General British politics discussion thread

It is a democracy but one that was fashioned grudgingly and incrementally over centuries for a much similar age and never has been properly updated for the twenty-first century. It is also teeming with undemocratic constructs such as the unelected head of state, the unelected upper house of Parliament, the peerage system, titles & honors, etc...

We now live in age when party affiliation has dropped through the floor, large voting demographics have collapsed like the trade unionists and more and more people are either self-employed or are in precarious "gig economy" jobs. The FPTP system of picking one out of two parties just doesn't really work with the UK being the most diverse it's ever been.

If the young had ever bothered to vote, we wouldn't be in this mess. They didn't vote in 2016, 2017 and 2019 and this is the result. The system would still yield warped results but we'd at least be in the EU.

It's facile to say the UK isn't a democracy as this invites comparisons with various undemocratic nations but it's perfectly reasonable to point out how unfit-for-purpose most of it is.

The thing with the sort of inter-generational disparity that exists here is that support for things like the monarchy tends to be concentrated amongst older voters. I think the same will hold true for Brexit but unlike the monarchy, the turnaround will be much slower. I think as the chanting about things like Scottish Independence, the House of Lords, peerages and the like increases over time, something will change.

Johnson, as he stands now is all but indestructible. He has an array of human shields in place should the worst happen. Of course, we don't know what tomorrow will bring. No strategy will work forever. At some point, deriding Labour because they allegedly want to undo Brexit will stop working. Reminds me of George Osborne warning that voting for Brexit would lower house prices in a tone deaf way that only an Oxbridge-educated old Etonian could muster without a shred of self-awareness.

When I look at some of the leaders of the past, men much more hard working and intelligent than Johnson, it shows clearly that what he's doing will work only until he overreaches like Cameron and Thatcher and then it'll spur some change, probably minor enough but change nonetheless.

Not gone off to sun himself while a humanitarian catastrophe unfolds? I find it highly unlikely that the foreign secretary of this country had no idea this was going to happen.