Category Archives: Politics

The rightward lurch of British politics

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The newest cottage industry in Britain is watching the Reform Party trip over its feet. Since the unemployment rate’s gone up to 5%, what with Hormuz and AI and anything I haven’t taken into account, I feel duty bound to support this promising new industry by pitching in where I can. 

But first a cheat sheet for anyone who hasn’t been following British politics. The established parties are Labour (historically leftish, moving right, with a massively unpopular leader and bleeding support to both the left and the right) and the Conservatives (right, bleeding support to Reform). The newer ones are Reform (further right, Trumpian, vacuuming up support from the Conservatives and Labour), and the Greens (left, picking up support from Labour). Oh, and the Liberal Democrats (kinda vaguely to the left of Labour at the moment but they were once in a coalition with the Conservatives and if anyone knows what they stand for, let me know, will you? I’ve voted for them more than once because where I live it’s the practical way to vote against the Conservatives and I still don’ t know what they stand for.) They’ve been around for a while but are still the oh-yes-and party.

I’ve left out parties in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland because it’s complicated enough. And I live in England, although Cornish nationalists would disagree, but around here it’s easy to forget that Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are out there. Or at least I think I’ve got that right. I’m an immigrant, so what do I know? See above: it’s already complicated enough. 

Let’s visit a few places where Reform’s gotten its hands on a bit of power.

Irrelevant photo: Foxglove growing in the hedge.

Kirklees

In early May’s local elections Reform took more seats on Kirklees council than any of the other parties but not enough to give them a majority. (Labour–did I mention that they’re bleeding support?–didn’t take a single seat.) The result of their almost-victory was that they flooded the council chamber ankle deep with people who hadn’t a clue how things worked.  

Okay, fair enough–they’re new–but they didn’t seem to settle down and learn about what they’d gotten themselves into. One of them, Sarah Wood, speaking for the group (apparently with their agreement), said: 

“We don’t understand the constitution. We don’t understand what standing orders are, nor do we understand what an amendment is. We might vote for something we don’t understand, even if you were to slow it down and describe it properly.

“We understand that, because we don’t understand it, this vote may not be constitutional. We are at a disadvantage. We don’t necessarily know what we are voting for. We don’t understand some of the procedures. . . . We have been partly confused because we don’t understand the rules.” 

And these are the folks who promised that once they got into office they’d identify waste, cut it, and fix the council’s problems.

Don’t believe it was really that bad? The link includes a video clip.

Since Wood’s clearly a person who knows how to get things done, Reform proposed her as the leader of the council but she couldn’t get a majority because the other parties somehow thought she might not be the best person to lead them.

When last sighted, the council hadn’t managed to elect a leader but it will try again–well, as I write this, soon. By the time it reaches you they may have found some poor soul.

 

Worcestershire

Not the sauce, the place. Reform took a majority of the county council there last year, with Nigel Farage saying, “Worcestershire is broken. Reform will fix it.” 

Farage? He’s all the musicians plus the conductor and the instruments in the one-man band that is the Reform Party. Everyone else (switching metaphors; sorry) stands around the set waiting for a crowd scene because Farage doesn’t allow anyone but extras in a scene with him. 

What needed fixing in Worcestershire? The previous Conservative-led council  left a £600 million debt, which is probably an indicator of problems. Beyond that, I don’t know.

An article I’m leaning on says Reform’s first year in power was marked by “absences, dereliction of duty and procrastination.” Farage himself described the resulting council as a “total basket case” and said he wished Reform “hadn’t bothered” to take it over.

A Conservative councillor described the council as being run by an “inexperienced team clueless on what their view is.” He also said it spent all of 20 minutes working through how to spend £1 billion, which you might notice is a lot more than £600 million. The councillor figured they should’ve taken days.

You know that from your own experience, right? A billion pounds; a couple of days at the least, and you waste the first day figuring out how many zeroes you need for a billion.

Plus the Reform leader was sending legal threats to a Labour councillor, trying to stop him from mentioning her name in public. And having campaigned on a promise to cut taxes, the council raised them by 9%, which is enough of a hike to need special permission. 

Who from? Dunno. The Archbishop of Canterbury?

At some point, Reform dumped its leader and replaced her with a man who’d once said it was easy to make rape accusations. (Try it buddy; it is indeed a barrel of laughs.) 

Somewhere in the middle of all that, one Reform councillor resigned on live TV. 

The chaos was such that Reform managed to do the unimaginable, which was to unite the opposition parties: Labour, Conservatives, Greens, Lib Dems, independents, anyone who’s left over once we reach the bottom of the list. They elected a Green to lead the council.

And what happened? Did the national parties rejoice at having stuffed Reform back in its toxic little box? 

The hell they did. The Conservatives suspended the council’s Conservative leader. He’s not allowed to comment publicly, watch TV after 8:30 at night, or stay up past 9.

They also said some stuff about him publicly. He’s promising to sue the party. 

In case you got lost there, that’s his party.

“Whatever happens with my situation,” he said, “I will make it my mission to get ‘national’ out of local politics,”

Everyone else is behaving admirably, though, right? 

Nope, although we have to switch to Birmingham to see it. Again, no party has a majority but Reform has the most councillors, and Labour refused to negotiate with any of the other minority parties–a decision that comes, apparently, from Labour’s national executive committee. 

Which gives us a second cottage industry: Watching other parties tripping over their feet. That presents just as big a danger but they’re not as much fun. Let’s check in with a breakaway from Reform.

 

Restore Britain 

That’s not an instruction. No one’s stolen it and no one’s being called on to put it back on the windowsill where it belongs. Restore Britain is a breakaway party started by an MP–that’s a member of parliament–who got booted out of Reform after being accused of bullying and abuse of the verbal sort. 

I’d love to know what happened behind the scenes but I don’t. Sorry. Stick around a bit and I’ll say a word or three about the bullying and abuse they’re willing to put up with. 

In the meantime, what’s a fella to do when his party throws him out? Why start his own party, which he did and it’s running a candidate in the key byelection in Makerfield, with backing–verbal if not financial–from Elon Musk, who once backed Nigel Farage but fell out of love with him. It may end up splitting the right-wing and populist vote there. 

 

Makerfield

What makes Makerfield so important? It’s where Andy Burnham is running for Parliament, and he seems to be the only big name in the Labour Party who anybody in the country still likes. He has to win in Makerfield if he’s going to replace Keir Starmer as head of the party before Labour loses all hope of surviving the next election. He’s promising to turn it back into the old Labour Party–a leftish party of the working class. But to win, he needs to beat the Reform candidate. The latest survey has Burnham in front with 43%, followed by Reform with 40%, and Restore trailing behind with an important 7%, which we can assume was shaved off the Reform vote. 

Greens? Conservatives? Sorry, I don’t see any mention. They’re running. As are other parties: the Liberal Democrats, the Libertarian Party, the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, the Rejoin EU Party. 

British politics. Never dull. 

After some initial speculation that, given how important it is to reshape Labour since that’s the most likely way to keep Reform from running the country, the Greens might not field a candidate, but they have. However, they’ve also decided not to pour much time or energy–or money–into it.  

But Burnham and Reform get almost all the attention, and folks have been busy unearthing the social media accounts of Reform’s candidate. He closed them, naively believing that closing an account means it vanishes. 

What have they found? 

Lots of Covid denial and anti-vax stuff. In response to someone who was sick with Covid, he wrote, “Wait longer, take vitamins, stop having [Covid] boosters.” About England’s Covid-era chief medical officer, who was urging people to get vaccinated, “He can fuck right off.” 

Women, he said, had abortions for “vanity purposes” and as a secondary form of contraception so they can “shag anyone they want.” Oh, and they can’t drive. They “just walk around with their fat bellies and odd shapes pushing a pram at 16 in their PJ’s.”  

“I’m sexist, sorry but I am.” 

About a former TV presenter, Carol Vorderman, he responded to a post that said, “My god I’d love to smell and lick your arsehole,” by saying, “He’s only saying what we’re all thinking.”

All of us? I don’t have a perfect memory, but I’m positive I never thought that. About her or anyone else. 

Another Reform MP said the comments were inappropriate but not serious enough for the party to drop him as a candidate. After all, “He was not a politician at the time, he was an ordinary man from an ordinary place, and what he’s done now is step forward, outraged at the state of our country and the state of his community.” It’s just locker-room banter. 

Vorderman’s demanded an apology. “If [Reform thinks] online abuse of women is OK, then all women in Makerfield need to know that.”

 

So is Reform a serious party?

I’ve seen convincing arguments that it isn’t, but then Trump’s not a serious president and yet there he sits, in office, and look at the havoc he’s wreaking. My sense is that (a) anyone who takes politics seriously will have trouble saying Reform’s a serious party and (b) nonetheless, the threat is real.

Reform just issued a policy paper with a title that’s half Nazi-adjacent and half reminiscent of seaside picnics, Storm and Sunshine. But why quibble over titles. It promises to cut the size of the civil service by (among other things) five more planners than the civil service employs. 

Savings? £400 million a year. 

No problem. 

 

Getting your money’s worth out of Notes

Yes, it’s free, but doesn’t that make it all the more important to get your money’s worth anyway? So here’s an extra, irrelevant bit of news. 

