2015 UK Election Thread

Cameron at least is able to form a stable government

His counterpart in Israel has had to watch as chickens come to roost ...

All of the complaints about the FPTP effect really do seem to miss the point that the rise of a dynamic of attaining the sort of dangerous levels of power through stealing an election by gaming oddities of demographics was a foreseeable consequence of 19th century reforms that was really brought to full fruit in 1911. The altar worship of commons and "absolute democracy" was warned against by (among others) Acton (whose focus was on liberty) and Dicey (whose focus was on the rule of law) - Dicey being particularly interesting as the cited authority on Parliamentary Sovereignty (or supremacy in some contexts) coupled with his rather peculiar sexist and racialist views - who each identified that FPTP was less in sync with absolute democracy than proportional representation but that PR would accelerate the erosion of liberty and the sanctity of common law. An identical debate was held in the turn of the century in SA, Australia, Canada etc ...
Perhaps the real lesson is Parliament ought to be Sovereign but not take itself too seriously, nor should any party read an election result as licence to in one generation shove a manifesto to the expense of 1000 years of British history - as pretty much every thumping victory at the polls has triggered in the last 120 odd years
 
There should never have been a referendum on proportional representation. It's ludicrous to even put it to a public vote which allowed those who benefit from status quo to prevent the change from happening. Under that situation the only alternative is revolution.

Maggie had the vision
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She had no such thing. She pretended to have a grand plan, but the reality was a lot of panicked running about putting out fires, many of which were her or her party's fault.

Paul Hjul said:
Cameron at least is able to form a stable government

His counterpart in Israel has had to watch as chickens come to roost ...
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That would only matter if there was a political party with integrity and an actual vision. The Conservatives and Labour have neither.

that PR would accelerate the erosion of liberty and the sanctity of common law.
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The current system in the UK is doing that anyway.
 
noxibox said:
There should never have been a referendum on proportional representation. It's ludicrous to even put it to a public vote which allowed those who benefit from status quo to prevent the change from happening. Under that situation the only alternative is revolution.


She had no such thing. She pretended to have a grand plan, but the reality was a lot of panicked running about putting out fires, many of which were her or her party's fault.


That would only matter if there was a political party with integrity and an actual vision. The Conservatives and Labour have neither.


The current system in the UK is doing that anyway.
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Nor does Bibi (have integrity or an actual vision - beyond being supreme sith lord over the Middle East)

As for the erosion of liberty and law - the answer is less power in politics rather than dealing with stop gaps in the electoral system. I do strongly believe that the UK electoral law and structure of Parliament needs reform and the model I would go with is three part:
[1] Retain the constituency system observed in commons for commons with a reform on the powers of whips - currently back benchers can be excluded from a vote, instead if an MP violates a triple whip (s)he should be deemed to have left the party caucus and the party should either within 30 days re-invite them into the caucus or accept their resignation from the party (the party looses a seat).
[2] The House of Lords should not form part of the Westminster Parliament and instead the upper chamber should be a 150 member "Lords in Parliament" which should be elected on a proportional balancing tally (the same model used for SA municipal elections actually):
The total number of seats in Parliament would be 800 (650 commons and 150 lords) and parties after a general election have a total nationwide vote tally which is calculated to give a number of seats that a proportional election would result. Seats are then allocated from the 150 seats in a loop as follows:
The party with the largest difference between number of seats held (from the 650) is given a seat and their difference is reduced by one; If two parties have the same sized difference the party with the fewest seats is given the seat (an their difference is reduced by one).
[3] The Blair era reforms on Lords get themselves abolished although all financial benefits of Lords are removed, Members of the European Parliament are eligible to sit in Lords but not to be members of Lords-in-Parliament. The 150 members of L-i-P function as a proper upper house BUT are expected to consider petitions moved through Lords.
 
Dave123 said:
Having read through the thread I have one observation for those being happy about UKIP doing well (even the Conservatives to a lesser degree). I hope you already have your Passport or visa sorted, with the Conservatives remaining in power and being pulled right by UKIP policies you can expect immigration policies and procedures to get a lot tougher and more expensive to get into the UK.

