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The Political Thread

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

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Slip de Garcon

Quote from: House of Usher on 06 May, 2011, 05:18:43 PM
Woah! Liberal Democrats have lost 591 council seats, and counting.


Liberal Democrats in "failed to realise how much of their support comes from the Left" shock.

::)


(duh.)

If much of their support comes from the left, weren't said supporters always gambling by voting for them? The outcome of a Lib/Tory coalition was always on the cards, and the best way of a left wing voter to prevent it would be to vote Labour, surely?

IMHO an awful lot of people that normally vote LD don't actually want to vote for a winner, so when the LDs went into government it was always going to alienate a lot of their voters - whatever they did in power.

House of Usher

#1696
Yes, voting LibDem was a gamble for left-wing voters. However, anyone really left-wing couldn't have given their wholehearted support to Blair's Labour Party and would have been looking for an alternative since 1997 or before. The Liberal Democrats had some good policies a left-winger could get behind, like a new top rate of income tax and its historical commitment to electoral reform.

A lot of voters have lost their appetite for electoral reform now that they've seen what happens when the LibDems hold the keys to power, i.e. they just hand it over to the Tories. If you've got no more chance of a left of centre government with AV than without, why would you vote in favour of AV? What opportunity the LibDems had to bring change to the voting system they wasted by settling for too little from the Tories and by getting the question wrong.

A LibDem/Tory coalition was never a foregone conclusion. You may remember that the May 2010 election result put Nick Clegg - just one man - in the position of being able to decide whether we had a Labour or a Tory government. Therefore there is no sense in which voters were given a straight choice of voting for a Tory/LibDem coalition or voting Labour to prevent it.

Many LibDem voters were disenchanted Labour voters who wanted to show that Labour couldn't take their votes for granted. Thursday's desertion of the Liberal Democrats by those same voters is sending the same message to the LibDems: you cannot take our votes for granted. The Labour Party needs to make serious overtures to those voters now to get them back on board. There's no point the LibDems worrying about it. Many of those people will never vote LibDem again and I think the LibDems have made it pretty clear they don't want their votes anyway.

I think the main lesson for left-wing voters is that we really do live in an age of broadly right-wing consensus politics (as Tony Blair supposed when he took over Labour and made it right-wing) and there is never going to be a time when there will be a mainstream left-wing political party with a realistic prospect of winning a national election outright and being able to form a government. In England and Wales (not Scotland, hurrah!) left-wing voters will have no choice but to vote Labour and put up with its neo-liberalism, its craven genuflexion to big business, and the dominance of the professional political class in the party hierarchy.

In future, am I going to vote for a fairer, more democratic, more equal society? No. I'm going to vote Labour instead.
STRIKE !!!

JOE SOAP

Did you expect it to be any different?  All three parties vie for the centre-right management position (one of them to act as electoral facilitator for the others) there is no divisiveness or alternative policy between any of these parties anymore because that's not the function of political power. 'mainstream left-wing political party' is never an idea that will catch on nor do I believe it will be able to function either.

House of Usher

Quote from: JOE SOAP on 07 May, 2011, 10:20:32 AM
Did you expect it to be any different?

No. No, I didn't. But with politics you have to entertain the possibility of the kind of change you'd like to see even if you don't really believe it's a very likely outcome. Like all those people who voted in favour of AV and wished really, really hard that 'yes' votes would outnumber 'no' votes when there was never any realistic possibility of it happening.

The reason I didn't vote Labour in 1997 is that I didn't approve of the direction in which the Labour Party had been taken. I could have voted for them despite not liking what they stood for, and added my vote to the mandate they had to do whatever the hell they liked, however right-wing. As it was, they won without my help and my hands stayed clean.

Up to this point I have observed the principle of showing my displeasure through the ballot box and voting for whichever party most closely corresponds to my own political views. I'm not a floating voter: it's the parties that are floating, and in only one direction. Labour, Plaid Cymru and the LibDems have shifted to the right and they've failed to take me with them. The only option remaining to me now is to vote Green where I can and Labour where I can't.

Last year's general election and Thursday's council elections in Brighton have shown that the Greens can win even without electoral reform, and the party list system by which the Welsh Assembly is elected would give us a Green Party assembly member with something like just a 2% swing to the Greens.
STRIKE !!!

Hoagy

Coalition  a quaking. Quite a few audible complaints about the Cons dirtying the poor old lib dems.
"bULLshit Mr Hand man!"
"Man, you come right out of a comic book. "
Previously Krombasher.

https://www.deviantart.com/fantasticabstract

Old Tankie

What a great couple of weeks!  Wills & Kate tied the knot; Bed Linen is away with his virgins; electorial reform got shafted; SNP won loads of seats (go go Alex, an English Parliament gets nearer by the day); and Davey Boy actually increased his number of councillors!!  Unbelievable!!  I'm off down the Conservative Club for a Dubonnet & Lemonade!!

Robin Low

Quote from: Old Tankie on 07 May, 2011, 12:17:57 PMI'm off down the Conservative Club for a Dubonnet & Lemonade!!

Rather amusingly, the favourite tipple of this character:

http://www.toonhound.com/briggsuw.htm

(Raymond Briggs fans take note - if you don't have Unlucky Wally and Unlucky Wally: Twenty Years On, then you jolly well should.)

Regards

Robin

Old Tankie


chilipenguin

New blog post on the result of the Scottish elections:

http://chillypolitics.blogspot.com/

Robin Low

Quote from: chilipenguin on 07 May, 2011, 05:00:17 PM
New blog post on the result of the Scottish elections:

http://chillypolitics.blogspot.com/

Rather early days, but I'm wondering who would be eligible to vote on a referendum on Scottish independence. My dad is Scottish, but lives in England and has done so for decades. I'm half-Scottish, and value that part as much as the English and Welsh quarters. Would either of us get a vote?


Regards

Robin

chilipenguin

As far as I understand it, anyone who is resident in Scotland is entitled to a vote. That means anyone from any ethnicity or background is allowed to vote as long as they are on the electoral register in Scotland. As for ex-pats, I have to admit that I'm not sure.

TordelBack

Quote from: chilipenguin on 07 May, 2011, 05:42:35 PM
As for ex-pats, I have to admit that I'm not sure.

Splitters!


Emperor

Oh Internet, you never fail - does what it says on the tin:

http://nickclegglookingsad.tumblr.com
if I went 'round saying I was an Emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!

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Definitely Not Mister Pops

Unlike Nick Clegg, that website delivers on its promises
You may quote me on that.