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UK Elections

Firstly, that's totally irrelevant to the point, and secondly, the alternative offered wasn't much better. It's something else we can blame Clegg for, he should have insisted on PR, then we wouldn't be in the godawful mess...

If they rejected AV by 2 to 1, you think an even bigger change would have won? The arguments against a party list system are even stronger.

PR is hardly a panacea. And if you think 'populism' is bad in FPTP, look at the far right in Europe.

PR in the last election might leave you with Farage bending the Tories over a barrel for concessions to join a coalition.
 
So you had a choice Bad System or Worse System

Why's it 'worse'?

Pretty much anyone who likes PR should also like AV more than FPTP. You might think it doesn't go far enough, but it would be preferable. It makes little sense to want PR, but to prefer FPTP over AV.
 

Martin

Spam, wonderful spam (bloody vikings!)
Maybe we'd be better off being ruled by the Queen and English Gentlemen. :p
 

Altfish

Veteran Member
Why's it 'worse'?

Pretty much anyone who likes PR should also like AV more than FPTP. You might think it doesn't go far enough, but it would be preferable. It makes little sense to want PR, but to prefer FPTP over AV.
Because AV is complex and is not PR. Cameron did it on purpose, got the Tory press behind him and the vote was lost before it even began,
A PR system like the EU vote would have been fine and probably have succeeded.
 

England my lionheart

Rockerjahili Rebel
Premium Member
So still no answers from any leaver as to what the EU has done to make their life worse or how it might improve when we leave. Ho hum.

Here's my last answer, the eu is an invasive protectionist entity, free trade has to be paid for, 5,yes 5 presidents have to be paid along with all the leeches that moves its parliament every month because of the past, even the euro suffers ecause the inner circle of France and Germany cannot agree on the way to go, there's more but I don't have time to write a book.
 
A PR system like the EU vote would have been fine and probably have succeeded.

Unlikely given the arguments against it are far more substantial than for AV.

How would you feel about putting Farage in a position to be kingmaker? Giving the far-right a far bigger platform and political leverage? Supercharging populism? Giving Corbyn absolute control over who becomes a Labour MP and thus silencing intra-party dissent?
 

England my lionheart

Rockerjahili Rebel
Premium Member
Who's "we" - I'm totally ashamed and embarrassed of Brexit Britain - home of the xenophobic, inward-looking, ignorant little Englanders.

Your of course entitled to be whatever you want, me, I'm proud of my country and its adherence to democracy, its remain that should be ashamed of their conduct and wasting 3 years of everyone who believes in democracies time.
 

Altfish

Veteran Member
Unlikely given the arguments against it are far more substantial than for AV.

How would you feel about putting Farage in a position to be kingmaker? Giving the far-right a far bigger platform? Supercharging populism? Giving Corbyn absolute control over who becomes a Labour MP and thus silencing intra-party dissent?
If Farage got the numbers - fine. That's democracy.
We couldn't have a more far right government and a more far left opposition.
Also, those (like me) in the middle ground would not be wasting our votes
 

Martin

Spam, wonderful spam (bloody vikings!)
If they rejected AV by 2 to 1, you think an even bigger change would have won? The arguments against a party list system are even stronger.

PR is hardly a panacea. And if you think 'populism' is bad in FPTP, look at the far right in Europe.

PR in the last election might leave you with Farage bending the Tories over a barrel for concessions to join a coalition.

"Il Duce" Faragio bending anyone over a barrel is certainly a scary proposition.
 
If Farage got the numbers - fine. That's democracy.

5% of the vote needed for a coalition being able to extract more concessions than 30% of the vote is not necessarily more 'democratic' than FPTP. Minority parties consistently threatening to bring down the government unless they get even more concessions is not exactly 'democratic' either.

If the governing party fears losing an election, you get huge leverage over them by threatening a no-confidence motion.

We couldn't have a more far right government and a more far left opposition.

Of course you could. You might even get the genuine far-right in government. Look how PR helps the far-right in Europe. PR is a godsend for 'populism'.

And a Corbyn Labour Party under PR would be stacked with his cronies. Think about the chatter regarding 'deselection', with a party list system wouldn't need that as Corbyn would be handpicking who got elected and who didn't.

