by liberal japonicus
Chaplin once said “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.” So watching UK politics is a bit like that for me. Which is an introduction to this New Statesman podcast about the Your Party conference. Here it is
I do want to be careful, we’ve seen multiple times how the media has crafted a narrative that feeds itself and doesn’t really reflect the actual reality, but the title for the video speaks volumes. So I’m asking the UKians if the whole thing is a farce or reflects stubborn attitudes to anything on the left. Or both.
It also makes me realize that the Monty Python didn’t have to look far for the skit
So I’m asking the UKians if the whole thing is a farce or reflects stubborn attitudes to anything on the left. Or both.
Or, just for completeness, stubborn attitudes of anyone on the left. Not saying that the left is particularly inflexible. Just that, given how far away we are, that’s also a possibility.
The Mad King’s Court of Fools Cabinet meeting is…well, a laugh or cry thing. One of the most astonishing aspects of it is that it was videoed and the video made public. The lack of self-awareness…Neom thanking Trump for keeping hurricanes away, Rubio saying that Trump alone can bring peace to the world while Trump slumps next to him, clearly asleep. The meeting started with one of Trump’s hour-long rants about Biden. Apparently, that took up all of his energy because he kept nodding off during the rest of the meeting. His sycophants literally watched him sleeping through their suck up attempts. ‘Taking the gloves off’: Trump just held the Cabinet meeting from Hell | The Independent Absolute lunacy.
On the war crimes in the Caribbean, I note that Hegseth seems to have decided to throw the admiral, who he ordered to kill the survivors, under the bus. Perhaps this will motivate those folks in the military to not obey illegal orders. If not just because they are illegal, then to avoid being scapegoated for following those illegal orders.
On Your Party, and lj’s question, IMO the whole phenomenon demonstrates yet again the factionalism of the far/mid left, and its incredibly self-defeating tendency which seems to (in fact if not in theory) value purity and virtue as against electoral success and the ability to actually achieve anything. There’s no question that there are “stubborn attitudes to anything on the left”, although admittedly not in the same league as in the US, but the far/mid left makes it awfully easy for them. The Monty Python sketch has never been far from mind during these developments.
Perhaps this will motivate those folks in the military to not obey illegal orders.
I seem to be horribly pessimistic today. I find it more likely that it will motivate flag officers to leave the military, to be replaced by officers who will have no problem when Trump/Vance declare martial law and order them to halt the 2028 federal elections. If their big military project in 2027 is pulling the 100,000+ uniformed troops stationed in Europe and Asia home, that will be the real giveaway.
There are people in the UK well to the left of me whom I respect. They ought to have a party to represent their views. But Your Party seems to me to represent almost no one apart from its activists.
Meanwhile, perhaps the only good thing about Trump is his willingness to fall asleep during utterly pointless meetings.
I’mthinking that, to prove their
bona fidesloyalty, they would be told to do something sketchy outside the US — no doubt they can find another war crime somewhere. Might start with the scenario you give, given how dumb they all are. But something more like the military equivalent of his cabinet meetings seems likely.Whichever way it goes, they discover, when there is a big negative reaction, that Trump loyalty goes one way. Meaning they get thrown under the bus, too.
Pro Bono – There are people in the UK well to the left of me whom I respect. They ought to have a party to represent their views. But Your Party seems to me to represent almost no one apart from its activists.
I recognize this impulse from the perspective of someone who has been (somewhat reluctantly) involved in union leadership for a few years now. And I think, given what I have seen from the Project 2025 wing of my family, that it also holds true of the far/religious right.
Your Party, as a populist socialist movement, wants to be radically democratic and represent all its members, but there is tremendous asymmetry in how involved members in these types of movements are, and how involved they want to be, in the day to day. Consensus building is tedious, time consuming and exhausting. Only a small fraction of the membership in any of these groups has the time, interest, or characteristics to actually do this sort of work long term. What you end up with is a mixture of scrappy, fearless pragmatists, and people for whom the institution takes the place of a sort of political church in their lives. They love to hear the testimony of others and have people affirm their faith in the institution. In my union, I think of myself as part of the former group and find the latter to be utterly exhausting to deal with.
I suspect that what Pro Bono is seeing is a result of this sort of dynamic. The scrappy pragmatists mostly stay on the edges and pick their battles, fighting activist burnout the entire time as the High Church idealists sap momentum with committees and leadership retreats and another round of membership questionnaires because the last round didn’t get the number of responses that would give them the confidence to move forward on any major issue. But since the majority of those involved at the leadership level are the ideological activists, they do all manage to unite around a few small ginger faction sorts of issues that they start to mistake for a consensus, so the leadership communications all come out sounding a bit too strident.
All of which makes the rank-and-file less likely to want to get involved because of the culture clash.
Solidarity is hard.
