Westminstenders: Following the EU lead

[RedToothBrush]

Coronavirus poses a particularly Irish shaped question. How the UK responds to Irish plans for ending lockdown and whether Arlene continues to back an all Ireland plan will be fascinating to watch and see justified regardless of which way we go.

The UK for all its new found independence is looking very closely to the success / failure of EU strategies before making our own plan public. Mainly because we've yet to write one.

Johnson hasn't led much. He's delegated. Yet he gets all the praise for doing the sum total of fuck all and never being the bad guy. There always another fall guy to blame.

Economically we are stuffed and promises of a very quick bounce back don't look likely based on public confidence and willingness to return to places like pubs restaurants and shops.

Our ability to adapt to new conditions at short notice has been tested and businesses can not afford to do this again soon.

This is the background to which we go into talks. Both sides need an extension to serve their best interests. Johnson is determined to cut our nose of to spite our face for the sake of his legacy and to keep those paying the back handers and dodging tax happy.

But who is going to pay for that quarantine ?

DGR
Oh I know.
I was catching up on Private Eye's shredding of Matt Hancock for handing all the contracts for everything to his rich mates rather than getting local experts who happen to be councils to do track and trace and test and the like.

The Furlough scheme is bailing out big business so they do not have to cancel their dividends and non exec fees to MPs

The Self employment scheme seems designed to drive as many to the wall as possible.

Johnson's phrase needs altering to Fuck small British business

I noticed in Private Eye a lawyer taking all the supermarkets to court for ignoring the Equality Act. I'm going to contact them and see if they want to add one to the numbers.

There's something grimly ironic in a UK free of the EU finding itself still hemmed in by needing to keep in rough lockstep (if not lockdown) with other countries, courtesy of C-19.

"Who is going to pay for that quarantine ?"

From now on:

. IFF their trip was important for the UK - and approved in advance - then the taxpayer foots the bill
. Ditto if they are returning travellers who went out before lockdown
. Otherwise, the traveller or their employer pays
- no reason the taxpayer should subsidise either

VE Day should celebrate the victory of all the Allies who came together to defeat the Nazis:

So celebrate the UK, but also the USA, USSR, the Commonwealth countries,
those who joined Britain to continue the fight after their own country was defeated, or fought in the resistance:
France, Belgium, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Czechoslovakia ....

Remember them all

Pretty's Times link upthread - Matthew Parris - sums it up:

"That Johnson himself nearly died does not mean he understands better.

The suggestion he has undergone some kind of transfiguration troubles me.
If a prime minister needs direct personal experience of a danger in order to comprehend danger to others, then heaven help us.

Besides, intensive care may have warped his judgment, leading to jumpiness.
The growing need is for intellect, clarity,
an end to nonsense about the Blitz and boasts about how well Britain is doing (we aren’t), and a readiness to talk to citizens as adults.

Regrettably, Johnson has an Etonian distrust of intellect among colleagues,
and a wariness of explaining things honestly and properly to hoi polloi.

Perhaps everyone is waiting for the old Boris to bounce back, but is “back” the word?
He was once noisier and bouncier, for sure, but was his ever a good, problem-solving mind?

Can you remember any big dilemma of government he ever tackled and sorted?

Any unpopular policy he ever won us over to?

There’s a hole at the top of government and I doubt it’s Boris-shaped.
If it is, we shall see tomorrow."

VE day was not really marked in Denmark aside from a from the stuff on TV, that said, Denmakr has a sombre memorial every 5th May to mark the liberation of Denmark in 1945.

On the corona front, the virus is supposedly retreating rapidly and most things will be open from 18th May. Including universities, but not museums, gyms and swimming pools. All kids back to school. Boarders to remain shut. 'structural' social distening remains - screens in shops, 15 customer max rules, distencing lines on supermarket floors, hand sanitising stations everywhere etc. Everything else nearly normal though - quiet of course- no street parties!

The UK gov have a lot to answer for. I fucking hate their incompetence. and I hate them cheering when a 1% pay increase for nurses was defeated in HOP a while back ; pricks.

There’s some nice selective quoting Gareth Roberts there DGR and a rather odd understanding of the convervative view of the state. I think his prediction that we will never again be governed by the Conservative party is very foolish.

Sorry made a typo selective quoting by Gareth Roberts that should have said. I wasn’t pointing the finger at DGR

Tell us which is selective quoting then Louise?

My impression is that the Tory party after Thatcher is much changed and more right wing and very much more about ruthless individualism. MacMillan and Co didn't undo the NHS, and he is noted for getting a lot of council houses built.

I would take issue with some of the byline times statements however - especially

"The ability of an individual to climb the social ladder to better themselves through education and experience and enterprise is at an all-time low. Mrs Thatcher may have denied the existence of society, but she was silent about the existence of a rigid, economically determined system of class. But Conservatives are very relaxed about class."

There has never been a golden age when individuals climbed the ladder via education; it has always been a system which only allowed a few poorer children a leg up. It's sort of forgotten that the 1944 Education Act brought in Secondary Education for all, but the by-product was that it spawned Secondary Moderns. It need not have been the case - the more progressive local authorities had already begun to provide proper secondary education for their children prior to the War. Not that you can wholly blame the Tory party; the Labour party didn't have a better vision back in the 1940s other than grammar schools.They certainly lacked the vision that they had for the health service.

