Reform UK - A symptom of all that is wrong?
Discussion
Vanden Saab said:
Kermit power said:
Vanden Saab said:
Kermit power said:
I have no idea what the first thing you said was! Probably "mama" or "cat" or something like that?
The most fundamental planks of any democracy are:
1. "one person, one vote"
2. that each voter's vote carries the same weight as anyone else's
3. that the makeup of government is a fair representation of the will of the people as voted for in a democratic election.
The electoral system in Germany and Italy delivers a reasonable approximation of all three. The electoral system in the UK delivers on the first one but fails completely and utterly on the second two.
The UK is not a true democracy.
All PR gives you is a government nobody voted for. Half the people you did not vote for are in positions of power and you do not even get to chose which other parties the one you did vote for makes agreements with. Amusingly part of the reason why right leaning parties are making such gains in Europe are because other parties will not form coalitions with them and end up with parties that are diametrically opposed to their own. This then means more people vote for the right leaning parties rather than have a coalition with a party they utterly oppose.The most fundamental planks of any democracy are:
1. "one person, one vote"
2. that each voter's vote carries the same weight as anyone else's
3. that the makeup of government is a fair representation of the will of the people as voted for in a democratic election.
The electoral system in Germany and Italy delivers a reasonable approximation of all three. The electoral system in the UK delivers on the first one but fails completely and utterly on the second two.
The UK is not a true democracy.
At least with our system a large minority get what they want.
As for far right parties gaining traction in Europe, one of four things happens there...
1. Other parties into coalition with them, they get some of what they're after and may well then recede at the next election.
2. Other parties keep ignoring them, and as you say, more people vote for them until eventually they'll take power alone.
3. One or more mainstream parties adopt some of the policies of the extreme parties to win their supporters over.
4. The mainstream parties manage to convince voters to step back from the extremes.
All of those are better than "we rig our electoral system to limit who can win" then get surprised when we have a revolution eventually.
Under PR, on the other hand, the nature of the system means that generally 50% or more of voters will see their party of choice represented in government, and in the majority of cases that will also include the single largest party.
105.4 said:
Kermit power said:
That would be one of the funniest things ever written on this forum if it wasn't so utterly terrifying!
At the last General Election (and figures are similar for decades beforehand) it took about 38,000 Conservative voters for each Tory MP elected vs about 336,000 LibDem voters to get one of their MPs in.
Nobody who thinks it is even remotely acceptable to have an electoral system which values the votes of one national party almost nine times as highly as those of another can possibly claim to have even the slightest belief in democracy!!!
The true irony of this is that you hold up LibDem opposition to Brexit on the back of a narrow 52/48 result in a non-binding referendum as some sort of proof that they "do not believe in democracy", yet that referendum itself only happened because David Cameron's Conservative party won a 10 seat majority in parliament despite only winning 36.8% of the vote!!! How in heavens name does that give any credibility at all to anything carried out by his government???
If the country would have returned a ‘clear ‘Remain’ vote, I’m skeptical that you’d still be making the same point.At the last General Election (and figures are similar for decades beforehand) it took about 38,000 Conservative voters for each Tory MP elected vs about 336,000 LibDem voters to get one of their MPs in.
Nobody who thinks it is even remotely acceptable to have an electoral system which values the votes of one national party almost nine times as highly as those of another can possibly claim to have even the slightest belief in democracy!!!
The true irony of this is that you hold up LibDem opposition to Brexit on the back of a narrow 52/48 result in a non-binding referendum as some sort of proof that they "do not believe in democracy", yet that referendum itself only happened because David Cameron's Conservative party won a 10 seat majority in parliament despite only winning 36.8% of the vote!!! How in heavens name does that give any credibility at all to anything carried out by his government???
oyster said:
That’s obtuse and disingenuous.
We elect local representatives to the national parliament. It means locations can be represented by someone who generally shares the concerns of those who vote for them.
Besides, the democratic door is always open to PR - it just needs a party to become electable who have it as one of their policies.
