There’s one less pompous supercilious twit in the cabinet — in a snit, Jacob Rees-Mogg has quit before he could be fired.
The move comes despite Mr Rees-Mogg suggesting he would be ‘open’ to a job in Mr Sunak’s cabinet. In u-turn on previous criticism of the new PM, he told the Telegraph today that he no longer considered Mr Sunak “a socialist.” He added that the Conservative party should unite around the new leader.
But these overtures have not been enough and Mr Rees-Mogg – who was a close ally of both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss – has left the government today.
He did make me laugh with his exit. Rishi Sunak, a man with hundreds of millions of pounds, a socialist?
From Dickens to Wodehouse to the Goons to Monty Python, Britain has always been a source of great comedy. Somebody needs to inform the people that you’re not supposed to elect the buffoons to high office, though.
This is the problem when you keep electing people from the Silly Party.
This seems ironic and lacking any self-awareness coming from this side of the pond, having just (barely) shed the mango Mussolini, and now facing viable candidacies from Herschel Walker, “Dr.” Oz, Tudor Dixon, Doug Mastriano, Kari lake, Melissa Carone…
@2
Another way to look at it: We’ve been electing buffoons for decades, and look where it has got us.
I assume the socialist accusation comes from Sunak’s various schemes during the pandemic that meant the government were paying a lot of people’s wages in industries that couldn’t be open during lockdown
Getting rid of MISTER Rees-Mogg seems like a positive move. He seems to have been doing everything he could to enhance the disaster known as Brexit.
I don’t mind buffoons, but I wish the scary clowns would disappear.
Speaking of scary clowns in the public eye: Adidas has dropped Ye (aka Kayne West). I guess they decided that bigotry doesn’t sell athletic wear.
Hopefully this means they’re abandoning Rees Mogg’s rapid bonfire of EU laws.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/oct/24/post-brexit-proposals-mean-2400-laws-could-disappear-lawyers-warn
I’m sure they’ll be pragmatic and remove worker’s rights, environmental protection and animal welfare standards more slowly.
Hey! the Goons were early 60s, Wodehouse died in the 70s and Monty Python finished in 1983. We’ve had plenty of comedy since then.
Not much competent politics though. Indeed, it’s just been Tories and marginally-less-Tory New Labour my entire life. I dearly wish we could have a socialist government, even a mild centre-left one of the Corbyn-McDonnell stamp would do.
This is not a good appointment. The problem is there were no good choices, or even shit choices. The UK has quite genuinely been made subservient to a very right wing economic ideology that is breathlessly repeated as “common sense” from all sides of the aisle, in media or politics. This has been coupled to a paradoxical and contradictory set of social policies. Is the UK anti-gay or pro-gay? Anti-woman or pro-woman? Anti-trans or pro-trans? Anti-social intervention/social compact or pro? I know everyone will have their answers to all of those (and more) but I promise you, even in the ones that seem black and white or clear cut, there is a spectrum of opinion that has public representation. A degree of public representation that the spectrum of economic positions simply doesn’t get.
The “UK Culture Wars” have a confused (and therefore IMO a much nastier) set of battlefields. They are (as ever) an excuse to disguise the kleptocratic economics being foisted upon the UK population. There is no piece of the culture war that will be rendered improved by the underlying economics. Set tribe against tribe and steal the grain from both. Divide and conquer, ever the method of Perfidious Albion.
Louis
Fuck, Cruella Braverman is back as Home Secretary. Fucksticks. A woman who said she dreams of deporting refugees.
Yay!
Louis
Sunak has just reappointed Cruella de Vil (aka Suella Braverman) as Home Secretary. This is the woman who announced that it was her “dream” to see asylum seekers who risk their lives crossing the Channel in small boats transported to Rwanda. Sunak has thus made clear that cruelty will be a fundamental principle of his government.
KG,
We are proper fucked. Austerity 2.0 is going to be bigger and better.
Louis
I’m glad Boris didn’t get his old job back, but it doesn’t look like Rishi Sunak is going to be much better.
@11. Louis : Austerity 2.0 is going to be bigger and better.
In austerity terms doesn’t that mean smaller and meaner?
