The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Oct 6, 2017 20:01:05 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Oct 6, 2017 20:01:05 GMT -5
Good morning to everyone reading 'Serious Topics', 'The Third' and all other social media websites currently online today. I trust that all is well with all of you this beautiful Saturday morning. What are you all up to this weekend? 'The Independent' leads today with some editorial comment that The Tories need to realise that Brexit is more important than party politics].
'The Independent' concludes that Theresa May’s advantage is that she can plausibly hold herself out as one of the few people in the Conservative Party who can be a bridge between hard and soft Brexiteers. But can she unite the country behind her? What do you reckon, Uncle Henry?
"When a Prime Minister is forced to assure the TV cameras that she has the “full support” of her Cabinet, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that her leadership is teetering on the edge of an abyss. Senior colleagues including Michael Gove, Amber Rudd and Damian Green have all been at pains to give the PM their public backing too. But how long will it last?
Having suffered a series of unfortunate events during her conference speech on Wednesday, Theresa May might have hoped that the party would rally round, united by sympathy if nothing else. Fat chance.
Instead, Grant Shapps, the former Conservative chairman and housing minister, merrily told the BBC that he thought there should be a leadership contest; worse, he claimed that 30 other MPs agreed with him. It would only take another 18 to join them to force a vote of confidence.
Fundamentally, of course, the only person to blame for the talk of plots is the Prime Minister herself. It was her disastrous decision to call an election earlier this year, when she did not need to, that led to the startling diminishment of her authority. When you run on a ticket offering strength and stability, there is nowhere to hide if you manage to actually lose your previously healthy majority. Were it not for Brexit, it seems certain that the Prime Minister would have already faced a formal challenge from within her party already. Yet Conservatives are aware that a leadership contest now would throw the EU withdrawal negotiations into disarray at a crucial juncture. Perhaps as significantly, it would immediately be met by calls from the opposition parties to hold another general election on the basis that a new leader would have even less of a mandate for his or her Brexit of choice than does Ms May.
However, this is not to say the sands cannot shift. Theresa May’s advantage is that she can plausibly hold herself out as one of the few people in the Conservative Party who can be a bridge between hard and soft Brexiteers. But if either faction believes their interests are not being suitably served, they will feel little compunction in bringing the bridge crashing down. Furthermore, in the event that a challenge becomes a reality, plotters will note that there have been prime ministerial changes before at periods of great national crisis. In fact, Boris Johnson might rather fancy a Churchillian comparison as a means to kicking off a potential leadership bid.
It was Mr Johnson, of course, whose prominent interventions in the press – not least setting out his own “vision” for Brexit in a Daily Telegraph column – arguably set the ball rolling on the most recent bout of dissent. He has in the past week sought to play down the perception that he is seeking to destabilise the Prime Minister, although that perhaps reflects a sudden doubt about whether he would actually win a leadership contest against one of the soft-Brexit potential candidates (Amber Rudd or Philip Hammond, or even Ruth Davidson if she were to enter Parliament), rather than renewed belief in Ms May.
It is likely also that Johnson is, much as he would deny it, as anxious about carrying the can for a bad Brexit as anyone else who might ultimately have to take responsibility for the UK’s EU withdrawal. Indeed, it is surely the fear of being unable, in the end, to have much control over the departure deal – which will be determined far more by the EU’s remaining members than Her Majesty’s Government – that gives Ms May hope for her survival.
Whichever way you look at it though, it is hard to avoid the impression that there are a great many Conservative MPs whose first instinct is to consider their own interests (ie their personal ambition) and whose second instinct is to consider the health of the party (ie doing whatever it takes to avoid a general election and to keep Labour out of office). The national interest comes a poor third. At a time when ministers are engaged in negotiations which will determine existential questions about Britain’s future, that is hardly reassuring.
It seems obvious that members of the armed forces win their medals for facing danger bravely, but this belief would not long survive exposure to a photograph of Prince Charles in uniform. Four of his 11 medals were awarded for simply being alive while his mother was on the throne. There is a long military tradition of handing out decorations to people who have not fought at all. In this light, the proposal by the Ministry of Defence to strike a medal for the campaign against Islamic State, which would be given to drone operators among other recipients, makes a kind of sense. But it is still morally disturbing. A similar proposal, in the US in 2013, was withdrawn after outrage from fighting soldiers. Their obvious objection is that a drone operator runs no personal risk at all. The same could be said of many specialists on whom a modern army depends, from technicians to staff officers, but most of them are at least in the theatre of war, even if behind the lines. That’s why they earn campaign medals even though medals for bravery are reserved for the fighting troops.
The drone pilots sit thousands of miles from the action, killing people with the press of a button. Rewarding them tends to reinforce the terrible delusion that modern war, as fought by our armed forces, is a hygienic business in which only consenting adults are killed. No drone pilot anywhere seems to have been punished for killing civilians; the British Ministry of Defence argues that none of our 4,000 strikes ever have. But then the only evidence for the effects of most strikes are gathered by the self-same drones. This is part of the wider moral ambiguity that has always attended killing people from the air. The drone controller 2,000 miles from his victim is different in degree, but not in kind, from the jet pilot who fires a cruise missile from friendly airspace over the horizon at his target. Nor is danger a guarantee of moral purity. The allied airmen who carried out the bombing of German cities in the second world war were undoubtedly heroic. They faced very high odds of death over long tours of duty, but they often set out deliberately to kill as many civilians as possible. Perhaps we should admire more those who were less brave – and less lethal with it."