There are solid arguments for and against, but claiming PR is 'democracy' and FPTP is 'not democracy' is somewhat facile.
 

ratiocinator

Lightly seared on the reality grill.
Here's my last answer, the eu is an invasive protectionist entity, free trade has to be paid for, 5,yes 5 presidents have to be paid along with all the leeches that moves its parliament every month because of the past, even the euro suffers ecause the inner circle of France and Germany cannot agree on the way to go, there's more but I don't have time to write a book.

Still no answer to the actual question....
 

Altfish

Veteran Member
5% of the vote needed for a coalition being able to extract more concessions than 30% of the vote is not necessarily more 'democratic' than FPTP. Minority parties consistently threatening to bring down the government unless they get even more concessions is not exactly 'democratic' either.

If the governing party fears losing an election, you get huge leverage over them by threatening a no-confidence motion.



Of course you could. You might even get the genuine far-right in government. Look how PR helps the far-right in Europe. PR is a godsend for 'populism'.

And a Corbyn Labour Party under PR would be stacked with his cronies. Think about the chatter regarding 'deselection', with a party list system wouldn't need that as Corbyn would be handpicking who got elected and who didn't.

There are solid arguments for and against, but claiming PR is 'democracy' and FPTP is 'not democracy' is somewhat facile.
You've not asked me which model of PR I support
You've suggested we'll get an ultra left/right government ... why does the EU not have such an animal?
 

Shad

Veteran Member
The problem with the system, which I pointed out in my original post on the subject #91, is that a party can get a thumping majority from a minority of the popular vote and they are more likely to do that if their support is geographically localised.

Nope. You are ignoring political parties which have divided the vote while projecting a form of democracy as if that is the only form. Namely a type of pure democracy.

This is a general point and this election isn't the worst example of it by a long way.

It is a flawed point as per the above.

The point about Brexit was because, in this election, it was one of the dominant issues and the voting pattern actually confirmed the opinion polls regarding what the public now think about it: a small but significant majority for remain.

You are assuming why people voted and that why is a single issue.

Eg I am a fiscal conservative. I didn't vote for the fiscal conservatives in the election in Canada. I voted for the NDP. Ergo I didn't vote based on one issue. Does my vote suddenly make me not a fiscal conservative or is it that the party that advocates this view didn't earn my vote?

As a result of lies, broken election law (in the referendum), and the electoral system, the UK will now be taken in a direction that the majority disagree with, with significant and long term consequences.

Assertion.
 

siti

Well-Known Member
One more Brexit election to go...that will be the Brexit post-mortem election - by then a few pennies should have finally dropped with (or rather a whole lot of pennies will have slipped through the fingers of) the British electorate and hopefully Labour will go into that with a credible leadership. They've probably got 5 years to sort themselves out. I wonder if Boris will still be PM by then - or whether some catastrophic foot-in-his-mouth PR fail or some dredged-up or emerging scandal will have seen him hand over the reins by then. Only time will tell. Anyway, the electorate has decided (again) - there can be no more question that "we" want out of the EU, a better NHS, more policemen and an end to austerity...I sense a tightening of belts in the offing!
 
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You've not asked me which model of PR I support

I assumed a form of party list because you were against 'convoluted' systems and have praised the EU elections.

What do you prefer then?

You've suggested we'll get an ultra left/right government ... why does the EU not have such an animal?

I said it is possible to get a more right wing government than we have now (which I doubt is actually going to be that right wing anyway, but that remains to be seen).

PR creates weak governments and enables extremists which isn't a good mix. Sooner or later you will have a party reliant on a far-right group to make a coalition.

The far right has a much greater presence and much greater power in European countries, and a much bigger presence in the EU parliament than it does in the UK. You legitimise the far right by allowing them in parliament and making them respectable. At first people 'refuse to share a platform' with them. A few years later they might well become coalition partners (see AfD)

Tommy Robinson MP free to say what he likes about ongoing court cases under parliamentary privilege

For all the wailing about Little Englanders, Britain is one of the few European countries without a significant far-right political movement (Best results: Austria - won, Poland - Won, Hungary - Won, France - 35% Germany - 15% Holland 20%, etc).
 

Notanumber

A Free Man
It is funny that all those Labour MPs that have supported Corbyn and his policies to the hilt are now saying what I have been saying all along.
 

ratiocinator

Lightly seared on the reality grill.
Nope. You are ignoring political parties which have divided the vote while projecting a form of democracy as if that is the only form. Namely a type of pure democracy.

