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I know this topic is important in substance and the thing I'm about to say is an aesthetic issue, but as an American watching this unfold I have admired the Bri

I know this topic is important in substance and the thing I'm about to say is an aesthetic issue, but as an American watching this unfold I have admired the Brits for the sense of heart that still seems to be present in their politics. I'm referring to the parliamentary sessions in which, even though they're savagely roasting each other, they're doing in a way that feels somehow good-hearted and doesn't lay bare the naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA. Also, less amusing but still inspiring, has been articulate criticism from politicians and pundits who seem to actually care about the thing they're talking about; on this side of the Atlantic, it's easy to get the sense that anyone in front of a camera has a pile of talking points on a set of index cards in their lap that they pull out to memorize during commercial breaks. Charles Walker, giving an impromptu interview, seems to care about a thing: https://youtu.be/Dimw572twfk https://youtu.be/Dimw572twfk Parliament roasts Truss: https://youtu.be/Zc_9Ty_-PrQ https://youtu.be/Zc_9Ty_-PrQ

Jgrubb 4y ago
Fellow American, asking earnestly - are both examples just products of the media environment of their respective countries? Does the UK still have popular media outlets that aren't solely pushing corporate agendas?
- fragmede 4y ago
  Depends how cynical you want to be about the BBC, I suppose. The fact that the "C" in BBC stands for corporation is not lost on me, however.
  - darrenf 4y ago
    The BBC is a statutory corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_corporation#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_corporation#United_K... It typically has no shareholders and its powers are defined by the Act of Parliament which creates it, and may be modified by later legislation. [...] The phrase is not used to describe a company which operates as a conventional shareholder-owned company registered under the Companies Acts.
- wyldfire 4y ago
  I wonder if district gerrymandering plays a role in the US. When your districts become packed to the extent that it's safely owned by one party, the only risk to an elected official's seat is a primary from a more extreme candidate. So instead of finding compromise to maximize your general appeal, you would be motivated to embrace extreme ideas and promote those on TV/social media. More elected officials doing this gives license to everyone to embrace the extremes, even if they're not very popular.
- rayiner 4y ago
  I think after seeing that all this got worse after Win Red/Act Blue donations displaced corporate support, trying to blame “corporate agendas” for polarization is willful blindness.
- ben_w 4y ago
  I think the BBC still counts, though I left the country in 2018 and most of my subsequent experience of the BBC has been the satirical news quizzes "Have I Got News For You", "Mock The Week" (TV), and "The News Quiz" (radio/podcast).
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    The BBC, at least in the last few years, has definitely been, if not taken over, strongly guided by the Tories (because they hold the purse strings, control over appointments, etc. and are vocal about this whenever the BBC annoy them.)
    - gadders 4y ago
      You must be watching a different BBC. How many right wing comedians get on to panel shows? The BBC is the visual arm of the Guardian at this point.
      - zimpenfish 4y ago
        > How many right wing comedians get on to panel shows? I'd counter that with how many right wing comedians could be funny on general-public-friendly panel shows absent the usual "my pronouns are ..." / "I identify as ..." jokes?
- pjc50 4y ago
  The UK doesn't quite have the same level of TV polarization. We can argue exactly how right-wing the BBC is, but the crucial thing is that most people are watching the same news. There isn't really a UK Fox daily hate channel. GBNews was explicitly trying to be that, and has completely died in the ratings. The UK press is pretty far right and a major element of how we got to this mess, though.
HelloNurse 4y ago
> a way that feels somehow good-hearted and doesn't lay bare the naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA. Do you think it is real hatred or kayfabe?
- fragmede 4y ago
  Circa 2014, George Mitchell (D-Maine), Bob Dole (R-Kan.), Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) were known to be IRL friends. But that was back then. These days I think the hatred is more real than not.
  - shanusmagnus 4y ago
    I think part of it is that we're in the political equivalent of "total war" -- if a politician were seen as being friendly with political opponents they would probably be destroyed in primaries by party rivals using it as red meat for how they were "soft" or an "x in name only" or some similar idiocy.
    - Macha 4y ago
      See for example the criticism of Ellen's friendship with George W Bush. Though interestingly the Obamas and Clintons don't get the same criticism for that, apart from occasionally being held up to suggest the centre left wing of the democrats isn't that different from the old bush-era republicans
      - lostlogin 4y ago
        Criticism of everything Obama related is next level compared to anything those others have had to deal with. I’m not in the US and all of the names you listed have politics I disagree with.
  - themgt 4y ago
    As a counterpoint, a recently released via FOIA transcript of Obama to reporters in the last days of his presidency: Obama: Privately, that's not -- [Trump's] interactions with me are very different than they are with the public, or, for that matter, interactions with Barack Obama, the distant figure. He's very polite to me, and has not stopped being so. I think where he sees a vulnerability he goes after it and he takes advantage of it. A fair amount of it is still kayfabe to the pros (the problem is, it isn't to the public). https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rb6X.vIarX3o/v0 https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://assets.b...
