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The Political Thread

Started by The Legendary Shark, 09 April, 2010, 03:59:03 PM

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IndigoPrime

Quote from: Professor Bear on 20 January, 2018, 04:26:33 PMThe Labour Party want people to vote for the Labour Party?  I wholeheartedly agree that's no way to fight an election, etc.
It's hubris. Labour had no chance of winning that seat. But in standing, it went to the Tories. They're presumably hoping the FPTP tipping point will favour them again soon, like it did in 1997, but we have a bullshit way to vote, and Labour's continuing 'no deal' arrogance (and direct threats prior to the last GE regarding 'daring' everyone else to not support them) showcases how absurdly juvenile British politics is.

QuoteAnd Parliament.
262 seats, against the worst Conservative government and the most inept election campaign in recent memory. So they're basically back to where they were in 2010. 2017 was not a victory of any sort.

QuoteThey also took Tory seats that were unwinnable.
They got a few good punches in, but to what end? Actually giving a shit in a handful more seats, or having the good grace to step back in one or two other constituencies and we suddenly have an entirely different political landscape, where even with the DUP the Tories cannot make ends meet.

Jim_Campbell

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 20 January, 2018, 01:25:41 PM
His party made a massive balls-up of the last general election. (Plenty of on-the-ground reports of them basically doing fuck-all in seats that turned out to be easily winnable.)

That was fuck-all to do with Corbyn. The Progress/Blairite-controlled party management believed (hoped?) that they were going to get annihilated and adopted a 'circle the wagons' strategy that saw them pour resources into defending safe seats while adjacent marginals got literally no support. Labour were never going to win that election but there were a number of winnable marginals that Party Central abandoned due to their belief (hope?) that Corbyn was leading them to electoral catastrophe.
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TordelBack

This is a very informative debate for an outsider,  keep it going.

Theblazeuk

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 20 January, 2018, 01:25:41 PM
Also, what the fuck in places like Richmond Park? Just get out of the fucking way, rather than offering hubris and letting another bloody Tory in.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. But the parties act like your vote counts individually, rather than in a first past the post system. Strategic voting undermines the democratic ideal they espouse but anything other than strategic voting is a waste of the absolutely miniscule amount of power anyone has.

Tim Farron demonstrated the self-same hubris in the by-election by taking the opportunity to piss all over Labour. He spent longer talking about Corbyn and Labour being 'irrelevant' than he did about taking Richmond Park from Zac Goldsmith and the Conservatives' attempt at a puppet-independency.

For all the stick they get for idealism, the Greens are the only ones I see who talk about the electoral system in the context of how it actually bloody well works.

IndigoPrime

Yep. The Greens put their money where their mouth is, and stood down in a bunch of seats (democratically, with the backing of their local teams/reps). Perhaps my memory's faulty, but I seem to recall this being reciprocated precisely once, by the Lib Dems (who stood down in Brighton Pav – although it turns out Caroline Lucas wasn't really under threat there in the end).

It's all hubris. Labour thinks it has a God-given right to rule, and craps all over the idea of standing down or collaborating. (After all, one must ALWAYS have the option to vote Labour! Well, unless you're in Northern Ireland, for some reason.) The Lib Dems seem to be labouring under the misapprehension they still matter to the extent they did before 2015. As noted, Farron should have shut the fuck up about Labour and gone full-on "get Goldsmith out". By all means appeal to Labour voters to achieve this, but don't rubbish their party.

Elsewhere, a limited amount of cooperation in specific seats would have resulted in a load more Lab MPs, and at least a handful of extra LDs, and no Con/DUP numbers that added up. Mostly, people respond to this by saying: but what about the press side of things, with Cons slamming this kind of cooperation? Well, UKIP candidates stood down to aid the Tories, and they didn't start complaining about that. The other point – Blair hurling the Jenkins report into the future, and Corbyn taking up that particular baton (as in: PR IS EVIL because Labour can't take advantage of it like it can maybe one election in four like FPTP) and running with it – is perhaps a bigger issue.

Basically, our electoral system is shit, hasn't really worked since the existence of Labour, has only twice in the last hundred years provided a government voted for by the majority (rather than a plurality), and leaves a great many people not represented. Still, it works for the Tories and sometimes for Labour, so neither of them gives a damn.

Dandontdare

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 22 January, 2018, 02:06:42 PM
Basically, our electoral system is shit, hasn't really worked since the existence of Labour,

I don't disagree that it's shit but I'm struggling to see the connection there - did it work better when it was whigs vs tories?

Professor Bear

#14016
Quote from: Jim_Campbell on 20 January, 2018, 09:00:45 PM
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 20 January, 2018, 01:25:41 PM
His party made a massive balls-up of the last general election. (Plenty of on-the-ground reports of them basically doing fuck-all in seats that turned out to be easily winnable.)

That was fuck-all to do with Corbyn.

