…well…uh…hello there, I guess?

…clearly I’ve missed a lot & it’ll take a while to catch up…but…judging by the couldn’t-call-it-a-concensus of the people I was with last thursday it could be that at least some of what actually went on with the UK election might be easy to miss…so…there’s that…but…it’s sunday…& I probably ought not to have left it so late to start the typing & stop the reading part…so…even if I can’t figure out where the version I remember from some mix or other is that has a quote at the beginning in a plummy voice saying “I’m exhausted – I couldn’t dance another set. All I want to do now is go home & go to bed.” in a way that makes me think it might be from an audrey hepburn movie…I think this is sort of where we’re at?

…but…once I’ve poured more coffee down my throat…I might try to mutter a bit between some more youtube clips of tunes that come to mind & call it a day

…any road…my guess is someone might have managed to surface this in my absence since it seems to have gotten about a fair bit…but the short version is that up with this they would no longer put

…but…historic majority notwithstanding…after that…it got a bit more complicated than it looked…particularly if the look was at the BBC telly coverage on the night…which…was not a bit of a shadow of its former sort of thing…absent dimbleby the anchors were projecting a lot of dim…& no gelling…or really much of anything to keep you engaged or offer useful analysis or evidence of a grasp of the context in terms of the elctoral form guide…which was to be found on the radio 4 feed…or the BBC blog they relegated their psephologist-in-chief too after he looked a bit too gleeful about the way the exit poll looked to appear altogether suitably impartial like the beeb is meant to be…so…a lot of it came down to…well

…anyway…there’s a reason skitz came to mind

…but I need coffee…so…if you’re up already…well…they say this sort of thing makes stuff better?

…so…anyway…I know it’s sunday & all but if I don’t get at least a few things off my chest I’ll be banging on about this worse than usual for the foreseeable…so maybe it’ll help to think of it as a preventative dose?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2024/uk/results

…it’s a win

The British Labour Party has won its largest majority since the founding of the party over a century ago, securing at least 412 of the House of Commons’s 650 seats. And in an age of populism and polarization, it has done so on a moderate, centrist platform.

…but…it’s the brits…so…there’s maybe more subtext than the highlights ostensibly augur

But it is too early to celebrate this election as a triumph of the center. There is no clear sign that British voters are any more enthusiastic than voters anywhere else for the socially liberal, fiscally conservative politics that this incarnation of the Labour Party represents. Voter turnout was near a record low, and while Labour won a remarkable margin of seats, it secured a very low share of the vote in what one commentator dubbed a “loveless landslide.”

…&…the NYT might not be as insightful as it likes to think

At its heart, this election was an emphatic rejection of a chaotic incumbent. The Conservative Party has been reduced to 121 seats, with two seats left to declare, the worst defeat in its 190-year history. It lost vote share not only to Labour and the centrist, pro-European Liberal Democrats, but also to the hard-right, anti-immigrant Reform U.K., led by Nigel Farage, an ally of Donald Trump.

…but

The Conservatives deserved the rebuke they got. They were in power for 14 years, with little to show for it other than a damaging exit from the European Union. After winning by a landslide in 2019, the party burned through three prime ministers, lurching from the feckless populism of Boris Johnson to the reckless 49-day libertarianism of Liz Truss to the uninspiring technocracy of Rishi Sunak.

…there’s no smoke without fire

After its own disastrous showing in the 2019 election, Labour embarked on a transformation. Mr. Starmer took over from Jeremy Corbyn – a veteran of the party’s left, a critic of liberal economics, free markets and Israel, and a passionate opponent of the U.S.-led global order – and committed the party to reduced public spending and lower debt, no increases to income taxes and backing President Biden’s position on the Israel-Gaza conflict. Mr. Corbyn, who was suspended from the party in 2020, was blocked from standing as a Labour candidate in this election.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/05/opinion/uk-election-labour-conservatives.html

…&

Sunak axed, the cast eviscerated: at last, it’s the Tories’ season finale [Guardian]

…there was no shortage of smoke this go around

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/02/tory-tactics-make-this-a-rip-roaring-election-for-the-phrase-citation-needed

…so…things of possible note when it comes to this sort of stuff

If voters sour on him and this centrist vision of Labour, the next election will almost certainly draw them back to the extremes. The Reform party is already betting on this, with Mr. Farage’s vow to “reshape the center right, whatever that means.”

Labour must demonstrate that it can improve people’s lives and transform public services – and soon – or we may look back at the British election of 2024 as merely a pause on the journey to polarization and the fantasies of populism.

