Count Binface - disappointing. Got several front page plugs in the comic rag Daily Star but polled fewer than 400 votes.
The SNP getting gubbed as badly in Scotland as the Conservatives are in England. The big difference though seems to be that the Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Hunt and some others have held their hands up and said they are sorry. As far as I can tell the SNP haven't even admitted they've done anything wrong to deserve the drubbing Labour are giving them. They have to face facts and take responsibility. Really, they should know that after 18 years in Power.
You were right and I was wrong - he lost! I guess he can spend more time presenting chat shows on GB News now...
Q: What do Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer have in common? A: Both of them have Nigel Farage to thank for their General Election victories. The rise of UKIP manoeuvred David Cameron into a decision that split the Conservative Party from top to bottom. The Brexit Party could have wrecked Johnson's campaign in 2019 and allowed Jeremy Corbyn to become Prime Minister. But Farage stood aside and gave Johnson a clear run. Reform UK has now destroyed the Government of Rishi Sunak, and gifted Keir Starmer a massive majority. I wonder now whether the ragged remains of the Conservative Party will now dance to the tune of Farage. Make no mistake. No other politician has had a more profound effect on British Politics in the last 25 years than Nigel Farage. And the man has only just been elected to Parliament. Farage is a master beyond comparison at playing the public mood. He is ten times the political player than Johnson, Sunak or Starmer will ever be. Will the Conservatives fall under his spell now? Or will they abandon extremism and return to the Centre ground. Sadly for them and for the Country, I think it will be the former.
Well our stupid electoral system has delivered the expected result. The Labour Party currently has 412 seats with only 33.7% of the vote. That means that it only got just over a third of the votes, but no doubt as with all elections since 1945 this will be taking as a mandate to do just what it wants despite two third of the votes not being for it. As predicted my seat (Beckenham and Penge) has become a Labour safe seat after the boundary changes from a Conservative safe seat. It would be nice if my vote counted for something!
Every Country in Europe except the UK and Belarus uses some kind of PR in its election system. Here in the UK we should abolish the House of Lords and replace it with a second Chamber elected by some form of PR. This second chamber must have some law-modifying powers (as the Lords currently has) but it should be made clear that when it comes to the crunch the Commons still has the final say. But a PR democratic second chamber would allow Britain to acclimatise to all the differences of PR democracy that we are not used to. If the PR chamber was elected every 5 years, but those elections were spaced 30 months apart from Commons General Elections, we would have a system where the People get to vote every 2 and a half years (for one chamber or the other), not simply once every 5 years. I think this would re-invigorate interest in Democracy in this Country.
I've favoured PR for years. The Tories never complained about the first-past-the-post when it favoured them, they loved it then! In fact they had the chance to change it in the Cameron coalition, but Cameron tricked Nick Clegg into a referendum in which we were presented with a half-baked alternative which nobody wanted, and we voted to keep the current system.
The right wing press are divided this morning (rather like the remaining Tories) The Express, credit to them, takes it on the chin. Gracious in Defeat. Sour grapes on the other hand from the Mail - who are still backing Bonkers Boris
Labour may have won a landslide, but they've inherited nearly £3trillion of national debt and public services which have been underfunded and run down, a cost of living crisis, seemingly insoluble immigration problems, and a public that wants to pay less tax. Oh, and climate change. Hence no celebrating.
I agree about replacing the House of Lords. The problem with this going PR before The House of Commons, would be that if it was effective and capable of hindering Government business no doubt the Government would blame the PR system for giving them a hostile second chamber. Particularly a Conservative Government, I can already hear 'We need to go back to First Past the Post for the upper chamber'. The other problem is voter apathy. I doubt such a second house would get more than a 40% electoral turn out. In many ways I'm not sure we need a second chamber at all, if the government of the day can force through legislation anyway. This is particularly true if the House of Commons represented the actual voting intentions of the public better rather than the Government in power. After all the Scottish Parliament is unicameral! ( a good word I'd never heard of before but found on Wikipedia meaning a parliament with only one chamber). According to Wikipedia 78 countries are bicameral and 112 are unicameral. So we would be out of step with the majority for a change! I'm not saying I have a better solution, I don't!
One of the potential problems with PR is that you end up with a couple of dozen Parties in Parliament, with no single Party having more than maybe 35% of the seats. So you end up with coalitions and alliances that A) are too fragile, and are always at the mercy of one coalition partner threatening to walk out and bring the Government down. B) Do not represent what anybody actually voted for. Voters vote for Parties, not coalitions or alliances or blocks. A recipe for paralysis and chaos in politics. First past the Post is a kind of hybrid between democracy and dictatorship, as Labour have just demonstrated. But there is no denying that a Government with a 170 seat majority can change the course of history if it is well enough led. A PR based cobbled-together Government will have the greatest of difficulty just deciding what to have for breakfast - it will always be held to ransom by its fringe elements. This is why I believe PR should have a role to play in moderating or modifying the law-making of the Commons. But a pure PR Parliament would be a disaster for the UK in my view. Between 2019 and 2024 the Tories got hardly anything done, and that was with an 80 seat majority. Imagine what we would get if you had a Coalition Government made up of 180 Labour MPs, 75 Lib Dems, two dozen Greens, 30 SNP... Or 200 Tories, 80 Reform UK, 35 Independents (each with his own agenda) 15 Reclaim fascists and Count Binface. It would be total anarchy.
Sir Keir says we have too many prisoners. How about we build more super prisons? More jobs, fewer scumbags on the streets. We are going to need plenty more cells, especially when a million people come ashore each year.