Thanks for all of the comments. I’m still curious what people think of Corbyn and Sultana as well as Polanski. He was recently on The rest is politics and I thought Cory Stewart was going to have a heart attack because Polanski didn’t have totals of debt interest the UK gov was liable for at his fingertips. I’m not sure if it was an ambush, Polanski does come off as a bit glib to me, but given the Green’s position, I think he has to push the aspirational stuff over the actual planning. I suppose this opens him up to the charge that he is unserious, but this seems like the way they always dismiss any left of center ideas.
Sultana seems like a person who relishes being a chaos agent so the combination of her and Corbyn seems doomed to failure, but I can’t tell if that’s because every thing I have read pushes that point. The New Statesman podcast was discussing how it was a clash between a federated system, where each group would get a vote or a more purely democratic system where each member would get a vote (if I understood it correctly) but I wasn’t sure who was for what.
I had quite a lot to say about Corbyn when he was Labour leader, little of it good.
Zarah Sultana: I know I’m older and I think I’m wiser than she is. She could do a lot of good in the future.
Zack Polanski: Rory Stewart’s gotcha about debt interest didn’t prove much: few could have answered it accurately (it’s the other side of the coin from asking a politician if they know the price of a pint of milk). . But when it comes to economics Polanski doesn’t actually seem to know what he’s talking about. I may well vote Green at some point anyway.
She could do a lot of good in the future.
My serious (but not far) lefty mates think well of her. I don’t know much about her, but her participation in this absolute clownshow so far makes me wonder about her judgement. However, I agree that lefties do deserve effective political representation, and if she turns out to be capable of it, good.
Corbyn’s judgement, on the other hand, is and has always been execrable. And most serious lefties of my acquaintance say he is also not very bright.
Zack Polanski’s past as a hypnotherapist, and his (disputed) claims that he could hypnotise women to have bigger breasts, are rather hard to forget when considering how serious he is capable of being.
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/zack-polanski-deputy-green-party-hypnotherapy-womens-breasts-5HjcmXc_2/
That aside, however, our politics are in such a mess at the moment, and most of the alternatives so frightful, that a vote for the Greens could make sense under some circumstances.
And most serious lefties of my acquaintance say he is also not very bright.
I can see that, though I have to admit, the past 5 or 10 years, I’ve gotten quite disenchanted with using intelligence as a yardstick for anything. I still get angry when people do stupid things, so I do give intelligence some weight, but I’ve gotten to the point where kindness and human decency weigh a lot more to me. Unfortunately, I think we are in a time where it is easy to railroad kind people.
Kindness and human decency weigh a tremendous amount with me, and more and more as I get older. But in politicians, and especially those who aspire to lead the country, with all the enormous complications and problems that involves, I feel intelligence (or at least the lack of stupidity) are a necessity.
I think lack of stupidity is closer. The US Presidency has metastasized to the point that one critical skill combines knowing what you don’t know, being able (and willing!) to select staff who collectively do know about those things, and then being able to take their advice. That’s by no means everything the job requires. But lack of that skill is a recipe for disaster. As we are seeing.
I don’t get the Corbyn hate/dismissiveness, there’s something visceral about it that is completely irrational. When you look at his policies instead, they were popular with a broad majority of people:
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/22265-eurotrack-corbyns-policies-popular-europe-and-uk
To be fair, I didn’t vote for him because of Brexit, but then Starmer cut a similar sorry figure in this regard. And the young voters don’t believe in him. Neither of them are gifted politicians, but after all the gifted politicians we had in this country and the havoc they wreaked, that might not be a bad thing.
I don’t get the Corbyn hate/dismissiveness
There’s a test, originating in the Labour party in the late 19th century – is he competent to run a whelk stall?
Anyone who’s worked with Corbyn knows that he isn’t.
He shares this disability with BoJo, Dubya, Trump, and sundry other politicians. I don’t hate him for it; I just don’t want him to be in charge of anything I care about.
What Pro Bono said, on every count.
I think Dubya might have managed it. Certainly he would have been far happier trying to run a whelk stand than he was being President.
Of course, the job he actually wanted was Commissioner of Baseball. Pity he didn’t manage to get it instead.
There’s a test, originating in the Labour party in the late 19th century – is he competent to run a whelk stall?
Though the bulk of the attacks iirc were that he was a far left looney. Similar to the way that they went after Mamdani. Which makes me wonder if the problem is that politically, you can’t get much traction by complaining how shitty someone might be as a manager, you have to pound them on ideological grounds.
What lj said. I could easily draw you up a list of prime ministers in my living memory, i.e. Thatcher onwards, that proves how each one of them was incompetent, with the exception of Gordon Brown maybe, but he was not very successful either.
So that leaves us with the fear of actual policy change. Policies that a majority of people supported.
I could easily draw you up a list of prime ministers in my living memory, i.e. Thatcher onwards, that proves how each one of them was incompetent, with the exception of Gordon Brown maybe…
That’s unexpected. I’d say that from Thatcher to Cameron inclusive, Brown was clearly the worst prime minister in terms of managerial competence.
I was looking at results, which is what counts for managers. And while Brown was clumsy, at least he didn’t cause any major disasters like the other ones.