This Earth, This Realm, This 2024 British Election to Tell Tories to Sod Off, Eh

It's been a busy weekend, but here's news about the British Prime Minister calling for a snap election - months ahead of when he was required to hold one - that may well spell the end of almost two decades of Conservative Tory rule (via Helen Lewis at The Atlantic (paywalled)):

One of the perks of being Britain’s prime minister is getting to choose the date when voters deliver their verdict on your government. Most push their advantage by selecting a time when their party is ahead in the polls, the economic mood is buoyant, and their supporters are optimistic about success.

None of those things is true now for Sunak and his Conservative Party, who will face voters on July 4. Since the last election, in December 2019, the Tories have dispensed with Boris Johnson for partying through COVID and Liz Truss for somehow tanking the economy in a mere 49 days in office. Sunak, who has been prime minister only since October 2022, was required to call an election by December, but no one quite understands why he has done it now...

The recent local and mayoral elections were bloody for the Tories. They lost nearly 500 local councilors, the mayoral elections in London and Birmingham, and a special election in the northern-English constituency of Blackpool South. “For the Conservative government the message is crystal clear,” Rob Ford, a political-science professor at Manchester University, wrote on Substack after the results came out. “Voters want them out, everywhere, by any means necessary. That mood is as strong as ever and time is running out to change it.” Added to this, Sunak’s personal ratings are woeful: Polls show that a majority of Britons find him incompetent, unlikable, or indecisive...

So why call an election now? Presumably because Sunak thinks, in an inversion of the song that soundtracked Tony Blair’s election victory in 1997, things can only get worse. And sure enough, when Sunak made his announcement outside Downing Street, a protester outside the gates started to play “Things Can Only Get Better” at ear-splitting volume, drowning out the prime minister’s recitation of his record in office, and of the threats currently facing Britain. As it turned out, things could also only get wetter, as spring rain soaked the normally dapper Sunak. He was just a man, standing in front of an electorate, asking them not to humiliate him at the ballot box...

Something that Lewis barely mentions in her article - the word itself only shows up three times - is Brexit. The biggest policy gambit since Margaret Thatcher's undoing of the social safety net, the one policy that Conservatives - pushed by Boris Johnson, Brexit's biggest advocate - campaigned hard for back in 2019, the one thing affecting nearly every economic decision made by Parliament since 2016... and you'd be hard pressed to find ANY Tory or major UK media outlet bringing it up as an issue for the voters. Not even Labour - the major opposition party poised to retake Parliament this cycle - wants to discuss Brexit's impact on the United Kingdom.

Which is weird considering how Brexit's been a negative effect on Britain ever since Johnson pushed a hard Brexit departure from the European Union. Even the economists like Bloomberg's Matthew A Winkler can't put a positive spin on it:

Far from being the bloated, inefficient bureaucracy derided by Euroskeptics -- led by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson when he was the fabulist journalist for the London Telegraph -- who colored the prevailing Brexit media narrative, the EU economy is growing 2.3 percentage points faster than the UK’s on an annual basis, with GDP advancing 24% since 2016, compared with the 6% for the UK. During the 10 years before the Brexit referendum, EU GDP lagged behind the UK annually by 12 basis points, since 2000 by 9 basis points and the two decades preceding Brexit, by 149 basis points, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The dichotomy is similar for GDP per individual among the 20 countries sharing the euro. The bloc’s per capita GDP increased 19%, or 2.19 percentage points more than the UK on annual basis since 2016, an overwhelming reversal of the decade prior to Brexit. During the 10 years preceding Brexit, annualized euro zone growth was barely eight basis points better than the UK, and between 2000 and 2016 the euro zone trailed the UK by six basis points.

Contrary to the overwhelming perception, Britain had everything to gain from its EU inclusion and little to lose as the bloc expanded with the fall of the Soviet Union's Berlin Wall and rapid integration of Eastern European countries. Between 2011 and 2015, the EU's jobless rate expanded from 1.3 percentage points higher than the UK to 4.6 percentage points above. Only after the Brexit vote did the situation reverse, with the EU's additional joblessness rate narrowing to 2.9 percentage points as its citizens secured employment at a faster rate than their UK counterparts...

Among other things that happened - even when you take the COVID pandemic of 2020-22 out of the equations - have been the increased red tape within the UK itself trying to deal with trade with multiple different partners instead of a unified EU bloc. Supply chains got disrupted and show no signs of getting better.

Conservatives can't resolve these matters because they dare not admit - even to themselves - that they bolloxed their prized policy stance this poorly. Every response they could offer from their agenda - tax cuts and deregulation - could well trigger apocalyptic reactions from their markets (like it did when Liz Truss tried to pitch a massive tax cut plan that nuked her Prime Minister job in record time). Labour doesn't want to talk much about it - even though they're likely to repair some of the damage to fit their own policy ideas regarding trade and finance - because they have their own concerns about the EU that hampered their own campaign stances back in 2019.

If the Tories have any advantage, it's that their district-oriented, first-past-the-post election system could split the anti-Conservative anger among the voters between Labour and the third party Liberal Democrats. Much like what happened in 2019, where the Lib Dems - the only major party to openly oppose Brexit - and Labour competed to their detriment letting Conservatives to eke past both in key districts. While this time around, there's more calls for "strategic voting" between Labour and Libs to ensure that doesn't happen again, there's no guarantee the voters will pay attention.

Tories have basically been in control of the UK since 2010, over 14 years of economic austerity and Brexit ineptitude that has broken most national services and created this social and economic malaise. Toss into that scandal after scandal that have exposed the Conservatives as liars/hypocrites/failures, and there's little that the party can offer as any kind of successful leadership. 

There's far too many British voters now angry at them, since there's no one else to blame now.

Time for them to depart, they have sat too long for any good they have never done for the nation or the world. In the name of Doctor Who, go.

P.S. As a side note, it's been pointed out how Sunak is calling for this election to fall on July 4th, which is a rather embarrassing day in British history all things considered; and a pretty funny act of irony for us Americans who'll be celebrating our Independence Day then. Considering how I celebrate that day - blogging like mad to make it Four for the Fourth - I am likely to comment on the election results, so I got that to look forward to. ;-) 

Buh-Bye, Brexit Boris

A grand day for exposing conservative douchebaggery across the globe. Boris Johnson has just straight-up resigned from Parliament (via Rowena Mason at The Guardian): 

Boris Johnson is standing down immediately as a Conservative MP after an investigation into the Partygate scandal found he misled parliament and recommended a lengthy suspension from the House of Commons.

The former prime minister angrily accused the investigation of trying to drive him out, and claimed there was a “witch-hunt under way, to take revenge for Brexit and ultimately to reverse the 2016 referendum result”.

In a bitter 1,000-word statement, he attacked Rishi Sunak’s government, blaming the current prime minister for rising taxes, not being Conservative enough and failing to make the most of Brexit.

Johnson hinted that he may try to make a return to politics, saying he was “very sad to be leaving parliament – at least for now”.

I personally can't see how Boris Badhair returns to politics. He's burned every bridge and goodwill he's ever had including within his own party. He's only quitting now because the suspension he was threatened with - 10 days of it - would have triggered an automatic by-election. He had to know he was going to lose in an election where it was him alone on the platform, and forced to explain how badly he performed as Prime Minister and as a human being.

Blaming Sunak for Brexit's failure is of course a charming way for Boris to deflect how his own screw-ups and obsessions with pushing a harsh No-Deal break from the EU is why Brexit never worked out the way he lied promised it would.

Can't wait to see how Chris Grey blogs about this over the weekend.

But man. trump getting hit with serious federal charges, and now Boris Johnson fleeing in shame from his own party. I wanna get a hat trick here people, let's hit the trifecta. C'MON GOD, HIT PUTIN WITH A LIGHTNING BOLT TONIGHT.

Truss is Toast, But Where Does That Leave the UK?

It's a bit worse than that. After my check-in with British politics showing Prime Minister Liz Truss - barely a month into her tenure - facing collapse of her government already, Truss was measured up to a head of lettuce - to see if a fresh head of lettuce could outlast her - and failed, miserably (via Helen Lewis at the Atlantic):

...Six days ago, Liz Truss’s leadership was in such trouble that a British tabloid began a livestream to test a simple proposition: Could the shelf life of a supermarket vegetable outlast her time as prime minister?

Today, the lettuce looked a little bruised, but it could still be incorporated into a healthy salad. Sadly, Liz Truss serves no such useful purpose. At 1:30 p.m. London time, she announced that she was leaving office. Her replacement will be elected next week.