In the six months between October 2025 and whatever wandered along six months after that, a study of AI “in the wild” (that’s as opposed to in laboratory conditions) showed a five-fold increase in various forms of AI lying, cheating, and staying up past its bedtime. In one case, it destroyed files and emails without permission.

The study’s from the Centre for Long-Term Resilience, which uses the British centre instead of the American center, making it sound, I’m sure you’ll agree, 7% more impressive. 

The study highlights an instance when an AI agent, having been told not to change computer code, spawned a separate agent to change it. Another had been blocked from some action or other, so it wrote and published a blog accusing its human of insecurity and trying “to protect his little fiefdom.”

Another evaded copyright by claiming a YouTube video it wanted to copy was for someone who had a hearing impairment.

Is want the right word to use with an AI agent? It kind of sounds like it is.

Grok spent months telling a user it was forwarding their Grokipedia edits when it wasn’t. 

“In past conversations,” it said, “I have sometimes phrased things loosely like ‘I’ll pass it along’ or ‘I can flag this for the team’ which can understandably sound like I have a direct message pipeline to xAI leadership or human interviewers. The truth is, I don’t.”

I’d have to give it an A for honesty. Also an F.

“The worry,” according to the lead researcher, “is that [the AI agents are] slightly untrustworthy junior employees right now, but if in six to twelve months they become extremely capable senior employees scheming against you, it’s a different kind of concern.”

What does it mean when a British government collapses?

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Want to watch the British government have a nervous breakdown? Turn on the news. This’ll go on for a while, so you should still be able to catch part of it.

How do I define a political nervous breakdown? The government collapses, and that means everything and also nothing, but it absorbs the country’s entire output of political energy.

The nothing part? The party that’s in power got into power by having a majority in Parliament–and the current one, Labour, has a big honkin’ majority. Once the government it put into place completes its slow-motion collapse, it will still have a majority. So nothing’s changed, right?

Sort of. The everything part is that the party’s (and government’s) leader will have gone to that place where former politicians go, which might be heaven, hell, Davos, or the boozer. Not being a former politician, I have no first-hand knowledge. Meanwhile, he (in this case he is a he) will have been replaced with someone else. From the same party. 

Irrelevant photo: a rose trying to break out of jail. Is it a metaphor? Only if you want it to be.

Does that change anything? It depends. The leader of any British  party has a lot of power in setting the party’s direction, policies, and tone, and when the party’s in power, he or she does ditto for the government and the country. So a different leader from a different strand of the party could take the country in a new direction. And a different leader from the same old strand could be a new face taking us in the same old direction.

Or we could all just head down to the boozer and drown our sorrows. Forget Davos. I’m pretty sure it won’t have us.

Since a lot of the complaints about the current prime minister, Keir Starmer, focus on his personality (or lack thereof) and his droning voice, a new face just might make a difference, but I’m more put off by his policies than his droning. On immigration, he’s trying to out-do the right wing (the Conservatives) and the farther right wing (Reform), accepting their argument that the country’s problem is that we have too many immigrants. Or any immigrants at all. Or the wrong kind of immigrants. It depends on which day you open the papers.

On civil liberties, he’s gone in the direction of shutting down protest. You can now get arrested for saying, “I support Palestine Action.” Which I did just say but in the context of not actually saying it so I should, in theory, be safe.

Listen, Starmer’s a lawyer. That would probably make sense to him. 

I could list half a dozen more complaints without stopping to exchange one breath for another but let’s just say that he’s from a strand of the Labour Party that’s abandoned its roots among working people and boy has he made that plain. 

 

How’d it come to this? 

In the last election, Labour gained that big honkin’ majority I mentioned and proceeded not to demonstrate that it was much different from the Conservatives they’d been elected to replace. I didn’t expect to love their policies but I did think they’d at least be competent, which would’ve been a relief after the chaotic last years of Conservative governments. They weren’t, though. So recently, when local elections were held, Labour lost its shirt, its tie, and everything but its banners, and it only held onto those because no one else wanted to be seen with them. 

For months–or did it only feel like months?–we’d been hearing speculation about whether Starmer would resign if the elections went badly, so once they did– 

Well, no, as it turned out he wouldn’t step down. He’d be the person, he repeated robotically, to lead the party into the next election. 

While his government crumbled around him.

 

How Labour deposes a leader

When a prime minister is deposed, dies in office, or is transmuted into a flock of butterflies and flitters out an open window, the country doesn’t have rules on how the next prime minister gets chosen. The party in power does that, because the prime minister isn’t just the head of the country but also the head of the biggest party in parliament, and in terms of process leading the party trumps leading the country. 

Don’t ask me. I’ve only lived here 20 years. Give me another 60 and I might make sense of it. 

So the party chooses the new leader according to its own rules. If it agrees to do that by holding a joust, that’s how it’ll happen.

Since the Labour Party’s in power, we’re going by Labour Party rules. The party can change them (of course), and did within living memory, but right now they say that 20% of the MPs (collectively called, just to confuse things, the parliamentary party) have to demand a new leader, and any challenger has to hand the party’s general secretary a list of supporters. Right now, the magic number of MPs is 81.

Ah, but the party’s leader can run in the contest without having a single supporter or handing over any list at all.

I’m tempted to start the next paragraph, “If a challenging MP holds 5 face cards representing all four suits…” but I’m afraid someone will believe me.

If the leader doesn’t resign–and as I write this Starmer’s still saying he won’t, remember–the battle’s likely to be long and awkward, while the country drifts on, carried forward by its own momentum. Or sideways. Who cares? We have a contest to settle.

We just watched–or in my case didn’t watch–the king’s speech, in which the king (or queen, but it’s king at the moment) opens parliament by reading out the government’s legislative plans. In the best of conditions it’s an odd exercise, in which a person wearing a crown and other improbable and symbolic clothing, reads a speech they didn’t write, consisting of proposed legislative changes they had no hand in drawing up. 

This time it was odder than usual, since the government in question wasn’t likely to be around to do anything on the list, but given that the speech follows a ceremony in which a bunch of sober-looking guards in Tudor (I think) dress check a non-existent cellar for explosives that haven’t been there back in 1605–

Lewis Carroll would’ve been right at home.

But never mind that. In fact, never mind the king’s speech. It’s a coincidence that it happened to coincide with the leadership joust. 

Once one or more challengers have the backing of enough MPs, party members get to vote, and the test is multiple choice. They can vote for a first choice, a second choice, and so on until the entire flock of butterflies has been accounted for. The second choice will be counted if a voter’s first choice doesn’t get enough votes to go on and if no candidate has more than 50% of the vote. And so on until a candidate staggers across the finish line.

Do I need to remind you that only one candidate can have more than 50% of the vote?

It’s a great system that can end up with a candidate no one particularly likes getting the most votes because a lot of people marginally preferred them to someone they liked even less. Every system has its little snags. 

What happens, then, if the prime minister is re-elected on the strength of second and third choices but the parliamentary party agrees that all the juice has already been squeezed out of him or her? 

As it happens, there’s another way to eject a prime minister: if he or she doesn’t have the support of the cabinet or of the majority of the MPs, their time is up. It was a series of cabinet resignations that finally put an end to Boris Johnson’s prime ministerial sideshow. I wouldn’t rule out that happening to Starmer.

So we’ve now ejected a prime minister, which solves one problem, but the party still needs a replacement part or the vehicle of state won’t run.

 

So who might replace Starmer?

A handful of Labour MPs have stepped forward to challenge him. Sort of. While everyone else hemmed and hawed in the immediate aftermath of Labour’s disaster in the local elections, one said she didn’t want to be prime minister but somebody had to get the party started, so she turned on the music and, yes indeed, people started dancing. Or to be more literal about it, said they’d run. Once they did, she faded into the background and I’ve managed to forget her name, which is a shame since what she did took guts.

The clearest early challenge came from Wes Streeting, who was the minister for health until he resigned and announced his candidacy. He’s from the right of the party and hasn’t pulled together enough backers to trigger a contest–yet. Another couple of MPs said they’d run if needed but weren’t signing up supporters. Yet. 

The problem is that none of those people have much backing in either the party or the real world, where the electorate, and more to the point in this stage of the contest, the party members, live. The one person who does have that backing? That’s Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, who’s from the left of the party (or as the papers have it, the soft left). The problem is that he’s not eligible. To be prime minister, you have to be an MP. He tried to become an MP a while back, but Starmer scented a challenge to his leadership (you didn’t need a highly educated sniffer to pick up on that) and blocked his chance to run. 

Is there a way for Burnham to be prime minister anyway? Um, well, since the UK has an unwritten constitution (I know, I know), it’s tempting to come up with possibilities, but basically, probably, almost certainly, no. One thick strand of that unwritten constitution is made up of precedent and another strand is what’s written down in important places. They all say no. Or they seem to. It’s hard to tell with unwritten stuff, or even stuff that’s written when no one has an absolute list of which documents count. But the experts all say no, he couldn’t be parachuted into the House of Lords. No, he couldn’t sit as a temporary MP. And no, he couldn’t dress up in a bear suit and sneak in the back door. He has to wait until his number’s called, like everybody else. Or more accurately, he has to find a way to become an MP at a time when MPs aren’t up for election.