Waffle. The fact that a party can get an unassailable majority when most of the population don't want them in control is undemocratic. Doubly so when there is no proper constitution that can limit what they can do.

You are assuming why people voted and that why is a single issue.

No I'm not. All I said was that it was a significant issue and the result reflect the polls on that subject.

Assertion.

Nonsense. That electoral law was broken in the referendum is a fact established by the courts. That the Tories (hence leave) now have a majority because of the electoral system, is another fact, and that the majority don't want to leave is backed by the evidence of opinion polls, the popular vote in the election, and analysis of demographics since the referendum. Do you want to dispute that Brexit will have significant and long term consequences?
 

Notanumber

A Free Man
The BBC propaganda machine –

At at a crucial crossroads in Britain’s history, the BBC got it wrong – thank God the people got it right
How did we all get it so wrong?” a mournful Andrew Marr asked Huw Edwards on the morning of Friday 13th. Hang on a minute, who did Marr mean by “we”?

The BBC certainly had a thousand ostrich eggs splattered on its face. Others were not so ready to believe that a hung parliament and a Prime Minister Corbyn (furiously waves garlic and crucifix) were a serious possibility. Last Thursday morning, I’d guessed a Tory majority of 42. Some gut instinct was telling me Boris could get a landslide, but hourly talking up of Labour’s prospects by the BBC and Sky News chipped away at my confidence.

No wonder, when the historic exit poll was released at 10pm, that many of us practically exploded with relief. Who says multiple orgasms are off the menu for the over-fifties? One reader told me he would have to get a plasterer in; so high was his jump for joy that his head smashed the ceiling. The BBC had us scared, and quite unnecessarily. Worse than that, at a crucial crossroads in Britain’s history, our national broadcaster revealed that it barely knew the nation at all.

Angry allegations of bias, from both sides, have flooded in. Boris has hinted that non-payment of the licence fee might be decriminalised. Huw Edwards, who ably led the BBC’s coverage on election night, hit back at the “toxic cynicism”. “You realise yet again that the real purpose of many of the attacks,” he said, “is to undermine trust in institutions which have been sources of stability over many decades.”

It genuinely doesn’t seem to occur to Huw that it is the institutions themselves that could be responsible for undermining trust. I’ve always defended the BBC, and admired much of its output, but for the past five weeks it was not making forecasts, it was making wishcasts.

Jeremy Corbyn, a Trotskyist who presented a clear danger to our security, was stroked like a pet chinchilla while Boris was treated as marginally less savoury than a child molester. BBC bulletins led with angry Gotcha! stories like the one about the Prime Minister failing to respond adequately to a photograph of a child on a hospital floor. That wasn’t the most important news item of the day; it was spite masquerading as compassion.

The BBC Charter has a requirement of impartiality. But, when you come down to it, it’s not really a question of the corporation being biased in favour of Labour. This general election was the final battle in the bloody, long, drawn-out Brexit War and the BBC has effectively been Remainer High Command since June 2016 when the British people shocked the establishment by voting to reject the EU.

So ingrained is what the veteran presenter John Humphrys calls the BBC’s “institutional liberal bias” that no one thought to question the wisdom of using a publicly-funded broadcaster to bombard 17.4 million voters with anti-Brexit propaganda. Europe Editor Katya Adler was forever telling us what the EU wanted. How about what British people want? Globalist BBC types would probably call that “populist nationalism”, darlings.

Humphrys says that BBC bosses were “devastated” by the victory of the Leave campaign. He likened their expressions to a football fan whose team just missed a penalty. “I’m not sure the BBC as a whole ever quite had a real grasp of what was going on in Europe, or of what people in this country thought about it.”

The BBC prides itself on “diversity” but it is embarrassingly bad at representing the views of millions of normal people. Sure, it loves a regional accent, but any working-class presenter must be fully signed up to the woke values and metropolitan outlook of their liberal superiors.

Imagine the dismay and astonishment viewers felt when they watched BBC1’s Question Time last Friday, following Boris’s magnificent victory, only to find the usual panel of doomsters. “Does anybody here want to defend Boris Johnson?” asked Fiona Bruce. A lonely hand went up. “I didn’t vote for him but…”

For crying out loud! Hundreds of thousands of Labour voters had just switched the allegiance of generations for Boris and Question Time couldn’t even find one person to admit they’d voted for him? Why not take Question Time to Workington or Wrexham where people were bubbling over with excitement at this redrawing of the political map? “Why should I pay a tax for this biased rubbish?” fumed one Tory viewer, speaking for the frustrated millions.