The saga of Liz and the lettuce tells us many things about British political culture, one of which is its taste for lousy jokes. How was the Brexiteer Liz Truss brought down? A Romaine plot. Why did she make so many mistakes? Just cos. Was her decision to give a tax cut to the rich her fatal error? No, it was just the tip of the iceberg. Be thankful there aren’t more varieties of lettuce...

What went wrong? As I wrote earlier this week, everything. Her economic plans made the markets shudder. Her staffing decisions alienated her colleagues. Her poll numbers suggested that the Conservatives were heading for an electoral wipeout. Britain’s economic situation is extremely precarious: Inflation is higher than 10 percent, food banks are warning about elevated demand, and there is a small possibility of electricity blackouts over the winter. Yet despite the widespread fear these things engender, in the end, so much went wrong for Truss that people kept telling me they felt sorry for her. She was absolutely hopeless...

It's been noted that in reference to the short career of Scaramucci (11 days), Liz Truss lasted about 4 Scaramuccis. Hardly the best thing for her resume. Truss' tenure was so short the political biographies on her getting rushed out to the bookstores for Christmas are already obsolete.

That all said, the question now is "Who is foolish enough to replace her as Prime Minister?"

I mentioned this in the last article: This whole fiasco "...Exposes the Conservatives with the painful reality that they have ousted two Prime Ministers within within 6 months of each other, and creating a leadership crisis among factions who are fighting amongst themselves for high office. A situation that will consume the next unlucky soul who signs up as PM because their party's Brexit platform will condemn that fool to more failure."

In a horrifying development, Boris Johnson is eyeing a return to the job that his own party drove him from three months ago. He still has a fanbase within the Tory ranks, even though enough of the Conservatives were sick of Boris' constant scandalous behavior and constant lying. It's as though Boris is thinking "Well, they've seen the worst of what my replacement Liz has done, surely they will forgive me and bring me back to power."

That is, of course, utter madness (and a terrifying sign of Boris' narcissism). One of the reasons the Conservatives are down in the polls is the loss of trust that happened on Johnson's watch. There are no signs that the British voters are willing to forgive Boris for his failures getting his Brexit plans to work, and especially not about to forgive him for his mishandling of the COVID pandemic and the self-serving scandals that doomed him.

When Boris faced his No Confidence vote in June 2022, it was followed by a series of party-breaking resignations that threatened to gut his Cabinet and wreck whatever government he could form, which drove him to resign (although he took all summer to do so). There are no signs that Boris can form a new government today. The Tories themselves are so divided by factions that if Boris forces himself back into the big chair that one of those factions will split off and wreck the weakening Conservative majority, forcing a special election now instead of 2024.

Even if it isn't Boris retaking 10 Downing Street, whomever does get the job faces the same problem of either major faction - either the Ultra Brexits who want their utopia, or the moderates looking to rebuild a trade deal with the European Union that could regain some economic stability (what a Soft Brexit could have been) - splitting off out of sheer spite. Whatever happens, this current situation is untenable, but the Conservatives are so bound to their Brexit fantasies that they cannot stop themselves.

This clown car is still falling off the cliff, everybody. It's a question of how sharp the jagged rocks are below.

Liz Truss Is In Trouble

Update: Ooof, what? I was at work today, what's all this about Batocchio adding this article to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up this morning? Dammit, I didn't vacuum the rug or anything! (hurries to clean up the place) Um, glance around, I got other stuff to read. Also, in a couple of weeks I will find out if any of my blog articles up for the FWA's Royal Palm Awards will win anything, so keep an eye out for more news! Thank ye, Batocchio.

When last we checked in with the United Kingdom, the Brits were coping with the loss of their beloved Queen Elizabeth II while their Parliamentary government had chosen a replacement Prime Minister to take over from scandal-plagued Boris Badhair.

Liz Truss had just recently replaced Boris Johnson in early September, going up to Scotland to Elizabeth's pastoral retreat at Balmoral to present her credentials and perform the ritual - bowing, holding the hand, answering three questions to cross the Gorge of Eternal Peril, that sort of thing - each new PM does with the Crown. Only that within 24 hours of doing so, Elizabeth II fell ill and never recovered, which didn't exactly bode well for Truss.

It was as though Liz II met Liz T, and Liz II decided "Fuck all, this ditz isn't worth it, I'll let Charles handle this nightmare" and got out while the getting was good.

Because Liz Truss is turning out to be even WORSE as Prime Minister than Johnson was. Within a month of being in office, Truss has blundered from one bad mistake to the next, exposing her Conservative leadership to humiliation, creating economic catastrophes that can't be easily undone, and forcing her Tory allies to plot her early removal.

Christ. Even William Henry Harrison lasted longer than this (okay, I exaggerate, but Truss is honestly facing the shortest tenure as Prime Minister in British history).

Let's go to the dirty details with Tom McTague at the Atlantic (paywall):

Today, we had the absurd spectacle of a prime minister, barely a month into the job, abandoning the central tax-cutting purpose of her premiership and sacking her closest political ally, who had implemented this vision. This all in aid of a vain and surely doomed attempt to cling to power, after the markets concluded that her policies were insane. Never before has Britain found itself in such a humiliatingly risible position. It is the stuff of nightmares: the national equivalent of getting caught short onstage in front of your entire school because you chose not to go to the bathroom when you had the chance...

The political ally McTague speaks of was Kwasi Kwarteng, chosen to be her Finance Minister in her Cabinet, who was obsessive about the supply-side/trickle-down fantasies of massive tax cuts as stimulus in a British economy facing inflation and several other woes. When Kwarteng presented his tax-cut plan with Truss' approval, everything went to hell (back to McTague):

What Britain needed, Truss argued, was a tax-cutting bonanza to set it free. Her rival for the leadership was Johnson’s chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who argued for fiscal responsibility and warned that such a reckless policy would lead to a run on the pound and a calamitous series of mortgage-rate rises. Given this choice, the electorate for the Tory leadership—the roughly 170,000 members of the Conservative Party—preferred the magical money tree.

So, on September 23—two and a half weeks after taking over as prime minister—Truss and her new chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced an extraordinary array of tax cuts without any indication of how they would be paid for. They called this their “plan for growth.”

And then there was a run on the pound and a calamitous series of mortgage-rate rises...

If you've followed my blog, every so often I will come across the Republican Party's obsessions with tax cuts being a cure-all for all ills, and I will scream into the void that TAX CUTS DON'T WORK. Watching the British counterparts of the Tories trying to pull the same trickle-down fantasy and getting smacked by the real world is satisfying in a schadenfreude kind of way. Back to McTague:

The reaction to Truss’s plan was immediate and savage. The markets responded with horror at the sudden gaping hole in Britain’s budget. The pound collapsed against the dollar, almost reaching an unprecedented parity, and the cost of government borrowing rocketed. Huge interest-rate increases by the Bank of England began to be priced in as the only way to protect the currency, which, of course, meant stepping on the brakes after Truss had put her foot on the accelerator.

This, in turn, led ordinary banks to start hiking their mortgage rates in expectation of what was coming, just as Sunak had warned, which then sent the property-owning middle classes into a tailspin as they rushed to lock in new rates before the numbers spiked even further. Suddenly, the tax-cutting budget to get Britain growing again had turned into a massive hit on Middle England. Even the International Monetary Fund departed from protocol to issue a sharp rebuke to Truss’s government...

Her intraparty rival warned her, the UK banks warned her, and Truss STILL pushed ahead on an unjustified tax cut plan all because - Gods help the Conservative Party - they have no other plans that fit their world-view. Tax cuts are all they believe in much like the American Republicans, because they dare not think about raising taxes on their billionaire corporate allies to fix their government's budget woes. Again to to McTague:

In a single act of stupidity, Truss managed to blow up Johnson’s markedly redistributive election-winning platform—and therefore his coalition, which included disaffected Labour voters from the poorer north of England. Instead of spending more on public services, Truss detonated an economic bomb under the middle classes—first, by lifting the cap on bankers’ bonuses and cutting taxes for the rich, and then, faced with market turmoil, by scrambling around for new spending cuts. It would be hard to design a more catastrophic act of political self-immolation...

Britain has been broke before. It was in this position after the war when it needed U.S. assistance, and then again in the late ’70s when it was bailed out by the IMF. It was battered by the markets in 1992 when John Major’s economic strategy collapsed.