I do find it funny that a user in SA would be openly happy that a bunch of xenophobic bigots like UKIP (who openly want to prevent immigration from places like SA) gained so many votes.

Nigel Farage getting a kicking in Thanet was actually a high point of the election for many people :)).
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That's exactly why so many people support UKIP.
I can understand why lots of people don't like them and call them "xenophobic bigots" , your chances of arriving there with your hands out are getting very slim.
 
CHURCHILL said:
That's exactly why so many people support UKIP.
I can understand why lots of people don't like them and call them "xenophobic bigots" , your chances of arriving there with your hands out are getting very slim.
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There has been so many UKIP candidates who have been recorded being racists. They lost a number of candidates in the run up to the election because of this.

Their policies are not very different to the Tories. Their main policy of EU membership differs only in that they would hold a referendum earlier.

There isn't really any other reason to vote for them.
 
CHURCHILL said:
That's exactly why so many people support UKIP.
I can understand why lots of people don't like them and call them "xenophobic bigots" , your chances of arriving there with your hands out are getting very slim.
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Your assertion as written is quite wrong ;).
 
CHURCHILL said:
That's exactly why so many people support UKIP.
I can understand why lots of people don't like them and call them "xenophobic bigots" , your chances of arriving there with your hands out are getting very slim.
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People support UKIP precisely because they want handouts
they see anybody outside of their mould of a UK person (black, Eastern European decent, IQ above 75) as a threat

Amusingly the namesake of your username would have been the greatest proponent today of berating the sort of stupidity that drives the UKIPs existence
 
Lolworthy article (for some)

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2...e-more-years-tory-government-no-one-predicted

Cameron rebooted: five more years of a shiny computerised toe in a prime-ministerial suit


Charlie Brooker

We’ve had the bloodletting of the Ed Wedding. Now we’ve got the full-fat Tory government that virtually no one predicted


*‘Clonking hither and thither, a thin smile above his shiny chin.’ Photograph: EPA/Facundo Arrizabalaga

Monday 11 May 2015*20.00*BST

It was supposed to be more complicated. After the vote, they said we’d have to get out the constitutional slide rule to try to work out who’d won. The*Wikipedia entry on “minority government”*experienced a huge spike in traffic. There were more bitter arguments about legitimacy than five seasons of Jeremy Kyle. Everyone agreed the election would herald the gravest constitutional crisis since the abdication, or that time*Jade Goody slagged off Shilpa Shetty*on Big Brother. Many said Ed Miliband was certain to become prime minister.

Yep. That’s what they said.

Instead, on the night, we got what Game of Thrones fans might call an “Ed Wedding”; from the shock exit polls onwards, the bloodletting never let up. Now we’ve got the full-fat Tory government that virtually no one predicted. And this is where we find ourselves: halfway through the Cameron Decade. The Cameron Era. Cameronian Times.

Five more years of a shiny computerised toe in a prime-ministerial suit, clonking hither and thither, a thin smile above his shiny chin. He won the election, won completely. Won the **** out of it. He’s already downloaded an OS update, rebooted and entered “phase two”. Maybe this time around he’ll develop some identifiable personality traits for satirists to latch on to, beyond being a bit distant and ultimately unknowable. We can only hope.

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Labour, meanwhile, have tumbled through a wormhole back to the 1980s. Some say it’ll take them a decade to recover, but there’s a precedent for it happening sooner. They were similarly wiped out in 1992, yet won by a landslide just five years later, fronted by a messianic warmonger. So there’s that to look forward to.

The Lib Dems came out worst. As a nationwide cultural force to be reckoned with, they’re now precisely as relevant asAnton Du Beke. It’s clear that, in coalition they were a kind of shock absorber for the Tories – Nick Clegg, in particular, functioning as a hate-magnet, deflecting anger away from Cameron and Osborne. It was inevitable: Clegg seemed like such a blank. He was the default pre-customisation character in a video game. A photofit of a bloke you once met at a barbecue. Someone in a lift at Southampton Radio. As a consequence, he could embody whatever seemed most psychologically convenient for you at the time, which is perhaps why, back in 2010 – at the height of Cleggmania – the public projected their hope on to him, only to replace that with scorn about a year later.

