Skip to main content

Theresa May's luck is about to run out

In spite of all the dire warnings and practical consequences, the UK prime minister Theresa May is determined to push through with Brexit. Although there are a lot of warnings that things could go badly wrong, I get the sense that she thinks the UK will muddle through and it’ll all work out in the end. No matter how adverse the situation, one can always pull through.

This got me thinking about where this blasé attitude comes from. The problem is that the Prime Minister has lead a privileged life, with a good dolloping of luck, where indeed everything has worked out for the best. It goes deeper than this though. 

Conservatives themselves tend to be hard-working and better off. Nothing wrong with that, but the feeling seems to be that if only the poor would apply themselves more, they too could be rich. Consequently, the poor who choose to not apply themselves are therefore poor by choice, and conversely, the rich have only got there due to merit and work.

Conservatives believe that the poor deserve to be poor, and the rich deserve to be rich.

With this mindset, Brexit is simply another obstacle that work and ingenuity can overcome. Theresa May has never personally encountered much failure and hardship, and does not consider this a possibility.

This mindset is of course wrong. Luck plays a tremendous role is people’s fortunes. From birth (so-called privilege), to random events and situation. And no matter how hard you apply yourself, sometimes you cannot win. The poor do not deserve to be poor. (That said, capitalist levers to guide people’s behaviours are still necessary.)

Brexit is a hand that cannot be won. There’s no such thing as British privilege that will get Britain through this. The days of British Empire were due to good judgement and luck. Right now, we are down on both.


Brexit is a step into the dark, where no one quite knows where we’ll end up. I suspect that even the most ardent Brexiters are having doubts by now. What if it goes wrong? When you need it the most, sometimes your luck just runs out. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Breaking the Article 50 Impasse

Andrew Tyrie overestimates the UK's control over when the UK government can invoke Article 50. As with much of the Brexit debate, hope and aspiration trump cold hard reality. The next few months will see a lot of work by the UK government setting up new departments and policy positions relating to the triggering of Article 50 and Britain's exit from the EU. This is a sensible and necessary delay. However this article by The Independent makes the case that the UK should delay invoking Article 50 until we establish an informal agreement with the EU on our exit terms. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-theresa-may-andrew-tyrie-must-manage-unrealistic-expectations-warns-tory-mp-a7220681.html This is very desirable from the UK's perspective, but flatly contradicts statements by the EU (including direct statements by Jean-Claude Juncker, Donald Tusk and Cecilia Malmström, as well as official EU policy) that no talks can happen prior to invoking Article 50...
3 comments
Read more

Can information theory prove the existence of God?

I recently came across this website by Perry Marshall, which makes a really interesting proof of the existence of God. The argument is basically that DNA constitutes information (a code), yet all information that we know of is the product of a mind. Randomness cannot create information. Therefore, God exists. Lovely argument. Now let's pick some holes. 1) My first observation is that this argument is almost exactly the same as entropy. The argument is that DNA is a low entropy state. Yet randomness always increases entropy. Therefore DNA cannot be the product of random processes, therefore it must be the work of God (or Maxwell's Demon). However this argument is invalid because localised decreases in entropy are perfectly possible, and expected, even though the entropy of the system as a whole increases. Considering that the site claims to make use of information theory, it presumably is aware of information entropy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_entropy It fo...
3 comments
Read more

Identity is taking over politics

Mark Lilla writes in the New Statesman ( September 2017 ) that the "Left", i.e. the US Democratic Party, social justice and anti-facism movements, lost the US election due to being side-tracked by gender and race issues. Enough of the electorate weren't buying it and Trump won. In hindsight attacking a large proportion of the electorate based on their gender and race is never a good idea, no matter which race or gender you are talking about. No, it's not acceptable to denigrate men or white people either. Trump of course did the same, by attacking foreigners, Mexicans, Muslims and women, but he got away with it due to media bias and partisan politics. At home, Peter North, a prominent pro-Brexit blogger, tweeted about "self determination". This immediately raised the issue of what is "self", and lo and behold we are back to identity again. If we all feel European, then being governed by the EU is indeed self-determination, and let's not ki...
Post a Comment
Read more