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The UK Politics Thread (Formerly the Brexit thread)

#1441 User is offline   Azath Vitr (D'ivers 

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Posted 26 July 2022 - 10:51 PM

View PostMalankazooie, on 26 July 2022 - 09:00 PM, said:

Caught some clips of the debate from evening past between Truss and Sunak. Obviously I don't have a dog in the fight and know nothing about these folks, but Truss has one of them British accents/dialects that I find annoying. Not sure what region of origin it is, but it's one of the annoying ones. Only caught bits but my take away is China is scary, and the rest of the world better get serious about competing, and the UK is a leader in providing support to Ukraine.

Oh snap, the latest debate cancelled because the host fainted? Where's Chuck Todd when you need him?


Think that's just a Leeds accent? His accent annoys me---it manages to simultaneously sound posh (which I don't necessarily mind, if it also sounds euphonious) and sonically ugly, with an added lisp (IDK if that's some sort of speech impediment?...). Or maybe this is more precise: 'Rishi Sunak is that posh boy at uni who had a posh accent but affected glottal stops and said he was from south London (Surrey) and his dad was a builder (CFO at Barratt homes).'

https://twitter.com/...877692716879872


'One of the most bewildering things I've come across as an adult immigrant to the UK[...] is how people talk about class. British people from well-off backgrounds will drop, quite unprompted, into conversation that they went to private school but that it was a "cheap" one. [...]

It took me a while living in this country to figure out what was going on. It wasn't class oversharing, but class discounting – a way for people to establish that their status[...] was earned and not bequeathed. [...] inherited family wealth is fast becoming[...] the most important determinant of how well-off a person will be later in life. Britain is also a place where the alumni of a small number of expensive schools and exclusive universities hold a wildly disproportionate share of the nation's power, wealth and top jobs.

[...] The study identified a "grandparent effect", by which people from privileged backgrounds over-emphasised the working-class credentials of extended family members, even though they have little impact on an individual's life chances.

A particularly outrageous example of this is unfolding in the absurd class cosplay of Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. Sunak, in an enormous reach, has to hark all the way back to his immigrant grandmother to ground himself in a rags to riches story. He likens the pharmacy his mother owned to the greengrocer's owned by Margaret Thatcher's father (the difference between groceries and pharmaceuticals is material in terms of class, but he has to work with what he has). [...]

[Truss's] journey was only possible, she claims, "through aspiration, ambition and enterprise". Nothing to do with the fact that she grew up in an expensive suburb of Leeds, in a comfortable family, with a father who was a professor of mathematics, and attended a school that at its worst was labelled "satisfactory" [...]

The most delusional part of this performance is the idea that class says something so definitive about a person's values or politics that it, alone, would make them suitable to lead. As the sociologist Stuart Hall wrote: "There's no permanent, fixed class consciousness. You can't work out immediately what people think and what politics they have simply by looking at their socio-economic position." Whatever Sunak and Truss's class, Sunak does not want to give immigrants the right to come to this country to have a shot at our great meritocracy, Truss believes that British workers are among the "worst idlers in the world", and both enthusiastically supported a lying prime minister. That is all the personal history that counts.'

What the absurd class cosplay of Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss tells us about Britain | Nesrine Malik


'The Battle to Become Britain's Next Prime Minister Is Suddenly All About Fashion
CLASS WAR

Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries lashed out against the expensive suit and shoes of prime ministerial hopeful Rishi Sunak. Her mistake was to bring Liz Truss' earrings into it.

On Twitter, Dorries taunted, "Rishi visits Teeside in Prada shoes worth £450 and sported £3,500 bespoke suit as he prepared for crunch leadership vote," a transparent attempt to knock Sunak's campaign platform, which is based heavily on a descendant-of-immigrants, started-from-the-bottom-now-we're-here success story.

In contrast, Liz Truss, Dorries' chosen candidate, "will be traveling the country wearing her earrings which cost circa £4.50 from Claire Accessories," Dorries said. (In fact, both candidates have been derided for inventing hard-luck personal narratives although they both come from comfortable backgrounds.)

"FFS Nadine! Muted," tweeted Guildford Conservative MP [...]

[...] hyper-awareness and hypercriticism of class background and class signifiers as a means of determining a candidate's worth are integral to the British electoral process.

[...] Dorries' luxury clothes-knocking is a perfect example: Why would a man of the people wear Prada?

Ironically, in 2007, Dorries told The Guardian that "I will wear cheaper clothes but there are things I will not compromise on, like my £6,000 diamond earrings."

In 2017, Dorries told another outlet she favors purses from high-end brand Mulberry and that she buys "clothes at the start of each season, rather than monthly, so I do two big hits a year where I probably spend over £1,000."'

