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[hector13]

She’s certainly not going to be a national leader ever again.

[Loud Whispers]

Maybe she's angling for a UN/global politics career now?

I honestly believe a significant number of UK politicians, whether they were pro-Brexit or not, will end up working to lobby in the European Union

[EuchreJack]

She’s certainly not going to be a national leader ever again.

Well, at least not a British national leader...

[Starver]

"Legal migration is too high, says Rishi Sunak"

I've long said that the Tories have been applying the stick (adding ways to punish 'illegal' migration, or make grey-areas more so) without offering any more carrot (at least token efforts at providing alternatives[1], so that people don't feel pressured to try the other[2]). Now I can definitely say that they're definitely also conspicuously rationing the carrot. Basically aiming for "all stick", indiscriminately, except for the lucky few (or rich enough few, even if there's also been fine words said against Russian diamonds, in the last couple of days).

Without being a free-immgration absolutist, by any means, I can see only that this is meant to bolster their Absolutely Not / No Overseas Individuals / Everyone Denied  (ANNOIED) base. Which I can only hope is not a loss-leader in their policy store, and that actually it bites them back with all those who think beyond the simplistic monochrome of it.


(Having recently heard of someone who might be looking at being a legitimate arrival, I'm a little more atuned to this issue. Also I've been a person (temporarily) living across national/subnational boundaries, in my past. Including a stint in Berlin; at the time often called "Turkey's second largest city", but not with any of the obvious ire of locals that you might get even in allegedly internationalist London of nth-generation 'immigrants'. - Though you still had plenty of Ost/West differences to distract them from trivial problems like that, and my own barely functional German. )


[1] Yes, they opened up options for Ukraine (but quite pointedly very much less so equivalent messes like Afghanistan), but only after public outcry. And they hardly made it easy, by all accounts, with many speed-bumps along the way. Hong Kong is the other example, of course, but volume/rate/length of time this has covered makes it harder for me to compare.

[2] Driving people into the clutches of the very migration-gangs they say they want to punish (by punishing mainly the attempted migrants themselves).

[scriver]

I mean, I absolutely view the policy of responding to our many population/workforce/wage-to-living-situation problems with an unsceptic "more immigration" is a spiral that only leads to further problems that needs to be forever answered with "more immigration!" again and again while treating the populace of the world as some sort of unending, ever drainablr resource that our "first world" countries can just suck up, chew up, and spit out over and over again in a race towards the bottom of wages and living standards; but the alternative, making use of and retraining the populace already here first, is going to mean actually investing money on the present populace on a probably unprecedented in the last 30-50 years scale and huge economical model changes, and still accept a lot of immigration. And I highly doubt a right-wing, neo-lib establishment is anywhere near ready to actually commit to that – I'm guessing it's gonna be the old "we don't need to import people who will work for less and live in worse circumstances than our lower class if we make our lower class poorer and worse off and forced to work" that always come from the right. If you want to lessen harvest work migration, for example? Well that's not mainly about "teaining" the locals that's about going back (or is it about going forward ) to an economic model where a person/company can make a livint/profit of fruit without having to have more plants than they can manage to harvest on their own – and is that a feasible change? Maybe the answer is more industrialisation, or having the slump-backed, coffee-addled IT and office workers of the cities get a few months of mandatory "muscle and cardio health improvement opportunity" in the summer and autumn, I dunno.  But harvest workers is one of the oldest forms of international migrancy reasons for a reason.

All in all I'd be supportive of all efforts to draw more on our established populace for important work; aiming for basic self reliance is a good thing – it feels wrong to just rely on other countries and brain drain instead of aiming to use our own resources for our own problems. But it has to be by building people up, not making things even worse for the working class, otherwise what's the point?

[EuchreJack]

(Torrie) Politicians know that they can score easy political points by beating on people that can't vote. So beating on immigrants is a solid tactic. It will probably be effective, as those who vote against politicians who take these positions have probably already abandoned the Torries.

...if you can make a parallel with US politics, feel free. 

[Starver]

They already made a poke at Starmer allegedly giving votes to 'furriners' and 'da yout'. (I forget the wording, but the press that screamed about this phrased it as "that horde of young boat-using foreigners", rather than two different classes.) Apparently an attempt to reverse Brexit[1]. When it was extending voting rights to all "settled" residents (not just EU-origin) in a "they pay taxes, they should be able to vote. And, separately, 16+ voting rights.

Whatever you like or dislike about Starmer, it's a clear dog-whistle "attack" constructed by his under-siege opponents. Which'll work in some circles. (It's a damned-if-you-explain/damned-if-you-don't-explain situation, of course.)


[1] If there's one thing Kier won't promise, it's that. And given the bolted horse, on that, I can't see any practical way to coax the whole horse back into the stable again, anyway. It'd need unprecedentedly positive pro-Euro pressure, not just a majority of people not voting anti-Euro like we already had.

