Tony Blair to step down May 9

[BrainGlutton]

@tagos

I predict a Conservative popular vote landslide translating into a comfortable 100 or so majority. Maybe less.

<snip>

From Iraq, to the extension of Public-Private Finance, there is little this govt has done that the tories would not have and won’t continue doing once in power.

Then what on earth is the point of voting in the tories?! What difference will it make?!

[jjimm]

@BrainGlutton

The House of Lords, even post-reform, remains the most undemocratic element in your system! (The monarchy is not really an element of the system any more.)

Yes, but de facto it does actually provide a reasonable check on Parliamentary power. The UK parliament has been so overwhelmingly Labour that anything Blair wanted, Blair got. I would dearly love the House of Lords replaced with something properly democratic, but until then, overruling it to force through legislation about fox hunting, using powers that remove a crucial check and balance, makes me rather unhappy.

[tagos]

@jjimm

Yes, but de facto it does actually provide a reasonable check on Parliamentary power. The UK parliament has been so overwhelmingly Labour that anything Blair wanted, Blair got. I would dearly love the House of Lords replaced with something properly democratic, but until then, overruling it to force through legislation about fox hunting, using powers that remove a crucial check and balance, makes me rather unhappy.

Why should the democratically elected Commons not use the appropriate democratic, constitutional tool to get through a thrice democratically assented policy?

The House of Lords was never a ‘crucial check and balance’ - it was a permanent Tory veto. Making it an appointed House of Party Cronies was no improvement.

And Blair has to rely on Tory votes to push policies through in the face of opposition from his own party nowadays.

As a democrat I have no problem with a majority party exercising its winners perogative without a bunch of decrepit old hacks interfering.

[jjimm]

@BrainGlutton

Then what on earth is the point of voting in the tories?! What difference will it make?!

It’s not a question of point, it’s a question of “what people will actually do”. Amazingly, the Tories are now attempting to occupy the centre-left. Just a couple of days ago Cameron was banging on about personal liberty not trumping the needs of society. That, and his green initiatives and “hug a hoodie” amusement. Of course the left don’t trust him to deliver, but a lot more people who had concerns about Tory sleaze and rabid monetarist policy in the past will probably lap it up.

[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

I would dearly love the House of Lords replaced with something properly democratic, but until then, overruling it to force through legislation about fox hunting, using powers that remove a crucial check and balance, makes me rather unhappy.

And join the ranks of every other ineffective bicameral legislature?

Ensure the democratic will of the elected House of Commons can be blocked by the politically appointed House of Lords with the permanent built in Conservative majority?

Presumably this acts to remedy Labour’s shameful advantage in the popular vote.

[BrainGlutton]

@jjimm

It’s not a question of point, it’s a question of “what people will actually do”. Amazingly, the Tories are now attempting to occupy the centre-left. Just a couple of days ago Cameron was banging on about personal liberty not trumping the needs of society. That, and his green initiatives and “hug a hoodie” amusement. Of course the left don’t trust him to deliver, but a lot more people who had concerns about Tory sleaze and rabid monetarist policy in the past will probably lap it up.

[sigh] You guys really need proportional representation. It sounds like at this point the LibDems are the only party capable of imposing any sanity at all on this mess.

[BrainGlutton]

@jjimm

Yes, but de facto it does actually provide a reasonable check on Parliamentary power.

And the point of that would be . . . ?

[tagos]

@Dominic Mulligan

And join the ranks of every other ineffective bicameral legislature?

Presumably this acts to remedy Labour’s shameful advantage in the popular vote.

Shameful advantage? Even if there is one your cite does not support it.

ABSTRACT: The 2005 UK general election resulted for the third successive time in the Labour party winning a much larger share of seats in the House of Commons than of the votes cast. Furthermore, with an equal share of the votes the Conservative party would have won 111 seats fewer than Labour. Commentators have used this outcome to criticise aspects of the country’s electoral system. This paper reports a decomposition of the pro-Labour bias in the 2005 result (in the context of the outcome of previous contests), which allows an evaluation of the validity of such criticisms. It shows that most of the bias can be attributed not to the operation of the first-past-the-post electoral system per se but rather to party and voter behaviour within the template provided by that system.
<snip>

Such disproportionality in the translation of votes into seats is not unusual in first-past-the-post (FPTP) systems, and is generally recognised. What particularly concerned commentators was that Labour experienced a substantial decrease in its share of the votes between the 2001 and 2005 elections yet still won a large majority of seats in the House of Commons. Labour’s majority of 64 seats over all parties in the House of Commons (including the 18 Northern Ireland MPs, five of whom – representing Sinn Féin – do not take up their seats) was achieved on the smallest share of the votes received by the winning party at a general election since 1832.