cjrp 4y ago
Parliamentary conduct is fairly strictly policed. That said, you can still jeer and yell in a way which would be unacceptable in 99% of professional workplaces.
- frereubu 4y ago
  I think the fact that yelling and jeering is allowed actually helps somehow. It's like it releases some of the pressure rather than people bottling it up and exploding.
chrisseaton 4y ago
> they're doing in a way that feels somehow good-hearted and doesn't lay bare the naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA It's nice that it looks this way, but the different parties and their supporters in the UK absolutely hate each other. Front-bench party members now routinely and openly using words like 'scum' and 'detest' to talk about their colleagues on the other side. I don't think US politics is quite that openly aggressive and hostile. In the past few years we've had politicians on both sides killed in politically motivated attacks. I think that's a worse tally than the US as well.
- FridayoLeary 4y ago
  A lot of it is theatre. For example keir starmer congratulating boris on the birth of his child, i think, and sounding sincere. Then pretty much in the same breath, he lashes out at him on some policy or scandal. English people banter a lot more then americans, so its not taken personally.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - iamacyborg 4y ago
    I mean, given you example I think Keir congratulating Boris was the actual piece of theatre.
    - deleted 4y ago
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    - lostlogin 4y ago
      It came across well, but should do as opportunities to congratulate Boris do come up regularly.
      - iamacyborg 4y ago
        He is a top shagger.
frereubu 4y ago
I don't think you should caveat that by saying it's "just aesthetic". It's at the heart of politics - how you say something carries a great deal of meaning, not just the words themselves. Witness the difficulty of good written communication. Unfortunately the tone in the UK is worse than it was, lead by a good dose of unhinged rubbish on social media: https://twitter.com/flashboy/status/1582784766222684160 https://twitter.com/flashboy/status/1582784766222684160
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  It's not just social media, remember when the Daily Mail was complaining about an "openly gay, ex-olympic fencer" being allowed to rule on a Brexit case (as if being gay, openly or not, or an ex-olympic athlete has ever stopped people from being a) competent and fair judges or b) right-wing nutters) https://twitter.com/TheMediaTweets/status/794155820313235458 https://twitter.com/TheMediaTweets/status/794155820313235458
rayiner 4y ago
What’s incredible to me is how honestly they talk about the facts on the ground. Truss admitted that the tax cuts were a bad idea in an inflationary environment and taxes would go up. American politicians would have lied and said “taxes will go up to curb inflation but they’ll go down also and you won’t pay more in taxes.”
- bearmode 4y ago
  They lie out of their arses. She also tried claiming that revoking a law limiting the bonuses that bankers could get (which was instated after the '08 crash...) would help poor people.
chx 4y ago
> hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA. UK and USA, they make a very interesting pair https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-world-country-db9829323a9a https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-wo... > Both nations, too, now, are nasty places. They feel so markedly different than the great social democracies of Western Europe and Canada. The atmosphere and mood are ones of constant, omnipresent hostility — to everyone, from everyone
- reducesuffering 4y ago
  That’s a lot of poetic words to poorly explain why 4x as many Canadians choose to immigrate to the US than US to Canada…
  - chx 4y ago
    There was this song a few years ago... https://youtu.be/9yv_rl3MYKA https://youtu.be/9yv_rl3MYKA > everything is fine if you are a straight white male muggle
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
One of my favorite C-Span shows was The Prime Minister's Questions[0]. Don't mess with British politicians. Even the grumpiest old dogs can savage most American politicians, as the folks that tried roasting Galloway found out[1]. [0] https://www.c-span.org/series/?PrimeMinisterQue https://www.c-span.org/series/?PrimeMinisterQue [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5u1skEoqLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5u1skEoqLs
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  This always seemed to me like pure theater. Have there ever been any serious consequences to anything anyone ever said during the Prime Minister's Questions? Or are they (like every other politician the world over) just putting on a good show for the folks back home?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I suspect the latter. They are also putting on a show for each other. Most of the stuff that actually happens, does so, in the shadows (for good or ill).
  - dboreham 4y ago
    The beginning of WW2 comes to mind (see the 2017 movie : Churchill)
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    The serious consequences are that if you do especially badly like Truss did yesterday the voters get pissed and you have to resign.
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      She resigned because of what she said at Questions?
      - m0llusk 4y ago
halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