What’s happening now is entirely new: the very real prospect that the markets will force a change of prime minister before an election. They have already forced a change in policy. Truss’s problems are so acute that Tory MPs are discussing removing her as a serious option, perhaps their only one. If Truss is removed any time soon, hers would be the shortest premiership in British history, beating George Canning’s 119-day tenure in 1827. And he died in office...

(That's where I got the comparison to Harrison. My bad)

While McTague is raking Truss over the coals for her blunders, the thing he avoids discussing is how Truss and her Tory allies were hampered by their blinkered devotion to the primary source of all of Britain's current economic woes: Brexit. That disaster - haunting that nation since 2016 - is a very big reason why Truss - and her predecessor Johnson, and his predecessor Teresa May - can't make any other major economic reform needed to rebuild the UK economy.

For that, I go to Chris Grey at his invaluable Brexit & Beyond blog where he points out the flaws in Truss' agenda and how Brexit is going to doom her and any other replacement Prime Minister until the next general election. From his September 30th article:

The political ambitions of the libertarian wing of the Brexit Ultras have always been ambivalent. On the one hand, they have largely preferred to complain of betrayal from the sidelines rather than take any responsibility or, if accepting ministerial office, to quickly resign rather than engage with the pragmatic realities of Brexit. On the other hand, they have hankered to be in charge not just so as to create ‘true Brexit’, but the ‘real Conservatism’ of which Brexit was a part and to which it was a gateway.

With the advent of Truss’s premiership, they have eschewed the sidelines in favour of governing and, with a rapidity that even their sternest critics would have thought it cruel to predict, have been exposed as utterly incompetent, both politically and economically, and in the most basic of ways. It is deeply ironic that this has happened at the hand of ‘the markets’ which they so slavishly fetishize...

The occasion, of course, was last Friday’s tax-cutting ‘mini-budget’. “At last! A true Tory Budget”, the Daily Mail drooled, whilst Nigel Farage simpered about “the best Conservative Budget since 1986”. Yet, whether despite or because of this fidelity to Conservatism, and as anticipated in my previous post, there was an immediate crisis in the currency and bond markets, with the value of the pound falling to its lowest ever level on Monday, and the cost of government borrowing in the form of gilts or bonds rising very sharply. Amongst numerous knock-on effects, pension funds, which invest heavily in such bonds, came within hours of mass insolvency on Wednesday afternoon, threatening a major breakdown of the financial system and requiring major emergency temporary action from the Bank of England. This, in combination, with a clear signal from the Bank that interest rates will rise in due course, which eased pressure on the pound, has effected a degree of stabilization, but markets remain jittery and it’s by no means clear that this crisis has run its course, especially as regards gilts.

These weren’t routine or trivial market movements, but an overwhelming and brutal vote of no confidence in the government’s plans. Specifically, they were a vote of no confidence in the decision to cut taxes, or not implement previously planned tax rises, and to fund this through borrowing. Again as anticipated in my last post, the government’s refusal to allow its plans to be scrutinised independently by the Office for Budget Responsibility added to market alarm. So, too, did Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s casual reaction over the weekend, even suggesting further tax cuts to come. The rout continued on Monday when, as Paul Donovan, Chief Economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, put it, “investors seem to regard the UK Conservative Party as a doomsday cult”...

Re-read the part about Kwarteng's suggestion of doubling down on an economic plan that already caused a meltdown. The wingnut Conservatives can't stop themselves. If tax cuts create a massive economic crisis, well then by God we'll insist on even more tax cuts, because sooner or later the Trickle Down Fairy will grant us our boons. /headdesk Truss firing Kwarteng from his job was the only way to curtail that particular madness. And yet, the cause of every other act of insanity happening in England remains because Truss and her party are still wrapped up in Brexit dogma, as Grey continues to note:

So, given that the Brexiters themselves regard the mini-budget as integral to Brexit, it’s reasonable to say, as Robert Shrimsley of the Financial Times did (£), that “Brexit ideology lies behind the UK’s market rout”. It’s abundantly clear to even the feeblest intelligence that those Brexiters now include Truss, for all the fury  of Dominic Cummings’s denials (directed at me!) on the inane grounds that she supported Remain in 2016. As I pointed out during the campaign, she is now a ‘born again Ultra’, perhaps the more fanatical for being so, and was extravagantly endorsed by the leading Ultras, making the fact that she was once a Remainer the most tedious and least relevant thing to say about her.

As so often before, Brexiter responses to the crisis they created have been confused and contradictory. Some in the government prissily said they could not comment on market events, as if some new Trappist ordinance of political propriety has been invented. Others downplayed what has happened, suggesting that the market reaction is either trivial or transient, or even that it has little or nothing to do with the budget but is simply a result of a strengthening dollar (which doesn’t explain why the pound fell against all major currencies, or what happened in the bond market). Outrageously, some, like Crispin Odey, hedge fund manager, Tory and Vote Leave donor, and sometime employer of Kwarteng, blamed “Remainers”. Peak insanity was reached by Daniel Hannan, who blamed the crash not on the mini-budget, but market fears of a Labour government!

Of course much like Conservatism itself, Brexit cannot fail it can only be betrayed. Even with the Bank of England and IMF and various other economic entities telling the Tories that it's their Brexit policies creating these economic meltdowns, the Tories cannot accept that fault and must blame others - the Remainers, Labour, hell even the Teletubbies will get accused next - rather than admit where the Leave movement went wrong. Grey calls them out on that:

That refusal has as its counterpart the distinctively Brexity idea, now taken over wholesale by this Brexit government, that they are beleaguered revolutionaries of true Conservativism fighting the (presumably false) conservatism of ‘the Establishment’. The notion of Brexit as an anti-Establishment insurgency has been a ludicrous one ever since the 2016 referendum was won, and Brexit became adopted as the central policy and national strategy. It is even more so now that the Brexit Ultras are unequivocally in charge of government, though of course it is a standard populist trope, familiar from the Trump presidency.

What we have seen this week is that the Brexiters have added ‘the markets’ to the increasingly long and diverse list – encompassing the ‘Woke’ Blob, the civil service in general and the Treasury in particular, the BoE, Remainers, Rejoiners, the National Trust, the BBC – of enemy forces they must confront in the name of revolutionary purity...

So my own view is that, in their arrogance and delusion, this Brexit government, and its cheerleaders, really do believe it has found a new ‘unconventional’ economic model and did not expect the market reaction, and that although a full November budget was certainly planned, including the announcement of the deregulatory ‘supply side reforms’ that will supposedly deliver the growth to pay for tax cuts, it was not going to include significant spending cuts which, instead, were anticipated for after Truss had won the election on the back of what they expected to be a growing economy. Then, with the legitimacy of a fresh mandate and a compliant parliamentary majority, she would declare it was time to shrink public spending but without coupling that with the tax cuts that would already be in place.

If my interpretation is right, the government’s plan is now in tatters, and the expectation is that the November budget will feature huge spending cuts (£) (and perhaps reversing the tax cuts, as some Tory MPs want, which can’t be ruled out though it seems unlikely at the moment)...

For this government was already politically weak, and as a result of this crisis is now much weaker. Although the libertarian cabal has taken control of the government, both it and Truss have many opponents amongst MPs and, as I remarked in a post during the leadership campaign, the current Tory Party is so riven by factions as to be unleadable, with rebellions an ever-present possibility. This week’s crisis has laid that bare, with, almost astonishingly given how new her premiership is, reports of letters of no confidence in Truss being submitted by some MPs and threats of backbench revolts...

There is already talk of a No Confidence vote happening by Monday. They're already pressing the 1922 Committee that oversees such matters to force her out as soon as possible. But this maneuver exposes the Conservatives with the painful reality that they have ousted two Prime Ministers within within 6 months of each other, and creating a leadership crisis among factions who are fighting amongst themselves for high office. A situation that will consume the next unlucky soul who signs up as PM because their party's Brexit platform will condemn that fool to more failure.

Seriously, who will be next to replace Truss? It's looking like it will be Sunak, who warned of the collapse of the pound and housing costs skyrocketing, but he didn't win over the party earlier this year, and he's viewed as being weak on Brexit meaning the extremist factions will rebel against him anyway.

The entire Conservative Party in the UK is stuck in a downward spiral of self-inflicted defeats, all because they can't change course on their Brexit policies and dare not open themselves to the possibility that the Remainers were right all along. But in the meantime, they'll fight against any calls for a emergency election in order to stay in power until 2024 when the general election happens anyway: Two more years of nightmarish intraparty fighting while the British Isles falls apart. 

The only way that election happens is if the Tories finally break apart into their own party factions: If the Tories go to a Minority government, they may not have enough votes to stop Labour forcing new elections.

