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DUP complain about the Conservative "lack of negotiating experience".  That bodes well for Europe.  Right Wing Unionists failing to sell right wing unionism to Right Wing Unionists, but don't worry about sorting out all those trade deals folks, that'll be fine.

What exactly could the DUP be asking for that the Tories, who happily out Ukipped Ukip, aren't willing to hand them to remain in power?

End to austerity.

[D.R. and Quinch]

I don't get the big fuss about that picture and I think its a shame that there is a 'disconnect' between him and Rebellion.

I'm not a big Halo Jones fan though and think its over-rated (and a bit dull at times). If someone else had drawn it I don't think it would have worked half as well as it did. 

I'm a bit critical of Alan Moore's work on 2000AD though. I didn't enjoy Skizz either. I think his best works in the prog were either D.R. and Quinch or the Future Shocks.

This is the right answer.

D.R. and Quinch is truly inspired.

My main issue with the film is we know the outcome, which negates a lot of the drama-it was the same issue that plagued the prequels, but at least in Rogue One the characters appear more human and convincing in their motivations!

[spoiler][spoiler]Kill crazy Vader at the end was a delight though![/spoiler][/spoiler]

Worth a tenner though and the 3D was fairly good after the appalling job on Star Trek Beyond-which rendered everything a murky indistinguishable mess.

Can't say I was convinced by the CGI cameos though.

[spoiler][spoiler]Everything with Vader was a joy. They did a really good job of pitching him just right so as not to contradict New Hope. I really hope we get a Vader solo movie at some point[/spoiler][/spoiler]

The problem with Dredd is that it needed to do well in the US, despite being a blunt-instrument satire, broadly anti-US in outlook, extremely violent, following a terrible prior movie, and with some iffy marketing. It's notable that Deadpool did well, despite being violent in a less moral manner (he's a vigilante, slicing up anyone who gets in his way and almost certainly causing considerable collateral damage; Dredd's a cop doing his job). Still, when you're a juggernaut, you can barge your way in. Dredd was a minnow at the cinema.

While they're very different films, the key difference for me is that Deadpool was actually marketed, and marketed well, whereas the distributors of Dredd, for whatever reason, seemed to actively suppress any and all news and material related to the movie getting out to public. As a result, there was simply zero awareness of the film in the run up to release, even among genre movie and comic book fans.

The flaws in the marketing are the same issue as the overall flaws in the film - the lack of money.

How many mid-budget movies are successful in today's film industry? It's became a game of naturalistic indie movies made for next to nothing or mega-budget epics. The former doesn't need to make back much to be successful, the latter are usually (although not always) too big to fail.

It's not intrinsic about Dredd that caused the film to fail except the future city setting mean it can't be done the cheap and the strip has no cheerleaders in Hollywood. A bigger budget would have allowed for the wilder sci-fi ideas to be reintroduced that would have made it more distinctive. A bigger budget would have allowed the cast to include some actual stars who would have impressed the punters. And yes it would have allowed for extensive marketing efforts.

Does anyone know who the editor says during the period that introduced Jura Edgar and the Robin Hood-style Slaine by Staples and Langley?  I actually really enjoyed that and thought the prog was starting to get back on track. Possibly because of the (as far as I recall)  recent reintroduction of John Wagner on Dredd.

Those ran around July-Sept 1995, which means they went out under the Tomlinson/MacManus interim period*. They would have been commissioned several months in advance, obviously.

I tend to think of Mills and Wagner shaping the direction of their own strips, but it was MacManus's idea for The Pit to take the soap opera angle, so who knows what other influence he may have had (even on the Mills Bomb).


* McKenzie was let go in November 1994, according to TPO p168

I do think the key to making 2000AD successful has been keeping Wagner and Mills happy and productive. If you look at the key strength of Tomlinson/Bishop/Diggle compared to the first half of the nineties it was all the great Wagner Dredds. Likewise the immediate upswing in the quality of Mills' stories after Smith took over greatly improved the Prog.