But the post war economy expanded and that inadvertently gave most men a leg up. It didn't do a great lot for women's prospects - it can easily be argued that they went backwards during the 1950s.

I think article @DGRossetti links to is accurate. @LouiseCollins28 is getting her Conservatives mixed up with conservative. The party does not represent the values you may think it does. I see no evidence for it, and lots of evidence to the contrary.

The “no such thing as society” quote is cut off mid sentence, omitting the words “and then, also, to look after our neighbours." Their inclusion does rather change the emphasis.

The guardian (not notably thatcher fans) reproduced it like this, it’s mid way down

www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-quotes

I agree with Jason here - a lot of Tories don't realise how much their party has been highjacked. You only have to look at the ones who were driven out of the party e.g. Dominic Grieve - an old fashioned Conservative to his fingertips, but there is no room in today's party for people like that. Instead we have Boris Johnson and Priti Patel.

Just for the record, I have voted for all 3 major parties (meaning in this case, since I’m in England) Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats at least once in a General Election and I have never been a member of any party. So I’m not exactly a Tory and I’ve found things in multiple party’s proposals that I support.

I do think that Peregrina and Jason make a good point, the Conservative party has changed, weirdly that it changes is one of its most enduring characteristics. Heath, Thatcher, Major, Cameron, May, Johnson...lots of change through the decades there.

Since we are on the subject of Thatcher, says she warming to her theme.
"People from my sort of background needed grammar schools to compete with children from privileged homes like Shirley Williams and Anthony Wedgwood Benn."

Er no, I think not Mrs T. If you hadn't passed the 11+ or The Scholarship as it was then called, Alderman Roberts would not have let you languish in an Elementary school - he would have made sure that you had a place at a nice little private school.

"They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."

I am not convinced that changes the substance of what was said. It sounds very much like the Government starting to wash its hands of public provision. E.g. looking after yourself and your neighbours isn't going to provide a whole country with clean water.

"It is ironic that just when those countries such as the Soviet Union, which have tried to run everything from the centre, are learning that success depends on dispersing power and decisions away from the centre, there are some in the community who seem to want to move in the opposite direction. We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels."

More about rolling back the frontier of the state, and particularly ironic when the Govt has centralised as much as it possibly can, and won't let Local Authorities use their expertise in the current crisis - or that might have changed in the last day, since their private chums have let the side down.

My recollection is that MrsT centralised even more and removed powers of local governments

.... merely because the hard left were elected in a few places.
London (GLC - Ken Livingston) and
Liverpool (Militant tendency - Derek Hatton)

Unpleasant though they were, removing local democracy was completely wrong - but she didn't trust the voters to get rid of them

My impression is that the Tory party after Thatcher is much changed and more right wing and very much more about ruthless individualism.

The Tory party remained a pretty broad church until quite recently and even Thatcher's cabinets spanned the divide between the ideological hard right (Lawson) and one nation Tories (Clark, Major, Heseltine).

I'm not a Tory voter by any stretch of the imagination but I can tell the difference between a small c conservative and a hard right ideologue, and I can even manage some respect for the first group. I disagree with Louise about a lot of things but I'd put her in the small c conservative group, which is ideologically distant from the hard right copy pasters .

I would note that the Labour Party has also changed - it's become a party for the educated middle class as much as the working class. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it leads in some odd directions including some (economically) very recessive education policies.

Certainly I have plenty of conservative values. But definitely would not vote for the Conservative party as I don't view those two things as compatible.

I don’t necessarily agree with the whole of the sentiment since I think Government clearly can do much more than Thatcher wished it to do (current circs expemplify this).

I do think people have a duty to look after themselves, if they can, and an equally strong duty to look after their neighbours too, again if they can

Seems Miriam Margolyes is a bit cross.

Also seen stories that Westminster told companies to fuck over Scotland and Wales in the rush for PPE.

Sorry, MNHQ censorship committee just emailed and insisted on balance.

"It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours."
The adverb and punctuation are key here. (Presuming the punctuation is accurately representing the emphasis in the sentence...)
Thatcher didn't say, as LouiseCollins does, that we have to look after ourselves and our neighbours, too. She says us first and then (i.e. once that's done, and we are OK) our neighbours.
This is not hair-splitting, IMO. It's a fudamental difference.

Powerful point Auld I read that sentence differently. It would be very easy and entirely reasonable to understand “first” to encapsulate a sort of “i’m alright Jack” sentiment.I have understood it to mean that an individual must first look to themselves for a solution to their problems, not to society.

Generally that’s a sentiment I would endorse, i.e. self reliance where possible, but I accept that it could be interpreted to endorse not ‘self reliance’ (which I would support) but ‘selfishness’ (which I wouldn’t)

The “then” is interesting and more troubling. My charitable interpretation would be to say it encourages a form of “self care”, i.e. help others but after you are secure yourself, but I concede that is probably naive.

I think it’s well understood, for example, that those with lower incomes and less security themselves offer more (proportionally) in charitable giving than do their better off peers.

Sorry about my squiffy ^^s... Was juggling posting and trying to prep the evening meal.

It's interesting, LouiseCollins, how ambiguous the quote is.

Your willingness to accept that ambiguity is much appreciated.