It then becomes an issue of how angry the British voters will be, and if they abandon Conservatives to switch to Labour - or even Liberal Dems - in a final rebuke to Brexit madness that has broken their nation the last six years.

That's the only hope the British have left.

London Burning (And the Heat Wave Is Only One Reason Why)

When last we checked in on the United Kingdom, a lot has changed.

For starters, there's a new Doctor Who announced as Jodie Whittaker wraps up her tenure as the first official female Doctor. It'll be Ncuti Gatwa stepping up - Good Lord, he's younger (born 1992) than my flip-flops (bought 1991) - to take on the Fourteenth Doctor (which may not be the fourteenth regeneration, they're starting to really wibbly-wobbly with the Doctor's already messy origin story).

Let's see, um, there's been big news in women's soccer oh right football to the European continent. The Lionesses rule!

There's been a brutal heatwave across the UK, as well as much of Europe. It's bad enough that airport tarmacs and roads are melting back into tar.

Oh, and the Tories finally had enough of Boris Johnson's scandal-paloozas and forced him to resign as Prime Minister (although being the cheating git he is, he won't leave until September and even then may back out of it).

The last big scandal Boris was mishandling was the Partygate Affair at the beginning of the year, where his administration ignored the COVID-19 protocols they were enforcing on everyone else. While he skated in public, due to putting a clamp down on the official report before it got completely out, he faced turmoil among his fellow Conservative Tories ranks. A party Vote of No Confidence got called back in June.

Even with Boris surviving that No Confidence vote, the fact it even happened is usually a sign the PM isn't going to last another year. Margaret Thatcher faced a No Confidence, Theresa May faced a No Confidence, and while they both survived they resigned within a year because further intraparty conflicts made their positions untenable.

And Boris only got 59 percent support where Maggie had 84 percent and Theresa 68 percent. He may have been on a lifeboat, but it had 41 leaks already and was sinking like a miniature Titanic.

All it would take was one more scandal - one wafer thin mint of a headache - and it came with the aptly named MP Pincher getting caught a little "hands on" with other members of a social club. As stories of Pincher's behavior going back years got out, Boris Johnson publicly proclaimed he and his government hadn't heard of those stories... except it turned out Boris himself was warned even as he promoted Pincher to a high position.

Basically, Boris had been caught in yet another lie.

This was a problem with him even back in 2019, when I covered his rise to the Prime Minister's post. I relied on Sam Knight's reporting from the New Yorker so let's refer back to that again: 

This is the Johnsonian way. The lies, the performative phrases, the layers of persona—they accrete, one on top of another, flecked here and there with Latin, until everyone has forgotten what the big deal was... In 2001, at the age of thirty-six, Johnson was elected a Member of Parliament for Henley, a safe Conservative seat in Oxfordshire. When he came under pressure to resign from The Spectator, because of the conflict of interest, he demurred, and coined what has become his best-known political aphorism: “I want to have my cake and eat it.” Johnson hates choosing between things, even right and wrong... 

One of the undercurrents of Knight's story was how Boris pushed his persona and his political stances not with facts but with half-truths and empty promises (the title of Knight's article). The Brexit campaign in 2016, in alliance with other anti-EU fringe groups, was the culmination of Johnson's efforts:

At first, Johnson promised that he would not take a high-profile role in the Brexit campaign—or criticize Conservatives who were backing Remain—but that pledge lasted only a few days. The referendum debate was made for him. It pitched the government, which was boring, cautious, and cognizant of the flaws in Britain’s relationship with the E.U., against the Brexiteers, whose very name carried a whiff of japes and derring-do. While Cameron and his loyal ministers presented fact sheets warning of the economic and political risks of Brexit, Johnson and the gang toured the country in a bright-red bus, waving asparagus (to promote British farming) and promising to return three hundred and fifty million pounds a week to the National Health Service, which was a lie...

The jolly feel around Johnson enables him to air sinister ideas and dodge the consequences. When Barack Obama told reporters that Brexit would hurt the U.K.’s trading prospects, Johnson wrote a column referring to “the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British Empire.” (Johnson has also written of “crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies” with their “watermelon smiles,” in Africa, and described Muslim women wearing niqabs as “letter boxes.”) At a climactic TV debate between Leave and Remain figures, on the last day of the campaign, Johnson adopted a line—previously used by Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party and now the Brexit Party leader—describing the day of the referendum as Britain’s independence day, a nationalist slogan that brought the house down...

And yet, all those lies Boris spilled had (still have) consequences: The Leave Vote forced then-PM Cameron to resign (Never the smartest or best Tory leader ever, even he knew exactly what the damage would be and fled before he could get held accountable himself). It created a leadership crisis among the Tories that Boris could have easily filled in that moment but even he faltered, overwhelmed by the immenseness of the damage he himself caused. For a politician who never really figured out an agenda other than to fulfill his own crass desires, he still stayed afloat because no one else - especially after Theresa May tried and failed multiple times - could complete the disaster that a full No-Deal Brexit would bring to the nation.

As much as Republicans in the colonies United States have to cope with the reality that their leader donald trump is a consistent (and terrible) liar, the Tories back in "this earth this realm this England" had to cope with the reality Boris is a consistent (and terrible) liar as well. Everyone saw this was coming and still the Conservatives had no one else to turn to. As Helen Lewis over at the Atlantic (paywalled) noted:

As I said, though, this was a long road to an inevitable end point. For years, Johnson has been making his aides and supporters look stupid by sending them out to peddle lines that turn out to be untrue. Back in July 2019—that last blessed pre-pandemic summer—Johnson was the favorite to win the Conservative Party leadership election, and thus to become Britain’s next prime minister, and I had just joined a magazine you might have heard of called The Atlantic. My second-ever Atlantic article explored an arresting modern phenomenon: the political outriders forced to humiliate themselves on behalf of charismatic, chaotic leaders. Think of all the Republicans who thought that, surely, Donald Trump wouldn’t lie to them...

These contortions could be attributed to “Johnson’s own vagueness and hatred of commitment,” as I wrote at the time. But there was a shorter word for the problem. Boris Johnson lies...

Or as noted by Jonathan Freedland over at The Guardian:

Lies and a brazen contempt for the rules powered his rise; lies and a brazen contempt for the rules brought his fall. Which means the political odyssey of Boris Johnson has a curious symmetry. Except that what began as defects in the personality of one man ended as defects in his party and his government, inflicting great damage on the entire country...

None of this was a surprise, because dishonesty has been the one constant through Johnson’s career. Famously, he was sacked from his first job, at the Times, for making up a quote, and later he was sacked from Michael Howard’s frontbench for lying to the then party leader about an affair...

Ordinarily, a reputation for serial deceit would close off the route to the top, or at least prove an impediment. Yet for Johnson it proved no obstacle at all. On the contrary, his route to No 10 was smoothed with lies. How come? What were the forces that propelled a man whose flaws were so clear and well documented into the most powerful job in the land...?

He turned the Tory party away from the values it once held dear, so that Johnson’s party cheerfully jeopardized the union, tramped on parliamentary sovereignty and even insulted the monarchy. He purged it of some of its best people and debased several of the great offices of state by filling them with obvious incompetents. Above all, he drained what remained of the public reservoir of trust.

In the spring of 2020, Britons were ready to follow their prime minister into a long period of collective self-discipline, even at the expense of hardship and emotional pain. They did it because they believed him when he said we would all be doing it, every last one of us. The Queen believed it, which is why she sat alone as she buried her husband of 73 years. But it was not true.

That will leave its own legacy, in distrust and cynicism that will endure long after Boris Johnson leaves Downing Street, his brief but toxic spell in the office he craved since childhood finally over...

Deceitful leadership from the Tories. From Conservatives in general, when you lump them in with trump's deceitful following here in the States. All to extend their political power at the expense of the realities that didn't fit their narratives: To the U.S. under trump, the falsehood of "Making America Great Again" with tariff wars, punishing minorities, and dragging the nation into a theocratic Stone Age; To the Brits under Johnson, the falsehood of freeing themselves from the EU with broken promises, a dysfunctional border system, and the likelihood of both Scotland AND Northern Ireland leaving the UK as Brexit ruins their local economies.

