Democracy Part 2: The Revengening · 5:58am Jun 9th, 2017
...You know what? I’m going to stop trying to predict how political events’ll unfold. Or at least, I’m going to make predictions based on whatever usual model I apply, and then re-calibrate my expectations with the help of military-grade hallucinogens. I mean, ask me if that would have happened a couple of months back, when I made this post, and I’d have just regarded you with serene confusion, as if you’d suddenly started trying to flirt with me in Martian.
To summarise, my word.
To unpack that summary once more, with personal thoughts thrown in for good measure.
1. Our Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party, Theresa May, has taken what started out as a twenty-point majority in the polls and proceeded to piss it away in a blithely arrogant campaign that seemed determined to alienate as many different sections of the electorate as possible. She could still create a minority government or seek coalition with someone else, but she’s mucked up what should have been a landslide romp in any universe governed by laws and sanity. The Conservative Party has a history of doing their best impersonation of frenzied sharks at the first hint of any weakness. This is not how one remains Prime Minister.
2. Jeremy Corbyn, who’d hitherto been doing his best impersonation of a confused and amiable Golden Retriever while leading the Labour Party, the Conservative’s main opposition in Parliament, turned out to have a streak of Rottweiler, and fought a much better campaign than anyone but his die-hards had been expecting. Whatever staffer in Labour headquarters bumped into the back of him one fateful day and nudged his setting to ‘campaign mode’, keep it there for the forthcoming Parliament, ye gods, keep it there. It’s been a rollercoaster of sentiment with regards to him - from initial hope, to waning enthusiasm, to weariness, and now back to delighted bewilderment - and he’s just earned the right to keep that rollercoaster going.
3. My own horse in the race - the SNP - got a kick in the teeth, losing a fair number of seats and some of their most distinguished members, but they’ve kept a majority of Scottish seats and remain on top in our own Scottish Parliament. If this night gives them a boot up the backside away from complacency, I can live with it. Not that it’s not galling to see that extra blue on our electoral map, mind.
What a weird and varyingly-wonderful night. At the risk of predicting something, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was another before the year’s out.
It seems that crazy is this years hot button for getting elected in polling.
May fought one of the worst campaigns I can remember. I think her first error was flatly telling the voters all the ways she planned to fuck them over.
My procedure this morning:
Wake up. Blearily ask, "Okay, world. Go on. How fucked are we?" Reach for tablet, pull up news of a hung parliament. "Oh, wow. So... only sort of fucked then?"
I'm not sure what happens now, but I'm fairly certain it won't be five more years of May even if the Tories form the next government. The teeth and knives will come out in her own party.
Speaking as a Canadian who only really knows that Boris Johnson has a silly face and that Theresa May wants to do scary things to the concept of freedom, I for one would appreciate a ‘fun’ summary of this frenzied shark campaign.
Do you mean a UK Parliamentary election, a Scottish Parliamentary election, or another Scottish independence referendum? Or all three?
(From the other side of the Atlantic... hi; at least you can sometimes get rid of your executives early!)
4565539
Off-kilteredness is in this season.
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“Make elderly people with dementia flog off their homes to pay for treatment! Tear up human rights laws! Throw foxes to dogs!”
It was a bold strategy to pursue, I’ll give her that much.
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No doubt here that’ll they’ll form the government, one way or another, but May’s odds of leading it are looking terribly shoogly, agreed. This’ll go down in history as one of the great political blunders.
4565555
Expect news updates in the coming days on how May was found with umpteen knife wounds in her back. The Conservatives have a ruthless streak wider than most accredited oceans.
4565567
A UK Parliamentary election. Scotland’s Parliament’s not been rocked much by this (though our own sub-leaders of Labour and the Conservatives’ll be pleased about the SNP taking it in the teeth), and another independence referendum’s off the table for the foreseeable future as a result of this.
It reminds me a bit of what happened in the last Australian election: The more conservative government, who has had a recent change in leadership, calls an election for dubious reasons (in our case: forcing a double dissolution) and the more progressive party, while not winning, does surprisingly well. The main reason I saw being tossed around was that the public was just rotating parties each election until they land on something they like.
Though, considering the brexit thing, the similarity may be surface deep, but there could be overlapping reasons that no one has noticed yet, having only just happened and all.
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Great minds ... or, well, fellow Commonwealth folk ... think alike, it seems!
All the analysis of this afterwards is going to be a joy to read. I want to see every reason and factor picked apart in fine detail.
4565575 I thought there was still a chance you might get another independence referendum sometime before Brexit? Though, I guess that’ll take a few more years to negotiate.
I followed the elections through the tweets from Warren Ellis. It was an interesting experience.