The Battle to Become Britain's Next Prime Minister Is Suddenly All About Fashion
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#1442 User is offline   Gorefest 

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Posted 27 July 2022 - 03:40 AM

Yeah, as an immigrant into the UK myself as well, that is still an aspect that sticks out like a sore thumb, this bizarre obsession with class. With those people publically claiming to be from 'working' class backgrounds walking the biggest circle around folks with an actual working class background. And the vaguely undefined 'middle' class indefinitely being squeezed according to the media. I'd never heard such references used in daily converstion and media reports until I came to the UK. It is a national obsession.

This post has been edited by Gorefest: 27 July 2022 - 03:41 AM

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#1443 User is offline   Maark Abbott 

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Posted 27 July 2022 - 07:44 AM

A large part of the problem from the view of a native Brit is that our country is set up to worship those who are wealthy, in a not-dissimilar way to how America sees the rich as those who succeeded at the American Dream, irrespective of their wealth being inherited. The wealth cult that is the Windsors is impressed as being a grand institution that people should take pride in, that it is just and correct that the landed and wealthy should hold power and direct the country, and that those who are not in that cadre of the elite should both strive to climb into it whilst also bowing and scraping to those already there. And despite the continuous, malicious incompetence that is the landed, excessively wealthy government we have now, there's still a large portion of people who think that it's right that they are where they are, and that they worked for where they are (when one and all the Tories were born to it).

As you'd imagine, I loathe it.
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#1444 User is offline   Tiste Simeon 

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Posted 27 July 2022 - 08:27 PM

So Labour have put the final nail in the coffin of really not being for the workers any more...

BBC News - Keir Starmer sacks shadow transport minister who backed rail strikes
https://www.bbc.co.u...litics-62325842
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#1445 User is offline   Maark Abbott 

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Posted 28 July 2022 - 07:42 AM

View PostTiste Simeon, on 27 July 2022 - 08:27 PM, said:

So Labour have put the final nail in the coffin of really not being for the workers any more...

BBC News - Keir Starmer sacks shadow transport minister who backed rail strikes
https://www.bbc.co.u...litics-62325842


I mean, a knight of the realm being in charge of the worker's party was sort of a huge giveaway, but yeah they are basically Tories in all but name at this stage.
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#1446 User is offline   worry 

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Posted 04 September 2022 - 01:57 PM


They came with white hands and left with red hands.
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#1447 User is offline   Mezla PigDog 

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Posted 04 September 2022 - 06:03 PM

I love Joe Lycett. At the beginning of the same show he said what a great use of government resources the Tory leadership race has been over the last 2 months while there is absolutely nothing else important happening.

Absolute shower of shite, the lot of them. I feel rather doomed. Still think we need to hit rock bottom before there is any hope of improvement. Not convinced rock bottom is close yet despite the depths we are hitting.
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#1448 User is offline   Azath Vitr (D'ivers 

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Posted 04 September 2022 - 06:52 PM

'Under Liz Truss, we’ll be careering into petrolhead politics while the world burns

[...] politicians who disparage net zero as a "new religion" and wind power as "medieval" are tipped for cabinet posts

[...] For all the talk by many journalists and politicians about the cost of living crisis as something that will decisively arrive in the autumn, it is already here. At the same time, the landscape of this small corner of northern Europe is parched and straw-coloured, while those terrifying images of flooding in Pakistan have illustrated the climate emergency’s even more nightmarish flipside. [...] one more crisis on the way to something completely convulsive: payback for our fragile dependence on fossil fuels, and a way of living that is no longer sustainable. [...]

Meanwhile, as if the immediate future is being decided by a TV scriptwriter who specialises in the bleakest comedy, Liz Truss is seemingly about to move into Downing Street, after two months of surreal and largely pointless debate in which the climate crisis has barely figured. [...] they have largely spoken with one voice on climate policy: the cursory, slightly bored tone of people who think of it as an optional extra.

[...] Jacob Rees-Mogg [...] being put in charge of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy – a move that would hand the climate portfolio to someone who has long met any suggestion of convincing action with weary sneers. [...] full of a blithe insistence that whatever is happening to the climate is beyond human understanding or control, and we may as well do what we want. [...] this year, he said that “every last drop” of hydrocarbons ought to be extracted from the North Sea.

[...] A lot of what is happening reflects the nostalgia that surfaced in our exit from the EU – this time centred on half-remembered visions of a coal bunker in the back garden and Sunday-afternoon motoring on a tank full of five-star petrol. [...] claiming that “woke” social attitudes are a huge threat to civilisation and that illegal immigration is even more dangerous, and then responding to 40C heat, failed harvests and endless floods by effectively telling us that no one need worry.'