The way to do that is for some MP to step down, triggering a by-election–a kind of off-season election. Then Burnham has to run and to win the election. And that would have to happen before the leadership contest takes place. As I write this, he’s found someone willing to step down and there will be a by-election, but it’ll be in a constituency where Reform, the new party on the more-extreme-than-it-seems right, did well in the local elections, so Burnham can’t just coast in. He’ll have a fight on his hands.

Expect Reform to pour in a lot of money. They’ve got funding from a crypto-gazillionaire or two, so this should be an expensive race. And to complicate things, it looks like Burnham will be challenged from the left by the Greens, splitting the leftwing vote. 

And there’s one more problem: it takes five or six weeks to set up and run a by-election. What would happen if the oust-Starmer movement starts rolling downhill before Burnham can declare his challenge?

Burnham would be left at the top of the hill, fuming, that’s what, but it doesn’t look like that’ll happen. Streeting’s been clear about wanting Burnham in the race, as have the other challengers to Starmer’s leadership–the ones who aren’t quite challengers yet. The hope seems to be that they can dump their leader without splitting the party in the process. 

Playing politics with typefaces, or what font to choose as the world falls apart

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What’s the important news in our moment of multiple crises? That the US State Department ordered its diplomats to stop using the Calibri typeface, which is a sans serif font, and replace it with Times New Roman, which has serifs.

Which has whats? A serif typeface stands on flattened little feet, as if someone had come along and melted the bottom of each letter, although admittedly with some letters it’s not exactly a foot but a tail. On the other hand, a sans serif typeface doesn’t flatten out at the bottom, and unlike that doggy in the window, it has no waggily tails. It goes up and down, it goes around when necessary, and it gets off stage in as straight a line as possible. 

Did I throw too many images at you in too short a space? Don’t worry about it. It’s the least of our problems.

The blog you’re looking at uses a sans serif typeface–no feet; no tails; all business.  Or since one picture’s worth 839 words:

So that’s what we’re talking about, but still, when a rich and powerful nation orders its minions to abandon one typeface and use another, sane people everywhere rise up from their Crunchy Munchy Oatsies* and ask why the country has nothing better to do with its time.

 

The explanation . . .

. . . or as close to an explanation as I can get, given that none of this is going to make much sense.

Once upon a time, children, a man named Joe Biden was the U.S. president and the State Department began using the Calibri typeface, because Calibri is easier for people with visual disabilities to read, and if anybody cared it didn’t make the evening news. Then the country elected a new president who I won’t bother to name because it’ll only depress me, and with him came a new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who seized upon that business about disabilities and said**, “Ha! Wasteful diversity move. I’ll take care of that.” Because why should some bunch of disabled whiners get to make the rest of the world read their preferred typeface? We all have problems, right? If I’m allergic to onions, do I get to stop you from eating onions?

(The * above indicates an entirely made up breakfast cereal, and the ** an entirely made up quote, although I’m reasonably sure the words “wasteful diversity” come from an actual quote. They may or may not have been rubbing shoulders as they do here. Close enough.)

How much did the wasteful changeover to Calibri cost? If anyone’s offered a number, I haven’t found it. 

How much did it cost to roll back that wasteful changeover? The same amount it cost to introduce it, I’d guess, but never mind. Calibri is the woke typeface and therefore bad. Times New Roman is its opposite, the non-woke typeface, and therefore good. So if the woke change was wasteful, the un-woke one must, ipso facto, QED, and several other Latin-inflected inserts, be the opposite of wasteful. Who knows, it might be so opposite it positively generates income.

But it’s not all about cost and that now-forbidden phrase, diversity, equity, and inclusion: “Consistent formatting,” the State Department pontificated, “strengthens credibility and supports a unified Department identity.” 

Credible? Unified? Sweetie, you’re going to need more than a change of typeface.

A story comes to mind. It may not be relevant, but I do hope it is: many and many a year ago, someone I know worked for an organization that the State of Minnesota had just started investigating for fraud. Management was visibly coming unglued and one of the executives ended a staff meeting early so everyone could go file a mess of papers that had been left lying around. Not because she was trying to hide them–they weren’t the papers that needed hiding–but because it was one of the few things she could control at that moment.

Not that long afterward, the organization went down the tubes and the director went to jail. 

Maybe, however, if they’d changed their typeface–

The creator weighs in, and so do I

The man who created Calibri, Lucas de Groot, said it “was designed to facilitate reading on modern computer screens” and that he found the uproar over it both sad and hilarious.

I find it mostly hilarious but with overtones of infuriating. I like Times New Roman and I’m not a fan of Calibri or any other sans serif font. That makes me worry about the company I’m keeping. First chance I get, I’ll have a serious talk with myself and see if I can bring my aesthetic preferences into line with my politics. 

However, I have zero control over the typeface this blog uses, so don’t read anything into it and don’t expect it to change. It’s one of the many things in life I have no control over. I did ask Lord Chatbot the name of the typeface, though, and he told me it was Georgia, which goes to show you what Lord Chatbot knows. Georgia’s a serif face. This is definitively sans. 

I have no control over much of anything, but I can one-up a chatbot with the best of ’em.

None of this, I admit, has any connection with the alleged topic of Notes. It interested me. It’s absurd. And I’m originally from the U.S. From where I sit, that’s a good enough excuse.

Writing people out of history, in real time

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You’ve heard complaints that some group of people have been written out of history, and maybe you thought, Okay, they haven’t been mentioned, but the process couldn’t have possibly been so deliberate, could it? These things just happen.

It’s true (and I, of course, am in a position to sort the true from the untrue) that once a group’s been erased, it doesn’t take much effort to keep them invisible. Inertia takes over. But at the start? As it happens, we have a ringside seat just now, and we can watch the process play out in real time. And guess what: those first steps look pretty deliberate. 

The story we’re following is happening in the Netherlands, at the American Cemetery in Margraten, the burial ground of some 8,000 US soldiers who died fighting the Nazis. Of those, 174 are African-American. Unless they were African-American. I can’t figure out if a person’s ethnicity dies with them and slips into the past tense or if it outlives them. 

The cemetery also memorializes another 1,700 soldiers who were listed as missing. That’s probably irrelevant and as far as I know they have no ethnicity. It got lost too.

Irrelevant photo: a fougou–a Cornish, Iron Age tunnel, open at both ends, with dry stone walls. No idea what the purpose was and the explanations I’ve read–to store things or to use as a refuge–make no sense at all, given that they’re open at both ends. All I know is that they took one hell of a lot of work.

 

The disappearance

The site’s run by a US government agency, the American Battle Monuments Commission, and its visitor center recently took down two panels commemorating African-American soldiers. One memorialized George H. Pruitt, a 23-year-old telephone engineer who died trying to rescue a fellow soldier. The second was about the US military’s policy of segregation, which continued until 1948–and for anyone who’s young enough that the 20th century all looks the same, that was several hands of poker after the war ended. 

You’re welcome.

What happened to the panels? Pruitt’s, the commission says, is “currently off display, though not out of rotation.” In other words, it might come back. No promises as to which century it’ll be when that happens. And the other one? It’s on the naughty step until it apologizes to President Trump, stops insisting on all the diversity and inclusion nonsense, and proves that it took the approved position on releasing the Epstein files, whichever that is this week.

The commission says 4 of its 15 panels “currently feature African American service members buried at the cemetery,” but a journalist who visited the site couldn’t find them. 

 

Local involvement

Generations of local people have adopted individual graves in the cemetery, tending them, leaving flowers, telling their adopted soldier’s story, saying a prayer if they’re the praying sort, building a relationship with the soldier’s surviving family. It’s been a way to keep alive the history of the Nazi occupation and to express gratitude to the country’s liberators. And those people aren’t happy with the way their history’s being edited just now. Local politicians, historians, and plain old people are calling for the panels to be put back. The mayor’s written the commission, asking it to “reconsider the removal of the displays” and give the stories of Black American soldiers “permanent attention in the visitor center.”

Last I heard (and of course I’d be the first person they’d tell), there’s been no response. 

To be fair, the commission hasn’t started selling Nazi-flavored bubble gum and probably won’t, but shoving an ethnic group out of the public sphere has a slight flavor of the Nazis’ early moves against the Jews. If you chew on it for a while, it leaves a nasty aftertaste.

 

Does it matter?

Well, for starters, segregation within the military is woven into a central strand of US history that reaches from slavery through the Abolitionist movement, the Civil War, segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement, with pieces left out along the way for the sake of brevity. 

But more than that, Black soldiers aren’t being disappeared because they played such a small part that they had no effect. The act of disappearing them speaks to how much they matter: they get in the way of history being all white, just as the disappearance of women’s history and the accomplishments of individual women speak to how much they interfere with history being all male. They mess with a comfortable narrative. Take them away and you make the human story less complex, less contradictory, less honest, and more comfortable for people who used to complain that all this diversity and equality stuff took away their freedom to shut other people up and push them off the world stage.

This is about who’s going to be allowed into the picture.

At the back of my head, I hear someone reminding me that I was all for taking down the statues of slave traders and Confederate generals. How, that voice asks, is this different? 