[Starver]

"They have still not produced a shred of evidence that I knowingly or recklessly misled the Commons."

- a taste of the various bits of "I'm innocent!" in Johnson's resignation letter, after being given an advanced look at the conclusions (and reasoning) of the enquiry set up to look into him. Which makes me wonder what it will say. Enough to not ride out, but aparently not so much as to break through the shell of self-denial.

But Boris was never one to deal with things gracefully. Perhaps he was just waiting until he had seen his "Resignation Honours List" pushed through without problem. With the rather interesting situation regarding Nadine Dorries resigning but not receiving a peerage (whatever the details are surrounding that).

[hector13]

Nadine Dorries is a bizarre one. “Something significant happened” they changed her mind, about what? She was a Boris loyalist who was never going into government while this lot were in charge.

My favourite thing she said was lambasting Rishi and his ilk for hastening the ousting of Boris because he was a proven vote-winner, while glossing over the fact he’s also a proven liar, and winning votes is apparently more important than effectively governing the country.

Rishi has shown himself to be weak, given he did nothing about the honours list being a pretty clear-cut case of cronyism. Boris’ hairdresser was on the list for crying out loud. You have people up and down the country raising money for charities, volunteering their time, keeping the country alive and running during the pandemic, and he rewards someone who made his hair look floppy? Anybody with a lick of sense would scrap the list, but I suppose the recently papered-over cracks in the party need to be maintained.

Rishi should just kick the chair away now, anyway. No point waiting a year for an election, unless Keir Starmer is videoed molesting a child the Tories are done, and the sad thing is Labour are no better. They’re trying to (and probably succeed to) take power away from local chapters from being able to choose who they want to represent them in parliament (like Jeremy Corbyn) as part of a quest to systematically eliminate the left-wing from the party. Sad day when the Labour Party doesn’t represent the labour force anymore.

[Great Order]

Nadine Dorries is a bizarre one.

Pretty sure that's just her being generally dim.

And maybe an alcoholic, someone suggested that and it'd explain a lot.

[scriver]

Hey styling hair to that unstyled isn't easy

[Starver]

Not that it probably matters to anyone (any side of the argument), but I find it entertaining that the released "Boris report" has effectively two new 'charges' added to it from when he got to read it (and weep) for himself. For both orchestrating the impugning of the committee's originally intended conclusions and also for contemptuously revealing their unpublished findings (whilst "getting his retalliation in first"), via his resignation letter.

The recommended 90-day suspension (it might have been as few as 10 days, before..?) can't apply now. But maybe it should be 'held over', like some driving disqualifications of underage drivers, made to start being served only upon the start of their normally legitimate "driving lifetime". (Though that would be... troublesome. Any place where he was listed up again and they actually elected him anew would by automatically required to re-open a new by-election, which... yeah, that has various problems attached to it.)

But he's been all-but-Expelled, to the limit of current procedure, even if support for actual expelling was a minority within the group themselves. Future parliamentary procedure/floor-time is open to increasing/decreasing the effectiveness of the recommendations, so maybe full disqualification could happen (until the tides change again and it gets revoked).

[hector13]

No idea if she’s still doing it (it wouldn’t surprise me) but the “immediate” resignation of Nadine Dorries is being delayed so she can figure out why she isn’t getting her £300 daily allowance I mean her peerage, because I imagine her constituents’ priority is indeed her completely naked ambition.

Another reason for it is also so that the Tories can’t get the by-election(s) over quickly, possibly with the intent for it to run into the party conference season in a few months time. Because Tory voters in her constituency presumably want to make it more difficult for the Tories to win these by-elections? That one might be the case though. A touch divided as a party they are, at the moment.

[Great Order]

x

[Starver]

Maybe none of the Chiltern Hundreds are yet prepared to take her on? (Given the legal fiction needed to get around the actual inability of an MP to officially 'resign'...)

Either way, we still haven't seen the result of ripping the other sticking-plasters off the hairy knees of the Tory majority. It could just as backfire for the disruptors, depending upon how both 20th July by-elections go. The general tone at the time may equally shift the old swingometer for each, but it'll be more likely that any 'lessons learnt' or kickback from those results could be far more chaotic an influence, on top of whatever other political landmines are unknowingly set to explode in the interim (laid by whoever, and currently ticking away beneath any party's front line[1]) and shift the background hum of public perception at just the right/wrong time.

And then there's Conference Season. Given how we seem to have had Summer Surprises over recent times, I really don't know where the big-picture will have shifted by then. We could even find a forced/chosen General Election called for before Christmas... Well... no sign of that yet, but either very bad or very good outcomes betweentime could yet make it seem necessary.

[1] Either another 'lockdown jitterbug' or a further whip-leaving over future energy policies or more party-top-table financial 'interviews' or further roadblocks on power-sharing or... Most likely, something new that's totally out of the blue(/red/yellow/green/other-yellow/whatever), as if the existing smouldering dumpster-fires aren't already obvious beacons to navigate between the various options.