PR allows for electing local representatives too. In the German system, for example, everyone has two votes. The first is cast for a local candidate who is elected by FPTP to represent the local constituency and the second is cast for a party at national level.We elect local representatives to the national parliament. It means locations can be represented by someone who generally shares the concerns of those who vote for them.
Besides, the democratic door is always open to PR - it just needs a party to become electable who have it as one of their policies.
In addition to fielding named constituency candidates for the first vote, parties also have a list of candidates at national level for the second vote, and each party is then allocated the right number of MPs from the national list to ensure that people have both a local representative and also a national government which is in proportion to the way the nation voted.
It's not absolutely flawless as on occasion smaller parties can win more seats directly from the first vote than their overall vote would normally deliver proportionally, but overall it's massively more democratic than our system without sacrificing local representation.
What's disingenuous is suggesting that "it just needs a party to become electable who has PR as one of their policies". Just look at an electoral map of the UK. 90% of the landmass is made up of sparsely populated rural and suburban Tory blue with most of the remainder small, densely populated urban Labour red. Unless one of both of those parties pretty much ceases to operate, that divisive political distribution is just going to continue.
Realistically no third party (be it the LibDems or anyone else) is ever going to win a majority of parliamentary seats because their support is always more evenly spread across many more constituencies than either the Conservatives' or Labour's. Arguably the best chance of seeing PR would be for a third party to win a higher percentage of the vote than the party who "wins" the election. At least that would provoke the sort of constitutional crisis which could surely only end in change.
heebeegeetee said:
oyster said:
That’s obtuse and disingenuous.
We elect local representatives to the national parliament. It means locations can be represented by someone who generally shares the concerns of those who vote for them.
Er, that's precisely what we don't do. FPTP means every local representative is voted by and representative of a minority.We elect local representatives to the national parliament. It means locations can be represented by someone who generally shares the concerns of those who vote for them.
Each one of our MPs does not generally share the concerns of those who voted for them, because the majority voted against them.
At the last GE, something like 420 constituencies did return an MP with more than 50% of the vote.
The problem with FPTP is that basing everything purely on local constituencies causes huge distortions at the national level.
At the most extreme, imagine a constituency where the Beige Party polls 50,000 votes and the Puce Party polls 49,999.
It is fair for that constituency to be represented by the Beige Party because they did win the most votes there, but it is not fair that the difference of one single vote means that the views of all those Puce Party voters are ignored at the national level.
Just look at some of the discrepancies that threw up last time around...
The LibDems won 11 seats, but came second in 91. None of the LibDem voters in those 91 seats have a voice in parliament.
If you want to see a real basket case though, look at the Scottish results!
The SNP secured 48 out of 59 seats with 1.24m votes. In comparison, Labour secured just one single MP for 512k votes, whilst the LibDems managed 4 seats from just 240k votes, and the Tories managed 6 seats from 693k votes.
Add all the three national parties together and they polled more than 200k more votes than the SNP and yet won just 11 seats in Westminster to the SNP's 48! How is that even remotely acceptable?
Who_Goes_Blue said:
Kermit power said:
That's not actually correct.
At the last GE, something like 420 constituencies did return an MP with more than 50% of the vote.
The problem with FPTP is that basing everything purely on local constituencies causes huge distortions at the national level.
At the most extreme, imagine a constituency where the Beige Party polls 50,000 votes and the Puce Party polls 49,999.
It is fair for that constituency to be represented by the Beige Party because they did win the most votes there, but it is not fair that the difference of one single vote means that the views of all those Puce Party voters are ignored at the national level.
Just look at some of the discrepancies that threw up last time around...
The LibDems won 11 seats, but came second in 91. None of the LibDem voters in those 91 seats have a voice in parliament.
If you want to see a real basket case though, look at the Scottish results!
The SNP secured 48 out of 59 seats with 1.24m votes. In comparison, Labour secured just one single MP for 512k votes, whilst the LibDems managed 4 seats from just 240k votes, and the Tories managed 6 seats from 693k votes.
Add all the three national parties together and they polled more than 200k more votes than the SNP and yet won just 11 seats in Westminster to the SNP's 48! How is that even remotely acceptable?
