Cameron is on a rampage. I've never feared rapid descent into dictatorship until now. I'm well and truly afraid of what the UK will look like in 4 years.
A lot of people said that about Bush in 2004. People are alarmist. Status quo is generally maintained with only minor changes in course - that's what our political systems are designed to do.
I'm not saying Cameron will start WW3, but I really am afraid of what will happen.
It's complicated.
Since 2004 we're finally getting to the point where some of the insanity put in place in the aftermath of 2001-09-11 is starting to go away.
On the flip side, the ways some of that is being done (see TSA PreCheck, put in place in 2011) are quite odious... but I have a hard time blaming Bush for a policy put in place in 2011.
While I agree that the changes from 2004 to 2008 were fairly negative, the ones from 2008 to 2012 were just as negative if not worse.
All of which is to say that the two major parties were quite happily marching in lockstep toward creating a security state for a while there. I'm glad to see that at least the electorate and the judiciary are now moving in the opposite direction.
People may be alarmist, sure, but when an ever-growing number of people worry about governmental actions, there tends to be some reason for it.
A campaign to make Manchester part of Scotland has gathered momentum after a surprising 72 per cent of respondents voted in favour of secession. The results of an online poll conducted by the Manchester Evening News revealed that thousands of people want the city to be ruled from Edinburgh, rather than London. A Twitter campaign with the hashtag #TakeUsWithYouScotland is being used on social media, and a Change.org petition has already been signed by 17,000 people.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/manchester-set-to-becom...
I've heard that UKIP had around 3.881.129 votes and got only one seat, Green party with 1.157.613 won a single seat and Scottish national party had 1.454.436 votes and got 56 seats.
I'm not sure it's plausible, but it could be a valid explanation.
There was a referendum to move to a more grown-up voting system, but the majority voted against it. Depressingly, many of those who voted against were too stupid and too uninformed to actually know what they were voting against. I could only weep as someone left the polling station proud to have taken a stand against proportional representation.
I suppose they could have been balanced by people who voted in favour who were too stupid and too uninformed to actually know what they were voting for, but I suspect that is less likely.
Ouch. That is quite depressing.
(I am a supporter of single transferable vote and I didn't see it on my referedum voting sheet only FPTP [rubbish] and AV [?more/less? rubbish but still rubbish].)
Really? Because AV is what Ireland uses and called it PR-STV.
This is not correct. PR-STV requires multi-member constituencies (as they have in Ireland). AV is single-member constituencies and isn't PR.
STV and AV (and a bunch of variants of each) are closely related, but they do have differences, and repeatedly claiming that one is the other, when they're not, isn't that helpful to the conversation.
Proportional representation is really a matter of degree rather than a binary categorization -- a system doesn't magically become proportional when you apply it to a two-member constituency that would be not-proportional when applied to a single-member constituency.
OTOH, the maximum degree of proportionality you can achieve in an electoral system increases with the number of seats that are elected by the same set of ballots.
STV is an election method defined for any arbitrary number of seats, IRV/AV is exactly STV applied to a single-seat election.
We also thought that AV would probably increase the number of pro-PR MPs and therefore increase the chances of getting actual PR later.
Ahh I didn't think of it like this. I thought that AV would allow the Tories and Labour to say that we'd had electoral reform and that would be it for another 100 years... I'm hoping that the pressure will build against FPTP now - especially after the farce of an election we just had.
I do hope that we don't go full PR or even region based PR for the commons though (maybe for the Lords if it ever gets reformed?). Political parties already have enough power in deciding who gets to run. I don't want them controlling the list order as well. I want voters to control the list order with their ballots.
Yes, that's why I said I wept as people left the polling station having thought that's what they were voting about. That's my point. Lots of people didn't know. They thought that's what they were voting on.
My particular hatred was for the people who chanted "One man, one vote", like only being able to express yourself in favour of one candidate was some kind of superior state of being, rather than the kind of democracy you have to introduce to a society coming out of a millenium of dictatorship to get them used to the idea before they can move on to a grown-up political system.
Yes it is. It's what Ireland uses (that and multi-seat constituancies) and it is called PR. (Technically PR-STV).
