Moreover, I would postulate that if we'd introduced AV we would not have Brexit and quite possibly not had Windrush. With UKIP supporters able to vote Tory as their second choice, the shift of the Conservative party to ape UKIP policies would not make sense and probably wouldn't have worked.
Whilst I agree with you on the desirability of Brexit and the Windrush scandal, I don't think that "AV means parties don't have to bother trying to accommodate potential voter's preferences because they'll get them as second or third choice anyway" either makes a great argument, or supports MrMandid's contention that such a scheme would select a government with >50% support (unless we're defining "marginally less bad than the other lot" as support).
It's irrelevant what my contention is. Y'all can whinge and be all "it should be this or it should be that" and pontificate till the cows come home and try and score self congratulatory points and intellectually debate the points of how you are right with your viewpoint as much as you want, and if that is what floats yer boat and makes you feel good about yourself then crack on. I'll chip in "you are wonderfully right and thats great, have a cookie".
But onto the rub of the matter, a change in the electoral system was proposed in referendum. It was rejected.
End of.
If you are unhappy about this then form a political party and get votes, get elected, form govt and change things.
The sneering contempt for discussion as soon as you realise you're out of your depth is both pathetic and becoming predictable.
If you are unhappy about this then form a political party and get votes, get elected, form govt and change things.
Or, form a party, get a few votes, get (at best) one or two MPs, have no input to government but manage to bully the government into adopting a major policy change that the party of government had never campaigned on. Which is what UKIP did - leading to the situation we have now of a party that in 2015 campaigned on the UK being a strong member of the EU supporting the customs union and single market as good for the UK being in government when the UK left the EU and crashes out of the customs union, single market and every other part of the EU structures without a deal in place to replace any of it. If UKIP had managed to get enough MPs elected in 2015 to have a part in a coalition then that would have at least followed the pattern of UK democracy - as you put it "form a political party and get votes, get elected, form govt and change things".
No. We're allowed to complain that our democracy is broken, without having to expose ourselves to the viciousness of public scrutiny. We're allowed to have a voice without being THE voice.
Mr Mandrid I assume then if Labour had won the election you would now be a quiet little soul with nothing to say.
Getting on to another point. This a discussion board. We discuss. If people wish to discuss alternatives to FPTP then that is allowed. What is your opinion? If you think FPTP is great then I genuinely look forward to hearing and discussing it. Genuinely.
Moreover, I would postulate that if we'd introduced AV we would not have Brexit and quite possibly not had Windrush. With UKIP supporters able to vote Tory as their second choice, the shift of the Conservative party to ape UKIP policies would not make sense and probably wouldn't have worked.
Whilst I agree with you on the desirability of Brexit and the Windrush scandal, I don't think that "AV means parties don't have to bother trying to accommodate potential voter's preferences because they'll get them as second or third choice anyway" either makes a great argument, or supports MrMandid's contention that such a scheme would select a government with >50% support (unless we're defining "marginally less bad than the other lot" as support).
It's irrelevant what my contention is. Y'all can whinge and be all "it should be this or it should be that" and pontificate till the cows come home and try and score self congratulatory points and intellectually debate the points of how you are right with your viewpoint as much as you want, and if that is what floats yer boat and makes you feel good about yourself then crack on. I'll chip in "you are wonderfully right and thats great, have a cookie".
But onto the rub of the matter, a change in the electoral system was proposed in referendum. It was rejected.
End of.
If you are unhappy about this then form a political party and get votes, get elected, form govt and change things.
The sneering contempt for discussion as soon as you realise you're out of your depth is both pathetic and becoming predictable.
There's a really important point here: The You Lost Get Over It mentality is fundamentally undemocratic. No one - literally no one - here is arguing that Brexit is rubbish, Boris is rubbish, let's have a revolution and kill them all. That would be an unacceptable response to where we are as a representative democracy. Conversely; Brexit is hugely damaging; Johnson is a terrible Prime Minister, let's talk about why, about how we discuss with others; about sharing the evidence and the stories, about election strategies going forward is the heart of what it means to live in a democracy and be a responsible citizen.
It's fine to disagree but dressing up sneering contempt and poor arguments as pseudo-patriotism or a pseudo-defence of democracy is just pathetic.
The reason this thread is so long is because the litany of abject failure by our Prime Minister is ever-growing and because we are still waiting for a cogent defence of Mr Johnson to appear. He has an 80 seat majority (based on a minority of the country supporting him) is not a logical defence of his policies or performance by any measure.
I think the problem isn't so much the electoral system used to elect politicians (all of which have different problems) but that the people put forward for election often don't have the qualities necessary for them to be effective at leading the country.
