Don't mess with British politicians. Even the grumpiest old dogs can savage most American politicians, as the folks that tried roasting Galloway found out[1].
Have there ever been any serious consequences to anything anyone ever said during the Prime Minister's Questions?
Or are they (like every other politician the world over) just putting on a good show for the folks back home?
Most of the stuff that actually happens, does so, in the shadows (for good or ill).
the great irony here is that Galloway left an innocent man, only to watch the US casually endorse its private contractors as they bribe taliban warlords for safe passage in Afghanistan in 2010.
I don’t particularly like that guy, but my goodness he’s absolutely brilliant in that exchange.
There were a bunch of Democrats and liberals, that were saying "I wish Galloway could be President!"
I'm like ... no, you really wouldn't like that ...
https://twitter.com/TheMediaTweets/status/794155820313235458
The difference is they all went to the same schools together.
Only Ed Milliband and Tony Blair went to Oxford, which is where (of the Conservative Party): David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Liz Truss went.
Saying "living under both sides is the same thing" is also observably false, as anyone raised under the Labour governments of 1997 to 2010 can attest and compare to the Conservative governments since.
edit: oh lol I get it now, in the post I replied to you're doing a very literal interpretation of "they all went to the same schools" and refusing to interpret this as it's very clearly intended (that a huge amount of MPs went to a couple of schools)
30% of our House went to a top 100 university which isn't necessarily saying much - that list includes many state universities and I'd say that's a perfectly appropriate number.
20% of the British Parliament went to Oxbridge alone.
//edit// ..and had a privileged upbringing, so was the same class as the others.
He went to neither Eton nor Oxford so no, he didn't go to the same schools as the Conservative leaders he faced.
Starmer went to Oxford. "gained a postgraduate Bachelor of Civil Law degree at St Edmund Hall at the University of Oxford in 1986."
In the past 50 years there have only been 3 PMs not from Oxford. It has nothing to do with conservatives or labor.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prime_ministers_of_t...
I think it's time to look in the mirror and see that your preconceptions and biases are making you overlook reality. Like.. obvious reality. Reality that's so obvious it's in Wikipedia info boxes.
There's a number of components to the sentence I responded to:
> same schools
and
> together
An undergrad studying PPE and postgrad studying Law are not "going to Oxford together." Instead of trying to uncover some insidious bias on my end, I'd strongly recommend doing more than a surface level scan of Wikipedia pages to "win the argument," so to speak.
Honestly, the problem isn't even with all Oxford undergraduate degrees, just a slice of PPE and adjacent students who are vastly overrepresented in politics.
(My background: Leeds BA, Oxford MSc/DPhil. Don't like Starmer, though, despite our similar university choices...)
Ahh yeah the “WMD” Iraq war and introduction of University top up fees.
It's nice that it looks this way, but the different parties and their supporters in the UK absolutely hate each other. Front-bench party members now routinely and openly using words like 'scum' and 'detest' to talk about their colleagues on the other side. I don't think US politics is quite that openly aggressive and hostile.
In the past few years we've had politicians on both sides killed in politically motivated attacks. I think that's a worse tally than the US as well.
Politicians being killed is clearly unacceptable and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of even very politically partisan people in this country would strongly condemn any kind of violence. However, we don't routinely have much security for MPs when they are at their constituency office, so it only takes one nutter to do something. If anything, it's sadly surprising that it doesn't happen more often.
At least up until recently, this was true in the US too. On camera, in front of a microphone, and they say the crappiest things about one another. Then a few minutes later they're shaking hands, slapping backs, and laughing about the whole thing. Hasn't even been that long since the President schmoozed with politicians from both parties as he made his way to the podium for the State of the Union. Now it's "YOU LIE!"
US political discourse is vastly more hostile than you give it credit for, as well. Veiled death threats (shooting pictures of opponents, burning in effigy, etc.) are increasingly common, particularly on the conservative side.
Huh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Congress...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_MPs_killed_in_...
UK 3 in last 30 years, US 2. For a US population of 40x larger, and easier access to guns.
Nine in the last thirty years, not including the ambassador killed overseas.
But nine is still less than the UK, adjusting for population! And that's before access to guns!
That's got to be a cause for alarm? In a society with less access to weapons?
What.
But the absolute number is larger, even ignoring the population size, so not sure what the person I was replying to means.
