Westminstenders Contines. Boris outmaneovered everyone?! Now War and Peace?

[RedToothBrush]

THE BREXIT FALLOUT CONTINUES - THREAD TEN

-----------------

This set of threads started out asking if Boris had been outmanoeuvred by Cameron handing him a poison chalice. Fate made it seem as if Boris lost the battle but May has confounded everyone and handed him a second chance. Or so it might seem.

May now has a new Cabinet after a sweeping cull of Cameron's lot. It is more right wing than in a generation. A number of appointments have raised eyebrows. There are plenty of poison chalices and plenty of Brexiteers. Will this create peace in the Tory ranks? Or is it just the calm before the storm

Labour are tearing themselves apart what now seems to be all out civil war. Talk of gerrymandering, violence, disenfranchisement, deselection and intimidation are rife. The seems to be no end in sight, and no prospect of a solution apparent. The question perhaps seems to be when and how, rather than if the party will split, and who will retain the name and party funds.

-----------------

So the sad face of British politics in the last two days can be summed up in a single image. Boris and a brick.

Depressed?

I think we have a while to go yet before we hit the bottom.

Excuse me with the intros as I'm starting to struggle to keep up with things myself

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/eu_referendum_2016_/2684990-The-Westminster-Hunger-Games-Contines-May-Day-May-Day Previous Thread Nine

Just realised the Olympics is only 3 weeks away.

It's at times like this that it comes in handy having a head of state who has absolutely nothing to do with politics or running the country.

I miss Nick Clegg (no 486 in my list of "things I never expected to say til 2016 happened"). Why oh why did he capitulate on tuition fees, when he's smart enough to marry a woman like Miriam?

Why oh why did he capitulate on tuition fees, when he's smart enough to marry a woman like Miriam?

I wonder this all the time.

He was a brilliant operator in Europe. We need him now.

But we've got Davis. And Boris. And Fox.

'Penny Mordaunt, a Defence minister who backed Leave, was moved to Work and Pensions'. From the Telegraph today.

Bl**dy hell! She lied 3 times on the Andrew Marr show about the veto. Would you believe a word she says? Did she ever apologise for lying and relaying falsely to the tv audience that the UK had no veto for new members joining the EU?

Gee, Fox would never have even had to resign in the first place by this government's standards.

And as for the university fees. Why weren't the Conservatives vilified for introducing them? I know the Lib Dems had explicitly stated they wouldn't introduce them and when in Coalition changed their minds and went along with their coalition partners. But the Conservatives got away with it and indeed gained a majority next time while the Lib Dems were wiped out.

The Tories didn't introduce tuition fees - labour did that- the coalition increased them. Nick Clegg promised not to when campaigning and it was one of the first things that the coalition did. Presumably thinking that 5 yrs down the line the electorate would have forgotten.

I'm going to give Clegg the benefit of the doubt on tutition fees with the benefit of hindsight. Especially now, given all the talk now of inequality and class divide, I'm not sure that free student tuition would necessarily go down well in the sections of the community that are most disillusioned tbh.

In terms of economics, Clegg pretty much said it was unaffordable once he opened the books in power and was shocked to see things were in such a bad state.

If it was a choice between tuition fees and benefits, which should be the policy which gets the money? Or tuition fees and raising the threshold at which you start paying tax?

The reality is that, it would have been viewed as a 'middle class' thing rather than an aid to social mobility by many who it is an unachievable goal and will never reap the financial benefits of a degree behind them.

It was a choice between pissing off the working class and pissing off the middle class in many respects. He chose the later, which included the majority of his supporters. That says something in its own right. Should government be about pleasing your own core voters or doing what you think is ultimately in the best interest of the country as a whole? Really it should be a balance of the two - not one exclusively over the other.

Perhaps there was a lot more he could have done to help the most disadvantaged students. Perhaps he could have done things differently. I'm not so sure. I do think that he was in an impossible situation.

I do find it ironic that a few of 'Cameron's biggest achievements' can be laid squarely on the front door step of the Lib Dems rather than the Conservatives though.

As for PR, I don't know why people love it so much tbh. It has benefits but it also has some pretty enormous drawbacks which people are very happy to gloss over. I still find it irony staggering that the Lib Dems were elected with this as a manifesto pledge and then their supporters got upset at the fact that back room deals were done as part of the coalition as that is exactly what PR brings! Its almost like LD voters didn't know what they were voting for and didn't have a good understanding of PR.

For this reason alone, I think Clegg should have been given a fairer public trial than he got about tuition fees.

I think history will judge Clegg and Cameron, ultimately very differently with the 'loser' Clegg ultimately having the last laugh.

Anyway, that's off topic really.

Here is The Lancet on Brexit and the NHS
www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(16)31075-3/fulltext
Full editorial and front cover story.

I am a bit about this image of Clegg as a brilliant negotiator. He had Cameron over a barrel after the 2010 election. For a couple of days, DC was on his knees and, if Clegg had made tuition fees a condition of coalition, I don't see how Cameron could have refused; not at that particular time.

This wasn't just any old manifesto commitment. Lib Dems had been touring the country waving their signed pledges. In my constituency, students were queuing outside polling stations to vote for them. Even by today's standards, it was breathtakingly cynical and I would want the Lib Dems to acknowledge and apologise before I would ever believe a word they said again.