I’m sorry if this is really how you feel about US politics but there is still healthy debate to be had (and that people are having) regardless of those who are “shouting the loudest”. The media veneer around US politics is just that. If anything, it’s helped unearth (some would say legitimize) things that have always been here. I’d rather it be like it is than festering under the surface. There’s a lot of people “saying the quiet thing out loud” on both sides that needs to be fully processed by the American people, no matter how polarizing.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
>even though they're savagely roasting each other, they're doing in a way that feels somehow good-hearted and doesn't lay bare the naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA. The difference is they all went to the same schools together. Makes close to zero difference who runs the country, because once you’ve lived under both sides it’s the same thing.
- scott_w 4y ago
  That's not even remotely true. The Leader of the Opposition (Keir Starmer) went to Reigate, then to Leeds University. Gordon Brown went to Edinburgh University, Jeremy Corbyn went to North London Poly. Only Ed Milliband and Tony Blair went to Oxford, which is where (of the Conservative Party): David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Liz Truss went. Saying "living under both sides is the same thing" is also observably false, as anyone raised under the Labour governments of 1997 to 2010 can attest and compare to the Conservative governments since.
  - smcl 4y ago
    So all the names of PMs you mentioned bar one went to Oxford...
    - scott_w 4y ago
      Considering the LAST FOUR PMs came from the Conservative party, that's not the epic own you think it is.
      - smcl 4y ago
        I wasn't trying to do an "epic own" and it sounds like you're implying I'm a Tory which is very funny :) edit: oh lol I get it now, in the post I replied to you're doing a very literal interpretation of "they all went to the same schools" and refusing to interpret this as it's very clearly intended (that a huge amount of MPs went to a couple of schools)
    - 4y ago
ergonaught 4y ago
I used to be utterly aghast at UK parliamentary behavior (as seen on CSpan or CNN I suppose), and thankful that the USA did not behave this way. So I guess that dates me, because we are a toxic and shaming embarrassment now, even in comparison. Pity.
ubermonkey 4y ago
I have spent very little time (maybe a couple months in my whole life) in the UK, but when I go it definitely feels to me like Britons feel a much keener sense of the Commons there than we do here in the US. It's not just you. It's how what you do affects other people. This is a better way to live than the "I got mine, fuck you" which seems more common in the US.
- bearmode 4y ago
  >This is a better way to live than the "I got mine, fuck you" which seems more common in the US. This is also exceptionally common in the UK. There's a reason the Brexit vote passed, and there's a reason people voted so strongly for right-wing parties over the last 12 years.
cameronh90 4y ago
For all parliament's faults, it's still largely populated by well educated, intelligent individuals who are skilled orators and debaters. Even some of the most awful parliamentarians would easily talk circles around me in any kind of debate. For anyone not aware, a large number of our politicians come from a background at public schools such as Eton, and read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Institutions such as these place great significance on rhetoric and adversarial debate as a method of reaching consensus. Stephen Fry's address to Oxford is worth watching, where he discusses Oscar Wilde's quote about the Oxford manner being the ability to play gracefully with ideas. One huge downside of this system is that our politicians are widely considered out of touch and unrepresentative. The role of public schools and Oxford PPE degrees in our political system is an area of active debate within society right now. If you are ever interested in contemporary British politics, the podcast "The Rest Is Politics" is a great place to start.
- T-zex 4y ago
  Did you mean private schools? Public school education in the UK is quite problematic.
  - brd529 4y ago
    In England “public schools” are what they call elite privately run schools. Edit: interesting history on why: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdo... the schools “were "public" in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession.”
  - smcl 4y ago
    No "Public Schools" in the UK refers to a very specific subset of fee-paying schools mentioned in the Public Schools Act of 1868 (sometimes informally includes a couple of others). Private Schools are the other fee-paying schools. What a non-Brit might think of as "public" schools are actually called "state" schools in the UK
    - 4y ago
bena 4y ago
The population of the UK is about 67 million. The House of Commons is the major legislative body and it is comprised of 650 members. That's roughly 1 member per 100,000 people. You know your member. Parliament is dissolved every 5 years. So elections are pretty regular, but not overwhelming. There's a House of Lords, but they seem to have far less power. The work of Parliament gets done in the Commons. The main legislative body of the US is Congress, comprising of the Senate and the House of Representatives. There are 100 Senators and 435 Representatives. The US has roughly 330 million people. So about 5 times the population being represented by more than 100 fewer people. Senators are a little weird. They serve for 6 years but about a third of them are up for election every two years. And never two from the same state. So a Senator is either on Cycle 1, Cycle 2, or Cycle 3. So every 2 to 4 years, a state gets to choose one person to represent the entire state in one of the houses of Congress. Then for Representatives, all of them are up for reelection every two years. As soon as they are sworn in, they're already thinking about reelection. And the number of representatives are set by the Census taken every 10 years. Right now, California has 53 representatives for 39 million people. About half the population of the UK, but being represented by under a tenth. So in the US, politicians are more akin to personalities than actual people. We essentially elect brands, not people.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  > Senators are a little weird. The whole system is weird. Why is a vote in one state more powerful than a vote in another?
