this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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UK Politics

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Westminster voting intention:

๐Ÿ”ด Lab 51% (+3)

๐Ÿ”ต Con 25% (-1)

๐ŸŸ  LD 8% (NC)

๐ŸŸก SNP 3% (-1)

โšช Ref 5% (-2)

๐ŸŸข Green 5% (NC)

via @Omnisis , 06 - 07 Jul

Busy day for polling, and another big but increasing lead for Labour

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[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

This would be a bad result.

I want the Tories gone. I am content for that to be a Labour majority - although I think we'd get a far better quality of government (including much-needed electoral reform) if Labour were the largest party in a hung parliament and depended on Lib Dem support. Governments that have to convince people other than their own supporters to vote for their policies tend to come up with more rigourously thought-through policies and pay more attention to addressing their critics' concerns.

But regardless of whether you agree with that last statement, Labour winning 535 out of 650 seats (on barely a majority of the vote) would be a recipe for atrocious government. We'd have to rely overwhelmingly on their own backbenchers to be the ones to scrutinise and hold the government to account, in the absence of an opposition presence - and the vast majority of those backbenchers would be people who only just entered Parliament themselves for the first time, many of them likely people who were selected for their seats without expecting to win, and who wouldn't even know what they were doing for the first few years.

[โ€“] thatwill 2 points 1 year ago

A government with a big majority is essentially a 5-year dictatorship. It's the worst of both worlds - not only do they have barely any short-term accountability but no long-term planning is required either.

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