Would bigger and better be less rather than more austere by definition?
@ 12. Artor : Well, Sunak somehow lost a popularity and choice for best leader contest to Liz Truss so .. yeah.
OTOH, it was a vote of hateful Tory scum so ..
@StevoR, #13,
Bigger austerity means less public investment/public ownership. Better austerity means less public investment/public ownership faster, harder, further, and crueller. Right up the proletariat. And “better” also includes “with the aid of the client media”. So all is well. The Right People are in charge making the Adult Decisions. And in this case the word “Adult” is the same sense as it is used in “Adult Movies”. I.e. someone is gonna get fucked.
Louis
The useless Thérèse Coffey has been appointed secretary for environment, food and rural affairs. Her only qualification is that she’s Truss’s friend (under Truss she was deputy PM and minister for Health), so this is a sop to the Trussites. Sunak evidently feels he can afford to have dead wood in this department, which gives us another signal of his priorities.
@ 10. KG :
Why Rwanda in particular I wonder? Why not, um, Uganda, Senegal or Burkina Faso / Upper Volta (those were the same just temporally nomenclaturally displaced Congo-Zaire style yeah?) or suchlike?
Also do the Rwandans know this and have they responded and if so how I wonder?
Does she realise she is implying that she thinks Rwanda is somehow better able to handle refugees than the UK and does she appreciate hwo much this is a diss of her own nation and govt? (Gee, we are so bad & messed up and incapable that, we cannot cope with refugees as well as a small poor struggling African nation! How good are we!? ) Do the British voters realise this?
So no change there then..
@1. expatlurker : “This is the problem when you keep electing people from the Silly Party.”
Britain had a silly persons party once – the Monster Raving Loony party :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_Monster_Raving_Loony_Party
Sadly appears they’ve merged with the Tories and the monster part has baisclaly taken over -metaphorically speaking anyhow.*
.* No offence to the MRLP which ..dunno. Ceratinly wasn’t as actively evil as the Tory scum.
@7. cartomancer :
What about the British Labour party under its current leader Starmer I gather it is? Perhaps in Coalition with the SNP (Scottish National Party) under Nicola Sturgeon at leat until Scotland seccedes and maybe the, what’s it called Lib Dems and some others too? Thoughts on those. From what this Aussie vaguely groks here if an election were called as it clearly should be there’d be a landslide that would wipe the British (Tory) Conserative party out so .. can you guys bring that on ASAP please?
@15. Louis : Thanks so – as usual – their use of words is paradoxically and kinda the opposite of ours.. & realities.
“Better” eh? They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means..
( Inigo Montoya )
@kingoftown, #6:
No such luck. They were giving the bill the second reading in Parliament a little earlier, while Sunak was still announcing “resignations” and appointments, with the freshly-fired honourable member for the 17th century (Jacob Rees-Mogg, in case there was any doubt) on the backbench but still listed as a sponsor, and throwing a little tantrum when challenged. But Rishi Sunak’s business minister said they’d carry on with it. The only slight ray of hope is that some Tories are uneasy about the bill, with one (former environment minister Rebecca Pow) asking for the deadline to be changed to 2026, because it’s not realistic to review 572 laws related to the environment in 15 months. On one hand, Sunak seems smart; on the other hand, he still has to do dumb things to appease some of the MPs, hence Thérèse Coffey (laughably incompetent) and Suella Braverman (downright evil). He probably doesn’t want to withdraw this bill (at least not yet), because it would anger the hard-Brexit Tory MPs.
No chance. Labour hate the SNP even more than they hate the Tories. They have actively colluded with them here in Scotland, to the extent of forming formal Labour / Tory coalitions to keep the SNP out at the local government level.
StevoR @ #17 — Why Rwanda?
Short answer: Rwanda gets paid. UK government can say it’s addressing a problem which they’ve exploited to get in power.
What’s perhaps missed in the debate is the fact there is a worldwide refugee problem driven by geopolitical and local political and religious conflicts, economic inequality, climate change, and a host of other issues. That needs to be dealt with.
Also, there are some very unscrupulous people taking money from refugees to get them into the UK, US, etc. even if it’s very dangerous.
