I understand that Cameron doesn’t have to call new elections for four years, if he doesn’t want to, but what does he do if these predictions come true?
U.K. unemployment will rise over the next five years almost everywhere in the country as the deepest government spending squeeze since World War II bites, the Centre for Economic and Business Research said.
Joblessness in the North East will increase to 13 percent in 2016 from 12 percent in 2012, while the rate in Northern Ireland will climb to 10.7 percent from 8.8 percent, the group said in a statement in London today. The regions have a large proportion of public-sector workers, which is weighing on the employment outlook there, the CEBR said.
I’m genuinely curious what the strategy is here. Go far right and try to stir up anti-immigrant stuff? Start a war with Argentina again? What? I don’t know much about UK politics and am an admitted Anglophobe, so I’d like to hear what people think. Has Cameron imbibed so much austerity purple drank that he thinks things will turn around?
feebog
Austerity = Victory. You just need to give it a few more Friedman units to work.
inventor
And the Liberal Dems are wondering why oh why did they make that deal for a last second ticket on the Titanic.
Jack Bauer
Confidence fairy.
Free market ideologues and aristocrats running a country is a recipe for a fuck up.
Hunter Gathers
He’ll do what Bibi did – cut a deal with opposition, go around that whole ‘democracy’ nonsense, and get back to the business of fucking the poor. If he has to sign on with right wing bigots to get it done, it will get done. And Sully will gush over his Burkean modesty.
Bruce S
“what does he do if these predictions come true?”
The most practical short-term solution, given that he’s not likely to quit being a policy asshole, is to beef up the police force. Pretty much his only option, because my assumption is that the Brits won’t take this lying down.
draftmama
My daughter lives in London but she and her husband are independent fashion photographer and artist respectively (and both successful, for now) so she says they aren’t particularly impacted. But public services suck and are getting suckier which makes living there less appealing. She thinks there will be more and more social unrest with the accompanying crackdown by the police – there is a CCTV on every street corner – which will just exacerbate the situation until it will eventually explode.
BTW the mood of the people in England from whence I hie, has ALWAYS been expressed at the local council level and the Cons got trashed in the elections so that’s a start.
flaneur
the Conster
Didn’t they just have riots a year ago? Angry public sector folks out of work + summer = trouble with a capital T, so a hard right turn is likely unless the left gets its act together asap.
Ash Can
Possibly, his government falls in a no-confidence vote and his party gets pounded into the turf in the ensuing election.
butler
Yes. John Oliver was on point when he made the observation that Cameron was born a century too late, and that he would be most at home in a pith helmet as a colonial minister.
Yes and/or he doesn’t care. He’ll just claim that even more austerity is needed.
Alexandra
Three years left, in terms of calling the general election. The coalition settled on a five year fixed term and we’re two years in.
As for what the strategy is, I suspect that when the election comes around, for Cameron it’ll be much as Obama is pitching himself: safe pair of hands, determination, leading through difficult times etc. Ed Milliband hasn’t quite sold the country on his personal/leadership qualities as yet; the Tory papers will pummel him as weird, weak and in bed with the unions.
It might be all they have.
Waynski
@feebog: This. He said as much at Prime Minister’s question time about a week and a half ago telling shadow Labour PM David Milliband that the austerity measures haven’t had time to work.
Brachiator
Uh, no. Not even.
It’s not all under Cameron’s control. He’s got to keep his hinky coalition together, and also deal with the resurgence of the Labour Party and whatever may develop with the Scots independence issue.
Short answer: don’t know if there is yet much point in speculating.
@Hunter Gathers:
Doesn’t make sense in the context of British politics. Cameron is already in a coalition with the Lib Dems, and there is no need to deal with Labour. The party of bigots, BNP, is not part of the government, having failed to win any seats in the last general election.
RalfW
I predict a government-facilitated 1%-ers smash-and-grab followed by early retirement to a tax haven with sandy beaches.