Also, who could foresee that a campaign based around the slogan "Hey, you. Citizen, i'm talking to you. You know what? Fuck you, Fuck your parents, Fuck your children, Fuck your rights. Oh, and Fuck the police too, I suppose" could backfire. Truly, wonders will never cease.
Some of what May has said is indeed quite worrying (I’m particularly concerned about her stance on internet freedom and her tolerance of Shariah Law). But much like a lot of election results lately, I feel like she’s the lesser of about seventeen different evils, and I’m not really shedding any tears about this result. Corbyn has no understanding of economics, no ability to control his party, and he has ties to the fucking IRA. The fact that he still got as far as he did given all that is mind-boggling, but we live in interesting times now, don’t we? I’m not upset to see the Lib-Dems do badly, either. As we’ve previously established, I voted leave, and I’m not particualarly sympathetic to the cause of parties trying to reverse the vote or sabotage the negotiations.
Same for the SNP really. No hard feelings, I know you’ve got your reasons, but I’m not Scottish, so the SNP’s political goals are at best irrelevant to what I think is good for Britain, and at worst actively contrary. But hey! That’s politics. I think we already disagree on bigger issues than that.
Now that all this is over, though, I’m pretty hopeful. The Conservatives have their majority, so hopefully May can get along with the Brexit negotiations and get us a good deal. But they don’t have too great a majority, so it’ll save them from getting complacent, and may even get them to rethink some of the stupider moves they made. Or at least, that’s what I want to happen. I guess we’ll have to wait and see, really, but I always live in hope. And even if it all goes to shit, we’ll soldier on like always. We made it through 2016, didn’t we? Stiff upper lip, lads.
May continues the Tory streak of making a complete mess of everything, it seems.
The Anglosphere really is living in very interesting times, politically.
I work a polling station position, and wow! The number of young people coming in to vote was dramatically up on every single other election I’ve worked these past few years. Was good to see the 18-25 year olds actually appear for once, these last few elections the turnout has been dramatically skewed towards the pensioner demographic.
Also,
the decaying ghost of Margaret ThatcherTheresa May is in trouble now. I’m not laughing at where complacency will get you. No, honest I’m not. Not at all.Thanks for giving an insider’s perspective. Being from New Jersey, I had no idea how to interpret this, and I knew Fimfiction would offer a far more entertaining perspective than traditional news media.
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Gasp! You said “shoogly”! :D I’m so happy!
It may be a pain in the ass, but I often wish the USA worked like this. :B Why do we have to be so stolidly anti-everyone-else?
Offer the electorate a genuine alternative and campaign passionately for what you believe is right and you might just succeed. Who would have thought it? Jeremy Corbyn is the first authentic politician on the left in a long, long time.
Two tory prime ministers in as many years taking an electoral gamble and royally fucking up. Accusing the opposition of being economically irresponsible after borrowing more over seven years than all previous labour governments combined, sending national debt through the roof while still failing to deliver on balancing the budget and running public services into the ground. Couldn’t even provide a costed manifesto, opting instead for ‘trust us’. Add to that the worst campaign in the history of forever, pissing away a twenty point lead in five weeks. The strong-and-stable incompetence is mind-blowing.
To top it all of, Theresa may has now struck a deal with the DUP of Northern Ireland. After accusing Corbyn of being a terrorist sympathizer, she’s hopping into bed with actual terrorist supporters. She’s now relying on people that will be burning effigies of the pope on bonfires in a month to prop her government up. Maybe she’ll wear an orange sash as well? The UK in effect hostage to some nutters in Belfast. Unbelievable.
The election winners suffered a crushing defeat. The losers won by a landslide. So far the reaction from Europe has been... silent confusion. Seriously, UK, wtf? On a side note: Brexit. No plan for that either, or even an idea of what should be achieved and how. Good luck.
I'd really like to see, assuming another election by end of year (Or a hung parliament here), that Labor and the SNP team up and target the Tories. Basically for any seat Labor or the SNP won this time, the losing party supports that candidate, and in any seat the Tories run Labor/the SNP split the difference and aim to run whichever party is stronger in a given district.
I doubt Sturgeon would go for that though.
4565586
That would have depended on Westminster's willingness to grant one, which was always a bit dubious, and is likely to have gotten dubiouser now that they can point to the SNP's seat loss and crow about a reduced mandate for one. There's also the likelihood that folk in Scotland who'd previously voted for independence and wanted another referendum will be less desperate for one, now that the rest of the UK's turned out to be capable to supporting something like Corbyn and the current Labour Party. Time'll tell on that one, and the polls on independence voting intention'll be worth watching.
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Oh, quite. Your chasm-esque reservoirs of malice and unyielding and inevitable intent to reduce all Creation to a silent charnel house of ghosts and whispered shrieks provokes more than enough opprobrium.