Didn't the Blairites actually change the codes on Labour HQ to lock out lefties on the day of the election in preparation for purging them and seizing the party's assets?  Even the BBC couldn't bury what was happening, their on-the-ground documentary about what they thought was going to be the elimination of Centrist Dads' nemesis turning instead into a chronicle of the palpable frustration of "moderate" MPs that their party wasn't being annihilated, Kinnock jr's face as the penny dropped becoming a meme the day after the documentary aired.
Added to which, there were some areas where Momentum had to bus in their own campaigners because local activists had been suspended from the Labour party for supporting Corbyn during the leadership contest instead of their own right wing MPs, which I am sure would have been reciprocated by Progress to support left wing MPs like Clive Lewis or Laura Pidcock, except, you know, it wasn't.

Still, it's a lie to say Labour didn't consider electoral pacts - Kezia Dugdale told Labour voters to vote for other parties, for instance.

Quote from: Theblazeuk on 22 January, 2018, 01:11:08 PM
Tim Farron demonstrated the self-same hubris in the by-election by taking the opportunity to piss all over Labour. He spent longer talking about Corbyn and Labour being 'irrelevant' than he did about taking Richmond Park from Zac Goldsmith and the Conservatives' attempt at a puppet-independency.

Anything that got Tim to stop talking about gay sex was probably good for the LibDems.

IndigoPrime

Quote from: Dandontdare on 22 January, 2018, 02:11:12 PMI don't disagree that it's shit but I'm struggling to see the connection there - did it work better when it was whigs vs tories?
It could still be a shit-show. 1847 was a good example: the Whigs secure 54% of the vote (an actual majority), but end up with 44% of the seats, and so the Conservatives win the election. Well done, democracy. (In the event, Conservative in-fighting meant the Whigs continued, but still.) Then you add into the equation ongoing complexity with Irish politics, suffrage, etc, and you realise FPTP has to some extent always been bollocks.

Still, when the majority of the country had just two choices, the system at least makes some sense, and the UK's tendency towards more multi-member constituencies at various times in history resulted in – broadly speaking – better representation in some ways.

Today, it's almost always a shit-show, and it really has been since a third party ended up getting a decent chunk of the vote, be that Labour in the early 1900s or Liberals of various flavours more recently. On the latter, look at 1983: the SPD/Lib got 25% of the vote (vs Labour's 27) yet ended up with 4% of the seats (vs 32). That is mental.

Then in 2015, we see UKIP and the Greens, respectively, secure 12% and 3% of the vote and get 0.2% of the seats. (The battered Lib Dems, meanwhile, become an irrelevance, but their 1% of seats – 8 – does not align with their 8% of the vote, which should have got them closer to 50.) These are extremes, of course, but at every GE we have this crap. My wife looks at this and doesn't understand why the UK has such an undemocratic, unrepresentative parliament, while banging on about being some kind of world leader in terms of democracy. (To top it off, we then have an entirely unelected second house with clergy, and a head of state that wears a fucking gold hat.)

Quote from: Professor Bear on 22 January, 2018, 02:34:09 PMStill, it's a lie to say Labour didn't consider electoral pacts - Kezia Dugdale told Labour voters to vote for other parties, for instance.
Some people in Labour said X ≠ Labour policy was X.

CalHab

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 22 January, 2018, 02:52:08 PM
Some people in Labour said X ≠ Labour policy was X.

The Scottish Labour leader would be a reasonable source for Labour policy in Scotland, I'd have thought.

Goaty

So Trump fired everyone at White House, same as in Zombo back in 2011...


von Boom

I always knew the prog was a more accurate forecaster of the future than your standard newspaper.

JayzusB.Christ

Real Trump wishes he looked like Zombo Trump.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

TordelBack

Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 11 February, 2018, 06:08:41 PM
Real Trump wishes he looked like Zombo Trump.

Or talked the best words as good as him.

Tjm86

Well, just to prove that the world is going to hell in a handcart, Trump suggests that one possible solution to the school shooting problem is to arm teachers!   :o

Now that might be one way to stop behaviour problems in school.  Just imagine the scene:

"Sit, shut up, get on with your work!"
"Make me!"
"Make my day, punk!"  (pulling out large semi-automatic rifle)

On a more serious note; seriously?  The solution to the gun problem in school is to put more guns in schools?  As has been pointed out by a few commentators, when the SWAT team come gunning for the gunman the last thing you want to be doing is running around school with a firearm.  Their first thought is going to be "they've got a gun.  They must be the perpetrator.  If the teacher is lucky, they won't open fire.  If the teacher is not white, that is pretty unlikely.

Two quotes from Robin Williams spring to mind:

"You have the right to bear arms, or the right to arm bears.  Whatever the hell you want!"
"Reality is a crutch for those who can't handle hard drugs."

Theblazeuk

That's such a good idea for the Big Meg in the face of cuts to Justice Department.