I'll believe it when I see it. We've managed to keep these idiots in power for 14 years longer than we should have - I still have plenty of doubts.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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Yeah, there's plenty of 'shy' Tories. By rights, after all they've done, they should be reduced to double figures but I am braced for them to only lose a hundred odd seats.
To be honest the dream result for me would them to lose just the right amount for labour to need to form a coalition with the Lib Dems and for the Lib Dems to demand PR as this price.
PR would destroy the Tories for good as the collection of interests that make them up would cause them to split into multiple parties.
Under PR the UK would almost always elect a centre left coalition. The only reason the Tories and the right seem to have so much power is that anyone who wants to vote right pretty much has one option. Whereas left of centre splits between labour, green, lib dem.
I don't know why the further left Labour MPs and the further right Tory MPs don't push for PR. They're more likely to enact policies they believe in in parties they'd be members of under a PR based system. The two parties would cease to exist but they'd join and form new parties.
I don't think this country can ever make any progress while we're under FPTP.
We had a chance at this back in 2010. I even voted for the Lib Dems. I know people were sick of Labour at the time, but damn did they fuck up by ConDemning us all.
I would love nothing more than PR, but just like Brexit, you can't underestimate the will of the British public to continuously vote against their own interests.
The referendum wasn't on whether or not we wanted Proportional Representation.
It was do you want the current system or do you want to go over to STV. PR was never on the table.
STV is basically the exact same issue we currently have but slightly more complicated it doesn't really solve anything.
Is there a specific proposal for PR? What does that look like? Abolishing constituencies entirely or merging them in fives or something and voting proportionally within that or something else entirely?
That why Mixed PR, or even better Ranked Mixed PR, would be an easier switch, as well a better system than pure PR.
What is why what? There is no claim in the post you're responding to. Only questions.
With PR you lose local MPs. With Mixed Member PR, you keep local MPs. Using rank/score voting, improves that local representation.
I'd like to believe that but if my 14+ on reddit taught me anything it is that the general population are petty, hateful and conformist and so philosophically it's the 'One Nation' Conservatives that they naturally align with.
I don't think Reddit or FPTP remotely give a good indication. You can see the right normally get sub 50%, but it concentrated on the Conservatives and with FPTP that gives them power. How people would vote in proper system is unknown. Ranked Mixed PR is what I want.
It wouldn't surprise me if the liberals just prop up the tories with a coalition again.
Under PR the UK would almost always elect a centre left coalition.
And this is why it can't happen. You can't have any change in an electoral system when one side is gleefully rubbing their hands over how under the new system they'd win every election. A bit of a conflict of interest.
The EU is PR and there is a clearly a problem with people feeling like the EU parliament doesn't represent their interests. And that disconnect is real, in a PR the parties own the seats, not community leaders. Having a first past the post system guarantees that everyone has someone from their community representing them. The biggest problem with first past the post is the fact that it was given that name in bad faith by those trying to push other systems.
And you may think it'll be great that conservatives break up into many different parties, but this means a conservative coalition may need to adopt policies to appease some extreme right parties to gain power. Israel is a PR system, and this is exactly what happened there.
Kinda a hard sell to convince people you want UK politics to be more like the politics of the EU or Israel. People that voted for Brexit may be convinced to rejoin the EU someday, but making the UK parliament more like the EU system will be a red line for them. And there would be a lot of Remainers that wouldn't want the UK to be more like Israel.
Stop trying to make proportional representation happen it isn't going to happen. Community representation systems (FPTP) have their flaws but PR systems have many more flaws.
It’s almost as if the constituency boundaries have been optimised to return Tory?!?!?!
Lol, no - the blue team are set for a poor election result, that doesn't mean conservatives nor their hold on power are at any risk whatsoever, since all 3 largest parties directly serve conservative, right winged interests.
The only thing a red team win will do is give blue team someone to blame the past 15 years on, so that they get back in power next time.
The fact that people still not only believe this charade, but are actually pinning their hopes on it is beyond depressing, but it also serves as living proof of the system working exactly as intended - to keep the powerful in power, and everyone else serving them.
I don't know anything about UK politics but it's common enough in any country to say "all parties are too conservative" while in fact one of them is clearly less-so than the others.
That's true but the labour party is far more conservative than ever before in its history, and is still squarely "conservative" even if less so than the others. They still want to privatise the NHS even more, for example, a.right wing position which will cause a lot of suffering and cost many lives. Just because they're not fully fascist doesn't mean you can't criticise them for being too conservative.
That is absolutely not true what are you on about. Is absolutely no evidence they want to privatize the NHS unless of course you want to actually point to some evidence
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/keir-starmer-nhs-pledge-privatisation-b2123849.html
And this is before the election even happens.