Moreover, I would postulate that if we'd introduced AV we would not have Brexit and quite possibly not had Windrush. With UKIP supporters able to vote Tory as their second choice, the shift of the Conservative party to ape UKIP policies would not make sense and probably wouldn't have worked.
Whilst I agree with you on the desirability of Brexit and the Windrush scandal, I don't think that "AV means parties don't have to bother trying to accommodate potential voter's preferences because they'll get them as second or third choice anyway" either makes a great argument, or supports MrMandid's contention that such a scheme would select a government with >50% support (unless we're defining "marginally less bad than the other lot" as support).
It's irrelevant what my contention is. Y'all can whinge and be all "it should be this or it should be that" and pontificate till the cows come home and try and score self congratulatory points and intellectually debate the points of how you are right with your viewpoint as much as you want, and if that is what floats yer boat and makes you feel good about yourself then crack on. I'll chip in "you are wonderfully right and thats great, have a cookie".
But onto the rub of the matter, a change in the electoral system was proposed in referendum. It was rejected.
End of.
If you are unhappy about this then form a political party and get votes, get elected, form govt and change things.
The sneering contempt for discussion as soon as you realise you're out of your depth is both pathetic and becoming predictable.
It's striking how many right wingers turn up with this sneering tone, and seem unable to make sound arguments. But this is a wider phenomenon, I sometimes make a comment on right wing blogs, e.g., Toby Young, and it's rare to get a coherent response. I realize that some are trolls and baiters.
I sometimes make a comment on right wing blogs, e.g., Toby Young, and it's rare to get a coherent response.
To be fair, if you post there like you post here you construct your posts with so much irony as to make coherent response difficult or impossible, and if a coherent response does get through you dismiss it with 'so much snark,' or some such.
I sometimes make a comment on right wing blogs, e.g., Toby Young, and it's rare to get a coherent response.
To be fair, if you post there like you post here you construct your posts with so much irony as to make coherent response difficult or impossible, and if a coherent response does get through you dismiss it with 'so much snark,' or some such.
It's irrelevant what my contention is. Y'all can whinge and be all "it should be this or it should be that" and pontificate till the cows come home and try and score self congratulatory points and intellectually debate the points of how you are right with your viewpoint as much as you want, and if that is what floats yer boat and makes you feel good about yourself then crack on.
This is a discussion forum. That is rather what we do. It's entirely reasonable to discuss what features of an electoral system we think will be good for our political system, and we can have that discussion more or less independent of how we rank the merits of the various political parties.
(Sure - there's always the rather self-serving argument that person X wants whichever electoral system they think most likely to produce electoral victories for their preferred party, but that doesn't make for an interesting discussion, and person X won't be able to produce a coherent defence of their position anyway.)
But onto the rub of the matter, a change in the electoral system was proposed in referendum. It was rejected.
And I'm happy about that, because as you will note from my previous posts, I don't think the proposed AV was an improvement on the current system. Just because I think we can do better than the current system (which has the merit that it can be easily counted by hand, by normal people who don't have to think) doesn't mean that I think any proposed system is better than the current system.
@Gee D asks how I would achieve a proportional parliament. The "Additional Member" system used in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly does a fair job of this, preserving FPTP-elected constituency MPs, and adding Additional Members from a regional party list to make the total representation from a region close to proportional. For example, the Scottish Green Party doesn't have enough localized support to win any constituency MSPs, but it has 6 MSPs out of 129 via the regional list, which is roughly it's share of the regional vote.
I'm not a huge fan of party lists, but they are electorally simple. Allowing people to vote up or down individual members of a party list is philosophically better (perhaps there are good hard-working people low down on the list, and entitled party hacks at the top) but presenting people with a list of several dozen names from their region, and asking them to rank them all seems unlikely to produce a great outcome - do most people want to mark down a few dozen preferences among people they've never heard of? The party list system has the benefit that you can complete your vote by making two marks on a piece of paper.
Thanks - you are achieving in one chamber what here all but Queensland does in 2. I'd like to think about the ramifications of that.
As for voting, voters here have a choice. In the Senate and other upper houses, they can vote "above the line" for a party and then take that party's allocation of votes amongst its candidates and those others standing. You can vote "below the line" and do that yourself. Most vote above. Lower house votes are for individual candidates. Tasmania has its own rules, basically the above but in reverse.
A final comment. Attending a polling booth and being marked off the roll as having attended is compulsory; actual voting is not, but again from memory somewhere over 95% attend and well over 90% of the votes cast are formally valid. As long as you comply with the pretty basic requirements, your vote will be counted.