20,000 of those sales were lost due to a change of distributor

At least 20,000 of those were due to the change of distributor. McKenzie said that they lost 20,000 within a very few weeks of the change being imposed on them.

I've long argued that the catastrophic crash in 2000AD sales at this time was (forgive me) something of a double-whammy: reduced availability due to the distributor change, coupled with the comic just not being very good.

I think either of those things would have been bad for the comic, but in combination were disastrous. Almost overnight, 2000AD disappeared completely from the four or five newsagents on the route between my house at the time and university. The comic hadn't been much cop for some time, but as long as I could pick up a copy on a Saturday morning when I nipped out for a pint of milk and 20 B&H, it remained a habit.

Once I was looking at a trip into London to get one from FP or a big WH Smith branch...? Well, the comic just wasn't good enough for me to contemplate doing that. Obviously, I could have picked up multiple issues whenever I did go to FP, but once you break that weekly buying habit...

I think you have to add a third fact which is that first British comics and then American comics were all engulfed by a massive recession caused by both diminished youth interest due to competition from video games* and a worldwide paper shortage forcing rapid price increases. Whenever people talk about 2000AD's declining circulation issues they always miss out the fact that it was far from the only Anglophone comic to have a terrible 90s.

*I always thought the issue was less video games themselves (which after all were so expensive in the 90s that they were more centrepiece presents for birthdays or Christmas) but the boom in video game magazines which took shelf-space and pocket money away from comics.   

In over six years they've never recommended a 2000AD or related collection. You'd think some of the more political releases might have interested them

https://www.theguardian.com/books/series/graphic-novel-of-the-month

Anyone notice anything strange about this list of the graphic novels that the Guardian recommends each month?

The way you whining lefty ninnies lot go on, you'd almost think commies were building a nuclear bomb inside our borders or something - you need to stop panicking and cheer up: we have our country back, the NHS is 350 million pounds a week better off, and no more immigrants will be moving in next door.

As someone who works in a university, I can heartily say that she certainly didn't do nothing.

The point for the Corbynites is they don't need to worry about Scotland. The SNP would actually be happier to make Corbyn PM than the old Scottish Labour contingent because they know Jezza's hard-left politics would ultimately drive the English doolay.

The polls show it wouldn't make much difference because it wouldn't - on the final round. But the logical conclusion is that people would use the first round to register a protest vote (either to the right or left). The reality is that it would actually make wild cards marginal less likely because centrist Tory/Labour/LibDem voters would gang up on any UKIP or Green who manage to make it to the final round. 

The LibDems are an interesting party. Despite their opposition to FPTP they only exist because of it. As Paddy Ashdown said (way before the Coalition) if PR ever happened then the LibDems would loose much of their support to rival parties who suddenly became competitive. And indeed the LibDems have always done remarkably badly in European Elections.

I would exactly suggest a direct-election for Prime Minister. The General Election would basically be to a) elect the Prime Minister and b) elect an independent Parliament. There's nothing ridiculous about a Tory Prime Minister being held accountable by a left-wing majority Parliament if that's what the people want.

The LibDem politicians may overlap with Labour but the voters don't. Look at what happened in 2015 - what caused their devastation was tory-leaning voters across Southern England freaking out about the possibility of Labour coming into power. And now its liberal conservatives migrating back due  to Brexit that is causing the parties revival.

I disagree that predicting a General Election outcome has become tough - look at how well the Exit Polls have done. The issue is with making sure the polls don't capture too many enthusiastic young Labourites.

Mind you, plenty of Corbynites I know also think that, because, apparently, all polling is some kind of anti-left conspiracy.

When Yougov did a survey whose findings suggested Corbyn was more popular than previously believed, they wrote lengthy qualifications to their own polling data explaining how and why the results were probably wrong, while the Guardian ran three separate articles by academics explaining why the polling was misleading - two of whom were Yougov employees - and all of this was within months of the disastrous 2015 polling fiasco, so you can't really blame lefties for the current distrust of polling.  Polling companies got themselves into that mess.