…there’s something to it

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/05/reform-few-seats-conceal-size-threat

…& we’d best hope keir’s bunch are alive to that part because a nation-swapped replay of the backlash that bounced the US from obama to a sloshing mass of snakeoil in an orange balloon poured into a suit could conceivably leave the world with prime minister nige in time to embrace the 2030’s as a speed-run of the 1930’s in which britain manages to beggar & bankrupt itself before the full-scale global conflict beggars us all…& I was wrong about not needing more than my thumbs to count the seats nige’s rabble wrested from people who might actually be about the business of government rather than trying to wreck the world for the sake of short term grift…even first past the post could’t keep them from getting pipped in five fucking places…five…goddammit…but only 4 by my count since ashcroft was just a re-badged tory who might otherwise have lost his seat…which is sort of the whole thing in a nutshell but I’ll come back to that…you might wish I wouldn’t…but…I wish a lot of people wouldn’t a lot of things…& so far that hasn’t stopped those either?

…if you have a weakness for that sort of thing

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2024/jul/05/eleven-charts-that-show-how-labour-won-by-a-landslide

…& time on your hands

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/general-election-2024

UK general election 2024: everything you need to know [FT by way of archive.today]

…this is always a fun place to poke about

https://election2024.electoral-reform.org.uk

…&…to start with a thing I was as wrong about as I was about brexit…very much not even a little bit coincidentally…which is sort of less hanging a lantern on my personal biases than peeling the decal off the bat-signal & strapping the floodlight to the things…but…without my obstinate over-estimation of the character of the british public I’d probably spend my days crippled by an existential identity crisis

…instead of being able to take refuge in a few lines from larkin

https://genius.com/Philip-larkin-the-importance-of-elsewheree-annotated

…& then get around to the getting around to things part

…but…in terms of being on to things…this effort…from a guy whose dad I had down as a man worth paying attention to…argubly even if you weren’t an english lit nerd…over-eggs a few things in a way that suggests the kid might get a little high on his own supply…& the supply might have hint of egg…in the “huffs his own farts” sort of way…still…as an example of its genre with that nation-swapped effect I had a go at with the obama/trump roles…it’s about the best I can find based on who among the people I know IRL who read it it wound up in what ways?

Opinion | Oliver Eagleton
Britain’s Next Prime Minister Has Shown Us Who He Is,
and It’s Not Good
July 3, 2024

[…right…so…apparently it isn’t just when you’re on holiday that time can fly by…& I’ve had the odd distraction to contend with…so…I’ll leave that hanging & come back later with a few more courses in this burgeoning wall’o’text]

…that’s close to being a bedbugs-brett level of op-ed with a UK overlay?

…it…or at least it does as edited by the NYT…makes it a lot easier to miscontrue the role of the DPP &/or the british legal system than it does to truly get to grips with the sort of insight one might potentially glean by considering the career of a prime minister with a record of proceedings…for example…it might be true to say that the post comes with a considerable degree of discretion…but it’s a reach to frame it the way that one does without better explaining the context in which the cases he fought were the cases he drew because they get assigned the way your ride is at a cab-rank (if you remember how that worked before uber)…& if you do that…your mileage varies a whole hell of a lot…which would certainly make a considerably more natural fit with the way he appears to be meaning to go on if you can read that out of how he’s started?

…a lot of that has been pretty predictable fare in which it’s almost more about the tea-leaves being the order in which they get done as much as the things he’s doing…but a few of the ones that had expectations off-balance are interesting…not least this one

Attorney general

Hermer KC is arguably the most surprising appointment, with Emily Thornberry, who has served as shadow attorney general since 2021, widely expected to be appointed.

The human rights barrister at Matrix Chambers, who was called to the bar in 1993, he was also given a peerage.

Hermer was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2009 and is a deputy high court judge assigned to the king’s bench division and administrative court.

He has also acted in inquests raising systemic failings in the custodial system including into the series of deaths of Irish men in Brixton prison, a series of deaths of vulnerable women at Styal prison and the case of Adam Rickwood, the youngest person to die in custody in the modern era.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/05/who-are-the-new-labour-cabinet

…in fact, he’s gone for “one of those things”

Starmer installs non-political ministers in ‘government of all the talents’ [Guardian]

…& among the post-post-experts talents he’s hauled aboard is a kind of interesting guy who has made money putting money where his mouth is about a relevant thing or two but (like the king’s counsel there) hasn’t made a career out of the sort of campaigning that makes you an MP…who @farscythe might be interested to know thinks the dutch have something to teach the world about the carceral consequentialism stakes

Watch this it’s fascinating – I asked James Timpson what he’d do about prisons and sentencing if he was in charge. He believes only a third of prisoners in jail should definitely be there. He’s now in charge of prisons (but not sentencing). pic.twitter.com/0Ddt0yojAG

— Krishnan Guru-Murthy (@krishgm) July 6, 2024

…personally, I must not have needed a lot of shoes repaired growing up…because my mind defaults to the key-cutting side of the business when I hear the name timpson

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/jul/07/prison-reform-experts-hail-role-for-shoe-repair-ceo-james-timpson

…but…in case it sounds like the sort of thing you’d asume in the current climate to be some bit of impossible liberal fever-dreaming…the man really has turned a tidy profit while not having hiring people lately out of prison to work jobs around all the smithing tools you’d want when locks were what your trade centred on bite him in either the ass or the bottom line…so…it’s not like anything is guaranteed & it’s still true that failure to be the messiah could be keir’s achilles’ heel & see the next bid for a mandate turning him over for a new flirting-with-fascism-fantasy ticket that tears asunder the fabric of at least society & very possibly world peace or whatever may remain of that by then…but it’s definitely not something I’d sniff at?