Or not. Who knows what those IMF/World Bank/Angela Merkel types are thinking?? Put another way, Is our austerity children learning?
Lev
@Ash Can: That would be nice.
The thing is, really, Cameron’s already screwed. Labour’s already back up in the polls, even though the public roundly blames them for the state of the economy. They’re realizing nonetheless that the cure of austerity is much worse than the disease. So unless Cameron finds some Keynesian religion–which would probably lead to a full-on revolt from his own party–Cameron is going to preside over a crummy (and worsening) economy for years. This guy is going to be just hated for a long, long time.
@DougJ: A title that would have worked also, “People sleep in the daytime, if they want to”
Villago Delenda Est
It seemed to work well for Mayor Quimby.
schrodinger's cat
What do you expect from someone who looks like one of Bertie Wooster’s clueless buddies hanging out at the Drones Club.
ETA: If the LibDems withdraw from the ruling coalition, then Cameron, will lose a vote of no-confidence and will have to call for the general elections. Is there any possibility that this might happen?
Cathyx
I don’t know why those unemployed people can’t just borrow money from their parents.
Lee
OT: but very interesting.
The Difference between the US and Europe in one graph
The last line is great.
Cathyx
In all seriousness, I think the plan is for the bankers to steal as much as they possibly can until they can’t anymore.
pseudonymous in nc
“Fuck the places with high unemployment, they don’t vote for us anyway.”
Having spent a fair amount of time around posh arseholes of Cameron’s ilk, they genuinely don’t think of England beyond Luton and wouldn’t mind if the Scottish border moved down to the M62.
@Lev:
There’s one twist: reports today suggest that the reduction of the Commons (to 600 seats) and consequent boundary changes may be postponed if the Lib Dems give up on an elected Lords. The reduce/redistrict strategy was the closest thing to a gerrymander in the UK, and designed to deliver the Tories a clear majority in 2015.
Punchy
He needs to walk down the street and talk to Sullivan about this. Unemployment in dub digs for the next 4 years seems damn near suicidal for Brit’un.
Napoleon
@schrodinger’s cat:
I would think not. I think the LibDems are done as a party and will suffer worse then the Tories for their governance. So I think the best thing for them is to hang on to the end of the term and hope something happens to really turn things around before the next election.
Hunter Gathers
@Brachiator: And I get British politics wrong for umpteenth time. The streak remains unbroken.
rea
@schrodinger’s cat: If the LibDems withdraw from the ruling coalition, then Cameron, will lose a vote of no-confidence and will have to call for the general elections. Is there any possibility that this might happen?
Not really. The likely outcome of the resulting general election would be that people vote either Labour or Conservative, and nobody at all votes LibDem, who caused this mess by betraying their constituents for an alliance with the Conservatives, thereby leaving everyone mad at them.
Martin
@the Conster: Yeah, the next round of riots – which will probably be worse – is going to be hard to excuse away.
Europe risks entering a dark place.
Forum Transmitted Disease
@RalfW: Merkel’s in an interesting (read horrific) position. I’m sure there’s nothing more she’d like to do than extract Germany from the clusterfuck that is the Euro, and from what I understand that is not an option.
The Germans did what any sane capitalist economy should have done: kept their taxes high, kept their manufacturing, regulated the shit out of their banks, kept their spending controlled, and built a surplus. They assumed their neighbors would as well. They did not assume that their neighbors, like Greece, would commit fraud in order to appear solvent – aided and abetted by our least favorite institution, Goldman Sachs – an assumption that in hindsight boggles the mind.
Is austerity going to work? Ludicrous, and more to the point, all over the continent, the voters aren’t having it. The 1%, of course, won’t be paying either. So who gets stuck with the bill?
Immovable object, meet irresistible force.
mdblanche
@schrodinger’s cat: The Lib Dems are more machine now than man. Their minds are twisted and evil. If they turn against Emperor Cameron and have to face the voters now it would be their last act before political oblivion.
