A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

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Viktor77
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Viktor77 »

So what happens now with what's going on in London right now?
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by alice »

Viktor77 wrote:So what happens now with what's going on in London right now?
Cynical viewpoint: Every party except for UKIP gets cowed into suspending campaigning for a couple of days.

More realistic viewpoint: Every party except for UKIP suspends campaigning for a couple of days out of respect for the victims, while UKIP blames everybody else.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by jmcd »

Pole, the wrote:
The Greens were second in Bristol West last election. If it weren't for the major gains in support for Labour (which is where former Green support is going lately), the Greens could be getting that seat this time around.
Wow! Two seats instead of one. They do matter now!
You're just jealous, because you'd rather have this unrepresentative electoral system than one where an electoral alliance can get 7% of the vote and not a single seat.

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Pole, the »

jmcd wrote:You're just jealous, because you'd rather have this unrepresentative electoral system than one where an electoral alliance can get 7% of the vote and not a single seat.
Yeah, because a system that guarantees no representation is better than a system that requires you to pass the electoral threshold to be represented…

(I'm somewhat disregarding the effects of the effective thresholds here, but these seem not to have historically been a problem in Poland, cf. PSL with 5.13% and 16 seats in 2015 or ROP with 5.56% and 6 seats in 1997.)

Also, see UKIP in 2015.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Curlyjimsam »

zompist wrote:My question is: why the big surge for Labour since the election was announced?
Corbyn's (previously very vocal) detractors within the Labour Party seem largely to have decided that going on about how awful he is all the time might not be the best idea just at the moment, so that might be part of it.

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Torco »

so May's not going to get the even bigger majority she wanted to get? does that mean britain's going to be even more stuck on the whole 'so do we brexit or not' thing ?

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

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Torco wrote:so May's not going to get the even bigger majority she wanted to get? does that mean britain's going to be even more stuck on the whole 'so do we brexit or not' thing ?
Well given the only other option when it comes to forming a government is Labour and they don't seem at all keen to overturn it (anti-Europeanism has always been present in Corbyn to some extent) it looks like it'll be happening. Labour might let the Scots stay in the single market though.

The problem is that the political inertia seems to be heading towards a Brexit of some kind, and there's little chance of stopping it. Even the Lib Dems have backed down slightly in promising only that they would have another referendum on the final settlement, whereas before the party has been about as pro-European as they get. This is partly the media's fault: if the next government actually tried to stop Brexit then the Murdoch Press, the Daily Mail and other right-wing Brexit-supporting papers would all go completely beserk, resulting in pretty much certain electoral death, and no political party would want that. You can already see that mad streak in some of the headlines, "Crush the Saboteurs" from the Daily Mail being a particularly notable one.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by sangi39 »

Isn't unclear at the moment whether the UK can even revoke Article 50 and thus halt its exit from the EU? Talk of reversing it or holding a second referendum are all well and good, but those take time, and unless you're able to simultaneously prepare for a second referendum, discuss the legal possibility of remaining in the EU after invoking Article 50 and can discuss a plan for leaving the EU with the EU itself (not to mention discussions with other non-EU states) then that's just going to be more and more time wasted in actually dealing with the mess we've landed ourselves in.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Torco »

'crush the saboteurs'
how delightfully democratic

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Salmoneus »

Torco wrote:'crush the saboteurs'
how delightfully democratic
Well, the PM herself has said that Corbyn is "unpatriotic" and "hates Britain", although she hasn't specifically called him a traitor so far. The papers have, of course. And "crush the saboteurs" is delightfully democratic compared to how the papers responded to the parliamentary powers law case - which was a front page of photos of the judges, naming and shaming them, outing one as gay, with the headline "Enemies of the people" and a front-page call for The People to 'take their future into their own hands' in some undefined way that involved the names and addresses of the treasonous judges. So yeah, saboteurs, yeah, that's an improvement in the level of democratic discourse.
Plus, of course, one of the 'saboteurs' was actually murdered last year.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Frislander »

Salmoneus wrote:Plus, of course, one of the 'saboteurs' was actually murdered last year.
Oh boy, nobody seems to want to address that elephant in the room, especially the Tories and UKIP, because it undermines the whole "terrorist muslims" narrative which we've been fed over the last decade and a half.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Salmoneus »

Frislander wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:Plus, of course, one of the 'saboteurs' was actually murdered last year.
Oh boy, nobody seems to want to address that elephant in the room, especially the Tories and UKIP, because it undermines the whole "terrorist muslims" narrative which we've been fed over the last decade and a half.
Indeed - but it's positively yelled about compared to the terrorist attack by the rogue stockbroker in Germany...
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Frislander »

So yeash, it's the day before the election and the Murdoch Press and the Daily Mail are throwing everything they can at Corbyn, including the kitchen sink, the cooker, the washing machine and the fridge. One can only hope that their glory days are now over and that this will have little effect on the day, but never underestimate the power of the tabloid press on the British public, nor the stranglehold it has long had on political discourse in this country.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Viktor77 »

Will May step down?