…I am conscious (however little it may show) that when it comes to my banging on supply may outstrip demand on a regular basis so I can’t in good conscience go seat by seat in an attempt to annotate the landscape of this parliament the way the genius.com crew tried to cliff-note-up that larkin poem…but that one seemed like it deserved to make the cut?

[…hmm…trying to figure how to make it to the thing I hooked @matthewcrawley with in the comments…which is bait I promised to deliver & mean to duly deliver on…in the fewest possible moves block-quote-wise…but I think I need an interlude & we’re past due a musical one?]

…in fact…let’s make it a double…& take five…smoke ’em if ya got ’em

…I’ll be back with more of this sort of bollocks in a wee while, though…fair warning?

UK general election: how does it work, when are the results and why does it matter to the world? [Guardian]

…ok…quick time out

Can the climate survive the insatiable energy demands of the AI arms race? [Guardian]

…deep breath

https://www.climateaction.org/news/googles-carbon-emissions-soar-by-48-due-to-ai

…pinch of salt

https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/report-ai-sustainability-google-cop28

…remember to laugh & not to cry

…&

…back to pedaling…or flailing or waving or drowning or chipping or whatever your metaphor of choice might be to describe these bouts of unnecessary labor

Trump and Project 2025 are attacking the Department of Education. How might they reshape US schools?
The rightwing manifesto proposes hobbling it, but the ex-president wants to abolish the department completely

…what’s taught & what’s learned is little like the nature/nurture thing…so…to speedrun this thing into the ground

Did that really happen? 14 years of chaotic Tory government [Guardian]

…while trying not to get entirely carried away by what sir bob buckland called (this might not be verbatim but it’s at least fairly paraphrased if not) politics as circus

From attack pillows to tortured metaphors: the ups and downs of the UK election campaign rollercoaster [Guardian]

…while trying to keep things in perspective

This mind-blowing map shows Earth’s position within the vast universe [New Scientist]

…it’s not the duoglas adams one with the integral crumb of cupcake core…so you can contemplate it without a psyche-destroying sense of belittlement…but…suffice to say…given what played into the UK election & the flash-in-the-pan timeframe of the part that’s considered to be “campaign season”…as we continue to spend more time wondering if joe will ride that ticket all the way or if they’ll switch horses mid-stream for longer than there was between rishi’s drowned rat routine & him leaving his foundering ship of state as it sank to be replaced by britain’s latest emulation of theseus…here’s some less jubilant fodder for misrepresentation about the representaive nature of the government of the day…& I include it because it’s not going anywhere anytime soon if nige is finally free to see if he can hang on to the seat he’s greased his way into & cling like a limpet to the right edge of the overton window as obstructively as he possibly can while seeing how much of a pension he can accrue from this parliament before he sabotages it the way he did with the EU one currently paying his non-dom ass a prodigious fucking stipend for the privilege

…several “blocs” scraped (or scrapped) their way into holding a four seat hand in the westminster game of hold ’em…five if reform get to pick up that tory ringer on the river…& I don’t want to get lost in the weeds about things like why a “traditional unionist voice” candidate managed to make ian paisley jr lose the family seat for the first time in generations for being – of all things – insufficently all-in on that cause for the tastes of the locals…but…the tories weren’t the only one who caught a kick to the proverbial knackers…the SNP got handed their ass in as uncertain terms as the stuff I heard from friends & relatives had me thinking they might

…that mostly counted towards keir’s tally…but in a lot of places reform appeared to cover the spread such that if you combined their votes to the ones the tory got they’d add up to more than labour won by…& that buries a host of ledes all by itself…there was a clear enough narrative that it was labour’s election to lose that some things are clear in terms of own goals…they let iain duncan smith dodge the bullet in part because they shafted their first pick candidate for being…think ilhan omar, give or take…& in part because when they shafted her she stayed in as an independent & split the vote so neither she nor the replacement labour candidate beat out IDS so third choice swept the field

