I have not been following events there lately but according to Pie, 14 years of conservative rule has resulted in the drastic reduction of nearly all public services and the degradation of life for ordinary people in favor of giving tax cuts to millionaires and big business.
Prime minister Rishi Sunak seems determined to stay the course even though the government lost two by-elections to Labour on February 15th, where the seats had been held by Conservatives, and is heading into a general election within the year with low approval ratings.
But then another by-election on February 29th saw George Galloway, formerly of the Labour Party but now head of the Workers Party, win a seat that had been held by Labour, with a vote share of 40%.. The race for that election was messy, to put it mildly, with the Labour Party withdrawing support for its own candidate, resulting in him coming in 4th, getting just around 8% of the vote. An independent candidate came second to Galloway with 21%, and the Conservative candidate came third with 12%. Given the peculiar nature of this race, it is hard to say what the result implies for the coming general election.
Within the lettuce category, I’m wondering if it’s actually possible for them to lose their majority, by-election by by-election, before they call the general. Only 27 more seats to go by my count.
To U.K.
You started burning the non-replaceable fuel of coal and it was the birth of industrial revolution. We all followed your footsteps. One of your sons wrote ‘The Wealth of Nations’ considered the foundation of capitalism.
It is only fitting that you start using less and less of fossil fuel -- actually there is no choice -- and show the rest of the world how to shut down the machines and use more and more muscle power. It will also be helpful if one of your sons (or daughters) write ‘The Poverty of Nations’ describing the demise of capitalism.
Thank you!
Venkataraman, I find what I perceive to be the sentiment you are expressing to be inane.
That effectively means ‘We are all equally guilty’, in ethical terms.
Being the first to burn coal does not entail being more guilty any more than the being the first person to kill entails being more guilty of murder than subsequent people who kill.
Killing is killing, burning coal is burning coal.
There is no original sin.
It will also be helpful if one of your sons (or daughters) write ‘The Poverty of Nations’ describing the demise of capitalism.
Karl Marx was said to believe the demise of capitalism would start in Britain, not Russia. And he wasn’t 100% wrong — Britain didn’t have a communist revolution, but they did give us at least a few progressive critics of the capitalism they’d helped to invent.
@ Venkataraman Amarnath
The UK pioneered antibiotics. So I’m assuming (not) you think all lives saved thusly must be credited to the UK, and we should all be writing letters of thanks?
Antibiotics: the epitome of a wonder drug | The BMJ
https://www.bmj.com/content/334/suppl_1/s6
@1 -- there’s a cartoon in this week’s Private Eye where a character is looking at a paper reporting by-election results, and musing “if only there was a way to hold all these at once…”.
It is in fact easy to say what the Rochdale by-election result implies for the coming general election: absolutely nothing. It has confounding factors piled so high you can barely see the constituency from next door. British democracy produces these results every now and then -- Martin Bell defeating Neil Hamilton, local football mascot H’Angus the Monkey beating Labour in the election for Mayor of Hartlepool. It’s a hyper-local, incredibly specific curiosity, nothing more, and if it was the only by-election that had happened since 2019, then the government could justifiably relax, sit back, and say “haters gonna hate” and disregard it as a blip.
Whereas here in reality real by-elections in seats they should hold easily have been going the wrong way, and very, very badly the wrong way, over and over and over again, to the point that a lot of the more experienced Tories have already stated they’re not even going to bother contesting their seats at the next election. They know they’re going to lose, and you can guarantee they’re not working to represent their constituents right now, they’re lining up their next job, because that’s what they do.
In 1997 I stayed up all night to watch the election results (that’s right Americans -- we have an election on Thursday, and Friday morning we have new Prime Minister, and the advanced tech we use to produce these speedy results is something called a “pencil”) because it was pretty reliably going to be exciting, and it did not disappoint. I stayed up again in 2001, but it was boring, and I haven’t done it since. I’ll be staying up for the next one -- it’s going to be a doozy.
I am not accusing the people of Eighteenth century England. Thomas Newcomen could not have foreseen global warming due to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
We are all to some extent guilty of the polycrisis facing humanity.
From two Tims (Surplus energy economics by Dr. Tim Morgan and The consciousness of sheep by Tim Watkins) I gather that the economy of UK is in deep trouble and there is no way out as the cost of energy is raising rapidly.
Chris Smaje has ideas (A small farm future) for feeding the Btritain with the available arable land. Barry Cooper (How to find our way into the future) has suggestions for living with less energy and fewer materials.
