Brexit.

[Luisa Land]

It is difficult to understand from a distance (from the EU) what leads to the British voter's election decision.
When it comes to factual issues, the uk polls put Brexit and ""health" as subjects at the top of the list. The polls show a narrow majority against the Brexit, the health policy of the conservatives is devastating. Nevertheless, the Conservative Party is leading.
Ok, I understand the most dont want Corbyn as PM...
But there are also smaller parties. Does the British electoral system (first past the post) prevent the blockade in the British Parliament from dissolving?
And why is there no serious movement to change this weakness of the British electoral system?

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

 

[Sid]

And why is there no serious movement to change this weakness of the British electoral system?

The fact that something is in place since ......... (fill in the date) has often more importance than efficiency.
The British love traditions far more than the rest of the EU.
And the parties that gain the most of the somewhat outdated democratic system will do everything to keep it in place of course.
It is beneficial for them, if they can get a majority in Parliament with only 35% or so of the totally casted votes.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

@Luisa: I don't think so.

 

[Essence Lumin]

Je maintiendrai

 

[Sid]

Je maintiendrai

If you would go out in the streets and ask the Dutch what it is, you would find that a vast majority will not have a clue what you are talking about.
And on top of that it is mostly a royal thingy.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

It is difficult to understand from a distance (from the EU) what leads to the British voter's election decision.
When it comes to factual issues, the uk polls put Brexit and ""health" as subjects at the top of the list. The polls show a narrow majority against the Brexit, the health policy of the conservatives is devastating. Nevertheless, the Conservative Party is leading.
Ok, I understand the most dont want Corbyn as PM...
But there are also smaller parties. Does the British electoral system (first past the post) prevent the blockade in the British Parliament from dissolving?
And why is there no serious movement to change this weakness of the British electoral system?

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

I'm not so sure you can deduce too much about the strengths and weaknesses of the British electoral system from the last two years.

In the past, the complaint -- rightly -- has always been that the first past the post system tends to give both the winning party and the smaller national parties an artificial advantage in terms of seats, leading to governments -- particularly those of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair -- that can cause Parliament to pass just about anything they want.

During my lifetime, or at least since I've been old enough to be aware of such things, we've had minority governments three times before 2010 -- those of Harold Wilson from March to October 1974, Jim Callaghan from 1977--79, and John Major from December 1996--7. Then in 2010 the Conservatives and Lib Dems formed a coalition government, which lasted for the full five-year term.

The recent problems have been caused by David Cameron calling a referendum with no plan about what to happen if he lost, then Theresa May calling a completely unnecessary general election and, on being returned with a minority, insisting on behaving both as if she'd won the decisive majority she'd expected and as if the narrow referendum result represented a resounding popular mandate.

We did, however, make an attempt quite recently to change the first past the post system, back in 2011, with the Alternative Vote referendum, in which the proposal to switch to the Alternative Vote system was convincingly defeated 68% vs 32% on a 42.% turnout (I didn't bother to vote since it was obvious the proposal would be defeated, but had I voted it would have been to keep things as they were).

While I'm perfectly prepared to accept that things might have gone very differently had a different system been proposed, the fact is that the Liberal Democrats, who'd been demanding PR for decades, insisted on the referendum as part of the price of going into coalition with David Cameron, and that's the proposal they ended up putting to the electorate, so to my mind they have only themselves to blame for selecting an unpopular system.

Be that as it may, we have recently tried to reform the electoral system, only to have the proposals convincingly rejected by the electorate, so it's mistaken to say there's no serious movement to change the system -- there was, only 8 or 9 years ago, and people didn't like the changes on offer.

At the moment, British politics seems to be undergoing profound changes, with the Conservatives turning into a hard-right, pro-Brexit, English nationalist party, and the Lib Dems trying to offer a home to the more liberally-minded (at least compared to their more right-wing former colleagues) , pro-EU, "one nation" Conservative MPs whom Boris Johnson recently purged.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party was on the verge of splitting until the 2017 election and its unexpectedly strong performance under Corbyn, so things are on hold until the results of next week's elections are known and things move on from there.

Certainly when Corbyn goes the Labour Party will change a lot, though the changes will depend greatly on the outcome of the election and the timing, circumsances and nature of his decision to step down, but there's going to be a huge fight between the more moderate (or, in my case, bleakly cynical) end of the party and the more hard-left groups like Momentum over the leadership and future direction of the party.