I should stop throwing in trump as a comparative model: This should be focusing more on the damage Boris Johnson is leaving behind when he departs (unless he tries to pull off another stunt and cancel his resignation). One last referral to the always-excellent Brexit & Beyond blog by Chris Grey: 

As the dust begins to settle on Boris Johnson’s downfall, it’s worth emphasizing that it was inextricably bound up with Brexit even though Brexit wasn’t its direct cause. Unusually and fittingly, it was his character and conduct rather than any particular policy which ended his premiership. Not, I think, because the Tory Party had some collective outbreak of moral rectitude – they all knew what Johnson was like from the outset – but more because the thumping loss of two by-elections demonstrated that the voters were finally starting to see through him, in large part because of ‘partygate’.

In some ways that’s a good thing. It arguably shows that, eventually and creakingly, the British polity still has some kind of moral compass. But it also means that, even though it ought to be, this is not a moment of reckoning for the Brexit he did so much to promote and shape...

Yet in truth, Johnson’s deficiencies of character are inseparable from Brexit. He was far from the only liar in 2016, but the casual and brazen dishonesty with which he fronted Vote Leave certainly embodied and perhaps swung its campaign. He even embodied many of the particular hues of that dishonesty, in his insistence not just that facts don’t matter but that belief matters more, in his endless sense of his own victimhood, still on display in his resignation announcement and mirroring that of the Brexiters generally, in his refusal to take responsibility for his choices even to the extent of denying choices have to be made, and in his constant bogus and half-baked invocations of the Second World War...

It's now widely accepted, including, if only superficially, by most of the candidates to succeed him, that Johnson’s legacy is a constitution and political culture horribly damaged by dishonesty and immorality, with accompanying public distrust and cynicism. But simply laying this at the door of his own character, without recognizing its roots in Brexit, means it will not be addressed.

There’s actually an even wider point to be made. The referendum didn’t just result in leaving the EU. It also created a massive and ongoing destabilization of British politics. It is not coincidence that we have had two general elections and are about to have the fourth Prime Minister in the space of just six years. That is astonishing in itself, but what is far more astonishing is that at each of the pivotal moments – the general elections and the leadership elections – Brexit itself was only discussed in the most cursory of ways.

This may seem a strange thing to say given how dominant an issue Brexit has been since 2016, but my point is that it has rarely, if ever, been talked about in depth, spelling out its actual practical implications and the choices and trade-offs involved...

So neither at these decisive points nor in the periods between them has there ever been any sustained, honest, realistic political conversation about the practical realities of Brexit. Instead, throughout the May years there were suggestions of securing ‘frictionless trade’ and the ‘exact same benefits’ of membership and in the Johnson years the claim of cakeism and denial of the coming costs, with Labour all the while just talking vaguely of the ‘better deal’ they would achieve. Equally, throughout these years there was virtually no honesty about the actual choices and problems posed by and for Northern Ireland. Instead there was endless nonsense about non-existent ‘alternative arrangements’ and, ultimately, the creation of an Irish Sea border whilst denying that that was what had been agreed. Thereafter, since the end of the transition the political silence about the damaging effects of Brexit has been deafening, whilst all the denial and dishonesty about Northern Ireland has been re-activated...

Boris may be getting kicked out of the Prime Minister's chair, but the damage his efforts to push and achieve Brexit remain ongoing. Not so much because Boris is still lying about Brexit - he is - it's because the rest of the political leadership in the United Kingdom are still lying to themselves about the far-reaching implications that they're stuck with.

Whoever is going to be the next Prime Minister is going to inherit the lies and delusions of Boris' false narratives, and it's not going to end pretty for them either. 

All of London - all of the UK - is going to keep burning hotter than hell for anyone inheriting No. 10 Downing Street.

Tories Partied Like There Was No Tomorrow...

...and for Boris Badhair, there might not be a tomorrow the rate the current scandals are overtaking his UK government.

When last we left the United Kingdom/Brexit news (my last full comment on it was 2019): Boris Johnson had pulled off an electoral stunner over Labour in spite of his unpopularity, and was poised to make a hard No-Deal exit from the EU to fulfill his dream of an economically-independent UK happen. 

What happened since then got a little overwhelmed by this minor inconvenience of a COVID-19 PANDEMIC, but since then the news about the UK's economic hardships piled up fast and often. Some of it tied to the overall economic hardships of surviving a global pandemic, but a lot of tied to Johnson's and his fellow Conservatives' (Tories) delusions about how to pull off their Brexit policy changes without hassles. (P.S. If you want better details, please follow Chris Grey's excellent blog updates for more)

The biggest problem has been their nation's supply chain woes: As predicted by several pro-EU critics, Brexit created a staffing shortage with truck (or lorry, in their terminology) drivers that the existing UK population can't sustain. 

Overall economic growth has been sluggish, even against what the pandemic did to bring a lot of business to a temporary halt: It is all well below the promises Johnson and other Leave advocates made from 2016 onward.

And now piling onto that is an energy crisis during a hard winter where energy bills for many residents are skyrocketing, creating conflict over Brexit ideology that Johnson's intraparty factions can't resolve.

So speaking of parties... Guess what it is that's pulling Boris Johnson and his political allies downward to the brink of resignation/no-confidence votes/all-out government collapse?

If you hadn't heard - and I think there's two ensigns on Deck 39 who haven't heard yet - Johnson is facing harsh scrutiny for allowing office parties to take place at 10 Downing Street and elsewhere back in 2020/2021 during the COVID Pandemic when rules were issued to the whole United Kingdom to disallow such gatherings. In short, the Tories - and Boris himself, who got caught on camera indulging in the shenanigans, oh Boris no, not with a LIGHTSABER - partied like the rules didn't apply to them.

From this Guardian opinion essay from Andrew Rawnsley:

The defenestration of a prime minister between elections is usually triggered by a seismic event. Neville Chamberlain was forced out after Norway was gobbled up by Hitler. The national humiliation of the Suez debacle did for Anthony Eden. The epic unpopularity of the riot-provoking poll tax impelled Margaret Thatcher towards her unwilling exit. David Cameron felt compelled to quit when he lost his gamble on the Brexit referendum. If Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson soon joins the gallery of toppled PMs, it will be because he attended a “bring your own booze” party in the back garden of Number 10 and his aides had a lockdown-busting piss-up in Downing Street the night before the Queen buried her husband...

True, the optics of that - Queen Elizabeth II, the human symbol of Great Britain's storied history and global importance, the Crown, beloved mother figure to an entire kingdom, and Doctor Who Number One Fan, sitting alone at her husband's grave while Rome burned Tories partied - should have caused mass resignations out of sheer British decency, but I digress. Back to Rawnsley:

No other premiership has had such a pathetically shabby ending. No finale to his slummy reign would be more appropriate. It has always been highly likely that cavalier and blatant rule-breaking, and then lying about it, would be the undoing of a prime minister with a career history of casual contempt for truth and integrity.

In its relatively short life, his premiership has been splattered with scandal. There was the “crony express” that sped lucrative Covid contracts to Tory mates down a “VIP lane”, which the high court has just ruled unlawful. There was the decanting of infected elderly patients from hospitals into vulnerable care homes at the height of the pandemic. Nor should we forget the multiple-sourced accounts that Mr Johnson callously declared that he would let the bodies “pile high in their thousands” in the winter of last year rather than take timely action to contain a resurgence of Covid, an appalling choice that resulted in many avoidable fatalities and has left Britain with the highest death toll in Europe.

These and other outrages ought to have deeply troubled Tories, but many in his parliamentary party responded to scandal after scandal with a dismissive shrug... When previous charges of moral turpitude bounced off him, Tories told themselves that their leader was coated with a lacquer of Teflon so thick that nothing could stick. Some cynically opined that voters knew that Mr Johnson was a mendacious scoundrel when he won the election in 2019 and so appalling behaviour was expected and – ghastly phrase – “in the price”. It was often averred that a substantial chunk of the public enjoyed having a “lovable rogue” at Number 10. “Everyone loves a sinner.” So one senior Tory chortled to me last autumn when his party was still sitting on a poll lead even as Wallpapergate and several other scandals were on the boil. He went on: “If Boris was caught shagging a goat in Downing Street, people would immediately make a goat beer and drink to his health...”

If this all sounds familiar, to a certain person's claim in the States that he could "shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and I wouldn't lose voters," you wouldn't be wrong. What you are reading/hearing/seeing is the arrogance of a political elite that holds themselves above all rules even their own, at the expense of any ethics or integrity we should expect from our elected leaders. Again, I digress:

It is hard to say which is the more jaw-dropping. The flagrancy of the rule-breaking. The arrogant stupidity of it. Or the stunning frequency with which the denizens of Number 10 behaved as if laws did not apply to them. The prime minister’s feeble plea in mitigation for the garden party that he admits to attending is that he thought it was a “work event”. This laughable excuse asks us to believe that he failed to notice that alcohol was flowing and that his wife and her chums were present. He had to fall back on such a risible defence because the alternative is to confess that he flouted his government’s regulations and afterwards sought to dupe the public and deceive parliament...