The real winners here are probably folk like yourself, who've gotten to watch pretty much every party either fall on its arse or not entirely succeed, and get to relish in them all scrambling and trying to up their game and levels of sense for next time. I do suspect Corbyn's going to do better next time, since one of the factors you mention - his control of Labour - will cease being a factor. When even folk like Peter Mandelson are now saying you're the right man for the job and they were wrong to doubt you, you're probably safe from internal politicking. And also deserving to feel deeply unclean, but hey-ho.
4565620
Canada/Australia/New Zealand/Ireland, this isn't a challenge, please don't interpret this as a challenge.
4565631
The plukey wee things did themselves proud, though I may be biased by dint of technically being within the plukey wee thing age category myself.
And oh yes, that last paragraph. Gods, you couldn't have plotted a more apt demonstration of the folly of hubris if you'd tried.
4565633
Oi, you just had your fun with Macron and Le Pen et al! Gies the Anglosphere a chance to soak up some of that limelight.
4565648
Any medium involving pastel-coloured equines and their associated derivative fiction makes everything better. And much more intelligible.
4565669
Give it time, and I suspect words and phrases like 'guddle' and 'gowk' and 'top-shelf shite' and suchlike will make far more frequent appearances as well. Inasmuch as they weren't already.
4565740
You want to know one more slice of beautiful, terrible irony, beyond May now entering a coalition of chaos with terrorist-affiliated pals? One more lovely bit of irony that was pointed out elsewhere?
One long-running grievance amongst we Scottish nationalists is that Scotland's often been ruled by Tory governments it didn't vote for. But now, thanks to the SNP's fall in seats and our new crop of Tory MPs, we're now contributing just enough of the latter to, er, prop up a Conservative government that the UK as a whole didn't vote for.
My running theory's that this is the Scottish electorate subconsciously grabbing its only chance to inflict it and declare, "Yeah, see how it feels, you bastards! See how it feels!"
4565913
It'd be lovely and tactical and primed to scunner Tories left and right... but alas, I doubt Sturgeon would go for it, and neither would Labour, either the UK branch or the Scottish accounting office. Pity.
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Steady on, now. I’ve been on my best behaviour since you started updating Wedding March again.
I must admit, I do frequently feel that sense of vindication and relief lately. My horses may not actually be fast runners like I’d prefer, but my picks usually still win. Except for Mayor of London. I voted Lib-Dem for that one.
I, too, would feel disgusted with myself for earning the approval of Lord Mandelson, but it does certainly look like Corbyn’s going to keep hold of his party for a while.
Not really sure how to feel about that, to be honest. I’m mixed. On the one hand, every government needs an opposition to keep them in check and push them to better themselves, so Labour getting their act together and uniting is a good thing in the abstract. But on the other hand, I still don’t like Corbyn, both for his policies and for personal reasons, and I’m flummoxed by the fact that he got as far as he did this time around. The idea of him doing better next time is unnerves me.
But hey, I’ve had an easy ride so far. I suppose it’s just my turn to feel worried.
4565968
I admit I sometimes still find it mind-boggling how the UK somehow manages to actually retain multiple parties when mathematically FPTP should always collapse into a 2-party system although I suppose the UK doesnt have quite the unified feeling America does - well, apart from the South, which is still angry we told them slavery was bad and then proceeded to kick their ass to force them to stop, and then have still had to spend closing in on 200 years trying to undo the harms and toxicity of racism but...well, the conclusion here is First Past the Post is shit and I really wish some major champion would take up at a bare minimum Instant Runoff because if y'all had that, Theresa May would be out of a job right now and I'd be most happy.
4565968
Gee, I should've brought you on as official Scottish consultant for Epic Unicorn History. I'm pretty sure I used 'gowk' once.
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/uk-politics-thread-eton-mess.23053/page-236#post-8680714
The above (hyperlinks aren't working for me at the moment, oddly) makes a very solid summary of events, I think. The Tories took a hammering on all sorts of levels, and they're not in a good position going forwards. The Lib-Dems are, contrary to expectations, actually doing pretty well, too; the forecast was that this would be where they totally died off, but instead they seem to be recovering from the 2015 slaughter. With Clegg gone, they might even be able to fully recuperate.
The SNP also took a hammering, but less than expected. It pays to remember that their 2015 results were simply apocalyptic for everybody else - they slaughtered their opposition, everywhere. They were in charge of 95% of Scotland; no party could maintain that kind of majority, nobody. They suffered losses, but they went from 95% of Scotland to 60% - any other party would give both arms for those kinds of 'losses'!
The LIb Dems did well in the circumstances. A lot of people dropped them in 2015 as "punishment" for their coalition with the Tories, but for many of them that punishment was a one time thing. The next election after that would have been the time when a good number of those Lib Dem voters returned.