By following advice from these two practical men UK may be able to avoid an unpleasant crash. What they learn will be useful to other countries as their economies are bound to contract with dwindling cheap enery.
A short book An inconvenient apocalypse by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen will convence you.
Unlike USA, there is a real possibility the party representing the oligarchy in Britain may suffer a blow it cannot recover from. Especially if Labour for once in a lifetime does something effective about electoral reform, consigning the tories to eternal minority.
Not to worry -- Starmer’s Labour is ready to step in to represent the oligarchy! And he’s certainly not going to introduce proportional representation -- why, that would mean he’d need to get a majority of the vote (or near it) to have a majority of seats in the Commons!
The full weirdness of the Rochdale byelection should be appreciated. There were in fact three candidates who at some stage have been disowned by the Labour Party: George Galloway himself (originally suspended from Labour for opposing the Iraq War, but has done his best to discredit himself ever since, known narcissist, misogynist, homophobe and antisemite, now representing the
George Galloway PartyWorkers’ Party of Britain); Simon Danczuk (suspended from Labour for writing creepy letters to a 17-year-old girl, now representing the crypto-fascist Reform Party); and their candidate for most of the current campaign, Azhar Ali, belatedly disowned (he’s a Starmeroid) for voicing antisemitic conspiracy narratives*. In addition the candidate of the Green Party of England and Wales, Guy Otten, disowned himself when Islamophobic social media messages came to light. The surprise, in my view, was that Danczuk did so poorly, coming in 6th with only 6.3% of the vote.*Azhar Ali was first revealed to have suggested the Israeli government let the October 7th Hamas attacks happen so they would have an excuse for attacking Gaza. While in my view unlikely (the attacks severely damaged Netanyahu politically), this is clearly not antisemitic, since the target of the accusation was not Jews in general, or even Zionists in general, but Natanyahu and his henchpersons. But he was then further revealed to have trotted out a classic “Jews control the media” trope. At this point he was disowned -- Labour couldn’t replace him or even remove him from the ballot paper at this late stage -- but there’s no doubt the disowning would have been instant as soon as there was the slightest excuse if he’d been a lefty.
KG: Ali was right on the first point: Beginyahu was indeed warned well in advance of an imminent attack from Gaza; and, for whatever reason (some say he was too busy waging war against Palestinians in the West Bank, or that he was indeed waiting for an extra excuse to attack Gaza), he did indeed choose not to act on that warning. That could be one reason why the attack “damaged him politically.”
As for the second point, did Ali actually say “Jews control the media” or did he merely say the pro-Israel lobby controls the media? Because the latter is at least 2/3 true. In fact, Israel’s propagandists were far more prepared for the 10/7 Hamas attack, and responded much faster, than Israel’s military.
Raging Bee@10,
Clearly Netanyahu would have no moral objections to allowing Hamas to kill and kidnap hundredss of Israeli citizens if he thought it would benefit him. But I judge that he is sufficiently intelligent to see that it would not be to his political advantage. Racist contempt for Hamas’s organisational abilities, and distraction by the struggle to stay in power and push his anti-democratic measures and land theft on the West Bank through, look more plausible explanations for his failure to act on warnings.
Azhar Ali :
I haven’t seen any denials that he did indeed say this.
KG: Is Beginyahu really that intelligent? In one sense, yes, the 10/7 Hamas attack, and the blatantly horrific level of violence, is indeed working to the Likudniks’ advantage, just as they’ve always expected Hamas to work to their advantage: by totally discrediting the Palestinian Authority and everyone calling for peaceful relations or concessions toward Palestinians; by dividing all of Israel’s opponents (including US and Western critics of Israel) against each other; and by sucking everyone’s attention away from the Likudniks’ malfeasance WRT corruption, judicial “reforms,” illegal settlements, etc.
But at another level, while Beginyahu thinks he’s playing everyone else as cleverly as Israeli diplomats always have, he’s also being played by people who are using his latest war to divide and paralyze their only consistent ally, the USA, and to keep us distracted from other, more important policy areas such as Ukraine, Taiwan, etc.
Also, the article you cite quotes Ali as blaming “people in the media from certain Jewish quarters,” which is, I admit, very carelessly worded, but also pretty much right, because there are indeed “certain Jewish quarters” commonly known as the “Israel lobby” (though there’s also lots of non-Jews in those quarters). And the article just robotically labels Ali’s words “anti-Semitic,” which is just plain false.