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The polls, though. The polls. For a long while it had seemed implausible that Ed Miliband could ever be prime minister – surely he was too gawky, gauche and inherently comic – but the polls began to claim he was in with a shot. An early run of impressive campaign performances underlined it: they changed the way we looked at him. He suddenly appeared confident, charming even. The underdog made good. He became a*quasi-ironic sex symbol. Even that*insane 8ft stone pledge card*couldn’t completely wreck his chances. But only because they were already wrecked.

Yes, all that pre-vote buzz was ten hundred million thousand years ago, because the polls were wrong and we’d never actually thought anything good about Miliband ever. And the polls were wrong because people were lying to the pollsters. The glaring disparity between the weeks of pre-election polling and the actual result is surely useful scientific data: perhaps the most comprehensive investigation into the difference between what people claim to think and what they actually think ever undertaken. Clearly, voting Tory is a guilty pleasure some people won’t readily admit to – like masturbating or listening to Gary Barlow. Or masturbating while listening to Gary Barlow. In the voting booth. Using your free hand to vote Conservative. Cameron’s Britain.

“Public opinion” helps to shape countless policy decisions every day, from the colour of the wrapper on your KitKat Chunky, to whether or not we should bomb some faraway kingdom. So it’s worrying to discover we might as well have decided all this **** on a dice-roll. In fact public opinion itself might not really exist, at least not in a form that can be measured outside of a secret ballot. Traditional public opinion had everything thrown at it in the run up to 7 May. Opinion polls, opinion worms, online votes, TV news vox pops – and all of it coughed up unreliable results. In an age where anyone can say whatever they want, online and all the time, to absolutely anybody, it’s bizarre that none of us seems to know what anyone’s thinking. Not without asking them to mark their opinion down using a pencil and a bit of paper, like it’s 1962 or something.

If there’s one thing we can get out of the 2015 election, apart from five more years of Gammonhead, and five years of Labour pacing its enclosure like a depressed polar bear, it should be an end to nervous, presumptive policy-making. Never again need any decision be guided by an opinion poll, or a focus group, or the popularity of a hashtag. Maybe that’s a good thing. Or 10 bad ones glued together. I have absolutely no idea and neither do you. Because none of us knows anything.
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Paul Hjul said:
Klu Klux Klan of England
or
AngloBigots
or
Morons of Anglia

would be a more sensible name
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Remind me again...which party did nothing for a decade regarding a child paedophile ring due to political correctness? Hint: It is the same party which has Diane "Whites Invented Racism" Abbott.
 
Chris said:
Remind me again...which party did nothing for a decade regarding a child paedophile ring due to political correctness? Hint: It is the same party which has Diane "Whites Invented Racism" Abbott.
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Um all of them ...

You really need to get a grasp on the underlying problem of political correctness
 
Paul Hjul said:
Um all of them ...

You really need to get a grasp on the underlying problem of political correctness
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Really? Go read up on the Rotherham paedophile ring and pay particular attention to what the former MP said about why they did nothing. It really is there in black and white. I dont know of any Tory-led councils which allowed 1400 underage girls to be raped.
 
Remind me again who knighted Jimmy Savile and which government his knowledge of his predilections ...

O and never forget Profumo
 
Chris said:
Remind me again...which party did nothing for a decade regarding a child paedophile ring due to political correctness? Hint: It is the same party which has Diane "Whites Invented Racism" Abbott.
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You really think Rotherham was the fault of one MP and one party?

It was a failure of the system, the system is ultimately controlled by the government, they were all to blame.
 
Brethren of Moronic Mosley-ites

(As Mosley himself was no fool ...)
 
Dave123 said:
UKIP should just wear black shirts and be done with it ;).
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they can't
black is evil

also Mosley and some blackshirts actually had command of the English language and didn't hate foreigners as much (well German foreigners anyway ... ;))
 
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