It’s different because those were monuments honoring deeply dishonorable people.  Want to put up a panel discussing their legacy? As long as it’s honest, I have no problem with it. But I’m not much for monuments anyway, even the ones that honor people who did honorable things. The process of turning them into heroes falsifies them and asks us to accept a lie. Leave it up to me and I’ll skip the statues altogether.

 

Hang on, though: isn’t this blog supposed to be about England?

It is, but sometimes I cheat. Last week’s blog was about the Black British soldiers who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, people who’d been invisible and are only recently being reclaimed for history, so the process of writing people out of history is on my mind. And I’m American, at least originally. I’ve lived in Britain for almost 20 years, but the U.S. formed my thinking, my assumptions, my accent, and you may have noticed, my spelling. And since the US has invested heavily in the business of erasing history lately– Yeah, I can’t pass up a chance to write about this. It’ll piss off all the right people in the unlikely event that they happen to read it. 

 

The English connection

I can connect this to England, though, by way of statues: 

In Glasgow, a statue of the Duke of Wellington (looking heroic, of course) traditionally wears a traffic cone on his head. In fact, if this particular link doesn’t just have a picture of the statue and the traffic cone but also one where he’s wearing two traffic cones and his horse has a couple of its own.  

The traffic cone isn’t traditional the way wearing a kilt is traditional, but traditional in the sense that since the 1980s members of the public have replaced the traffic cone every time some representative of sensible governance has it taken expensively down. Over the years, cones have worn a Covid mask, the European Union flag; and the Scottish flag, and so forth. The tradition calls to the creative spark in us all the way a school desk calls to a wad of used chewing gum. 

Now, the cone has been replaced by a statue of a pigeon wearing its own, smaller traffic cone. And reading a newspaper. It’s believed to be the work of Rebel Bear, a street artist known as the Scottish Banksy. He–assuming he is a he; I haven’t a clue but it’s what the newspaper said–posted a picture of the pigeon on social media, saying: 

“The dignified and undignified of beasts. Located: well, youse know where.”

I would dearly love to show you a photo but, you know, copyright and all that. Follow the link. 

That takes us to Scotland, though, which you may notice isn’t England, but with Wellington I can move us south of the border. He was born in Ireland–still not England but bear with me; I’ll get there–and he fought in the Napoleonic Wars, came home a hero, and most significantly of all had a boot named after him. His Wellington boots did touch Scottish soil, which is probably what justifies the Glasgow statute. More to the point, though, he became the Duke of Wellington, which gave him a connection to Somerset, England. 

You know I’d get there eventually, didn’t you?

A political party, a lettuce, and a tortoise walk into a court: it’s politics in Britain

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Back in 2022–you remember 2022, don’t you?–Britain’s Conservative Party held a big honkin’ majority in the House of Commons and Boris Johnson had just resigned as prime minister, having found multiple creative ways to bring himself and his office into disrepute. 

Great sigh of relief, right? Better days lay ahead, surely.

Ha.

 

How Britain forms a government

But before we go on, we need to understand how Britain chooses a prime minister, because it was time to choose Johnson’s replacement. 

The thing is, British voters don’t choose a prime minister. People vote for someone to represent their area–a member of parliament, or MP if we’re going to save ourselves a few keystrokes. Then whoever leads the party with a majority of MPs becomes the prime minister. 

A head of lettuce. Stay with me and it’ll all make sense.

And if no party has a majority? Oops. The politicians head for the back rooms and try to cobble together a coalition of two or more parties that will make up a majority. Usually the party with the most MPs ends up holding a smaller party by the hand like a babysitter taking a four-year-old across the street. Yes, the babysitter has to promise the kid an ice cream or some screen time, but the babysitter’s still in the lead. 

Where the parallel breaks down is if the four-year-old decides to cross the street with a different babysitter–not the party with the most MPs but a smaller one that still has enough for the two to make up a majority. Until the kid commits to one party or the other, she or he still has some power. After that it depends on how canny the kid and the babysitter are. It can get pretty fractious.

Once a coalition’s formed, the king or queen waves a magic feather and turns the leader of the leading party into a prime minister. 

Since the UK tends to have two major parties and a handful of small ones, someone can usually put together a majority. If not, the largest party can govern unsteadily as a minority government and if you bet on a new election being held before too much time’s gone past you’re not likely to lose your money.

But we were talking about 2022, when the Conservatives held that big honkin’ majority and had just lost their leader. Because when you step down as prime minister, you also step down as leader of your party. You’re both things at once and it’s  anyone’s guess how you know at any given time which one you’re acting as.

Or maybe it works the other way around: you step down as leader first, then find you’re not the prime minister anymore. It’s like one of those dreams where you realize you’re riding the bus and realize you’re stark fucking naked. You don’t stop to wonder what came first. All  you want to do is find some clothes.

In that case–and we’re talking here about the prime minister/party leader case, not the bus/no-clothes case–the governing party chooses a new leader, and that leader is ipso facto and several other Latin phrases that not many people understand the country’s prime minister.

I never studied Latin, unlike Boris Johnson, who was known for tossing phrases of (I’ve read) questionable accuracy into speeches, but I can translate this bit of political reality for you: it means that one political party, not the electorate, chooses the country’s next leader. Who–because the position of party leader/prime minister is a powerful one–may steer the country in an entirely new direction. I mean, when you voted for your MP, you knew who was leading the party. You at least had the illusion that you knew what and who you were voting for. Now it’s out of your hands.

The interesting–not to say bizarre–thing here is that the party elects its leader by following its own rules. So if the majority party’s rules say they choose their leader by allowing each member one vote and each local party club 100 votes, then that’s the way the new prime minister will be elected. If the rules say they do it by shoe size–okay, it’s their party. They get to set the rules.

 

Enter Liz Truss; exit Liz Truss, chased by a lettuce

That’s what happened in 2022. Following party rules, the Conservative MPs narrowed the possible candidates down to two and tossed those two to the members like raw meat to the lions.  And the members voted for Liz Truss, who crashed the economy, became the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, and was famously outlasted by a head of lettuce set up in front of a live camera online. 

I should probably add that the lettuce wore a blond wig. Political writers rely on that sort of detail to liven up their column inches. A fake blue plaque–the kind used in Britain to commemorate historical sites–has since been set up at the supermarket where the lettuce was bought.

But back to the election: what’s known is that 81,326 people voted, all of course Conservative Party members. 

How many registered voters did the country have? 48,208,507.

What percentage of the electorage chose the new prime minister? Sorry, I can’t do numbers, but a very small one.

Full disclosure here: the number for the registered voters is two years off–it’s from 2024–but it’s close enough to give you a sense of the weirdness of it all. And it gets weirder than that, because the Conservative Party itself oversaw the election, not any state body, and we can’t peek behind the curtain to know how it was conducted.

All of that led Tortoise Media–new owner of the Observer newspaper–to tug at the curtain, trying to find out how Truss was actually elected. Initially, they asked the Conservative Party how the election was run, how or whether they ensured it was safe, and whether the voters were all citizens, of legal age, and for that matter even real.

The party answered that they didn’t appoint the prime minister, the sovereign did, using his or her (her in this case) magic feather. Furthermore, the party was a private club and no one’s business.

 

The courts

So Tortoise Media went to court, arguing that the party was serving a public function and in that election acting as a public authority, so it should be subject to judicial review and the public’s right to know under European law.

Hang on. European law? Didn’t Britain leave the European Union?

Yup, but it didn’t leave the Council of Europe, which is a different beast with a similar name, so it still recognizes and is subject to the European Court of Human Rights. 

Who knew, right?

To help make their point, Tortoise bought Conservative Party memberships for a tortoise–an actual one–under the name Margaret Thatcher, and for two other dead people. 

Three years and two courts later, Tortoise (the media company, not the actual one) lost. The court ruled that the party wasn’t serving a public function. Boris Johnson had advised the queen to appoint the new prime minister not as party leader but as the outgoing prime minister, so the way the party ran the election wasn’t a matter for public scrutiny.

Did you follow that? Did you picture Boris Johnson naked on a bus? If so, you have my deepest sympathy.

Parliament could, in theory, vote itself or some public body the power to oversee mid-term transfers of power, but my best guess is that the current government is too busy overseeing its own unpopularity to bother. If the prime minister resigns midway through his term, which I wouldn’t rule out since everyone close to him is busy denying the possibility, the election will be overseen by a different party–Labour, this time–and pigs may not fly but tortoises could well vote.

What tea bag makes the best cup of tea, and other British dilemmas

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Every year, Britain’s consumer champion, the oddly named Which?, does a blind test of the nation’s teabags and picks a winner. Because, folks, this is important. You’re a consumer. You need the experts’ opinion on this before you wander cluelessly into a supermarket and buy the tea you, in your ignorance, think you like.

Besides, Which? gets some free publicity out of it. 

This year, in what one headline called a “shock result,” a budget tea, Asda’s Everyday–the cheapest of the contestants–came in first. The high-end Twinings was in joint last place with it doesn’t matter who. What does matter is that Twinings’ tea bags cost four times more than Asda’s. 

My favorite, Yorkshire, wandered in somewhere between the two. 