This situation generated suggestions that the ‘electoral system’ caused the disproportionality. Some used it as the basis for outright condemnation of FPTP, calling for its replacement by a more proportional system.2 Others suggested that the FPTP system as currently operated in Britain either favoured Labour or had been manipulated by Labour to its own ends – one respected commentator, for example, referred to Labour’s ‘gerrymandering of seats’.3 Among the former group, the main concern was that Labour tended to win much smaller seats – in terms of the number of people registered on the electoral roll – than the Conservatives: for them, the result was not only disproportional, it was also biased.

Some of these criticisms of the current system are valid, and indicate problems with the current system: others are not – including that about gerrymandering. But the disproportionality is not new. What is relatively new is its size, and that it favours Labour.

Labour benefits from the concentration of its votes. In a geography-based representative system there is nothing wrong with that. And anyway, the permanant Tory majority in the Lords has nothing to do with that.

[BrainGlutton]

@tagos

Labour benefits from the concentration of its votes. In a geography-based representative system there is nothing wrong with that.

In democratic terms there’s a lot wrong with it.

[BrainGlutton]

@tagos

Labour benefits from the concentration of its votes. In a geography-based representative system there is nothing wrong with that.

In democratic terms there’s a lot wrong with it.

[jjimm]

@BrainGlutton

[sigh] You guys really need proportional representation. It sounds like at this point the LibDems are the only party capable of imposing any sanity at all on this mess.

I know. Which is why I’m voting LibDem.

[Revenant_Threshold]

@BrainGlutton

[sigh] You guys really need proportional representation. It sounds like at this point the LibDems are the only party capable of imposing any sanity at all on this mess.

That’s only because we haven’t had them yet. I’m sure, given their chance, they’ll proceed to get stuck into ruining the country as have their predecessors.

[BrainGlutton]

@Revenant Threshold

That’s only because we haven’t had them yet. I’m sure, given their chance, they’ll proceed to get stuck into ruining the country as have their predecessors.

Of course they will. But in a different way!

The same old same old, it gets boring, you know?

[tagos]

@BrainGlutton

In democratic terms there’s a lot wrong with it.

Such as? It’s the pretty standard democratic approach. Vote for representatives of the locality. And if most pre-defined constituencies have a preponderance of voters for one party or another that’s just how it is.

What’s the alternative? National party lists? No thanks. I vote for who I want to represent me in Parliament not a list of party nominees.

I prefer a system that allows the electorate to make a clear choice - not one that produces coalitions. I want to hold parties to account.

And what this discussion is missing is that from 1997 onwards the electorate has gotten the taste for tactical voting.

In the last 3 elections the electorate wanted the tories to lose and shifted votes accordingly while tory votes fell to the bedrock level.

In other elections the tories benefitted from population distribution.

If the tories want to win again they’ll have to start appealing to a wider segment of the population. If they don’t appeal to urban voters any more then that is their, not the electoral system’s problem.

[BrainGlutton]

@tagos

I prefer a system that allows the electorate to make a clear choice - not one that produces coalitions.

Coalition government, as a permanent feature of the system, would provide a much more effective “check” on unbridled majority-party rule than the House of Lords does.

[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

Labour benefits from the concentration of its votes. In a geography-based representative system there is nothing wrong with that.

Well, perhaps you should start by reading past the first page of a twenty four page document - that may be a decent tactic. If Labour and Conservative votes had been swapped in the last GE, the Conservatives would have lost 111 seats from the majority that Labour now hold.

If there is no bias, with equal shares of the votes the two
parties should get the same number of seats.
There have been major changes in the size and direction of bias in British general
election results since 1950 (Figure 1: in all analyses reported here, a positive figure
indicates a bias favouring Labour whereas a negative figure indicates a pro-
Conservative bias.) The first five elections had pro-Conservative biases, never greater
than 60 seats (the maximum value was 59, in 1951). In the 1970s-1980s there was
virtually no bias. From 1992 it increased again but in a different direction, favouring
Labour by 38, 82 and 141 seats at the 1992, 1997 and 2001 elections respectively.
Labour was again very substantially advantaged in 2005, with a bias of 111 seats.

And anyway, the permanant Tory majority in the Lords has nothing to do with that.

Nor did I say otherwise.

[Revenant_Threshold]

@BrainGlutton

Coalition government, as a permanent feature of the system, would provide a much more effective “check” on unbridled majority-party rule than the House of Lords does.

Well, to be fair, it depends on the party composing the majority. The Lords aren’t just a roadblock, they’re a small-c conservative roadblock. They probably provide a more effective check on unbridled liberal majority-party rule, and a less effective one on conservatives, than would a totally non-partisan House. Problem is, a democratic Lords would probably be composed of similar proportions to the Commons, making it not all that an effective check on anyone.

But you’re preaching to the converted with me. I’m all for a voted Lords and proportional representation. And i’m a republican (in U.K. terms). I’m annoyingly in favour of voting.

[Quartz]

@tagos

New Labour have basically been better conservatives than the tories

What did you expect from someone who painted himself as Thatcher’s heir?

[Skywatcher]

obligatory YouTube link

[Frank]

How reliable is the Sunday Mail? I’ve not seen this tidbit anywhere else.