I don't think Johnson is unintelligent, although I think it is fair to say there is something of a stupid person's idea of an intelligent person about him. He is however more inclined to apply his intelligence to avoiding responsibility for the consequences of his actions than avoiding those actions in the first place.
He strikes me as the sort of person who would have reached a position as a middle-level accountant in a large company had it not been for his Eton background. A suburban house, but not one in a good suburb, perhaps driving a 6 cylinder Wolseley, but more likely to have gone for a Vauxhall Cresta or Ford Zodiac if the company allowed him to.
He strikes me as the sort of person who would have reached a position as a middle-level accountant in a large company had it not been for his Eton background. A suburban house, but not one in a good suburb, perhaps driving a 6 cylinder Wolseley, but more likely to have gone for a Vauxhall Cresta or Ford Zodiac if the company allowed him to.
No way does Johnson have the patience or attention to detail to function as an accountant. Something in sales, maybe. One of those fuckers who promises clients everything under the sun and leaves it to the technical team to explain that what he's promised is physically impossible.
Well the first one depends on your view point. Any country can leave the EU. It is how you do it that matters. Boris did not do it well.
The second it appears some think was a certainty.
Well the first one depends on your view point. Any country can leave the EU. It is how you do it that matters. Boris did not do it well.
The second it appears some think was a certainty.
And ironically, the same people who think that are the ones most in support of Johnson.
The Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt thinks Johnson has two great achievements:
1) That the UK has left the EU
2) That he won the election against Corbyn.
He's left out the Emirates Air Line. I wonder why. (According to wikipedia it's the most expensive cable car system ever built, and was running at under 10% capacity before covid-19 shut it down.)
But what an Achievement, anyway! Such a wonderfully Useful Asset for the poor and underprivileged of our Great Capital! Hail Boris!!
I gather that support for Scottish independence has increased since the Great Leader's State Progress to the remoter parts of that country yesterday. Now that is an Achievement...
I'm not sure that being a useless Prime Minister and a useless Mayor of London (twice) actually count as Achievements.
Perhaps @Telford would care to enumerate Achievements actually accomplished during those terms of office? I think that's what @alienfromzog was getting at...
No. We're allowed to complain that our democracy is broken, without having to expose ourselves to the viciousness of public scrutiny. We're allowed to have a voice without being THE voice.
And plenty do. But complaining is often simply not enough.
Moreover, I would postulate that if we'd introduced AV we would not have Brexit and quite possibly not had Windrush. With UKIP supporters able to vote Tory as their second choice, the shift of the Conservative party to ape UKIP policies would not make sense and probably wouldn't have worked.
Whilst I agree with you on the desirability of Brexit and the Windrush scandal, I don't think that "AV means parties don't have to bother trying to accommodate potential voter's preferences because they'll get them as second or third choice anyway" either makes a great argument, or supports MrMandid's contention that such a scheme would select a government with >50% support (unless we're defining "marginally less bad than the other lot" as support).
It's irrelevant what my contention is. Y'all can whinge and be all "it should be this or it should be that" and pontificate till the cows come home and try and score self congratulatory points and intellectually debate the points of how you are right with your viewpoint as much as you want, and if that is what floats yer boat and makes you feel good about yourself then crack on. I'll chip in "you are wonderfully right and thats great, have a cookie".
But onto the rub of the matter, a change in the electoral system was proposed in referendum. It was rejected.
End of.
If you are unhappy about this then form a political party and get votes, get elected, form govt and change things.
The sneering contempt for discussion as soon as you realise you're out of your depth is both pathetic and becoming predictable.
No need to reply to any of my comments old bean, you can jog on.
I suppose an intelligent defense of Johnson is possible, but this seems rare, partly because he doesn't seem intelligent.
Although he did appear savvy enough to steal loads of Labour safe seats and see Corbyn skulking back to the backbenches.
No he stood on a Brexit ticket. A position he chose in 2016. Though it was almost the other way round.
After the election the news was full of Labour voters saying they leant him their vote to get Brexit.
The Brexit ticket won the election, not Boris, not Conservative policy.
I suppose an intelligent defense of Johnson is possible, but this seems rare, partly because he doesn't seem intelligent.
Although he did appear savvy enough to steal loads of Labour safe seats and see Corbyn skulking back to the backbenches.
No he stood on a Brexit ticket. A position he chose in 2016. Though it was almost the other way round.
After the election the news was full of Labour voters saying they leant him their vote to get Brexit.
The Brexit ticket won the election, not Boris, not Conservative policy.
