There's a couple of British shows I very much really enjoy, the Blackadder series chief among them(which I'm sure none of you have noticed at all) and I'm always up for finding a new one.
Ukraine
- Thread starter Silvanus
- Start date
Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister are consider to be among the best political satires of the British political system. But that’s the important distinction: where more modern shows will satirise the parties and how they operate - see The Thick of It for an example of that - Yes Minister/Prime Minister is targeting the very systems of government.
Yes, Minister is heavily out of date, however.
The modern shows focus on political parties because these are what increasingly have driven government, with the civil service increasingly subordinated to party interests. Policy development, for instance, is now heavily transferred to party operatives (hence Malcolm Tucker as an enforcer) rather than ministers working with their civil service departments. Civil servants simply do not have the sort of power that they did in the days of Yes, Minister, nor in fact many ministers either. This is why The Thick Of It matters, because it reflects a changing way that government started operating.
In fact, I think it's a fair point that the current British government, presently, does not really govern at all, starting around David Cameron. The Tories, ideologically, do not r
think the government should do things: the invisible hand of the market should. Thus heavy civil service diminution, deregulation, with functions handed out to quangos and agencies. Ministers then operate what is designed to be a PR machine to earn short-term favour for electoral victory. What ministers want is absolute autocratic power to make things happen, which they only use for headline-grabbing. I cannot help but wonder if the problem facing Rish! is that he realises that post-Brexit the government does actually need to govern, it's just his wider party no longer thinks that way, has any practical ideas, or is ultimately capable of doing so.
To the point several civil servants have bemoaned the fact that it led to their political masters shouting ''I won't let you Humpfrey me!'' when they tried giving advice.
Indeed. The Civil Service has changed significantly though, as I’m sure our British members will explain. It no longer is able to exert itself the way parodied here.
To be fair I think he's American, as an American I can firmly say we cannot comprehend construction not taking 20 years to finish.
One might note the recent stories of ministers (Priti Patel, Dominic Raab) unprofessionally bullying civil servants. This is conduct that would have been unlikely 40 years ago, and reflects how power has shifted.
Civil servants certainly do still have power. A minister that alienates his or her department is likely to have a hard time. And senior civil servants are potentially risky to attack, as there can be pushback, difficult headlines. One might note that shortly before her catatrophic budget (ensuring she would be the shortest ever serving PM), Liz Truss fired the head of the Treasury department. That was probably a major incident contributing to the severe concerns, especially in the financial markets, about her plans.
*Sighs in the 3rd year of bridge construction through a major artery in town*
Same bridge, not even a series of bridges
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Considering that Putin (or at least some Russian officials) have openly declared their dreams of rolling through Berlin in tanks, yeah...
There's a lot wrong with NATO, and Russia could have sat back and pointed out a lot of that if they hadn't invaded Ukraine.
Fuck, NATO was desperately trying to justify why it still existed like a decade ago. Putin could have probably waited for it to fall apart if he'd waited another decade or so.
Xi Jinping must be laughing his arse off at all this.
Unless he's stuck in an oversized hunnypot.
Let's just pull up the satellite footage....Connecting to NAFO HQ under skull island.......authenticating.....processing.....found it.
Yep, honey pot confirmed.
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I hate myself right now cos I put a totally different meaning behind honeypot. And I have suffered for that xD
I read an interesting analysis opinion on Putin and the Ukraine war the other day.
The basic idea is that Russia's long-term strategy was to attempt to break NATO by trying to drive a wedge between the USA and Europe. Once done, this could allow for a wider European bloc including Russia (which, naturally, would become a major player).
France and Germany played along with this to some extent to prevent war; in particular, through things like maintaining trade agreements - this was enough to prevent a full Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, that was apparently a lot closer to occurring than we might think. It suggested that the Minsk accords were known to be likely unworkable, but could delay Russia long enough to give Ukraine time to militarily prepare for a invasion. The 2022 invasion reflects the point where Russians realised that they had effectively lost the diplomatic war and the West was still unified: Putin was then all but forced to invade, not so much by his own choice but under pressure from Russian hardliners who perceived him to have been outwitted and shown weak. Part of this is also that although Russia is implacably opposed to the US, it did consider European governments worth working with. However, the perception that European governments successfully tricked Russia into inaction has broken a lot of that trust. Interestingly, as a side issue, it also notes that Trump was in a sense right that Russia may not have invaded Ukraine if he were still president. But that's only because he was a bad president damaging US-EU relations enough to give the Russians hope of a schism, not because he was a good one.
The article is something of a vindication of the much-criticised European attitude to Russia that has been perceived as too accommodating; although its conclusion is that Europe should have done more to create amity between Russia and the West. What, precisely, is unspoken.
Few thousands, even tens of thousands, in a population of 67 million (France), 83 million (Germany) and 59 million (Italy) is a drop in a bucket. For comparison yellow vest protests few years ago in France had millions of protestors. Seeing Russian flags, it's quite clear who is behind these.
They had been for decades and still the threat to Russia grew rather than receded.