General British politics discussion thread

A lot of people in England would find this blunder funny, rather than getting outraged by it.

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/dominic-raab-misogyny-men-women-21775871

Is what Raab actually said. So it's clearly a case of poor grammar in a live interview than doesn't know what misogyny means.

All seems a bit desperate for Twitter and The Guardian to jump on this on Boris day, but since it has been a controversy-less conference unlike the Labour one, I suppose there was no other option.

Whenever I watch Boris give speeches I have foremost in my mind those that hate his guts, imagine what they're thinking and get amusement from that as much as from his authentic quips. Particularly liked the 'levelling down' one (Labour aspiration of course) and insulating protesters in a prison cell. And on protesting I'd hardly think you can do whatever you like just because you're protesting, which seems to be what some people here think is right and proper.

I wonder if anyone in Labour watched that Brown/Blair doc on BBC. It would seem to me the position the Labour party are in today is exactly the same as the Kinnock/Thatcher era. If they did they might do well to take the approach Blair took back in his day, because as it is the Tory's are untouchable for the foreseeable.

Finally I wonder since Labour are not backing PR can we stop all this talk of Britain not being a democratic state when clearly it has been democratically decided they don't want PR.

I doubt Labour will ever consider PR for Westminster. They are more concerned about having power to themselves than the 15-20 years gaps that FPTP keeps them out of office.

Same thing in Ireland. FF used to get around 40 to 44% and form a majority government. That is still possible here. Are we undemocratic?

Our multi seat system has led to our politicians showing up to funerals of constituents that they don't know, using their position to get medical cards etc etc. All of this stuff doesn't happen to any extent in UK. I remember a time when people here wanted single seat constituencies to eliminate parish pump politics.

There are faults with all forms of parliamentary democracies. The UK have had their system for centuries and don't see the point in changing it.

The Electoral Reform Society did some analysis on the 2019 result based on the pr system used for EU elections and found the tories would only have won 288 seats using that method, well short of a majority. The so would be on 28 rather than 48. Lib dems and greens would be the big winners. I'd guess in a regular election a ukip or other far right party would comfortably muster 50+ seats and chances are they'd end up in a coalition with tories which, in a sense, is kind of what you have now anyway.

The thing about analyses like this is that they tend to assume that, under a PR system, people would have voted in the same way as, in the real world, they did vote.

In fact this is unlikely. There's a real sense in the UK that, in 99% of constituencies, a vote for a party that cannot possibly win is a "wasted vote", and you use your vote most effectively by considering only the parties which have some chance of winning - which, in most constituencies, is just two parties. The likely consequence is that both Labour and the Tories get a much higher share of the vote than they would in any system of proportional representation, and all other parties get a much lower share. If the UK did adopt a more democratic voting system, people's voting preferences would likely shift in response to the new options open to them.

My comment about far right winning 50+ seats wasn't aimed at 2019 specifically, more in general. The brexit party would have won a good bit more than that, given they were polling into the 20s at one stage iirc. We can't be certain but i suspect the numbers would have stacked up.

I think the point here is that pr is definitely a good system and the most democratic, but you have to accept that the extremes will also be given the opportunity to develop and grow electorally. You only have to look across Europe to see that. People think the far right will never gain such traction in the uk, perhaps so but 50ish seats would seem quite plausible to me anyway. We'll probably never know anyway.

Well, the ukip vote did collapse in 2017 so I think any substantial electoral progress would be presupposed on them getting their act together, adapting to the system and pushing issues like immigration to the forefront. I'm not saying there's any huge appetite for them, and my earlier comment about them being in coalition is a bit ott as again that presupposes it wouldn't be anathema for other parties to do deals with them. But 7-8% seems plausible enough to me anyway, 40-50 seats ballpark figure.

The party really losing out is the greens. Polling round 5-6% but in a position where they can still only target one extra seat next time. I strongly suspect they might well outdo those polling numbers but it's still unlikely to make a blind bit of difference.