@pseudonymous in nc: Nothing new there.
schrodinger's cat
DougJ@top
Have you read, Bobo’s column this morning. It is full of misinformation and half lies, even worse than usual.
I Am An Important Internet Commenter
“I don’t know much about UK politics,” says man on blog.
Steve in DC
The Brits aren’t really the ones sabre rattling, Argentina is. The British stance is that the Falklands can decide what they want and surprise surprise, they want to stay part of the UK. Argentina’s stance is “fuck what they want it’s ours”. It’s been Argentina’s ambassador running around stirring up the shit, not the UK.
Argentina has some serious internal problems and rather than addressing them they have been banging the drum on the Falklands to distract people from them. And given the history of Argentina, I can understand why the people in the Falklands would rather remain with the UK.
smintheus
Cameron just is not all that smart. He’s glib and facile and does a good impression of earnest/sincere, and for a while that worked as a plain contrast to Blair and that dour Scottish guy. But Cameron’s problem is that he’s a bit thick. He bought into austerity for simple ideological reasons, had no fall back plan, and probably cannot think his way out of the blind alley now. So his strategy will be to try to change the subject, and probably ride the Olympics to some kind of glory.
PaulW
Thing is, the Conservatives are already in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, who were supposed to be by nature progressives. If the unemployment gets worse by year’s end, I wonder if they can pull off a vote of No Confidence and break the coalition. In that case, the government may be forced to hold an election. Labour would well win out, or else win enough seats alongside the Liberal Dems to form a new coalition, one that will end the Austerity mindthink.
Maude
@Cathyx:
I agree. look at the battle between Greece and the EU. Spain might bail out its banks.
Brachiator
@Hunter Gathers:
That’s OK. Everything I know about British politics I get from the BBC podcast of the Friday Night comedy show.
More seriously, I try to keep up with international news and some Brit friends, but I often have to say, “wait a minute, slow down, and explain that to me at least two more times.”
But the Friday Night Comedy show, especially the News Quiz, is good stuff, and surprisingly informative.
Shit. Maurice Sendak has died. From news reports.
Maurice Sendak, the US author of the best-selling children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, has died aged 83.
His long-time editor, Michael di Capua, told The New York Times the author died in Danbury, Connecticut, after complications from a recent stroke.
He wrote some 17 books and was a prolific illustrator, but was best-known for his 1963 tale of Max, who became the “king of all wild things”.
schrodinger's cat
@smintheus: Are you saying that he is the British version of W?
Napoleon
@PaulW:
It would be suicide for the LibDems to do anything that would cause an election. Currently they have something like 90 seats and I bet they would be lucky to get something like a dozen. Don’t believe me, well there is this from local elections on 5/3:
Brazilian Rascal
I usually don’t back the Argentinians, but the Falklands are as british as the Phillipines were ever American: only acceptable if you think imperialism is the bees’ knees and totally justifiable.
It’s no surprise that the colonists the UK shipped there want to stay british. I’m sure the israeli settlers in the West Bank settlements also consider it just part of Israel.
Though given the news, they may be singing a different tune within 5 years.
smintheus
@schrodinger’s cat: He’s not as dumb as Bush, and his education gave him a veneer of intellectual respectability (he can speak English without injuring himself). But I remember him from my Oxford days, and he was a drunken conservative yahoo who gave no impression that his mind had ever been unsettled by deep or prolonged thoughts.
handsmile
One vital element of Cameron’s strategy to weather the next few months is to grasp his finely manicured hands tightly around “Wenlock”, the mascot of the 2012 London Olympic Games. He hopes to bask in the international media glow of beauty and benevolence that irradiates this quadrennial masquerade of sportsmanship.
