Interesting story that I’ve seen on multiple UK news sources.
Any chance we see a new Tory PM? And who would really want the job? Even in a Trump world, I can’t see waking up to the news that Jacob Rees-Moog is one of the leaders of the free world.
Well Boris is probably available. But almost every other PM candidate sees the Brexit negotiation as a no-win situation–that any Brexit result is going to be unsatisfying to huge numbers of people. So they want to wait until that is resolved before attempting to become Prime Minister.
As a Yank, I have to ask, is May really as incompetent as she comes across in the few stories we get over here on this side of the Pond?
An outside observer’s view: Brexit isn’t a partisan issue but it’s the issue. Either the country needs to give up on Brexit or the current parties need to be dumped in favor of a pro-Brexit majority. You can’t effectively negotiate Brexit when the ruling party just doesn’t give a damn about the measure. And with the current parties, that can’t happen because the borders of political groups isn’t based on Brexit. It’s based on fox hunting and military hawkishness and other nonsense.
May should have formed a coalition with the pro-Brexit Laborites, the pro-Brexit Scots, the pro-Brexit Lib Dems, and so on, rather than trying to keep the traditional parties.
If someone takes over for her, Tory or otherwise, they’re not going to be in a better place unless they do that.
I don’t think a “pro-Brexit coalition” would have a workable majority. And there don’t appear to be any pro-Brexit SNP.
Labour Leave was about 11 MPs. I don’t know of any pro Brexit Lib Dems or SNP. The Tories weren’t even in favour of Brexit, even though the Eurosceptic bunch can be very loud.
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Seems so. It’s just that compared to Cameron’s mob she seems highly skilled and supremely in charge.
Then so would Lyndon LaRouche.
May is utterly incompetent. She has no sincerely held policy views as to what she’d like to accomplish. She’s an anti-Thatcher, fine as a cabinet minister when she’s told what to do, but useless when she tries to lead. She’s a weaker John Major and stuck in an unenviable position of trying to negotiate leaving the European Union when she knows the UK is better off in the EU. Brexit is the UK’s equivalent of the defeat of the Spanish Armada and May probably doesn’t want to be know for leading the UK into being a second class citizen in Europe
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Nah. She’s so weak that she’s incapable of enforcing any authority on the Brextremists in her party, but there’s no alternative to those who want a steady ship of state.
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Possibly. I don’t know how many there are.
Is there an election for MPs anytime soon where someone would be able to ask the people to start hiring pro-Brexit candidates?
You take what you are given in a democracy.
Voters don’t select candidates, local party machines select candidates.
There was an election earlier this year and the Tories lost their majority. They’re in government because of a working arrangement (not a coalition) with an extreme social conservative party from Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionist Party.
The Fixed Term Parliament act was designed to make elections every 5 years. Although, as May proved, it really has no effect. When May decided she wanted an election with the snap general election this year, she easily got the support of Labour since no leader of the opposition wants to be seen as a coward.
The 2017 general election backfired on May so drastically that I can’t see a new general election unless the Tories completely fall apart. Corbyn could try to form a coalition government of some sort, but I imagine he’d want to go to the country for new elections to try to get a Labour majority rather than hobble together some sort of coalition or minority government with a working arrangement with some SNP or Lib Dem MPs.
Competence is to a certain extent relative - she was probably the most competent of any of the options available at the last leadership election, but she’s been handed the poison chalice of having to negotiate Brexit with absolutely no leverage against the EU and a party at her back in a state of infighting tumult. Had her gamble on an early election paid off and given her a stronger majority she could have blustered through on her usual “I’ve got the power so fuck you” approach (see: her entire Home Office career) until the next election, by which time Brexit would be sufficiently in the rearview mirror. As it is, she ended up hobbling herself even worse and managed to make the Opposition Leader look like a credible alternative*. And her deal with the D[del]evil[/del]UP is a ticking dungbomb yet to explode and shower everyone with fundamentalist insanity.
