Nicker on 5/7/2024 at 17:38
Despite all the right-wing whinging, wails of despair and predictions that the end of the world is nigh, UK has bucked the trend towards fascism in Europe, kicked the co-authors of the disastrous Brexit to the curb and installed the party of working people, you know, the folks who actually do the fucking work.
Well done UK. Perhaps there is hope for humanity after all.
And yes, I know there is already a thread about this election but I refuse to stick my head up that arse to explain how doing the right thing is actually GOOD NEWS.
Also, this is what delivering election results should look like. Calm, orderly, respectful. In less than 24 hours, the UK has a new, fully installed government. No cries of FAKE, no torch waving yobs , shitting in the halls of Parliament, no orange shit stain threatening to destroy the country for his own benefit.
Normalcy. Why are we surprised? Why does it seem remarkable?
We know the answer.
WingedKagouti on 5/7/2024 at 18:22
Quote Posted by Nicker
Despite all the right-wing whinging, wails of despair and predictions that the end of the world is nigh, UK has bucked the trend towards fascism in Europe, kicked the co-authors of the disastrous Brexit to the curb and installed the party of working people, you know, the folks who actually do the fucking work.
Well done UK. Perhaps there is hope for humanity after all.
The election result was definitely the best they could be for the future stability of the UK.
Quote:
Also, this is what delivering election results should look like. Calm, orderly, respectful. In less than 24 hours, the UK has a new, fully installed government. No cries of FAKE, no torch waving yobs , shitting in the halls of Parliament, no orange shit stain threatening to destroy the country for his own benefit.
Normalcy. Why are we surprised? Why does it seem remarkable?
We know the answer.
You don't need to cross the pond to see a clusterfuck of an election, just look at what is happening across the canal in France
right now.
Subjective Effect on 5/7/2024 at 19:09
Quote Posted by Nicker
Also, this is what delivering election results should look like. Calm, orderly, respectful. In less than 24 hours, the UK has a new, fully installed government. No cries of FAKE, no torch waving yobs , shitting in the halls of Parliament, no orange shit stain threatening to destroy the country for his own benefit.
Normalcy. Why are we surprised? Why does it seem remarkable?
We know the answer.
That's how we do it.
Tomi on 5/7/2024 at 20:58
Quote Posted by Nicker
UK has bucked the trend towards fascism in Europe.
I think UK can mostly thank their voting system for that though. People seem to have voted against Tories rather than for Labour. The number of votes that the Reform loonies got is particularly worrying, but thankfully they weren't rewarded with too many seats.
Subjective Effect on 5/7/2024 at 21:03
Exactly what I said in the other thread.
Tocky on 6/7/2024 at 04:36
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
That's how we do it.
It's how we used to do it. I hope it can't happen to you but we have seen that megalomaniac cults can happen in Europe.
SD on 7/7/2024 at 01:36
As a Lib Dem member for two-thirds of my life and counting, even though our vote share didn't increase by much from last time, this was a very good night for us (and for the first time ever one of my Facebook friends was elected as an MP :D).
The first-past-the-post electoral system we utilise in this country delivers grossly disproportionate results - last time we won 1.7% of the seats from 11.6% of the vote - but a laser focus from the party on winnable targets has given us 11% of MPs on 12.2% of the vote. It is our best result in terms of seats since 1923.
It was a funny election, because Labour's majority is both enormous but also fragile, achieved largely because the unhinged Putinist-Trumpian lunatics of Reform UK split the right-wing vote. If right-wing voters coalesce around either the Tories or Reform (or, Heaven forbid, they come to some kind of arrangement) then Labour will have a much tougher test next time.
Still, Starmer will now have five years to prove to the public that he merits his position, particularly those people who think politicians are out of touch and that Labour is captured by identity politics. Sir Keir has recently made some encouraging noises around the latter.
My dad was telling me that one of his friends is a KC who used to work with Starmer, and he thought Starmer was a third-rate barrister because he took so long to come to decisions, indecision being a trait that is not especially prized in the legal field. However my father and I both agreed that this flexibility of thought would probably be something of a benefit for a Prime Minister.
The Conservatives have badly lost their way over the past decade, beginning in 2015, when the relatively sensible liberal conservative David Cameron won a narrow majority he would not have expected or wanted, because it meant he was beholden to the swivel-eyed loons on the right of his party, where previously his coalition with the Liberals gave him the breathing space to ignore them. This ultimately led to Brexit and his resignation barely a year later.
Since then they have had a series of dreadful leaders; the benign but incompetent Theresa May, hamstrung by her failure to deliver the impossible - a Brexit deal that was acceptable to the nutters without being hugely damaging to the economy; the malignant tumour in a suit, Boris Johnson, felled by his inability to obey laws he himself had devised; the abominable Liz Truss, a psychopath with none of the plus points, who managed to wipe £300bn off the stock market during a disastrous seven week reign; and Rishi Sunak, a man richer than the King, painfully out of touch and unable to steer his party off its suicidal path. They are in dire need of an extremely long period in opposition.
Subjective Effect on 7/7/2024 at 05:54
Nice write up SD. I'm increasingly in favour of run off elections because these FPTP numbers are sometimes so ridiculous. I thought it encouraging that the Lib Dems have done so well but to those people that think we're a bastion of leftism in a European sea of the right - just look at the rise of Reform. Farage is finally an MP. Not concerning at all, no.
One of the most bizarre things this political cycle is the number of people mentioning Gaza in their acceptance speeches. I thought these were UK elections, lol.
Nicker on 7/7/2024 at 21:30
I'll take a pause in the march of Fascism over capitulation. While tRump and the politics of fear, bitching have encouraged a resurgence in strong-man popularism, we may be able to turn back the jack-boot tide.
The left is hanging on in France and if sanity prevails, the USA will return control of Congress and the Senate, to sane people, in November. Or we will have a global cabal of toddlers running the world.
Cipheron on 8/7/2024 at 06:41
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
Nice write up SD. I'm increasingly in favour of run off elections because these FPTP numbers are sometimes so ridiculous.
Well how we do it in Australia is just by numbering the candidates on the ballot. Then they count up everyone with 1's, and whoever has the least 1's is eliminated and their voters ballots get redistributed by their 2nd choice, and so on, until there are two candidates left, and whoever has the most votes left wins.
Mixed-Member-Proportional is better, but the Australian method is simple, fast, doesn't need big changes in how ballots work, and is easy for voters to understand the process.