I don't think Tuition fees have ever been that controversial with conservatives and a substantial number of labour supporters would say that it isn't fair that non graduates should pay for an increased number of graduates through taxation.

The problem the lib dems had was that they explicitly campaigned on ending tuition fees. Even then I don't think tuition fees did for them. The problem was that once they were in power they looked like Tories, so Tory/lib dem voters thought they might as well vote Tory and labour/lib dem voters abandoned them.

Rosie I'm old enough to remember the Munich Olympics in 1972
I think that was when terrorism genuinely went global.

I also remember many false dawns of the Liberal Party, from the 1960s.

Their main problem is FPTP:
Once a big party is replaced, as they were by Labour in early 20th C, they lose their power base and most of their infrastructure within a generation.

Their dreadful result in the 2015 GE - only 8 MPs - make it very difficult for them to be an effective or credible voice for Remain.
They genuinely have some expert resources like Miriam González Durántez and some of their former MEPs and MPs.
The Liberals can best be useful now by publicising the realities of Brexit and the disaster that attempting WTO would almost certainly be.

The UK desperately needs an effective Opposition, but JC has declined that role for Labour.
So currently the Tories have free rein to define Brexit and hence shape the next 30 years or so
The Liberals have a small chance of returning to power within a generation by replacing Labour, if JC succeeds in turning Labour into a protest party. However, we need an effective opposition right now.

There is a danger that UKIP could fill the vaccuum for an opposition:
Their politicians are eccentrics, idiots and crooks.
However, the far right is rising throughout much of the West - a significant minority of the population can be hooked by scapegoating the "other" in times of economic turmoil and uncertainty.
UKIP have also been lucky with a series of zillionaires funding them, currently Arron Banks.

Labour and Liberals tear themselves apart on issues like Iraq / tuition fees respectively.
Important issues, but should not be allowed to make the 2 "respectable" opposition parties impotent.
In the meantime, Tories concentrate on getting and keeping power.
In government.
So they sail on with TM firmly in charge and - barring Brexit disaster - a Tory government until 2025 or later.

I'm not asking them to tear themselves apart. As far as I'm concerned, all they have to do is acknowledge that they lied and fucked up. I don't think that's unreasonable.

Agee Rosie! Everyone always goes on about the tuition fees issue but tbh, for me, the pr thing was their big fuck up. It had been an issue of theirs forever and they accepted crumbs and did nothing whatsoever with. Those crumbs. They would have done better to wait it out tha. Take the crumbs but of course hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

And as I've said, if Clegg is so brilliant, how come he handed all the cards to Cameron after the 2010 election? For a couple of days, Cameron was all over the place. He had just effectively lost an election he was expected to win comfortably. He was toast and any politician with half a brain could have got more concessions out of him than Clegg did.

I agree with a pp that clergy didn't think tuition fees would be something that would wipe them out in 5 years time. And tbh, although that is the easy thing to pin it on, I don't think it really was. It was lining themselves up alongside the Tories generally, and being linked to austerity generally. Mother tuition fees was the easy tangible thing to point to.

The Lib Dems are a consensus party. Compromise is their thing.

The Conservatives are much more authoritarian and rigid in their thinking. They do not like compromise.

For this reason, this is why the Lib Dems had a Clegg and the Conservatives had a Thatcher.

In the context of Brexiting and getting the best for the UK this is a significant and important difference, and would gratefully affect the outcome of what we got.

Do you want a compromiser or a hard baller? It depends on what your goals and objectives are a guess. If you really want to restrict movement AND get a good trade deal, you would want the latter.

That said I do think there is a place for compromisers in British politics - in fact perhaps we could do with more - but we do rarely see it, precisely because of FPTP.

Sorry about autocorrects, assume the point is still obvious. Clergy is clegg, not sure what the random mother is all about.

Agreed rd. One of the reasons I am a fan of pr is forcing sides to listen to each other and compromise. We never get entirely what we vote for anyway so I'm not sure I agree with that point about or leading to not getting what's on the manifesto.

I wonder how many of the students who queued up to vote for the Lib Dems in 2010 have bothered voting again. You reap what you sow.

Tbh I was more cross with labour for introducing them. I voted for labour as my first ever vote and one of the first things they did was the tuition fees. I felt it was a very negative move In Terms of equal educational opportunities. Once tuition fees were in higher education had already been made harder for the poorer of society and the increase, while not ideal, was much less of an issue than their original introduction.

Do you want a compromiser or a hard baller? It depends on what your goals and objectives are a guess. If you really want to restrict movement AND get a good trade deal, you would want the latter.

No.

Playing "hardball" is not effective in European negotiations, which is why the UK underperforms so woefully.

The concessions we have we got through our size and wealth.

In a negotiation with 32 vetoes, you need people who can build alliances, make cases, do the soft negotiating well.

Hard ball is not the way to play this.

And we're sending Davis.

Who, by all accounts, utterly failed to grasp EU negotiations last time he was out there and msde it hard for Civil Servants to do their jobs.

If you can't appreciate, respect, and use to your advantage, the interests of the people you are negotiating with, you will fare badly at negotiating your way out of the EU.