  - bena 4y ago
    I personally have become a fan of the Wyoming Rule for the House. That seems fair without getting into crazy sizes. I mean, if the US had representation in the same proportion as the UK, they'd have roughly 3300 representatives. The town I grew up currently has a population of 1500. So I can see why we wouldn't do that.
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      That’s not the problem though. Having an elected member represent a larger number of people is fine. However having a rural candidate represent less voters than an urban candidate is terrible. Wherever you vote it should be worth the same. The system hasn’t kept pace with demographic changes. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/31/u-s-population-keeps-growing-but-house-of-representatives-is-same-size-as-in-taft-era/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/31/u-s-populat...
permo-w 4y ago
Charles Walker isn’t standing in the next election
gsatic 4y ago
Ya right. This is called hysterical realism.
PaulHoule 4y ago
My impression is that British politics are more resentful, but that you don't see it the way you do in the US because the structure of the system is different. In Britain the PM is chosen by the party in power so you don't get the divided government situations you see in the US where usually the Democrats control some of (1) the Presidency, (2) the Senate, (3) the House of Representatives and the Republicans control others. Considering the veto power of the President and the filibuster rule in the Senate that can be a formula for gridlock. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both represented a move to the right but when Thatcher was in power she had no effective opposition while any legislation that passed in the 1980s was a compromise between Reagan in the US and Tip O'Neill and I think between having a good conservative and a good liberal, we got a lot of good legislation in the 1980s (we got a new Clean Air Act in that time frame, for instance.) As a result there was a lot of resentment towards Thatcher from Labor advocates who felt completely shut out, so some sang "Ding Dong the Wicked Witch is Dead" when Thatcher died https://theconversation.com/burying-thatcher-why-celebrating-death-is-still-wrong-13499 https://theconversation.com/burying-thatcher-why-celebrating...
- lostlogin 4y ago
  > In Britain the PM is chosen by the party in power so you don't get the divided government situations The UK government has been in utter turmoil for a long time now and it’s at its worst right now. This resignation marks a new low in self destructive politics and posturing. I know you are referring to a different type of political impasse, but the chaos that is present in the UK is not a lot better than what the US system seems to see so regularly.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    It's a different kind of turmoil than we have in the US. I subscribe to The Economist which would like to support the Tories but has had nothing but contempt for Teresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Some people say that the Democrats in the US are like the losers in professional wrestling but the complete incompetence and inability of Labor to get elected makes it possible for conservatives to get elected by pandering to a particular segment of the population. Voters have no interest in talk about redistribution if they think they think the people who talk about redistribution push policies that will leave people with nothing to redistribute. Jeremy Corbin did nothing to push back on the perception that he wanted to turn the UK into Cuba, and by not providing a viable alternative the Tories became useless. Corbin hoped that the fall of the Tories would lead to the rise of Labor but oddly it doesn't work that way.
HillRat 4y ago
Look past the veneer and you'll see plenty of ugliness in UK politics -- just a few days ago the (now former) Home Secretary was snarling about her plans to fit up "Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati" with ankle monitors and house arrests. Backsliding into invective, authoritarianism, and radicalism seems to be a commonality across Western democracies these days.
cee_el123 4y ago
Could it have anything to do with the fact that the UK is a much older democracy ? ( the first English parliament was called in 1295 )
- kibwen 4y ago
  Parliament itself is that old, but it's possible to argue that the UK didn't qualify as a democracy until the Reform Acts of the 1800s (and possible to argue against it too, of course).
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    Is a country a democracy if people are blocked from voting because they are female? Obviously democracy is a sliding scale, but what was in place in the 1800s had a lot of headroom.
rootusrootus 4y ago
> naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA The question I have is which came first, in the US? Regular citizens in the US harbor the same naked resentment and hatred for their fellow Americans based solely on political affiliation. We used to hide it better, especially around family, but that barrier has mostly been broken down too. Did our politicians turn us this way? Or did we just elect politicians that say the things we want to say? Did the news media whip up this resentment with biased stories, or did we voluntarily filter bubble our way into incentivizing that behavior?
anm89 4y ago
How do you watch that video and think it's a sign that things are going well? That's idiocracy level of discourse. My take away from that video is that the UK had much more serious problems than I realized.

