British Politics Thread

Is Scotland's new hate crime laws actually overdoing it or are You Tube comments just being pissy?

The latter. They're just your bog standard "if you commit a crime that's motivated by some sort of bigotry, the judge will consider a harsher sentence", but specifically including trans people now.

It’s more than that but not by much. So the 1986 Public Order Act made it a crime to “insight racial hatred” and the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act made it a crime to “stir up religious hatred”. Scotland has now copy pasted the law to extend to gender identity.

Rowling has falsely claimed that any instance of misgendering would get a person locked up under this change, Scottish politicians have said that what counts as stirring/insighting hatred is something the police determine (which they have for years under the other laws), the press have had a field day claiming that the law is unclear, the police have been flooded with complaints under the new law many of which look to have come from people trying to score political points, following a police investigation they have determined that Rowling’s most recent tweets don’t hit the threshold for insighting hatred.

No they wouldn’t. The Labour membership are consistently in favour of PR and so are the unions (that’s why pro-PR motions have passed at Labour conference), the problem is that the PLP don’t like it and Starmer isn’t the kind of person to push radical change. I think PR was even in the 1997 manifesto.

Labour could absolutely elect a pro-PR leader, the problem is winning an election with such a platform (the press would hate it). Though considering the Tories changed the voting system for some elections to FPTP with minimal noise there’s a world where a new Labour PM with an existing majority could push it through anyway.

Edited by Silasw on Apr 11th 2024 at 6:55:52 PM

Mm, how are police going to determine what is or is not incitement? Are there court rulings or government guidelines? Overly vague laws that get mis-/under-/overused can be just as much a problem as overly rigid, easily circumvented ones.

Same way they have since 1986?

There will be case law going back to 1986 and more specific guidance probably exists in the original 1986 law, it doesn’t need to exist in the new Scottish law because it directly says that the standards for the crime ar ehte same as set out for racial hatred under the 1986 law.

I can understand if one has a problem with the idea of insighting hatred bring a crime, but it has been for over 30 years and this is the third law criminalising it, so the problem would be bigger than this one law.

But nobody is objecting to the old laws, this is a bunch of new people who are taking issue only with the fact that you can’t insight hatred against trans people, they’re fine with it being a crime to insight hatred against black/white/christian/Jewish people.

Edited by Silasw on Apr 11th 2024 at 7:07:53 PM

I should have clarified that I meant the PLP rather than the Labour voters. Still, combine a press offensive with a PLP revolt against a radical Labour leader, and you've got a recipe for PR to lead to another Corbyn.

Thing is the PLP can change, if Labour manage to add a couple hundred new M Ps a chunk of them will be in favour of PR and alongside a new leader and stalwart loyalists could be enough to get such a change through Parliment.

You can have a deeply unpopular party leader pushing change that the press are dramatically opposed to, you just have to get that leader in once you already have a majority, not before.

Labour need to learn from the Tories, get a majority under a leader who is viewed as moderate (Cameron) or who campaigns for publicly supported things (like Boris with expanding public services), then change to someone who actually reflects your deeper ideological beliefs (May, Truss, Sunak).

From what I have read, the Police seems to be a bit overworked with the new Hate Crime Law, though the problem of the being understaffed and underfunded is an old one.

Since the Lib Dems, FPTP vs. PR etc. has been in this thread recently, maybe now is as good a time as any to share my hot take with the thread: that I don't think FPTP in and of itself is the root of the problem and that not all forms of PR are a good solution.

(Caveat: I'm not an expert and some of my terms and thinking may be muddled or inaccurate, so feel free to correct me!)

Really I figured a few years ago that the real issue is that the system is really designed so that what people are voting for is their local MP, whereas what most people want to do is elect the party of government. PR merely gives those people what they want whilst not addressing the rest of the problem, and possibly introducing other ones.

Being as we have a parliamentary system in which the government (executive) is made up of sitting M Ps and is composed of the party (or coalition) with the largest number of seats, you still have the case where the Prime Minister (and lesser ministers) are not elected by the people but the party. Internal party politics rule the day. Plus you have the added not-so-bonus of parties needing to make coalition deals with each other which mean what parties do is even more entrenched- and as compromise results, you're not guaranteed manifesto pledges will be guaranteed.