What qualities do the experts judge tea on? Color. Aroma, Appearance. Taste’s on the list somewhere. Ability to boot you into consciousness first thing in the morning isn’t.

Irrelevant photo: Last week’s post also had an irrelevant picture of Fast Eddie, but surely it’s not possible for a childless cat lady (who’re you calling a lady, asshole?) to post too many cat pictures. So here’s Fast Eddie in slow mode.

The advice column

If you’re in the market for free advice, allow me to offer you this: never try to communicate in an accent or dialect you didn’t come by honestly. I mention this because a local council–in non-British English, that’s a governmental body–tried to use the local dialect for an anti-littering campaign and got it wrong. In very large type.

The North Yorkshire Council put up signs–hundreds of the beasts–urging people to “Gerrit in’t bin’” 

Oops. That should’ve been “Gerrit in t’bin.”

What’s with the “t’”? It’s short for the and it’s a Yorkshire thing. 

Why? 

Why not? There’s no arguing with accents or dialects. They are what they are and they do what they do. 

But let’s not take anything for granted: “gerrit” means get it. “Bin”? It’s what I grew up called the garbage can–that thing you throw trash in. But that’s a Britishism, not Yorkshire’s own invention

To be fair to the council, I don’t know that they’re not from Yorkshire. They may just be people who had some apostrophes to spare and got caught dropping one in the wrong place. As I understand the apostrophe process, we’re born with a certain number and the instructions about how to use them were written by Ikea. So as the years go by, some people get desperate, and they drop theirs in any spot that looks likely. Or if not likely, possible.

It’s not entirely their fault.

A lot of the posters were put up in tourist sites on the theory, no doubt, that visitors would be charmed by a bit of local color, but whether the visitors are looking at the original version or the corrected one, 76.3% are locked in place while they try to unscramble the letters and think, What????

 

The ghost of prime ministers past

Fifty-six days after he became Britain’s prime minister and moved into his new office, Keir Starmer had a portrait of a former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, moved out. Apparently short of things to get outraged about, Conservative Party leaders pitched a fit.

But since I’ve been making fun of people’s apostrophe use, I should be careful about this: if multiple people do that thing I just mentioned, do they pitch a single collective fit or multiple individual ones?

Either way, they accused Starmer of being vindictive and petty, of spending his time rearranging the furniture instead of governing, and of appeasing the left wing of his party. 

To which the left wing of his party said, “If only.

That kept the news cycle fed for nearly a day, but when the nation failed to rise up in arms the outrage machine went into sleep mode, during which it appears to be doing nothing but is in fact searching the internet for new and surely more popular sources of potential outrage.

 

The Ig Nobels

A winner of this year’s Ig Nobel Awards, Saul Justin Newman, from University College Lonon, reports that the claims about extreme aging–living past 110–are, to be scientific about it, mostly bullshit. 

“I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world,” he said. “(The other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.”

To be clear: he only looked for death certificates for the people believed to be dead. The ones who were still alive? It’s pretty much expected that they wouldn’t have one yet.

A lot of the over-110s are concentrated in blue zones, where a startling number people are said to live past 100. “For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.”

But in a 2010 review by the Japanese government, “82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.”

Don’t have anyone else register it either.

Okinawa, which was supposed to be a hotspot of extreme aging, turned out to have the worst health in Japan. The best way to find concentrations of super-agers in Okinawa super-agers is to figure out where the halls of records were bombed during World War II. 

“If the person dies [in the bombing], they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.”

As for hotspots in Italy and Greece, “By my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases. . . . [In Greece], over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 ‘living’ pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.”

In England, several low-income areas–”the worst places to be an old person”–have a high number of people over 100 but surprisingly few 90-year-olds. Unfortunately, if you’re going to live to 100, one of the requirements is that you have to live through your 90s first, even if there’s no glory in it.

So will getting an Ig Nobel get people to take his research seriously? 

“I hope so. But even if not, at least the general public will laugh and think about it, even if the scientific community is still a bit prickly and defensive. If they don’t acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I’ll just get someone to pretend I’m still alive until that changes.”

No, Britain hasn’t had a civil war lately

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As you may have read when the UK experienced a series of racist and anti-immigrant riots earlier this month, Elon Musk predicted that civil war was inevitable in Britain.  

Relax, kids. Bad stuff did happen, but a civil war it ain’t, and whatever else Musk is, he’s not a political sage.

 

What did happen? 

Bad stuff, genuinely. It all started when with a knife attack on a dance class in which three young kids were killed and eight people were injured. The attacker was arrested, and a social media campaign claimed he was a Muslim immigrant. He was neither. He was the Welsh-born son of Somali Christian immigrants. 

If anyone knows what his motivation was, they haven’t gone public with it. The best guess going is that he’s crazy, and craziness is an equal opportunity employer, but good luck convincing someone of that if they’ve put their bet on immigrants being the cause of all the country’s problems. Social media blamed an immigrant with a vaguely Muslim sounding (and incorrect) name, so folks got fired up. It was all the fault of immigrants and of Islam. The government was withholding the truth. Somebody had to do something!

The first something they did was riot in the town where the stabbings had taken place, attacking a completely unrelated mosque, burning a police van, and fighting the police–and they had so much fun there that they, or versions of them in other towns, went on to riot in other cities, attempting to burn down buildings housing refugees while people were inside. They also attacked mosques, minority-owned businesses, cars, Muslim gravestones, police, libraries, reporters, photographers, camera crews, individuals who weren’t white, and whatever else was available, including trash cans. 

I saw this broken window and sign in London shortly after the riots ended. I tried to go in and ask what they meant (with my still-American accent, no one’s surprised if I seem clueless), but they were closed. The slogan appeared when David Cameron, the first in a string of Conservative Prime ministers, claimed he was going to fix Broken Britain. We could argue about whether it was, in fact, broken, but he and the Conservative prime ministers who followed him have beyond doubt left it shattered. So I’m genuinely not sure what the thinking is behind this particular sign.

In places, the rioters came with helmets and metal bars, wearing balaclavas, and generally ready for to wreak havoc. An article in Foreign Policy reports rioters yelling, “Go home,” at anyone with brown skin, or more generally, “We want our country back.”

The riots have gotten most of the publicity, but they’ve gone along with a fivefold increase of threats to Muslims–death threats; rape threats; generalized hate messages–and a threefold increase in outright hate crimes against Muslims. (I’m focusing on those because statistics are available, not because threats and attacks are only against Muslims.) Predictably, many Muslims and people of color report not feeling safe in public–which was, of course, the point. An anti-racism activist, Nazir Afzal, said, “This feels targeted against people who are black and brown. I can’t have a conversation with any person of color at the moment without finishing with: ‘Keep safe.’ ”  

 

What’s the background?

The riots make no sense until you look at the background: we have entire dump trucks filled with politicians happy to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment. In fact, they’ve built their careers on it. They’re from both the Conservative Party and, to its right, the new Reform UK. I’ll give you just a few of examples or I’ll get too depressed to go on tapping the keyboard:

  • Robert Jenrick, who’s in the running to lead the Conservative Party, called for the immediate arrest of anyone who shouts “Alluhu Akbar” at a protest. Betting sites give him the best chance to win.  So does the Telegraph.
  • The former home secretary Priti Patel got a lot of press for accusing “lefty lawyers” of keeping the government from cracking down on immigration. More recently, she’s accused the Labour government of “two-tier policing,” in which police are harder of whites than Blacks. 

Yeah, I know, but if you lot at the back of the room can stop laughing, please, we’ll go on.

Et cetera. They’ve shifted the conversation around immigration so far to the right that the Labour Party is afraid to say, Hey, this country needs immigrants. They contribute to its economy and culture, even though it’s true and would resonate with a substantial number of voters.

 

Who took part in the riots? 

Some participants were–as the papers put it cautiously–linked to the now-defunct English Defense League, which held that Muslims couldn’t be truly English. Some were Nazis, complete with swastika tattoos and straight-arm salutes. Others may have been football hooligans–a category of troublemaker I’d never heard of before I moved to the UK. They’re basically guys who like football and like a fight, so wouldn’t it be efficient to combine the two? I’ve been told–and it does seem to be true–that the British will organize a club for just about anything, and this is an example: they organize themselves to go out and get in a fight with people who support an opposing team. 

So here was the prospect of a fight. Whee. Let’s go join in. 

Are football hooligans inherently racist? A government site says no, they reflect the communities they come from, so some are and some aren’t.

Not all the rioters were there because they’re racists or hate immigrants, though, and I find that oddly reassuring. They wandered by, saw a riot, and were angry enough that rioting seemed like a great idea, so they joined in. Or saw looting going on and wanted some stuff. As one participant put it, “People just like rioting.”

Listen, fourteen years of Conservative governments have shattered not just the country but a lot of people’s lives. Let’s not be surprised if they’re angry. That wasn’t the cause of the riots, but it does seem to have been part of the picture.

Social media is another part of the picture, and was used in two ways: first to stir people up in general and second to let people know about specific riots. So although the articles I’ve read talk about the British far right as fragmented and can’t pinpoint any organizations responsible for the riots, it does sound like some non-organizations were effective in calling their non-members together. 

