It's today then ... (Trump thread)

[Factotum]

Oh I agree. I'm not an AV fan. I do think PR should be looked into properly, but the fact is no sitting Government will ever go for it.

[Keith Houchen]

6 minutes ago, Gus Mears said:

That was absolutely conventional wisdom on the subject from Conservative researchers/party workers I have spoken to since 2015. For all the world, it was assumed it would be a Hung Parliament and he could bin the whole thing for five years again

GET IN!!!  This is my stopped clock moment.

[David]

Judging by how close the EU referendum was it would seem it was the correct call to hold that vote, regardless of how it came about.

[The King Of Swing]

51 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

GET IN!!!  This is my stopped clock moment.

Lol.

But yeah I think it's pretty accepted that Cameron never expected to have to actually honour the referendum. And when he was forced to (hilariously in the hopes of uniting the party) was convinced of victory for remain.

Hence his "I'll stay on regardless of the result" bollocks, before bolting after the result.

The Coward of the Commons.

[JNLister]

TBF, he was pretty much always going to have to quit if Leave won. It's just that admitting that in advance would have been an incentive for more people to vote Leave just to get him out.

Regarding Brown, IIRC they originally offered a referendum but in the last day or two offered straight out AV without a referendum as a way to outbid the Tories. However, the Lib Dems (correctly) realised there was no actual way the bulk of Labour MPs would vote for it, so it was a meaningless offer.

As for the US, it's not really the system that makes the House of Representatives unproportional, rather it's the gerrymandering. The constituency/FPTP/one member per seat system (with "fair" constituencies) only gets really disproportional once you have three or more serious parties. (Of course, that's inherently a barrier to third parties gaining momentum.)

The Senate and the Electoral College are disproportional by design.

[Factotum]

Quote

Judging by how close the EU referendum was it would seem it was the correct call to hold that vote, regardless of how it came about.

You cannot hold a simple YES/NO referendum on EU membership. As the last 2 years have shown, its far too complicated a situation. You're not even voting on a deal, you're voting on an emotion. There was no counter plan as to what leaving the EU would involve.

Cameron could have forced some EU concessions on a number of things, fact is he couldn't be arsed and decided to slag it off so as to court UKIP voters and then that kicked him in the arse.

[Gus Mears]

16 minutes ago, Factotum said:

Cameron could have forced some EU concessions on a number of things, fact is he couldn't be arsed and decided to slag it off so as to court UKIP voters and then that kicked him in the arse.

That's not really true at all. While he did sabre rattle against the EU for votes (though significantly less than a lot of other Conservative politicians), the Referendum was predicated on moderate concessions he got from Europe, like the emergency break on migration. He also spent a lot of time attempting (and largely failing) to build bilateral relations with EU leaders from 2010, and especially after the 2015 General Election, to instigate institutional change.

He attempted to get the EU to concede on a lot of things and largely got short shrift, especially on migration. He spent an enormous amount of effort on it, the fact that it was a monumental failure is one thing, but it certainly wasn't a case of 'not being arsed'. Also, I think you only need to look at the Brexit negotiations now to see how easy it is to get the EU to make concessions on things relating to the five freedoms when it isn't politically expedient.

[Carbomb]

I'm a marginal Remainer. Truth be told I have a lot of problems with the EU; it's very corporatist, it's quite anti-trades union in parts, and it continually encourages its nation states to "liberalise" essential industries, i.e. privatise them, which I'm very much opposed to. This country has a very strong economy, and has a lot of political clout globally - if Switzerland and Norway can operate outside the EU, we certainly can.

BUT: I voted Remain, mainly because I felt the issue was being driven by racism and xenophobia (yes, there were plenty of people with legitimate complaints, but I honestly don't feel they were the majority, or comprised the most vocal element of the Leave campaign). If we were going to leave the EU, I didn't want it to be guided by abject pieces of shit like Farage, Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Gove et al., because, quite frankly, I think it's obvious the main reason they want to leave Europe is they want to turn this country into US-lite, with all the rolling-back of workers' rights, removal of corporate regulation to prevent their excesses, and the supremacy of utter greed that entails. 

However, one other thing that was a concern, and it's become probably the biggest one, is that this entire fucking thing is a complete abortion. The Brexit lot have done nothing but offer a load of vague "solutions", most of which are very much "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it", or "believe in Britain" without actually supplying any real, detailed, concrete solutions.

They've been whining about this for decades; where are the white papers, the case studies, the research, in fact every fucking thing you'd want normally before making a decision this enormous for an entire bloody country?! We could leave the EU without damage, but it's a long detailed process, and should take a while, not a couple of years. And we could leave the EU, but doing nothing at least wouldn't be damaging, so we should be demanding exhaustive and well-researched details, information, plans, explaining why the hell we should take such a risky leap that could, if we did it wrong, fuck us up to kingdom come (or, in this case, gone).

[David]

14 hours ago, Factotum said:

You cannot hold a simple YES/NO referendum on EU membership. As the last 2 years have shown, its far too complicated a situation. You're not even voting on a deal, you're voting on an emotion. There was no counter plan as to what leaving the EU would involve.

Cameron could have forced some EU concessions on a number of things, fact is he couldn't be arsed and decided to slag it off so as to court UKIP voters and then that kicked him in the arse.

No, I absolutely agree. The first referendum should have been the beginning of the conversation, not the end of it. 

