Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to BenWilson,
Well Labour got pretty much a proportional result.
I didn't mean so much in terms of final representation – more in the benefits of the race turning binary.
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After all the headlines about Dunne slamming Genter's bill I thought I'd been severely embarrassed in my predictions.
But a look at what he actually said on The Nation suggests it was more about voting maths.
I suspect he's still wrong, at least on the calculation of the public mood. But it does seem the case that if it progresses to law, Genter's bill will look quite different to what it does now.
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Blazing Fintan O'Toole piece for the New York Review of Books:
Thirdly, the idea of a single British people united by the Brexit vote is ludicrous. Not only do Scotland, Northern Ireland, and London have large anti-Brexit majorities, but many of those who did vote for Brexit are deeply unhappy about the effects of the Conservative government’s austerity policies on healthcare, education, and other public services. (One of these services is policing, and May’s direct responsibility for a reduction in police numbers neutralized any potential swing toward the Conservatives as a result of the terrorist attacks in Manchester and London.)
This unrest found a voice in Corbyn’s unabashedly left-wing Labour manifesto, with its clear promises to end austerity and fund better public services by taxing corporations and the very wealthy. May’s appeal to “the people” as a mystic entity came up against Corbyn’s appeal to real people in their daily lives, longing not for a date with national destiny but for a good school, a functioning National Health Service, and decent public transport. Phony populism came up against a more genuine brand of anti-establishment radicalism that convinced the young and the marginalized that they had something to come out and vote for.
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to BenWilson,
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.
There's been a petition calling on both May and Corbyn to commit to a proportional system and it's now nearing its 300,000-name target.
But the awkward reality is that it won't happen because both May and Corbyn benefited greatly from third-party votes collapsing.
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to BenWilson,
Yes, obviously the whole world is waiting with bated breath to hear what either of the British main parties think about that. They could be excused for thinking that was perhaps the point of the election, since that is how mandate seeking elections are done in other democracies, although of course sensible democracies would have held another referendum to confirm the result first. They could also be excused for thinking that what actually happened shows a weakening political will to Brexit at all. But unfortunately May invoked Article 50 before getting her mandate, which very much destroyed the point of seeking the mandate at all.
EU political leaders are openly incredulous at Britain's latest "own goal".
There seems to be a universal view that a sensible Brexit just got much harder to negotiate.
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Hoy shit, this super-interesting.
A barnstorming analysis by Newsnight's policy editor Chris Cook on how the Conservatives got polling and strategy terribly wrong.
They really thought they were going to hoover up the UKIP vote in Labour-held seats. They bet the farm on it.
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I must say though ... I'm seeing a lot of triumphalism about coming second.
I get that people want to celebrate the ideological victory, the reclaiming of the Labour Party etc, but the rather harsh fact is that Labour did not win the election and the Conservatives are the governing party for (possibly) the next five years and are now obliged to pay heed to the social policy cave people of the DUP.
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Wow. The Conservatives' only success yesterday – the Scottish party – is saddling up and riding off on its own, having established a view on Brexit it does not share with London.
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Hard News: Interesting Britain!, in reply to Ben Austin,
In any event, we finished up canvassing last night and were sitting in a Brixton pub at ten when the exit poll was announced and there were audible gasps and then cheering. My group were shocked. We had thought that we’d be wiped out everywhere in the UK but we were placed at 14 (seem to have ended up with 12).
Thanks for sharing this, Ben. Clearly, you weren't alone: they were gobsmacked by the exit poll at Labour HQ too.
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Hard News: Rugby Now, in reply to simon g,
Sorry, but that really is nonsense.
I confess, I have thought along similar lines to Geoff. I followed football when I lived in the UK, but the lack of resolution in football drives me nuts these days. A rugby match is full of small victories and defeats – not just scoring events, but scrums, lineouts, breakdowns. The ball is in play for a much shorter time, but there are more quantifiable events. I do wonder if that's why big rugby crowds are more tepid in both a negative and positive sense.