The other issue is if you have the wrong form of "PR" i.e. a straightforward party list system- you lose some of the advantages of electing a local MP who is known to and accountable to a given constituency, and give power again to the internal party mechanisms as to who gets appointed to the list. From what I can see, the single transferrable vote (STV) would probably be a better way forward- it can work as a way of electing a person as constituency MP and actually solving the problem of FPTP-in-itself: in which a candidate can get elected with less than 50% of the vote, meaning . PR supporters also get their way as it is supposed to approximate proportionality if parties are your main concern.

Which also leads us on to the claims that the Lib Dems are somehow "unelectable". Well, I can understand the damage they did to their base by getting into bed with the Tories, but again we are seeing "electability" from the point of view of being a party of government. I don't even think that seems to be what the current Lib Dem strategy is as they know it's doomed to failure. Rather they seem to be aiming to get constituency MPs elected and overturn some of the so called "blue wall" ex-safe Tory seats. As such when we're talking about electability, are we talking about the ability to elect more MPs in some constituencies at all, perhaps enough to help unseat the Tories from government, or to elect enough MPs to form a government? "Success", "electability" or whatever is relative and depends on what you're actually aiming for.

As for Labour actually supporting PR that is actually a surprise for me, as it wouldn't naturally seem to be in their interests to essentially undermine the existing two party, winner-takes-all system.

I think another conceptual issue with FPTP parliaments is that writing laws is more a policy thing than a person thing, while persons matter more in government constitution. That system emphasizes the person in the branch of government where it is least germane.

Who sets up the party list is a big question. In some places, you have primaries. In others, the party decides. Come to think of it, how are MP candidates picked?

Mind you, presidential systems lack an inherent method to solve inter-branch disagreements, and thus tend to devolve in gridlock as in the USA or dictatorships as everywhere else. Any electoral system with districts is prone to bias and local/national issues being mixed up - and I don't think that there are good solutions to the bias issue.

not entirely sure what you mean by the first paragraph. After all, policies are determined by persons, surely?

As for how M Ps are selected, in the UK I think it's a matter for each party as to who they put forward, although technically anyone who can secure enough support from nominees within the constituency and can pay the required deposit can stand for election, if only as an independent. We certainly don't have "primaries" as far as I know, like in the US.

On that last point, I think the least I can say is to safely agree the US is not exactly an ideal model for the UK to follow, if cynically one might say the powers that be are trying their best (elected mayors and police commissioners, voter ID, etc.) to emulate it in small ways. Especially though the separation of powers leading to gridlock might mean it isn't the ideal solution to the current parliamentary system.

Nay, lawmaking is to a large degree a function of the policy agenda, while the composition of a government often reflects personnel relations. In lawmaking, people are mostly a means to an end. In government, they can be as important as the end.

I still, alas, have no idea what you mean by that.

What he means is that when it comes to getting legislation passed in the UK, who is in the legislature matters a lot less than how many butts a party can get into the seats. Individual actors matter a lot more when they hold posts in the Government.

You're sort of right. By and large, people do vote more and more based on who's going to be in charge at the end, but one of the few benefits FPTP has is tying geographic representation to a single person so it's easy to know who to go and complain to. The other thing it's good for is speed.

But you can easily have proportional representation systems that also assign MP's regionally, and I'm even more confused why you've sidetracked into talking about party lists, because both FPTP and STV can still easily have the same problem: the party decides who gets to run for them in a given area, and independent candidates are a once in a blue moon thing. You just make the geographical areas larger (which is what you need to do anyway for PR to work) and don't go so far as to lump the entire country into one big melting pool.

