British Politics Thread

Corbyn is looking at a serious constitutional overhaul, he’s probably the only way we will ever get a proportional system, personally I favour AMS.

Which one is AMS?

Personally, I'm in favour of anything that would just give you, say, Glasgow constituencies. Or Yorkshire. Or Manchester. You'd probably still need to split London up, but dear god no more tiny fiddly boundaries. And none of the weirdness of this whole Regional List nonsense.

Additional member system

"Under AMS voters are also given the opportunity (a second vote) to vote for a political party. Once all the first votes are counted and constituency MS Ps elected, this second vote is used to make the overall representation of each of the political parties fair."

Edited by Ultimatum on Jan 13th 2019 at 5:20:57 PM

The exact system I don't like.

Why not? Works great in a lot of countries.

The problem with bigger contuancies is that you either shrink the amount of representatives or make them multi-member, the problem with multi-member contuancies is that it becomes very easy for M Ps to pass issues off to each other and avoid doing constituency work.

Edited by Silasw on Jan 13th 2019 at 5:43:11 PM

I'd rather have multimember constituencies than an AMS system.

Particularly, I hate the amount of influence it gives party apparatus on parachuting people in. It's safe seats but worse.

I like a ranked ballot system. It’s simple; has one representative per constituency and no cases of representatives without constituencies; and removes the concept of strategic voting (which I can’t stand).

Theresa May has indicated that if her deal is rejected, the whole idea of brexit itself may be rejected as well.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-46856149

Looks like even May isn't too keen on Brexit. Who'da thunk it?

I mean, she did vote Remain in the Referendum.

Ok, thanks for the whole think about no deal, my knowlage about british politics is almost none, I only know that.

The tories arent good people, labour is slighty better, Corbyn seen to do the right thing most of the time, david cameron is a uper class twit who severly underestimated the whole brexit nonsense and right now they dont see to get into a conclusion over where they want brexit or not.

Im right or im wrong? just bein curious here.

Corbyn is very by-the-book and believes strongly in democratic principles. It's both a strength and a weakness in British politics.

He's also sometimes considered a bit too old-fashioned when it comes to geopolitics. He's also one of those left-leaning people who is a bit too forgiving of Venezuela's administration's flaws if some of his comments about Venezuela are anything to go by. Of course, a lot of that is from heavily biased media coverage. He has also said he opposes "all" Venezuela violence.

And yes, the fact that he claims he opposes violence on "any" side does seem a bit too close to "bothsiderism".

So Corbyn's a mixed bag. It doesn't help that for decades the UK's media coverage of him has been heavily biased against him. British tabloids and all that. This makes it more difficult to properly understand him and his views.

That said...it's hard to see how he could be any worse for the UK as PM than Theresa May or any other Tory.

And yeah, Cameron's a posh Tory twit who fucked off to his little private £25,000 shed rather than try to clean up his own mess.

Edited by M84 on Jan 14th 2019 at 3:30:42 AM

Brexit isn't a pure right-wing project, there are also the so called Lexiters, who want to leave because they operate under the misconception that the EU rules would hinder them to build the socialist state they want and because they are anti-freedom of movement. Not sure how this happened, but they actually buy into the "immigration supressed wages" ideas. Corbyn himself has peddled both ideas in the past, so a lot of people think that Corbyn is actually a Lexiter - while May ironically campaigned for Remain. But she is an opportunist without any principles who is really obsessed with freedom of movement.

Honestly, a LOT regarding Brexit boils down to freedom of movement. Somehow the Brits don't really understand that it is a two way street….

I'd just like to point out to Ultimatum regarding the post on the previous page about us just had 13 years of Labour which ended badly - that was New Labour. There's an important distinction to be made there, because under Blair the Labour party become closer to the pre-Thatcher Tory party than the traditional Labour party. It shifted a lot to the right, decisions were applied from the top down rather than the grassroots up, it adopted a lot of Thatcherite policies and so on.

