re: #26 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

Corbyn is an example of sunk-cost thinking. He’s still thinking anti-Thatcher, when what the UK needs is a unifier.

I think he’s far more anti-Blair than anti-Thatcher. The Tories are the opposition; it’s other Labour members that are the enemy.

I have a theory (which is mine) about why we have manifestly unfit national security threats as US POTUS, UK Labour leader, and now UK fucking PM. All of these started off with rule changes designed to fix something else which then had fatal unintended consequences.

Trump: The GOP wanted to fix the Romney-notRomney back and forth problem from 2012, so compressed the calendar and kept (with an asterisk) winner-take-all primaries. This was supposed to reduce the risk to the front runner. Trouble is, Trump became the frontrunner and all of the other greedy selfish pricks couldn’t work together to take him out, because that’s what they are. Voila, Trump.

Corbyn: The Labour leadership in 2014 wanted to democratize the leadership election process and made it much easier for people to join the Labour Party and vote. You could pay 3 pounds and become a voting member. Corbyn was nominated sort of as a sop to inclusiveness, when by normal procedure he shouldn’t have been. Then a whole raft of new members signed up, Corbyn ran a Bernie-ish left populist campaign, and now he’s boss.

Johnson: The Fixed Term Parliament Act. It used to be that most major votes in Parliament were confidence votes: this meant that if it failed, the PM would/should resign and call new elections. Under the 2011 FTPA, this was reduced to very specifically worded votes and then gave 14 days for somebody to form a new government without elections. Theresa May lost a number of major votes over the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, yet under the new FTPA that didn’t count as confidence. She dragged on with a zombie government that couldn’t do anything, then resigned as PM but didn’t call elections. So, in the opposite problem to Labour, the Tory leader and therefore instant PM was selected by a small, old, and insular bunch of uber-Tories who picked Johnson because he said Brexit the loudest.

Way to go, everybody.