UK Politics Thread 🇬🇧
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DrBanneker
Space is the Place
So who is the British conservative press blaming for the lashing last week?
The axe murderer
For I am death and I ride on a pale horse
The axe murderer
For I am death and I ride on a pale horse
The unfortunate fact is that most politicians in the world are not going to address climate change in a serious manner. I don't mean meaningless gestures I mean as an existential threat. We getting fukked by the climate is a Canon event at this pointNo mention of addresing climate change? One of the many issues Rishi was terrible on.
‘Disproportionate’ UK election results boost calls to ditch first past the post
Campaigners for electoral reform say outcome has renewed pressure for proportional representation
www.theguardian.com
‘Disproportionate’ UK election results boost calls to ditch first past the post
Campaigners for electoral reform say outcome has renewed pressure for proportional representationAlexandra Topping
Mon 8 Jul 2024 01.00 EDT
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View image in fullscreenElection staff counting ballot papers for Richmond and Northallerton on Thursday night. Photograph: WPA/Getty Images
The push for electoral reform in the UK has received a shot in the arm after the “most disproportionate election in history”, according to campaigners and academics.
Longstanding reform campaigners have become uneasy bedfellows with Reform UK’s Nigel Farage in recent days after Labour secured a 174-seat majority with just 34% of the popular vote.
“This election has thrown the spotlight on to the electoral system as the result was the most disproportional on record,” said Darren Hughes, the chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society. “We have already had a growing chorus of calls for PR [proportional representation] in the aftermath.”
Farage said the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system was “unfair” after Reform took 14.3% of the popular vote – making it the third biggest party by vote share – but won only five seats. The Green party received 6.8% of the vote for its four seats.
“I think these results will reinforce in people’s minds the need for reform,” Farage said.
Some experts argue that PR has produced more social democratic politics in Wales and Scotland, but others say it could also be a pathway for extremist politics, as has happened in some places in Europe.
Hughes said the major political parties and FPTP advocates could no longer use fears of the rise of extreme parties as an excuse to resist change.
“The debate around electoral reform can often focus on which parties would benefit from which voting system, but the only people the electoral system should be biased towards is the voters,” he said.
If the UK used the additional member system of PR, used for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, Reform would have won 94 seats across the country on Thursday and the Greens 42, according to the Electoral Reform Society.
It noted that Labour and the Conservatives had received their joint lowest vote share on record, and for the first time four parties had gained more than 10% of the vote.
The additional member system is a hybrid system under which half of a tranche of MPs are elected by FPTP and the rest by a proportional list system, where parties are allocated the remaining MPs on the basis of vote share.
The Liberal Democrats under Ed Davey ruthlessly targeted resources at winnable seats rather than focusing on vote share. As a result, they won a record 72 seats, up from eight in 2019, despite a similar vote share of about 12%.
One Lib Dem insider said: “It’s not that we like first past the post. But it’s fair to say that we had to use the system in front of us and play the board that was there.”
Analysis of the results at the cross-party pressure group Make Votes Matter found that 58% of voters did not choose their MP. The group’s spokesperson, Steve Gilmore, said previous election results using FPTP had also been “disproportional and unrepresentative”.
In 2015 the Conservatives won a majority with 36.9% of the vote, and in 2017 they had to form a minority government with 42.4%. Then in 2019 they landed an 80-seat majority on a vote share increase of 1.2 percentage points.
Gilmore argued that Thursday’s result should still be seen as an outlier. “A government has been elected on a third of the vote and they’ve got two-thirds of the seats,” he said. “That is pretty extraordinary, even by the discreditable standards of first past the post.”
In a referendum in 2011, a proposal on changing the electoral system was comprehensively defeated.
Campaigners were hopeful that a Labour government could result in reform after delegates at the 2022 party conference, including from the major unions Unison and Unite, backed PR.
Keir Starmer said during his leadership campaign in 2020 that the party had to “address the fact that millions of people vote in safe seats and they feel their vote doesn’t count”. Since then his official spokesperson has said he has a “longstanding view against proportional representation”.