I do maintain that May putting Boris in as Foreign Secretary was actually a fairly shrewd move in that it keeps him on a short lead and puts him in a position where either he delivers or he faces the consequences of his bumbling (as his recent Iranian gaffe has done); in either case the threat to her leadership from him is reduced. And the idea of Rees-Mogg as leader is horrifying for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the further confirmation that the path to power in the UK involves a few guest spots on HIGNFY.
The biggest implication of a successful “no confidence” vote and ouster of May, should it occur, would of course be for the aforementioned Brexit negotiations. The UK are already woefully underprepared for Brexit and have already planned to drag the process out well beyond the March 2019 deadline. A chaotic change of government would only make that position worse - it would be unlikely to halt Brexit, but would vastly increase the odds of a “no deal” outcome, with all that would follow.
*Not to hijack this further, but my views on Corbyn are that he is 1) woefully unqualified to lead, yet 2) still a lot better than the endless media smears make him out to be. What a world we live in.
Well so this takes us to the other option: The UK isn’t a democracy, it’s a republic. (A democratic republic, yes, but still a republic.) And the reason that one chooses a republican style of government is because you want reasoned, professional representatives of the people to spend their full time analyzing the situations that are being considered as government aims, not rule the country on the backs of ignorant doofuses who are simply out for their own good, at the expense of everyone else, and (likely) based on incomplete, misunderstood, or false information.
Ultimately, they do always have the option to simply do their job, tell the people that they’re a bunch of stupid wankers and that the people are going to have to vote them out if the electorate really wants to ruin the country, and good luck finding someone to replace them who isn’t an idiot if you’re going to insist on hiring pro-Brexit representatives.
What? Of course the UK is a democracy. And it’s right in the name that it’s not a republic (that’s what the K stands for).
Does it have representatives of the people who are elected to govern?
Y/N
Yes, which makes it a democracy. The standard definition of democracy is representative democracy, not absolute democracy, since the former actually exists and the latter does not.
It also has a monarch, and a country with a monarch as a head of state is not a republic, even if it is a democracy. That’s why the biggest anti-monarchy group in the UK is called “Republic.”
Actually, vide Dicey, Bagehot, Bryce and other old constitutional [del]bores[/del] experts, it is a ‘Crowned Republic’, and has been since the 17th century.
cf Poland when they had ‘Kings’.
She was a local politician for 10 years and now an MP for 20 years. Before that she worked at the Bank of England for 6 years. So far so good.
The recent election campaign was a huge misjudgement but not so much of her doing, more her closest but crucially inexperienced advisers. The result was a disaster.
Anyone who has tried to lead without a clear mandate and without authority will appreciate how hellish is her predicament.
At this point I can believe she’s hanging on for the good of her party, perhaps in her mind the good of the country. There is so little talent and so much poison in the Conservative Party atm and, of course, the socialists - proper, no nonsense socialists - are at the gates.
Let them in, I say!
This was a lazy shift from “Democratic Republic” championed by populists who wish for direct democracy, choosing the adjectival part of the phrase rather than the noun, despite all logic. Those populists are/were stupid and harmful and, more importantly, I clarified my terms for anyone who was not aware of the technical usage, so I’m pretty sure that there’s no ambiguity here that needs to be debated, not is there anything in my post that was not correct. Using the technical, rather than the popular terms, I’m pretty damn sure, is not frowned upon here - and particularly not where the distinction is quite relevant to the point being made.
I was not aware of your second point, so yay knowledge, but I’m pretty sure that a history of how things have changed over time, where words are misused or properly used, how and why, is not really germane to anything. My point was and remains that the British government is run by a group of representatives - i.e. the system of government that is most technically described by the term “republic” - and that there are reasons to choose that style of government which are in opposition to an alternate style of government that is most technically described by the term “democracy”. Brexit was a democratically decided measure and was stupid for the reasons that democracy is stupid. Abiding by a democratic decision in a republican state is unnecessary and stupid. The representatives have merely to do their jobs to correct the situation; represent the best interests of their electorate, even if it is opposition to the desires of the majority.