Better alternative to first-party propaganda: https://www.eff.org/pages/uk-online-safety-bill-massive-thre...
It has to obey instructions on prioritisation from the secretary of state and has no real operational flexibility.
As with much of the (dire) UK legislation here, the government saying something is true until it is blue in the face does not make it true.
Ofcom has operational independence. Neither its investigations nor its enforcement actions are directly controlled by the Government. The Government does approve Codes of Practice but if it doesn't approve, it can only request modifications. It's still up to Ofcom to decide how to interpret and implement. Secretary of State interventions are, by convention, rare and subject to Parliamentary scrutiny.
It is never "inevitable" that the correct place for law and regulation is somewhere in the middle on every issue. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but it's never inevitable.
Assuming that it is makes it far too easy to move the Overton window: regulation proposes something stricter than the status quo, "compromise" moves in that direction, repeat.
The UK has a very funny (literally ha-ha funny) notion of "democracy" -- with people just voting against the status quo most of the time and with "first past the post" resulting in leadership that doesn't have, and cannot even credibly claim, genuine popular support. It's a totally broken system.
A move to STV wouldn't be a silver bullet but at the very least it'd eliminate the phenomenon of wasted votes and make safe seats less safe, forcing politicians to care about all the seats rather than just currently competitive ones. The problem is there's no incentive for either major party to end their duopoly in the national interest, it's the same sort of problem the 'rotten boroughs' of old faced in that the people who benefitted from them were the only people with the power to deal with them. Labour in particular are notorious on this subject, they'll promise electoral reform in opposition and change their tune instantly once in power.
Some appointed positions have term limits (some 'machinery of government' kind of functions, some quangos and public bodies etc) but a few are for life or retirement such as members of the House of Lords.
The other thing to consider is that the electorate basically moved to the right in 2024 (Tory voters moved to Reform), but parliament shifted hard to the left.
2024: 33%
2019: 43.6%
2017: 42.3% (Lab: 40%!)
2015: 36.9%
2010: 36.1%
2005: 35.2%
2001: 40.7%
1997: 43.2%
1992: 41.9%
The last election where the winning party got over 50% of the popular vote was .. 1931.
Somewhat ironically, given your arguments, UK voters decisively rejected a plan to change the voting system to a more proportional one in a 2011 referendum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...
Proportional systems give an outcome where a majority of voters voted for at least one of the parties in the winning coalition. Coalitions become explicit rather than internal to parties. The internationalist/isolationist split in the Conservative party that they were desperately trying to put off would have happened much earlier.
The referendum failed because only the LDs really supported it. I note that all sorts of devolved assemblies, councils, and (former) Euro elections used different systems.
Edit: I'd also add that the UK is astonishingly democratic in some respects. It is remarkable that Brexit was implemented merely because a majority voted for it. There are few countries where such important decisions of national policy would be put to a popular referendum in this way and then implemented faithfully. (I was very firmly opposed to Brexit, FWIW.)
It's a series of (balanced) regional votes for elected representatives from equal-sized constituencies who are supposed to be responsive to that region.
Suddenly this is a massive problem for tories because it's red-faced angry right-wingers on the losing side. Whenever it contributed significantly to a tory win, it has not been a problem.
If you look at what actually happened you will see that, repeatedly, right-wing candidates lost out on a constituency-by-constituency level because the Conservatives were largely incumbents who had built up enough very personal bad reputation to be booted out, or inexperienced first-time candidates who are very rarely elected anyway and were parachuted at the last minute into seats where grandees were retiring, and the Reform candidates were a gaggle of weirdos, randoms, odd-bods, extremists and idiots who were lining up to stand for election for a party that had such a thin platform it ultimately resolves to "oooh we don' t like them", where "them" varied a little region by region but usually meant foreigners.
(And, of course, they split part of the vote between them.)
You're talking with someone who thinks that it is egregious that a party that gets the minority of the vote runs the government, and the grandfather of your own comment points out that in 2024 it was with the lowest percentage vote in 30 years, which is particular.
The electorate lurched from the Conservatives farther right, and the result of that was a centrist government.
But again, in case it is not clangingly obvious yet: we don't vote for parties to control government. We don't vote for party leaders. We vote for constituency MPs, and if there are enough of them who can agree to form a government, that is what they do. Political parties are not, particularly, even essential to the process. They just speed it up.
A big chunk of why we have a Labour government this time round is Tory constituencies deciding to tactically vote Lib Dem because a Labour candidate would be less likely to gain a majority, after all. One has to assume that the people who did that meant to do it.
> The electorate lurched from the Conservatives farther right, and the result of that was a centrist government.
I dispute this concept; it's a convenient hopeful fiction being sold by hucksters and grifters. You only have to look, for example, at polls saying a majority of Leave voters would now support closer ties with Europe to resolve problems caused by Brexit. What happened is simple: people chose to have a functional government, which neither the Tories of 2024 or Reform could possibly offer. Reform is probably a generation or more away from being able to do that, and who knows if the Tories can reassemble around something mainstream before then.
Don't patronise me. I'm fully aware of all of these things.
But it doesn't actually change who we vote for. If you want Reform to have more MPs, they have to have locally electable MPs. Because we vote for MPs.
If you change the system in any way that means people get candidates that parties choose on some proportional basis, you break this crucial link with the local area. We vote, locally, and we choose a person who is best for us. Time and time again this has proved to be valuable and to have generally selected quite good candidates and very good parliamentarians.
As soon as you have any other system than, locally, "I choose this person to be my representative", important things break, IMO.
But, again, this only upsets right-wingers now because they are on the losing side of it. Hasn't bothered them in the slightest before.
The idea that parliament has shifted "hard to the left", as you said earlier, is absolutely delusional, given the Centrist Dad government we now have.
Did I? You're projecting.
I voted for a third party. And that third party candidate got elected. In one of the formerly safest Tory seats in the country. Because we wanted change and we are aware of the trends of our own local politics.
New parties have no chance because first time MPs -- of all parties -- have no chance. It's rare to get selected on your first try, or to get a winnable seat on your first try. Across all parties. Because it's a process that requires practice and proper infrastructure -- competent agents, competent support, competent canvassing.
So a new party will have to find exceptional candidates, or media-addicted fame chasers, or defectors who rarely get elected because defection is frowned upon, to get anywhere in its first general election campaign. By that measure, Reform did exceptionally well.
Everyone's vote gets counted. Everyone's vote has equal weight. The system, again, elects local representatives as its method of operation. If you want a local representative of your chosen party, find someone who is locally electable to run for that party. Or run yourself.
The electorate didn’t lurch further right… some went right others went left
We don't know how people would have voted in this hypothetical. (Likely there would be a lot more parties, which generally is good.)
Also C+R could have formed a coalition. (Or merge into a new party ... or - I haven't looked up how R came to be, but I assume it's a spin-off of/from C - R could have merged back into C, right?)
Reform are, like UKIP and the Referendum party, Trumpist parties organized around a popular figure and external funding (Richard Tice). They're not really spin offs although a few MPs may cross over.
I can think of at least one other system where they would.
99.999% of the population of Earth will never be directly affected by either of those two things, so at the very least you're going to have to expand on how eroding the privacy of those 8 billion people will make their life better.
They certainly don't line up with 99.999% of the population of earth being unaffected.