Intelligent (or, smart at least) if the aim was to simply be the PM. If the aim was to govern the country on issues other than just Getting Brexit Done it was pretty dumb. He doesn't have a manifesto to fall back on to give him a mandate for managing the economy (even how to manage the inevitable economic hit of Brexit, which he should have had outlined within the 'Get Brexit Done' package), how he would fund the NHS and welfare, public sector pay, environmental regulation ... even without Coronavirus he'd have been floundering around without a clue what needed to be done. Winning an election is the start not the goal.
Intelligent (or, smart at least) if the aim was to simply be the PM. If the aim was to govern the country on issues other than just Getting Brexit Done it was pretty dumb. He doesn't have a manifesto to fall back on to give him a mandate for managing the economy (even how to manage the inevitable economic hit of Brexit, which he should have had outlined within the 'Get Brexit Done' package), how he would fund the NHS and welfare, public sector pay, environmental regulation ... even without Coronavirus he'd have been floundering around without a clue what needed to be done. Winning an election is the start not the goal.
And if he and the party he leads doesn't deliver to the standards required by the electorate then the opposition parties have plenty of time to propose their alternatives. And if the electorate like those alternatives then we will see a change in government.
What smug facade? I voted for the Conservatives at the last election, mostly to keep Corbyn out of power, that threat has fortunately now been removed permanently AND because I'd like to see Brexit finally delivered. If however the Labour Party finally sort themselves out and become a more eclectic and centralist party then I would have no issue changing vote. Under Corbyn my chance of voting Labour was 0%. Under Starmer it has lifted to around 25-30%. Under someone like Dan Jarvis it would probably hit the 50% mark.
Both of you totally miss the point. His achievements were to actually obtain the positions. Very few people have.
Usually when we talk about the achievements of a particular politician, we mean what he has accomplished with the job. Getting the job in the first place is usually taken as read.
Comments
The sneering contempt for discussion as soon as you realise you're out of your depth is both pathetic and becoming predictable.
Getting on to another point. This a discussion board. We discuss. If people wish to discuss alternatives to FPTP then that is allowed. What is your opinion? If you think FPTP is great then I genuinely look forward to hearing and discussing it. Genuinely.
There's a really important point here: The You Lost Get Over It mentality is fundamentally undemocratic. No one - literally no one - here is arguing that Brexit is rubbish, Boris is rubbish, let's have a revolution and kill them all. That would be an unacceptable response to where we are as a representative democracy. Conversely; Brexit is hugely damaging; Johnson is a terrible Prime Minister, let's talk about why, about how we discuss with others; about sharing the evidence and the stories, about election strategies going forward is the heart of what it means to live in a democracy and be a responsible citizen.
It's fine to disagree but dressing up sneering contempt and poor arguments as pseudo-patriotism or a pseudo-defence of democracy is just pathetic.
The reason this thread is so long is because the litany of abject failure by our Prime Minister is ever-growing and because we are still waiting for a cogent defence of Mr Johnson to appear. He has an 80 seat majority (based on a minority of the country supporting him) is not a logical defence of his policies or performance by any measure.
AFZ
It's striking how many right wingers turn up with this sneering tone, and seem unable to make sound arguments. But this is a wider phenomenon, I sometimes make a comment on right wing blogs, e.g., Toby Young, and it's rare to get a coherent response. I realize that some are trolls and baiters.
I think I said that once.
This is a discussion forum. That is rather what we do. It's entirely reasonable to discuss what features of an electoral system we think will be good for our political system, and we can have that discussion more or less independent of how we rank the merits of the various political parties.
(Sure - there's always the rather self-serving argument that person X wants whichever electoral system they think most likely to produce electoral victories for their preferred party, but that doesn't make for an interesting discussion, and person X won't be able to produce a coherent defence of their position anyway.)
And I'm happy about that, because as you will note from my previous posts, I don't think the proposed AV was an improvement on the current system. Just because I think we can do better than the current system (which has the merit that it can be easily counted by hand, by normal people who don't have to think) doesn't mean that I think any proposed system is better than the current system.
@Gee D asks how I would achieve a proportional parliament. The "Additional Member" system used in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly does a fair job of this, preserving FPTP-elected constituency MPs, and adding Additional Members from a regional party list to make the total representation from a region close to proportional. For example, the Scottish Green Party doesn't have enough localized support to win any constituency MSPs, but it has 6 MSPs out of 129 via the regional list, which is roughly it's share of the regional vote.