What you've completely discounted are the actual benefits of PR and why people support it, which is that PR aims to eliminate wasteful votes and maximise the number of people who feel that they have some representation in government. So far as practical, a PR system aims that the number of votes a party gets should translate into its seats and therefore its importance on crafting legislation and actually running the government and directing it—the Lib Dems shouldn't exist to be a spoiler effect on the Tories as a party whose lowest point is 7.4%; they should be a consistent player in forming governments. And on the flip side, something like David Cameron's 2015 government shouldn't exist either—less than 37% of the vote, but an actual majority (which was so narrow that the brexit wing could, of course, dictate everything).

See, on the whole representation thing—my local MP isn't someone I voted for, and who I have stringent disagreements with on several platform positions. Am I actually being represented in Parliament, then? If I have concerns, is there a point to going to this person? The gap was only 6% last time there was an election, after all (although that was a by-election). And if we use STV and assume the results flip, that's still nearly half of voters who can say the same thing, as opposed to just over half. But—this is only one of four constituencies in the council area, to use the simplest way to group them together. Taking the results from 2019, which includes one very lopsided constituency, it'd be a 3:1 SNP/Labour split by the d'Hondt† method, which is at least closer for such a small number of seats (and 2:2 if the other constituency had been more in line). And if you factored in the next council that could logically be combined, it's more like‡ 4:3:1, which is a lot closer to the actual vote totals and much better than the 7:0:1 split from the 2019 election (now 6:1:1 because of by-elections). And, one should note, at that point we're still talking about logical, regional subdivisions where the MP could be considered local (and if a party has enough representation, one's probably even closer).

And that is why PR is preferable to plurality voting: because you don't get anywhere from 40% to the majority of voters discounted. Who those people prefer is actually represented further down the line, and if they want to raise something to their local MP, they have a vastly lower risk of running into "but my party platform stringently disagrees with you, so I won't actually represent you". All it loses is voting specifically for which person in the party gets the seat—but as I noted at the start, the party more or less controls that anyway.

† Picked entirely because it was the first thing I found a calculator for, other methods are available.
‡ Haven't done the exact maths, could go back if you really want—I just doubled the number of seats for demonstrative purposes.

(I will note that this only accounts for 95% of voters at this scale, but compare that with the 40-something % of FPTP)

Edited by RainehDaze on Apr 15th 2024 at 2:22:32 PM

That explanation certainly makes a certain amount more sense. How true it is is another matter, as is how true it ought to be.

After all party policy is one thing, but it's up to the actual M Ps to vote in accordance with their party's policy or not, and not every vote is a "three line whip". So, who the M Ps are does matter to some extent.

The other reason for who M Ps are mattering is accountability. Under the current system, each constituency has a specific MP to whom constituents can get in touch and they are ultimately accountable to their constituents in some sense, and I don't suppose under party-list PR that link is retained. Who do you lobby if there is no specific MP for your specific constituency?

And of course that all avoids the issue of whether parties themselves are a good thing in the first place. If so much is already decided by the party, both the what (policy) as well as the who (M Ps, government ministers alike) is already decided either by internal party politics or inter-party politics (e.g. in a coalition government) then all we the people are left with is little more than picking our preferred party or parties from a menu and hoping for the best. Not exactly what I would call particularly democratic, if by definition "democracy" is supposed to be "power of the people" (as a whole, not a political elite). I suppose that could go for any form of "representative democracy" but it's part of why I don't like party-list PR. It just entrenches the importance of parties within the system, rather than just happening to become important in a system not originally designed for it.

Edited by TheLyniezian on Apr 15th 2024 at 2:44:19 PM

Parties are inevitable. Better to work with them and account from the offset than stick with a far worse system out of ideological purism and vague fear of elites that applies even without parties.

Literally said that in the post before.

Also, went and checked—it's 4:2:2 with a 45/26/22% vote split (LD with 5% still don't get a seat), which is at least 93% of people across two council areas having voted for someone that's sitting in parliament, as opposed to 46%.

Edited by RainehDaze on Apr 15th 2024 at 3:24:44 PM

Well, to answer the parts I can, I mentioned the party-list system because it was my understanding it was one method of having a PR-type voting system, and I would rather have a candidate-based system that means we can in principle do away with political parties. True, most party candidates have already been preselected by their parties by whatever means, and how that is done needs looking at, but you don't have to vote for a party candidate or be one to stand.

