UK exit polls

Things aren't looking so hot for Teresa May at the moment.

Are the stock markets going to care one way or the other?

The ones in Britain seem to be caring.

So far Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party have 172 seats and May's conservatives have 160. 47 other seats have gone to other parties. That leaves 271 seats left. I have no idea whether most of those left tend towards conservative but if they're not Britain might have a Labour government tomorrow.

Seems it's definitely a hung parliament. This is a good result. Given that Theresa May called this election to try to increase her parliamentary majority so that she would have a completely free hand, it represents a huge loss for the Tories, even though they will still be the largest party and will probably be able to govern with the support of the DUP. It's also a vindication of Jeremy Corbyn, who has been much criticised (wrongly, in my view) by the media and even within his own party. Hopefully it also represents a shift in the view that you can only win through nasty, personal attacks plus lies and propaganda; Corbyn has tried to maintain a clean issue-based campaign. And it's yet another rebuff within Europe to what looked like a steady right-wards trend - the centre and centre left are making a good showing.

As we move towards the detailed Brexit negotiations, it means that whoever is prime minister will now have to take account of the will of our sovereign parliament rather than railroading everything through with an unassailable tame majority.

Does anyone is the US (LT being primarily US) notice or care? I heard one bbc report that this election had gone largely unnoticed in the states. Certainly feels like the dawning of a new era this morning, but there's a lot of work still to be done. If the torys do form a government it would be helpful if labour could actually carry this momentum into an active opposition.

Yesterday's two big news stories on US public radio and TV were former FBI Director Comey's Senate testimony and the British election. Probably hear much more today as results become clear. Stock market, Brexit, etc.

I've already had to explain to one US colleague what a hung parliament means. Our two political systems are very different.

>6 reading_fox: I'm honestly not in the best position to assess general US interest at the moment (I'd say our media is a bit preoccupied with former FBI director Comey's testimony yesterday -- that's all I watched) but I can tell you that I'm smiling at the news.

What is this nonsense about May sticking around?

After apprising myself of the numbers: it does look that way, doesn't it? How much daylight is there really between the DUP and the Tories, in the grand scheme of things? (Unlike the last question, this one is not merely rhetorical).

>10 davidgn:

What I'm reading and hearing from pundits is that the DUP does not want Labour in power and therefore in the short term they will shore up the Tories, but that doesn't mean they agree with all Tory policies, and as time goes on the differences will emerge. It means the Tory minority government wlil be fragile.

I don't know much about DUP - apparently there website crashed when it became apparent they may be kingmakers, it was a trending google search term too. But Yes May will have a minority government, with enough DUP support to just about pass things that aren't controversial. She's going to be held hostage to any DUP requests though, as well as rebellion from her own backbenchers. Even the Whip will be less effective because if she expels an MP from her party she's got even less support.

Currently she's staying on as leader, but I really doubt it will be for long -a short while to save face maybe.

Going in May and her conservative party had 330 of the 650 seats which was a small majority overall--326 being the magic number. Now she has 318--meaning she needs a coalition with the DUP (a Northern Irish Unionist part who won ten seats) to maintain any grip on power and it is not much of a grip. Corbyn's party meanwhile gained 31 seats which puts him a lot closer to the 326 and especially if the Liberal democrats and the Scottish National Party work with him.

The other thing going on with Corbyn's rise is it consolidates the Labour party under his control and does major damage to the neoliberal Blairist wing of the party. I don't think we're going to see any internecine coup d'etat's for a while. Corbyn is much closer to a Sanders by the way than he is to a Bill Clinton. For me it's a very positive result.

Listening to the BBC One coverage brought up a couple of interesting points. First, the DUP are apparently climate change deniers as a party, and now the Tories are beholden to them. Second, the fact that the Tories are now beholden to the DUP taints any claim of impartiality they might have tried to make with respect to ironing out the Irish question as it relates to Brexit. So while it's a positive result on the whole, it's complicated.

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) was founded by the presbyterian Rev. Ian Paisley who over many years built quite the reputation as an anti-catholic bigot and a person who did a lot of stoking of the fires during the Northern Irish troubles--very violent apocalyptic rhetorical language, marching at head of Orange Order parades through resentful catholic areas, always claiming that the pope was the anti-christ. He was an MP and also in the European parliament (if I'm remembering correctly) for quite a spell where he would vent his spleen on the subject of the Pope all the time. FWIW he was every bit as conservative as your average right wing catholic prelate like Ratzinger. I did once read a chapter on Paisley from Jon Ronson on a charity expedition in sub-subharan Africa. It was a book Ronson wrote on all kinds of whack job politicians and political conspiracists and some of their crazier ideas. In that chapter Paisley didn't come across as badly as some of the others. Still the DUP is pretty right wing.