Jgrubb 4y ago

Fellow American, asking earnestly - are both examples just products of the media environment of their respective countries? Does the UK still have popular media outlets that aren't solely pushing corporate agendas?

fragmede 4y ago
Depends how cynical you want to be about the BBC, I suppose. The fact that the "C" in BBC stands for corporation is not lost on me, however.
- darrenf 4y ago
  The BBC is a statutory corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_corporation#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_corporation#United_K... It typically has no shareholders and its powers are defined by the Act of Parliament which creates it, and may be modified by later legislation. [...] The phrase is not used to describe a company which operates as a conventional shareholder-owned company registered under the Companies Acts.
wyldfire 4y ago
I wonder if district gerrymandering plays a role in the US. When your districts become packed to the extent that it's safely owned by one party, the only risk to an elected official's seat is a primary from a more extreme candidate. So instead of finding compromise to maximize your general appeal, you would be motivated to embrace extreme ideas and promote those on TV/social media. More elected officials doing this gives license to everyone to embrace the extremes, even if they're not very popular.
rayiner 4y ago
I think after seeing that all this got worse after Win Red/Act Blue donations displaced corporate support, trying to blame “corporate agendas” for polarization is willful blindness.
ben_w 4y ago
I think the BBC still counts, though I left the country in 2018 and most of my subsequent experience of the BBC has been the satirical news quizzes "Have I Got News For You", "Mock The Week" (TV), and "The News Quiz" (radio/podcast).
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  The BBC, at least in the last few years, has definitely been, if not taken over, strongly guided by the Tories (because they hold the purse strings, control over appointments, etc. and are vocal about this whenever the BBC annoy them.)
  - gadders 4y ago
    You must be watching a different BBC. How many right wing comedians get on to panel shows? The BBC is the visual arm of the Guardian at this point.
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      > How many right wing comedians get on to panel shows? I'd counter that with how many right wing comedians could be funny on general-public-friendly panel shows absent the usual "my pronouns are ..." / "I identify as ..." jokes?
pjc50 4y ago
The UK doesn't quite have the same level of TV polarization. We can argue exactly how right-wing the BBC is, but the crucial thing is that most people are watching the same news. There isn't really a UK Fox daily hate channel. GBNews was explicitly trying to be that, and has completely died in the ratings. The UK press is pretty far right and a major element of how we got to this mess, though.

HelloNurse 4y ago

> a way that feels somehow good-hearted and doesn't lay bare the naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA. Do you think it is real hatred or kayfabe?

fragmede 4y ago
Circa 2014, George Mitchell (D-Maine), Bob Dole (R-Kan.), Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) were known to be IRL friends. But that was back then. These days I think the hatred is more real than not.
- shanusmagnus 4y ago
  I think part of it is that we're in the political equivalent of "total war" -- if a politician were seen as being friendly with political opponents they would probably be destroyed in primaries by party rivals using it as red meat for how they were "soft" or an "x in name only" or some similar idiocy.
  - Macha 4y ago
    See for example the criticism of Ellen's friendship with George W Bush. Though interestingly the Obamas and Clintons don't get the same criticism for that, apart from occasionally being held up to suggest the centre left wing of the democrats isn't that different from the old bush-era republicans
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      Criticism of everything Obama related is next level compared to anything those others have had to deal with. I’m not in the US and all of the names you listed have politics I disagree with.
- themgt 4y ago
  As a counterpoint, a recently released via FOIA transcript of Obama to reporters in the last days of his presidency: Obama: Privately, that's not -- [Trump's] interactions with me are very different than they are with the public, or, for that matter, interactions with Barack Obama, the distant figure. He's very polite to me, and has not stopped being so. I think where he sees a vulnerability he goes after it and he takes advantage of it. A fair amount of it is still kayfabe to the pros (the problem is, it isn't to the public). https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/rb6X.vIarX3o/v0 https://docs.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://assets.b...

cjrp 4y ago

Parliamentary conduct is fairly strictly policed. That said, you can still jeer and yell in a way which would be unacceptable in 99% of professional workplaces.

frereubu 4y ago
I think the fact that yelling and jeering is allowed actually helps somehow. It's like it releases some of the pressure rather than people bottling it up and exploding.

chrisseaton 4y ago

> they're doing in a way that feels somehow good-hearted and doesn't lay bare the naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA It's nice that it looks this way, but the different parties and their supporters in the UK absolutely hate each other. Front-bench party members now routinely and openly using words like 'scum' and 'detest' to talk about their colleagues on the other side. I don't think US politics is quite that openly aggressive and hostile. In the past few years we've had politicians on both sides killed in politically motivated attacks. I think that's a worse tally than the US as well.

