Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Tom Semmens,
it wasn’t just a two finger salute to the toffs in the Conservative party
Who won the election...
it was a right royal fuck off to insufferable middle class liberal wankers and their suffocating, weaponised identity politics as well
...even though millions of middle class liberals vote Labour, and making an entire rant about identity has been part of the socialist playbook from the 19th Century, and looks set to continue forever.
It also signals the final smashing of the identity politics of the reactionary PC liberal middle classes and that reactionary classes pretensions to owning the left
I guess it's nice to have a big dream.
It's an electoral loss in one country in the world, with steadily declining influence. It happened at a particularly extraordinary time, Brexit is once in a lifetime. If you think that the entire Left in the whole world is shaken to the core by all of this, you're very much overrating how large Britain looms in the minds of most of the planet, and how much the British Labour Party represents the external perception of the place. It's not really a champion of left wing causes in the eyes of the world, it's the home of the monarchy, the aristocracy, the Lords, centuries of class division, unasked-for and unwanted military adventurism, brutal internal oppression, terrorism, disenfranchisment, and the heart of European banking and finance. It's not the fucking champion of anything progressive. It's systems are archaic and dysfunctional.
Yes, it's a promising sign that Labour did better than expected. It's also a sign of how low the expectations were in the first place. The world's looking at it like a drunk having a moment of clarity, not some shining beacon of wisdom and guidance.
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Rich Lock,
I can see that it was a protest vote against the status quo. The problem is that it wasn't like throwing your vote at the Homebrewers Front when it results in a complete social order redefinition at the hands of the Tory Party. There is so much more at stake than immigration and yes, it's a boil that hasn't been lanced, in the UK or here. The public debate has not happened. Brexit is probably the least sane way I can imagine to have it, committing to an outcome without any detail, plan, or vision relating to the myriad issues facing the country, beyond scapegoating the relationship with all of the country's neighbors.
It's beginning to happen here - clearly Labour's done their research and worked out the numbers are there to back a tighter immigration regime, or at least making noises about one. It's cynical in the way that Corbyn backing Brexit is cynical, he basically can't not back it now despite the support being not exactly a clear majority. Problem is, it's not divided on party lines, and it's probably a divisive issue.
I still feel that the real issue is even now being avoided. The direct assault on neoliberalism itself, the alternate world order that doesn't allow the whole fight to be framed in the terms that made neoliberalism successful in the first place.
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Tom Semmens,
FPP has some considerable advantages, as long as you have a largely two party system.
I hope this isn't actually part of your argument, since it's clearly a circular justification.
For example, it actually allows for more radical reform once you have a mandate.
Also without a mandate. Which is how we got neoliberalism. MMP came ten years later in NZ. Britain, a strongly neoliberal country, practically the inventor of it, brought it about using FPP, and has maintained it for 30-40 years using that system.
Let’s face it, MMP was voted for in New Zealand as an additional constitutional check on a series of rogue parliaments
No. It was voted for because a majority of voters in two referendums wanted it, for reasons that ranged widely. It is not a constitutional check at all. The elected parliament is still sovereign.
not as a tool for legislative reform.
Since it literally reformed the Legislature it's hard to make any sense of a statement like that.
And there is much to be said in favour of the bracing democracy of being directly responsible to an electorate.
Which is probably why we still have electorates with people directly responsible to them.
When was the last time under MMP a senior minister lost their seat and was outside WINZ on Monday morning?
2008? Winston Peters? Not only his seat but his entire party. Judith Tizard? It happens. Under FPP, MPs who were senior were simply given safe seats, and that practice continues anyway. That's decided by the same tiny group of political insiders who draw up the party list, and it always was, and it works much the same way in Britain.
FPP also emphasises the need to have well developed electorate organisations, which in turn improves public involvement vis-a-vis our tiny elite cadre parties.
That aspect is less pivotal in our system, certainly. For the SFA of people who ever get involved in party politics, I guess that might be an important factor. Public involvement of, say, the 2% of people who give a shit about turning up to sausage sizzles and going door to door spreading the word for some local persona. They can still do it, though, since we still have electorates and they still matter, forming half of our parliament.
MMP is a great system for getting an accurate representation of the voters in parliament.
It's a better system than FPP anyway, for that purpose.
Once they are there, it has become a great system for the careerists and managerialists to keep the neoliberal radical centre well and truly locked in place.
