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It's a fairly stereotypical British trait to be self deprecating. If we were singlehandedly saving the world from a rogue asteroid the general sentiment would p
by VBprogrammer 6y ago
It's a fairly stereotypical British trait to be self deprecating. If we were singlehandedly saving the world from a rogue asteroid the general sentiment would probably be "let's hope we don't mess this up".
- hermitcrab 6y agoSadly, they are being realistic. The current UK government is riven with incompetence and cronyism. They couldn't organize a piss up a brewery.
- brigandish 6y agoGovernment is a continuum, and I don’t remember a time that it wasn’t riven with cronyism. A book came out in 2005 called The Essential Guide to Quangos and I’m willing to bet it wasn’t Blair’s government that invented them (and it certainly didn’t put a stop to them).
- thu2111 6y agoThe quango is the worst of all worlds, so it's not surprising that the concept was invented by governments. I haven't seen the word used outside the UK so a definition might be useful: a quango, or quasi non-governmental organisation is the platypus of the British government world. As the name implies it's neither a part of the government nor the private sector. Instead, quangos are paid for by taxpayers but are completely unaccountable to them, as they can't be directly controlled by ministers or the civil service. The theory behind this is that governments are crap at things because elected politicians interfere with the expert work of technocrats. So by setting up artificial blockades to political interference, power is transferred to technocrats and things should work better. In practice what happens is that the government ends up hiring people who aren't very good at what they claim to be expert in, and who get corrupted by whatever unaccountable powers have been delegated to them. But they aren't easily fixable because they're "independent". The Electoral Commission is a good example of a completely broken quango. Its only goal in life is to organise elections and referendums in ways that everyone agrees is completely fair and trustworthy. It is a staggering failure: the board of directors is full of people who publicly state very strong political opinions. It engaged in a legal vendetta against people who campaigned for Brexit. It has constantly prosecuted pro-Leave campaigners and got its ass kicked in court, where judges have repeatedly dismissed cases on the grounds that they have no evidence and/or are engaged in malicious legal behaviour. They've referred cases to the police that were then dropped for lack of evidence. Senior staff have posted on Facebook that they cried when the Tories won the election. Nobody who has followed these sagas can possibly believe these people are neutral, independent or even possess basic competence, but as they're a "quango" there isn't much of a framework to fix it beyond changing the law to totally abolish them. tl;dr quango = power without accountability.
- hermitcrab 6y agoNo government has ever or will be completely uncorrupt or efficient. Thatcher bent various rules for her shady son. Labour arranged all those dodgy PPI deals. Humans will be human. But in my 54 years on this planet and living in the UK I don't remember a government being anything like this corrupt or inefficient. Everyone politician with a brain, spine or conscience was fired and replaced by Brexit 'loyalists'. And here we are. One of the worst responses to the pandemic in the world and I don't know if I will even be able to get fresh veg in January. So much for British exceptionalism.
- brigandish 6y agoI live in Japan and the response by the government here was and is in sharp contrast to that in the UK (a super soft lockdown that ended before the summer is one example), yet it has been akin to comedy show from the beginning, before it hit the UK. Still, there has not been the same hit from the disease, which only underlines that the differences in effect that are seen worldwide are about differences in population and geography - being overweight, having a very low friction of movement (e.g. excellent transport links, many borders), and not being low in vitamin D etc - far more than they are about government response. I'm not saying the UK government has done well but it's striking to me that, from a distance, the criticisms of the UK and US I see coming from my friends are very similar, very parochial, and seem driven by media headlines rather than anything objectively sound. In short, I'd give it another few years before you judge them more harshly than the government that brought us the Iraq war, for one.
- ChrisRR 6y agoBut they could organise awarding the funds to one of their friends who pinky promises they know how to organise a piss up
- VBprogrammer 6y agoFor what it's worth, I completely agree. Still, I don't think those things are mutually exclusive though.
- BjoernKW 6y agoThere's the government and there's the people who run things, i.e. the Civil Service in this case. While governments change and might or might not be incompetent, those structures largely remain the same.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoWhile I appreciate your point I think the current UK government have done more than average to "shake up" the civil service. Others might describe these changes in less charitable terms.
- dafoex 6y agoOpinion, not necessarily fact, but my understanding of the "piss up in a brewery" outlook comes from Parliament, not the government. The structure of Parliament is that the opposition has to challenge everything the government in power says and does in order to keep them in check, even when the opposition has exactly the same views on the policy being discussed; this leads to arguing for the sake of arguing even when common sense would say "this is entirely agreeable to practically everyone". I'm not saying that the government shouldn't be kept in check, but the fact that the UK government appears to move with all the speed of a striking slug appears to be the fault of the system they are required to follow, not the government itself.
- samdamsamma 6y agoActually the UK government is an absolute wreck.
- kmlx 6y agoit really depends. they're pushing for more cycling, more climate measures, more taxes on IT giants etc and these are Conservatives, the opposite of left-leaning. on the other hand, their Covid response was the same as Spain, Italy, France etc i.e. pretty bad. but they also approved the vaccine really quick, and we're getting that next week. so overall, a meh, like most other countries where I lived. as a point of reference, from the countries I lived in, I consider Singapore and Tokyo to be a notch above the rest of the world when it comes to governance. but most government of the countries i've lived in were the same as the UKs: they only react, they're politicians, they're detached from the real world etc etc
- swarnie_ 6y agoLots of people in the UK (UK internet) are still not over the loss of Papa Corbyn, everything is dark and corrupted to them.
- kmlx 6y ago> It's a fairly stereotypical British trait to be self deprecating. If we were singlehandedly saving the world from a rogue asteroid the general sentiment would probably be "let's hope we don't mess this up". was this always so? i've noticed this while living in London and, coming from a literal 3rd world country, I do not understand it. i'm trying to find when this started... i don't it started anytime in the recent past. seems to have been going on for a while.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoIt's an interesting question. I'm sure you could probably do a study and find that on average British people are no more self-deprecating than the average; and yet it does appear as one of those commonly accepted parts of the British psyche.
- blibble 6y agoOrwell noticed it 75 years ago: > England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box. though since the 2016 vote the visible self-loathing on the internet has vastly increased it's utterly relentless and I personally find it extremely boring that any articles with any positive mention of the UK (no matter how slight) are always swamped with the same self-loathing commenters
- Ichthypresbyter 6y ago"England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box." -The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, George Orwell, 1941.
- adrian_b 6y agoI do not believe that it is a stereotypical British trait to be self deprecating. Being self deprecating is very common in a large number of countries, among all those who are reasonably intelligent or educated, to be able to notice how many bad things exist around them. As others have already mentioned, this is caused by the fact that people can see directly the many bad things that exist in their neighborhood, but they have very little information about how things are bad elsewhere, and they hope that at least in other distant places the same mistakes are not being made.
- bambataa 6y agoIt’s a very English trait to think of itself as a self-deprecating, gentle and peace-loving nation while also being inordinately proud of the Empire and its conquests.
- thrwyoilarticle 6y agoSometimes it's a kind of fake modesty.
- arc0 6y agoI've noticed a shift in the last decade or so from self deprecating to self loathing. People seem loath to admit that we are one of the richest, most privileged, most developed countries in the world.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoI think a large part of that is because it doesn't tally with how the vast majority of people in the UK experience life.