"Democracy's not for the people…"

[Funt Solo]

Tempting to imagine that Rishi has perhaps laid a large bet on Labour winning, and his decision to announce the election in the pouring rain was just one in a series of deliberately engineered moves. That would explain pushing through a doublethink law that says Rwanda is safe even if it isn't.

[Jim_Campbell]

Remember the SNP can only get a Max of 57 seats so that would mean the tories only getting 56 or less which would be hilarious but I think they will still get over 100 probably closer to 150.

Some of the polling before all the SNP woes really kicked off had the Tories barely exceeding the LibDems' total number of seats if you put the numbers into one of those GE seat calculator websites. I mean, it was never really going to be that bad for the Tories, but it was fun to imagine.

[IndigoPrime]

Electoral Calculus currently has Con 85 and LD 50. The Con predicted vote share is 22.9%, though, which I imagine will ramp up somewhat. The LD one is 9.6% and, well, who knows what will happen there? Hard to tell if the Libs now have a double-digit ceiling.

Obviously, EC is a bit of a blunt weapon, and I suspect a lot of the models cannot cope with such radical swings. Even so, you don't need that much tactical voting on those numbers for the Tories to end up third. (A fifth of Greens, a quarter of Labour and a third of Libs is enough.)

I still don't think this will happen. And I'm not sure I want it to happen. A chamber with ~500 Labour MPs and ~50 Libs in opposition would be a mockery of democracy. It might push the Libs to be adversarial for the sake of it, and Labour would just steamroller everything, before realising with a start that everything gets stuck in the Lords. At which point, everything will be blamed on the Lib Dems. Better to have rabid Tories in opposition and for Labour to work with the Libs a little to smooth things along in the second chamber. (The numbers there still aren't quite enough, but Lab+Lib+some crossbenchers onside will do.)

[nxylas]

I think 500+ MPs of any one party is...not great for democracy. The thing about a Tory rout, though, is that it might show voters that they have other options besides endlessly see-sawing between the same two parties. My worry is that opposition is easy, particularly when you have a government as unpopular as this one. But the public has never really warmed to Starmer, and many of the electorate have memories like goldfish. Look at America, where the forthcoming election is neck-and-neck, despite one of the candidates being the guy they threw out last time. If the Tories just become a regular opposition party, instead of a fringe group with like a dozen MPs, then that could set the stage for them to come back again in five years as if nothing had happened.

[IndigoPrime]

It's quite odd how short people's memories are. We're already seeing people argue the Tories will be in the wilderness "for a generation". People were saying the same thing about Labour... in 2019. It's possible the Tories will go down a full-on nativist rabbit hole. But the party has a tendency to rewrite itself. Plenty of people have suggested they may therefore even outflank Labour by brazenly taking us back into European integration, arguing that's what Churchill would have wanted.

Ultimately, we need the Commons to represent what people believe in. Right now, there's a lot of emphasis on what people look like. And that's fine. We don't need 650 white men ruling over the UK. But we are more than our genders and our ethnicities. So it's undemocratic for the two biggest parties to constantly bat away the notion of a representative parliament in a real meaningful sense, but they do it because they get 55–75% of the seats (and 100% of the power) from as little as 35% of the vote.

[Woolly]

They really are the most reprehensible shower of fuckers.

They really are.

Amen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TppbFVcfBcU

[JayzusB.Christ]

You know, I saw that photo of pint-sized Rishi in the rain earlier and a tirade of derisive tweets under it, and started to feel a TINY bit sorry for him... but snapped out of it.  It's like Woolly's link says.

[nxylas]

I noticed that the newspapers the day after the Prime Miniature's speech had all touched up the photo to make him look less pathetic...apart from the Daily Mirror, whose front page showed him walking away looking like a drowned rat, with the headline "GOODBYE".

[Funt Solo]

I noticed that the newspapers the day after the Prime Miniature's speech had all touched up the photo to make him look less pathetic...apart from the Daily Mirror, whose front page showed him walking away looking like a drowned rat, with the headline "GOODBYE".

I saw "Drown & Out". Newsthump had fun with "Rishi Sunak still not dry".

[Definitely Not Mister Pops]

Rishi Sunak is an anagram of Hi Risk Anus.

[Colin YNWA]

Rishi Sunak is an anagram of Hi Risk Anus.

Gold!

Anyway all these Tory MPs running scared and bailing is going to deny us the possiblity of so many glorious moments. What will we have left for the Portillo Moment? Gove was my banker.