The glorious Games will be just the Circus Maximus to distract social/economic discontent and to kettle efforts by the Labour Party to bolster their recent council election successes. It remains to be seen whether its leader Ed Miliband, newly roused from his slumbers, will be able effectively to advance Labour’s prospects. The next party conference will not be held until the end of September, i.e., after the feel-good fervor of the summer spectacle.
With reports of surface-to-air missiles being installed on residential apartment buildings, journalists already being assaulted by private security goons at Olympic park locations, and security measures to be adopted at competition sites that will make Beijing 2008 look like a hippie commune, what could possibly go wrong?
Nemesis
Austerity, like conservatism, only fails when its actors perform poorly. More purity, better results.
Brachiator
@Napoleon:
And yet, the Lib Dems have no choice but to keep their lame alliance with the Conservatives. Here’s a tidbit of the most recent news.
David Cameron has said there will be no “let-up” in tough decisions on the economy and defended the coalition as “necessary” to solve the UK’s problems.
Speaking on a visit to a factory in Essex ahead of Wednesday’s Queen’s Speech, the prime minister said many people were having “tough times”.
He vowed to do more to help with living costs and help the UK “go for growth”.
Deputy Nick Clegg said the economy could not be fixed “overnight” and the process could take many years.
The two were making a joint appearance ahead of the launch of the coalition’s legislative programme for the next year and in the wake of poll losses for both the Conservatives and Lib Dems in last week’s council elections.
KevinA
Ironically, the Lib Dems, despite being thrashed far worse than the Tories, now have more coalition leverage. Cameron can only tack right at the moment he wants an election. B/c when he does, the LDs will bolt, and the gov’t will fall. Needless, to say, only Labour benefits from an election now, so that won’t happen.
BTW: Lords reform is a phenomenally stupid idea.
Tractarian
What about a Vote of No Confidence Fairy?
That might do the trick.
Davis X. Machina
@Napoleon:
They’ll be the Somerset Nationalist Party when the smoke clears….
They’ll play the video for “Into the West” for their party political broadcast come the next general election.
Violet
Really? Why?
Culture of Truth
Run away! Run away!
Hawes
I think the Lib Dems could revolt against Clegg and bring in a new leader who can scrub the last two years away. The Lib Dems mainly want electoral reform of some sort. Miliband is a twit, but he has to know that a promise of even mild electoral reform would win a governing coalition or a vote of no confidence. And the Lib Dems will have to think long term, sacrificing their already weak electoral position now for a hope that electoral reform will bring them gains down the road.
Davis X. Machina
@Hawes:
Which LibDems, though? Even a splinter party like the LibDems is still a coalition: suburban would-be Labour voters who just don’t like working-class people, and genteel rural Tories, who find all that Col. Blimpery de trop.
KevinA
^Right. The Simon Hughes-type Liberals might well revolt, but not, for example, a David Laws type.
David Koch
PPP:
Obama 50-43 Ohio (leads women +19)
Obama 50-40 Iowa (leads women +20)
Barry
@Cathyx:
“In all seriousness, I think the plan is for the bankers to steal as much as they possibly can until they can’t anymore.”
This covers the economic side of any and all right-wing politics.
Barry
@Forum Transmitted Disease: “They did not assume that their neighbors, like Greece, would commit fraud in order to appear solvent – aided and abetted by our least favorite institution, Goldman Sachs – an assumption that in hindsight boggles the mind.”
Two things – first, please give me a dollar for every German banker involved in this. That way I can retire right now. German hands are quite dirty.
Second, Germany got in good shape by exporting to the rest of Europe, running a net trade surplus. Good for German, but not possible for all of Europe.
Tony J
The Tories are – not – going to back down on Project Austerity. Like your own GOP State Governments they see it as a ‘serious sounding’ cover for dismantling the Public Sector and crippling the Unions, and that’s something their rank-and-file have wanted to do for a very, very long time.