True, also, that I wasn't trying to address the arguments for PR head-on, so much as to suggest my thoughts on why I don't think they're necessarily my ideal solution to what I think are the real underlying problems. Is the problem that people feel disenfranchised because they can't directly elect the government? Then that is the real problem. You could just as easily have a US-style separation of powers than change how M Ps are selected, which as mentioned brings its own problems. Is the problem one of wasted votes? Well, that can mean a number of different things, and it's true that if all you're talking about is voting for one candidate over the other, votes can still be "wasted" under FPTP in ways they perhaps would not be under other systems such as a ranked choice system (there are others, but as with your detailed explanation of how you think PR is better, I'd need time to study them in more detail, and possibly not do so when there's a noisy toddler in the other room).

[EDIT: one thing I have definitely missed, is perhaps that PR is more about the party makeup of Parliament reflecting votes cast for a given party, not so much who the government (in the sense of the executive) is, which would still be an issue if you had separate executive and legislative branches, as to how the legislative branch is made up.]

[EDIT #2: I'm also aware of the possibility of larger multi-member constituencies within a proportional type system, being basically how European Parliament elections worked. Which I recall meant the need to get in touch with a larger number of people of differing political parties and standpoints.

I think a point I also want to make here, is in principle your MP(s) should represent you in spite of party affiliation or political leanings, which is again, part of the reason I have issues with the need for party loyalty. It may trump loyalty to the actual electorate in practice.]

(Which, to be honest, is probably why we've got what we have- most attempts to understand the system, and most attempts to change it, are too complicated for the average voter to bother with... some Self-Deprecation there...)

[EDIT #3: not to mention I also tend to feel the need to answer before I've really addressed the content of other's previous posts, for which I must apologise...]

I dispute that, although it's fair to say there will always be at least some sort of informal factionalism within politics. Political parties in a recognizbly modern form have not always existed, Parliament has been around longer historically speaking, and need not exist as formal entities with their own structure and rules that are integral to the workings of the political system.

Edited by TheLyniezian on Apr 15th 2024 at 4:20:18 PM

Parliament has existed longer than there have been parties, sure, but we've had some form of parties since the seventeenth century. Where you have a system that requires groups of people to co-ordinate to achieve anything, it is inevitable that factions will form. It's easier to co-ordinate, and when you work with other people, then there are advantages to, say, running an election campaign.

Or, the inevitable complexity of actually forming a legislative body and government will require groups to co-ordinate, and as soon as you have groups of mutual interest, boom. Political party. And if you're going to have big groups in government, it's for everyone's benefit if they're actually formalised and some control is exerted on them—not recognising parties makes it worse as they can do basically anything.

The sole advantages plurality voting have are that it's easy to understand, easy to count, and trivial to map voters to a geographic representative. But it's not like proportional systems can't have said geographical representation—as my example demonstrates, it would be easy to combine my constituency (Airdrie & Shotts) with the other constituencies in North Lanarkshire, and if that's still too small to have decent proportionalism, it could fairly logically be combined with the constituencies in South Lanarkshire too. Or maybe one of the other adjoining councils, depending on how you want to think about it. Am I better represented just because I have one MP whose office is more or less down the road from me, even though we have some pretty big disagreements on principle? If I have a complaint, is there much point lobbying him? Even if we do agree for once, is this voice in parliament actually capable of doing anything? After all, FPTP discourages coalition building, so it's a single MP from a minor party—chances are, nobody would listen anyway.

And, generally, people feel disenfranchised when their vote feels pointless. FPTP doubles down on this in so many ways it's depressing.

1. Wasted votes. If you didn't vote for the winner in your constituency, you might as well not have done anything.
2. Winner-takes-all at the national level. Voted for your local MP? Well, except in the occasional matters of conscience, better hope they got a majority! Otherwise your MP's basically thumb-twiddling for the next parliament.
3. Can't accurately select a candidate—this one is down to safe seats and tactical voting. Because of the first two points, you have to vote for whoever you least dislike who's likely to win. Neither of the options feels like it represents you? Well...