Will the Tories coalition with the DUP? What's that going to mean? Could Labour have any chance of coalitioning a majority?

Thoughts?
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Io »

Please spoon feed me: “I’m disappointed at the SNP losses but I’m pleased that we’ve won the election," Sturgeon said. — what does that mean?!

Holy shit! Look at the exchange rates!! Just yesterday I places some orders from the UK, if only I waited for a day...

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Alces »

During the last general election in 2015 the SNP got the most votes in almost all of the 59 Westminster parliamentary constituencies in Scotland. There were just three exceptions---a border constituency which was held by the Tories, a seat in Edinburgh which was held by Labour, and the Northern Isles which were held by the Lib Dems. But in the current election the SNP has lost many of those seats again, some to the Tories, some to Labour, some to the Lib Dems. This has reduced the SNP's majority to 35 and, importantly, confirmed that all three of the three rival parties are still alive to some extent in Scotland. So those are the losses Sturgeon regrets. Furthermore, among the losses were the seats of two of the most notable SNP MPs, namely Alex Salmond (leader of the SNP up to 2014) and Angus Robertson (Sturgeon's surrogate leader in the Westminster Parliament, Sturgeon herself having her seat in the devolved Scottish Parliament).

Nevertheless, the SNP still has an absolute majority of the Scottish seats and a plurality of the popular vote in Scotland. In that sense they did win the election in Scotland. It could be argued that it was inevitable that the SNP's majority would be reduced---a majority of 95% isn't something you can expect anybody to keep for long in a democratic system. They're still the by-far dominant party in terms of all metrics except, maybe, momentum.

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Pole, the »

So, the Tories have ended up with 318 seats. (This might become 319 after the Kensington recount.)

The Northern Irish right wing ended up with 10 seats.

Then there are the abstentionist Sinn Fein, which ended up with 7 seats.

This leaves us with at most 650 - (318 + 10 + 7) = 315 MPs if everybody else manages to unite against the Tories. If Corbyn (or, for that matter, anybody vaguely on the left side) wanted to unseat May as the PM, they would need to turn the DUP against their fellow conservatives.


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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Salmoneus »

Thanks Pole.

Yes, Labour still say they're trying to form a minority government, but it's unlikely, and it would be a genuinely minority government. It would seem virtually impossible for Labour to do a deal with the DUP - the DUP are further to the right than the Tories. Their glimmer of hope, however, is that the DUP might refuse to do a deal with the Tories either. In that case, there can't be a majority (I guess Tory+SNP is a theoretical option in the short term if the Tories were willing to give massive concessions, starting but not finishing with an independence referendum, but it doesn't seem likely). In that case both main parties will be looking to form a minority government.

It should be explained that there are sort of four different 'levels' of majority here:
- outright majority, one party has more than half the seats;
- coalition, where a big party gets over the threshold in a formal agreement with another party (who get to have ministers, etc)
- "confidence and supply" - where a big party relies on a smaller party in a semi-formal agreement whereby the smaller party promises to vote with the big party, but only on votes of no confidence and the queen's speech* ("confidence") and on the budget ("supply" (of cash)). If a party has enough votes on confidence and supply, they're the government - but they may not be able to get any other substantive measures through
- vote-by-vote survival - where a big party declares itself the government, and persuades people to vote for it in confidence and supply votes, but on a vote-by-vote basis, and not necessarily the same people each time. This is obviously the weakest position.

It seems overwhelmingly likely that there'll be a Tory-DUP alliance, but it probably won't be an official coalition, but just a confidence and supply situation. However, if the Tories can't reach an agreement with the DUP, the other parties could conceivably unite to allow Labour to function as a minority government, though this would be incredibly unstable.

*every year, the Queen gives a Speech to Palriament, written by the government - basically a 'state of the union'. It lays out the government's priorities and specifies some bills they want to pass in the following year. It has no practical importance, but it's taken as symbolising a party's ability to get their platform enacted. So the vote in parliament on approving the proposed official parliamentary reply to the speech is considered to be a motion of confidence - lose that and you're not the government anymore.

-----------

As for May... well, the Tories are incredibly pissed off with her, and some are even saying it publically. The Sun is blaming her aides, and I'm sure that after this and the London mayoralty there'll be a lot of scrutiny of Dead Cat Crosby too.