Britain won't accept things like Politicians being harassed, or one politician calling for other politicians to be harassed (and that's before we even get to anything Trump related).
And the amount of references I see to "civil war" when wandering across anything relating to US politics (i.e. not zero) is disturbing.
No, let's not try to dog-whistle one as acceptable and the other as not. That's exactly the thing I'm talking about.
this is the exception not the rule, and as evidence of this, it’s something that’s been turned over and over in the (especially right-wing) media for weeks now
the two MPs killed were killed by Islamic and right-wing extremists, respectively. this has no bearing on how the main parties treat each other
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/sep/26/angela-rayn...
>the Labour leader distanced himself from her words
you’ve cherrypicked two examples that were disregarded by the parties as a whole, then discussed ad nauseam in the media. this is not evidence of anything
No the problem is just as bad across all parties. That's the worst of it - the civility and willingness to work together is down across the board.
Maybe not, but pretending they are better while ignoring the homophobia, racism, sexism and offensive class warfare from the like of Boris Johnson seems disingenuous.
The fact is that Johnson was ousted by his own party, as was Truss. That would never happen in the US because it's party before everything.
I was trying to make the point that The Conservative Party had members making some pretty average comments on a regular basis.
I remember Jo Cox, who was the conservative who got killed?
The death of Jo Cox wasn't a party political matter, it was a US-style radicalized loner.
No, only one front-bench political party routinely refers to the other as "scum". Stop pretending that both sides do it.
We've had 4 presidents assassinated in our history (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy) and there were attempts on the lives of at least 3 more while they were president or president-elect (Jackson, FDR, Reagan). There have also been a significant number of attempts on the life of presidential candidates (Huey Long and RFK were assassinated, George Wallace was shot and paralyzed) We also don't know where Flight 93 would have gone on 9/11 if the heroes on board hadn't charged the cockpit and crashed the plane in a Pennsylvania field instead of somewhere in DC. The reason why we haven't had many politicians assassinated lately is largely good luck but also because we now have Secret Service protection for all major presidential candidates.
Words like "scum" and "detest" are also not that different from the way people speak about political opponents here. Every presidential election for at least the past 20 years has involved people throwing words like "socialist", "communist", "fascist" and "theocrat" around to describe the other party's presidential candidate even when those candidates were centrists. There's always alarmist insinuations that we're going to turn into the USSR or Nazi Germany if the wrong political party wins the next election. In reality, the US will be largely the same but always getting slightly worse no matter which party wins the election. The difference between the donkeys and the elephants is that one of them makes things worse faster than the other (but people don't agree which is the lesser evil). I imagine Labour and Tory are probably the same way in the UK (although Truss did seem to be especially terrible at her job even compared to her predecessors).
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shoot...
I mean, let us know when a mob storms Parliament to prevent the confirmation of the next PM.
UK and USA, they make a very interesting pair https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-wo...
> Both nations, too, now, are nasty places. They feel so markedly different than the great social democracies of Western Europe and Canada. The atmosphere and mood are ones of constant, omnipresent hostility — to everyone, from everyone
> everything is fine if you are a straight white male muggle
Do you think it is real hatred or kayfabe?
Though interestingly the Obamas and Clintons don't get the same criticism for that, apart from occasionally being held up to suggest the centre left wing of the democrats isn't that different from the old bush-era republicans
I’m not in the US and all of the names you listed have politics I disagree with.
Obama: Privately, that's not -- [Trump's] interactions with me are very different than they are with the public, or, for that matter, interactions with Barack Obama, the distant figure. He's very polite to me, and has not stopped being so. I think where he sees a vulnerability he goes after it and he takes advantage of it.
A fair amount of it is still kayfabe to the pros (the problem is, it isn't to the public).
https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://assets.b...
> The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you've cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society.
The market fundamentally rejecting the ideas of the market fundamentalists would be hilarious, if it wasn't happening to us.
I think when one side believes (with good justification) that the other side tried to get them killed in the workplace, it's not kayfabe any more.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
The BBC is the visual arm of the Guardian at this point.
I'd counter that with how many right wing comedians could be funny on general-public-friendly panel shows absent the usual "my pronouns are ..." / "I identify as ..." jokes?
It typically has no shareholders and its powers are defined by the Act of Parliament which creates it, and may be modified by later legislation. [...] The phrase is not used to describe a company which operates as a conventional shareholder-owned company registered under the Companies Acts.