Insiders say there is growing support for reform among the Labour party ranks. “More progress has been made internally then at any stage before,” Gilmore said.
Martin Smith, a professor of politics at the University of York, said it was likely that self-interest would be the factor that would push the main political parties to change the voting system.
“The more the party system fragments, the more disproportionate the electoral system becomes, and that fragmentation is not going to go away,” he said. “There’s a point when both Labour and the Conservatives will see the current system as threatening their interests, and then they may start to think: ‘OK, we need to change this.’”
This reminded me of one of my buried tabs! But it's a little Pepe Silvia... (IIRC I was reading about Tufton Street some time around when Truss was PM lol)Do any of you remember the AV referendum? It feels like political ancient history, but I haven't been able to shake the feeling that the opportunity for change was essentially sabotaged. I can't even trust my memories of the vote now, but I don't think the Alternative Vote was explained well at all, almost as if they wanted us to choose the status quo. What system even was it? Ranked choice?
...So I came across this tweet thread from the campaign director of NO2AV essentially bragging about the success/importance of the campaign - see tweets 2 & 12 - (but also looking at the results of the 2015/2017 elections under AV and possible consequences.)
That is a substantial change.
I honestly can't even imagine how different things could be now
I thought it was interesting because this man was also chief executive of Vote Leave:
They even recycled the line about using money for the NHS
An astounding level of influence tbh.
I wonder why he considers PR such a threat.
What’s there to address ? The climate will be fine once we’re all gone as a species and there’s no reversal at this point.The unfortunate fact is that most politicians in the world are not going to address climate change in a serious manner. I don't mean meaningless gestures I mean as an existential threat. We getting fukked by the climate is a Canon event at this point
The axe murderer
For I am death and I ride on a pale horse
Reform UK under pressure to prove all its candidates were real people
Doubt raised about election hopefuls who stood without providing photos, biographies or contact details
www.theguardian.com
Reform UK under pressure to prove all its candidates were real people
Doubt raised about election hopefuls who stood without providing photos, biographies or contact detailsPeter Walker, Ben Quinn and Rowena Mason
Mon 8 Jul 2024 14.44 EDT
Mark Matlock was initially suspected of being fake, in part due to his election photo looking AI-generated, but turned out to be a real person. Photograph: Reform UK
Reform UK has come under pressure to provide evidence its candidates at the general election were all real people after doubts were raised about a series of hopefuls who stood without providing any photos, biographies or contact details.
Reform insists every one of its 609 candidates on 4 July were real, while accepting that some were in effect “paper candidates” who did no campaigning, and were there simply to help increase the party’s vote share.
However, after seeing details about the apparently complete lack of information about some candidates, who the Guardian is not naming, the Liberal Democrats called on Reform to provide details about them.
A Liberal Democrat source said: “This doesn’t sound right and Reform should come clean with evidence. We need Reform to show who they are. People need to have faith in the democratic process.”
A series of candidates listed on the Nigel Farage-led party’s election website only show their name and the constituency they stood in, without any information about them, or contact details beyond a generic regional email address.
Many of these people have no visible online presence, and did not appear to do any campaigning. Photographs of the electoral counts for some of the relevant constituencies show that the Reform candidate was the only person not to attend.
Under electoral rules, the only details that need to be given about the candidate is their full name and the constituency where they live. They must all have an agent, and be nominated by 10 local voters.
With some of the Reform candidates, it is not clear if they are listed on the electoral register for the area where they are standing – which in a few cases is hundreds of miles from the constituency in question. One person with the same name and location of a candidate denied it was them.
While there is no evidence any of the candidates are fake, if that turned out to be true, it would be a serious electoral offence. Reform was keen to win as big a share of the national vote as possible, which is helped by a full slate of candidates. Some of the seemingly invisible candidates won several thousand votes.
A Reform source said: “All our candidates are categorically real. Given the rush, a few are just paper candidates and didn’t campaign. Some people began as paper candidates but then did campaign, and one of these – James McMurdock in South Basildon and East Thurrock – ended up winning his seat.”