When a politician says "Let me be clear, we’re not talking about privatising the NHS, we’re talking about using the private sector effectively" (emphasis mine) they mean further privatisation, just like under Blair, Starmer's hero.
That's not really how major parties work though?
This is incredibly reductive but suppose there was a single spectrum between progressive and conservative. Let's make progressive 0 and conservative 10.
Forgetting about parties for a moment, let's say the will of the general population is 7.
If you have two major parties they will arrange themselves as 6.5 and 7.5. Both parties appear "conservative", but really your progressive party needs to appear conservative to steal as many swing voters as possible.
If they won consecutive elections their policies would start to move back down the spectrum.
This is known as the "Overton window" for anyone who wants to read into it further.
Yeah right I had no idea it had a name. Thanks.
They still want to privatise the NHS even more, for example, a.right wing position which will cause a lot of suffering and cost many lives.
This proves that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Then again, very few people seem to know anything about healthcare provision, yet pontificate like experts.
Take a look at Europe for how we should do healthcare. Shock horror, it's a mix of public and private that isn't anything like America and is affordable for all. And that you can actually access. And doesn't waste all the billions we put into it.
This proves that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Wrong. 1) The Labour party do intend further privatisation and 2) the current creeping privatisation has been directly attributed, time and again, to worsening outcomes. A third point would be that capitalism and healthcare fundamentally do not mix, as one relies on quantitative feedback and metrics, while the other can only be measured subjectively.
The NHS model is not that of European healthcare systems, and further privatisation under this model will cause damage.
Which is why we need to change to a European model.
The NHS model is outdated. When it was created, it was designed to be used to make people healthier, then demand would go down. They didn't envision a society where we would all lead healthier lives, live longer and then need healthcare in our later lives as a natural byproduct of aging.
The NHS hasn't moved with the times, so either we reform it or we stick with the current model, continuing to chuck money into a bottomless pit.
People say that Labour are like the Tories but they're not at all like the Tories. People say this basically want the Labour Party to be the socialist workers party. There wouldn't be happy with anything else.
If you're tired of people who are upset with their choices at the polls, consider working to pass electoral reform so they can shut the fuck up and get off the sidelines and show us how it's done!
The solution is more democracy, not vote shaming people into a false dichotomy merry go round.
and now we may have a blairite to look forward to, wish the working class would vote in theyre interest
Blair took a few years to embrace authoritarianism. Starmer is doing it straight out of the gate.
and now we may have a blairite to look forward to, wish the working class would vote in theyre interest
Exactly this. Starting with better education, schooling, and basic spelling competency. But instead we get Tory.
wish the working class would vote in theyre interest
That's what I plan to do, while being well aware that playing within the rules they've set us won't actually change anything (but I refuse to vote for someone who doesn't represent me, and Labour now categorically don't), and aiming to abolish the establishment, rather than put any trust in it to look out for the working class, because it never will, no matter how we vote. By design.
There's always been a strong dose of authoritarianism about the red team, they might purport to represent the working classes but they also seem to want to 'improve' them too. And as someone on the Alexei Sayle podcast pointed out, their Foreign Policy is always quite imperialistic.
That's exactly the article the run in the US when they don't want the progressives to vote
But this is published in The Guardian so that doesn't really track with the whole let's suppress the left wing vote conspiracy
Good. That's how it should be.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It also suggests the prime minister is at risk of losing his own constituency, the new Richmond & Northallerton seat in North Yorkshire, to Labour with his lead less than 2.5 percentage points.
The poll also suggests the Scottish National Party would pick up 41 seats, the Liberal Democrats 22 and Plaid Cymru two.
Naomi Smith, Best for Britain’s chief executive, said: “With the polling showing swathes of voters turning their backs on the Tories, it’s clear that this will be a change election.”
The findings come after Labour sources said the party’s overall financial position remained strong despite membership subscriptions falling off because donations were healthy and unions were expected to give very substantial backing to the election effort.
Labour has suffered more than a 23,000 fall in membership over the past two months after controversies over its policy on Gaza and its U-turn on green investment, according to figures released to its National Executive Committee (NEC).The party’s general secretary, David Evans, revealed that membership, which had stood at 390,000 in January, had plummeted to 366,604 at the latest count, with more than 11,700 of these being in arrears.
Labour only had 150,000 members at the end of its last period in office [in 2010],” he said.“The state of the opinion polls suggest there is no correlation between membership and electoral popularity.”
The original article contains 388 words, the summary contains 223 words. Saved 43%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I've been hearing about record turnout and fears of a Trump landslide, I've heard that Trump will fail fantastically and nobody will vote R, it's almost like all of this polling is basically useless propaganda.
Go out and vote. Ignore the pollsters. They all said that Clinton would win in 16
Welcome to UK politics...
I'm feeling this election is going to get quite a lot of fringe MPs by function of their previous defection.