The UK press is pretty far right and a major element of how we got to this mess, though.
It's not just you. It's how what you do affects other people. This is a better way to live than the "I got mine, fuck you" which seems more common in the US.
This is also exceptionally common in the UK. There's a reason the Brexit vote passed, and there's a reason people voted so strongly for right-wing parties over the last 12 years.
For anyone not aware, a large number of our politicians come from a background at public schools such as Eton, and read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Institutions such as these place great significance on rhetoric and adversarial debate as a method of reaching consensus. Stephen Fry's address to Oxford is worth watching, where he discusses Oscar Wilde's quote about the Oxford manner being the ability to play gracefully with ideas.
One huge downside of this system is that our politicians are widely considered out of touch and unrepresentative. The role of public schools and Oxford PPE degrees in our political system is an area of active debate within society right now.
If you are ever interested in contemporary British politics, the podcast "The Rest Is Politics" is a great place to start.
I always have to remind myself that an English "public school" is what most people call a private school.
Per Wikipedia[0]:
> "public" in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession.
I emphatically agree that an emphasis on rhetoric will make smart people smarter.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)
The issue is that language drifted and now “public” generally means “owned by the public” rather than merely “open to the public”.
This is true both in their inferior form of "British Parliamentery debate" as well as the various American styles, such as Lincoln Douglas, Policy, or Public Forum.
We truly are two peoples separated by a common language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqjHz9laqgU&t=368s
And debate between the Harvard Democrats and Republicans:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYLcpQQCjLE&t=1655s
I've never seen or heard of a debate like the one in Peter Schiff's youtube channel there, and it is pretty obviously being shared on social media for emotional effect.
While I have to admit I'm not a fan of that debate style, if you want to know the context behind it, there's an episode of Radiolab on the topic: https://radiolab.org/episodes/debatable
The short version is that it seems to have been a response and rebellion to what was already an arguably ridiculous style of competitive "debating": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FPsEwWT6K0
You'd think that in a community of "hackers" that should value actual skepticism and subversion that people wouldn't fall so easily for obvious propaganda.
For anyone else curious, this is maybe a good read:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-to-speak-gibberi...
It starts with the knee-jerk conservative anti-woke reaction, which peaks here:
> A reader in the comments suggests that these students should listen to MLK’s oratory and take a lesson. Absolutely. King was a master of rhetoric. That is the way to change minds. The teachers who are instructing these kids in this sort of thing are guilty of intellectual abuse, as are the CEDA officials who reward it.
But the updates after that, explain what is really going on:
> Rod, this post needs a serious correction. While that debate was ridiculous, it is entirely typical of what college “cross examination” debating has been for decades. The trend has been for (mostly white) debaters to talk about nuclear war in a debate about education policy, the environment in a debate about military policy, post structuralism pretty much whenever they feel like it, etc. etc. It’s a ridiculous form of debate but it isn’t some weird black thing. The reason these black students are debating like this is that they are competing, in a league with teams from schools like Harvard and Yale, that rewards this style of debate.
And the author is slightly magnanimous in his apology:
> UPDATE.3: To be perfectly clear, I concede that I was wrong to say that this team broke the rules of debate by refusing to address the topic, instead choosing to rant about racism, and to say that the woman who looked as if she were having a psychotic break (which she does, to the untrained eye) was doing anything wrong. I learned from readers that the Towson team’s bizarre display is actually well within the rules and the custom of competitive debate. So, congratulations to them, I guess. I learned something new today: Competitive debate is a completely insane phenomenon.
Naturally the most obvious explanation for the US beating the UK at something is that the US population is 5x ours. Another explanation is that outside of public schools and Russel Group universities, we don't actually have much of a culture of competitive debating or debating societies any more. None of the schools I went to had a debate club, despite being relatively good schools, and I never heard of any debate competition being held.
From what I've seen from US competitive debate, it seems to be surprisingly popular with minority students and seems to use a style of rhetoric and scoring that I'm completely unfamiliar with - seemingly sometimes rewarding speed or Gish galloping. Here, the debates that most people would be familiar with are most commonly judged by their ability to convince the audience and are more popular with well educated, upper middle class people.
If not, maybe that explanation isn’t a very helpful one.
So it’s not a very good joke, as it implies that there aren’t any other filters, despite their intense concern for reputation.