>12 reading_fox: I also know little about the specific policy positions of the DUP (though I have an idea of their general tenor, given that it was founded by Paisley), but I found this interesting.
http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/what-connects-brexit-the-dup-dark-money-and-a-...
(h/t to "b")

The Unionists are regarded as worse than UKIP (by people who dislike UKIP... rest in peace its charred carcasse...), as far as ideology goes. Them's the little ironies...

I was wondering if Conservatives are displaying unusual lack of insight into their electorate: Scotland, Brexit, and now this election? What's going on?

Non-Brits: here's what you need to know about the British election

...“Cameron gambled, lost. May gambled, lost,” tweeted Dutch MEP Sophia in ‘t Veld overnight. “Tory party beginning to look like a casino.”...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/09/british-election-explained

#18--I was keeping track of this last night and the Conservatives took a lot of seats held by the Scottish National Party (SNP) and if hadn't been for that they would be very much dead and stuffed ducks today.

On the DUP--what they're up to is going to be the complete opposite of what Sinn Fein is up to. On Brexit Sinn Fein's POV was they wanted Northern Ireland to have a special status to continue in the EU--their argument being 1. that 56% of the people of Northern Ireland voted to remain and 2. they share a border with a EU country--namely the Irish republic. Unionist fears are stoked by those kinds of arguments--of being separated from the British govt. and becoming part of reunification of a nation that they've historically been dead set against becoming part of (tantamount to losing to the IRA) and even if the republic's main religion catholicism is very much toned down (I believe the republic just elected a gay man as taiseoch (sp?) to be it's governmental head) those fears ain't going to go away--besides a gay political leader certainly scares the shit out of them too. Sinn Fein for their part are going to do what they usually do which is take no part in the Westminster govt. They'll be no use to Labour or the tories. Their end game continues to be reunification with the republic of Ireland---though perhaps who knows they could be leveraged on the Brexit front if Northern Ireland were allowed to stay in the EU---that's just conjecture on my part though and with the Conservatives still in the catbird seat I don't think that will even come up.

It's just a matter of time when T. May will step down. She was PM for far too long.

>19 lriley:

As I understand it, the interest which Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have in the open border goes beyond membership of the EU. It is part of the Good Friday Peace Agreement. Arguably any border restrictions would breach that agreement and would need to be agreed with the parties to the original agreement. That makes it rather more complex.

Now this is remarkable:

Labour wins Kensington

Labour has taken the Kensington seat, the country’s richest, from the Conservatives. Emma Dent Coad defeated Victoria Borwick, a former deputy mayor to Boris Johnson, by 20 votes - adding more than 5,000 votes to the party’s 2015 tally.

...

The west London seat, the boundaries of which have been redrawn several times, had been in the hands of the Conservatives since its establishment in 1974. It is seen as a natural Tory haven partly because it is Britain’s richest constituency, according to the latest data from HM Revenue & Customs.

Kensington’s average income was £148,000 per annum in 2014-15, putting it ahead of Cities of London of Westminster, where the average was £127,000, and Chelsea and Fulham, where it was £117,000. In no other constituency were average earnings as great as £100,000.

A mere 43 years it took!

#21--FWIW when it comes to politics there's almost always what we might call unspoken complexities. Not that you're wrong and truthfully I hadn't considered the Good Friday agreement when I wrote #19 up above. It's clear to me though that your basic unionist mostly on the protestant side and your basic SDLP or Sinn Fein voter mostly on the catholic side (however strongly they feel about reunification or Brexit or whatever) are going to be at loggerheads for the foreseeable future like they have been pretty much since the partition. It's also apparent that the Unionist politicians who won last night are the wedge that the Tories need to maintain power. Without them they are screwed at least as I understand the situation in that the SNP and Liberal Democrats and the Green and the Welsh party will in all likelihood work with the Labour party before they will with the Tories. There's much more balance to the situation than there was before and if May continues to shoot herself in the foot Corbyn and Labour will have a real opportunity to take that power away from the conservatives.

