BatesOriginally Posted by Witton Park
Bates
But then you of all people know I cannot be Yorkshire Thug! So Has YT been retired?Now don't get carried away with self-love Oracle; after all you aren't Yorkshire Thug (not knowledgeable enough about fellrunning I'm afraid)
And anyway. YT wrongly seemed to think fell running was just an elite sport. That would be news to 95 percent of fellrunners!
Last edited by Oracle; 07-06-2019 at 04:02 AM.
Must say, I did not expect the Peterborough result, I assumed the Brexit party would win it easily. I wonder if Corbyn will take note of the fact that a remainer actually manage to win in a strong leave constituency.
The Labour candidate won by a whisker with only 31% of the vote - down 17% on the last election. Peterborough is normally a Labour-Tory marginal. This time many Conservative voters (and some Labour) switched to the Brexit party (29% of the vote) but enough stayed loyal to the Tories (21%) to let Labour win.
For me it is a worrying foretaste of what could easily happen in a General Election with the Brexit Party taking enough centre right votes to allow Corbyn in through the middle.
FPTP is not fit for purpose, the statistics for votes-per-seat in 2015 where scandalous. While I am no supporter of UKIP/Brexit Party, it is a farce to call it demoracy for a party to get such a high percentage of the vote and zero seats.
Yes I tend to agree. It works reasonably ok where there are only two main parties. However when you get into the fragmented situation that we have at the moment with support spread among a number of parties it produces some very distorted results.
Yes but it is a bit chicken and egg. The electoral system is proabably a lot of the reason why the UK & US have two main parties. The British are a bit snotty about coalition goverement, but Labour and Tories are such broad churches they are in effect coalitions across center/left and centre/right. This has really been hightlighted by types of Brexit/No Brexit and Momentum on the Labour side.
It's interesting that when we did have a coalition government, one of the parties, the Liberal Democrats paid a heavy electoral price for being part of it.
As we all know they'd campaigned to abolish tuition fees at the 2010 election only to go along with the Conservatives and triple them when they got into power. I actually had some sympathy with the LibDems over that. What did their supporters expect? They were the junior partner with less votes and seats than the Tories. They weren't going to get everything they wanted and would have to compromise.
The above episode illustrates that no electoral system is perfect. Proportional Representation leads to coalition every time so you could vote for a party that said it was going to do X only for it to do Y when in coalition with another party. So how do you hold them to account? FPTP used to lead to stable majorities for one party so if a Government didn't do what it promised they couldn't blame anybody else.
But the weakness of FPTP in distorting the relationship between votes and seats is profound where votes are widely spread over a number of parties.
Ya fully agree re the LibDems.
There is nothing easy in politics.
Labour threw the kitchen sink at it, and knew exactly what doors to knock on. If it had been a level playing field on information, and brexit party had had more time,the majority is so thin, Corbyn would have lost it. The party themselves were never so confident of winning as the media were.
For a party in opposition for ten years, the result is appalling for labour. They should be winning such seats by big majorities. For one thing labour voters are more likely to vote for a donkey wearing a red rosette, if they turn out at all. In this case they did. Objectionable woman, out of the leaders mold. It is why she got picked.
It is also interesting that Ben (of britainelects) who is worth following and savvy on results said it is as expected from polls: but apparently this also proves that a substantial number of other seats would go to brexit party if voted right now.
In the end none of it solves the problem.
EU refuse to negotiate. So the only brexit is what they call no deal.
The "More ambitious deals" are simply more EU shackles. So not brexit at all.
And parliaments only alternative is to rescind A50.
The straight choice they refuse to make.
The only arguments for staying in are negative: fear of EU reprisal. Like russia, in europe the machine guns point in, to stop people leaving! It is not a reason to stay.
Labour is as divided as Tory. Their only policy is duplicity.
It is not a tory problem.
It is the refusal of the house in general and labour in particular to accept the reality of the position. Compounded by a traitor of a speaker.
No deal or rescind A50. Just get on with it.
Last edited by Oracle; 07-06-2019 at 12:09 PM.
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