oct 2023 19.15 BST

Last modified on Thu 5 Oct 2023 20.31 BST

A future Labour government would not be able to easily reverse Rishi Sunak’s decision to scrap the northern leg of HS2 as he has “spitefully” authorised the sale of properties that were subject to compulsory purchase orders on part of the route.

Steve Rotheram, the mayor of the Liverpool city region, said the move killed HS2 “stone dead” and would “tie any future government’s hands and make the delivery of HS2 for the north all but impossible”.

Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, on Thursday refused to commit to building HS2, telling ITV News Meridian: “What I can’t do is stand here now they have taken a wrecking ball to this project, and say that we will simply reverse it.

“What I will say is we will work with leaders across the country to make sure that we have the transport we need between our cities and within our cities and projects that can actually be delivered.”

The government failed to deny that HS2 would not be extended to Euston unless enough private investment was secured to pay for the new station.

“There is already support and interest from the private sector. Ministers have had discussions with key partners since the announcement,” a government spokesperson said.

Mark Harper, the transport secretary, also conceded on Thursday that paying off contracts previously awarded for the cancelled HS2 sections would cost hundreds of millions of pounds.

He told BBC Breakfast that the cost of pulling out of the agreements would “broadly balance out” with money recovered from selling land and property acquired for the high-speed railway. 'It's laughable': mayors across the north react to Sunak scrapping HS2 leg – video

National Labour proponents of HS2 were blindsided on Wednesday when the prime minister not only cancelled the Manchester leg but made it extremely difficult for the project to be restarted. “We expected him to kick it into the long grass,” said one party source. “We are now trying to understand where this leaves us. Selling off the land was unexpected.”

Gareth Dennis, a railway engineer and writer, said the decision to sell off the land was motivated by “spite” and was, in effect, “salting the earth” to make it extremely difficult for Labour to restart the project.

The Department for Transport (DfT) said that within “weeks” it would lift the so-called “safeguarding” order on phase 2a of the route, which would have run from Birmingham to Crewe in Cheshire. Safeguarding is the process HS2 Ltd and the government use to buy up land needed for the railway.

As of last week, HS2 Ltd had bought up 239 properties on phase 2a at a cost of £219.3m. “Any property that is no longer required for HS2 will be sold and a programme is being developed to do this,” said the DfT in its Network North prospectus, released on Wednesday.

“Phase 2a safeguarding will be formally lifted in weeks,” said the document.

However, the DfT confirmed on Thursday that safeguarding would remain for now on the Crewe to Manchester leg (phase 2b west) as well as the Birmingham to Leeds spur (phase 2b east), which was paused by the government in November 2021. “Phase 2b safeguarding will be amended by summer next year”, said the government, to retain any land needed for Northern Powerhouse Rail, a new east-west line across the Pennines.

Dennis said: “I knew Sunak would cancel HS2 to Manchester but I didn’t expect him to be so spiteful that he would authorise the sell-off of land on the route. There are barely any votes in lifting the safeguarding. It’s pure salting the earth to make it extremely hard for Labour to build it.

“What will happen now is essentially a fire sale. The land is not going to be returned to nature. It’s going to be developed on. That will make it much more expensive and much more complex should any future government want to build it.”

Rotheram said: “After weeks of uncertainty and confusion, Rishi Sunak’s lifting of the HS2 safeguarding order means that he has not only cancelled HS2 but he’s killed it stone dead. The consequences of this decision will tie any future government’s hands and make the delivery of HS2 for the north all but impossible.

“The Liverpool city region was set to benefit from a £15bn economic boost from the delivery of HS2 and Northern Powerhouse Rail in full. Almost overnight, the prime minister has robbed us of that chance to grow and develop our economy. He has turned the northern powerhouse into the northern powerless with this latest act of a long line of pronouncements that are holding the north down, not levelling us up.”

In his first interview since his speech to the Conservative party conference, Sunak declined to apologise for the decision to scrap the rail line, saying that he sometimes needed to take “decisions that aren’t always easy”.

Sunak said “the facts have changed” on HS2, pointing to costs doubling since the project was approved more than a decade ago and changes in passenger behaviour since Covid as evidence that the economic case for it had been “severely eroded”.

He denied that the line would be reduced to a mere “shuttle service” between London and Birmingham, insisting that many more people would be helped by paring back plans for the project and boosting other transport schemes instead. You've read 31 articles in the last year Article count

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