Comments | andrewducker: Interesting Links for 20-07-2016

andrewducker

Interesting Links for 20-07-2016

Jul 20, 2016 12:00

Government lawyer tells court UK will not trigger Article 50 this year (tags: uk europe ) David Cameron built fewest houses of any Prime Minister since 1923 (Frankly, Labour's record not much better) (tags: housing uk epicfail ) People with low cognitive needs don't care about spoilers (and they don't bother people with low need for affect) ( ( Read more... )

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The Current Meltdown in Our Political System Is a Sym.. drdoug July 20 2016, 11:39:32 UTC

I'm strongly in favour of electoral reform, but find this argument for it a little unconvincing. We have had FPTP for considerably longer than the current meltdown. Universal suffrage and no extra votes for graduates are newer electoral innovation than FPTP but I wouldn't blame them. Before the current meltdown in the UK, Belgium was the poster child for a dysfunctional political system in Europe (they went more than 500 days without a proper Government), and they use proportional representation.

Re: The Current Meltdown in Our Political System Is a Sym.. andrewducker July 20 2016, 11:43:22 UTC

Nobody is blaming *all* political dysfunction on voting systems.

But the Labour problem clearly is, and I'd definitely argue that Brexit is strongly connected.

RE: Re: The Current Meltdown in Our Political System Is a Sym.. drdoug July 20 2016, 13:50:56 UTC

I'm hesitant to make your arguments for you here, so do please do correct me if I have the wrong end of your stick ( ... )

RE: Re: The Current Meltdown in Our Political System Is a Sym.. andrewducker July 20 2016, 14:00:14 UTC

Oh, I'm not saying there would be no disagreements between different left-wing parties. There clearly would be. But Labour.Right and Labour.Left could go off and both get on with being political parties rather than spending their time fighting over who should get to lead Labour.United. And then the public would have a choice over which party to vote for, rather than the interminable arguments over what, exactly, Labour should be doing to pull in the voters ( ... )

RE: Re: The Current Meltdown in Our Political System Is a Sym.. drdoug July 20 2016, 14:52:42 UTC

I suppose Labour.Right and Labour.Left could ignore their worst disagreements unless and until it came to time to thrash out a coalition. But I rather suspect they might end up arguing internally over how much to compromise in their approach to each other.

It seems remarkably clear to me that the two ends of the party don't actually belong in the same party

I dunno. This problem has been around in the Labour movement in some form or other since the Menshevik-Bolshevik split and probably before that. I'd hesitate to say the differences are so large that a split is inevitable - though mainly because I am holding off from any predictions about what will happen in this climate.

feel so utterly disenfranchised as to, effectively, set fire to their homeThe pro-Brexit people I've spoken to are almost certainly a small unrepresentative subset, but all of them seemed to genuinely think voting Leave was a good idea and would make things better, rather than being an act of desperate self-immolation. The only sense of disenfranchisement they' ( ... )

RE: Re: The Current Meltdown in Our Political System Is a Sym.. andrewducker July 20 2016, 14:58:19 UTC

" But I rather suspect they might end up arguing internally over how much to compromise in their approach to each other ( ... )

kalimac July 20 2016, 16:19:28 UTC

You think Belgium is fncked up now, it'd be unimaginably worse if they had FPTP.

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