“Hi all, after what has been an incredibly busy period it would be nice to make the most of the lovely weather and have some socially distanced drinks in the No 10 garden this evening. Please join us from 6pm and bring your own booze!” This e-mail was sent to 100 staff in Downing Street,at a time when social mixing was banned apart from with one other person from another household outdoors. Johnson refuses to say if he and his wife were in attendance, although his spokesman did not deny they were there. It is not going down well with those who lost loved ones, couldn't be with them in their final hours, or even attend their funeral. I dread to think what pressure Sue Gray is under as she conducts an inquiry into the illegal goings on in Downing Street. Even if Johnson wasn't at the party he can hardly claim to be unaware of a hundred people in his back garden. This stinks along with all of the other parties that have been reported in Downing Street, and come about when there is a PM whose only interest is in himself.
I dread to think what the repercussions of this would be. Labour haven't been much of an opposition, but this could see the UK left without an opposition at all. https://evolvepolitics.com/the-labour-party-is-on-the-verge-of-bankruptcy/
Proud to say I was one of those who left because Starmer (and the rest of those in the election to replace him) stabbed Jeremy Corbyn in the back, dissociated themselves from socialism and became Tory Lite 2.0 Starmer accentuated the 100,000 leaving by removing any sense of party direction or resolve to sort out this country, leaving us to the Hooray Henry ****wittery of the Eton/Harrow Alumni.
It amazes me that Corbyn after his disasters at the election which gave the Hooray Henrys an 80 seat majority still has a following that would rather see a corrupt Johnson in power than attempt to unseat him by their infighting. As some friends from both sides of the political spectrum have said to me, he was never going to be electable. Both main parties are held together by links that get stretched to almost breaking point at times, but if you wish to change the direction of the country you have to first win power. Blair was bright enough to realise that offering a very left wing agenda would not get support, but having achieved power many more social measures were brought in slowly. Many would wish that he had done more, and in some ways he was more right wing than Major, but if you look at what he did achieve it makes the governments of the past decade look regressive. My Tory friends, that amazingly I still have, see Starmer as a far greater threat than the man who they dismissed all to easily as a red under the bed.
Because JC could never succeed with the media against him. That doesn't say much for the 'democracy' we boast about across the world. And invade countries because they don't hold our idea democracy (this is where Blair comes in). Tony Blair "achieved" an increase in the gap between rich and poor. This is unforgiveable. The 'very left-wing agenda' had 80% approval ratings until people realised they were Labour policies. This is because the public are prejudiced by the media. Starmer would not, without any doubt, change the status quo. He's weaker than Blair in that regard. JC's following is because he is a very decent man, and there ain't many (any?) others in Parliament with his record of decency and being on the right side of history.
If JC ever became leader of the Labour Party again, or worse still set up his own party, would the right wing press treat him any differently? I suspect the answer is no. We have a slight control over politicians when they know an election will be taking place, but we have no control whatsoever about what a right wing press chooses to publish. He may well be a very decent man, but my point is that in opposition you have limited opportunity to put decent policies into effect. You must first win an election. Everyday you can see the present corrupt government removing a little bit more of our democracy. It may be taking away rights given to us by the EU, wanting politicians to overturn court judgements, or selling off the NHS which the people of the country have paid for, and rightfully belongs to them. It has been shown that working together has brought about two by-election defeats in very safe Tory seats, and in my opinion it is by working together, not splitting the opposition more, this dreadful period of political life can be put behind us. A coalition of parties should bring about a decent form of PR, which would take us back to a fairer position. Beyond that the country would be able to decide if it wished to follow the far more progressive policies that exist in some countries.
I agree....and the trouble with the two major parties is that they are really coalitions in themselves which are pulled this way and that ... and then have to offer some sort of compromised agenda...which has been happening in the LP forever........ I think what Blair {and i am not talking about Foreign Policy} and Brown did was so much better than what we have had since..... and sadly the LP have to deal with the right wing media as well as the Tories at every turn.... Most of Europe including Germany is run by coalitions and i also agree PR would be a step forwards in getting a more balanced Govt..... other than this divisive toing and frooing we get in our oppositional system that we call democracy....
The problem which Britain's political system produces is that you always end up with a government which only a minority actually voted for - so 60+% will go away scratching their heads and feeling disenfranchised after every election. This can only lead to political inertia in the long run, where the majority of the electorate feel disengaged from politics. Tony Blair was actually in favour of PR but was, apparently, talked out of it by his advisers - had he stuck to his guns on this things might have turned out differently for Britain. Stopping to think about this - the ripping up of Britain's industry in the 80s, the disaster of British involvement in the Iraq war and the Brexit referendum would all never have happened if a PR system had been in place.