One question for PR supporters. Currently I vote for my local MP whose views may or may not wholly align with the party they are affiliated with, but on the whole I vote for them because I agree with their views and they will represent me and my local areaAt the last GE, something like 420 constituencies did return an MP with more than 50% of the vote.
The problem with FPTP is that basing everything purely on local constituencies causes huge distortions at the national level.
At the most extreme, imagine a constituency where the Beige Party polls 50,000 votes and the Puce Party polls 49,999.
It is fair for that constituency to be represented by the Beige Party because they did win the most votes there, but it is not fair that the difference of one single vote means that the views of all those Puce Party voters are ignored at the national level.
Just look at some of the discrepancies that threw up last time around...
The LibDems won 11 seats, but came second in 91. None of the LibDem voters in those 91 seats have a voice in parliament.
If you want to see a real basket case though, look at the Scottish results!
The SNP secured 48 out of 59 seats with 1.24m votes. In comparison, Labour secured just one single MP for 512k votes, whilst the LibDems managed 4 seats from just 240k votes, and the Tories managed 6 seats from 693k votes.
Add all the three national parties together and they polled more than 200k more votes than the SNP and yet won just 11 seats in Westminster to the SNP's 48! How is that even remotely acceptable?
Under PR, would I vote for the party? And then get assigned some random person to represent my area?
Or do all MPs just represent the nation and local issues go unheard?
The actual results in 2019 looked like this...
| Party | Votes Won | % of Votes Won | Seats Won | % of Seats Won |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conservatives | 13,966,454 | 47.87% | 365 | 58.31% |
| Labour | 10,269,051 | 35.20% | 202 | 32.27% |
| LibDems | 3,696,419 | 12.67% | 11 | 1.76% |
| SNP | 1,242,380 | 4.26% | 48 | 7.67% |
| TOTAL | 29,174,304 | 100% | 626 | 100% |
If you calculate the number of seats that each party would have won if they'd got seats relative to their proportion of the national vote, the actual numbers (allowing for rounding errors) would've looked something like this:
Conservatives: 300 (-65)
Labour: 220 (+20)
LibDems: 79 (+68)
SNP: 27 (-21)
The way the German system would work is that you'd have two votes each. One is cast for your local constituency and is FPTP. The other is cast for the party, and that goes towards a national list, and that national list is used to balance up the FPTP discrepancies.
As we don't want to have a parliament even more bloated than it already is, however, to keep it simple we'd probably double the size of the constituencies for vote 1, so for mathematical simplicity I'm going to assume that we keep the same proportions, thus halving the number of constituencies for each party.
This would then give us something like this:
| Party | Constituency MPs won on FPTP | MPs they should win proportionally | MPs allocated from national lists |
|---|---|---|---|
| Conservatives | 183 | 300 | 117 |
| Labour | 101 | 220 | 119 |
| LibDems | 6 | 79 | 73 |
| SNP | 24 | 27 | 3 |
Using that system, we'd all have a local representative in parliament, and the parties we voted for would also all get the number of MPs in parliament that their share of the national vote deserves.
In terms of what would happen next, it would be up to the parliamentary parties to work out a coalition, with the Tories as the largest party being given the first crack at it. As the major party, if they don't give enough concessions to a smaller party then they won't get the support to form a coalition and then Labour get a crack at it. You'd assume that Tory voters would prefer to govern with some concessions than not govern, so they're likely to be amenable to reasonable concessions and not punish them at the next election. Equally the smaller party has to avoid abandoning too many of their red lines, or as we saw with the LibDems, they will get punished next time around. The last time it happened was the first time in a generation, so neither parties nor voters had much idea what to expect, but it's reasonable to assume that it would become smoother over time.
The potential issue I alluded to earlier didn't quite arise, but would have done if the SNP had won more than 27 seats in the constituency vote, as you can't give them a minus number from the national list, but in reality you might well find that some of their voters might've voted SNP for their local MP who understands their constituency but actually have voted for one of the national parties with their second vote to get the overall national policies they want.