True but they got themselves into that mess by massively overestimating Labour's share of the vote. So you can forgive them for being a bit nervous about any pro-Labour outliers.

I think Labour's pretty united on being anti-PR, in the sense that all wings of the party hate the idea of compromise. The only difference is the so-called moderate wing still seems to labour under the misapprehension that the party can actually get a majority in the Commons. Mind you, plenty of Corbynites I know also think that, because, apparently, all polling is some kind of anti-left conspiracy.

Where I wonder, Will, is in your figures. If you rattle through elections over the past few decades, you very regularly find parties securing an absolute majority with about 40% of the vote, which then dips post-2005 to the mid-30s. We find ourselves in a weird situation where we could feasibly find the Conservatives with a huge majority on a third of the vote, which feels inherently undemocratic. And although the threat of UKIP does mean a Con/UKIP pact of some kind might push everything over 50%, there have been plenty of times where Lab/Lib could have formed a coalition under PR to oust the Conservatives.

Moreover, the assumption in such guesswork is always that people would vote the same way under PR, when that's unlikely to be the case. If you know your vote counts, tactical voting becomes broadly meaningless. I suspect we'd probably unfortunately see quite a few UKIP MPs under a PR system, but we'd also see a smattering of Greens and, for the first time in recent history, Liberal Democrats getting an actually representative number of MPs. In Scotland, MP numbers would be more representative too, rather than the absurd situation of the SNP claiming almost every seat on half of the vote.

So I'd like to see some change. I'm open to arguments about which system, being it AV+, STV or AMS, but what we have now is ridiculous. But the Conservatives and Labour also know that without FPTP, the chances of either party every securing a majority again is slim. What they don't factor in is that if voting trends continue, we will probably increasingly see hugely unpredictable swings that cannot be planned for nor controlled.

I'm not arguing against PR - just the idea it would help the left. And again - you can't count all LibDems as left-wing voters. Throughout the 20th Century the Liberals have been just as much an anti-socialist party as a anti-Tory one. Indeed whereas we have many occassions of Liberals and Tories sharing power without Labour, we've yet to see any Liberal MPs enter a Labour Government.

And actually my gut is that we've entered the opposite to wild swings. You listen to political scientists and the big problem is geographical polarisation, with Labour and Tory parties both overwhelmingly strong in their heartlands but weak outside. This has been made worse by the implosion of the Liberal Democrats who by default had been the natural party of opposition all over England. Unless Corbyn really tanks Labour's numbers (which is should be stressed hasn't happened yet - they're bad but they've been bad for much of the past seven years) its likely that even a snap election would only see the Tories gain a handful of seats.

In terms of AV - it's both not that big a change and huge change at the same time. As someone who once run Students' Union elections that use AV, I can say from personal experience that it really is extremely rare that the person who is top on the first round doesn't ultimately win in the end. That has certainly been true of the London Mayoral Elections.

The Mayoral elections where despite clear guidance, lots of people didn't know how the system worked. The major argument to me is as simple as removing the idea that votes can be wasted. And once we've made the most minor improvement we might be able to get people more engaged with politics, when they don't just have to choose the best of two bad options - they can choose the best choice for them without effectively handing a vote to the worst option. And then we can maybe cross the bridge of getting politicians to grow up a bit and stop depending solely on the party whip.

Anything would be better than FPTP in terms of engaging people with politics. Your proposed system has a lot of benefits. I am dubious about electing a head of government directly but personality politics seem to be more important to most people than details or facts.

(And not to knock your point but Student Politics differ greatly in every way from a general or even local election for a lot of obvious reasons )

I really don't think AV will engage more people in politics. AV allows people to go through the charade of voting for a minor party but makes it no more likely for that vote to mean anything. Because the minor parties are still unpopular they will be eliminated before the climatic round of voting. So those annoyed that Greens and UKIP can't get into parliament will still be annoyed - although there will probably be more of them. The only possible benefit is that it would make it even harder for extreme candidates to come through a divided field with a low share of the vote (although anti-Farage tactical voting shows that probably already happens) - but that would actually increase hard-right/hard-left disillusion.