The joke would only work for schools that famously looked the other way on pretty egregious stuff if you paid them enough -- not on a school that makes a point of heavily filtering beyond the official tuition. (Sorry, "sticker price".)
Side note: It's also kinda funny how the parent expects 45k to be some kind of jaw-dropping, outrageous number, when Americans routinely pay that much for college.
This is not true of Eton or Harrow or the other public schools.
[0] - Or whatever Boris Johnson got, I can't recall exactly, they were spectacularly subpar but he's masterfully scrubbed them from the internet
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33275396
So… what’s left to make the joke work?
Both of us thought this was hilarious!
Given the life-long opportunities an Eton education affords someone, and the likely backgrounds of that 75%, you’d be reasonable in suspecting “a system of perpetuated inherited privilege”.
When these schools were founded, the alternative was to have private tuition - as opposed to be taught "publicly" and live with children from other families.
(The school I went to was founded in 1513 - but is known as a private school rather than a public one because it was never a boarding school).
Edit: interesting history on why: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdo... the schools “were "public" in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession.”
Ita confusing. In the uk, private schools are referred to as "public schools". The last person to know the reason for this died in 1764. Probably.
Schools that the actual public go to are called "state schools" because they're funded by the state (and not by daddy's estate).
(Although that school isn't currently in the HC, presumably because it was run by Christian Brothers and one of the teachers has since been imprisoned for inappropriate behaviour with children.)
Nine prestigious schools were investigated by Clarendon (including Merchant Taylors' School and St. Paul's School) and seven subsequently reformed by the Act: Eton, Shrewsbury, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, Westminster, and Charterhouse.
Confusingly, "Public School" refers to the most elite (and very exclusive) schools in the UK
They do tend to be very good schools but raise issues about social mobility, elitism etc (they tend to be expensive).
Because, on the face of it, that viewpoint seems to be simply deranged.
The brexit vote passed with a very slim majority, which is why it's still controversial here.
It's also a cross spectrum issue, i.e. not of the left or the right.
Personally, I would like to see our politics become more centred and pragmatic again.
I don't want anyone like either Jeremy Corbyn or Jacob Rees-Mogg near the levers of power. Both seem determined to destroy things of value for the sake for the sake of the personal political dogmas.
Part of the current crisis is the intra-party conflict between the "libertarian" faction that wants more immigration to boost the economy and the "nationalist" faction that wants to eliminate it to win easy votes. They got to have their cake and eat it for the last decade (people voted Brexit to both increase and to decrease immigration from India), but this caught up with them.
One of the major mistakes made by Kwarteng as chancellor was firing an extremely senior civil servant which spooked not just the civil service but also the markets, because it indicated that elected officials would now be more active in running the business of government. That’s something no one really wants.
Real ill luck then to find the one educated fool who is skilled in obfuscatory rhetoric for the latest PM. Reassuring to know that the rest of parliament is filled with educated good intentions.
I don't think this is quite the benefit some think it is.
i'd consider that a bug not a feature
Sure, they may run circles around you or me when it comes to debating some aspects of policy. But not around someone who's invested time and energy into a specific topic, which I think ought to be the bar for whether we consider these people 'well educated' and 'intelligent' when they are running the country supposedly on my behalf(!).
On the conservative side you have several politicians who had actually been programmers before they went into politics, one who worked with implementing risk models at a betting firm. They had generally read the Ferguson/ICL papers and understood why they were deeply flawed, and could talk at length about the concrete technical problems that had undermined COVID modelling, both statistical and implementation wise. For example, one MP talked about a specific paper and why it was based on circular logic, others about the validation of the underlying assumptions. And of course they asked a lot of pointed questions about how such shoddy 'science' had been allowed to dominate the government, about how the quality of scientific advice could be improved. Concrete things that they'd already thought about a lot.
Then the SNP and Labor MPs stood up. It was night and day. They were, primarily, angry that a debate was being held in the first place. Their entire spiel was "How dare the evil Tories criticize amazing SCIENTISTS who are only trying their best". One even cited the conclusions of the specific paper a Tory MP had just ripped to shreds 10 minutes earlier, apparently without realizing he was discussing the same research. None of them had any knowledge of the actual topic whatsoever. Their worldview went no deeper than: academics are brilliant, Tories are evil, why are we even wasting time debating this?
