Buzzfeed reads between the lines:
We feel your pain, UK.
In unrelated news, a genius has come up with #KardBlock, a browser extension that expunges all mentions of the Kardashian clan from newsfeeds. It’s about damn time!
Please feel free to discuss whatever.
Svensker
Was hoping “#KardBlock” would stop those animated e-cards that take 3 minutes to watch while making you click on the tree (so it lights up), then the mailbox (so it lights up), then the bird (so it sings). I friggin hate those things. Maybe 15 years ago they seemed magical, now it feels like being bored at gunpoint. But I still feel guilty if I don’t watch, just in case the “card” contains something personal I need to respond to.
Also, too, very disappointed in the Brits.
WereBear
I must admit I find British Party names to be confusing. But I gather the good guys didn’t win?
Jerzy Russian
It rained quite a bit here in San Diego, and it is actually a bit cold right now (50 F). I haven’t been able to sleep owing to the noise from the rain and the cool temperatures. Should I blame Obama, or is this one on Al Gore?
schrodinger's cat
Cameron is how I picture what Bertie Wooster’s friends who hang out at Drones Club would look like.
schrodinger's cat
@Jerzy Russian: Blame both!
Kylroy
Isn’t this the first time the UKIP has actually *had* seats in Parliament?
Helmut Monotreme
So, my impression of the Tories is that they are basically every snotty clique of rich kids from every ’80s teen comedy ever. How accurate is that characterization?
JPL
@Jerzy Russian: There’s a tropical storm brewing near Charleston, SC. It’s a tad early so I’d blame Gore. He is responsible for the weather.
Jerzy Russian
Also, too, apparently the San Diego Union Tribune is being bought out by the parent company of the LA Times. The U-T (the current owner was butthurt about the word “Union” in the name and uses “U-T”) went down the shitter in recent times (e.g. a ranking of US presidents that put GW Bush at the top and Obama at the very bottom). There is plenty of room for improvement here.
Jerzy Russian
@JPL: O.K., Al Gore it is (I am shaking my left fist as I type with my right hand). I am not sure about the Atlantic storm season, but May storms here are quite rare.
Richard Mayhew
Couple of interesting poliscience points to make about Alberta and the UK elections:
1) Electoral system design matters (fragmented ideological groupings across multiple parties rewards the organized groups — Cons got 35% of vote, 49% or 50% of seats, NDP got mid 40s% of the vote and 61% of the seats)
2) Economic myopia/throw the bums out. NDP is going into power as Alberta’s economy is going into the shitter due to the collapse of oil prices. The Conseratives with the mania for austerity enacted horrendous policy for three years, but once they stopped kicking Britain in the balls, the pain receded and a bit of growth that is far below previous trend has occurred, so the past couple quarters have been Okay(ish).. so there was no throw the bums out impulse
3) The best thing to happen for an incumbent party on fixed election terms would be a sharp V-shape recession that starts the week after an election.
Tripod
Nick Clegg…. LULZ.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Jerzy Russian:
It must be an interesting place off in Wingnut land to think GW was worth squat as far US presidents go historically. Outside 911 I doubt if GW will be remembered for anything.
Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim
@schrodinger’s cat: The Drones only tossed bread rolls around their own club. Cameron was a member of the Bullington Club, who are more to the point: upper class, drunken, destructive.
jonas
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
The only US President to take the country to war over a casus belli that turned out not to exist? Kind of like finding out at the end of WWI that the Lusitania hadn’t been sunk after all.
That’s one for the ages.
Betty Cracker
@Jerzy Russian: Seriously? They ranked GWB first? Above Lincoln and even their demigod Ronald Reagan? Our local rag is wingnuttish, but even they aren’t that delusional.
However, today, via Steve M at No More Mr. Nice Blog, I learned that Dubya enjoys an 88% approval rating among Republicans. That honestly surprised me. I figured at least a quarter or so of them would be pissed at him for tarnishing their brand if nothing else.
PlanetPundit (used to be Sir Laffs-a-Lot)
After the epic USB post yesterday, can we declare Betty as “The New Cole” or must we await her placing a Subaru in some poor farmer’s field for the duration?
JPL
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Hopefully, he will be remembered for his disastrous foreign policy and economic policies. Americans have short term memories, though.
WereBear
Oh, he’ll be remembered for things! None of them good.
Jerzy Russian
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Yes, their virtual reality is more elaborate than the Unimatrix Zero thing the Borg had going on in the season 6 cliffhanger of Star Trek Voyager.