"PR" covers a lot of voting schemes.
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/alternative-vote
"AV is not proportional representation and in certain electoral conditions, such as landslides, can produce a more disproportional result than First Past the Post (FPTP)"
It is perhaps the only form of democracy that's typically less proportional than FPTP.
I support electoral reform wholeheartedly and I voted for AV only reluctantly.
What's more likely is that the sum of the evidence isn't actually the same.
People will generally vote based on what they know (the evidence that's been presented to them). What they know isn't much for most of the population - it's whatever TV channel they watch, whatever newspaper or website they read.
IOW, anyone who disagrees with GP is, in fact, likely to be misinformed - at least from the point of view of GP.
Are you saying that these people were not misinformed? That somehow, even though the referendum was not about PR, and they thought it was about PR, they were still right? Is this some kind of "prizes for all, everyone's correct in their own way" situation?
UKIP: 3881129 / 624 = 6,220 per area, winning 1/624 SNP: 1454436 / 59 = 24,651 per area, winning 56/59
Non-proportional voting systems are barbaric and anti-democratic, but when they're in place you might consider that voting for parties that can't realistically win to be a measure of how little your voters understand the political system or at best a protest vote. On the other hand, without large numbers of people publicly wasting their votes, then there's no push for change. The Green party explicitly told their voters to "vote with their heart" i.e. waste their vote, and have now suggested that the progressive candidates work together to avoid splitting their vote.
The Liberal Democrats did extremely well at implementing some of their policies (notably increased personal allowance), obsoleting that part of their manifesto. I think they are right to be proud of that record, but it means that some of their strongest policies are now irrelevant.
The Liberal Democrats did extremely poorly at implementing some of their promises (notably tuition fees), going back on their word and making themselves non-credible in these respects, obsoleting the other part of their manifesto.
The Liberal Democrats were not observed to take any position that would contradict the two major parties during the election campaign. They were criticised for being "blank tiles", easily able to meld with either of the major parties in coalition. A vote for the Liberal Democrats could easily be a vote for the worse of two evils, whichever side you think that is. And many (former?) Liberal Democrats would think that the worse evil would be their coalition partner.
The major parties and UKIP have been very effective in pushing an anti-immigrant and anti-human rights agenda with the help of the press. The Liberal Democrats did not appear willing to stand openly against this in the election campaign.
During the election debates, the Green Party, Scottish Nationalist Party, and Plaid Cymru made a convincing claim to stand for human rights. The Liberal Democrats did not.
So they managed to alienate both their prior left-wing vote and their new centrist vote. Quite an achievement!
On its own, that's probably not that significant, but it appears to have helped cement their reputation as untrustworthy, not least among those who thought they were voting for a party more left-wing than Labour have become in recent years.
I suspect it is more that the conservatives have much stronger support by the media.
Of course after seeing 10 days of government without the lib dems to moderate I'm starting to re-evaluate how positive an influence they likely were...
That was how they lost my vote and those of others I know.
How they voted in 2010: 28 For, 21 Against tuition fee increases (as promised), 8 absent
Remaining MPs in 2015: 4 For, 4 Against.
- In the election 5 years ago there was no clear winner, the Lib Dems chose to go into a coalition government with the party who received the largest proportion of the vote.
- This coalition meant compromising on several key issues, for example tuition fees for university, in exchange for getting through other policies (raising the free tax allowance for the lower paid).
- The lib dems failed to properly communicate their achievements as a liberal/progressive force within government, and spent their time apologising for every compromise.
- Scotland moved strongly to a nationalist party, hurting a traditional source of seats.
- The polls looked as though there would be another coalition, and the people who previously voted lib dem were damned if they were going to vote effectively for another coalition in which they felt the party betrayed its values
tl;dr they got burned for doing the "right thing".
As I've said before on HN, people here seem to think that security is a huge issue. Surveillance, police state etc. In all of the election content I saw, it was mentioned maybe once or twice and barely scrutinised. The people of the UK did not care about it, and the politicians left it in the manifestos.
As for the GP comment suggesting something about dictatorship, it's probably the most ridiculous thing I've read in some time.
Always the way with small parties in coalition.