This is ultimately the reason the conservatives have such long durations in government. The quality of MP they attract seems to be much higher overall. Yes they have lots of the Oxford PPE types but overall they're less angry, way more polite and analytical, and way more likely to have concrete skills obtained outside of politics. A good example of this problem for the left came up just a few days ago where a supposedly neutral Channel 4 presenter was caught on a hot mike calling Steve Baker a "cunt". Baker - a Tory MP and one of their former programmers - just politely brushed it off, clearly the better man.
This sort of thing is routine in Labour circles and it puts voters off. Whilst some may rail against classism, ultimately most people want to see civilized debate between politicians who don't clearly want to kill each other.
In addition to being out of touch and classist, a main thesis of the book is that Oxonians learn “to write and speak for a living without much knowledge”. This worked well for England for hundreds of years but more recently has led to disaster where actual knowledge and expertise matter eg implications of Brexit, pandemic response, etc.
Review: https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/01/chums-how-a-ti...
That's roughly 1 member per 100,000 people. You know your member. Parliament is dissolved every 5 years. So elections are pretty regular, but not overwhelming.
There's a House of Lords, but they seem to have far less power. The work of Parliament gets done in the Commons.
The main legislative body of the US is Congress, comprising of the Senate and the House of Representatives. There are 100 Senators and 435 Representatives. The US has roughly 330 million people. So about 5 times the population being represented by more than 100 fewer people.
Senators are a little weird. They serve for 6 years but about a third of them are up for election every two years. And never two from the same state. So a Senator is either on Cycle 1, Cycle 2, or Cycle 3. So every 2 to 4 years, a state gets to choose one person to represent the entire state in one of the houses of Congress.
Then for Representatives, all of them are up for reelection every two years. As soon as they are sworn in, they're already thinking about reelection. And the number of representatives are set by the Census taken every 10 years. Right now, California has 53 representatives for 39 million people. About half the population of the UK, but being represented by under a tenth.
So in the US, politicians are more akin to personalities than actual people. We essentially elect brands, not people.
The whole system is weird. Why is a vote in one state more powerful than a vote in another?
I mean, if the US had representation in the same proportion as the UK, they'd have roughly 3300 representatives. The town I grew up currently has a population of 1500. So I can see why we wouldn't do that.
Wherever you vote it should be worth the same.
The system hasn’t kept pace with demographic changes.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/31/u-s-populat...
In Britain the PM is chosen by the party in power so you don't get the divided government situations you see in the US where usually the Democrats control some of (1) the Presidency, (2) the Senate, (3) the House of Representatives and the Republicans control others. Considering the veto power of the President and the filibuster rule in the Senate that can be a formula for gridlock.
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both represented a move to the right but when Thatcher was in power she had no effective opposition while any legislation that passed in the 1980s was a compromise between Reagan and Tip O'Neill and I think between having a good conservative and a good liberal, we got a lot of good legislation in the 1980s (we got a new Clean Air Act in that time frame, for instance.)
As a result there was a lot of resentment towards Thatcher from Labor advocates who felt completely shut out, so some sang "Ding Dong the Wicked Witch is Dead" when Thatcher died
https://theconversation.com/burying-thatcher-why-celebrating...
The UK government has been in utter turmoil for a long time now and it’s at its worst right now. This resignation marks a new low in self destructive politics and posturing.
I know you are referring to a different type of political impasse, but the chaos that is present in the UK is not a lot better than what the US system seems to see so regularly.
I subscribe to The Economist which would like to support the Tories but has had nothing but contempt for Teresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
Some people say that the Democrats in the US are like the losers in professional wrestling but the complete incompetence and inability of Labor to get elected makes it possible for conservatives to get elected by pandering to a particular segment of the population. Voters have no interest in talk about redistribution if they think they think the people who talk about redistribution push policies that will leave people with nothing to redistribute. Jeremy Corbin did nothing to push back on the perception that he wanted to turn the UK into Cuba, and by not providing a viable alternative the Tories became useless. Corbin hoped that the fall of the Tories would lead to the rise of Labor but oddly it doesn't work that way.
100%.
The inability of Labour to make headway at this time is so depressing.
The common ground between the UK and the US is the inability to find and promote leaders with a combination of age, charisma and ability on their side.
If their best are those elected, the future is grim.
In the US, if you want to go after the rural working class then you better be talking correct about abortion and guns otherwise you will get nowhere.
Its really not easy to do.
