Links 15: Cash for peerages and illegal parties

links from Scotland and around the world

Welcome to Links, my occasionally-updated round up of mostly-Scotland-or-UK-related links that caught my eye. If you have a story you’d like me to add, add it to the comments below.

Wanna buy a peerage? That'll be £3 million

Tories charging £3 million for a peerage:

Buying and selling peerages is a criminal offense, under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925, and the whole fucking lot of them need to be banged up for life.

Working class people care more about economic issues than woke rhetoric

Jacobin magazine, alongside YouGov and the Center for Working-Class Politics, did a study on How a Working-Class Coalition Can Be Built, and Maintained. This is an American survey so not all of it will be true for the UK or Scotland, but I suspect a lot will.

One of their main findings was that to win working class voters, politicians should cut out the woke rhetoric and instead concentrate on bread-and-butter economic issues:

Working-class voters prefer progressive candidates who focus primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues, and who frame those issues in universal terms. This is especially true outside deep-blue parts of the country. Candidates who prioritized bread-and-butter issues (jobs, health care, the economy), and presented them in plainspoken, universalist rhetoric, performed significantly better than those who had other priorities or used other language.

Blue-collar workers are especially sensitive to candidate messaging — and respond even more acutely to the differences between populist and “woke” language. Primarily manual blue-collar workers, in comparison with primarily white-collar workers, were even more drawn to candidates who stressed bread-and-butter issues, and who avoided activist rhetoric.

It's hardly surprising that people care more about issues such as their paycheck, job security and healthcare than whether someone is (horror of horrors) being misgendered or whatever is the woke issue du jour on Twitter.

deBoer on left rhetoric

Further to my last item, Freddie deBoer says the left need to talk about popular and material consequences of their agenda and not use jargon:

People want help with the stuff that actually hurts them in their lives, things like being unable to pay the rent, struggling to find doctors who take their insurance, sending children to schools with broken HVAC systems, suffering from crime, suffering from corrupt or brutal police officers, and on and on. And the smart thing to do is to keep referring back to these material needs and our proposed solutions to them.

Yes, of course. If you want to win elections, you need to answer a hypothetical voter's question "how will you materially improve my life if I vote for you?"

deBoer adds:

You know what the most basic political message is? “Your problems are real, and you deserve help.” [...] People have to hear that you, as a politician or activist, are including them in your concerns. And the left-of-center just sucks at this, in this country, so so much. Everything we say seems tailored to some group, some identity category, which inevitably leaves a lot of other people out. That’s just bad politics, especially given that 70% of the electorate is white and thus the Republicans can target them and still win elections. [...] This is maybe the one real pain point of what I’m saying here: the constant demands to “center” this group or that are really destructive.

Rittenhouse: it's all the media's fault

Says HWFO:

The important thing to realize here is that if most of the Blue Tribe knew the facts, they’d run like hell from any opinion whatsoever in this trial. Rioting because a wife beating kidnapping rapist got shot does not fit #METOO, nor does defending a serial pedophile and another wife beater. They have no idea who they’re supporting, because if they did then the story would get no clicks.

The evil actor in this situation is certainly not Kyle Rittenhouse. But it also isn’t, by my read, the people who hate him. The evil actor is the media that made them hate him for clickbait profit [my emphasis], to cover up their prior act of inciting an arsonist riot for clickbait profit. Or, alternately, the evil actor is the business model abstraction itself which drives the media entities to behave this way, because if they didn’t do it someone else would.

International opinion turning pro-Scotland

Says Wee Ginger Dug:

During the 2014 referendum there was a lot of ignorance internationally about why Scotland sought independence. Many in other nations were perplexed by why Scotland sought independence from what they believed to be a well governed and stable democracy that was at the heart of the EU. The Conservatives and the Better Together campaign capitalised on that in order to rustle up a series of European and world politicians who were happy to do the British Government a favour and make a statement which was helpful to the anti-independence cause.

The Conservatives have now trashed the UK’s international reputation, and those European and global leaders attending COP were left in no doubt that Scotland’s rejection of Brexit and its desire to have a closer and more cooperative relationship with the EU is a major factor driving support for independence. With its constant lies and deceit over Brexit negotiations the British Government has proven it can’t be trusted to act in good faith.

As we go into a second independence referendum the reasons for Scottish independence are much clearer and easier to understand for the rest of the world. There is also, crucially, far more sympathy internationally for the idea of an independent Scotland than there was in 2014. The Conservatives and their allies are going to find it much more difficult next time round to find international statespeople who are willing to do the British Government a favour by speaking out against Scottish independence.

I concur. The UK government have pissed off a lot of people in Europe, first with Brexit, then by attempting to renege on Johnson's "oven ready" treaty they agreed to and signed.

Many European countries would welcome an independent Scotland. So might the USA.

Who is actually on the left?