Again AV is only useful in terms of political reform as a staging post for PR. It would do that by inflating the minor party vote and breaking (this ludicrous, untrue) notion that the electoral system is this ancient system that has served the country well since 1066. Reality is that elections were very different before 1918 (lots of multi-member seats) and was still fairly different until 1950 (some surviving multi-member seats plus the various fancy franchises).

On directly the Head of Government - I just think its something that's going to have to happen if we're to stop devolved Government cannablising the country or done by second-rate politicians. When you think about it - its kind of absurd that the Mayor of London has less right to stand to be Prime Minister than some random backbencher. A directly elected PM would allow a broader range of people to stand for parliament. It would then empower parliament to hold the executive to account without the Government MPs being worried they were hurting their own chances of re-election.

With you entirely on that Indigo - the electoral system is badly broken. I can't believe that people campaigned against that referendum because 'it wasn't enough'. Some positive change is better than no positive change... and Labour really messed it up there. I get why the Tories will resist that forever but FPTP is an incredibly limiting system which makes voting an even more frustrating exercise than it would inherently be.

I am very happy that the London mayoral election uses SV and that small difference would still go a long way to improving our democracy. It would at least be an end to 'If you vote X you are wasting your vote", the explicit acknowledgement that the system is ****ed.

There's plenty of good reasons why Labour don't support PR:

Labour is an incredibly tribal party. I went from right to left whilst at university and I was amazed at how much more passionately committed to the party even moderate Labourites were. So many people don't want PR because they want a single-party Labour Government rather than having to compromise with other parties...especially the Liberal Democrats!

There's then the traditional Bennite argument against PR. That's basically that's its almost impossible to get 50% of the country to vote for a radical platform but its more than feasible that a radical majority could be elected on 35%-42%. So the hard-left support FPTP, even though it makes an independent hard-left party impossible, to keep alive the dream of securing a majority that would push through their programme.

Perhaps the more important argument is that it would probably hurt the centre-left. The idea that PR helps the 'left' is wrong. Let's remember in the last election the Tories and UKIP actually got 51%. If you look across Europe, without the protection of PR it's likely that Labour would lose even more of its working class base to UKIP. It's worth pointing out that without the European Elections moving to PR in 1999, UKIP would probably never have broken through as a major party.

So for all these reasons it does make sense for Labour to oppose PR.

In terms of AV - it's both not that big a change and huge change at the same time. As someone who once run Students' Union elections that use AV, I can say from personal experience that it really is extremely rare that the person who is top on the first round doesn't ultimately win in the end. That has certainly been true of the London Mayoral Elections.

Where AV would be a huge change is that it would encourage people to vote for minor parties, safe in the knowledge they could vote for their preferred major party. That would mean the votes of parties such as the Greens and UKIP would be inflated without their chances of winning MPs actually increasing. That would strengthen the argument for PR. 

Personally, I would like to see a directly elected Prime Minister. That gives you the benefit of PR (every vote counts) and the benefit of FPTP (clear decision on who forms the Government guided by voters). I would then personally use STV to elect the parliament but I'm not too precious about that point.

The LibDems could have put their money where their mouths were and attempted a broad coalition of parties of the center and left

How realistic would that have been? Political figures from the time have said Labour itself was deeply divided and during talks couldn't nail down key elements of its own policy, let alone how it would work in coalition. And Lab/Lib combined would have been 11 seats short of a Commons majority. So who fills those spaces, and how much effort would have been required to get any policy through the Commons? How much misery would backbenchers have caused?