WereBear
@Betty Cracker: The delusion is strong with these ones. (Mangled Star Wars quote.)
catclub
@Richard Mayhew:
I am blaming that long article by Krugman calling the brits idiots for continuing austerity after the rest of the world gave up on it.
I will still call them idiots.
Jimgod
@Richard Mayhew: Polisci grad student here. It’s more than just electoral design in the UK, though it didn’t help. Labour were caught between Scottish nationalism and an English reaction that pulled the two nations (England and Scotland) in radically different directions. This is actually a very dangerous electoral outcome. If the UK is to survive, it’s going to have to have some sort of constitutional convention and draw up a federal system of government of some sort. The current union with devolved powers and parliaments for some but not all sub-national regions is no longer tenable. Not to mention the coming civil war in the Conservative Party over the issue of the EU. This may have been a Pyrrhic victory for the Tories. We’ll see.
Jerzy Russian
@Betty Cracker: As I remember it (I don’t care to go on to their web pages and look at the archives), GW Bush was the tops. I don’t remember where the Gipper came in, but one assumes it was high. I stopped my subscription soon after.
They might have been pissed at Bush at first, but perhaps over time they have put so much energy at hating President Obama that there are no more hate rays left to be directed at Bush.
JPL
@catclub: I call them Kansans!
ThresherK
The underbite thing I reallly hadn’t noticed so much before. Does that lockjaw uppercrust voice and fossilized patronizing attitude go along with it?
schrodinger's cat
@Cheap Jim, formerly Cheap Jim: True, Bertie and friends very by and large pretty harmless.
EconWatcher
I wouldn’t say we feel Britain’s pain.
I dream, dream of the day that the US Republicans think and act like the UK Tories. The Tories are generally pro-gay rights these days, they don’t challenge the basic principle of universal health care, they’re not religious nutjobs, they’re not the ones who led the UK into Iraq (although they generally supported it)–on and on
Yeah, they’re not good on austerity and economic justice, but they have nothing like an equivalent of a TEA Party driving them.
I have no sympathy for British progressives at all. They have it easy, and they don’t have to worry about civilization collapsing if the other guys win.
schrodinger's cat
This must make Andrew Sullivan very happy. Any sightings since he shuttered down his blog?
Ridnik Chrome
@Betty Cracker:
I think the idea was whoever would infuriate liberals/Obama supporters most…
Tripod
@Jimgod:
I agree. Wanting to find God (or unicorns) in the electoral system is a suckers play. See Nick Clegg.
Betty Cracker
@schrodinger’s cat: I’m thankful for the timing of Sully’s vow of silence. He was always such a hysteric on the topic of the Clintons. Covering the upcoming primaries might have done him in. Hmmm…wait a minute. He said he quit to write more long-form pieces. Maybe he’s putting together the ultimate anti-Clinton tome at this very moment!
YAFB
It’s the first time they’ve had elected UKIP representatives in Parliament. There were two defections to UKIP from the Conservatives in the dregs of the last Parliament. One held his seat in this election, the other lost it (to the Conservatives), plus they added another new one.
Disturbingly, under our first past the post system, this number of seats doesn’t reflect UKIP’s percentage vote share – they’re actually unrepresented, like the Greens and other minor parties.
It remains to be seen whether UKIP will wither away, as other similar anti-EU/immigration parties have in the past, without the weird and inexplicable madcap charisma (pumped up by wall-to-wall media coverage) of their now ex-leader, Nigel “Just an Ordinary Reactionary Retired Millionaire Propping up the Bar down the Pub” Farage.
In Scotland, UKIP won no seats, though it did beat the Liberal Democrats into fifth place in quite a number, and got 1. 6% of the votes. The SNP got 50.2% and won 56 out of 59 seats.
Amanda in the South Bay
@EconWatcher:
The only reason same sex marriage passed in the UK was overwhelming Lab and LibDem support. About half of Cons in parliament voted against it.
DanF
Keep in mind that policy-wise the Tories are more closely allied with DLC Democrats (albeit really mean DLC Democrats) than our conservatives. I’m sure that many Tories wish they could let their freak flag fly like Ted Cruz or Michelle Bachmann, but their Overton window is not our Overton window. It sucks (because yes, DLC Democrats suck), but it’s not quite like Scott Walker took over the joint.
Amanda in the South Bay
@DanF:
The right wing of the Cons are what, monarchists? Supporters of the established church? Jacobites? St Charles King and Martyr and all that? How is that not extreme?