I wouldn’t be – too – surprised if Cameron called a snap General Election sooner rather than later. The logic being that the Lib-Dems are absolutely going to get left for dead by an electorate disgusted with their gimping for the Tories, but that means the voters are left with a binary choice between Tory or Labour. In that case, it’s a simple question – have the Tories made themselves unpopular enough to make voters forget how much they dislike New Labour? And bank on it, any Tory General Election campaign for the next two decades is going to push the message that the current Labour leader, whoever they may be, is just a sleazier version of Tony Blair/less charismatic version of Gordon Brown.
Sooner rather than later would seem like the best move if those figures you cite are anything close to accurate.
sherparick
I believe the current Parliament expires in 2015 since this one was elected in 2010. If they were smart, they would at least talk the “pound” and thereby give their private business a boost on exports and import substitution. But hard money is another Conservative fetish, to that won’t happen. So it is “internal devaluation” and slowly ratcheting down the living standards of the 99% with high, continous unemployment. And of course it will all be the fault of the Brown/Black people and the French/Germans/EU.
Will the coalition break before then? Well, if politicians were driven by principle, then yes, since this devastation of the public sector goes against the traditions of both the ancient Liberal Party and Social Democrats who bolted Labor over the Cold War. But, if politicians are driven by love of power and office, then no, because this will be the last British Government with Liberal Democratic ministers after this fiasco.
Barry
@Hawes: “And the Lib Dems will have to think long term, sacrificing their already weak electoral position now for a hope that electoral reform will bring them gains down the road.”
Or hang on for dear life, extracting as much as possible for the next three years.
catclub
@Martin: “Yeah, the next round of riots – which will probably be worse –”
But if riots breaks up an Olympic Opening or closing ceremony, I will heartily approve.
Could only be improved on by a riot breaking up the Rose parade.
Sly
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
The Germans are where they are because of a trade surplus, financed by reams of cheap credit funneled to the EU periphery by creditors in Frankfurt, London, and Paris. Germany is doing what they are doing because their economic security depends on everyone believing that Germany’s financial crisis is really someone else’s sovereign debt crisis.
And this has created a serious legitimation crisis for the EU as a whole. This was an economic and political union sold as being democratically accountable to its constituent members. All of its constituent members. It turns out that it’s only accountable to those creditors in Frankfurt, London, and Paris, and everyone is justifiably pissed.
@Napoleon:
The LibDems are also facing a very real legitimation crisis. The UK equivalent of political progressives thought they were being groovy and voting for the “real” progressives. Turned out they were snookered into voting for the UK equivalent of Ron Paul.
Oops.
catclub
@Barry: “Second, Germany got in good shape by exporting to the rest of Europe, running a net trade surplus. Good for German, but not possible for all of Europe.”
Someone has been reading Krug and Beat the Press.
terraformer
I think it’s just greed, pure and simple. They don’t really care what happens to them or what people think about them, they just want more money.
They are all about short-term gain, and austerity fills the pockets of the super-rich. Just like how BushCo raided the country’s cookie jar of treasure for their pals, they just run up the bill, grab billions in short-term cash, and then let someone else clean it all up.
Then they sit back and relentlessly attack whoever is trying to do the cleaning in hopes that they’ll get back in power and do it all over again.
pragmatism
@Hawes: i loved this poster re: clegg
http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&sa=N&rls=com.microsoft:en-us:IE-Address&rlz=1I7ADFA_en&biw=1280&bih=705&tbm=isch&tbnid=XcvjPkvxD_H79M:&imgrefurl=http://noifsnobuts.wordpress.com/&docid=MS71k5G0XI4IhM&imgurl=http://noifsnobuts.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/2.jpg&w=509&h=675&ei=YXCpT96IKcnZiQLg7Zy9Ag&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=484&sig=101552601780045265112&page=1&tbnh=158&tbnw=100&start=0&ndsp=17&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0,i:75&tx=56&ty=64
Amanda in the South Bay
@Brazilian Rascal:
Speaking of imperialism, how many Argentines have European ancestry? Shit, just about everyone can be accused of being an imperialist if you go backlong enough.