This time, however, there was a lot of tactical voting in an effort to avert what many expected to be a disastrous
thousandfive years of Tory rule. And while the Lib Dems, Greens and other progressive minority parties actively stood aside in favour of the candidate with the best chance of beating the Tories, Labour actively condemned any candidates who tried to do that, which in combination with their larger voter base meant Labour absorbed more tactical Lib Dem voters than the other way around.So, it's hard to read the voter numbers accurately when tactical voting is in play like that, but I think there are more Lib Dem supporters than we can immediately see in the raw numbers.
tl;dr -- we need a better voting system.
4565994
Look, I have your tendency to unhinge one of your many retractable jaws and consume the souls of unborn puppies on good testimony. Don't pretend you're capable of somehow taking offence.
Perhaps we've stumbled onto the next approach of Labour's right to try and unseat him. They can't do it with an overt challenge or poorly-concealed undermining, so they're getting defter.
"Hey, Corby, just got off the phone with Blair! He asked me to tell you you're doing a heckuva job, and he couldn't have done better himself."
"Oh, god."
4566014
Part of it maybe comes down to the tendency of our two main parties to deftly cock up at critical junctures (such as Labour's SDP wing splitting off in the 80s, or Scottish Labour's numptiness allowing for such a relatively unchallenged SNP rise, or UKIP hoovering up disatisfied Tory- and Labour-voters). So long as the big two keep bungling things up, smaller and regional parties'll always have an angle of attack. Plus, long-standing regional loyalties play a part in keeping wee parties afloat, like Orkney and Shetland for the Lib Dems.
4566090
I also recommend "pillock" and "tumshie". 4565631 may also have fun terms to offer if entreated, being based in a different part of the country than I.
4566112
Good point about the SNP, and that linked post makes a point about the Lib Dems I hadn't considered so far - if Nick Clegg's gone, then that could give Farron or whoever scope to properly distance themselves from the days of the coalition, and try to sook up a few more votes come the next election. They've not not done much seat-wise as a party this time, but they're worth keeping an eye on yet.
4566149
Totally hear you about the need for a better voting system. I'm partial to Scotland's own system for Holyrood elections, where members for constituencies are election and then members are assigned to whole regions based on vote share (thereby getting you both local representation and a proportional Parliament), and it seems to deliver results more in keeping with the voting preferences of the country as a whole. A Westminster that adopted it would certainly see a lot more Lib Dems than it's had before.
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4566090
I'm fond of "dunderheid", myself, if we're just needing Scottish names for idiots. Or "bampot" if we require a word for a violent idiot. (Entertainingly, we also use the word "rocket" for an exceptionally violent idiot, which adds a certain delightful tang to the character of Rocket Racoon in Guardians of the Galaxy")
Current favourite word is "scunnered", which means deeply weary. As in "I'm scunnered of all these elections, that Theresa May is a total eejit"
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4566090
Guid stuff!
I'll add the brief addendum that 'scunnered' is wonderfully versatile, and in its root form of 'scunner', can double as a noun to refer to someone or something for which you feel a strong dislike. ("See that Paul Nuttall? He's a right wee scunner.") It's not quite up up there with the Doric use of 'fit', from which an entire coherent sentence can be arranged ('Fit fit fits fit fit?' - meaning - 'Which shoe fits which foot?') but it's not bad at all.
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4566281
Yes, this is good, this is working. :3
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Oh, one more. Only this morning my mother told Donald Trump to "Away and bile yer heid". This quite literally means that you have been so stupid and ridiculous that you should go away and boil your own head, for shame over your own foolish actions. It is a wonderful expression.
What a weird result, May to remain Prime Minister but Corbyn more powerful than ever.
I suppose the only thing they have in common is a mutual distrust for the free market.
Normally yes, but the PM who negotiates Brexit is almost certain to be remembered forever, and not in a good way. I think all the other Tory leaders are planning to let May carry that hot potato over the finish line, decry her miserable result and pull out the long knives afterwards.
Actually, she's a bit like Trump that way. In the short term her own party refuses to remove her from power no matter what she does, and she knows history will revile her, she should start throwing empties off the balcony of No. 10 onto crowds below, it won't make any difference and it might be fun.
4566480
That's possible, and understandable - and it's possibly why Labour's dodged a bullet as well, by not outright winning. Let some other numpty whose reputation's already shot take all the flak for the Brexit negotiations and the ways they inevitably cock up, and let someone else swoop in to look like a breath of fresh air after.
4568772
Affa slick. Is that based on FPTP as well, or are there complexities involved?
4568946
Sounds affa efficient.
I was about to comment on how the scale of Macron's party's victory probably benefits from one side being utter pillocks, but then again, our own pillocks won a slim minority. Pillockness clearly isn't the deciding factor here.