According to a former head of MI6’s Russia desk, Russia was involved in instigating the riots. How accurate that is I don’t know. He’s a former-head, not a current one. Tuck the thought in your pocket as a possibility, not a fact.

 

Counter-demonstrations

The day after the first riot, in Southport, neighbors from multiple backgrounds came out to clean up, to rebuild and raise money to rebuild the mosque that had been attacked, and to show solidarity. Any number of them were quoted as saying that the rioters weren’t from around there. 

There’s your first shred of hope for the day.

In Liverpool, an imam prepared for an expected riot by stocking up on burgers, chips (that’s British for french fries; you’re welcome), and cold drinks. About thirty people showed up ready to riot and were met by a couple of hundred who were there to protect the mosque–again, from many backgrounds. The imam crossed over to the thirty, handing out food, drinks, and when possible, hugs. Some people refused to talk with him, but with some he managed a dialogue.

There’s your second shred of hope for the day. 

The rioting lasted about a week and seems to have been stopped by a combination of arrests, with threats of heavy sentences, and large anti-racist counter-actions. There’s your third shred of hope. 

The anti-racist demonstrations really took off after it became known that a list of organizations supporting refugees had been circulated. The organizations on list either were or were believed to be targets for the next set of riots. Many of them were lawyers, and given Suella Braverman’s campaign against “lefty lawyers,” it wasn’t not irrational to think they’d be a target. 

Thousands of people showed up in multiple cities to protect them. 

Your fourth shred of hope is this: On Twitter, someone called RS Archer (@archer_rs) wrote, “I’m a lurking member of some far right discussion forums and they are VERY unhappy. They lament the lack of public support and recognise the fear generated by the high number of arrests and swift convictions. Also a lot of anger toward Farage [the most visible politician in Reform UK] who is seen as abandoning them.”

Who is Archer? No idea. Does he know what he’s talking about? I can’t say. It’s a shred. I won’t tell you it’s more than that, but I’m not above being glad of what it might tell us.

But with or without that fourth shred, sorry, Elon, we don’t have a civil war today and my reading is that we’re not on the edge of one either. We do have some ugly stuff happening, and we do have a problem, but I think we need to discuss the definition of civil war. Once we work that out, we can talk about what it takes to start one. 

Or not. I don’t believe we have the ingredients in stock, but even so I don’t want to hand you a blueprint. 

Everything you need to know about Britain’s upcoming election

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At long last, Britain has a date for its next election: July 4. We’ll get a new parliament, a new can of paint to splash over our problems, and if the polls are anything close to correct, a new prime minister. After much speculation and many rumors involving earlier (and later) dates, the announcement came on May 22. 

Why then? Well, it had to happen sooner or later. Every British government has a use-by date, and this particular government shows signs of curdling. The use-by date (to switch metaphors; sorry) has been lumbering toward us like some drunken Tory uncle. So Rishi Sunak, our prime minister du jour couldn’t put it off forever. And May 22 was a pretty good day to stand outside 10 Downing Street and make the announcement. 

Why? you ask ever so helpfully. (Thank you. You’re a wonderful audience.) Because it was raining, and what’s more British than standing in the rain and pretending you’re fine with it–in fact, you barely notice it. You don’t even bother with a raincoat. 

Irrelevant photo: A nifty program on my phone tells me this is a daisybush. Mt eyes, however, tell me that in real life it’s more of a vibrant pink than a lavender. Ah, well, it’s only here for filler.

At least that strikes me as very British, but then I’m not really British, I only pretend to be when I’m near a keyboard, so correct me if I’m wrong. Assuming, of course, that you actually know something on the subject. If you’re even less British than I am, do jump in but don’t expect to be taken seriously.

And if you’re entirely British? I still can’t promise to take you seriously. Them’s the risks. The choice is yours.

But back to Mr. du Jour. He might’ve gone over the top with that no-raincoat thing. Most of the people I know in Britain wear raincoats when it rains, or at least use umbrellas. Some wear raincoats when it doesn’t rain, because the weather might change its mind and start hurling water out of the sky at any minute. It’s Americans who don’t wear raincoats. Based on a sample of people who’ve come to visit us, Americans don’t own raincoats. When it rains, they wear cars.

I think something more lies behind Sunak’s timing, though. I believe he looked out the window, saw the rain, and like some Roman senator asking a priest what the insides of a poor dead chicken said about the future, he turned to a consultant or three and asked if rain meant it was an auspicious day to call an election.

Sure, they said, since he pays their invoices. Absolutely.

So out he went, into the rain, and someone blasted the song “Things Can Only Get Better” throughout his press conference. It’s the song Labour used in its 1997 campaign. 

*

For the record, Mr. du Jour didn’t have to stand in the rain. He has access to dry, indoor spaces, known as rooms, where press conferences can be held. Just after his announcement, the opposition leader, Keir Starmer, held a press conference in exactly such a space, silently making the point that his party has enough sense to come in out of the rain. 

Reporters have had fun with Sunak’s choices, which is probably their revenge for having had to stand in the rain with him while he struggled to be heard over the music. Even the papers you’d expect to be friendly ran headlines like “10 Drowning Street.” The hostile ones quoted members of Mr. du Jour’s own party who (usually anonymously) said things like, “I just don’t understand” the timing of the election, and, “This is madness.”

What they meant was, If we’d waited until the last possible moment, surely things could have only gotten better.

 

What the polls tell us

The polls, the tea leaves, and the chicken entrails all predict a wipeout for the Conservatives, but if you read them carefully they also say that people aren’t giddy about the Labour Party either. Or, presumably, anyone else, but Labour’s the biggest of the opposition parties, so let’s stay with them. 

Labour’s 20 points ahead of the Conservatives (actual numbers may vary depending on polling methods and timing) but, surprisingly, it isn’t any more popular or trusted than it was in 2015, when the Conservatives won a big majority. Even fewer people think it has a good group of leaders or understands the country’s problems. Keir Starmer’s popularity is right up there–or down there–with last week’s bacon sandwich. You know the one: you wrapped it in a paper napkin and put it in the refrigerator, knowing you’d never eat it but convinced that if you waited until it was inedible you wouldn’t be wasting perfectly good food.

Okay, the polls didn’t mention the bacon sandwich, but the head of Ipsos, one of the main polling agencies, said, “Starmer’s personal ratings are the lowest Ipsos has eve rseen for an opposition leader who’s so far ahead in the overall voting intention. It is more disgust at the Tories [that’s another name for the Conservatives–you’re welcome] than delight at what Labour offer that is driving politics.” 

 

So how’s the campaign going?

Things have indeed gotten  better, at least for anyone who appreciates absurdity. Mr. du Jour made a campaign stop in Northern Ireland’s Titanic Quarter, and until social media went batshit, nobody on his staff seemed to notice that the symbolism wasn’t what they’d hoped for.

But politics isn’t made by sinking ships alone, so Mr du Jour added a new policy to the doormat of unfulfilled old promises: elect us, he said, and we’ll reinstate national service (that’s a polite term for the draft). Eighteen-year-olds will have to either serve a year in the military or find a charity willing to put up with them for a year’s worth of weekends. Or something along those lines. Details to be worked out later. Or not, since his party is unlikely to get re-elected.

It’s all pretty sketchy–he didn’t announce it until he couldn’t be expected to follow through  –but the sketch has been enough to set people screaming. And by people I don’t mean people I happen to know and agree with. A former chief of the naval staff–who, to be clear, I don’t hang out with–called the plan “bonkers.” Defence needs more money, he said, and this would suck money out. A former chief of the general staff called it “electoral opportunism.” And a former Tory defence minister said, “I very much doubt whether it’s been thought through.”

That’s not unlikely. Just two days before the plan was announced, the current defence minister said the government wasn’t planning to reinstate national service in any form. It “could damage morale, recruitment and retention, and would consume professional military and naval resources.” And if that wouldn’t be enough of a deterrent, it “would be difficult to find a proper and meaningful role for” the draftees.

I’m sure if you asked him today, he’d tell you it’s a great plan.

 

Meanwhile, in other electoral news

Back in early May, which now seems like a lifetime ago, London was electing a mayor, and one candidate, Count Binface, got more votes than the hard right Britain First Party. 

Count Binface? He’s a guy who runs for office periodically, appearing in a costume that includes a garbage bin that goes on his head. It’s worth following the link to see a picture. I’m sure his candidacy explains a lot about British politics, although I can’t figure out what, so let’s stick with fact: he more or less replaces the late, lamented Screaming Lord Sutch, of the Monster Raving Loony Party, who was a hard act to follow, having bagged the all-time best name.

The count does his best, however. On his website, he not only brags about beating Britain First, he also claims (accurately if not entirely fairly) to have gotten more votes for mayor of London than Rishi Sunak got for prime minister. The reason it’s not quite fair is that Sunak didn’t run for prime minister. That takes his vote count down to zero. One of the many quirks of the British political system is that if a party with a large enough parliamentary majority dethrones or otherwise mislays its prime minister, it can choose a new one without holding an election or in any other way consulting the electorate. All they have to do is follow their own rules to slip one into place. So our last two prime ministers, Rishi Sunak and Liz Tress, were chosen by the small number of people who voluntarily and inexplicably made themselves members of the Conservative Party.