Freddie de Boer writes:

What unites just about all of the hundreds of young left-leaning people I’ve talked to in the past five years or so is that they have essentially given up on opposing the interests of capital. They don’t realize they have, but they have. They don’t even conceive of the left’s one true traditional enemy, the heart of our animus and the source of our problems, as a political actor at all. They might have some vestigial instincts that corporations are bad or that investment banks are particularly bad, but they have no particular passion in that direction and no policy preferences beyond a vague desire to raise taxes. But why would they feel visceral antagonism towards the moneyed and corporations? Whose example would they be following? How often does the liberal intelligentsia talk about the depravations of the wealthy and the corporations they run, relative to the pathetic fringe of the ultra-right? When the newsmedia wants to represent a conservative threat today, it’s always some yokel with a 4chan account and an AR-15. When young left-of-center people conceive of a right-wing enemy, all they think of are “the fash.” They think Charlottesville and Kyle Rittenhouse epitomize the contemporary American political struggle. That those are utterly remote threats to the vast majority of poor and oppressed peoples in the United States today doesn’t seem to occur to them.

The truth is that if you're not opposed to the ruling class, the elites, the corporations, the banks, and the 0.1%, you're not actually on the left. This is true regardless of whether you say you are or even whether you think you are.

Let corporations make your decisions for you

Molly Rocket says don't think for yourself, let corporations make your decisions for you:

Scottish judges working to quotas

Iain Lawson writes that Scottish judges may soon be working to quotas:

Will it surprise you to learn that Lady Dorian, the judge concerned is a leading advocate of jury free trials for sexual offences? Looking at her handling of both the Alex Salmond trial where she ruled out the defence lodging WhatsApp messages that clearly demonstrated Alex Salmond was the victim of an organised, malicious plot, involving many of the prosecution witnesses, and also her conviction of Craig Murray in a concocted evidenced trial that will remain a permanent stain on Scotland’s Justice System, adding Scotland to the list of renegade nations that jails political prisoners. We need to be very wary of this Lady.

We are told the reason for getting rid of jury trials is that the conviction rates are not “high” enough. To me that is the most dangerous warning sign that this is very, very wrong and DANGEROUS!

Do we want Justice being determined by a judge anxious to keep their quota of guilty verdicts up?

So if the evidence against a defendant is not very strong, but the judge is behind on their monthly quota of guilty verdicts, they will be under great pressure to find the defendant guilty anyway.

I am reminded of Stalin's purges in the 1930s, when regional NKVD offices had quotas of "anti-Soviet elements" who had to be executed or sent to the GULAG.

White Americans lie about their race in university applications

The Hill that 34% of white university applicants in the USA lie about their race:

A survey from Intelligent found that 34 percent of white students who applied to colleges and universities falsely claimed they were a racial minority on their application.

The publication found that 81 percent of students who faked minority status did so to improve their chances of getting accepted. Fifty percent of students who lied said they did it to get minority-focused financial aid.

If, as wokists complain, America is a "white supremacist" society, why is it that many whites feel they will be discriminated against because of their race, unless they lie on university applications?

Fair Representation Act

In the USA, the Fair Representation Act (a bill not an act, since it isn't actually law) seeks to elect the House of Representatives by Single Transferable Vote:

Voters would elect representatives with proportional ranked choice voting in larger multi-winner districts. Safe "red" and "blue" districts would be a thing of the past, as every district would elect both Republicans and Democrats in proportion to their level of support. With proportional results, there would be no gerrymandering, every election would be competitive, and our votes would be far more powerful than they are today. Senators would also be elected with ranked choice voting.

This is an eminently sensible measure, and if passed would go most of the way to making the USA a full democracy. So why isn't it law? Probably because most congressmen prefer the current system of government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations.

Met taken to court for refusing to investigate illegal No. 10 party

The londson Economic writes:

Good Law Project has today written to the Metropolitan Police asking it to justify its failure to investigate reports of an unlawful party being held at No 10 Downing Street on 18th December 2020 – and threatening legal proceedings if it fails to do so.

There have been multiple reports from people who say they were in attendance on the night that a party of 40 – 50 people took place in the prime minister’s own home. This would have been a clear breach of the “tier 3” restrictions in place at the time.

Yet – unbelievably – the Met claims there isn’t enough evidence to open a criminal investigation.

Apparently, this wasn’t even the only unlawful gathering held at Boris Johnson’s home during this period.

Thousands of people have been prosecuted for having illegal parties and other illegal gatherings. So Boris Johnson should be too. MPs make the laws that everyone else has to follow, so they absolutely should be prosecuted and punished for breaking their own laws.

UK says Ukraine is on its own

UK defence secretary Ben Wallace says UK won't help Ukraine defend itself from Russian invasion:

Britain and its allies are "highly unlikely" to send troops to defend Ukraine if Russia invades the country, the UK's defence secretary has said.

"We shouldn't kid people we would," Ben Wallace told the Spectator magazine. "The Ukrainians are aware of that."

Mr Wallace said Ukraine was "not a member of Nato, so it is highly unlikely that anyone is going to send troops into Ukraine to challenge Russia".

So what will Britain do, then:

"That is why we are doing the best diplomatically to say to Putin don't do this", he said, adding that "severe economic sanctions" were the most likely form of deterrent.

I'm sure Putin is quaking in his boots.