General British politics discussion thread

Farage is getting a huge amount of pushback for his comments today from all quarters, but will it hurt him and Reform at all? Every closet Putin fan and disliker of Ukraine / Zelensky now has a party they can vote for.

The only coalition (at least involving England) within living memory was about booting Labour out of office so a lot of them went anti-PR out of spite.

With the present system Labour are occasionally in power. With PR they would almost always be in Govn't, but as the major party.

the two big parties would just fragment as well. We would see reform get stronger and a militant type party form from the left wing of labour. The greens would probably get a bump as well.

It would be a massive job reinventing constituency boundaries and whoever was in power at the time would have inordinate amounts of allegations of gerrymandering. The cost of doing it would be enormous.

It would be a mammoth task to accomplish. I don't even know how they could go about it in a way that would ensure impartiality.

The boundary commission deals with constituencies and there were few if any complaints when they drew up the Euro constituencies when the UK switched from FPTP to d'Hondt.

peddling the narrative that Brexit was a good idea but the Conservative just didn't do it right. And clearly, there is a audience for that narrative.

There sure is.

And that audience are the people who will vote Labour.

Because Labour are peddling that narrative too.

I acknowledge that. As for changing the voting system, PR would mean more MPs - I can't see that being popular!

They have been peddling it for the last few years.

They have said they will not look to rejoin the EU or single market or customs union or whatever.

They will instead they will do it better.

It's a bit like socialism.

Socialism doesn't work, just for over a century many have tried to do it better.

Brexit is the same, Brexit doesn't work, any form of Brexit is bad for the UK but people think they can make it work

I'm a regular reader of this thread but i rarely post but i do have one question to ask here:

Why does changing the UK voting system crop up every few weeks in this thread? It's been done to death at this stage and none of the main parties look likely to change it in the next cycle after the last failed election. There's a pretty seismic election in a few weeks, isn't that far more relevant at the moment?

Nice idea but none of the main operators are remotely that progressive. Even if the Tories are completely wiped out they will still dream of their next majority government.

Britsh politics fosters a winner takes all mentality, I don't think either side can cope with a coalition mentality. Ideology dominates British politics. It's why as a country they are so fucked up.

This is precisely why I say that the real danger for the Tories from the Faragistes is not the splitting of the vote costing them seats in this election, but providing Reform with enough votes to justify a mega-whinge about how unfair it is.

Whatever failings they might have in terms of sensible, realistic, forward-thinking policy-making, they are masters of ramming a half-baked idea into gullible heads and getting it amplified into an unavoidable talking point.

Electoral reform, though, isn't a half-baked idea; and the previous "strong and stable government" argument in favour of keeping FPTP has been demolished by the example of the Tories themselves.