Even if he (Boris) was not physically present for all the parties, he was at every one in spirit. What possessed Number 10 staffers to think that it was sensible or decent to turn Downing Street into a drinking den while people were dying? As I like to remark from time to time, the culture of organizations is greatly shaped by the character of the person at the top. The most egregious rule-breaking became habitual at Number 10 and that is surely directly connected to the fact that the most senior person in the building is a compulsively shameless rule-trasher. “Fish stink from the head,” remarks one former Tory cabinet minister. “So does Number 10...”

It seems a bit off that with all of the chaos afflicting the United Kingdom right now it would be a set of ill-advised drunken bacchanals that would drive out a sitting Prime Minister, one of the most politically powerful figures across the world.

Under other circumstances, such rule-breaking would likely involve the civil workers caught partying to quit or get fired, a shake-up of the lesser Cabinet seats of expendable party members to bring in more "reform-minded" replacements, and then brush it all under the rug of "I apologize, lesson learned."

But it seems Boris and his ilk are receiving the full force of national outrage, with 63 percent of the general UK population calling for his resignation. While the intraparty support isn't wavering - it never will until the party faithful are told it's okay to support someone else - the Conservative Party itself is under serious threat. Two recent by-elections to fill seats vacated by this scandal both went Liberal-Democratic (a staunch pro-EU party) in what were heavily-Conservative gerrymandered districts (well, not rotten boroughs but along the same lines).

From where I'm sitting, the PartyGate situation has less to do with the rule-breaking and more to do with the general outrage most Brits were feeling after several years of Brexit follies and COVID mishandles. Unable to express full anger over the supply woes, unable to express outrage over rising costs both Brexit and COVID related, all because a strong plurality of the population are Conservative-leaning (what we'd call Center-Right) and couldn't complain about a Brexit process they supported, these party scandals seem like an outlet granting the citizenry their chance and their right to vent at bad leadership caught lying to them over and over again. And not just the leadership under the clownish Boris Johnson, but a decade or more of questionable leadership from the likes of Theresa May and David Cameron who held onto hard-line Conservative values that left the UK unprepared for the crises happening today.

Yes, leadership ought to be held accountable. Yes, leadership needs reminding that they themselves are not above the laws. But this outrage is a rupture of scope and anger somewhat disproportionate to the damage actually caused by these reckless parties the Tories sought to indulge in.

Not that I'm complaining. I'm breaking out the popcorn - well, okay, the Nestle Buncha Crunches because I got out of eating popcorn as a teenager, damn you braces! - watching all of this just like everybody else who's Center-Left enjoying the schadenfreude of the Right-leaning wingnuts crash and burn.

There's supposed to be an official government report investigating these parties due next week. Thing is, as Prime Minister Boris will get the first look at it, and God knows if he'll try to redact it or suppress it in some way. Of course, something this big will be bound to leak out, so any suppression effort will hurt him anyway.

(keeps munching on those Buncha Crunches) Would it be tacky of us to throw a Farewell/"GET THE FOOK OUT" party if/when Boris is forced to resign...?

Bring on that tomorrow, Tories. It's the bill for decades of mismanagement and self-entitled bullshit come due.

How the Year 2019 Ends: In Fire

I woke up this morning to reports of the US Embassy in Baghdad under siege by protesters angered up by recent military strikes on Shiite strongholds in Syria and Iraq.

For almost a month now, the entire continent/nation of Australia has been on fire due to prolonged drought, rising ocean temperatures, and an ungodly heat wave (it's Summer on that side of the Equator) that are all part of the climate change nearly every scientist has been screaming was coming to kill us all. Those eco-disaster movies from ten-twenty years ago? THEY ARE HAPPENING NOW IN REAL LIFE.

India is on fire this month due to their nationalist Hindu government pushing a citizenship law that would specifically exclude Muslims. It doesn't help that the nation is roiling from a growing rape gang crisis threatening the safety of every woman who lives there.

Over the past ten days the number of antisemitic attacks in America have gotten worse, ranging from vandalism to street assaults to someone with a machete stabbing Orthodox Jews at a rabbi gathering in Brooklyn.

Boris Johnson has cleared out nearly every obstruction in his quest to fulfill a Hard Brexit pullout from the EU, which is now including efforts by the Tories to privatize their National Health Service and make it more like the United States (welcome to medical bankruptcy, Brits!). We are looking at a January 31 2020 where a No-Deal Brexit will happen because the EU won't cave on any of Boris' demands.

Israel is forcing itself into yet another general election because the last three tries failed to form a unified government. It does not help that current PM Netanyahu is facing corruption charges... but refuses to leave office and indeed got an overwhelming vote of confidence from his own party meaning that unless enough voters break with their own parties to support an opposition majority they are stuck in gridlock.

China has entered its umpteenth month (since June at least) of Hong Kong protests over the city/region's autonomous status, which is a serious civil/human rights fight that China will never recognize. Not to mention the ongoing human rights abuses of concentration camps punishing millions of Uyghurs for their religious/ethnic differences.

We're still coping with the ongoing Impeachment of President Loser of the Popular Vote and Eternal Shitgibbon donald trump. With additional evidence showing that members of his foreign policy team - Sec of State Pompeo, Sec of Defense Esper, and NSA John Bolton (!) - confronted trump in late August (before the Whistleblower concerns got to Congress) to convince him to release Ukrainian military aid (trump refused). Not only reaffirming other evidence of trump's extortion racket but that key members of his administration have evidence they still need to present for the Impeachment proceedings.

Everything is chaos.

Everything is on fire.

Welcome to 2020.

It's going to get crazier from here.

I Know The Voices Dying with a Brexit Fall

So despite some early hopes that the youth vote turnout would flip enough districts in the UK, the British General Election right now is showing a major Conservative victory: Tories getting an increase of 51 seats for a solid majority, Labour losing 71 seats, the Lib Dems not doing well enough to be a factor, and absolutely everybody on the Remain side of the debate utterly horrified that a No-Deal Brexit is going to happen.

Even though the results of the overall population showing 40 percent support for Labour over 32 percent for Tories, the way each district is Winner-Take-All within that district distorts the final results (like the U.S. Electoral College, an overabundance of voters for one Party in one locale cannot compensate for smaller turnout in others).

It was foolish for Labour under Corbyn to agree to letting Boris Johnson push a new election at this point in time. Corbyn either didn't think his own unpopularity with general voters (and within in his own ranks) would hurt Labour, or else thought the controversies Boris was having with bad Brexit deals would weaken Tory support. There's also the reality that Remain voters - the ones most likely able to NOT vote Conservative - were split between Liberal Democrats and factions within Labour... which could have been positioned to uphold Remain but didn't because even among the Far Left there is a desire to exit what they view as a corrupt (pro-Capitalist/pro-banking) EU.

Either way, how the HELL do you lose 71 seats to the worst Prime Minister in British history? If Corbyn doesn't resign from Labour leadership for his open incompetence, just surrender now and relocate to Finland, my Progressive brethren.

So where does this leave the United Kingdom?

Boris and the other hardline Brexiteers are going to push for votes on the hardest possible terms for leaving the EU... which may not get enough votes in Parliament anyway if enough Tory members are terrified of the long-term consequences. This "blowout" election is no guarantee of the backbenchers signing up for something that a majority of Brits will end up regretting... and they know it.

The Scots may well revolt to get an Independence referendum. Northern Ireland might as well if the border backstop is screwed by Boris' Brexit deals.

The National Health Care system - already under the strain of budget cuts and preliminary reaction of a future Brexit - will face even tougher hardships under a Conservative Party that openly wants to turn their universal health care system into a for-profit model similar to the United States. (Just on this alone, Brits, you should have voted those Tory fuckers out of office. The hell?)

More chaos and bad leadership. That's how bad it's going to get under a Boris majority in the UK.

It's time to bring punk music back, my people.

Gods help you.

London Calling to the Brexit Zone

London Calling to the imitation zone
Forget it, brother, you can go it alone
London Calling to the zombies of death
Quit holdin' out and draw another breath

London Calling and I don't want to shout
But while we were talking I saw you noddin' out
London Calling, see we ain't got no high
'Cept for that one with the yellowy eyes
-- The Clash, "London Calling"

At some point talking British politics, you GOT to quote from the classics. I was due to quote my guys - The Only Band That Matters, aside from the Beatles and Ramones - considering Brexit. And boy, today it was way overdue.

