UK Politics Discussion Thread

[Tarkeel]

I'm hearing a lot of talk that many MPs want Boris back...

[Krill]

Please see the last sentence in my previous post.

[Krill]

On a slightly more serious note BJ fell due to lack of junior ministers.

He threatened the removal of the whip but no way these clowns retain their seats so that isn't a threat anymore.

So he is even more dead in the water now than in July.

[Cyneheard]

Sunak will be elected unopposed by MPs. And the UK is fucked. And if he declined, then with Gove dropping out, we're fucked.

We just need a GE now but the Tory party is hellbent on destroying everything.

At what point does it get bad enough that Charles says they need a new election????

[Krill]

Charles can't say that at all but theoretically he could appoint Starmer PM rather than the Tory leader when Truss resigns on the belief that he commands the majority of united MPs and then Starmer requests a GE immediately.

It will never happen unless about 40MPs defect. But at this rate who knows.

[Jowy]

On the other side you have Keir Starmer who's trying to take Labour more to the right. Would that be the New New Labour?

[Krill]

Doesn't matter. To steal a paraphrase, the guy could knife a Tory in front of Parliament and it would only improve his chances of winning an election.

[MJW (ya that one)]

Reform UK has allegedly won the by-election by just 4 votes.

[MJW (ya that one)]

They won by six votes. I believe that Lib Dems + Greens siphoned more votes than CONs but this is supposed to be a safe Labour seat and the Reform UK candidate was weak.

[BING_XI_LAO]

Remember Dominic Cummings, the abrasive Boris Johnson adviser? Here's his blog.

https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/people-ideas-machines-xiv-lessons


excerpt:

There have been successful political/electoral projects after Thatcher but there has been no other No10-government project successful on anything like the scale of the Thatcher project, able to combine:

A. A real leader. Thatcher had flaws and some of them are characteristic of the MPs who select into modern SW1 such as a lack of skills seen in great CEOs — prone to hopeless chairing of meetings, difficulties running a team etc. But she also had genuine leadership abilities, she had moral courage, she was very determined, she was interested in ideas and power, and she was focused on the real job, she’s the last PM who did *not* see No10’s core job as Content Provider for Legacy Media Entertainment. No Pitt but obviously more consequential than her successors.

B. An accurate map of the core problems.

C. Agreed goals and a plan for how to get there including changing Whitehall.

D. A team with the skills to get it done.

E. A story for the country.

F. The leader, map, goals, plan, team, story and execution etc sort of (barely) coming and holding together for years such that a real transformation happens.

The story is told by John Hoskyns (JH) in his memoir, Just In Time.

Hoskyns’ father was killed in the defence of Calais to buy time for the Dunkirk evacuation. JH served in the army then created one of the very first British software startups in 1964. Dealing with the disintegration of the British economy in the 1960s-70s as an entrepreneur, he became obsessed with the complex causes of the problems and how to fix them. He sold his company so he could pursue politics. He set out to become friends with the people around the IEA and CPS in the 1970s and through those networks got to know Thatcher, Howe and Keith Joseph. He wrote plans, including the Stepping Stones memo, and tried to corral leading politicians to consider a systematic explanation of the problems and therefore an agreed step-by-step plan for fixing them. When she won the 1979 election he went to No10 to run the Policy Unit. He worked with her through the first tumultuous critical years until resigning in 1982. His Memoir draws on a detailed diary he kept.

For all those thinking about the next regime, Hoskyns’ memoir will be fascinating and rewarding. It is amazingly little known in SW1. I think that of MPs I’ve asked ‘have you read it’, only one or two have said Yes. There is no other post-1979 British book like it partly because there has not been since then a combination of a) someone with his training and intellectual perspective at the heart of power working for b) a real political leader trying to change deep things. (The best example of something modern written in another country is Lee Kuan Yew’s memoir which I did several blogs on in 2021.)

I had the privilege of writing to JH before he died and he sent me thoughts and some old things he’d written about Whitehall. Many of the things I’ve said since 1999 were more elegantly explained by him decades ago.

His situation obviously rhymes with today:

A failed economic consensus which has produced stagnation, misery, investment fleeing and a doomloop of negativity.

Whitehall stuck repeating the failed consensus and resisting change. Senior civil servants strongly resistant to outsiders explaining their mistakes and showing how to do things better, a determination in Whitehall to continue with what they’ve been doing and how they’ve been doing it which seems increasingly crackers outside SW1.

Parties struggling to find new ideas or explain them.

Parties struggling to make Whitehall act differently even when they came up with new ideas.

MPs unwilling to take responsibility for governing and impose their will on the civil service then blaming officials for failure while the officials blame the MPs — as they say in Moscow, ‘everyone’s right and everyone’s unhappy’.

Very powerful self-reinforcing elite networks across politics, civil service, academia, and legacy media telling themselves that the answers to everything are essentially: higher taxes, more state control, ‘trust and support the civil service’, and all alternatives to SW1 consensus are ‘extremist’.

A growing feeling of a ‘systems crisis’ in which many different failures interacted with each other to make it very hard to see how to escape and what to focus on first, so many things feel like a precondition for other things.

MPs lacking the skills to cope with a systems crisis so they go around in circles and default to focus on the legacy media news cycle and diaries organised by officials (often to keep them out the way).

Widespread assumptions that attempts to break out of the doomloop were doomed.

Talent, especially young talent, leaving for America in despair. Talent which talks to senior SW1 figures rapidly becomes more despairing of the prospects of recovery!

Declining international confidence in SW1 and the capacity of UK elites to bootstrap themselves out of perpetual crisis.

Some of you reading this will find particularly striking in the Hoskyns-Thatcher story the combination of:

One of Britain’s very first software startups.

A nuclear physicist.

A causal wiring diagram of Britain’s core problems. (Imagine what LLMs could do with this concept now, see below.)

History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes…

The country has been living off the wealth generated by the Thatcher project ~1976-1985 which turned many things around and put us on a different path. That project had economic momentum which carried us through the failures of Major, Blair, Cameron etc. But Thatcher’s successors have cumulatively done so much damage to infrastructure, regulation, capital budgets, critical capabilities etc — while in parallel very long term dynamics with elite talent and SW1 played out, rotting the system — such that the economic momentum of the Thatcher project has run out and left us stalled with unprecedented stagnation in productivity and wage growth. The economic stagnation is a big cause of our rolling political crisis.

Hoskyns makes clear that the main failure of the Thatcher project was her failure to face the reality of modern Whitehall and how the senior civil service had evolved. If she had done, history would have been very different. This failure led to other failures including Thatcher getting conned over the Single Market and other aspects of the European project which Insiders successfully misled her about (and later bragged about).