Finally, no government that I’m aware of wants to really deal with the problem humanely. They’re happy to just sweep it under the table to Rwanda or some other remote location.
I saw somewhere (I haven’t corroborated these figures, so apply appropriate quantity of sodium chloride) that the UK govt has paid Rwanda about £120million to take about 200 people. So £600k per person. I wonder what a refugee could do with a £600k start even in the UK.
Louis
@cartomancer #7 rem acu tetigisti, as I believe Bertie W. is supposed to have put it. We are so fucked :-(
The tories in expensive suits will let their most frothing-at-the-mouth far-right fanatics wage “culture wars” while they quietly get on with executing austerity on steroids, and the vast majority of the press will coo admiringly at them for being “the grownups in the room”.
StevoR, #17,
Well, judging by current polling numbers the Labour Party wouldn’t need to be in coalition with anyone to form a government (I think the recent ones would have them with something like 500 of the 650 Commons seats available. Which is fortunate, as Dunc says above, since there is little fondness between Labour and the SNP.
As for what a Starmer-led Labour government would be like… well, that’s harder to say. A massive improvement on what the Tories are doing, obviously. Left-wing enough for me? Clearly not. Starmer seems much in the mould of Blair, i.e. a Tory-lite neoliberal by conviction, though opposed to the worst excesses of the Tory austerity regime and much more socially progressive. The Parliamentary party he leads runs the gamut from fellow neoliberals who could easily find themselves on the left wing of the Tory party to people like Corbyn with genuine socialist ideas and progressive credentials. The party membership is far, far to the left of the MPs, however, on any assessment. In the final analysis, it seems a Labour government with the current lot in charge will be sensible, disappointingly middle-of-the-road, but far more susceptible to campaigning pressure from grass roots groups than the Tories would be.
OK, this is rather remotely sourced, but worth keeping in mind:
Sunak has appointed Kemi Badenoch as Minister for Trade, and senior minister for women and equalities. Economically, Badenoch makes Truss look like a pragmatic centrist, and she has been given the equalities portfolio to sabotage any attempt to combat systemic racism (she’s of Nigerian origin, not from a privileged background like Sunak, but is one of the “I made it, so if anyone else can’t, it’s because they are stupid or lazy” school), homophobia and transphobia (she was notably unenthusiastic about banning conversion “therapy”).
With regard to Braverman, she resigned/was forced out just before Truss fell for having breached the ministerial code in regard to confidentiality and security (sent an email about immigration policy to people she should not have sent at all, from a private account), and in her resignation letter, which she turned into an attack on Truss, made a great fuss about how important it was to own up to your mistakes and take the consequences. Now she’s back in the same job – and Sunak has the impertinence to say his goivernment will be “accountable at all levels”. Stinking hypocrites, both of them.
Reminder: Sunak was fined by the police for lockdown parties, the same as Johnson.
Rules only apply to the plebs.
@#17, StevoR
Starmer is an acolyte of Blair, the right-of-center pro-austerity PM who famously knew that Bush was lying about Iraq but went along with the invasion anyway. He (Starmer) managed to get Corbyn out of the party’s leadership by various explicitly unethical means. (The Starmer faction bought targeted Internet advertising in Corbyn’s area, pretending that there was a groundswell of unprovoked support for Labour, to try to convince him not to campaign, which was at least a factor in the Tories’ big win in 2019; Starmer’s cronies were in control of the party apparatus which was supposed to address accusations of internal bigotry, they manufactured internal accusations of antisemitism, told Corbyn he should keep his hands off and let the party’s official apparatus deal with it, dragged their feet to avoid resolving the cases, and then leaked to the right-wing press that Corbyn was encouraging antisemitism in the party because he wasn’t forcing things to be resolved; after Corbyn was ousted as leader Starmer tried to have him expelled from the party completely on no grounds whatsoever; all this and much more has been admitted outright and reported in the party’s own reports, but because most Labour loyalists are just as empty-headed and lacking in actual ethical principles as Democratic loyalists over here in the US, Starmer still has support.) Starmer has repeatedly indicated that he approves of Tory policy — in the last couple of days he has ruled out any move towards rejoining the EU and said he wants more immigrants expelled. He’s not going to be even remotely helpful if he becomes PM, he’ll just serve to discredit Labour and renew support for the Tories.