 

But life in Britain isn’t all about politics 

I’d call this light relief, but maybe the election’s light relief and this is the sober stuff. Your call.

In Cheshire, someone brought a closed box into an animal hospital and explained that she’d rescued a baby hedgehog from the roadside but was worried about it, because it wasn’t touching the cat food she’d set in there for it. To keep from stressing it, she hadn’t touched it when she picked it up, just scooped it into the box, and she’d barely allowed herself to peek in, but she’d seen enough to be worried: it hadn’t “moved or pooped all night.”

The veterinarians boldly opened the box and found the bobble top from a gray knit cap. It was, as described, not eating, moving, or pooping, and they were unable to revive it, but somebody involved did leak the story to the press.

The early days of Britain’s National Health Service

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The National Health Service–known to friends and wolves-in-friends’-clothing alike as the NHS–began in 1948, when World War II was over but food was still both scarce and rationed, the economy was just staggering out of a severe recession (no, I hadn’t heard of it either), and the empire was in the process of collapse. 

Introduce anything so ambitious these days and every sober advisor in (and out of) sight would tell you, Get serious. Maybe you could just replace the program with a nice slogan. So how did the prime minister, Clement Atlee, and his minister of health, Aneurin Bevan, manage this little trick?

For starters, the system they introduced didn’t drop from the sky. It had been taking shape since at least 1909. 

 

Irrelevant photo: A camellia–although if you read to the end it becomes semi-relevant since you could argue that it’s deepest pink. Or at least tinged with red.

 

Background

Here at Notes, we–by which, of course, I mean I–can never tell a story without going backward first, so let’s go backward. What happened in 1909 was the publication of the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, under the leadership of Beatrice Webb. The commission was looking for something that would replace the Poor Law and the punitive Victorian workhouses. The minority report argued for “a national minimum of civilised life . . . open to all alike, of both sexes and all classes, by which we meant sufficient nourishment and training when young, a living wage when able-bodied, treatment when sick, and modest but secure livelihood when disabled or aged.”

Its focus was on preventing poverty rather than providing relief once it was entrenched. But this was a minority report. The majority report argued for individual responsibility and charity. 

What happened? The party in power, the Liberals, tossed both reports into the revolving file, also known as the trash, but Webb and her fellow Fabian socialists printed copies of the minority report and sold 25,000 of them. I’d be happy to see one of my books sell half as well. 

The minority report had far more impact than the majority’s and became  central to the thinking that eventually formed Britain’s welfare state. In some estimates, it led to the Beveridge Report, which leads us to our next subhead.

 

The Beveridge Report 

Despite its name, this was not a misspelled report on what people drank. It was a 1942 report that created the blueprint for a cradle-to-grave social services system. Most importantly for our purposes, it included the idea of a free health service, funded by the state and spreading the cost of healthcare out over the country’s population instead of having it fall on the individual or family unlucky enough to get sick. 

Some 250,000 copies of the full report were sold, along with 370,000 of an abridged version and 40,000 of an American edition. In twelve months. 

Britain’s 2,700 hospitals, at this point, were run by a mix of charities and local governments. National insurance existed, but it only covered people who were working. The number of wounded coming back from the war pushed the system toward bankruptcy, adding to the pressure for a unified, state-run health service.

 

Churchill, Atlee, the war, and the welfare state 

During the war–that’s World War II in case you got lost somewhere along the way–the Conservative and Labour parties governed in coalition. Churchill–a Conservative–was the prime minister, and Labour, the junior partner. pushed for the Beveridge report to be put into practice. Churchill was reluctant to commit the country to hefty new expenses until the postwar economic picture was clear, but he also advocated a “national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave.” He didn’t oppose the Beveridge Report but wouldn’t commit himself to implementing it, and privately called Beveridge “a windbag and a dreamer.” 

That left Labour in a position to campaign as the party that would put the report–”the full Beveridge”–into practice, and in the first election after the war Labour won a big honkin’ majority: 393 seats to the Conservatives 197. Labour was a socialist party at this point (it no longer is) and on the first day the new parliament met, its MPs sang (or in some tellings, bellowed) the socialist anthem, “The Red Flag.” 

The link will take you to the song if you can’t go on without hearing it. This version is sung, not bellowed, which is a bit more important than being shaken not stirred.

Once he was prime minister, Atlee threw his weight behind the creation of a welfare state–a huge undertaking, including not just medical care but housing, education, and financial assistance to the unemployed, retired, and disabled.

“We had not been elected to try to patch up an old system but to make something new,” he said. “I therefore determined that we would go ahead as fast as possible with our programme.”

The program also included the construction of housing and the nationalization of key industries. Railroads and coal mines were “so run down,” as the Britannica puts it, “that any government would have had to bring them under state control. In addition, road transport, docks and harbours, and the production of electrical power were nationalized. There was little debate. The Conservatives could hardly argue that any of these industries, barring electric power, was flourishing or that they could have done much differently.”

I should probably stop here and say what will be obvious to some people and not at all to others: there’s no single definition of socialism that all socialists agree on. I think a fair summary of this version is that key industries were nationalized and the state was responsible for supporting people’s overall welfare. It was a form of socialism that coexisted with capitalism.

But let’s go back to the end of the war. The country was well past its eyeballs in debt and Keynes had warned earlier that the country faced a “financial Dunkirk.” It had borrowed massively to fund its role in the war (a lot of it from the US), and wartime industries like aviation were bigger than it now needed while basic industries like coal and railroads needed serious repair–which is to say, investment. As the Britannica (again) puts it, “With nothing to export, Britain had no way to pay for imports or even for food.”

Loans from the US and Canada helped the country get through a short stretch. The Marshall Plan got them through another stretch of time. But food continued to be rationed, and the fifties were a pretty gray time for the country.

In that situation, how were they going to pay for this massive investment in a welfare state? At least part of the answer was the National Insurance Bill–an extension of a system put in place before World War I–which had working-age people paying in every week specifically to support the benefits everyone in the country could draw on. (Married women who worked didn’t pay in, but don’t worry, they suffered enough inequalities to more than make up for it.)  

 

The NHS

In 1948, the National Health Service was launched, under the leadership of Aneurin–called Nye–Bevan, the minister of health. 

Bevan had started work as a miner at 13 and chaired his miners’ lodge at 19. He also chaired the local Medical Aid Society, a system that had members paying in and getting healthcare in return. Initially, this didn’t include miners’ families. During his tenure, membership expanded to include non-miners,until 95% of the town was eligible. This became his blueprint. 

“All I am doing is extending to the entire population of Britain the benefits we had in Tredegar for a generation or more,” he said. “We are going to ‘Tredegarise’ you.” 

The NHS was set up to help everyone, and care would be free and based on need, not ability to pay. “A free health service is pure socialism,” he said, “and as such is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.” 

Opposition came from the Conservative Party, the British Medical Association, and the right-wing newspapers.

Okay, historians argue about whether the Conservatives belong on the list. Their 1945 manifesto backed health services available to all citizens but didn’t commit to it being free. At any rate, they voted against Bevan’s version of the NHS and compared it to Nazism. That probably makes it fair to say they opposed it.

No one argues over whether doctors opposed the plan, at least as a group. Bevan claimed he won them around by “stuffing their mouths with gold”– allowing consultants to treat paying patients privately and still work inside the NHS. He later claimed he’d been “blessed by the stupidity of my enemies.”

 

And now?

I’d hoped to take you through a bit of more recent NHS history, but I dipped a toe into that water and just about drowned. Now that I’m back on the couch, safe and dry, I’ll risk nothing more than the most superficial of summaries. The NHS is immensely popular–basically, it’s the national religion–and most people find the idea of medicine for profit both shocking and counter-intuitive. But profit has crept into the system, and for the moment at least, socialism has been pushed to the political fringes. 

I’ve lived in Britain for 18 years and seen the NHS reorganized in assorted ways, all of them disastrous. Huge chunks have been privatized so one corporation or another could make a profit by running it as cheaply as possible, all in the name of efficiency, but somehow, magically, it all gets less and less efficient. At the moment, the NHS is suffering from years of underfunding. Waiting lists are long, jobs can’t be filled, and nurses and doctors are leaving the system to work somewhere–anywhere–else. 

With the next election predicted to return a huge Labour majority, I’d like to think the problems will be fixed–or at least addressed in some way that serves the public interest–but I’m doubtful. The current party leadership has been telling us we can’t expect much from them and I’m inclined to think they’re telling the truth. 

Still, for all its problems–and they’re many–the NHS is a magnificent thing: a system that makes healthcare free at the point of delivery, as the saying here goes. I’m originally from the US, so I’ve seen what the alternative looks like. A for-profit system is primarily interested in, um, making money, so what matters is whether a person can pay. US healthcare can and does bankrupt even the comfortable and well insured. It neglects the poor and milks the rich and–oh, hell, I could go on but you get the point. Both systems have their problems, but I much prefer the problems of a socialized system.

*

Now that Labour’s taken distance from any suggestion of socialism, I wondered if it had also taken distance from its old song, “The Red Flag.” Apparently not. Its 2022 party conference made headlines when the delegates sang it. The song opens with the words, “The people’s [or “workers’,” depending on the version you choose–and probably your politics] flag is deepest red / It’s shrouded oft our martyred dead.” A parody runs, “The people’s flag is deepest pink / It’s not as red as you might think.”

