Dio wrote:The next step is a GE with no deal at the core of the Tory manifesto, because Boris can't force no deal through without a majority of at least 30. He persuades Farage to stand down based on the solid promise of no deal, and if you add together the polling numbers for those two parties vs Labour's pathetic showing you get a 100+ majority landslide.
Yes. That would be a logical course of action. Unfortunately.
Although, it's not without its risks. The Tories suffered heavy defeats not just to the Brexit party in the European elections, but - just beforehand - also lost badly to pro-European parties, like the Lib Dems and Greens, in the local English elections.
So it's not at all clear cut that a General Election would go that way - the European elections are different and people don't vote the same way in them. And those particular European elections were, of course, a very particular circumstance, as they were only necessary at all because we failed to Brexit when we were supposed to, and were bound to be dominated by the "why haven't we left already?" protest vote (while Remainers had less reason to come out in force, as - if we are Brexiting - then the vote is purely academic, as they literally won't be actually doing anything useful - that's where the October 31st date comes from, as November 1st is when the new EU commission starts. The deadline is exactly "get out of there the day before").
The Brexit Party is a new variable - they were not running in those local elections - so who knows what'll happen? But the combined pro-Europe vote in those elections did technically win (and UKIP was running to gather up the pro-Brexit vote). So it's not at all an obvious and clear walk over necessarily.
Plus, as we've become all too familiar with, predicting votes has become a rather random sport of late. Democracy has become rather impossible to predict all over the globe lately.
(And as I've covered, it's all a massive red herring.
Because it's not immigration nor globalisation that's the cause of our modern woes. It's the steady rise of technology and automation that's actually been creeping along, stealing all the jobs and depressing wages. Not necessarily by direct replacement with a robot - not unless you work on the factory floor in manufacturing, where your job is quite literally taken over by a robot - but the subtle assimilation of more and more work by machine and automated process. Because computers and robots often have the effect that a single person is now capable of doing far more. Automated calendars, text-to-speech, emails, etc. eating into the usefulness of having secretaries and personal assistants. Emails, word processors, photocopiers and deskjet printers meaning that companies that once has a "print department" no longer need that, as people manage their own communications now. You get the gist. The loss doesn't necessarily come from "you're fired!" and Robbie the robot is sitting at your desk tomorrow. But from how, over time, there's been less and less "you're hired" for once specialist jobs that now ain't needed, as the staff you do hire can now manage much more with the assistance of technology. One person is now doing what was previously 4 or 5 jobs.
Look at any modern high street. Retail is dying. And, obviously, it's not because people aren't buying things - we haven't all just stopped requiring needing stuff. It's because they're ordering it online, getting home deliveries or, for entertainment, it's all digital downloading over the Internet, so there is no physical product for you to go to the shops to obtain anymore.
And, soon enough, "online" is going to get rid of high street banks - as that's already going on - and with most payments now being "sans cash" then we don't need them there to supply the ATM machines either. So it's all food places - and even that, of course, gets eaten into (pardon the pun) by online and phone home deliveries - and charity shops. But even there: There's Deliveroo for food, and there's eBay for flogging off your old tat.
I don't know if the political classes are simply also ignorant that this is the real problem - that they are as duped as the general population in thinking, erroneously, that it's "brown people" at fault - or they do know but are deliberately avoiding the subject.
Because I kind of get that. I, myself, of course, ply my trade in technology. I'm a coder and I'm responsible for some of this "increased automation".
And I totally appreciate that while I make this "neo-Luddite" case, I'm Joseph Marie Jacquard and I'm quite literally multi-tasking between writing this and coding up a new "automated loom".
I ain't stopping. And I think this is perhaps the real underlying issue. Automation might be slowly eating into our jobs and our very social structure, but none of us would give it up. Because automation is a good thing, in terms of Jacquard's looms can knock out any design precisely way faster and at a fraction of the price - and, ultimately, we're all consumers of clothing, right? Even the Luddite can't deny that the machine's product is excellent and hella cheap to buy.
This shit has been going on for decades, of course. But I feel we're now reaching the point where it's biting - and that it is accelerating, as automated vehicles are around the corner, which will wipe out taxi drivers and delivery truck drivers. It also represents a major step - the crucial milestone - towards "human-less production". The idea of production that, from mining the raw resources, all the way to an automated van bringing it to your front door, things could be produced without a single human being involved whatsoever.
E.g. mining robots putting raw material on the back of automated delivery trucks, that bring it to the robots and 3D printers on the factory floor, which creates the product for the automated delivery vans to bring to your front door - after you've ordered the product online - and no human being was ever involved in this process at all (well, other than in a supervisory role - to repair things, as these are machines and a well-designed machine simply doesn't get anything wrong, so the humans are basically there to simply repair worn out parts - and even that job could eventually be automated away).
What then? Whole companies, whole industries, manned by a "skeleton crew" of humans, who're only there to ensure that the machines keep running.
It's not just the lost human jobs. Robots don't need to be paid. So, you know, no income tax. No National Insurance contributions.
One has to realise where the end of this road leads: It will conspire towards annihilating the very concept of money itself.
On one level, that's a good thing. Abundance for all. On another level - oh my god! - how the fuck could any of that ever work? Panic! Panic! This undermines the fundamentals of how human societies operate and we haven't got a fucking clue - we're not even talking about it - how the hell any of this could possibly function.
No wages? No taxes? Umm, then eventually no "universal income" either, because where's the taxes going to come from for funding that, with the entire human race "claiming benefits"?
This is not going to happen uniformly either. Some things are easier to automate than others. So we'll have an uneven situation, with some people still employed, while others are unemployable, as robots do their jobs better and cheaper.
This "transition period" is not going to be remotely pretty. And I honestly have zero idea - as I think it through - how we could even possibly manage it all sensibly, and without causing massive pain to someone or another somewhere.
Like how's it going to work? "Don't worry, jobless masses. In 50 years' time, we'll eventually work out how to fully automate all food production and then everything will be fine. If you could just quietly starve in the meantime. Console yourself with the thought that, eventually, it'll be okay, even if, right now, it's an intolerable Hell on Earth of pain for you personally."
But, bizarrely, that is kind of what politicians are actually doing, as they ignore the real problem and instead ride on "it's the brown people!" red herring lies to distract them all.
It's not the brown people. The brown people are eventually just as fucked as anyone else.
How long will Indian call centres survive, once the robot assistant is finally perfected?
(Noting that it doesn't have to be "human-level intelligence" perfect. Only "good enough" that you can call up the robots, get them to satisfactorily fix your problems and then hang up. They don't have to be capable of discussing Shakespearean poetry with you or anything. Just stuff like "I've lost my bank card. Can you cancel it?" or "my broadband isn't working, can you send an engineer around?".)
This is why I find this whole Brexit - and Trump - nonsense to be slightly insane and surreal irrelevance. A bit like calling in an exorcist to "dispel evil spirits" when you've got a fever, rather than going to the doctor's. It's absolutely not going to work, because you are 100% misdiagnosing what the fuck is actually going on here. Your illness is not caused by "evil spirits" and your joblessness / wage depression is not caused by "brown people wearing hijabs, talking a funny language on the train" either (they're as fucked as you - in fact, more so, because why the hell do you think they emigrated from another country to come here in the first place? Because, back where they come from, shit's even more economically worse!)
Which is a worry. As none of this is going to be solved any time soon, while apparently no-one is even looking in the right direction for an actual useful solution, and are just almost superstitiously blaming some magical "bogeyman" in their heads for it all. Which is bound to go well.
Brexit, like Communism, was just a red herring.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