FridayoLeary 4y ago
A lot of it is theatre. For example keir starmer congratulating boris on the birth of his child, i think, and sounding sincere. Then pretty much in the same breath, he lashes out at him on some policy or scandal. English people banter a lot more then americans, so its not taken personally.
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- iamacyborg 4y ago
  I mean, given you example I think Keir congratulating Boris was the actual piece of theatre.
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  - lostlogin 4y ago
    It came across well, but should do as opportunities to congratulate Boris do come up regularly.
    - iamacyborg 4y ago
      He is a top shagger.

frereubu 4y ago

I don't think you should caveat that by saying it's "just aesthetic". It's at the heart of politics - how you say something carries a great deal of meaning, not just the words themselves. Witness the difficulty of good written communication. Unfortunately the tone in the UK is worse than it was, lead by a good dose of unhinged rubbish on social media: https://twitter.com/flashboy/status/1582784766222684160 https://twitter.com/flashboy/status/1582784766222684160

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
It's not just social media, remember when the Daily Mail was complaining about an "openly gay, ex-olympic fencer" being allowed to rule on a Brexit case (as if being gay, openly or not, or an ex-olympic athlete has ever stopped people from being a) competent and fair judges or b) right-wing nutters) https://twitter.com/TheMediaTweets/status/794155820313235458 https://twitter.com/TheMediaTweets/status/794155820313235458

rayiner 4y ago

What’s incredible to me is how honestly they talk about the facts on the ground. Truss admitted that the tax cuts were a bad idea in an inflationary environment and taxes would go up. American politicians would have lied and said “taxes will go up to curb inflation but they’ll go down also and you won’t pay more in taxes.”

bearmode 4y ago
They lie out of their arses. She also tried claiming that revoking a law limiting the bonuses that bankers could get (which was instated after the '08 crash...) would help poor people.

chx 4y ago

> hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA. UK and USA, they make a very interesting pair https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-world-country-db9829323a9a https://eand.co/how-america-collapsed-and-became-a-fourth-wo... > Both nations, too, now, are nasty places. They feel so markedly different than the great social democracies of Western Europe and Canada. The atmosphere and mood are ones of constant, omnipresent hostility — to everyone, from everyone

reducesuffering 4y ago
That’s a lot of poetic words to poorly explain why 4x as many Canadians choose to immigrate to the US than US to Canada…
- chx 4y ago
  There was this song a few years ago... https://youtu.be/9yv_rl3MYKA https://youtu.be/9yv_rl3MYKA > everything is fine if you are a straight white male muggle

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

One of my favorite C-Span shows was The Prime Minister's Questions[0]. Don't mess with British politicians. Even the grumpiest old dogs can savage most American politicians, as the folks that tried roasting Galloway found out[1]. [0] https://www.c-span.org/series/?PrimeMinisterQue https://www.c-span.org/series/?PrimeMinisterQue [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5u1skEoqLs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5u1skEoqLs

pmoriarty 4y ago
This always seemed to me like pure theater. Have there ever been any serious consequences to anything anyone ever said during the Prime Minister's Questions? Or are they (like every other politician the world over) just putting on a good show for the folks back home?
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I suspect the latter. They are also putting on a show for each other. Most of the stuff that actually happens, does so, in the shadows (for good or ill).
- dboreham 4y ago
  The beginning of WW2 comes to mind (see the 2017 movie : Churchill)
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  The serious consequences are that if you do especially badly like Truss did yesterday the voters get pissed and you have to resign.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    She resigned because of what she said at Questions?
    - m0llusk 4y ago

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago

I’m sorry if this is really how you feel about US politics but there is still healthy debate to be had (and that people are having) regardless of those who are “shouting the loudest”. The media veneer around US politics is just that. If anything, it’s helped unearth (some would say legitimize) things that have always been here. I’d rather it be like it is than festering under the surface. There’s a lot of people “saying the quiet thing out loud” on both sides that needs to be fully processed by the American people, no matter how polarizing.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

