[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.