The other really obvious thing to point out is that by simplifying the numbers, I've removed the likes of Reform, who might well prove to be the third biggest party in terms of votes cast at the next GE without winning a single seat, hence the numbers not adding up as you might expect compared to the actual national results!
Hants PHer said:
540TORQUES said:
Kermit power said:
You are completely missing my point, which is the absurd irony of anyone complaining that the LibDems are being anti-democratic for opposing the result of a 52/48 vote whilst accepting without question that the vote only happened because the Conservatives "won" a parliamentary majority from which to introduce the referendum by a "winning" score of 37/63.
The first party to request a referendum on the UK membership of the EU was the Liberal Democrats. They were happy to do so in Parliament following an election where they were a small minority party.
They simply didn't like the result when it was eventually held and tried to scupper its implementation, the result was the electorate removed most of them them from Parliament at the first opportunity.
If opposing a 52/48 vote win is undemocratic, then supporting a 37/63 "win" is much more so.
bad company said:
It’s not wasted if it helps to influence the Conservative Party to return to its core values. The forthcoming election is already lost imo & the loonies will be back into power.
I'm confused! By and large the Loony wing of the Conservatives already are in power, and have been for some time?I'd love to see the party return to sensible policies around reducing taxation and driving economic growth, but I'm not sure how realistic that is at the moment!
The biggest barrier I see at the moment is that the Tories are hellbent on pushing a traditionally left wing policy on limiting immigration. Combine that with our own ageing population and growing the economy is only going to become harder!
Vanden Saab said:
So the parties choose 1/3 of the MPs who have no constituents, people complain now that nobody voted for the PM and those 1/3 have no connection to anybody who voted for them.
What happens if one of those MPs is banned from Parliament, is there any recall as there is with our system?
I've never heard anyone outside NP&E complain that we don't vote for PM, and I'm not aware of anywhere that does vote for their PM under any form of election? What happens if one of those MPs is banned from Parliament, is there any recall as there is with our system?
There's a difference between people failing to understand the difference between a PM and a Head of State which, if necessary, could be addressed by simple education. It's rather different to a fundamental lack of democracy.
As for parties choosing 1/3 of the MPs, so what? You might occasionally meet people in the UK who choose specifically not to vote for an individual MP in a party they'd usually vote for, but the overwhelming majority vote for the party and get whomever happens to be behind the rosette.
Under the German system of PR, you still do get to vote for the person rather than the rosette if you wish to with your first vote anyway. The second is simply used to ensure that the makeup of parliament represents the choice of society.
Catweazle said:
I would just like to point out that if the 2015 general election had been run using a PR system then UKIP would have had more MPs than The Liberal Democrats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_Kingdom_...
Taking a closer look, UKIP got the same percentage of the vote as the Liberal Democrats and the SNP combined.
Which personally I would have had absolutely no objection to!https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_Kingdom_...
Taking a closer look, UKIP got the same percentage of the vote as the Liberal Democrats and the SNP combined.
I think that UKIP were wrong and Brexit a mistake, but I would still much rather see them get the seats their vote deserves and then have them defend their position in parliament than have the current system that does little but foster more and more resentment from people who feel disenfranchised.
Paradoxically, I also think that had UKIP been able to get those MPs, it might actually have prevented Brexit from happening! When Cameron went on a tour of other EU leaders seeking concessions to make membership more attractive to the British public, the UKIP vote was largely irrelevant. If he'd been able to point to an ever-growing number of UKIP MPs getting elected over the previous few elections, I think it's far more probable that he would've been able to secure enough additional concessions to swing the 52/48 the other way at the very least.
ETA - As an interesting philosophical discussion point, how many of those people who voted UKIP in 2015 do you think would've voted for them if they hadn't known it was always just a protest vote?
Vanden Saab said:
I don't really see how anyone can call Reform Far Right?They are populist, which means that their manifesto on everything other than immigration is a complete mishmash of utter fantasy designed to try and appeal to absolutely everyone even though they can't deliver it.
