David Cameron Has Just Announced He’s Resigning As An MP

[WhiteTara]

Source: buzzfeed

David Cameron has announced that he is resigning as an MP, after stepping down as prime minister in June following the EU referendum.

The move will trigger a by-election in his seat of Witney, Oxfordshire, which he has held since 2001.

In a statement reported by the Press Association on Monday, Cameron said: “Having fully considered my position over the summer, I have decided that I am going to stand down as the member of parliament for Witney.

“There will now be a by-election and I will do everything that I can to help the Conservative candidate win that election.

“In my view, the circumstances of my resignation as prime minister and the realities of modern politics make it very difficult to continue on the back benches without the risk of becoming a diversion to the important decisions that lie ahead for my successor in Downing Street and the government.

Read more: https://www.buzzfeed.com/emilyashton/david-cameron-has-just-announced-hes-resigning-as-an-mp?utm_term=.qiGEmv9Qv#.tx8GXW1mW

[BSdetect]

1. He has left an indelible blank in our memories.

[WhiteTara]

4. Thank you!

It is so true and you saying so made me laugh early in the morning.

[ananda]

9. Me too. It's on my FB page now.

Lol

[LeftishBrit]

17. Great comment!

[Odin2005]

23. Oh, British humor!

[saltpoint]

2. For some time now, Cameron has wanted

to leave politics and launch a world tour with his reggae band, Babylon Exile.

They've booked studio time for an upcoming album. No word yet on a release date.

[MowCowWhoHow III]

3. Sad!

[Blue_Tires]

24. "pie?"

[Nye Bevan]

5. I respect Cameron much more than any of our RW politicians.

For one thing he has always been strongly in favor of marriage equality. And second, he actually resigned from power on a matter of principle.

[unblock]

6. i'll give you that there are and have been worse rw politicians, but as to your second point

i'm not sure how much "power" he could be said to have in practice after the leave vote.

[Blue Idaho]

7. I'm sure life as a back bencher

Is a pretty big fall from Prime Minister. He can probably retire and make a small fortune writing a book and sitting on a few corporate boards after gutting social services and replacing them with private industry.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

8. A question to our Brit members...

Have you seen a lot of lashing out by conservative assholes in public like road rage?

[muriel_volestrangler]

12. No, I haven't, myself. I did come across something today about correlation with authoritarianism

The Leave campaign’s stunning upset has barely sunk in and already the pundits are flogging a familiar storyline. Those ‘left behind’ in the hard-luck provinces have punched privileged, corporate London in the nose.

The facts tell a different story: culture and personality, not material circumstances, separate Leave and Remain voters. This is not a class conflict so much as a values divide that cuts across lines of age, income, education and even party. A nice way to show this is to examine the relationship between so-called ‘authoritarianism’ questions such as whether children should obey or the death penalty is appropriate, and support for the EU. The British Election Study’s internet panel survey of 2015-16 asked a sample of over 24,000 individuals about their views on these matters and whether they would vote to leave the EU. The graph below, restricted to White British respondents, shows almost no statistically significant difference in EU vote intention between rich and poor. By contrast, the probability of voting Brexit rises from around 20 per cent for those most opposed to the death penalty to 70 per cent for those most in favour. Wealthy people who back capital punishment back Brexit. Poor folk who oppose the death penalty support Remain.



A similar pattern holds in the British Values Survey for the strongly worded question probing respondents’ desire to see those who commit sex crimes ‘publicly whipped, or worse.’ Political psychologists show a close relationship between feeling fearful of change, desiring certainty, and calling for harsh penalties for criminals and discipline for children. These are people who want a more stable, ordered world. By contrast, those who seek change and novelty are willing to embrace immigration and the EU.



Precisely the same relationship – based on values rather than class – characterises support for Donald Trump. “I’ve found a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump—and it’s not race, income or education levels: It’s authoritarianism,” wrote Matthew MacWilliams back in January.

http://www.fabians.org.uk/brexit-voters-not-the-left-behind/

(I came across this in a blog by the writer of the recent trial episodes in the world's longest running soap,the BBC's The Archers (it's on radio), which has gripped its many inveterate listeners like myself. A woman stabbed her husband, who had been putting her under a form of 'coercive control' - undermining her character and confidence, isolating her from friends and family, trying to alienate her child from her. They just had her trial, and in the jury discussions, they had one or 2 characters who regarded people being found not guilty as an attempt by 'the establishment' to stop 'the common people' expressing their democratic right to punish people they were sure were criminals, and likened it to Brexit - the writer having read the above article:

Not quite as big a challenge as the Jury Special though. Writing for characters you already know is one thing, but having to create eight new characters from scratch is quite another. What I knew I didn’t want was a group of functionally written jurors sat around doing nothing but going over the evidence. One would hope that most listeners are on Helen’s side so it wasn’t as if anyone’s opinion was going to be swayed. Where was the dramatic potential that could make the Special genuinely special?