This was, note, nonetheless my preferred route at the time, and I was gutted when it didn't happen. Yet even on the day of the results, you had Labour capitulation, with MPs suggesting people had had enough of Labour and that it was time to let someone else have a go. (Surely, any MP should want their party to always be in power, to do good things!)

I also suspect people hadn't realised quite how far the Lib Dems had shifted. Under Ashdown and especially Kennedy, they had shifted into a somewhat socialist position, and certainly a fairly libertarian one. By 2010, they had lurched rightwards and also become more authoritarian, which was even more evident by 2015. (Oddly, their manifesto, at least, seemed true to the party's roots and ideals, but their actions did not.) So perhaps people didn't realise we had a soft-right/authoritarian-right coalition, rather than something more centrist in nature.

On Brexit, I do think it's a pity even despite everything the Lib Dems did or didn't do, many people are unwilling to do anything other than dismiss Clegg. He's in it for the money, apparently, or to get some kind of cushy EU job if we somehow stay in. Or, you know, he actually has loads of experience in this and is for the most part talking and writing sense.

Gay Marriage would never have become law if the Tory Government hadn't support it. So whilst you note/criticise the Tory party for having a large proportion of homophobes...Cameron's Government clearly deserves credit for supporting the measure (i.e. drafting bill, championing the cause, allotting parliamentary time and allocating resources to implementation).

The problem is more that they took all of the credit, despite this all being a legal requirement from the coalition agreement. In other words, the Conservatives had no choice to do all those things, otherwise the government would have fallen. I think Cameron deserves some praise – it's one of the few things he got right, despite not having the support of the majority of his part – but the Conservatives as a whole? Not really. And them whitewashing this being Lib Dem policy was pretty distasteful, but then that also showcases the naivety of the Liberal Democrats – as Clegg as mulled since, they simply didn't realise how ferociously the Conservatives would gobble up every piece of good news and frame it as their own, rather than the coalition (and certainly never the coalition partners).

What's most depressing about this is it knocked back electoral reform yet again. The choices in the referendum were ridiculous (FPTP vs AV), and then the broadly disliked coalition put loads of people off of the general idea, further cementing the reactionary and partisan nature of British politics. I fully believe we would be a better country politically with more coalitions, with smaller parties that could then join together to form government. In Iceland, for example, you have two parties that broadly map with the UK Conservatives, and they sometimes form coalitions. But they each have their own identities and policies to fight with. (And, most importantly, that country as PR voting, so every vote actually matters.)

Er, but off topic there, but, hey, it's the politics thread...

A few things.

100% true people hadn't realise the change in the Lib Dems. It makes sense really, if counter-intuitively. Ashdown, Kennedy, Campbell and Cable are all centre-left politicians who joined the Liberal Democrats because of how left-wing Labour was in the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas the likes of Clegg and Laws are centrists or even centre-right politicians who joined the Liberal Democrats because of how right-wing the Tory Party was in the 1990s and 2000s.

Reason the manifesto was significantly to the left of the leadership is that Liberal Democrat members through conference still have significant control over writing it. Indeed, one of the issues with tuition fees, is that Clegg and Cable had been fighting to water it down since they took control of the party, but activists kept rejecting their proposals. Significantly they did leave it out of the pledge card the leadership issued as their key red lines. Alas for them the NUS brilliantly seduced them into making a much bigger deal of the policy.

Anyone who says the LibDems could have avoided going into Coalition with the Tories is insane. A Lib-Lab pact would have had no majority without the nationalists and the Brownite approach to politics just didn't overlap with Clegg's.

As several issues proved, the Coalition Agreement had no legal force. In any case Gay Marriage wasn't included in the original Coalition Agreement.

The Coalition massively set back the cause of electoral reform by enshrining the idea that even a pretty miserable change such as switching to AV needed to be approved by referendum. Sadly, a referendum on AV+ would never have escaped the Commons (Milliband struggled to stop rebels on the AV Referendum, and some Tories would surely want to kill it) and in any case with Labour supporter sore about the Coalition it would have lost similarly badly.