I had planned to write about the unparalleled UK crisis this week. Well, not entirely unparalleled, and we'll get to that. However when I had some time this evening I was planning to jot a few things down.
So much for that idea.
I still can, of course. Liz Truss, the last British Prime Minister to meet with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, has been forced out. There's a lot of talk, a lot of uncertainty, and quite a bit to chew on.
Mark Steyn's GBNews show on Wednesday had a lot of sport with the resignation of Home Secretary Suella Breverman:
His "hang on didn't we" gag probably got a lot of repeats on yesterday's show (I haven't had the time to watch it yet) when 105 days after Boris Johnson resigned as Prime Minister Liz Truss herself resigned as Prime Minister. She only had won the leadership bid 45 days earlier, and as Steyn has previously noted the first three weeks of her premiership were spent in mourning of HRHQE2 which meant she really didn't have to do anything during them. This is a two-and-a-half week trainwreck coming to an end.
It all started, in retrospect, when they made such a big deal how the "Big Four" in the Palace of Westminster were not straight white dudes. As has been noted many times before, this is always a bad idea.
Reminder: The least problematic employee continues to be the straight white male.
— Katewerk (@katewerk) October 18, 2022
They did, however, happen to at least be in favour of Brexit, which is where things started to get curious. The pro-Brexit Chancellor of the Exchequer (a title Canada's Finance Minister should really take on) passed a mini-budget that introduced a controversial tax cut a week after the government agreed to spend a hundred million pounds on paying people's heating bills. Why was it controversial? Here's the best thing: nobody really has any coherent argument against it. Still, it meant she reversed course, then reversed course on her reversal, and then reversed the reversed reversal. There may be a couple extra iterations in there somewhere.
Anyways after endless back and forth about austerity (which, let's remember, is the classic Keynesian response to government spending) and tax cuts for "the rich" (which, like all tax cuts, are always a good idea so long as government spending is also permanently slashed) he resigned on Friday and was replaced by Remainer Jeremy Hunt. Straight white males are back in business baby!
Then on Tuesday, after a scandal which may well have been deliberately engineered, Suella Braverman was forced to resign after routing government emails through her own personal email. Hillary Clinton, call your office. The list of straight white males to take the job forms to the left.
Since we brought up the SheBeast, I guess it's a good time to get into the parallels (ie. not her): Liz Truss' government has been extremely unpopular, and after winning the leadership race to take the job from a Prime Minister who had won a very significant conservative majority, Conservative Party insiders have been (very publicly) warning that they were looking at a "Canada in 1993" moment.
For yet again a female PM (Kim Campbell, Liz Truss) replaced a male PM (Brian Mulroney, Boris Johnson) via a leadership race after he was forced out due to scandal most people would have trouble describing (Airbus affair, a high ranking faggot in cabinet tried to fondle a man at a party and they didn't just cut his fingers off...2022 is weird), and the long-standing Conservative Party was garbage in the polls over an unpopular tax measure (GST, 45p rate cut). Meanwhile a populist party with less than 2 MPs in the House of Commons is nipping away Conservative popularity from the right (Reform Party, UKIP), and there's a risk of a rout by the traditional centre-left party (Liberals, Labour) with the role of the Official Opposition going to an ethnocentric separatist party (Bloc Quebecois, SNP) located only in one small region (Queerbec, Scotland).
At least this parallel looks to be nipping itself in the bud with Truss's resignation: indeed until yesterday the previous paragraph was to be the central thesis of this blogpost. So now instead lets look at some other parallels that are of note.
We've just had a woman defeat a man to be the King's First Minister after the man had to resign in part due to his nonconservative use of heavy handed COVID restrictions while meanwhile he and his inner circle got to Gavin Newsom-style enjoy themselves at the same time they arrest people who try to do this while not being a member of the privileged elite. She then wins a tight leadership race and then proceeds to spin around in circles, taking action and then having to apologize (despite not having done anything actually wrong) and reverse course.
Well, we've just had a woman defeat a man to be the King's First Minister after the man had to resign in part due to his nonconservative use of heavy handed COVID restrictions while meanwhile he and his inner circle got to Gavin Newsom-style enjoy themselves at the same time they arrest people who try to do this while not being a member of the privileged elite. She then wins a tight leadership race and then proceeds to spin around in circles, taking action and then having to apologize (despite not having done anything actually wrong) and reverse course.
There's so many parallels to go around! There's one other news story that caught my attention earlier this week: apparently some MPs came to physical blows while L'Affair Truss continued to heat up.
The Labour MP Chris Bryant raises a point of order accusing senior Tories of “bullying” backbenchers to vote with the government. He calls for an investigation and provides a photograph of the incident to the Speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, who is said to be taking it “very seriously”. In an interview with Sky News, Bryant elaborates, alleging that Jacob Rees-Mogg and Thérèse Coffey were among the group “physically pulling” an MP through the door into the lobby. Rees-Mogg denies this. He says he is “not entirely clear” whether Morton is still chief whip.
Now it's hard to be sure what happened: as a leftist, Bryant thinks its "bullying" when somebody says Ezra Miller is a man, so it's possible we're in another Star Trek Discovery case where a couple cruel words were said.
However if UK Parliamentarians are physically attacking each other, that's the first time in almost a hundred years (April, 1923) and possibly only the second case since...are you ready? Are you ready?
...
Are you sure?
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Okay: it was 1629 during the Short Parliament of King Charles I, when the John Finch the First Baron of Fordwich was physically held down in the Speakers chair by the MPs during a vote on the taxation of tonnage. That means that of the three times in recorded history that British Parliamentarians have had a physical altercation within the chamber, two of them have been under odd-regnal-numbered Kings named Charles.
We told you that you should have become George VII.