>even though they're savagely roasting each other, they're doing in a way that feels somehow good-hearted and doesn't lay bare the naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA. The difference is they all went to the same schools together. Makes close to zero difference who runs the country, because once you’ve lived under both sides it’s the same thing.

scott_w 4y ago
That's not even remotely true. The Leader of the Opposition (Keir Starmer) went to Reigate, then to Leeds University. Gordon Brown went to Edinburgh University, Jeremy Corbyn went to North London Poly. Only Ed Milliband and Tony Blair went to Oxford, which is where (of the Conservative Party): David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and Liz Truss went. Saying "living under both sides is the same thing" is also observably false, as anyone raised under the Labour governments of 1997 to 2010 can attest and compare to the Conservative governments since.
- smcl 4y ago
  So all the names of PMs you mentioned bar one went to Oxford...
  - scott_w 4y ago
    Considering the LAST FOUR PMs came from the Conservative party, that's not the epic own you think it is.
    - smcl 4y ago
      I wasn't trying to do an "epic own" and it sounds like you're implying I'm a Tory which is very funny :) edit: oh lol I get it now, in the post I replied to you're doing a very literal interpretation of "they all went to the same schools" and refusing to interpret this as it's very clearly intended (that a huge amount of MPs went to a couple of schools)
  - 4y ago

ergonaught 4y ago

I used to be utterly aghast at UK parliamentary behavior (as seen on CSpan or CNN I suppose), and thankful that the USA did not behave this way. So I guess that dates me, because we are a toxic and shaming embarrassment now, even in comparison. Pity.

ubermonkey 4y ago

I have spent very little time (maybe a couple months in my whole life) in the UK, but when I go it definitely feels to me like Britons feel a much keener sense of the Commons there than we do here in the US. It's not just you. It's how what you do affects other people. This is a better way to live than the "I got mine, fuck you" which seems more common in the US.

bearmode 4y ago
>This is a better way to live than the "I got mine, fuck you" which seems more common in the US. This is also exceptionally common in the UK. There's a reason the Brexit vote passed, and there's a reason people voted so strongly for right-wing parties over the last 12 years.

cameronh90 4y ago

For all parliament's faults, it's still largely populated by well educated, intelligent individuals who are skilled orators and debaters. Even some of the most awful parliamentarians would easily talk circles around me in any kind of debate. For anyone not aware, a large number of our politicians come from a background at public schools such as Eton, and read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Institutions such as these place great significance on rhetoric and adversarial debate as a method of reaching consensus. Stephen Fry's address to Oxford is worth watching, where he discusses Oscar Wilde's quote about the Oxford manner being the ability to play gracefully with ideas. One huge downside of this system is that our politicians are widely considered out of touch and unrepresentative. The role of public schools and Oxford PPE degrees in our political system is an area of active debate within society right now. If you are ever interested in contemporary British politics, the podcast "The Rest Is Politics" is a great place to start.

T-zex 4y ago
Did you mean private schools? Public school education in the UK is quite problematic.
- brd529 4y ago
  In England “public schools” are what they call elite privately run schools. Edit: interesting history on why: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdo... the schools “were "public" in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession.”
- smcl 4y ago
  No "Public Schools" in the UK refers to a very specific subset of fee-paying schools mentioned in the Public Schools Act of 1868 (sometimes informally includes a couple of others). Private Schools are the other fee-paying schools. What a non-Brit might think of as "public" schools are actually called "state" schools in the UK
  - 4y ago

bena 4y ago

The population of the UK is about 67 million. The House of Commons is the major legislative body and it is comprised of 650 members. That's roughly 1 member per 100,000 people. You know your member. Parliament is dissolved every 5 years. So elections are pretty regular, but not overwhelming. There's a House of Lords, but they seem to have far less power. The work of Parliament gets done in the Commons. The main legislative body of the US is Congress, comprising of the Senate and the House of Representatives. There are 100 Senators and 435 Representatives. The US has roughly 330 million people. So about 5 times the population being represented by more than 100 fewer people. Senators are a little weird. They serve for 6 years but about a third of them are up for election every two years. And never two from the same state. So a Senator is either on Cycle 1, Cycle 2, or Cycle 3. So every 2 to 4 years, a state gets to choose one person to represent the entire state in one of the houses of Congress. Then for Representatives, all of them are up for reelection every two years. As soon as they are sworn in, they're already thinking about reelection. And the number of representatives are set by the Census taken every 10 years. Right now, California has 53 representatives for 39 million people. About half the population of the UK, but being represented by under a tenth. So in the US, politicians are more akin to personalities than actual people. We essentially elect brands, not people.