It's too early to call the outcome but I suspect that, one way or another, we'll eventually see the more left-wing Liberal Democrats and the more right-wing and centrist Labour MPs and supporters will end up in one centre-left party and the far-left of the current Labour Party in a separate party.

But that's a concern for another time -- at the moment, Brexit is going to dominate British politics until there's some clear way forward, and after that I, for one, will certainly welcome a break from referendums and constitutional issues for a while (since I'm in my 60s, I think about 20 or 30 years should be a reasonable interval).

 

[Essence Lumin]

If you would go out in the streets and ask the Dutch what it is, you would find that a vast majority will not have a clue what you are talking about.
And on top of that it is mostly a royal thingy.

OK. I was curious. I've heard the Dutch have some sort of royalty. My impression is it holds nowhere near the importance to the Dutch as the royalty do to the UK.

Royal Thingys can cause trouble as I've read about Prince Andrew.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

OK. I was curious. I've heard the Dutch have some sort of royalty. My impression is it holds nowhere near the importance to the Dutch as the royalty do to the UK.

Royal Thingys can cause trouble as I've read about Prince Andrew.

The important thing, at least as far as I'm concerned, about constitutional monarchies isn't how junior members of the family behave -- and the younger siblings of the heir to the throne are, for constitutional purposes at least, very junior indeed after their older siblings have married and started families -- but in what powers the monarch has, not because the monarch is going to use them but because this stops anyone else from having them.

Consequently, our PM -- the Head of Government -- doesn't enjoy anything like the personal powers and privileges enjoyed by the US President (for example, executive privilege or the ability to pardon people at will) because those powers belong to the Head of State, the Queen, and the Head of Government can only advise her to exercise them, with that advice being susceptible to judicial oversight.

This was the very important issue -- more important even than Brexit in some ways -- behind our Supreme Court's 11-0 decision that Johnson's attempt to have the Queen prorogue Parliament was unlawful and completely void.

If a British PM were trying to hide behind Crown Privilege, then the courts would allow that only to the extent they thought the PM was exercising that privilege for a lawful purpose, which trying to hide his personal business affairs or his alleged attempts to pervert the course of public justice, or otherwise conceal his abuse the powers of his office from lawful scrutiny obviously wouldn't be.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The Telegraph's Peter Foster on the implications of today's leaked document on the implications of Johnson's deal for Northern Ireland's trade with the rest of the UK.

In short, not good at all, and Boris Johnson has been lying through his back teeth about it (you could have knocked me down with a feather!).

The Treasury understands the problems, even though Johnson is desperately trying to say there aren't any:

Can Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal avoid a border in the Irish Sea?

We examine the PM’s claim that Great Britain-Northern Ireland trade will remain frictionless

www.theguardian.com

 

[Sid]

OK. I was curious. I've heard the Dutch have some sort of royalty. My impression is it holds nowhere near the importance to the Dutch as the royalty do to the UK.

Royal Thingys can cause trouble as I've read about Prince Andrew.

We don't have some sort of royalty. NL is a kingdom just like the UK.
And just like in the UK our king has no or little political power. Their function is mainly ceremonial, just like for instance the president of Germany.
Political power is with the parliament and the government.

Of course the British queen is far more well known all over the world, than the other royal families that still are head of state in Europe (Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Spain, The Netherlands). She is still head of state of more countries spread all over the world.

Our king has an approval rate of 80% in the Netherlands. So he is popular.
My personal opinion: We are lucky that we had a few queens and now a king in a row who were/are good at their job. But kingdoms belong in fairy tales, not in modern day democracies.

 

[Tigger]

Her words are damning, so obviously a filthy traitor remainer who'll hang from the lamp posts with the rest of us in the post brexit pogroms

“I have been increasingly dismayed by the way in which our political leaders have tried to deliver Brexit, with reluctance to address honestly, even with our own citizens, the challenges and trade-offs which Brexit involves; the use of misleading or disingenuous arguments about the implications of the various options before us; and some behaviour towards our institutions, which, were it happening in another country, we would almost certainly as diplomats have received instructions to register our concern,”
“It makes our job to promote democracy and the rule of law that much harder, if we are not seen to be upholding these core values at home,”

British diplomat in US resigns, saying she can't 'peddle half-truths' on Brexit

Alexandra Hall Hall, Brexit counsellor in Washington, described UK government’s ‘use of misleading or disingenuous arguments’

www.theguardian.com

 

[Tigger]

I'm not so sure you can deduce too much about the strengths and weaknesses of the British electoral system from the last two years.

