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TRWe're well and truly through the looking glass. The PM has been a lifelong supporter of the EU, but heads a party which is strongly anti-EU and so has to half-heartedly claim she is also anti-EU. The leader of the opposition has been a lifelong opponent of the EU but heads a party which is strongly pro-EU and so has to half-heartedly claim he is pro-EU. Armando Iannucci or Peter Jay could have a field day with this material.
TRBIt's this simple. 1) Without PR, there is no logic whatsoever to the Tories or Labour splitting. It's electoral suicide in a FPTP system. See: SDP, 1983. 2) With electorally strong Tory and Labour parties, there is no drive to bring in PR. Why would either party dispense with a system that potentially enables them to get almost unbridled power with 43-44% of the vote? There's no push and there's no pull for PR. Always the chance of something unexpected happening but it would have to be seismic to challenge any of the logic above.
I get the impression that NOF was referring to the North as the North of England. I suspect people who frequently jump down his throat thought the same, but chose to ignore that, in order to continue to clutch at straws to give the tired old argument more life.Let's look at what happened. Del boy said, "With exception of Scotland that link pretty much backs up NOF".That statement is 100% correct and true. I suppose Hoola's statement that "If just 600k had changed their minds the result would have been at the workst a draw for Remain" is also true, but's that's just plain silly!
But it would have been a first step away from FPTP, and made people more amenable to further change in the future.
Quote from: Glyn_Wigley on October 30, 2017, 11:06:03 pmBut it would have been a first step away from FPTP, and made people more amenable to further change in the future.I very much doubt that. It would have been a final step and I doubt it would have changed all that much.
GlynAye. Except that wasn't remotely close to proper PR. And it came in a totally different political climate. At (or shortly after) peak-LD. If Clegg had been a really serious politician, we'd have had PR by now.He could have turned down coalition in 2010. Gone for not voting to bring down the Tories. Just yet. Let them make themselves as unpopular as they did through Austerity. Let Labour panic in a navel-gazing year or two about what they stood for. Sweep up the centre-left support. Then bring the Govt down in 2012. Force an election. Win 100+ seats and demand REAL PR as the price of support for the next Parliament. But he wasn't up to that job. He was dazzled by the idea of coalition. He was bullied by Isborne and Mervyn King into signing up lock stock and barrel to Austerity. So by the time the PR-lite referendum came along, everyone hated the LDs and no-one voted for it. A kid in an adult's game.
Quote from: The Red Baron on October 31, 2017, 09:46:12 amQuote from: Glyn_Wigley on October 30, 2017, 11:06:03 pmBut it would have been a first step away from FPTP, and made people more amenable to further change in the future.I very much doubt that. It would have been a final step and I doubt it would have changed all that much. The point I was making is that we have had FPTP for so long that I suspect a great many people voted to keep it purely because it's all they know and are suspicious of changing the system in any way - quite possibly so they don't have to think about any proposed alternative and make an informed decision. Once one change has been made, however small, then I think that stumbling block would be removed.
Bst, I'm not clever enough to no much about the economy but has it ever crossed your mind that austerity was the only answer,for whatever reason the country was in a poor state, labour will throw money at everything they did last time, they made it nearly impossible to get off benifits by giving you so much, while yes there was a banking crisis many labour mps admitted they overspent last time and there record with money is not the best, why if/when they get in power will it be any different?
I seem to remember at the time Cameron and co basically tried to reduce macroeconomic argument to a household budget, when in reality it's much much more complex than that. And of course, the majority of people have no real idea how an economy works, but almost everyone can understand the vastly simplified version of things he and Osborne put to the British people...
RedJ/GlynnNail. Head. Cameron graduated from Oxford with a 1st Class degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. The very renown Oxford Professor, Vernon Bogdanor said Cameron was one of the brightest and most perceptive students he ever taught. And yet Cameron spouted these idiotic phrases about "maxing out the nation's credit card" to justify Austerity. He MUST have known just how mendacious he was being. He MUST have known how dangerous Austerity was in 2010. He'd been taught by some of the finest economics academics in the world and he'd excelled in his studies. Grand, eh? His ambition to be PM and Clegg's vacuosity have cost us £1tr.