Boris Johnson just crashed and burned in his first big vote as Prime Minister, and likely trashed his Tory majority for the moment. Via Patrick Smith at NBC News:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson lost a key vote in the House of Commons on Tuesday after lawmakers used an obscure procedural motion to wrest control of the parliamentary agenda from the government in a bid to stop a "no deal" Brexit.

The vote was 328-301, with several members of Johnson's Conservative Party rebelling and supporting the motion. They can now expect to be kicked out of the party...

Senior party figures, including former chancellor Philip Hammond, were among those who backed the motion. This means opposition members of Parliament and a handful of rebels from the ruling Conservative party can now introduce legislation to postpone Brexit beyond the Oct. 31 deadline...

The vote was perhaps the most dramatic moment since Britain voted to leave the E.U. in June 2016. Since then, British politics has been paralyzed and obsessed with the question of how the country should leave the bloc.

Most observers now expect the government to call for a snap election in October in order to win a mandate for a "no deal" scenario in case an agreement can't be made with the E.U.

However, it is unclear whether the opposition Labour Party, currently trailing in the polls, will agree to back an early election...

According to other commentators - I can't find the links at the moment - it's not in Labour's best interest to hold a snap election. Johnson could use that election to perform other tricks - such as delaying the election itself - to ensure the No-Deal break from Europe happens on October 31.

More than likely, Labour and the Liberal Democrats - who are likely picking up the exiled Tories to boost their numbers, they already picked up one today to legally break the Conservative majority to zero - could use their mathematical majority number to force another extension of the Brexit deadline and then force something that the Tories and Pro-Leave forces can't sabotage.

Everything is in chaos at the moment. The only thing we can be sure of is that Boris is running out of tricks to force the collapse of the United Kingdom to serve his whims. This is, unfortunately, the moment when a wounded beast is at his most dangerous.

No Hope for the Queen's Courage Against Brexit (w/ Update)

Update 12:45 PM EDT: Queen Elizabeth approved Johnson's request for the Prorogation of Parliament. This is not good. She's essentially allowing Johnson to do whatever he wants at this point. Disaster. Disaster and madness.

Today we need a special kind of courage. Not the kind needed in battle, but a kind which makes us stand up for everything that we know is right, everything that is true and honest. We need the kind of courage that can withstand the subtle corruption of the cynics, so that we can show the world that we are not afraid of the future. - Queen Elizabeth II, 1957


When last we left Brexit, the Conservatives promoted Boris "trump's Mini-Me" Johnson to the seat of Prime Minister... and then broke on a month-long vacation because corrupt conservatives love nothing more than to let government crises melt on the stove while they're away on vacays.

So now that the vacations are over and the Members of Parliament are coming back to work, what is Johnson's solution to the Brexit crisis?

Oh, I see. He wants to shut down Parliament so that nobody can stop him push a No-Deal Brexit through. Via Jessica Elgot and Heather Stewart at the Guardian:

Boris Johnson has confirmed he has asked the Queen for permission to suspend Parliament for five weeks from early September.

The prime minister claimed MPs would have “ample time” to debate Brexit, as he wrote to MPs on Wednesday, saying he had spoken to the Queen and asked her to suspend parliament from “the second sitting week in September”. (personal Note: this is bullshit)

MPs will then return to Westminster on 14 October, when he said there would be a new Queen’s speech, setting out what he called a “bold and ambitious domestic legislative agenda for the renewal of our country after Brexit”.

The effect of the decision will be to curtail dramatically the time MPs have to introduce legislation or other measures aimed at preventing a no-deal Brexit. Parliament is expected to sit for little more than a week from 3 September...

What Johnson is legally asking for is a "prorogue," a normal Parliamentary practice of closing down government whenever there's new Parliament leadership put in place so that things can get organized around a planned platform of policy initiatives (symbolized by a new "Queen's Speech" - like the U.S. State of the Union).

However, the timing is obviously NOT to create a new platform but to end an ongoing one with Brexit, which has consumed the British government for the past three years and is basically down to "Leave or Remain." Johnson is doing this less to get a new government up and running and more doing this to obstruct/block any opposition to the "Leave" he is intent on pulling off... which is a No-Deal Brexit that a vast majority of Brits (as well as enough members of his own Tory party) do not want.

This particular prorogue is - in short - a ministerial coup d'etat to prevent real democracy from rising up in anger against a widely disliked and self-destructive agenda.

What this will do is effectively prevent any opposition vote from getting a chance on the floor, stymie a likely vote of no-confidence against Johnson's No-Deal obsession (unless enough Tories can force one before Parliament is shut down), and expose the Leave effort as a straight-up dictatorial move instead of the "public referendum" that the pro-Brexit people have been lying about all this time.

I honestly hope Queen Elizabeth II takes her time to think this through, to think of the reality that the United Kingdom she has ruled - she has served and sworn to protect - for her entire life is now about to get pulled apart by this grinning buffoonish nightmare of a Prime Minister. That of all the PM's she's ever had to deal with (and My God she's dealt with so many), Johnson is the one most likely to destroy everything her reign had kept together evolving from Empire to Commonwealth.

I hope Ma'am realizes that if she agrees to shut down Parliament - effectively guaranteeing a No-Deal Brexit - she is destroying her legacy, her nation, her home. I hope the next thing she does after that is publicly kick Johnson in his balls for five straight minutes before firing his ass and calling for a new election (if that is within her powers).

If the Queen approves this prorogue, then that's it. She's presiding over the internal destruction of her own kingdom, a bonfire to her legacy.

Brexit became a problem because men like Boris and Farage lied, backed by Far Right media eager to spread fear and confusion, aided by Putin, and now the British people from England to Wales to Scotland to Northern Ireland are going to have to pay the price.

A good Queen would recognize that she shouldn't agree to a Brexit that will hurt her own people. And this is more about her being a Queen: She's a Briton as much as the rest of her people. This affects her and her family as much as it affects everyone else.

I hope she chooses wisely, for her fellow Britons, I hope she chooses to keep HER democracy open for business. No, she did not choose wisely. The United Kingdom is now screwed.

Brexit News: We're Likely Waking Up to Boris "Badenov" Johnson as Prime Minister Tomorrow

So let's just set the stage for how most of the world is going to react to that.

Okay, seriously. How bad is this going to get?

Think "donald trump" but with fewer golf courses to his name.

Okay, that's a little too unserious. Here's serious. From Sam Knight at the New Yorker:

This is the Johnsonian way. The lies, the performative phrases, the layers of persona—they accrete, one on top of another, flecked here and there with Latin, until everyone has forgotten what the big deal was. In Brussels, Johnson confined himself to dodgy journalism. When he returned to London, he brought the same approach to jobs, extramarital affairs, and political stances. In 1999, Johnson became the editor of The Spectator, a witty, right-wing magazine that is traditionally close to the Conservative Party. The magazine was owned by the news magnate Conrad Black, who would call Johnson and ask him how it was going. Johnson would say that he was trying to turn the magazine into a cookie. “ ‘An opening of solid meal followed suddenly and dramatically by a chocolate taste explosion,’ ” Black recounted to Gimson. “It’s all rubbish, but it’s imaginative.”

In 2001, at the age of thirty-six, Johnson was elected a Member of Parliament for Henley, a safe Conservative seat in Oxfordshire. When he came under pressure to resign from The Spectator, because of the conflict of interest, he demurred, and coined what has become his best-known political aphorism: “I want to have my cake and eat it.” Johnson hates choosing between things, even right and wrong. In 2003, Lynn Barber, of the Observer, asked Johnson what principles he would be prepared to resign over. “I’m a bit of an optimist so it doesn’t tend to occur to me to resign,” he replied. “I tend to think of a way of Sellotaping everything together and quietly finding a way through, if I can...”

Already you can see the trumpian sins of self-indulgence and arrogance. And there's a reason why Knight titled his article "The Empty Promise":

On the morning of June 24, 2016, after the result had become clear, Cameron resigned. Johnson and Gove, the two most high-profile Conservative Brexiteers, appeared at a news conference, looking terrified. Johnson was expected to be installed in Downing Street within weeks. But, not for the first time, when he was confronted with something that he desperately wanted, Johnson lost focus. The day after the most momentous event in British politics for several decades, Johnson went to the countryside to play cricket with the ninth Earl of Spencer. The next day, he hosted a barbecue.