EconWatcher
@Amanda in the South Bay:
I rest my case. Would anything like half of ‘pubs in Congress support it?
boatboy_srq
@Helmut Monotreme: Leaven that with every Anglo equivalent of Archie Bunker you’ve ever met, and you’ll have that about right. But be sure to add about 10-20 IQ points: UKIP and National Front seem to sinks for their versions of Teh Stoopid. One advantage of a multi-party system is that wingnuttery coalesces outside the main parties – but the corresponding disadvantage is that you wind up with at least one party almost exclusively made up of wingnuts.
YAFB
@Jimgod:
I think even Cameron’s recognized the need for constitutional changes.
I’ve long wanted to see a more federal structure in the whole UK. The country’s tilted suicidally towards London and the South East of England both demographically and in terms of the distribution of resources and investment.
The problem is that what he’s likely to propose will be top-down. Devolution in Scotland and the SNP’s rise has been very much bottom-up and has evolved over quite a long period. There are some small moves in England for city-scale devolution, but the last time an English region had a referendum about having its own assembly, the apathy was crushing.
Looking for small comfort, the Conservative/Liberal Democrat alliance had a 40-vote majority. Cameron’s majority is now in single figures. On the other hand, he doesn’t have to moderate his policies in the marginal ways the Lib Dems brought about, and is more hostage to the right wing of his party, which has never fully accepted him anyway.
He’ll also have to preside over a continually ballooning deficit and national debt brought about by his own austerity policies, so Labour won’t have to pick up the pieces and get the blame if and when they can’t turn things around within an electoral cycle (which they wouldn’t anyway if they’d adopted watered-down austerity as their manifesto promised).
EconWatcher
@DanF:
I actually don’t think that many Tories would even want to let their freak flag fly in any way similar to Republicans here, because they’re missing one key ingredient: the old time religion. You don’t hear Cameron talking about the baby Jesus.
boatboy_srq
@Amanda in the South Bay:
This, versus the near-uniform GOTea opposition to the same, I for one will take in a heartbeat.
boatboy_srq
@schrodinger’s cat: Look like, sound like, govern like.
catclub
@JPL: That is low.
catclub
@Jerzy Russian: Yep, Bush is great because he was the last one before Obama.
DanF
@Amanda in the South Bay: They’ve got their extremists to be sure, but it’s not like Cameron can call for the repeal of the NHS and deny evolution without being called a nutter. They embrace safety-net policies which would have them being called socialists in America. They may not like it, but to do otherwise would be political suicide.
WereBear
Yes. And we have one now in the US.
beltane
Very interesting analysis from English lefty Richard Seymour, “The End of Labour” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/labour-miliband-conservatives-british-elections/
mainmata
@WereBear: So does NPR, apparently. Announcer yesterday said (I paraphrase) “And so the Tory Party, which is the more conservative of the major parties…”. No, the name of the party is the Conservative Party; Tory is its nick name (like GOP here). Sigh…The center of political gravity in GB is in southeast England (Greater London and southeast of there). The Conservatives get a lot of votes there and in the suburbs and small towns in England. Tories don’t do as well outside of England proper.
Tom
@EconWatcher: They do like to beat up on the poor and disabled, though.
Amir Khalid
@boatboy_srq:
But don’t forget: Archie Bunker is an Americanised version of Alf Garnett, a British sitcom character.
WereBear
@mainmata: NPR has really fallen. But then, they’ve been a conservative target since, ever.
beltane
@Tom: Part of my mother’s family are Tories. No, they are not religious people in any usual sense of the word. Yes, they believe in evolution and are OK with gay marriage, etc. They are educated. They are eminently “civilized”. They are also the most smug, entitled, and soulless people I have ever met. Social class and money are their religion, and in this religion they are absolute fanatics.
Amir Khalid
@beltane:
Ah, the Hyacinth Bucket tendency.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Jerzy Russian: It would have been an improvement if Fox News had bought them. Doug Manchester is an evil, evil worker-hating motherfucker, devious, a habitual and compulsive liar and a room full of cash just to make all his sick dreams come true. I could write pages. No other major city in the nation would allow the shit he’s pulled here in San Diego for decades.
The Tribune Group buying them may well result in the most liberal (I use that term advisedly) ownership that paper’s ever had.
I remember as a kid reading it back in the seventies, back when it was two papers, the Union and the Tribune. I think the Union was the afternoon paper but I can’t remember. It has never been a good paper, but Manchester managed to make it much worse than it had ever been previously.
beltane
@Amir Khalid: Exactly, except that unlike Hyacinth, these people are filthy rich 1%ers. It goes without saying that they are in finance.