The argument for the first past the post system is that the elector is directly putting in parliament the person they wish to represent them. Fair enough until that member is controlled by party whips, and no longer represents the views that he/she stood on when they were seeking election. It is infuriating when you send an e-mail to your MP and get back, if lucky, the standard party template reply. The days of the free thinking MP has largely gone, so you might just as well vote for a party. The first MP I became aware of was Frederick Fairey-Jones elected MP for Watford in 1955. He was a very right wing Tory, who hardly ever spoke in Westminster, and did not take much notice of those he represented. If he was there, he liked travel, he trooped through the division lobby without much thought as he seemed to always do as he was told. He spoke six languages so wasn't a dimwit, but was not an individual in any way. So really hoping he would represent the voters of Watford as Mr. Jones did not happen, as he never wanted to raise his head above the parapet. Mind you in those days the Tories were paying men from WWII above the rate of inflation increases to their pensions.
It's possible for constituencies to directly elect their representative in parliament and have PR as well Frenchie. This is what they do in Germany. The constituencies here are about twice the size of those in the UK and they all send someone to the Bundestag on a direct mandate - but then the rest of the Bundestag is rounded off to make sure that each party has a fair share of members of parliament. So half those in the Bundestag are on a direct mandate the other half come from the reserve lists from the different parties. This means that the exact number of MPs here can vary - it's not a set figure as in the UK.
Yes, there are different forms of PR. The direct representation argument is used in the UK as a reason not to have PR.
I agree with you about the media, but clearly this is highly undesirable. Owned by tax-avoiding billionaires, yet setting the political agenda of our country. Some ‘democracy’! When we invade countries to install our idea of democracy, do we similarly install a destabilising media owned by non-domiciles? All very well and good re the getting in to power to do the right thing point, but, at the risk of sounding like Neil Kinnock it was a ‘Labour’ government, a ‘Labour’ government, that started the selling off of the NHS. A ‘Labour’ government that privatised via PPP (‘Public/Private Partnerships’ or more accurately ‘Pissing Away Public Ownership’) various previously publicly-owned assets. All in the name of ‘Labour’. The splitting of the PLP happens because they did/do not represent their membership, who were palpably behind Mr Corbyn. The very popular manifesto (until people discovered whose name was on the front) clearly shows the agenda wanted by swathes of the public. Is PR the way? I don’t know. I think after the Liberals sold their values/souls in 2009 to get power, that is a less appetising thought than before. I’m more resigned to the inevitable corruption of our system now. We missed the boat with Jeremy Corbyn, and now I feel that Gandhi’s (please forgive approximation of this quote) “A country run by idiots is well represented” is the most apposite.
That sounds similar to the additional member system used here in Scotland - although the constituency:list split isn't 50:50 - it's 73:56. I'd be interested in knowing how the winning list seats are calculated - it's a bone of contention here that the more constituency seats a party wins, the less likelihood it has of winning any list seats.
I can only answer that on the local level BB, but the principle is the same throughout the German system. My own town of Engelskirchen has 16 electoral wards for the local council elections and each of them would elect a councillor on a first past the post system. Councillors are then added to that from the reserve list so that each party has a representation in proportion to their overall share of the vote (this is never exact !). The complication would arise if a party won too many seats on the first past the post system eg. if one party won all 16 on that basis but based on something like 40% of the overall vote - which would be possible but unlikely. In this case the other parties would all put forward people from their reserve list - in this case the overall number of councillors would vastly exceed 32 - probably closer to 40. So the overall size of the town council varies - but there is a maximum number based on the population of the town. Smaller parties such as the Green Party get no direct mandates (only the SPD and CDU get these) and so all of our councillors come from the reserve list. Conversely most of those from the SPD or CDU would be direct mandates. This runs through the entire system here. If applied to the House of Commons it would mean that some MPs would be representing constituencies and some wouldn't. If related to the Bundestag it means that a party fraction with few (or no) direct mandates would not necessarily be geographically drawn from the whole country - those on the reserve list of die Linke are mostly from the former East Germany or from NRW.
That’s different to the system in Scotland. Here, the country is split into eight Regions. Each Region has around nine Constituencies (two have ten each and one has eight)- and each Constituency elects one MSP on a FPTP system. Each Region also gets to elect seven List MSPs - which is where the system falls down in the eyes of many. Voters get two votes, 1=Constituency + 2=List. In each Region, the total second vote for each party is divided by the number of Constituency seats each party won +1 - a process repeated six more times until all seven seats have been allocated. This results in two things - firstly the oddity of parties winning the bulk of their seats with small percentages of the vote - as shown in last year’s Scotland-wide election result: SNP - Constituency votes 1,291,204 Seats won 62, Regional votes 1,094,374 Seats won 2 Tories - Constituency votes 592,526 Seats won 5, Regional votes 637,131 Seats won 26 Labour - Constituency votes 584,392 Seats won 2, Regional votes 485,819 Seats won 20 And secondly, the ridiculous situation where candidates don’t need to stand in front of voters in a Constituency to win a seat - they simply have their name added to the party list to virtually guarantee winning a seat. A prime example is Tory MSP Murdo Fraser - he has ‘won’ his seat in every election since 2001 simply by having his name on the party list, not once has his party won more list votes than the SNP, and not once has he actually faced his electorate by standing for a Constituency seat - in through the back door every time. There’s a similar tale for current leader of his party, Douglas Ross. He knew he had little chance of winning his Constituency seat, so he stuck his name on top of the party’s Regional list. 25% of the vote was enough to get the Tories four seats there. There simply has to be a better way than that.
