[trackflak]

It seems like the government playbook reads as follows:

- Make the practicalities of everyday life extremely miserable

- Make the population worn down and apathetic because things are so bad, a better life unattainable for all but a few

- Then, no one will notice while we pass bills that heavily restrict your liberty and vastly entrench our power

- Profit

It's a sinister genius, and smacks of contempt for the governed.

[gnfargbl]

Who is the evil bond villain behind this dastardly plan, exactly?

The UK government has made the practicalities of everyday life extremely miserable through a combination of

(a) ham-fisted political decisions (Brexit referendum held for party-political reasons, followed by the multi-decade car crash that is still ongoing); plus

(b) plain and simple not giving a single shit about the majority of the population, because it isn't in the personal interests of most of the current set of ruling MPs to give said shit.

There's no overarching devious plan to enslave us all, here. It's just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence and disinterest.

[ClumsyPilot]

> just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence

1. Appoint Evgeny Alexandrovich Lebedev to House of Lords as Lord of Siberia. His dad is a Russian oligarch and owns evening standard.

2. Handing out billions in PPE contracts to Tory donors to companies that were literally registered yesterday.

3. Privatise rail. Allow massive dividends from private rail companies. Spend 3.5 billion bailing out the same rail companies.

4. Allow 80 billion in dividents to be extracted from private water companies. Legalised dumping of raw sewage into rivers by water companies. Infrastructure is not maintained and most of water is lost to leaks. Enter talks about bailout with water companies.

[samtho]

> There's no overarching devious plan to enslave us all, here. It's just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence and disinterest.

At least the overarching-plan theory has a boogie man to attack. This is preferable to the alternative of nobody being directly at the helm and all these transgressions are done for a purely political game of chess that awards the person responsible with marginally more power than they had prior.

Honestly, that reality terrifies me more than some secretive cabal.

[jdietrich]

The reality in the UK is worse than your proposed alternative - the government are simply too incompetent to effectively govern. The contents of the government's playbook is completely irrelevant, because they can't reliably deliver on anything. There's a kind of bleak slapstick humour to their sheer ineptitude.

[Aromasin]

It's because we have a government of aristocratic bimbos who have blundered through life studying a curriculum of ancient classics and pre-1950s history, with a sprinkling of "GDP is king" economics, which at best prepares them on how to accumulate a power base, but provides no practical knowledge on how to use said power effectively in a modern society.

Our Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology is a woman called Michelle Donelan. She graduated with a BA in history and politics, and her career outside of being a career politician was in marketing, including a time working on Marie Claire magazine and for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). How in the world is she qualified for to run the nations tech initiatives? If she was appointed as CEO of a tech company, the stock would sink like a rock over night. Dare I even get started on Michael Gove, who originally wanted the role. Let's compare this to some other comparable countries to the UK:

Canada's Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry; François-Philippe Champagne. Ex Vice-President and Senior Counsel of ABB Group, as well as Strategic Development Director, acting General Counsel, and Chief Ethics Officer and Member of the Group Management Committee of Amec Foster Wheeler.

Taiwan's Minister of Digital Affairs; Audrey Tang. Tang was a child prodigy, reading works of classical literature before the age of five, advanced mathematics before six, and programming before eight, and she began to learn Perl at age 12. On CPAN, Tang initiated over 100 Perl projects between June 2001 and July 2006, including the popular Perl Archive Toolkit (PAR), a cross-platform packaging and deployment tool for Perl 5.

South Korea's Minister of Science and ICT; Lee Jong-ho. Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Seoul National University. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2016 for contributions to development and characterization of bulk multiple-gate field effect transistors.

Australian Minister for Industry and Science; Edham Husic. Husic worked as a research officer for the member for Chifley, Roger Price. Husic was first elected as a branch organiser in 1997. In 1998, he was elected as vice-president of the Communications Division of the CEPU. From 1999 to 2003, he worked for Integral Energy as a communications manager.

I can do the same peer-to-peer analysis when looking at our agricultural, education, health, and transport secretaries. Our government is criminally incompetent when compared to the majority of other first world countries. It's a fucking embarrassment.

[loup-vaillant]

> At least the overarching-plan theory has a boogie man to attack.

Oh but there is such an overarching plan: some people have power, and they want to keep it. It’s not even a secret, see how increasingly plutocratic governance is becoming across the whole West. Problem is, the known methods to thwart that plan (that is, taking power from those who currently have it), tend to be unpredictable and deadly.

[varispeed]

You forgot about widening of the wealth gap and massive wealth transfer in the last couple of years.

That's not incompetence. The rich are in charge.

[mptest]

>Who is the evil bond villain behind this dastardly plan, exactly?

Idk, maybe start with the 8 people who own more wealth than 3.6 billion people combined? 3 own more wealth than half the US. Probably freaking them?!? I really hope this is rhetorical.