In the past, the complaint -- rightly -- has always been that the first past the post system tends to give both the winning party and the smaller national parties an artificial advantage in terms of seats, leading to governments -- particularly those of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair -- that can cause Parliament to pass just about anything they want.

During my lifetime, or at least since I've been old enough to be aware of such things, we've had minority governments three times before 2010 -- those of Harold Wilson from March to October 1974, Jim Callaghan from 1977--79, and John Major from December 1996--7. Then in 2010 the Conservatives and Lib Dems formed a coalition government, which lasted for the full five-year term.

The recent problems have been caused by David Cameron calling a referendum with no plan about what to happen if he lost, then Theresa May calling a completely unnecessary general election and, on being returned with a minority, insisting on behaving both as if she'd won the decisive majority she'd expected and as if the narrow referendum result represented a resounding popular mandate.

We did, however, make an attempt quite recently to change the first past the post system, back in 2011, with the Alternative Vote referendum, in which the proposal to switch to the Alternative Vote system was convincingly defeated 68% vs 32% on a 42.% turnout (I didn't bother to vote since it was obvious the proposal would be defeated, but had I voted it would have been to keep things as they were).

While I'm perfectly prepared to accept that things might have gone very differently had a different system been proposed, the fact is that the Liberal Democrats, who'd been demanding PR for decades, insisted on the referendum as part of the price of going into coalition with David Cameron, and that's the proposal they ended up putting to the electorate, so to my mind they have only themselves to blame for selecting an unpopular system.

Be that as it may, we have recently tried to reform the electoral system, only to have the proposals convincingly rejected by the electorate, so it's mistaken to say there's no serious movement to change the system -- there was, only 8 or 9 years ago, and people didn't like the changes on offer.

At the moment, British politics seems to be undergoing profound changes, with the Conservatives turning into a hard-right, pro-Brexit, English nationalist party, and the Lib Dems trying to offer a home to the more liberally-minded (at least compared to their more right-wing former colleagues) , pro-EU, "one nation" Conservative MPs whom Boris Johnson recently purged.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party was on the verge of splitting until the 2017 election and its unexpectedly strong performance under Corbyn, so things are on hold until the results of next week's elections are known and things move on from there.

Certainly when Corbyn goes the Labour Party will change a lot, though the changes will depend greatly on the outcome of the election and the timing, circumsances and nature of his decision to step down, but there's going to be a huge fight between the more moderate (or, in my case, bleakly cynical) end of the party and the more hard-left groups like Momentum over the leadership and future direction of the party.

It's too early to call the outcome but I suspect that, one way or another, we'll eventually see the more left-wing Liberal Democrats and the more right-wing and centrist Labour MPs and supporters will end up in one centre-left party and the far-left of the current Labour Party in a separate party.

But that's a concern for another time -- at the moment, Brexit is going to dominate British politics until there's some clear way forward, and after that I, for one, will certainly welcome a break from referendums and constitutional issues for a while (since I'm in my 60s, I think about 20 or 30 years should be a reasonable interval).

Not surprisingly I disagree, not on the facts just on the conclusions we can draw from them.

In my view the worst failing of any political system has to be leaving voters feeling unrepresented. Our FPTP system does that in spades. For example, the wikipedia entry on safe seats notes that some seats have not changed party hands for almost 200 years (such as Shropshire North tory since 1835, Haltemprice and Howden tory since 1837, Rutland and Melton, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, and East Worthing and Shoreham tory since 1841 and so on) constituency boundaries have changed in that time but the geographical areas they represent still continue to return Tory MPs. If you aren't a Tory and live in one of these areas, why would even bother to vote? Your vote has meant nothing since 1835, why would it suddenly mean something in 2019?

First Past the Post means that the only voices that ever carry any weight are the winners. A PR system would mean that every vote carried some weight. Now I despise UKIP but they have attracted 10% and more of the vote share nationally but they certainly have never held 10% of the seats. In fact they've never won a single seat. How can a UKIP voter feel their vote means anything ?

There are 650 seats in the commons. In 2017, only 70 seats changed hands. Our system is seized solid people slowly losing any interest in voting because there is so little change.

Unfortunately as others here have observed; in the UK nothing is prized more than a total lack of change over time, particularly by those in power and even more so in regards to the system that keeps them there. We've managed to turn our democracy into a second aristocracy where parentage and background count more than talent or ability because our political parties determine who stands as a candidate in what seats and the vast majority of seats are so safe that they practically count as a job for life for whichever candidate is placed there.