IMO the Democrats would have been better off focusing most of their effort on something like single payer health care, along with minimum wage and housing affordability, things like that. Those are issues that are ostensibly part of the party platform but are not high priorities.
Calling abortion a “wedge issue” leads you to thinking about it the wrong way. Sure, democrats say abortion is an unimportant distraction the GOP likes to trot out—but only insofar as everyone unilaterally accepts their position on it. They certainly didn’t treat it that way when Roe was repealed.
There’s no “wedge issues.” The electorate cares about what it cares about. Parties need to triangulation on positions that keep their coalition together, and avoid positions that allow the other party to divide their coalition. It’s just math.
Aka, propaganda doesn't actually exist. At the very least, my team doesn't do it.
This myopia is a great shortcoming of democrats (of the last 20 years—the party used to be savvier in the past), because it leads them to believe that politics is about lecturing and badgering, instead of building coalitions of people who agree more than they disagree.
"There are no wedge issues - propaganda doesn't actually exist. At the very least, my team doesn't do it."
List of countries with same or more restrictive laws for abortion when compared with Texas
Europe - None
Asia - Afghanistan, iraq, syria, Yemen, Burma, Papua new Guinea, Bangladesh
Africa - Somalia, Mali, Malawi, south Sudan, Congo, Niger, Nigeria, Madagascar.
America - Venezuela, Haiti, Suriname, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, tiny Caribbean islands.
Your use of the phrase "seeing as how it’s illegal in two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa" would have been a great example of propaganda, especially considering that no country in Europe is as restrictive as Texas. Especially, leading with "Europe,..." instead of leading with " barely 2 dozen non European countries across the 200+ countries in the world".
But as we all know wedge issues and propaganda don't exist. So, my previous paragraph can actually be deleted.
The real strategic leadership of that block mostly died off in the 2000's though, leaving evangelicals headless and politically adrift. These days most seem to have reverted back to being somewhat apathetic in the positive direction, and aside from abortion, are voting completely based on the products out outrage culture.
Like it or not the electoral map favors rural voters, Democrats can recruit more urban voters and it will make no difference for winning seats. If Democrats gave up 5% of their urban votes in exchange for 3% of the rural votes the Republicans would find themselves in the wilderness.
The GOP stands to gain nothing in the urban cores outside of a few southern cities and Texan cities, but they currently live for the suburban fight. The Dems biggest struggle out in the sticks is less that they can't field any candidate that isn't an 80 year old union man or a local youngin' fresh out of college who says all the wrong things (and is thus unelectable).
The people you’ll lose doing that are the Rockefeller republicans—Silicon Valley and Westchester types. And that’s fine.
I don't know a huge amount about Regan, but I doubt you can really compare them.
Britain in the late 70s and early 80s had huge issues which Thatcher addressed, but in hugely contentious ways, in some cases destroying entire industries and their communities.
The structural impact of some choices she made are still present in British society even now, decades later.
To interpret Thatcher you need to know about the labor unrest in the UK in the 1970s. Back then there seemed to always be a strike in some chokepoint industry (Coal mining, trucking) that threw the rest of the economy into chaos, almost like a general strike. This gets talked about it in this song
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(Wish_I_Could_Fly_Like)_Superm...
A lot of people saw the labor movement as a big problem, thus Thatcher was in position to make a big crackdown against it. I occasionally meet an Americans who is opposed to unions, but there never was a time when a reasonable person could say unions were bringing the US economy to its knees.
Reagan had an impact of moving the US to the right a lot like Thatcher did, but not so much.
The Democrats largely accepted Reagan's viewpoint because it was perceived to work. Clinton accepted Reaganism just as Blair accepted Thatcherism, in fact both politicians were able to outdo their predecessors because on the other side of the aisle they were able to neutralize any possible opposition and normalize the slogan "there is no alternative".
Although Barack Obama introduced almost universal healthcare but implemented the public-private partnership plan that Nixon offered in 1974... One that almost works as a policy, but does great damage to institutional legitimacy because it looks like another case of regulatory capture and ultimately contributes to the nation becoming ungovernable.
Terms and conditions apply.
Once I heard Newt Gingrich talk vaguely that high deductible plans and health savings accounts (a core idea of Obamacare) would be a good "free market" solution but it strikes me as another one of those penny wise and pound foolish ideas.