Today I have been imagining BoJo laying out a selection of his finest knives and trying their edges with his pudgy fingers.

Incidentally the DUP is also homophobic, which will be interesting as the leader of the Tories in Scotland is openly gay and pointedly tweeted about gay marriage after May's announcement of the pact with DUP yesterday. Actually, much as I struggle to find anything positive in Toryland, I am quite impressed with Ruth Davidson. A future Tory leader? In many ways I hope not, as she might even manage to make them look slightly palatable.

There are seven Sinn Fein MPs who never take their place in the UK parliament on principle. I wonder what it would take to draw them in now in opposition to the DUP? Very unlikely, as they will probably be content to let the UK tear itself to pieces.

The Grauniad on the DUP and Theresa May

Well, things just got more interesting.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/09/ruth-davidson-planning-scottish-tory-...

Ruth Davidson is to defy Theresa May’s plans for a hard Brexit and tear her Scottish party away from English control after the UK Tories’ disastrous General Election result. ... Although it has been mooted for some time, the imminent split between the Scottish and English parties is a direct result of a dramatic deterioration in relations between the Scottish Tory hierarchy in Edinburgh and 10 Downing Street.

Fresh from her success in winning an extra 12 Scottish seats in Thursday’s election, at the same time as the Prime Minister was losing 21 constituencies in England, Ms Davidson also vowed to use her Commons votes to prioritise the single market over curbing immigration.

This is certain to split Tory ranks as Mrs May has pledged to take the UK out of both the single market and the EU customs union as part of her Brexit negotiations, which begin next week.
...
Ms Davidson also signalled her opposition to Mrs May’s deal with the DUP in blunt fashion by tweeting a link to the same-sex marriage lecture she gave at Amnesty 's Pride lecture in Belfast last year.

She is engaged to Jen Wilson, an Irish Catholic Christian who campaigned during the Republic's same-sex marriage referendum, is a practising Christian herself and has said she would like to get married in a local church.

Her views could not be further from those of the DUP, a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage and supporter of the “traditional” definition of marriage. Last night, Ms Davidson said she had sought and received assurances from the Prime Minister that she would try to advance gay rights in Northern Ireland despite the DUP's record.
...
Most Scots voted Remain in the EU referendum and Ms Davidson has repeatedly said that she favours Britain reaching an agreement that allows it to stay in both the single market and customs union.

As a result it is expected that she will now seek to bring about a dramatic change in the government’s negotiating position which hitherto has been opposed to both the single market and the customs union.

At a press conference in Edinburgh Ms Davidson said: “We must seek to deliver an open Brexit, not a closed one, which puts out country’s economic growth first.” In answer to questions she said she wanted the “greatest possible amount of free trade”.

FWIW that Brexit vote has pretty much realigned the political landscape in Great Britain for the better IMO. It's weird how some things works out in the end. Personally Brexit always looked to me like poison to stay and poison to leave and the Tories with a whole lot of arrogance and bombast have pretty much fucked themselves over on that issue and it's probably a good thing that they're still clinging to power because they're the ones still with the mandate to figure it all out and IMO they're probably going to be in for another great big and well deserved bashing when that happens.

The other thing that pleases me about all this is the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the defeat of the neoliberal labour Blairist wing.

>29 lriley: The other thing that pleases me about all this is the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and the defeat of the neoliberal labour Blairist wing.

100% agreement!

Can Iriley write about England? He lives in New York state. Isn't there someone on this site who should be (I)riled?

Mrs May’s deal with the DUP threatens 20 years hard work in Ireland (Guardian)

Since 1990, the British government has been neutral in Northern Ireland, backing neither the unionists nor the nationalists...

If Mrs May depends on the DUP... it will be impossible for it to be even-handed...

#32--no doubt---the demographics however have been changing. Back in the 60's about two thirds of the Northern Ireland population identified as protestant of one kind or another and the other third as catholic and it was a lot easier to discriminate against the one third than it is now when the demographics are (according to a 2011 survey--info from Wikipedia) 41.5 identifying as protestant and 41 as catholic with the balance of 17% or so more or less having had enough of religion--or at least I would suspect. The numbers in any case I would think would be problematic for those with Unionists (mainly protestant) proclivities. The thing is in Northern Ireland what religion you are seems to have a lot of sway with what political party you belong to but the trend in population growth is firmly on one side of the divide and if the other side decides on discriminating too much against that side the future for them promises a real nasty payback. They are losing their group as it is. Right wing politicians being what they are though I suspect they'll be assholes.