lostlogin 4y ago
> Senators are a little weird. The whole system is weird. Why is a vote in one state more powerful than a vote in another?
- bena 4y ago
  I personally have become a fan of the Wyoming Rule for the House. That seems fair without getting into crazy sizes. I mean, if the US had representation in the same proportion as the UK, they'd have roughly 3300 representatives. The town I grew up currently has a population of 1500. So I can see why we wouldn't do that.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    That’s not the problem though. Having an elected member represent a larger number of people is fine. However having a rural candidate represent less voters than an urban candidate is terrible. Wherever you vote it should be worth the same. The system hasn’t kept pace with demographic changes. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/31/u-s-population-keeps-growing-but-house-of-representatives-is-same-size-as-in-taft-era/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/31/u-s-populat...

permo-w 4y ago

Charles Walker isn’t standing in the next election

gsatic 4y ago

Ya right. This is called hysterical realism.

PaulHoule 4y ago

My impression is that British politics are more resentful, but that you don't see it the way you do in the US because the structure of the system is different. In Britain the PM is chosen by the party in power so you don't get the divided government situations you see in the US where usually the Democrats control some of (1) the Presidency, (2) the Senate, (3) the House of Representatives and the Republicans control others. Considering the veto power of the President and the filibuster rule in the Senate that can be a formula for gridlock. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both represented a move to the right but when Thatcher was in power she had no effective opposition while any legislation that passed in the 1980s was a compromise between Reagan in the US and Tip O'Neill and I think between having a good conservative and a good liberal, we got a lot of good legislation in the 1980s (we got a new Clean Air Act in that time frame, for instance.) As a result there was a lot of resentment towards Thatcher from Labor advocates who felt completely shut out, so some sang "Ding Dong the Wicked Witch is Dead" when Thatcher died https://theconversation.com/burying-thatcher-why-celebrating-death-is-still-wrong-13499 https://theconversation.com/burying-thatcher-why-celebrating...

lostlogin 4y ago
> In Britain the PM is chosen by the party in power so you don't get the divided government situations The UK government has been in utter turmoil for a long time now and it’s at its worst right now. This resignation marks a new low in self destructive politics and posturing. I know you are referring to a different type of political impasse, but the chaos that is present in the UK is not a lot better than what the US system seems to see so regularly.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  It's a different kind of turmoil than we have in the US. I subscribe to The Economist which would like to support the Tories but has had nothing but contempt for Teresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Some people say that the Democrats in the US are like the losers in professional wrestling but the complete incompetence and inability of Labor to get elected makes it possible for conservatives to get elected by pandering to a particular segment of the population. Voters have no interest in talk about redistribution if they think they think the people who talk about redistribution push policies that will leave people with nothing to redistribute. Jeremy Corbin did nothing to push back on the perception that he wanted to turn the UK into Cuba, and by not providing a viable alternative the Tories became useless. Corbin hoped that the fall of the Tories would lead to the rise of Labor but oddly it doesn't work that way.

HillRat 4y ago

Look past the veneer and you'll see plenty of ugliness in UK politics -- just a few days ago the (now former) Home Secretary was snarling about her plans to fit up "Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati" with ankle monitors and house arrests. Backsliding into invective, authoritarianism, and radicalism seems to be a commonality across Western democracies these days.

cee_el123 4y ago

Could it have anything to do with the fact that the UK is a much older democracy ? ( the first English parliament was called in 1295 )

kibwen 4y ago
Parliament itself is that old, but it's possible to argue that the UK didn't qualify as a democracy until the Reform Acts of the 1800s (and possible to argue against it too, of course).
- lostlogin 4y ago
  Is a country a democracy if people are blocked from voting because they are female? Obviously democracy is a sliding scale, but what was in place in the 1800s had a lot of headroom.

rootusrootus 4y ago

> naked resentment and hatred that seems to be all we have left in the USA The question I have is which came first, in the US? Regular citizens in the US harbor the same naked resentment and hatred for their fellow Americans based solely on political affiliation. We used to hide it better, especially around family, but that barrier has mostly been broken down too. Did our politicians turn us this way? Or did we just elect politicians that say the things we want to say? Did the news media whip up this resentment with biased stories, or did we voluntarily filter bubble our way into incentivizing that behavior?

anm89 4y ago

How do you watch that video and think it's a sign that things are going well? That's idiocracy level of discourse. My take away from that video is that the UK had much more serious problems than I realized.