General British politics discussion thread

it is only a red herring in a conversation about immigration or for people who have a major problem with immigration.

It is possible to see the illegal trafficking of people across borders, which a lot of this is, and not have a possible with immigration per se.

The only way I see electoral reform happening anytime soon is if at the next election Labour find themselves with their majority gone (at the least this implies SNP retaking Scotland) and the only reason they won at all was Reform still tearing a chunk out of the arse of the Conservatives. Reform and Conservatives then doing some sort of SDP-Liberal type deal, scaring the sh!t out of Labour.

At best highly contrived sequence of events.

People forget that first past the post "is British" and all other forms of voting are "foreign".

Stop and talk to the English for five minutes about inches and miles and you will see just how protective they get of anything from the days of empire.

There almost seems to be two completely different Green parties over there. One modern urban environmentalists and the other rural conservationists.

Any MP has a very easy path to getting their views in the press: issue a press release. Zero requirement for them to be paid for a newspaper article. The British public are already paying them handsomely.

All MPs (and indeed TD's here in Ireland) should be forbidden from holding secondary jobs and I'd go one further: they should be forbidden from actively investing: any shares/stocks/bonds etc should be locked into index funds or similar vehicles for the duration of their time in office. You can be damn sure most of Boris's mates made far more from their investments than they ever did from their salaries as MPs.

does that mean no more MPs on “have I got news for you”?

There's a very good argument that this would be no bad thing. For all of Boris Johnson's many, many faults and failings, it's undeniable that he can be very witty. Providing him a platform where he could make light of the many scandals he was caught up in almost certainly helped his political career.

It's a point that's been made many times by better political minds than mine but the British (and Irish imo) propensity to satirise or make fun of governments incompetence and / or corruption acts as a societal pressure valve that results in laughter at actions that could, and often should, result in righteous anger.

Contrast us or the British with the French: when government acts against the wishes or interests of the Franch people, they take to the streets. When they do it in Westminster, the most likely reaction is a biting cartoon on the cover of Private Eye, some memes on Twitter and a roasting on The Last Leg / Have I Got News for You etc.

As far as I know, sitting MPs aren't paid for HIGNFY, Lembit Opik had to film the show the day he lost his seat in 2010 and commented about how he could finally get paid for it and not take the abuse for free.

That is a long enough time ago now, though.

A very impressive start and I'm envious of this "Change" the UK has and wish we had something similar

So true

The imposition of PR-STV on Ireland was also British. Thank God eh!

It was part of the legislation to set up the Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland home rule legislations basically. Designed to stop exactly what its promoted as doing in GB - letting a party with ~40% get a huge majority.

NI used it for Stormont for one or two elections before the Unionist majority changed it to reduce the number of Nationalist MPs; we kept it despite the IFS not being the same as Southern Ireland.

Irish Free State.