General British politics discussion thread

All the major economies have been spending billions on overseas development aid for decades and it doesn’t seem to be having a great effect. It’s hard to see what labour can do to change that.

Generally the emigration figures out of the UK will be around 50% of that into the UK. Therefore the 1M figure on it's own is misleading. The net figure is the key. Did the podcast not reference this?

edit

Here's a link to some figures. The 'out' figure has actually been around 80% until about 2019. Has clearly come down since then so the net has shot up. 2022/23 figures may be a Covid backlog or Ukraine factor?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-figures-of-the-united-kingdom-y-on-y/

You would suspect if PR was brought in the days of single party governance would be over so you would need more than one party to vote for the change and this would not happen again. I fail to see why it is a problem now, it was a problem in 2017 when the Conservatives won 42.3% of the vote and Labour, SNP and the LibDems won 50.4% of the vote and they could not form a government together. Or how in 2019 the Tories won 43% of the vote but the parties who together won 49% was not even close to forming a government and Brexit was enacted on the back of this.

I agree there should be a change, but I see no reason why the left should clamour for it now when they have been squeezed the most from it. It needs to come from the right for it to stick, but I suspect they will not be the ones fighting for it too hard as they have gotten the most advantage of it in the past.

A mandate?

The small boats are a red herring in this context. Unauthorised boat arrivals represent between 1% and 2% of the UK's annual immigrant numbers. Even if the Rwanda policy, or any other policy, did succeed in 100% stopping the small boats, this would make no material difference to immigration.

It's true, obviously, that the UK's (largely ineffective) efforts to stop small boat arrivals consume resources that are then not available for other purposes. The options for addressing this are (a) stop trying to control small boat arrivals, which is I think not going to be acceptable, or (b) adopt better policies, which look at the factors which drive small boat arrivals and seek to change them. That might still cost money, obviously, but at least the taxpayer might get some benefit by spending on effective policies rather than on ineffective ones.

Others have touched on big-picture policies that might change migration flows. These are necessarily long-term but, more to the point, they are not something the UK can do unilaterally; if they are to work they will require concerted multilateral implementation.

But, if the focus is on the small boats, there are certainly things the UK can do that would be more effective than the preposterous and depraved Rwanda policy. But they wouldn't be doing much to change the bigger picture of migration to the UK.

The UK is unlikely to change away from FPTP in the foreseeable future, for a number of reasons.

• They're firmly wedded to it.
• The gross disproportion between vote share and seat share is well-known, well-understood and already priced in to everyone's views about it. They regard it as acceptable, even desireable.
• It's hugely beneficial to both Labour and the Tories.
• Even now, in what is pretty much their worst defeat ever, it still delivers the Tories more than 20 times as many seats as Reform got, when they got less than twice as many votes. It doesn't entrench Tories as the permanent party of government — no remotely democratic electoral system could do that — but it does entrench them as the dominant party of the right, which means they will always be either (a) the party of government or (b) the opposition, and only feasible alternative government. They can't realistically wish for more.
• Pretty much the same goes for the Labour party.
• This is how the system has always operated; how it is designed to operate. Those who are bleating about the injustice of it as though it were something new are largely partisans for Farage or for the loony wing of the Tory party.
• But even they are not entirely sincere. There is nothing new or surprising about the result this time around. Farage's party got 14.3% of the vote and 5 seats; in 2015 Farage's party got 12.6% of the vote and 1 seat. So, even for Faragists, things are as they ever were. This hasn't stopped Faragists being extremely influential in UK politics; they've learned to play the game successfully according to its current rules, so even they will not be heavily invested in getting the rules changed.

Also, the Brexit ref showed that for many in the UK, a full debate about any change will not happen. The previous voting reform ref failed because people just weren't interested. I would be slow to say that they just aren't interested enough to bother to actually inform themselves, but the Brexit ref and the 2019 GE certainly enhanced that feeling.

Moving to PR would require significant change. Not only for the ref itself (if that was the route taken although of course Labour could simply vote it through tomorrow if they so wished) but also in terms of the voting public. Do they really want to get into the complication of multi seat constitucies, slow counts, having to consider more than just the first option?