As Innula notes there was one attempt made recently to make a change to our system, by the LibDems in exchange for supporting the Tories. This partnership has been used ever since to beat the LibDems because of the student fees issue and everyone has forgotten that they tried to change the entire basis of the political system. It was a brave attempt, but I don't think the general population at the time really had any idea what that referendum was about. Saying it's the LibDems fault for picking an unpopular system is probably unfair. I wonder how many of our electorate could describe more than one voting system (I can't tell you how SAV works, without looking it up). From what I've seen a shamefully small number of us have even slightest idea of how our own system works.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

In my view the worst failing of any political system has to be leaving voters feeling unrepresented.

That's where we differ -- first and foremost, I want political systems to deliver stable governments that command at least the acquiescence, however grudging, of most of the electorate.

For most of the last 50 years, FPTP has done pretty much that -- the last three years, though they feel like a lifetime, are a very much a departure from a norm that was, until David Cameron and his bloody referendum, working pretty well, and I don't think it's reasonable to reach any conclusions based on the last 3 years without looking at how things have worked (or not) over the last 50 or 60 years.

Quite possibly we will need to change things, since British politics seems pretty badly broken at the moment, and, for the reasons I outlined above, I think things are very much in transition, but the time to change them is when things calm down a bit -- this just isn't a good time to start messing around with new voting systems, and I'm not sure that yet another national referendum on top of (I hope) a second EU referendum isn't too much of a good thing.

As to the previous attempt to introduce PR, whose fault was it that the option put to the public was AV?

At least according to Wikipedia, the Tories, who wanted to keep FPTP, offered it to the Lib Dems, who would have preferred PR, in return for joining the coalition, but it was presumably open to Nick Clegg to turn down the offer if he thought it was a bad one, just as it was open to him to refuse to go into government if it meant ditching his party's commitment not to increase university tuition fees.

 

[Govi]

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

In recent polls so far the Tories are in the lead: 43% Tories, 33% Labour and 13% Libdem at election day.

UK general election poll tracker

Poll of polls tracks voting intention ahead of the general election

www.ft.com

 

[Tigger]

When you look at polls remember that the Tories were 20 points ahead, not 10, in 2017 and as a result of that election that had to buy the DUP to keep a majority.

 

[Tigger]

That's where we differ -- first and foremost, I want political systems to deliver stable governments that command at least the acquiescence, however grudging, of most of the electorate.

For most of the last 50 years, FPTP has done pretty much that -- the last three years, though they feel like a lifetime, are a very much a departure from a norm that was, until David Cameron and his bloody referendum, working pretty well, and I don't think it's reasonable to reach any conclusions based on the last 3 years without looking at how things have worked (or not) over the last 50 or 60 years.

Quite possibly we will need to change things, since British politics seems pretty badly broken at the moment, and, for the reasons I outlined above, I think things are very much in transition, but the time to change them is when things calm down a bit -- this just isn't a good time to start messing around with new voting systems, and I'm not sure that yet another national referendum on top of (I hope) a second EU referendum isn't too much of a good thing.

As to the previous attempt to introduce PR, whose fault was it that the option put to the public was AV?

At least according to Wikipedia, the Tories, who wanted to keep FPTP, offered it to the Lib Dems, who would have preferred PR, in return for joining the coalition, but it was presumably open to Nick Clegg to turn down the offer if he thought it was a bad one, just as it was open to him to refuse to go into government if it meant ditching his party's commitment not to increase university tuition fees.

I don't find grudging acquiescence to be an adequate basis for government.

In my view brexit has just thrown the failings of our system into stark relief. They've always been there if you looked closely enough but at a time of relatively minor local turmoil they could be ignored. You worry about things like the fixed term parliament act for not dealing well with edge cases but you don't seem at all bothered that the entire political system is incapable of dealing with edge cases. Right now those edge cases include the impact of the internet on politics, the impact of a malign foreign influence on politics and the impact of climate change on everything.