Having suffered a series of unfortunate events during her conference speech on Wednesday, Theresa May might have hoped that the party would rally round, united by sympathy if nothing else. Fat chance.
Instead, Grant Shapps, the former Conservative chairman and housing minister, merrily told the BBC that he thought there should be a leadership contest; worse, he claimed that 30 other MPs agreed with him. It would only take another 18 to join them to force a vote of confidence.
Fundamentally, of course, the only person to blame for the talk of plots is the Prime Minister herself. It was her disastrous decision to call an election earlier this year, when she did not need to, that led to the startling diminishment of her authority. When you run on a ticket offering strength and stability, there is nowhere to hide if you manage to actually lose your previously healthy majority. Were it not for Brexit, it seems certain that the Prime Minister would have already faced a formal challenge from within her party already. Yet Conservatives are aware that a leadership contest now would throw the EU withdrawal negotiations into disarray at a crucial juncture. Perhaps as significantly, it would immediately be met by calls from the opposition parties to hold another general election on the basis that a new leader would have even less of a mandate for his or her Brexit of choice than does Ms May.
However, this is not to say the sands cannot shift. Theresa May’s advantage is that she can plausibly hold herself out as one of the few people in the Conservative Party who can be a bridge between hard and soft Brexiteers. But if either faction believes their interests are not being suitably served, they will feel little compunction in bringing the bridge crashing down. Furthermore, in the event that a challenge becomes a reality, plotters will note that there have been prime ministerial changes before at periods of great national crisis. In fact, Boris Johnson might rather fancy a Churchillian comparison as a means to kicking off a potential leadership bid.
It was Mr Johnson, of course, whose prominent interventions in the press – not least setting out his own “vision” for Brexit in a Daily Telegraph column – arguably set the ball rolling on the most recent bout of dissent. He has in the past week sought to play down the perception that he is seeking to destabilise the Prime Minister, although that perhaps reflects a sudden doubt about whether he would actually win a leadership contest against one of the soft-Brexit potential candidates (Amber Rudd or Philip Hammond, or even Ruth Davidson if she were to enter Parliament), rather than renewed belief in Ms May.
It is likely also that Johnson is, much as he would deny it, as anxious about carrying the can for a bad Brexit as anyone else who might ultimately have to take responsibility for the UK’s EU withdrawal. Indeed, it is surely the fear of being unable, in the end, to have much control over the departure deal – which will be determined far more by the EU’s remaining members than Her Majesty’s Government – that gives Ms May hope for her survival.
Whichever way you look at it though, it is hard to avoid the impression that there are a great many Conservative MPs whose first instinct is to consider their own interests (ie their personal ambition) and whose second instinct is to consider the health of the party (ie doing whatever it takes to avoid a general election and to keep Labour out of office). The national interest comes a poor third. At a time when ministers are engaged in negotiations which will determine existential questions about Britain’s future, that is hardly reassuring.
It seems obvious that members of the armed forces win their medals for facing danger bravely, but this belief would not long survive exposure to a photograph of Prince Charles in uniform. Four of his 11 medals were awarded for simply being alive while his mother was on the throne. There is a long military tradition of handing out decorations to people who have not fought at all. In this light, the proposal by the Ministry of Defence to strike a medal for the campaign against Islamic State, which would be given to drone operators among other recipients, makes a kind of sense. But it is still morally disturbing. A similar proposal, in the US in 2013, was withdrawn after outrage from fighting soldiers. Their obvious objection is that a drone operator runs no personal risk at all. The same could be said of many specialists on whom a modern army depends, from technicians to staff officers, but most of them are at least in the theatre of war, even if behind the lines. That’s why they earn campaign medals even though medals for bravery are reserved for the fighting troops.
The drone pilots sit thousands of miles from the action, killing people with the press of a button. Rewarding them tends to reinforce the terrible delusion that modern war, as fought by our armed forces, is a hygienic business in which only consenting adults are killed. No drone pilot anywhere seems to have been punished for killing civilians; the British Ministry of Defence argues that none of our 4,000 strikes ever have. But then the only evidence for the effects of most strikes are gathered by the self-same drones. This is part of the wider moral ambiguity that has always attended killing people from the air. The drone controller 2,000 miles from his victim is different in degree, but not in kind, from the jet pilot who fires a cruise missile from friendly airspace over the horizon at his target. Nor is danger a guarantee of moral purity. The allied airmen who carried out the bombing of German cities in the second world war were undoubtedly heroic. They faced very high odds of death over long tours of duty, but they often set out deliberately to kill as many civilians as possible. Perhaps we should admire more those who were less brave – and less lethal with it."
'The Independent' concludes that Theresa May’s advantage is that she can plausibly hold herself out as one of the few people in the Conservative Party who can be a bridge between hard and soft Brexiteers. But can she unite the country behind her? What do you reckon, Uncle Henry?