Mike in NC
No major political party in all of Europe would be capable of puking up a lunatic like Ted Cruz. Here he can easily pick up between 27% and 47% of the vote.
schrodinger's cat
@Mike in NC: There are a fair number of parties in Europe with a predominantly anti-immigrant platform. I am sure they have their Ted Cruzes too.
beltane
@schrodinger’s cat: They might not have Ted Cruzes, but they do have a lot of Pam Geller types who get elected to office. The differences with Europe are mainly ones of style, not substance.
Jimgod
@Amir Khalid: The Keeping Up Appearances faction. Nailed it in one.
Hilarious show from the 90s, but scary to think there are people like that in appreciable numbers….
WereBear
@Jimgod: And Hyacinth, when backed against the wall, would give Onslow a cup of tea.
WereBear
Got a new health post up. If you’ve ever felt your doctor wasn’t listening, you were probably right:
What doctors see
schrodinger's cat
Does Labor’s disastrous showing have anything to do with Miliband’s personality? I don’t know much about UK politics, but I have seen Milliband interviewed by Katy Kay a few times on BBC World News tonight and he comes across as insufferably smug and a tad whiny.
Jimgod
@schrodinger’s cat: There could be something to that, which is shame. He seemed like a decent man trying to do what was right. But the personalization of politics really is a worldwide phenomena and not a positive one. Policy seems to get tossed in the back seat for issues of style. And the whole concept of cabinet government, where you have a whole team running the country, is reduced to back-up singers for the glorious leader. In that sense, personality may have played a role here and not a good one.
Captain C
@Betty Cracker:
He did, after all, give them some great hategasms and fap-fantasies. Plus, all the bad shit he did either happened long enough ago that they’ve forgotten, or if it’s ongoing, they just blame it on Obama.
boatboy_srq
@EconWatcher: Cons, don’t forget, gave us Thatcher, Major, the near-death of the UK coal industry (environmentally good but economically terrible plus Death To Yoonyuns) Clause 28, the Falklands crisis and then war, and a host of other stupidity. Thatcher at least tried to use a scalpel to tackle public sector fat; Major took a carving knife, and the GOTea seems compelled to use a bandsaw.
@EconWatcher: “The Old Time Religion” is a uniquely Ahmurrcan creature, though there are UK equivalents. Part of the reason even that creature doesn’t carry much weight is that the UK lived the Reformation and remembers it pretty well, whereas the US is a product of the post-Reformation and has no idea what that kind of strife is like. The quietly reserved C of E holds that attitude in no small part because it’s survived Catholic repression, Puritan repression, Presbyterian iconoclasm, etc etc over the centuries; FundiEvangelicalism has no memory further back than when Reverend Bob bought the meeting hall and called the faithful for the first time (all of X years ago).
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@beltane: A good read. Thanks for the pointer.
Cheers,
Scott.
WereBear
@boatboy_srq: I wish I knew why the hold of Xantianism remains so deep and so utterly unhinged. Back in the day, sure — when you got off the farm once a week, the singing and good feeling of go-to-meeting was a necessary antidote to daily backbreaking labor.
But now?
Sloane Ranger
@YAFB: Actually both Tory defectors to UKIP stood in by-elections and won. Now only one survives so it’s a backwards step for them.
Joining Nigel Fararge in resigning their party leadership are Ed Milliband and Nick Clegg.
David Cameron will have problems later since he is broadly in favour of EU membership and there is no concession that will be good enough for his eurosceptics. Eventually we will see a new outbreak of the Tory Euro-Civil War. It was not an edifying sight last time and I, for one, look forward to the seeing it again.
As for the SNP, this must be their highpoint. The only wayu is down. What I suspect Cameron will do is call their bluff. Prior the the collapse of oil prices Nicola Sturgeon was calling for full financial autonomy. She’s been very quiet about that recently. I think he will give it to her. That will put the SNP in the position of either spending more than they get in revenue, which will worry a lot of Scottish voters, or not carrying forward on all their commitments, which will piss off many of their true believers.
Origuy
I think the Democratic Unionist Party (Northern Ireland) holds up the old-time religion flag. One of its members (who lost this time around) caused the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s production of The Bible: The Complete Works of God Reduced to be briefly banned in Newtownabbey. Blasphemy, you know.
Correction: The DUP member who caused the banning wasn’t the MP, but a city council member.