At the time the country was still reeling from the Brexit vote and it seemed to me that the jury room could be a forum in which some of those issues could be raised. I’d also just read about a study that found that attitudes to capital punishment are a much better indicator as to how a person voted in the referendum than socio-economic factors. How much would the jurors’ individual worldviews affect how they saw Helen’s case?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thearchers/entries/5ca14063-dad0-4cb9-8c7f-54974261db8e

[Spitfire of ATJ]

13. So the Right feels they scored a victory with Brexit due to Ayn Rand's brand of anti-collectivism?

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. No, I wouldn't say it's Ayn Rand-style stuff; it's more a deeply conservative nationalism

that thinks "this was the way we did it for hundreds of years, until the permissive society came along and ruined everything". It's an attitude of "things were better before hippies, and the Common Market, and feminism, when people knew their place, and there was proper punishment - death penalty for murder, caning for naughty schoolboys, and prisons that didn't coddle anyone, and we had an empire, and there was no 'political correctness', and that was how we won the war!" The EU is lumped in with everything else that changed in the sixties and seventies, perhaps just because it happened at the same time.

See, for instance: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027954279#post82 I remarked it read well in a Tony Hancock voice; he was a comedian 60 years ago, whose sitcom character was even then pining for 'the old days'.

[Spitfire of ATJ]

15. So you have "50s guys" there too...

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. Oh yeah, that's it

Thanks for the link - that's a good Maher piece.

[LeftishBrit]

19. Yes. There is a big British tendency to nostalgia, and as someone put it, many people seemed to

treat the referendum as though it were a time machine.

Some of these *were* disadvantaged people who had been led to blame the EU, and, too often, immigration, for things that were really the result of Thatcherism - someone even explained their Leave vote as 'because the EU closed the coal mines'.

But quite a few were as you describe: everything's got worse since the Good Old Days and the EU must be the scapegoat! In fact most of the social reforms to which these people most object - abolition of the death penalty; availability of contraception and abortion; decriminalization of homosexuality - date from the 60s, before we ever entered the EU; but people are not always very logical when seeking a return to the Good Old Days. Their other major grievance - the loss of the British Empire - mostly occurred from 1947 to 1961; but again the EU is seen by some as replacing/usurping the British Empire.

It also has to be said that most British people, even those who are internationally minded and politically aware, know surprisingly little about the EU and how it works; and as a result of this lack of knowledge, and of pervasive propaganda in the media (much of which HATES the EU), think that we give far more to it, and get far less from it, than is actually the case. I was certainly in this fairly ignorant category myself until quite recently. For instance, most British people who follow the news at all will know who is the President of the United States, and often the names of several other American politicians; yet the same people would struggle to name a single major EU official, and may not even know who their own MEPs are.

Also: the very fact that we were given a referendum on the subject at all made it seem less crucial to many than it was. Most people, even strong Remainers, thought that there'd be some sort of plan in the case of a Leave vote: would we have a referendum without that? obviously not! - except it turned out that we had just that. Would a Prime Minister actually give people a vote on the subject of 'Do you think that it would be an excellent idea to impose economic sanctions on your own country, and to sow divisions to the point of risking the break-up of the UK?' - of course not!!! Obviously there must be plans in place to prevent such consequences, even if not ideal plans! Unfortunately, we totally underestimated the recklessness of our political leaders and their readiness to place the survival and unity of their party over the survival and unity of their country. Not to mention their ability to run faster than Usain Bolt when it comes to fleeing from the consequences of their own actions.

[LeftishBrit]

20. Here is a relevant post that I made in 2007 to a thread by William Pitt on different RW 'species'

A few British variants, with a great deal of interbreeding and cross-fertilization:

Taxophobius Thatcheritus: Obsessed with the evils of taxes, and would much rather see all public services run to the ground than pay a penny more in tax. Considers that if people are poor it's their own fault for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and becoming entrepreneurs. Worships the memory of Milton Friedman. Closely related to the American species Taxophobius Reaganomicus.


Hangmannicus Nostalgicus: This person has a simple explanation for crime: we don't punish people violently enough. Locking 'em all up to the tune of the last Tory government's favourite expresssion "Prison works!" is OK, but really nothing like as enjoyable as hanging 'em all and flogging 'em all. Since Britain formally abolished the Rope 40 years ago and the Birch even longer ago, this is difficult to achieve nowadays, but its still possible to daydream about it, and talk nostalgically and with alarming relish about how the Rope and Birch would vastly improve modern society. Nothing like enjoying sadistic fantasies AND feeling virtuous about them at the same time!


Xenophobius Bigotticus. This is our most venomous native species, and 'native' is the key word. To such people, there is nothing worse than an Immigrant, and Immigrants include some people whose grandparents were born in this country. They hate all people who aren't white, and many people who are. Their main wish in life is to Send 'Em All Back Where They Came From. According to them, Immigrants and Asylum Seekers are responsible for all the country's problems, except for a few that can be blamed on The Evil Europaean Union. Their delusions are fuelled by the dangerous and addictive drug commonly known as Dailymailium.

[LeftishBrit]

18. No, not personally

However, there has been a definite increase in hate-crimes since the referendum.

The latest incident:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/polish-man-attack-leeds-beaten-up-racially-aggravated-gang-20-teenagers-armley-a7238251.html

[Spitfire of ATJ]

21. The t-shirt says it all....

The half-skinhead look is kinda handy for the upcoming lobotomy.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

10. Now he can get a nice relaxing job cuffing Rupert Murdoch's old wrinkled saggy balls. nt

[Javaman]

11. in other news: cameron gives up British citizenship and moves to mainland Europe. ;) lol nt

[McKim]

22. Plenty of Opportunity in The Corporate World

David Cameron will be well paid by the corporate world now, it's all about the money for these types. Does Tony have an extra room on that yacht?