But the BBC say that they're hearing that, after some uncertainty, it seems May will "survive the day" at least. There's no obvious replacement - Boris is rumbling, but I don't think there's the appetite for him yet - and if there is going to be a new election very shortly, they don't want to be without a leader going into it. So May will probably still be PM tomorrow. However, unless she starts performing miracles she will not survive as leader until 2022 now - they'll let her take the hits over this difficult period, and when things settle a bit they'll replace her. Effectively this election will be the starting gun for the various Tory hopefuls to build their case for the inevitable leadership challenge in a year or two.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Salmoneus »

Two larger-scale things:

- we're moving much further back toward two-party politics. The LDs as the traditional third party gained a few seats (but not really votes), but UKIP, the Greens and the SNP all saw losses (haven't heard about PC). Similarly, in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein and the DUP gained at the expense of the smaller parties (the SDLP and the UUP were wiped out)

- young people voted. And boy did they vote. The overall turnout was 69%... but among those 18 to 25, it was 72%! The promised/feared animating spark of the Brexit referendum does seem to have materialised.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Io »

Thanks, Alces.

I read the Tories in Scotland haven't performed so well since 1983, what's the reason for that?

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Salmoneus »

Io wrote:Thanks, Alces.

I read the Tories in Scotland haven't performed so well since 1983, what's the reason for that?
Scotland is politically to the left of England, and the Tories have struggled as a result. Before Thatcher, they could do well there on a less extreme platform, appealing to an old paternalist sort of conservativism that won them plenty of votes among farmers an the like (most of Scotland is rural and the Conservatives usually do well in rural areas). With Thatcher's lurch toward a more brutal, libertarian style, it became really hard for them there. Major's government in the 1990s was hated everywhere, and fell particularly hard in Scotland - they lost all their seats there in 1997. After that, with the rise of the SNP as a nationalist left-wing party and the shift of Labour toward the centre, Scottish politics became effectively a contest between the SNP and Labour (with the Lib Dems picking off stray seats), with the tories far too far to the right, and with enduring stigma of various hated governments of the 80s and 90s.

But now, the twin issues of scottish independence and brexit have allowed the Tories, who have run hardest against the SNP on both issues, to try to become the de facto opposition to the SNP, while the SNP's landslide two years ago largely came by swallowing up Labour seats from the left.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by linguoboy »

Salmoneus wrote:- we're moving much further back toward two-party politics. The LDs as the traditional third party gained a few seats (but not really votes), but UKIP, the Greens and the SNP all saw losses (haven't heard about PC). Similarly, in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein and the DUP gained at the expense of the smaller parties (the SDLP and the UUP were wiped out)
The Grauniad has a very detailed breakdown of the vote. PC's percentage declined a mere 0.8% and they didn't lose any seats.

Independents did surprisingly badly, with four out of five being unseated and no new winners. (Sorry for anyone pulling for Naomi Long in Belfast.) I guess the one to keep his seat was Bercow, who will stay on as Speaker?

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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Frislander »

So yeah, the Tories are going to coalition with the DUP, Theresa has gone to see the queen, and other senior Tories have been refusing to speak with the BBC. May tried to push the stability rhetoric again but I'm not sure anyone buys that.

In more lighthearted news, nobody appears to want Corbyn to go, and the era or Murdoch/Mail smears appears to be over.
Salmoneus wrote:As for May... well, the Tories are incredibly pissed off with her, and some are even saying it publically. The Sun is blaming her aides, and I'm sure that after this and the London mayoralty there'll be a lot of scrutiny of Dead Cat Crosby too.
He bloody well deserves what's coming to him does Lynton, he's probably done more than anyone else to poison the atmosphere of British politics this past decade.
Boris is rumbling, but I don't think there's the appetite for him yet
Fuck me if he tries again, I'm surprised they even let him out in public given how awful he's been.
However, unless she starts performing miracles she will not survive as leader until 2022 now - they'll let her take the hits over this difficult period, and when things settle a bit they'll replace her. Effectively this election will be the starting gun for the various Tory hopefuls to build their case for the inevitable leadership challenge in a year or two.
Oh dear... And they have the nerve to call Labour a divided party.
linguoboy wrote:I guess the one to keep his seat was Bercow, who will stay on as Speaker?
No he's a Conservative. The Independent seat is Down North in Northern Ireland.
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by alice »

Who polled the lowest? The Communist candidate who stood against Jezza got seven votes; the strange red person who stood against Theresa May got three.

Here's a good illustration of the state of the unity of the Conservative party right now:

Iain Duncan "The Quiet Man" Smith (paraphrased): "Of course she shouldn't quit. We need stability,"
Anna "Traitor Remainer" Soubry: "Of course she should quit. This mess is all her fault."

Salmoneus, what do you think the implications for Northern Irish politics are likely to be if the DUP props up the Conservatives?
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Re: A Very Brief Explanation of the British Election

Post by Ars Lande »

I just discovered the existence of Lord Buckethead.

I'm a little disappointed he didn't make it. And also jealous: we could use a few Lords Buckethead too.

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