There's more, but those are the ones that obviously come to mind.

And the solution to the issues with FPTP votes manifestly isn't to just introduce a presidential-style direct election but leave the existing MP system in place. People aren't going to suddenly be happy with governments because they got direct input on some figurehead position (not to mention that because that will be a plurality anyway, it wouldn't change who the PM was over any election in my lifetime anyhow, fairly sure)

The point of PR is that elected representatives should represent the votes cast, and voters should be able to cast votes in accordance with their preferences, rather than voting around how other people will vote to try and get a slightly-less-disliked candidate in.

You get a lot more coalition governments, but I honestly don't have a clue where you're trying to go with that. Most of the UK civil service is pretty stable, it's mostly ministerial positions that move around.

Or you just reach out to the one MP. You don't need to contact all of them just because they all represent an area. I mean, you could, really depends what you want to complain about.

An elected official who was elected on a certain platform and for holding certain views should not, however, be expected to backtrack on those because one of their constituents happens to disagree. Which is kind of the thing I'm talking about here—my only representative will have been elected for things that I disagree with, and therefore on those topics I have no effective representation, and can have no effective representation, as it would mean asking them to go back on their word and not represent the constituents who are in favour of these things.

Edited by RainehDaze on Apr 15th 2024 at 4:23:57 PM

Some fair points.

It's worth pointing out I'm not exactly trying to defend FPTP here. My issue is what are we trying to replace it with? "PR" by itself is an umbrella term which can be done by means of a number of different systems, which as far as I currently understand could be more candidate- or party-based. STV is one of the former types, supposedly. The other point I'm trying to make is that simply changing the voting system for how we select M Ps isn't going to solve every problem with the overall system by which people feel disenfranchised. Maybe some of those have to do with the Parliamentary system itself, or with party politics, or the fact people vote in a certain way because that's how they think they "have" to vote in the system they have (i.e. the "[Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy voting for the lizards in case the wrong lizard gets in]", or else it's a "wasted vote"). It seems that there are enough people to feel disenfranchised in many countries, all of which have differing electoral systems, that they are willing to elect radical fringe elements than they were before, so obviously it's not just the British FPTP system that is responsible for people feeling disenfranchised. Perhaps the problem runs much deeper.

On the last point: obviously reaching out to any elected representative is going to only achieve so much by itself; one constitiuent can't be a dictator in a democracy. Obviously the one-member-per constituency is simpler in terms of knowing who to reach to to and who you are dealing with; I don't pretend there is any greater advantage than that or that the disadvantages don't outweigh it. In summary, though, I know there isn't ultimately a perfect system (and I don't even need to wrap my head around Arrow's impossiblity theorem to know that!)

The fact people can elect fringe parties if they're dissatisfied is actually a good thing! Dissatisfaction with your current political parties should allow you to go elect somebody else. But FPTP as a system doesn't allow for that unless things change so drastically that the second largest party gets replaced by the third largest party. The mechanics of how a winner-takes-all plurality system work mean that you will always trend towards having two parties, and that further drives disengagement because people see it as pointless, and the wasted votes.

In a voting system, what you ideally want is that if voters think they aren't being represented, then they change their votes and someone else will represent them. Plurality voting goes right against that—if you don't like your MP, and they're in a 'safe' seat, it doesn't matter where you assign your vote. If you're in a swing seat... well, then tactical voting comes into it. Or, more often, people just won't bother at all.

(I will note that I was thinking of STV in the context of having a single elected seat, not having X seats—in the case that you have multiple, STV is a form of PR, but it's not one where you can demonstrate alternate outcomes from existing voting data—hence I just went for the D'Hondt method for being quicker. You'd still probably have parties picking candidates, though, just as they do nowadays. STV is a bit of a bugger to work out in general where surplus votes start being involved but, ideally, does lead to all votes contributing to the election of a candidate)

The easiest PR system to use would be the one we already use in London, Wales and Scotland. The system we actually forced on Germany after WW 2 because it’s a way of having locally linked M Ps while also having voters represented and counter Fascism.