Our system, based on wild swings between extremes, is confrontational and combative. it is not suitable for setting long term goals or plans beyond 1 or perhaps 2 elections away. At most 10 years or at current length of term, about 3-4 years. You can see this in the promises being made for this election 50 new hospitals (AFTER 10 years - i.e. you can't judge me until after Im gone) 50,000 more nurses (AFTER 10 years. We are already short of 43,000 nurses, even if they could provide 50,000 more than now in ten years time we could still be short of a target number by 43,000 or more ) These are not sincere promises of a political party with a long term plan for improving the country they are throw away promises pushed into what, politically, is the far future. We have massive existential threats not just to the UK but to ALL LIFE ON THE FUCKING PLANET which require enormous upheaval of the status quo and we are not fit to decide with how we deal with our next door neighbours and closest friends.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Tigger: democracy is build upon the principle of building groups: likeminded people should group together and build an organization, a party, in order to realize their projects. The problem is that Brexit is a topic which was for all parties a non topic until the referendum - so suddenly grouping people around Brexit was a topic, which was none before - so those people were split more or less evenly around all major parties. And that schism is what tears parties apart and forms new ones which primarily focus on that topic only, e.g. the Brexit party.

This is indeed an edge case - but one of the major problems is that it took Theresa May so long to get their guts together, so that most now do view BoJo as the only person only to sort this mess out because he's acting outside the box, which May was not. The GE might be a method to break the dead lock in parliament, but we've got to wait until it happened and we do know the results.

The other thing is an issue for all democracies, and not easily to be resolved. On the other hand authocracies and kingdoms, where democracy plays no role, are not acting so much different though: they are creating usually five years plans, naming the major goals they want to reach and acting accordingly. E.g. Saudi Arabia and China are run that way. So there it depends on the content of those five year plans, which is fundamentally different between KSA and PRC, of course.

And especially China does not care if getting down there to the goal might be a desaster; we've just got to look at Mao's "Great Leap forward", which as a result had a death toll on the Chinese population - the range goes from 45 up to 60 million people - simlar to the overall death toll of WWII. And this was not the result of a war, but politics of their own government only trying to modernize the economy.

Democracies and authocracies both fail at large in implementing long term goals > 5 years.

 

[Tigger]

Tigger: democracy is build upon the principle of building groups: likeminded people should group together and build an organization, a party, in order to realize their projects. The problem is that Brexit is a topic which was for all parties a non topic until the referendum - so suddenly grouping people around Brexit was a topic, which was none before - so those people were split more or less evenly around all major parties. And that schism is what tears parties apart and forms new ones which primarily focus on that topic only, e.g. the Brexit party.

This is indeed an edge case - but one of the major problems is that it took Theresa May so long to get their guts together, so that most now do view BoJo as the only person only to sort this mess out because he's acting outside the box, which May was not. The GE might be a method to break the dead lock in parliament, but we've got to wait until it happened and we do know the results.

The other thing is an issue for all democracies, and not easily to be resolved. On the other hand authocracies and kingdoms, where democracy plays no role, are not acting so much different though: they are creating usually five years plans, naming the major goals they want to reach and acting accordingly. E.g. Saudi Arabia and China are run that way. So there it depends on the content of those five year plans, which is fundamentally different between KSA and PRC, of course.

And especially China does not care if getting down there to the goal might be a desaster; we've just got to look at Mao's "Great Leap forward", which as a result had a death toll on the Chinese population - the range goes from 45 up to 60 million people - simlar to the overall death toll of WWII. And this was not the result of a war, but politics of their own government only trying to modernize the economy.

Democracies and authocracies both fail at large in implementing long term goals > 5 years.

First past the post results in a default 2 party system. Yes, there are more than 2 parties but there are only 2 parties that can produce on outright win. As a result you have two choices, support a 3rd party and hope enough people abandon one of the 2 pre-defined winners that party #3 can take their place as one of the possible winners OR join one of the winners and try to change their policies from within.

This results in the two large parties being "broad churches". That broad church concept has been the Tory strategy forever. The Tories occupy the right in the UK. They have no political rivals in their right-wing ground except the openly fascist or racist parties that border on being terror organisations. On the left in the UK you have.... everyone else. Lib Dems (centrist/left) Labour (very left right now) Green (left) even the nationalist parties are left (except the DUP, but NI is its only little rats nest of hate and tribalism) As such every election is Fragmented Left vs United Right. Until UKIP came along and started eating a few percentage points out of the tories vote. It wasn't a lot but the tories know well how small shifts in numbers are massively magnified by the FPTP system. They panicked and created brexit.

Brexit did not find two unified solid monolith parties and split them apart, the huge entities have always been fractured, with factions clinging together for fear of falling into the political wasteland of "Not one of the 2 parties in a 2 party system". In a healthier democracy there would be more parties the so called "One nation" tories would be a party in their own right, there would be more variety.

 

[Aribeth Zelin]

I was just about to post this.