Calouste
@boatboy_srq: And the C of E is very much an establishment church. The Queen is the head of the church, bishops sit in the House of Lords, it’s where one goes (or more accurately, went) if one wants to fit in in society, even if one doesn’t really believe. Not an institution that rocks the boat.
And of course the UK (and most of Europe in general) is far less religious than the US. Only about 1 in 10 Brits goes to church/mosque/temple every week.
Calouste
@Origuy: There are some Tories too. In the last election Cameron booted one of the candidates out of the party because he made discriminatory comments about gays. And I remember the loony wing of the Tories caused a bit of a kerfuffle in 1996 or so when William Hague was party leader and his fiancée was staying with him in the same hotel room for the party congress, instead of in a separate room like a proper woman should. That didn’t particularly show the Tories as being with the times, to say the least.
mds
@Calouste:
Indeed, Ed Miliband is openly atheist, and that didn’t seem to be particularly controversial. Imagine the shitstorm over here if Bernie somehow got any traction, and they started making a big deal about his non-observant status.
Origuy
@Calouste: I think the DUP member who caused the kerfuffle about the Bible play (and that is exactly what the producer called it!) was a member of some small Presbyterian offshoot called the Wee Wee Frees.
The BBC has an article called 20 Things You May Have Missed About the Election. One of them is about the British National Party’s loss of support:
I think UKIP picked up their voters.
Brachiator
@Jimgod: Yep, yep, yep. The SNP was all about Scottish nationalism, and attracted people for whom the old consideration of Labour vs Conservative were no longer relevant.
Ed Miliband, Labour leader (Defunct) kept whining that he would not seek a coalition with the SNP, and the SNP (and voter) reaction was, “Who cares?”
Much of the news about this in America thought that the Scottish referendum vote settled everything, and focused on controversies about UKIP and the EU. But the SNP victory renews the thirst for independence. The SNP took 56 of Scotland’s 59 seats in the Westminster parliament. The Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats could muster only one seat each.
And as you note, this creates a huge gulf between England and Scotland.
@schrodinger’s cat:
Oh, hell, yes. And also his oddly feckless incompetence as a politician, especially when dealing with the public. BBC comedians (see any of the Friday Comedy BBC podcasts) had a field day mocking Miliband. I tried listening to him in a debate and immediately understood what the comedians were getting at.
@Helmut Monotreme:
The way the British Class system works, you will find Tories, Lib Dems, Labour who all went to the same schools and belong to the same clubs.
Conservative PM David Cameron: Eton, Oxford. Clegg’s grandmother was a Russian baroness and his family owns a chateau in France. And yet, because the British are perverse about things like this, Cameron is upper class, while Clegg would be considered to be middle class.
And then you have someone like Stephen Kinnock, who won his election to be a Labour Party MP, went to Oxford and whose father was a longtime politician. Kinnock’s wife is the prime minister of Denmark. You might remember her from the selfie she took with Obama.
Kryptik
@Brachiator:
Wasn’t a large part of the vote turning against the Scottish Referendum the promise of some concessions toward Scottish concerns by the government? Concessions which evaporated quickly after the referendum and ticked off quite a few people who campaigned on the No vote? I remember reading something about that, which might explain part of why the SNP surged so hard.
Cervantes
@Calouste:
Loony wing?
Thatcher Her Own Self was scandalized.
One of the best things Hague ever did.
dww44
@Jimgod:Thanks for that insight. I believe I might do some more in depth reading. Do you have any links or suggestions?
Mike G
@Helmut Monotreme:
https://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/the-bullingdon-club/
boatboy_srq
@WereBear: Isn’t the acronym these days shorthand for “Now Presenting Republicans”?
boatboy_srq
@Sloane Ranger: It was telling that in the independence referendum it was the Highlands – the historical hotbed of Scottish independence – that voted most strongly against.
@Amir Khalid: Too true. I forget sometimes that US television has never had an original idea.
mai naem mobile
Miliband is an atheist. I.don’t see a major party candidate admitting.to that, ever in.this country.
Brachiator
@Kryptik:
I am not aware of specific concessions that evaporated after the vote. But I am not deeply knowledgeable about this. But the vote really hammered the Labour Party, which was not in any position to deliver anything to anyone.
I’m not even sure that the Brits have a handle on what had happened here as a result of the referendum. After the vote, membership in SNP and other Scottish nationalist parties swelled dramatically (“By 2 October, SNP membership had trebled from 25,000 to 75,000, making it the third largest political party in the UK,” from one story).