With regards to immigration, they are debatably racist but implementing racist government policies isn't really a right wing thing either, is it? Historically resistance to immigration - in the UK at least - was led by the Left and the Unions as they were opposing an influx of low-cost labour threatening their livelihoods whilst the capitalist Tories lapped up the big business profits!
There have been plenty of examples of ethnic cleansing and similar atrocities carried out by left wing regimes as well. It seems more a case of these sorts of policies being linked to populism or authoritarian regimes rather than sitting anywhere on a recognisable left/right spectrum.
JagLover said:
Kermit power said:
With regards to immigration, they are debatably racist but implementing racist government policies isn't really a right wing thing either, is it? Historically resistance to immigration - in the UK at least - was led by the Left and the Unions as they were opposing an influx of low-cost labour threatening their livelihoods whilst the capitalist Tories lapped up the big business profits!
.
The existence of immigration controls is not racist. If they specified only certain races would be admitted then that would be racist, such as the old "whites only" policies. .
The reason why some see the far-right everywhere is because they regard any sort of control as racist, despite the fact that the primary duty of any government must be to its own citizens.
There's then things like the use of grooming gangs as rhetoric for only allowing in the "right sort of immigrant". Whilst their actions were utterly reprehensible, and it's undebateable that this very specific form of abuse has undoubtedly been perpetrated almost exclusively by men of Pakistani origin, the various recent enquiries and investigations have shown firstly that overall men of Pakistani men are no more likely to commit horrible sex crimes than anyone other group in the population.
You might also say that because that specific form of abuse being almost the exclusive preserve of Pakistani men makes it reasonable to to use it as an example of why we should control immigration more closely without being racist - simply because we don't want grooming gangs - but I struggle to see how that position can really be sustained without calling for the banning of the Catholic Church in the UK, given that the per capita sexual abuse perpetrated by their clergy and other employees has been found by those same enquiries over the past thirty years to be absolutely off the charts by several orders of magnitude compared to any other group.
DeejRC said:
Ah yes, the Catholic Church, that great bastion of British society that, was, er banned for the best part of 400yrs.
Well it’s an argument I suppose. Damned if I know what it’s in support of though.
It's not in support or against anything beyond pointing out that those who use grooming gangs as evidence of why we should be controlling migration from certain places are being either disingenuous with or ignorant of the full data picture.Well it’s an argument I suppose. Damned if I know what it’s in support of though.
Personally I think any form of sexual abuse is abhorrent and should be investigated and prosecuted without fear or favour to the full extent of the law whether the suspects are individuals or groups, white, brown, black or any other colour, former BBC DJs, MPs, members of the Royal Family or anyone else.
Where I have a problem is with the actions - repugnant though they are - of a tiny minority of the 1.5 million British Pakistanis being used in the debate about immigration when British children are at no greater overall risk of abuse from a British Pakistani than they are from someone of any other ethnic group, and infinitely safer than they are from the vastly smaller number of members of the Catholic Church, based on the findings of the enquiry into child sexual abuse by the church.
I absolutely think you can use British Pakistani grooming gangs, the Catholic Church and more besides as 100% clearcut evidence of the fact that we should never allow any allegation to go uninvestigated for fear of being accused of racism or anything else, but it wasn't the wider British Pakistani population who pushed for inaction any more than it was the average Catholic in the street.
If I was setting up a political party, I'd have a manifesto commitment to set up an independent sexual crime review board and require that any allegation of sexual crimes by groups of offenders or by individuals in positions of power be fully investigated by the police without delay and a copy of their findings be handed to the review board to ensure that there hadn't been any undue leniency (or severity) or delays in how the investigation was handled.
markbigears said:
S600BSB said:
s1962a said:
I encourage all those inclined, to vote Reform. Let’s make the tories totally irrelevant after this GE.
This! Try to get the reform vote up to 12/13% and make this election a Tory Carthage.You can just see that first meeting in Conservative HQ after the election loss, can't you?
"Well chaps... we seem to have lost the election! What in heaven's name happened? We promised to send hordes of invading foreigners to Rwanda and everything! The everyday oik in the street LOVES us for that sort of nonsense!"