Not that FPP has posed any great problems to neoliberal radical centrists. You could hardly have picked a worse time to sing the praises of the British electoral system. Not only is there still strong hardcore austere neoliberalism in control of the country, but it's there by the grace of less than a majority of voters, and the radical reform it seems to be capable of bringing about is to convulsively shit its pants about Europe and yet not actually decisively do anything about it beyond fouling up the nest.
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Russell Brown,
Thirdly, the idea of a single British people united by the Brexit vote is ludicrous.
I don't think I've ever seen a more disuniting movement. It's literally a movement to break out of a union. They are incompetently pissing away one of the few good things about being in Europe. The most frustrating part is that there is a huge number of people in Britain who aren't stupid and don't want this. But that is not how Blighty works. It's vying to out-clownshoe the USA and at the moment that is a big ask.
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Russell Brown,
But the awkward reality is that it won’t happen because both May and Corbyn benefited greatly from third-party votes collapsing.
Well Labour got pretty much a proportional result. But the Tories got heaps more, 48.8% of the seats off 42.4% of the popular vote. DUP got 1.5% of seats off 0.9% popular vote. So the "majority" has 43.3% of the popular vote.
The losers are LibDems (1.8% from 7.4%), Greens (0.2% from 1.6%) and UKIP (0% of 1.8%).
But yes, Labour certainly can do much better out of, and would anticipate doing so in future, so again, I can't see either of the big turkeys voting for their disadvantage.
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Tom Semmens,
the Tories will run to limit their losses.
How would running limit their losses? If they're down massively in the polls all that can happen is they increase their losses. They'd be ejected from Government and all the pomp and power that goes with it. This is Thanksgiving for Turkeys stuff here.
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to simon g,
For the UK to have an early election, 2/3 of Parliament has to vote for it.
Yeah, I can't see that happening either. May may get rolled, but it'll just be the next muppet in line. Britain done fucked itself. Again. In a PR system, a close call like this would lead to all sorts of horse trading and essentially the majority would sort of get what it wants, the harder edges would be knocked off. But a winner take-all system like Britain's fucking throwback democracy encourages narrow winners to double down. However much truth there is in "UK Labour is by far the largest, most vital and successful social democratic party left in Western Europe" (and I just don't even), it's probably not going to be much relevant for 3-4 more years.
I'd be stoked if there was another election, and Corbyn swept in. I'd be stoked about a lot of things that probably won't happen.
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Rich Lock,
So, the Tory/DUP coalition only have a majority when it comes to non-English laws (Brexit, basically).
That is fascinating. I think your assessment of this being extremely unstable is correct, in that case. So in order to get any English laws passed at all, they need to reach out to other parties? And even on Brexit they have to have support of pretty much all of their own MPs. There are surely Tory MPs whose electorates who are actually Europhiles?
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Russell Brown,
They really thought they were going to hoover up the UKIP vote in Labour-held seats. They bet the farm on it.
Interesting. While I'll take their word for it that political strategists use this analysis, I definitely struggle to see some of their points in the data shown. The battle line trend line May chose looks pretty tenuous to me, as in that line is hardly clear in the pattern of her visitations. The only line I clearly see is that the zero difference (ie swing electorates) were more visited, something Corbyn did not seem to do.
The "actual" battle line, however, does show that UKIP vote was correlated to final vote (in the close electorates at least). More red dots low down on the right side, and more blue dots high up on the left side. The guess that Toryness is related to UKIPness seems to have some evidence in the battleground. But that cut both ways, there were many Tory electorates with very low UKIP support and those seemed to flip to Labour more than the reverse.
But overall, I don't see strong evidence that UKIP and Toryness are strongly related. If anything, I see the reverse. The white triangle in the top right hints that the more strongly Tory they were, the less UKIP. That pattern is absent on the left.
TBH, I don't really think much of this strategic stuff mattered anywhere near as much as the simple fact that May's appeal was less. She was AWOL in debates, presented little policy, basically didn't seem to try, trusted in her commanding lead to win the game. Which it actually did, but only just.
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Moz,
But yeah, maybe it could happen.
And if it did, things would be better, IMHO. You were saying that you thought that it would actually be worse that way. You're confusing "unlikely" with "bad".
It's still 'a whole bunch of “maybe this” and “hopefully that” and “if they’re really lucky”' even now. Talk of another election before the year is out. Wishful thinking that the Blairite faction will shut up and get with the program.