Starmer publicly said — before polls were showing that the Tories would necessarily lose control — that he will refuse to form a coalition with the SNP under any conditions, and would refuse to form a coalition with the LibDems. Right now, polls suggest Labour won’t need a coalition anyway, so he will absolutely not be doing so. A pity, because Sturgeon is head and shoulders above any living English politician of whom I am aware in terms of personal integrity and dedication to good policy.
A big chunk of the English (because it is mainly an English problem) live in a conservative bubble. Most newspapers support the criminal liar party.
BBC has been broken and rarely bring up issues that would be embarassing for the government, bor do they call out politicians for obvious lies.
Unusually, I agree with pretty much all of what The Vicar says @28. But there’s almost no chance the SNP would enter a coalition with Labour even if the distribution of seats made that feasible and Starmer agreed. They might enter a “confidence and supply” arrangement, meaning they would support the government in votes of confidence and to get its budget through, but without joining the government themselves, and being free to vote against it on any other issue. Their price would be a fresh independence referendum, on SNP terms (straight yes/no to independence, electorate consisting of all those 16 or over and normally resident in Scotland, equality and independent oversight of funding etc.). They might support the Tories on the same terms if the distribution of seats made that possible – independence is their raison d’être. As a supporter of independence (although not of the SNP) I can see advantages to not having an election in the near future, as this would almost guarantee a Labour landslide, but these are outweighed by the urgency of getting rid of the Tories, despite the fact we would just get a Tory-lite replacement under Starmer. But Sunak will not grant an election unless forced to by coordinated strikes and civil disobedience severe enough to threaten big business profits, collapse of the £, etc. – it would be corporate pressure that would directly force his hand, of course, but the example of popular resistance forcing an election and change of government would shift the class balance of power considerably in the medium term.
Context: “resigned from the frontbench” is to what “Jacob Rees-Mogg has quit before he could be fired” refers.
He’s still very much there.
From over here on the continent, I’m hoping that one outcome of Sunak’s time as PM will be us welcoming a newly independent Scotland into the EU in a few years.
Oh, just as a followup to my earlier post: Starmer has now called for longer sentences for protestors (because, if you missed it, protesting is now automatically a crime whenever the UK’s government decides it is) and said outright that on the subject of immigration there isn’t much difference between Labour and the Tories.
This is what happens when “centrists” take over a supposedly left-leaning party. After all, a “centrist” is by definition somebody who thinks the right wing is at least partially correct — that that Hitler guy may have been a bit wild but he had some good ideas, and that we can have Unity and Bipartisanship with the likes of Rees-Mogg or Farage (or McConnell and Greene) if we just concede enough ground to them.
Today it’s becoming increasingly clear that Sunak has not been able to put an end to the turbulence within the Tory Party. Specifically, restoring Cruella de Vil as Home Secretary six days after she was pushed out following a security breach has attracted adverse comment not just from the opposition parties, but from Tory MPs and the Daily Heil (there’s more in items below the one I have linked to). Also the Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly, who Sunak kept in post, has not-so-cleverly put his foot in it by telling LGBT soccer fans to “respect” the culture of Qatar (i.e. its persecution of LGBT people) if they go there for the World Cup.
@ ^ KG : Huh. Meanwhile our Socceroos have been widely supported and applauded by their protest against Quatar :
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-27/socceroos-call-for-qatar-to-improve-human-rights/101583400
Centrists have controlled the Labour Party for most of the time since its formation in 1900. In the last half-century there have been two short periods when the left was in the ascendant – the leaderships of Michael Foot (1980-83) and Jeremy Corbyn (2015-2019). The centrists have periodically improved conditions for the general population (particularly the post-WW2 Atlee government), but have of course not challenged capitalism. Under Blair and Brown (1995-2010) there was a near-total neoliberal takeover, which Starmer appears to be repeating.
Atlee -> Attlee@36 in case anyone wants to look him up.
A Guardian article on the kerfuffle around Cruella.