If people don't buy the $200 a month Asthma inhaler which high deductible plans make them pay for themselves they might have 2 hospitalizations a year which cost $15,000 a piece... which high deductible plans will pay for. High deductible plans seem to be a way to maximize the costs of chronic disease like diabetes.
Britain's problem with labour unrest was rooted in other problems. Ironically, one being a problem we are seeing again now - massive inflation.
Yes, you can definitely 'solve' the problem of industry strikes by completely destroying the industry involved.
That's one option.
There's no doubt that workers would like to get a 10% raise in a year when there is 10% inflation. Since labor is a substantial input into the cost of services, it also seems like a plan to have at least 10% inflation next year.
The leader of the coal miners union didn't even fight for coal minor wages, he was talking actually revolution.
Some privatizations were sensible, lets remember that Nordics, Switzerland and so on also did that and you can do it well depending on the situation. But they are complex issues that you need to consider rationally on what you want to do.
The British government rail was probably to big, doing to many things and selling part of that and splitting it up and opening it up to some competition is sensible.
In my opinion labor in the 1950/1960 just did poorly, overly focus on some of their socialist hangups rather then making smart policy. Like Britain had debt after the war for sure, but its not like it was bombed to the ground (the Blitz was minor compared what most countries experienced), you have a rebuilding Europe. Britain had a world class aircraft industry, advanced nuclear, building lots of cars, world leading and so and so. Its had a great good electronics sector as well. Being among the best in the world in almost every major technology.
And somehow that couldn't be leveraged into much economic success. You have terrible growth and massive inflation just 20 year later. Something did go wrong, and you can't blame the conservatives. Even when they were in power for period they only slightly slow down the agenda.
To be sure, good things were done in that period as well it certainty wasn't all bad but its hard to look at pre-Tracher Britain and be overly impressed.
Coal was mostly crushed in the 1980s by the low capital cost of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant
and the low cost of gas of Natural gas in the US and UK, the latter because of the discovery of petroleum in the North Sea. The same economic steamroller pushed "pause" on nuclear energy.
Today we see coal miners in the US who are empowered by the "one state, two votes" structure of the Senate to keep the industry alive despite it being basically uneconomic as well as environmentally unsound, the difference is this time the coal miners are supported by the right instead of the left.
Those who hate Thatcher today aren't so much pining away for the way things used to be but instead for the loss of their dreams for how they think things could have been.
Thatcher's most memorable slogan was "There is no alternative" and it's that sense that the realm of the possible in politics shrunk dramatically is why people have a sense of loss. (I'm amused that both Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton liked that slogan too.)
We lost over 2 million manufacturing jobs at the beginning of the 80s.
The hate of Thatcher, imo, was less about "the country" and more directly about the impact on people's communities and direct personal relationships.
But looking back, Thatcher tactics were at times borderline fascist.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/03/miners...
One of them killed lots of people, and still gets praised today as making their country richer, when the evidence suggests they didn't. Which wouldn't really justify the deaths even if true. Sorry, did I say one of them, all of them, I meant all of them. Seems easier to spot that when it's not your country though.
Financial impact too; oil company privatisations and tax cuts which offset the income from the oil fields deprived the UK of a sovereign wealth fund equivalent to Norway's (although likely not as large, due to variations in the price of oil).
Obviously democracy is a sliding scale, but what was in place in the 1800s had a lot of headroom.
The question I have is which came first, in the US? Regular citizens in the US harbor the same naked resentment and hatred for their fellow Americans based solely on political affiliation. We used to hide it better, especially around family, but that barrier has mostly been broken down too. Did our politicians turn us this way? Or did we just elect politicians that say the things we want to say? Did the news media whip up this resentment with biased stories, or did we voluntarily filter bubble our way into incentivizing that behavior?
I'm referring to the parliamentary sessions in which, even though they're savagely roasting each other, they're doing in a way that feels somehow good-hearted and doesn't lay bare the naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA.
Also, less amusing but still inspiring, has been articulate criticism from politicians and pundits who seem to actually care about the thing they're talking about; on this side of the Atlantic, it's easy to get the sense that anyone in front of a camera has a pile of talking points on a set of index cards in their lap that they pull out to memorize during commercial breaks.
Charles Walker, giving an impromptu interview, seems to care about a thing: https://youtu.be/Dimw572twfk
Parliament roasts Truss: https://youtu.be/Zc_9Ty_-PrQ