I'm not a huge fan of party lists, but they are electorally simple. Allowing people to vote up or down individual members of a party list is philosophically better (perhaps there are good hard-working people low down on the list, and entitled party hacks at the top) but presenting people with a list of several dozen names from their region, and asking them to rank them all seems unlikely to produce a great outcome - do most people want to mark down a few dozen preferences among people they've never heard of? The party list system has the benefit that you can complete your vote by making two marks on a piece of paper.
Do you think that all his achievements are down to luck ?
As for voting, voters here have a choice. In the Senate and other upper houses, they can vote "above the line" for a party and then take that party's allocation of votes amongst its candidates and those others standing. You can vote "below the line" and do that yourself. Most vote above. Lower house votes are for individual candidates. Tasmania has its own rules, basically the above but in reverse.
A final comment. Attending a polling booth and being marked off the roll as having attended is compulsory; actual voting is not, but again from memory somewhere over 95% attend and well over 90% of the votes cast are formally valid. As long as you comply with the pretty basic requirements, your vote will be counted.
No, also a talent for bluster and the projection of a persona that appeals to certain types of people.
No way does Johnson have the patience or attention to detail to function as an accountant. Something in sales, maybe. One of those fuckers who promises clients everything under the sun and leaves it to the technical team to explain that what he's promised is physically impossible.
Please list those achievements. We can then discuss the merits of each of them.
FWIW, I would say luck had little or no part in the story (beyond accident of birth); his career is mostly a testament to a desperately skewed system.
Good idea - it won't take long...
The Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt thinks Johnson has two great achievements:
1) That the UK has left the EU
2) That he won the election against Corbyn
[source: https://twitter.com/Jeremy_Hunt/status/1286195712401842184?s=20 ]
I think that sums it up very nicely. (You can read my reply to everyone's favourite former 'Health' Secretary here): https://twitter.com/alienfromzog/status/1286216909336317952?s=20
AFZ
Well the first one depends on your view point. Any country can leave the EU. It is how you do it that matters. Boris did not do it well.
The second it appears some think was a certainty.
Does being unable to build a bridge from London to London count as an achievement?
A longer, and possibly more interesting, discussion would be about the Great Leader's non-achievements, but it's time for lunch.
And ironically, the same people who think that are the ones most in support of Johnson.
Funny old world innit?
Come on - own up! - who messed with the Large Hadron Collider back in 2016?
I gather that support for Scottish independence has increased since the Great Leader's State Progress to the remoter parts of that country yesterday. Now that is an Achievement...
UK Prime Minister and Mayor of London twice.
I have never lived in London and did not vote COnservative in 2019
Over to you.
Neither of which is actually an achievement of merit. What did he do as Mayor? What has he achieved as Prime Minister for 12 months?
Perhaps @Telford would care to enumerate Achievements actually accomplished during those terms of office? I think that's what @alienfromzog was getting at...
But how many babies?
Someone should run a book.
And plenty do. But complaining is often simply not enough.
Although he did appear savvy enough to steal loads of Labour safe seats and see Corbyn skulking back to the backbenches.
No need to reply to any of my comments old bean, you can jog on.
No he stood on a Brexit ticket. A position he chose in 2016. Though it was almost the other way round.
After the election the news was full of Labour voters saying they leant him their vote to get Brexit.
The Brexit ticket won the election, not Boris, not Conservative policy.
Intelligent move then. ;-)
And if he and the party he leads doesn't deliver to the standards required by the electorate then the opposition parties have plenty of time to propose their alternatives. And if the electorate like those alternatives then we will see a change in government.
Hee hee ha ha If hee hee ho ho.
It's such a shame you can only be doubt accidentally.
AFZ
I'm probably missing something here, you alter my quote and then make no sense at all. I'll have another gin and see if you start making sense.
MM
And if he and the party he leads doesn't deliver to the standards required by the electorate...
I reiterate: If.
Really? IF?
Haha. No worries, apology accepted. Well, then, it's a slam dunk for a Labour government in 2024 then! I appreciate your pessimism.
What smug facade? I voted for the Conservatives at the last election, mostly to keep Corbyn out of power, that threat has fortunately now been removed permanently AND because I'd like to see Brexit finally delivered. If however the Labour Party finally sort themselves out and become a more eclectic and centralist party then I would have no issue changing vote. Under Corbyn my chance of voting Labour was 0%. Under Starmer it has lifted to around 25-30%. Under someone like Dan Jarvis it would probably hit the 50% mark.
Both of you totally miss the point. His achievements were to actually obtain the positions. Very few people have.
Usually when we talk about the achievements of a particular politician, we mean what he has accomplished with the job. Getting the job in the first place is usually taken as read.