One barometer for the degree to which this is reopening old wounds: the War Nerd begins tweeting about NI (a subject that under most circumstances he tries studiously to avoid -- evidently for good reason).
https://twitter.com/TheWarNerd/status/873530002939236352

For background, here's an autobiographical piece wherein he relates how he (and Northern Ireland) contributed to the formation of the individual who became known as Dr. Montgomery McFate, the prime mover behind the U.S. Army's failed Human Terrain System counterinsurgency program.
https://pando.com/2015/08/03/my-human-terrain-part-one-me-and-mitzy-carlough/
https://pando.com/2015/08/03/my-human-terrain-part-two-me-and-mitzy-carlough/

>34 davidgn: Had time to read the "autobiographical" piece and found it interesting & entertaining.

>29 lriley:, >30 John5918:

You might get a chuckle out of Jonathan Pie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUUhYqtguFI

#36--over the past year or so I've watched a lot of Pie's political routines. This one is the most hilarious. Thank you.

>35 DugsBooks: Dolan tends to elicit that reaction. :-)

>36 krolik: >37 lriley: He's got another one today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hGAP7b4zW8

But of course, remember: Pie aired on RT. Therefore he must clearly be a Putinist propagandist useful idiot working to undermine British democracy.

(Oh, wait: that's Corbyn, apparently: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/09/jeremy-corbyn-west-nato-russia...
h/t Mark Ames: "@politico smears Corbyn as a Russian agent—written by chairman of "Extending American Power for the Center for a New American Security"" https://twitter.com/MarkAmesExiled/status/873521502779580416 )

#38--I read the Dolan piece and what kind of name is Montgomery McFate--I was thinking is this for real? but when you check the links it is.

James Rubin is another neoliberal. His concern is for this carefully managed narrative about the NATO alliance and its battle against evil authoritarianism and he conveniently overlooks the fact that he represents elite oligarchic interests and he could really give a rat's ass about the interests of the population of the country he supposedly represented. He'd rather we have another cold war or WWIII with Russia--continue to spend trillions on war rather than give the people universal health care or free education. Domestic politics should trump geopolitics. This is a deliberately done wrong way around argument to put fear into people. So he's a jerk to me.

On the question of whether Russia has ties to the Trump administration--yes, I think so. Hacked the election to some extent?--possibly--we're still waiting for something really concrete but I will say on the one hand I'll look at that if we ever see it with some skepticism but OTOH it wouldn't surprise me if it really happened either. But it's not like I wouldn't expect them to try to leverage it if they could pull it off just as I'm pretty sure we've leveraged their elections when we could--Yeltsin being one example. Our elections are sacrosanct--but what about our govt. manipulating the elections of other nations or what about governments--sometimes even democratically elected ones that we've helped to overthrow? Our elections by the way are not sacrosanct which should have been clear enough after Bush/Gore. Our own political entities do it to us too. And FWIW when one candidate gets 2.9 million more votes than the other but gets creamed in the electoral college something really fucking smells. Our political system is crap.

>36 krolik: Thanks for that link. I hadn't come across Pie, so I'm delighted with the discovery.

John Oliver eventually gets to the UK election and reaches his peak in the 25th minute with the brilliant 'Thatcher in the Rye': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCKloPo6AJM

>41 RickHarsch: Rats! The link's gone dead.

>36 krolik:

Thanks. Bloody brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyVz5vgqBhE

15:50

Dear Theresa May: A Counter-Terrorism Lesson from Africa (Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria)

From Kenya's Sunday Nation 11 June 2017

Fromer Prime Minsiter Sir John Major on Northern Ireland and the DUP:

John Major: Tory-DUP deal risks jeopardising Northern Ireland peace (Guardian)

Edited to add:

Unseated: the Sinn Féin MPs whose absence strengthens May's hand in Commons (Guardian)

>33 lriley: the demographics however have been changing

The realignment of Northern Ireland’s MPs reflects the power and organisation of the two main rival parties, rather than any underlying demographic shift

>38 davidgn: Speaking of comics who surely must be Putinist propagandists because they appear on RT:

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/06/lee-camp-write-propaganda-ny-times-demons...

I'll just leave this here. (Click through for full size)


http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15413766.Outrage_over_Orange_hall_Halloween_p...