Under Liz Truss, we’ll be careering into petrolhead politics while the world burns
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#1449 User is offline   TheRetiredBridgeburner 

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Posted 05 September 2022 - 07:09 AM

I feel rather naive in being so happy when they ditched Boris. Truss is a genuine nutcase and so much worse.

And even when things are this bad I'm not convinced Labour would win an election... sigh.
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#1450 User is offline   worry 

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Posted 05 September 2022 - 07:42 AM

You can't truss anybody these days.
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#1451 User is offline   Maark Abbott 

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Posted 05 September 2022 - 07:47 AM

Truss stating that she wants to re-evaluate workers' rights to boost productivity.

I really hope Brexit voters are happy. I've been saying since before the referendum vote that the end goal would be our rights as workers so that they could effectively chain us to desks. "Say something other than 'Tories bad'!", people said.

With how things are with cost of living, rampant strikes everywhere (with more to come) and the prospect of the elderly, young and infirm freezing or starving to death over the winter, I for one cannot wait for the filled glass bottles with handkerchiefs to start flying (in Minecraft). There's no other feasible way anything will change at this point.
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#1452 User is offline   Tiste Simeon 

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Posted 05 September 2022 - 07:58 AM

It doesn't matter who gets in that. They will be truly awful.
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#1453 User is offline   Maark Abbott 

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Posted 05 September 2022 - 11:50 AM

View PostTiste Simeon, on 05 September 2022 - 07:58 AM, said:

It doesn't matter who gets in that. They will be truly awful.


True, the meat of one Tory is much the same as the next.

But bears remembering that either way, they're still food.
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#1454 User is offline   Maark Abbott 

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Posted 05 September 2022 - 11:53 AM

Fuck me, we really hit the bottom of the barrel.
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#1455 User is offline   Tsundoku 

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Posted 05 September 2022 - 12:17 PM

View PostMaark Abbott, on 05 September 2022 - 11:53 AM, said:

Fuck me, we really hit the bottom of the barrel.


The scary thing is that while it seems that way, there's still worse when you look over the rest of the Tory Rogues Gallery.
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#1456 User is offline   Gorefest 

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Posted 05 September 2022 - 04:27 PM

View PostGorefest, on 07 July 2022 - 06:47 PM, said:

Still cannot believe the self centered fecker has left on his own accord. Just worried how much worse we will be getting back. I cannot stand any of the Tory lot, although I may consider moving back to the Netherlands if Liz Truss gets in.



Fuck me. I love the UK, but seriously guys. What the feck are you doing? Isn't this one of the first signs of the Apocalypse or something?

I don't like to make things personal, but Liz Truss is more gormless than a can of spam and has less charisma than Michael Gove, famously a man who has less likeability and personality than a taxidermied molerat with syphilis.

This post has been edited by Gorefest: 05 September 2022 - 04:33 PM

Yesterday, upon the stair, I saw a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today. Oh, how I wish he'd go away.
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#1457 User is offline   Tiste Simeon 

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Posted 05 September 2022 - 04:32 PM

View PostGorefest, on 05 September 2022 - 04:27 PM, said:

View PostGorefest, on 07 July 2022 - 06:47 PM, said:

Still cannot believe the self centered fecker has left on his own accord. Just worried how much worse we will be getting back. I cannot stand any of the Tory lot, although I may consider moving back to the Netherlands if Liz Truss gets in.



Fuck me. I love the UK, but seriously guys. What the feck are you doing? Isn't this one of the first signs of the Apocalypse or something?

Maybe the Tory members heard about your prediction and decided to force you to move back to the Netherlands?

It's not beyond their values and I genuinely can't think of any other reason anyone would think she would be a good leader.

Oh, except that she is so stupid, she's easy to manipulate by the real powers behind the throne...
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#1458 User is offline   worry 

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Posted 05 September 2022 - 07:45 PM

It’s a game.

They came with white hands and left with red hands.
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#1459 User is offline   Gwynn ap Nudd 

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Posted 05 September 2022 - 08:00 PM

I see Jonathan Pie has toned down his language a bit when posting for the New York Times, but here's his take on Liz Truss.

https://www.nytimes....-inflation.html

Might be behind a pay wall. If so, it should be on the times YouTube page in a couple days.
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#1460 User is offline   Tiste Simeon 

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Posted 06 September 2022 - 08:05 AM

Yeah he's put it up on his Facebook page. Spot on as ever:

https://fb.watch/fmKx_A7AIY/

See also his tribute to Boris Johnson 😂
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