Jimgod
@Brachiator: The promise was Devo Max, the next generation in devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament. However, the day after the referendum, Cameron came out and said yes we’ll do Devo Max, and oh by the way, we’re gonna set up a committee of English votes for English laws, kthanxbai. This was not discussed at all during the referendum campaign and further pissed the Scots off. (For the uninitiated: this has to do with the Weslothian Question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Lothian_question )
So many Scots viewed that as a bait and switch. As a grad student studying comparative politics, I’m fascinated by the constitutional implications going on over there. As much as I detest Boris”Bozo the Clown” Johnson (London Mayor and newly elected MP) he’s right. Federalism is the only way forward for the UK to survive.
boatboy_srq
@WereBear: @Calouste:
Europe in general, and the UK in particular, are not especially devout. But they were, and there are lots of cultural memories (reinforced by years of learning actual history, and by not a few landmarks) of those times. The closest things the US have experienced are the fragmentation of New England over a series of religious disputes (although the Civil War could be described as the general rejection of Southern Baptism because it believed Some People could be property). All the whinging about “religious liberty” and “oppression of Xtians” is coming from adherents to faiths whose most direct experience of “oppression” was being turned down by a lender when financing their megachurch; the tribulations of the Inquisition and the Reformation are unknown to them. US churches in ruins are the product of bad economics, urban decay, population migrations and other small steps. There are no churches missing roofs (removed by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries), or with plain leaded-glass replacing the stained masterpieces the windows used to hold (removed by the Puritans and Presbyterians as blasphemous iconography). The US houses may have an armory in the basement, but there are no priests’ holes built in to keep their spiritual leaders safe. The US museums have a near-total lack of materials depicting the Inquisitor’s toolset, and the sites I know of that have anything like those are recreations of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay settlements which were used on witches and other heathens amongst the faithful three hundred years ago. The physical indicators of religious strife in Europe are absent in the US, in no small part because the “oppression of [some] Christians” was once a real thing in Europe, and has never been so in the US.
C of E may be the “established faith” but that was a not-especially-easily won condition, and tolerance in some form has been the default position since the Restoration (1660s): Puritanism and its descendants have had some measure of approval and recognition for generations and most of them fare decently. C of E may be keeping quiet, but you’ll notice that the Methodists, Catholics, UCC and other home-grown Protestant sects rarely make much noise either.
One of the reasons I have such trouble with FundiEvangelists is their insistence that the entire rest of the planet (Christian or not) is not “saved” and must be ministered to, so they set off for such exotic locations as Manchester and Bristol (and Paris, Rome and other places not unacquainted with Christianity) to conduct “missionary” work – and complain about the “repression” and “harassment” and “cruelty” they encounter when they’re laughed out of town.
Jimgod
@dww44: I’ve been following British politics for a long time. I get a lot of info from the Guardian and the New Statesman not to mention the BBC. Here are some interesting articles:
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-29841830
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29934867
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/08/david-cameron-plotters-prime-minister-nick-clegg
Paul in KY
@Betty Cracker: It’s only because they know how much we hate him.
Brachiator
@Jimgod: Yep, and of course the proposal for “English votes for English laws” has an acronym that of course sounds bad, EVEL. And variations of this idea had been around for years. The Conservatives were pushing this as party of their party platform, but I didn’t know how close this was coming to be actual government policy.
I would think that the Welsh and the Northern Irish are looking at all this as well, and considering options. Federalism looks good, but will everyone really go for it?
catclub
This was the Krugman article I referred to:
http://www.theguardian.com/business/ng-interactive/2015/apr/29/the-austerity-delusion
every reason why the conservatives should be thrown out for economic malpractice — and they win in a landslide!
Cervantes
@Jerzy Russian:
In the ranking I saw, they listed (in order) Lincoln, Washington, Reagan, FDR, and the two Bushes tied for fifth.
Jimgod
@Brachiator: On some level, they all have no choice. Either finally write it all down on paper and delineated powers between Westminster and the Home Nations or prepare for independence referendums aplenty. I would love to see either an English Parliament or some super-regional governments created for the English. This BBC article gives some very good background on English devolution:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29934867
Between this and the EU debate, we will have interesting times.
fuckwit
Those headlines describe exactly how I felt here in the USA in 2000, and 2002, and 2004, and 2010, and 2014.
In fact, in the what, 17 elections since 1980, I think I’ve been happy after about 4 of them.
So, I guess, I feel yer pain.