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Comment by zahllos | Hacker News Reader

Further clarification: deputy prime minister is not a position that exists as a matter of constitution in the UK. The position was created for Clegg as the junior partner in a coalition government. I think it has existed before and no doubt will again, but you don't need to have a deputy PM.

He also reneged so hard on a campaign promises as part of the 2010 coalition his Liberal Democrat party was wiped out in the 2015 election and is now a non-entity in British politics. They went from 57 seats to 8.

I'm British. I used to be able to name the leader of the lib dems in the same way I knew the leaders of labour and the conservatives. I now no longer know who they are and I don't think anyone else cares either.

So yeah the guy that brought that about is earning 4MM/yr.

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> Further clarification: deputy prime minister is not a position that exists as a matter of constitution in the UK.

the same is true of prime minister!

Very true, but the role exists by long standing convention, which in the UK is almost as good ;)

Whereas the role of deputy PM is much more nebulous.

I guess I really wanted to contrast this against the US VP, which while that also hasn't always existed, does mean something, e.g. the next in line of succession and senate tie breaker.

Clegg bet big on a referendum to replace First Past The Post with Alternative Vote. He believed that this would greatly increase the power of third parties, especially his third party.

It was rejected by a 2:1 margin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_Voting_System_an...

It's possible that it could have been a huge win, which would have enabled all of the rest of his (and the LibDem's) agenda. Instead, it basically destroyed the party.

His successor tried to resuscitate it, when Labour failed to be an anti-Brexit party. That was a huge opportunity. But they were so far behind after Clegg's debacle that all it really did was to turn some Labour seats to Tory.

I forgot about that. I think they wanted proportional representation / single transferable vote and alternative vote was already a compromise.

They also promised tuition fees would be abolished. As a junior partner they were unlikely to achieve that, but the government they were part of ended up tripling them. So they didn't even 'prevent things from getting worse'.

Why do referendums to replace FPTP fail so often? It is an objectively less democratic system.

Yeah it didn’t exist under Blair — then Gordon Brown was the de facto #2 but it was never an official designation.

But it did. John Prescott was Deputy Prime Minister under Blair. And Michael Heseltine was Deputy Prime Minister in the previous Tory government.

Wow, mine was just an amazingly brain-dead post, but it also reinforces the idea that the deputy PM isn’t the PM-in-waiting.

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