The Guardian has also learned that one Reform candidate suspected of being fake, in part because his official election photo looked AI-generated, is a real person.
The suspicions about Mark Matlock, who won 1,758 votes in Clapham and Brixton Hill in south London, were compounded when he did not show for the election count, with sceptics also pointing to an apparent lack of any photographs of him campaigning.
However, Matlock insisted that he did exist, and there was a reason for the curious-looking election picture: “The image is me. Stupidly I had to get it altered to change my tie and suit as I couldn’t get to a photographer on time.” He showed the Guardian a copy of the original image, which was changed to make his tie a Reform light blue.
Matlock, who lives in the Cotswolds, said he did undertake a leaflet drop, adding that he understood the rush to get candidates in place: “The election caught us all on the hop and Rishi Sunak knew that. But we still managed to fill most of the seats with candidates, even if not all of them lived there, and it all contributed to our vote share.”
The Clapham and Brixton Hill candidate said he missed the election count because he had pneumonia.
Separately, it has emerged that Reform raised the most out of all political parties during the fourth week of the election campaign, bringing in almost £600,000 – of which a third was from the party’s new donor, Zia Yusuf.
Yusuf, a Muslim businessman who spoke at a recent Reform rally, is the founder of a luxury concierge company called Velocity Black, and gave Nigel Farage’s party £200,000.
Other donors to Reform include £125,000 from Jeremy Hosking, a businessman who recently backed Laurence Fox’s Reclaim party, and the anti-vax former Tory MP Andrew Bridgen.
1/11
"The party's got a problem."
Former Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire, who lost her Bristol seat to the Greens, exclusively tells @cathynewman that her party's "lack of a strong narrative" around Gaza during the election "had consequences".
2/11
Watch the full interview here: Ex-Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire: Party’s ‘lack of a strong narrative’ on Gaza ‘had consequences’
3/11
It wasn’t just Gaza - you represented a constituency where Corbyn was v popular and you were rabid against him
4/11
Why’s this loser and the other loser, Ashworth getting so much airtime?
5/11
The British Labour Party continues to enable the genocide in Gaza. They still are pretending that they don’t. It is a pity that more of them are not suffering the consequences as a result.
6/11
Sounds like she's got a problem, not the historic winners.
7/11
She’s a LFI. Hypocrite,
8/11
Gaza’s fault - couldn’t be yours could it?
Everyone else seemed to get elected.
9/11
The Labour party in a matter of months will be the same as the Tory infighting … what’s this space !!
10/11
Just wait until some of the Muslim Labour MPs jump ship to an "Independents' Coalition" - it's just the start.
11/11
Another Gaza junkie.
To post tweets in this format, more info here: https://www.thecoli.com/threads/tips-and-tricks-for-posting-the-coli-megathread.984734/post-52211196
"The party's got a problem."
Former Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire, who lost her Bristol seat to the Greens, exclusively tells @cathynewman that her party's "lack of a strong narrative" around Gaza during the election "had consequences".
2/11
Watch the full interview here: Ex-Labour MP Thangam Debbonaire: Party’s ‘lack of a strong narrative’ on Gaza ‘had consequences’
3/11
It wasn’t just Gaza - you represented a constituency where Corbyn was v popular and you were rabid against him
4/11
Why’s this loser and the other loser, Ashworth getting so much airtime?
5/11
The British Labour Party continues to enable the genocide in Gaza. They still are pretending that they don’t. It is a pity that more of them are not suffering the consequences as a result.
6/11
Sounds like she's got a problem, not the historic winners.
7/11
She’s a LFI. Hypocrite,
8/11
Gaza’s fault - couldn’t be yours could it?
Everyone else seemed to get elected.
9/11
The Labour party in a matter of months will be the same as the Tory infighting … what’s this space !!
10/11
Just wait until some of the Muslim Labour MPs jump ship to an "Independents' Coalition" - it's just the start.
11/11
Another Gaza junkie.
To post tweets in this format, more info here: https://www.thecoli.com/threads/tips-and-tricks-for-posting-the-coli-megathread.984734/post-52211196