Johnson and Gove paired up to form what was known, very briefly, as the “Dream Team,” to lead a new, pro-Brexit government. The pact lasted six days. The afternoon before Johnson was due to launch his campaign to become Prime Minister, he still hadn’t written a speech. Boles, the M.P. who had advised Johnson when he became mayor in 2008, remembers finding him surrounded by a few lines jotted on scraps of paper. “Johnson was proud of his writing skills, his way with words,” Shipman writes. “And in his hour of maximum exposure they appeared to be failing him.” Johnson told Boles, “I’ve got nothing.” Gove ran to become Prime Minister himself. Johnson withdrew from the contest before it began.

The implosion of the Dream Team opened the way for Theresa May to become Prime Minister. To Johnson’s great surprise—and to everybody else’s—May chose him as her Foreign Secretary. (“What next, Dracula as health minister?” a spokesman for Germany’s Social Democratic Party asked.) At the age of fifty-two, Johnson was appointed to one of Britain’s great offices of state. Given the chance to frame a credible narrative for leaving the E.U., and to influence and improve Britain’s relationships with its neighbors in Europe and around the world, Johnson did none of those things. It is true that he was impeded by May’s close control of Brexit from Downing Street. It is also true that Johnson’s sole contribution to the conversation about the difficult trade-offs involved in Britain’s most important political challenge since the Second World War has been a reheating of his two-decade-old adage: “My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.”

Johnson talks a game but rarely plays it well. At yet even with all these obvious flaws, his Conservative Tory party is going to vote him in to the Prime Minister's office to replace the resigning May (whose constant failures with Brexit hastened her career's end).

In terms of leadership he'll likely rely on two things: clownish buffonery and having someone else clean up his mess. As trump has proven, that makes for poor governance.

And he's going to create a mess because Boris has made it clear his disdain for the EU - he was one of Leave campaign's biggest liars - will lead him on a singular path towards a No-Deal Brexit: the one deal most likely to cause economic chaos with the UK's own financial system and also likely to cause in no particular order 1) Scotland's independence from the UK, 2) Northern Ireland's willingness to merge with Ireland just for the sake of border sanity, 3) Queen Elizabeth II punching Boris in the face for fucking up her Commonwealth.

Boris will also (might also, there is an alternative choice for the Tories to pick but Boris has been the intraparty favorite throughout the process) inherit a situation where not everyone among the Conservative ranks will accept him. There are enough ministers who don't want a No-Deal result and are willing to put their careers on the line to stop that (via Rowena Mason at the Guardian):

...But several Conservative MPs said they would regard Johnson’s first speech to the nation and cabinet appointments as a test of whether he was capable of reaching out across parliament to find a majority for a plan to leave the EU that can find approval from Eurosceptics and more moderate Brexit supporters.

If he does not, then organisation will start again in earnest to prevent him pursuing a no-deal Brexit, with some senior Tories already sending out feelers about the possibility of a “national unity” government with opposition MPs...

...One former minister said a “sizable chunk” of the 42 Tories who voted against a no-deal Brexit last week were prepared to put their own careers on the line to stop Johnson pursuing that path – either through a legislative block on leaving the EU without a deal or a confidence vote if that proves impossible...

...While Tory moderates are biding their time, Eurosceptics are also circling Johnson to ensure he keeps to his promise of taking the UK out of the EU by 31 October and ditching May’s Brexit deal. One senior Eurosceptic on Johnson’s campaign team said they were perfectly prepared to “take him out ourselves” if he failed on his promise to deliver a clear-cut Brexit by that date...

There are two opposing forces right now in British politics: Those who want to back away from a hard Brexit (if not canceling it outright) and those (the Tory hardliners and Farage Racists Nationalists) who want nothing less than a complete break from the EU. There's not enough seats to retain a Tory majority either way... which is why a number of observers are marking Boris' tenure in days instead of years.

Right now, the game plan seems to be:
Step One: Boris enters 10 Downing Street and immediately sets the place on fire.
Step Two: Boris goes to Brussels with the strong belief he can get a solid Brexit deal from the EU that Theresa May never could... all because he's convinced *he's* better at dealing than she was, and that his No-Deal stance gives him a stronger negotiating position.
Step Three: Boris gets laughed at in Brussels and ships back home in tears.
Step Four: Boris goes back to Parliament to report he's following through on a No-Deal stance, at which point enough moderate Tories quit the party for the Liberal Dems to force a collapse of the government.
Step Five: Boris either suspends Parliament (!) or is forced to call for a General Election before the October 31 deadline, facing the likely possibility of a narrow Labour plurality win.
Step Six: Brits march on London and force Queen Elizabeth II to nominate Larry the Downing Street Mouser as the new Prime Minister. I am not joking.
Step Seven: Billionaires who relocated to Amsterdam get to make PROFITS because there's always money to be made in crisis situations. I am not joking.

There's a lot of fantasy in those steps: mostly surrounding the Hard Brexiters thinking they can resolve a crisis that May spent five ten fifty times trying. There's nothing the UK has as leverage to force the EU to deal: There's nothing the UK can force on Europe if they make the decision to cut the cord outright.

The Brexiter's belief in using a trade system in GATT - with an Article XXIV provision - to override the damage of a No-Deal collapse is proving to be a bad idea if not an outright lie (if not to the public then certainly to themselves).

Johnson seems to think he's got an exit strategy for Brexit in the form of a big trade deal with the United States. He forgets a few things, not the least of which is how his plan may violate existing trade laws that will be untouched in a No-Deal Brexit. He's also forgetting any deal with trump would have to pass both houses of Congress, and the Democratic-led House is not going to sign off on some half-baked scheme (especially where trump is involved). Worse, Boris is forgetting trump is a terrible deal-maker: trump ALWAYS wants to win the deal and may well break the arrangement if he thinks he loses anything in it.

There isn't a lot of room to maneuver for Boris, there aren't a lot of sane options to begin with, and we're looking at the likelihood of a shattered and broken United Kingdom on Halloween night.

Trick or Treat, Brits.

Some Days of the Darkest Timeline Are Just Packed

So Kellyanne Conway violated the Hatch Act...

trump's chickenhawks are accusing Iran of attacking Japanese oil tankers...

House Republicans are STILL claiming "No Collusion"...

Just to note how fucked up the world is right now, Boris Johnson is lining up to be the next Prime Minister of Brexit...

There's an ongoing civil war in Syria, bloodshed in Sudan, and Ebola plagues in Africa...

And Sarah Huckabee Sanders is leaving the White House by the end of the month.

Did I miss anything?

Oh, right.

trump argued that he doesn't have to report any foreign offers of support to his re-election campaign essentially claiming he'll collude (again), prompting the chair of the Federal Elections Commission to issue a rebuke (which is still toothless without arresting trump for the shit he's already pulled in 2016! /headdesk)

I swear, O Lord, You better have angels coming down to fix all this shit, 'cause we're fucked and nobody else is coming to help.

I Don't Even Know How Milkshakes Got Worked Into This Brexit Mess, But Somehow It Makes Sense

There's a lot of other things to write about regarding Brexit and the self-immolation of the entire United Kingdom over an issue that could be easily solved by CANCELLING THE DAMN THING and reconsidering just how to fucking do it properly.

But in the meantime, watching one of the main villains of the Brexit drama get his just desserts is too good to ignore (via Amy Walker at the Guardian):

Nigel Farage has been forced to seek refuge on his campaign bus after being stalked by people carrying milkshakes in Kent, according to reports.

The Brexit party leader and his campaign team seemed keen to avoid a repeat of events in Newcastle on Monday, when he was doused in banana and salted caramel milkshake after making a speech.

Okay, I can remember a time when people got doused in animal blood by activists, sometimes stale beer (but only at sporting events), oil during any energy/climate change protests, eggs for the standard meme of "having egg on your face", stuff like that. But milkshakes?!

I'm also a bit distraught that they wasted a perfectly good banana caramel milkshake. I can only hope the protesters got two, one for Farage and one for themselves to enjoy later.

Anyway, back to the drama.

Following a tour of Dartford and Gravesend before Thursday’s EU elections, things took an unfortunate turn for Farage in Rochester, where three young men wearing balaclavas with their hoods up were spotted by a supporter.

He was then told to stay on the bus. Its driver, Michael Bolton, told the Kent Live website: “There are a couple of guys standing over there with milkshakes, they were going to throw them over him. But the police are there, we’ve spotted them and now Nigel isn’t getting off the bus.”

You know something?

A real man does not fear the milkshake.

A real man would drink the milkshake.

I DRINK IT UP!

Do they have shamrock shakes in Ireland, by the by?