The Additional Member System. You basically run both a FPTP constituency based election and a party-list style PR election.

• Everyone votes for a local candidate exactly as they do under FPTP.
• Parties then gain extra seats (bound either regionally or nationally) based either on the disconnect between the votes and results of the local candidate elections (so if the Lib Dem’s get 20% of the vote but only 8% of the seats they’d get extra seats) or on a second vote (so you vote once for a local candidate and once for a party). The aim is to bring the overall seat distribution percentage roughly in line with the vote percentage each party gets (based on either the total percentage they got for all their candidates nationally or the total percentage they got on the party list vote).
• The number of extra seats available can be either fixed or floating, depending on if the legislature needs to be a specific size. There’s also normally a minimume percentage needed to get any of the extra seats (normally 5%).

You can modulate this system to run the bonus seats at a national or regional level. In London the list seats are city wide, while in Scotland each region gets 7 list seats.

Each party puts forward their candidate for each constituency as determined by their own internal process. Most parties generally run it through their constituency level party, so as a Labour member in constituency X I get to vote for who we make our candidate. The level of meddling from party HQ in this process varies and often frustrates the local party activists. Sometimes a candidate is “parachuted in” and the local party are just told that a person is now their candidate, sometimes the eligibility criteria might be mandated by HQ (Labour under Blair ran a number of selections only allowing female candidates, though it’s now been ruled that the PLP has enough women that doing it again would be illegal), Party HQ can also disqualify a particular candidate from being selected for a number of reasons (this is why Corby can’t run for Labour again, he’s still a member who hasn’t been found to have breached any rules, but Party HQ have ruled that he’s so unpopular that him being a candidate would severely damage the party politically so he’s not allowed to be a candidate).

Elected M Ps normally don’t have to run again to be the party candidate for their seat, Labour has it so that a reselection vote can be forced by the local party but it’s very rare.

Edited by Silasw on Apr 15th 2024 at 6:58:57 PM

AMS is annoying jank in practise, though. If we were going so far as to change how Westminster allocates seats, no reason to pick the ugly stepchild of PR methods.

Actually, calling it PR is a stretch. It's more proportional, but it's only particularly good at it once you start letting the number of seats increase to account for a wide disparity, which will never happen.

Edit: In fact, it's worth noting that AMS can actually go backwards in some scenarios and let some people's votes count effectively double—namely, anyone voting for the most overrepresented FPTP party can take their regional vote and give it to any other party because they're treated very distinctly here. It's how you get things like the SNP getting 47% of the constituency vote (and 62/73 of the seats), and only 40% of the regional list (for 2 seats more, putting them on 64/129, or 49%).

Where did that other 7% go? Greens, naturally, who got less than 2% of the constituency vote but 8% of the regional vote, for 8 seats there.

Things have mostly only gone okay because people haven't fully exploited this, as well as not letting parties just change their name to be a second party on the other list, but there is nothing about it that would prevent such loopholes in theory. If that near-wasted 40% of the regional list was transferred to another party, then the voters who won their constituency votes would get massive influence on the final shape of a parliament.

Also, it still leads to tactical voting and safe seats on a local level.

Edited by RainehDaze on Apr 15th 2024 at 9:09:34 AM

The way around that is to basically uncap the size of Parliment and run the lists at a national (or country in U.K. case) level.

Then top up seats can be used not only to supplement parties who did badly at the constituency level but well at the national level, they can also be used to dilute the parliamentary power of parties that did well at the constituency level but badly at the national level.

Yeah, but it's something I think is very unlikely to happen, at which point... honestly, if you're going that complicated, just... pick a different voting method. Because the main reason to go with AMS is that we already use AMS in regional elections, except the way we've implemented it in said regions is terrible, so just pick something more appropriate from the outset. "FPTP but we add an entire second ballot with party lists just to account for the fact that FPTP is terrible" sums itself up quite well. Plus you might have to start adding so many seats to make things proportional that the original constituency thing is kinda minor in comparison, which is... silly.

But definitely don't adopt AMS as used in Scotland, where it's only mostly functional because voters and parties have been largely stupid about it.