"Yes, that's true, but we were undermined by this party of actual oiks with all sorts of properly loopy candidates pedalling all sorts of populist rubbish!"
Ah!
Gotcha!
Further to the right it is then!
thetapeworm said:
President Merkin said:
Can't overstate how much I would loathe the prospect of Reform becoming the official opposition & all of the platform that would facilitate for their brand of politics.
I love the idea of the mischief behind it but not the actual outcome. It's getting close though. 
If you factor in some of the Conservatives that actually win their seats potentially deciding it's not worth it any more it's an odd prospect.
Until now, that has quite clearly been the LibDems, as although UKIP picked up significantly more votes than they did in 2015, it was clear that UKIP was a single issue party, so voting for them wasn't going to shift the needle on PR.
Now, however, the picture is beginning to look rather different. The average Reform candidate might well be a repugnant clump of pond slime and their policies utterly barking mad, contradictory populist fantasy land nonsense, but they are clearly not a single issue party any more.
They might still not land any seats in parliament, but in some ways that would make an even stronger argument for PR, as I don't see how FPTP could possibly survive the inevitable constitutional crisis that would arise if the party with the second highest number of votes records no parliamentary victories!
smn159 said:
Ian974 said:
I've a plum of a mate who seems to think some stitching on the back of the England strip is a complete outrage, mainly because Lee Anderson is complaining about it on twitter and despite being Scottish and never having supported England through any tournament.
The sooner musk manages to completely break twitter, and lee decides to follow through on his threat to move to rwanda the better. The amount of outrage on such inconsequential things is unfathomable...
I had to look up the England strip thing and could only find links from the Express and GB News. Jesus wept, Anderson is a half wit.The sooner musk manages to completely break twitter, and lee decides to follow through on his threat to move to rwanda the better. The amount of outrage on such inconsequential things is unfathomable...
Apparently 'GB News have approached Nike for a comment'. I'm really hoping that their comment is "f
k Off"In a country famed for Union Jack boxer shorts, you'd think people could get their perspective, wouldn't you? Or are skidmarks considered less offensive to the national dignity than a few rainbow colours?
bad company said:
Lots of sanctimonious posts here.
How do the obviously high intellect Reform critics here suggest I should vote? I’m a lifelong Conservative voter and former party member. I’m very disappointed with the party moving towards a left leaning agenda. I’m also very disappointed in my Tory MP.
I intend voting Reform to help influence the Tory’s to move back to Conservative values/policies.
I'd be interested to know specifically what you are referring to in terms of the Conservative party "moving towards a left-leaning agenda"?How do the obviously high intellect Reform critics here suggest I should vote? I’m a lifelong Conservative voter and former party member. I’m very disappointed with the party moving towards a left leaning agenda. I’m also very disappointed in my Tory MP.
I intend voting Reform to help influence the Tory’s to move back to Conservative values/policies.
Like you I voted for them for years and was also a party member, and also like you I feel they no longer represent me at all, but that's more because of things like them letting Brexit happen and their barking mad immigration policies than anything that I can specifically label as a shift to the left?
swisstoni said:
Yes, I think many erstwhile Tory voters will vote Reform as a protest.vote.
A Labour govt is nailed on, so how do they express their dissatisfaction otherwise?
Imho, the Cons will eventually go into damage limitation mode.
By saying that a vote for Reform is effectively just increasing the Labour maj.
Nevertheless Reform will have made their point and influence the direction of the Tories in opposition.
My local Tory MP once implored me to realise that a vote for UKIP was a vote for Labour. After giving that due consideration it occurred to me that this was only true under our current utterly lunatic anti-democratic electoral system. A Labour govt is nailed on, so how do they express their dissatisfaction otherwise?
Imho, the Cons will eventually go into damage limitation mode.
By saying that a vote for Reform is effectively just increasing the Labour maj.
Nevertheless Reform will have made their point and influence the direction of the Tories in opposition.
I didn't vote UKIP, but I've not voted Conservative since either.
Vanden Saab said:
In which way
High tax
Authoritarian smoking ban.
The whole covid thing.