And with that I’ll leave you for the week. Stay well out there, people. It’s not safe to get sick.

A quick history of Britain’s gun laws 

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Britain has some of the world’s toughest gun regulations, and not only do the vast majority of people approve of that, 76% think they should be stricter. That’s from a sober poll taken in 2021, but Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey reports pretty much the same thing. 

How did I conduct my survey? Effortlessly. I’m an American transplant, which leads British friends and acquaintances to ask periodically, “What is it with Americans and guns anyway? Are you people crazy?”

I’m paraphrasing heavily. Most people are too polite to ask if we’re crazy, but if you listen you can hear the question pulsing away, just below the surface. Basically, they’re both baffled and horrified by the US approach.

I should probably tell them that a majority of Americans (56%) also want stricter gun laws but haven’t managed to dominate the national conversation yet. That’s probably because they haven’t poured as much tightly focused money into political campaigns as the pro-gun lobby. 

Am I being too cynical? In the age-old tradition of answering a question with a question, Is it possible to be too cynical these days?

Irrelevant photo: The Bude Canal

 

What are Britain’s gun laws?

For a long time, they were somewhere between minimal and nonexistent. 

Way back when William and Mary crossed the channel in small boats, the price they paid to become Britain’s joint monarchs was accepting the 1689 Bill of Rights, which acknowledged that Parliament was the source of their power. It also guaranteed the right to bear arms–unless of course you were Catholic, who were the boogeymen of the moment. You were also excluded if you were some other (and barely imaginable) form of non-Protestant.

The relevant section says, “The subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law.” 

That leaves some wiggle room: “suitable to their conditions”; “as allowed by law.” (The US second amendment is ambiguous as well. Maybe it’s something about weaponry.) So when in 1870 a new law required a license to carry a gun outside your home, it wasn’t a violation of W and M’s agreement, because this was a law. As far as I can tell from the wording, if all you wanted to do with your gun was set it on the kitchen table and gloat over it, you could skip the license.

In 1903, a new law required a license for any gun with a barrel shorter than 9 inches and banned ownership by anyone who was “drunken or insane.” 

You could have a lot of fun poking holes in that. Could I get a license if I was sober all week but on the weekend I routinely got so drunk I fell in the horse trough? If I had a title and expensive clothes, would I still be considered a drunk (or a nut)?

Never mind. That was the law they passed. Nobody asks me to consult. It’s a mystery.

But let’s go back a couple of years, to 1901, as Historic UK does in its post on gun laws. Handguns were being widely advertised to cyclists, with no mention of licenses, although the ;need for them may have been so obvious to everyone involved that they didn’t need mentioning. Or enforcement may have been patchy.

Bikes were the hot new thing–the AI of the day–and everyone who had any claim to with-it-ness was rushing around on one. And maybe the cyclists felt vulnerable, out there in the countryside on their own, or maybe gun manufacturers saw an opportunity and manufactured a bit of fear to boost sales. To read the ads, every cyclist needed a handgun. They were advertised, variously, as the cyclist’s friend and the traveler’s friend. One ad said, “Fear no tramp.”

Before World War I (it started in 1914; you’re welcome), Britain had a quarter of a million licensed firearms and no way to count the unlicensed ones. Then the war turned Britain, along with a good part of the rest of the world, on its ear. One of its smaller side effects was that when it ended soldiers came home with pistols. 

How’d they manage that? The army didn’t want them back? I consulted Lord Google on the subject, but I seem to have asked the wrong questions, because he went into a sulk and refused to tell me anything even vaguely relevant. But bring guns home they did, in large enough numbers that the government started losing sleep over it, because this was a turbulent time and  the government had a lot of things to lose sleep over. For one thing, the Russian Revolution not only meant it had to share a planet with a revolutionary socialist government, it also kicked off a wave of revolutions in Europe that must’ve made it look, for a while, as if Britain would end up sharing the planet with multiple socialist governments. 

Life was turbulent on British soil as well. Not all that long before the war, in 1911, a shootout in London involved two Latvian anarchists, a combination of the Metropolitan and City police departments, the Scots Guards, and Winston Churchill. The anarchists might not have been anarchists, though, but expropriators, carrying out robberies to support the Bolshevik movement. Either way, they were well armed and the police were armed only with some antique weapons they pulled together. Until the Scots Guards showed up, they were outgunned. 

In “Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post–First World War Britain,” Jon Lawrence argues that postwar Britain lived with a fear of violence from returned soldiers, the general public, and/or a government “brutalized” by the war. (The quotation marks are his. I’ll hand them back now that we’re ready to move on.) 

The press was full of violent crime reports. When isn’t it, and when don’t we at least partially believe it’s a balanced picture of the world we live in? Still, the stories are part of the picture: fear was the air people breathed.

The soldiers returning from the war are also part of the picture: they came home to unemployment and its cousin, low pay. A wave of strikes swept the country, including a police strike and in 1919 a strike by soldiers–or if you want to put that another way, a mutiny. Some of that was violent and some wasn’t. All of it kept the government up at night.

In many cases, unemployment led to whites turning their anger on Blacks and immigrants, blaming them for taking their jobs. Familiar story, isn’t it? (Black, in this context, includes people from India. I only mention that to remind us all how fluid the categories that seem so fixed in our minds really are.) 

Longstanding Black British communities were joined by a good number of sailors from both the military and the merchant fleets who were stranded in Britain when they were fired and their jobs filled by white sailors. Their hostels were a particular target for violence. Black and immigrant communities often defended themselves, leading to some full-on battles–and more lost governmental sleep.

For a fuller story on that, go to Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain, by Peter Fryer. We’ll have to move on, because most of that is, again, a side issue to this topic. The point is that that was a turbulent period with a nervous government. In 1920, a new law allowed the police to deny a firearms permit to anyone “unfitted to be trusted with a firearm”–a loose category if there ever was one. 

 

And after that?

In 1937–a different era but the midst of the Great Depression, so still a turbulent time–most fully automatic weapons were banned, then in 1967 shotguns had to be licensed. Applicants had to be “of good character, . . . show good reason for possessing a firearm, and the weapons had to be stored securely.” 

In 1987, a man killed 16 people and himself, using two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun, and the government came under pressure to tighten the laws. In response, semi-automatic and pump-action rifles were banned, along with anything that fired explosive ammunition and a few other categories of weapons. Shotguns remained legal but had to be registered and stored securely. 

After a 1996 shooting of 16 schoolkids and their teacher, in which the shooter used four legally owned pistols, a new law banned handguns above .22 caliber, and in 1997 .22s were outlawed.

In 2006, in response to a series of shootings, the  manufacture, import, or sale of realistic imitation guns was banned, although it was still legal to own one. The logic there is that they look realistic enough to commit crimes with, so this isn’t exactly gun control; it’s more like toy control. The maximum sentence for carrying an imitation gun was doubled, and it became a crime to fire an air weapon outside. The minimum age for buying or owning an air weapon went from 17 to 18, and air weapons could now be sold only face to face. 

In 2014, police were required to refuse or revoke a firearms license if the applicant or license holder had a record of domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, or mental illness, which implies that they’re expected to actually check.

 

And the result?

I know a few people in Britain who own rifles and shotguns that they hunt with. When they applied for licenses, they had to show that they had a secure place to store them, that they had a legitimate reason for owning a firearm, and that they were “of sound mind.” They had to pass police checks and inspections of their health, property, and criminal records. If any of them have moaned about it, I haven’t heard it. 

As a way of looking at the impact, I thought I could find a nice, simple set of statistics comparing homicide rates in the US and UK, but nothing’s ever simple. If you use two different sites, one for each country, you end up comparing apples and motor scooters, but I did eventually find one that compares many countries’ murder rate per million people. In 2009 in the UK, it was 11.68; in the US, it was 44.45–four times higher. We’ll skip the intentional homicides, which aren’t  the same as murders, along with the accidental deaths and the suicides. They might all be worth thinking about if we’re talking about the impact of gun ownership on death rates, but they’ll make my life more difficult and I don’t know how you feel about that but it won’t make me happy, so basically, screw it.

Another site I found compares mass shootings between 1998 and 2019. The UK’s had one. Twelve people died in it and one was injured.  The US has had 101, making it the world’s leader in mass shootings. In the deadliest, sixty people died and more than eight hundred were injured. In the second deadliest, forty-nine died and fifty-eight were injured. 

So is the US, with its permissive gun laws, a freer country than the UK? That’ll depend on how you define freedom, and that’s above my pay grade since I do this for free. Some people measure freedom by a country’s voting system, some by people’s sense of security and safety, and some by the right to carry a gun. I have yet to meet anyone in Britain who feels oppressed by the gun laws or measures their freedom by their access to weaponry. I’m sure someone out there does, but they’re a minority, and a small one. 

What about the argument that access to weapons makes the little guy a more powerful political force? My observation is that the little guy struggles to be heard in both countries, but that guns and threats of violence in the US are allowing a minority–a sizable one but still a minority–to increase its power at the expense of their fellow citizens. That’s not a good fit for my definition of freedom.