James E. Powell
Anglophobe? Are you sure you don’t mean the opposite?
Brachiator
@Brazilian Rascal:
Slight adjustment for history’s sake.
El Cid
@Barry: Whatever do you mean? If they work hard enough, everyone can run a trade surplus! If you cut taxes enough, revenue can increase as much as you need! If you fire enough people who aren’t efficient enough, then this lets more people be hired!
SRW1
“I’m genuinely curious what the strategy is here. “
If the economy doesn’t turn around in time, which it won’t, Cameron’s gonna take to whipping the EU some more. If need be he could always call for a referendum on UK membership, ideally with a date set some six months after that of the next general election. That’ll make those UKIP sympathizers vote Tory at the next general election. Voila, majority.
Hypnos
@Brachiator:
History remembers well enough.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_War
Filipino civilian dead: ~200,000 to 1,500,000
Brachiator
Damn, the austerity people are shifting their position
This kind of thing cannot be good for Cameron in the UK.
I expect the Republicans to hold their ground. That kind of thing works so well.
Beauzeaux
If things go even more pear-shaped, he could lose a vote of confidence and have to call an election.
Brachiator
@Hypnos: History remembers well enough.
Sadly, it doesn’t. Whatever the Spanish originally did to establish their rule over the indigenous people is reduced to the following in the Wikipedia.
And the war had its roots in a revolt against Spanish domination, and a close reaction to abuses such as this:
The US role in all of this was just the last stages of a long, bitter struggle.
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Violet:
It’s not so much that they starved my great-great-grandfathers to death as that I find them rude and pretentious on the whole.
snarkyspice
Anglophobe? What the hell did we ever do to you?
Still, as a Brit expat who spent 20 years in the US and finally, joyfully escaped back to Britain, I guess I can understand. Some places just get on your nerves.
Cameron’s austerity measures are ill-advised, but they’re not batshit crazy. The right wing here remains very slightly to the right of Obama on most issues. God isn’t dragged into every conversation. And we’re not still debating contraception. Not sure you should be looking down your nose at us from over there in crazy-land.
PeakVT
@Brazilian Rascal: Britain has exercised control over the Falklands since the 1830s, and made the first recorded visits to the islands in the 1500s (the Portuguese probably discovered them first, but there are no records of any visits). Spanish and then Argentine control was fitful at best, and Britain never reliquished sovereignty through the entire period.
montanareddog
Lot of BS talked on this thread about imperialism and the Falkland Islands.
The islanders are not subjugating, nor have ever subjugated, any indigenous people; nor have they stolen the land from anyone. Just because they originated, several generations ago, from a country with a history of imperialism, does not mean their right to self-determination now should be denied.
What gives Argentina, itself a colonial project, a right to the Islands? Geographic proximity is not a justification in the post-WWII era. The Channel Islands and Gibraltar remain British, the Canary Islands Spanish, St Pierre and Miquelon French, Guam and Puerto Rico American because the inhabitants want it that way.
Contempt for Great Power imperialism is fine; but the Falkland Islands are not such a case.
montanareddog
@DougJ, Head of Infidelity:
You’re mixing ’em up with the French, mate!
montanareddog
@DougJ, Head of Infidelity:
Perhaps, I am taking this too seriously but any form of glib bigotry irritates me. Aren’t we supposed to decry perennial victimhood?:
the British did nasty things in Ireland, so let’s hate modern-day Brits
American colonists did nasty things to native Americans, so let’s hate Americans
the Germans, what can I say, let’s hate Germans
The Belgians in the Congo, let’s hate Belgians
The Rape of Nanking, let’s hate Japanese
The US. 100K dead in Iraq, let’s hate Americans
Genghis Khan and piles of skulls, let’s hate Mongolians
The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold – if it wasn’t for the Angel of Death, we’d be hating us some Assyrians too
ad infinitum…