…&…in a lot of ways…that’s the takeaway…for me, anyway…because that’s the classic…the archetype of the way it plays…& almost always to the benefit of tory interests…who, when they get away to breaking it down the way I swear I found a BBC example of at one point but can’t seem to place…in any case…in terms of raw number of votes needed to get a seat the top spot…which is to say most seats for least votes-per…which I admit does cast the winners as hailing from the cheap seats…is a binary that swaps between labour & conservative…but beyond that it gets exponetially more expensive as you go…& that’s why the showcase for the difference between performance & perseverance to my mind is the part where the lib dems scored the best they’ve managed to by playing the game they were in & knowing where to stay in & what to fold…so a weaker hand in a proportional representation game of the sort nige will be shilling like a bastard as hard as possible on account of wanting to claim he should be given a bigger bullhorn for his bullshit gave them 72 seats when the dust settled…while all those third place votes of protest added up to nige being in the small fry with his 4+1

…along with the greens…for whom four whole seats is 200% of what they had to hang onto going into the thing & used to only have the one in brighton despite having two leaders since the reform rebrand of the party of eternal grievance was a glimmer in nigel’s rheumy eye…& you could arguably add “pro-palestinian independent” as another four card draw if you add the trio to corbyn hanging in against the equivalent of labour trying to primary him out…as did dianne abbott…so the pair are now the longest serving member of their chosen gender boasted by the mother of parliaments…a thing sometimes referred to as the mother & father of the house, repsectively…if not always respectfully

…anyway…I like to think that had more people voted they wouldn’t all have turned out to be tory votes that stayed out of the game…& that not all of the people who threw a vote reform way would have had the inclination to pick that as the tallest middle finger they could flip the bird with…so…you may find some mileage is made about the turnout being the lowest since 2001…which is the only lower one until you go back to the 1880s…& that being a bit of significant undermining overhanging the mandate awarded…which will have a kernel of truth but likely pasted into something with an axe to grind & a line to push…so…this one has a nifty diagram showing who syphoned what volume of vote from where…& when you look at it as an exercise in the conservative reliance on the left always eating itself to let them coast to victory turning into a heaping helping of humble pie with a side of their own medicine at the hands of farage’s mob doing them the way they traditionally do the opposition…in terms of seats won to seats lost the day was carried by the progressive side of the thing by sufficient margin to say that trad-tory-regressive + supersize-fantasy-brexit-voting-lunatic-slash-grifter-regressive still would have lost in an aggregated score-card scenario…& if in five year’s time the conclusion that seems foregone is PM nige “flat cap, pint & a fag” farage backed by burberry’s newly-bestselling take on the jackboot…maybe it will wind up feeling phyrric in hindsight…but…for now

Biggest-ever gap between number of votes and MPs hits Reform and Greens [BBC]

…so…some other neat stats include…the tories had a bigger majority back in the 1920s…& that crack about th 1880s might have been stretching the point by the time the dust settled & a grand total of three seats were recounts…in one case three times…& (iirc) as many as five races were won with margins between 100 & as low as 15 votes…it seems pretty clear who rishi took shots at about how dignified & orderly & above all prompt the transfer of power proceeded under his auspices & how he’d keep doing the leftover job for a bit but had his walking papers in his back pocket anytime his replacement could be lined up without making too big of a scene…according to this lot

https://fullfact.org/election-2024/general-election-result-numbers

…you only need to reach as far back as 1918 for a sub-60% turnout figure…but not since 1974 (with a score of a mere 28 compared to 30 before the last handful had been called definitively so maybe even a couple more) have the tories lost their deposit (AKA got less than a 5% share in a constituency they ran a candidate in which is the threshold below which you don’t get your stake back in what’s intended to be a bar to nuisnace candidates making the whole thing look like it’s a farce…so…that’s nice…& meant that that tweet with a winnie-the-pooh & piglet caption meg found had me in stitches…&…although I don’t want to wind up joining twitter now of all times…someone I sent a link to that one came back with another than made me say “damn”

"I like sandwiches too Mr Sunak…" pic.twitter.com/4v4tyxkXV9

— christhebarker (@christhebarker) July 4, 2024

…&…mostly to make up to our matt for how long it took me to get to that part…but also in case the reference is too oblique…in the original of that image the figure on the left is bigger than the bear…& was the longest reigning monarch the british isles has ever produced…& it called back to this

…&…gotta be honest…that kind of paddington-meme-ry is seriously tempting bait for the likes of me…so these times may be more trying than they appear in the reflection?

…I’ll try to remember the rest of the tunes I thought might have a shot at making up for me today…but…you can see how my rate of progress is coming along…so I won’t blame you if you slide checking what they might have been over into the tomorrow column of your to do list…or off the thing entirely?

…anyway…how the hell are ya?

…missed you lot…even the quiet ones

…this one’s from “the return of the drifter”

…from 1999’s “premonitions”

…keep those fingers crossed for france, folks