>There's no overarching devious plan to enslave us all, here.

Of course not... Enslaving us is not the goal, just the best means to infinite wealth/power accumulation. The US is built on free labor, from slaves to the prison labor we use as slaves today.

>It's just classic honest-to-goodness incompetence and disinterest.

Laughably naive. You're describing the apathetic's contribution, the banality of the evil, not the people who really drive decisions who rely on that apathy.

[clnq]

I’m sure there are some devious plans taking advantage of the circumstances created.

[totetsu]

https://metro.co.uk/2017/10/04/everyone-is-disgusted-by-bori...

This guy? "Boris Johnson Libya 'dead bodies' comment provokes anger"

"There's a group of UK business people, actually, some wonderful guys who want to invest in Sirte on the coast, near where Gaddafi was captured and executed as some of you may have seen."

"They have got a brilliant vision to turn Sirte into the next Dubai."

"The only thing they have got to do is clear the dead bodies away," he said, before laughing.

[xeonmc]

So what you’re saying is, they’re just incompetent rather than malicious?

[dagw]

How anybody can look at the past few years of the Tories and go "there is a group of people clearly capable of planing and executing a genius level long term strategy with finesse and subterfuge", is beyond me.

[blakblakarak]

…because the Tories are the ones being manipulated. A PM earns less than 200k£, a Minister even less and an MP even less - they’re incredibly cheap to ‘buy’.

[mavhc]

We should pay them 10x more

[polygamous_bat]

... because a billionaire will look at the £2M price tag for the British PM and throw up their hands and say "shucks"?

As long as extreme wealth inequality exists, politicians will keep being bought and sold by the minority for their own interest at the expense of the majority.

[smolder]

Feigning incompetence is classic passive aggression and always has plausible deniability.

[squarefoot]

There's no such thing as an incompetent politician. They may be technically illiterate, but their personal goal is to maintain power, and a good part of the time they don't spend telling bullshit to the public is spent asking their experts in a given field (IT in this context) to find ways to do something that would increase their power and also can be advertised as good for the people by telling more bullshit.

[trackflak]

This is what I was getting at - it is impossible for us underlings to imagine what it is like to have the grasp of power over millions of individuals and innumerable resources. We might experience something of it if someone comes to us for help, clueless, and sense we can say or do certain things that would profit us at the expense of the needy person.

Even if the political class don't rationally understand everything they do, they are very good at dressing their apelike dominance-pleasure in saleable words instead of naked aggression, because modern politicians are essentially just trained PR mouthpieces. What they are doing feels right, and that's enough reason to continue because they are addicted to power, one of the most addictive things we can experience. It's perverse and we're all trapped in it.

[gnfargbl]

> There's no such thing as an incompetent politician.

I present Liz Truss as a counterexample.

[jdietrich]

>their personal goal is to maintain power

The current government have largely given up on that goal - they're so disastrously far behind in the polls that they're facing a historic defeat and staying in power is a near-impossibility. They've fallen back on a damage-limitation strategy, using culture war wedge issues to try and secure their base and set a lower bound on how badly they'll lose. They're positioning themselves well to the right of the median voter, because they simply don't have the credibility to fight over the middle ground.

https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/united-kingdom/

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/20/uk/uk-sunak-climate-targe...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/world/europe/uk-rishi-sun...

[sanitycheck]

It's definitely both.

Not that our other options at the moment are a significant improvement.

[t43562]

We have to excercise our choice whether or not we are delighted about the other options. We cannot let any party get too entrenched or feel too safe.

[sanitycheck]

If the message "I suppose I'd rather eat cat shit than dog shit" is then interpreted as "I really love cat shit, feed me more" I'm not sure that works.

[t43562]

It's more like crop rotation than a message. If you grow the same crop in a field too often then it impoverishes the soil and allows pests and diseases to build up.

[FujiApple]

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity"

[salawat]

Stupidity is indistinguishable from malice. Try again.

[idontknoworcare]

Ask Kanye West

[mouzogu]

it's from the friedman/thatcher-esque neoliberal playbook.

manufacture a crisis that creates the scenarios which are most pliable for the policies you want to impose.

or as chomsky called it "manufacturing consent"

UK has had 15 years of getting battered with elite-imposed financial austerity, and the outcome.....brexit. says it all.

[corobo]

Honestly I think it's worse than that. Their playbook is just that last one.

- Profit

Everything else is a mere side effect of that rather than a plan to end up there.

And we're worried about AI alignment, lol. Bring on the grey goo.

[ColinHayhurst]

All parties have supported and encouraged this bill. There have been a few individuals in each party willing to question it, and improve it, but they have been more or less ignored by all sides.

[switch007]

Don’t forget destroy education to make people less educated

[kerrsclyde]

The secondary education my children recieved was awful. UK Secondary schools seem more interested in their uniform policy than the quality of learning.