• 3 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • No, with the party list system, any one party which gets north of something like 60,000 votes gets an MP and the party chooses who gets the seat, so the leader cannot lose their seat. They are immune from becoming unelected, no matter how unpopular.

    In our current system, if you can’t find a locality that wants you, you lose. Reform might have got a lot of votes, but its candidates are very unpopular, for good reason, and they don’t win elections much. It’s only because the Conservatives have been a total shit show that they got any MPs at all.













  • Historically, people turn to the far right when things are going terribly wrong. The conservatives ran the country into the ground and legitimised everything the far right stood for, then were upset that people started voting far right. I say it was unsurprising. Why not vote Reform if you’re a rabid racist and your usual party are about the same policywise but have a boring British Asian leader instead of a white laddish thug of a politician?

    If things get significantly better for folks, there’s less motivation to vote in desperation.



  • Yes, but I think you’re overstating how right wing Labour pitched it. There were no claims to be anti woke. I think it was a pretty firmly centrist pitch. It’s the Conservatives who are going to panic and try to out-nutcase Farage. Labour are going to try and be responsible and fix the broken ship. It’s just whether they can do it fast enough for people to notice a big improvement in the cost of living vs wages problem.




  • You can’t out-Farage Farage. The Putin-sponsored shyster has no limits. Elections are won in the middle ground in the UK. The Conservatives could easily win next time. They just need an affable leader, some more centrist policies and some headlines about how they’ve had a change of heart and want to be nice to poor people now and balance the books again. Worked for Cameron. Starmer, meanwhile, had to make a difference in the cost of living crisis so large that people notice they’re getting better off, and restore hope that our children will be better off than us. Tall order.



  • I lived through the Blair government. Some left wing people were upset because he was on the right of the Labour Party, but things did indeed get a lot better in those ten years. Not everything by any stretch of the imagination. But no one expected him to make things better for gay people but not only did the legal situation change but the mood music affected the nation’s morals for the better for a while. It became socially far less acceptable to hate on gay folk. Could happen again, but I get why you might be cynical.