Even curbs on immigration are historically left wing.
I am fascinated as to all these right wing things they are doing...
I don't think taxation is a left/right thing any more. People are fundamentally selfish, so always want other people to give stuff up rather than doing it themselves. The mostly elderly Tory support base with their caps held out for their triple-locked pensions and vast healthcare requirements are no different, and both of those cost vast oodles of tax to provide. Cut those and lose the bulk of the Tory vote.High tax
Authoritarian smoking ban.
The whole covid thing.
Even curbs on immigration are historically left wing.
I am fascinated as to all these right wing things they are doing...
That segues perfectly into the "Authoritarian" (said in a way that would have you believe the likes of Franco and Mussolini were champions of the anti nanny state movement!
) smoking ban. If you want to reduce tax, you need to reduce tax spending. You don't want to reduce it on policing and defence and Tory voters won't let you do it on pensions, so health is the obvious place. You can't actually reduce the service you give your elderly Tory voters though, so maybe a bit more draconian action on access to junk food and tobacco is probably the best way forward regardless of political hue.In that respect, were it not for the absurdly unworkable nature of a policy which in 3 decades could see 45yr olds standing outside newsagents begging 46yr olds to buy them some fags it would be utter genius by Sunak! This is a policy which 99.9% of voters will support without giving it a second thought, because it only impacts current non voters (and how many parents are going to stand up for the rights of their teenaged children to have a crafty fag?) and newsagents!
Covid? With the exception of Sweden - who are certainly not famed for their right wing tendencies - and some of the more ideologically motivated US states, most of whom have population densities of about 2 people per 100,000 gophers pretty much every Western nation handled Covid pretty much the same way regardless of the leaning of their government.
As for curbs on migration being historically left wing, that's not strictly true. Resistance to immigration because it threatens British jobs and suppresses working class wages. Resisting immigration because it's brown people doing the immigrating is a much more traditional right wing pass time! Look for example at the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, condemned at the time by Labour leader Hugh Gaitskill as "cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation". What is true is that the Right have adopted the "protecting British jobs" thing as an anti-immigration rallying call because, as Enoch Powell discovered, even by the late Sixties calling for controlled immigration to keep the duskier foreigner out was considered a little beyond the line of acceptable society.
Oilchange said:
I'm wondering if anyone on here knows the meaning of 'net zero immigration'...
It means that if Reform were to win the GE, we wouldn't be able to fill any of the 260,000 doctor and nurse vacancies the NHS are trying to fill with immigrants unless we can persuade others already here to leave for a start. valiant said:
Anyyyywayyy,
Back to politics.
Latest London mayoral poll was released a few days ago as below,
What is interesting in relation to this thread is why Reform are polling so badly compared to the country at large. Cox is only polling at 2%.
I know that London is a two horse race anyway and Khan has it in the bag but why would you think that Reform are doing so badly in the capital? Is it the candidate? There’s a lot more scrutiny on individuals at a more local level so maybe he isn’t connecting with the electorate or maybe London being more, say, liberal has no time for edge candidates?
The disparity is interesting and would be interesting to see how it compares with other mayoralities.
Is it really all that surprising?Back to politics.
Latest London mayoral poll was released a few days ago as below,
What is interesting in relation to this thread is why Reform are polling so badly compared to the country at large. Cox is only polling at 2%.
I know that London is a two horse race anyway and Khan has it in the bag but why would you think that Reform are doing so badly in the capital? Is it the candidate? There’s a lot more scrutiny on individuals at a more local level so maybe he isn’t connecting with the electorate or maybe London being more, say, liberal has no time for edge candidates?
The disparity is interesting and would be interesting to see how it compares with other mayoralities.
Okay, it's a generalisation, but assume for the moment that it's highly unlikely that any immigrants will vote Reform, and probably also pretty unlikely that any significant proportion of non-whites will do so.
Around 40% of the population of London is non white.
On top of that, of the also around 40% of the population of London who are immigrants, 62% are white, making for near enough a further 25% of the population.
Overall, then, that's 65% of the population who are really rather unlikely to consider voting Reform.
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