Like the Labour party, the BBC has displayed remarkable contempt for the normal person and is now running out of time to save itself. That brand of po-faced, liberal sanctimoniousness is finished. A friend from South Wales, who voted Tory, jokes about being patronised by people who wouldn’t know a working-class person if they bopped them on the nose. “They say I live in a pocket of social deprivation,” she laughs. “So bloody what? We know how to enjoy our lives. F**ck ‘em!” Unlike Emily Thornberry and her snotty ilk, working class people tend to love their country. They don’t regard the Union Jack as akin to a Swastika. Asked by a reporter why she wouldn’t vote for Corbyn, one Geordie lady replied, “He disrespects the Queen.” Broadcasting House may be chock full of republicans, but normal people have huge respect for Her Majesty and they love Princess Diana’s boys and their beautiful little kids. Normal people like the military, with each region having a proud attachment to a regiment in which normal people’s sons and daughters serve. (The mastermind of this huge demographic shift, Dominic Cummings, had a paternal grandfather who served in the Durham Light Infantry)

Normal people don’t believe that they live in a hateful, racist society, as they are informed they do on a daily basis by privately-educated BBC presenters and Corbynistas. According to the new, 2019 Eurobarometer on discrimination, when people were asked “How comfortable would you feel if your child fell in love with a black person?” the UK emerged as one of the most tolerant countries in the world.

But we knew that, didn’t we? Not Andrew Marr’s “we”. I mean, the normal “we”. The Normals who live outside the metropolitan bubble and who haven’t succumbed to the deadly virtue-signalling virus which destroys that part of the brain where common sense and humour reside.

Normal people might not be racist, but they’re concerned about immigration which has happened far too fast and put huge pressure on their public services, whatever the BBC news might say. It’s also depressed wages in their communities – ask their builder nephew! - and they’re counting on Boris to sort it out. Points-based system and better border control? Bring it on! Lest we forget that it is the Conservatives which just got the first gay Muslim into Parliament. Meanwhile, the Labour party, which thinks it can lecture us all, still hasn’t had a woman leader.

Normal people aren’t the downtrodden victims of the Marxist imagination. They have aspirations for their families, every bit as much as shadow Cabinet ministers living in three-million-quid Georgian houses in Islington. They watch Kirsty and Phil and they plan to knock through and create a kitchen-diner on the back of the house. They use Ofsted ratings to help them find the best school for their kids. (Corbyn said he’d abolish Ofsted.)

At a crucial crossroads in Britain’s history, the BBC got it wrong – thank God the people got it right
 
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The fact that a party can get an unassailable majority when most of the population don't want them in control is undemocratic. Doubly so when there is no proper constitution that can limit what they can do.

There are many factors that limit what they can do. Just because Britain doesn't have a single constitution doesn't make it a free for all.

How does a 'proper' constitution make it 'more democratic' though?

You would have a vote on it at a fixed time, and then that would become 'locked in' across multiple generations with a qualified majority needed to make amendments.

Just like with PR there are valid arguments for and against, so it is highly specious to consider one 'democratic' and the other 'undemocratic'. There are numerous approaches to democracy, none of which are perfect and all have aspects that are more or less 'democratic' depending on the angle you approach them from.
 

Shad

Veteran Member
Waffle. The fact that a party can get an unassailable majority when most of the population don't want them in control is undemocratic. Doubly so when there is no proper constitution that can limit what they can do.

You are still assuming one issue voting. Try again.



[quote[No I'm not. All I said was that it was a significant issue and the result reflect the polls on that subject.[/quote]

Wrong. You are assuming. You have no evidence.



Nonsense. That electoral law was broken in the referendum is a fact established by the courts.

Citation.

That the Tories (hence leave) now have a majority because of the electoral system, is another fact, and that the majority don't want to leave is backed by the evidence of opinion polls, the popular vote in the election, and analysis of demographics since the referendum. Do you want to dispute that Brexit will have significant and long term consequences?

That is how the system works.

You are still making an assumption that people are one issue voters. Try again
 
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