Blair purged a lot of Labour M Ps who were to the left of New Labour - Corbyn is one of the few who survived that purge, and under his leadership the party is returning to the policies and structure it had before Thatcher. So you can't compare the potential Corbyn government to the Blair/Brown governments - they're completely different beasts.

Incidentally, (this is in addition to your point Swan, not an attempt to undermine it) while Lexiteers do exist, it's important to note that it's the right-wing narrative that has completely dominated the conversation during the past few years. No left-wing party of note (maybe none at all) supported Brexit - it was driven by UKIP and the Tories' right wing, and the vast majority of the talking points you heard spouted by Brexiteers are right-wing garbage about nationalism, immigration and so on. Also, the Left have traditionally been Eurosceptic, usually voting against joining the EEC and further integration, but it's a sign of how many of their fears and concerns were unfounded that they backed Remain fairly strongly in 2016.

Regarding AMA - it's the system the Welsh Assembly uses, and as a result we have a few UKIP A Ms - mostly because the last election was pre-Brexit vote - so it's certainly more representative, even if that means giving the idiots a voice.

Yeah while Lexiters exist the narrative and ‘facts’ that makes them believe in Brexit is a distinctly right wing set of ‘facts’.

As for May’s threat, I suspect that she’s bluffing, she’s trying to get her deal approved and is throwing out the possibility of cancling Brexit to scare people to voting for it, she has no intention of actully cancling Brexit.

On the subject of New Labour, New Labour made a lot of mistakes (Iraq, financial deregulation and not reigning in the barons being the biggest ones), but it did good, we built school, we funded the NHS, we started building (too few) houses, we got the minimum wage, we got civil partnerships, we got a number of other labour regulations.

I get that it’s trendy to act like all new Labour did for all it’s time in office was crash the economy and invade Iraq, but we didn’t cause 2008 by overspending on public services, that’s a Tory lie and always has been.

Edited by Silasw on Jan 14th 2019 at 12:10:35 PM

Not to mention bringing peace to Northern Ireland and banning fox hunting.

Much of the credit for Northern Ireland goes to Major more than Blair.

Ah, there you go. Knew there was a reason I liked him, along with telling Murdoch to shove off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDEVp-5pVEk

This interview summons up exactly why I dislike Corbyn so much. For starters, he keeps saying that there can be freedom of movement once the UK is no longer an EU member states, but, well, not true at all, and overall he is promising the same pie in the sky deal the Tories keep talking about.

But also the suggestion that there is a connection between freedom of movement and the "undermining of workers rights" is just wrong.

I see you're starting the week off with "I dislike Corbyn" explicitly.

Are we now moving the goalposts from "it's impossible to have single market access without freedom of movement"?

At this point I am done with giving him the benefit of the doubt. And yes, I hate that he pushes the "freedom of movement is bad for British workers" narrative. That SHOULD be a far right talking point.

And no, I am not moving the goal posts, I am saying that ie Switzerland is not part of the EU and has freedom of movement. Now, if you LIKE the arrangement Switzerland has with the EU is another question, but it is simply not true that only EU states have freedom of movement. All states in the single market have it, but not all states in the single market are EU members.

Edited by Swanpride on Jan 14th 2019 at 6:21:20 AM

Without knowing all the nuances, something seems odd about refusing to give Corbyn the benefit of the doubt but doing so for Tories that here repeatedly shown themselves undeserving of it.

??? I don't give the Tories the benefit of the doubt. I do think that a selected few of them might support a people's vote. Because some of them do. Vocally. I don't see why the likes of Anna Soubry should openly campaign for it and then vote against it once the question comes up in parliament.

You're also repeatedly told that those individual Tories won't actually do squat, whatever they say, and I'm not sure I've seen sufficient evidence they're wrong about that.

Edited by sgamer82 on Jan 14th 2019 at 7:25:39 AM

You've consistently expected the Tories to make sensible decisions even though other Tropers here have pointed out that's not going to happen for various reasons.