[Loki]

Not to sound like a crazy Brexiter, but producing a point-by-point plan for Brexit and putting that plan up as the choice in a Referendum sounds like a great idea, but it was impossible as the EU wouldn't countenance starting negotiations until we triggered Article 50, which we couldn't do without a referendum.  So it was somewhat of a Catch-22 situation.

As someone said earlier, ultimately it was a vote about emotions, and in some respects similar to the Trump vote in that you have a slowly diminishing but previously majority demographic kicking back against seemingly inevitable social change.  When you are used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.  Rich and middle class white voters turned out (and continue to turn out) for Trump in the US because they fear that their way of life is under threat.  It is of course, from the inevitable march of market forces and demographic change, but they have been persuaded that it's reversible.  That's why immigration is such a powerful vote-winner - limiting immigration is presented as a solution to the problem of racial equality.

White men want to continue to go to church, beat their wives and look down on coloured people in the same way their father did, and white women want the same for their daughters.  That last bit sounds insane, but you have to try and explain why white women vote for Trump in such large numbers.  My thought is that if you've spent your whole life being subtly oppressed, the idea that the next generation get to live without that constraint triggers a very deep-seated jealousy.   "Why should women be able to have abortions, run companies, get divorced from shitty husbands, move to another state, marry other women, change gender?  I didn't.  Are you saying my life was wasted?"  I have actually encountered this argument from women of my parents' generation about the #metoo movement.  Modern girls, it was suggested, are taking things too far.  You should be able to shrug off a pat on the bottom at work.  Except if you delve down into it, you discover that many women of that generation actually dealt with horrible sexual aggression and often physical assault and because they HAD to accept it, they've buried it deep down.  It's an uncomfortable conversation to have with your mother but an illuminating one.

Anyway, I don't like referendums.  Asking over simplified questions to an electorate is a bad idea.  Representative democracy works for a reason.

 

[Wideload90]

So Trump cannot attend a ceremony to commemorate WW1 because of the weather. What a shambles.

I also get the impression that Macron is making Trump out to be his bitch through handshakes and gestures. Is this about right?

[Keith Houchen]

"The weather" meaning he doesn't want to get his hair wet or blown about as he probably thinks if that crumbles, his support crumbles. Vanity is even bigger when it's The Donald. 

[BomberPat]

On 11/10/2018 at 10:28 AM, Loki said:

Rich and middle class white voters turned out (and continue to turn out) for Trump in the US because they fear that their way of life is under threat.  It is of course, from the inevitable march of market forces and demographic change, but they have been persuaded that it's reversible.  That's why immigration is such a powerful vote-winner - limiting immigration is presented as a solution to the problem of racial equality.

White men want to continue to go to church, beat their wives and look down on coloured people in the same way their father did, and white women want the same for their daughters.  That last bit sounds insane, but you have to try and explain why white women vote for Trump in such large numbers.  My thought is that if you've spent your whole life being subtly oppressed, the idea that the next generation get to live without that constraint triggers a very deep-seated jealousy.   "Why should women be able to have abortions, run companies, get divorced from shitty husbands, move to another state, marry other women, change gender?  I didn't.  Are you saying my life was wasted?"  I have actually encountered this argument from women of my parents' generation about the #metoo movement.  Modern girls, it was suggested, are taking things too far.  You should be able to shrug off a pat on the bottom at work.  Except if you delve down into it, you discover that many women of that generation actually dealt with horrible sexual aggression and often physical assault and because they HAD to accept it, they've buried it deep down.  It's an uncomfortable conversation to have with your mother but an illuminating one.

 

I agree with this. There's also a sense, particularly when it comes to prejudice, of things being "settled". White America love to think that racism ended with the civil rights movement, or with the election of Obama. Just like racist attitudes moved from deportation to segregation to assimilation, the idea of what constitutes racial progress is on similarly shifting sands. If we can pretend we live in a "post-racial" world, then we don't have to feel guilty, and black people can be criticised for "playing the race card" when they bring up discrimination, as if they're just making excuses.

Everyone likes to think that the world they grew up in is the baseline, it's how things should be. So they're proud of the rights they (or the generation immediately preceding their's) fought for, the victories they won, the social progress they made, but anyone fighting for more is just making a big fuss over nothing. Nostalgia is a huge driving force, and too often an ugly, reactionary one. 

On top of that - and what I'm starting to think is one of the driving factors of the rise of the far right - is that, in most of what we think of as "Western" countries, the last few people who lived from the rise of fascism and Nazism are dying off. The last surviving member of the White Rose group recently did an interview with the New York Times saying he didn't think it was a coincidence that those who fought against fascism are dying out at the same time we see fascism rearing its ugly head.

Because most of us are several generations removed from the reality of fascism, and our "baseline" world is one that includes the post-war consensus, the mid-20th century ideal of globalism, the welfare state, human rights, and so on, we assume that world is normal, and not something that was hard fought for and hard won. And it's when we start taking all those things for granted that we're most at risk of losing them.

 

Immigration is the most irritating aspect of it all, aside from it being an obvious xenophobic ploy, you have to look at recent reports that the global fertility rate is declining even faster than people thought. We have an aging population and declining birthrates, so outside of immediate post-war years, have never been more in need of a young, mobile workforce. Declining birthrates do not sit well with increasing isolationism, yet that's the world we're in right now.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, BomberPat said:

Declining birthrates do not sit well with increasing isolationism, yet that's the world we're in right now.

And too much of that sort of thing gets... undesirable.

[HarmonicGenerator]

Excellent post @BomberPat. I’d quote it all but have nothing to add except ‘yes I agree’, but want to say thanks for writing it anyway.