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The Political Thread

Started by The Legendary Shark, 09 April, 2010, 03:59:03 PM

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IndigoPrime

Quote from: Professor Bear on 27 September, 2016, 11:32:46 AMThe LibDems could have put their money where their mouths were and attempted a broad coalition of parties of the center and left
How realistic would that have been? Political figures from the time have said Labour itself was deeply divided and during talks couldn't nail down key elements of its own policy, let alone how it would work in coalition. And Lab/Lib combined would have been 11 seats short of a Commons majority. So who fills those spaces, and how much effort would have been required to get any policy through the Commons? How much misery would backbenchers have caused?

This was, note, nonetheless my preferred route at the time, and I was gutted when it didn't happen. Yet even on the day of the results, you had Labour capitulation, with MPs suggesting people had had enough of Labour and that it was time to let someone else have a go. (Surely, any MP should want their party to always be in power, to do good things!)

I also suspect people hadn't realised quite how far the Lib Dems had shifted. Under Ashdown and especially Kennedy, they had shifted into a somewhat socialist position, and certainly a fairly libertarian one. By 2010, they had lurched rightwards and also become more authoritarian, which was even more evident by 2015. (Oddly, their manifesto, at least, seemed true to the party's roots and ideals, but their actions did not.) So perhaps people didn't realise we had a soft-right/authoritarian-right coalition, rather than something more centrist in nature.

On Brexit, I do think it's a pity even despite everything the Lib Dems did or didn't do, many people are unwilling to do anything other than dismiss Clegg. He's in it for the money, apparently, or to get some kind of cushy EU job if we somehow stay in. Or, you know, he actually has loads of experience in this and is for the most part talking and writing sense.

Quote from: Will Cooling on 27 September, 2016, 12:14:45 PMGay Marriage would never have become law if the Tory Government hadn't support it. So whilst you note/criticise the Tory party for having a large proportion of homophobes...Cameron's Government clearly deserves credit for supporting the measure (i.e. drafting bill, championing the cause, allotting parliamentary time and allocating resources to implementation).
The problem is more that they took all of the credit, despite this all being a legal requirement from the coalition agreement. In other words, the Conservatives had no choice to do all those things, otherwise the government would have fallen. I think Cameron deserves some praise – it's one of the few things he got right, despite not having the support of the majority of his part – but the Conservatives as a whole? Not really. And them whitewashing this being Lib Dem policy was pretty distasteful, but then that also showcases the naivety of the Liberal Democrats – as Clegg as mulled since, they simply didn't realise how ferociously the Conservatives would gobble up every piece of good news and frame it as their own, rather than the coalition (and certainly never the coalition partners).

What's most depressing about this is it knocked back electoral reform yet again. The choices in the referendum were ridiculous (FPTP vs AV), and then the broadly disliked coalition put loads of people off of the general idea, further cementing the reactionary and partisan nature of British politics. I fully believe we would be a better country politically with more coalitions, with smaller parties that could then join together to form government. In Iceland, for example, you have two parties that broadly map with the UK Conservatives, and they sometimes form coalitions. But they each have their own identities and policies to fight with. (And, most importantly, that country as PR voting, so every vote actually matters.)

Er, but off topic there, but, hey, it's the politics thread...

Will Cooling

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 27 September, 2016, 10:50:13 AM
The Lib Dems did actually manage to get a large amount of their manifesto into policy, along with derailing a fair chunk of bad Conservative stuff, such as the IP bill. The problem is they screwed themselves with that daft pledge on tuition fees (which people on my Twitter timeline still bang on about whenever the Lib Dems are mentioned), forever ruining their credibility as something different. That the reality of coalition means you have no choice but to compromise is irrelevant – although the party should have stood fast against any rise in fees, because that made them all look ridiculous.

For my money, they made three bigger mess-ups: Clegg should have had as a red-line one major position of state (ideally him as Foreign Sec.); the referendum on voting reform should have been AV+, as per the recommendation (although I suspect it would still have lost); and the Health Bill should have been killed in the Lords (rather than Lib Dems helping it through). 2015 would still have seen the party get a serious kicking (not least due to the Lib Dems being inept from a press standpoint and the Conservatives taking all the credit for everything the Lib Dems did, not least, brazenly, gay marriage), but not quite to the extent we saw.

I think the coalition exposed two much broader problems for the Lib Dems. Firstly there's no avoiding the fact that the party is divided between Tory and Labour leaning voters, with only a hardcore that genuinely has no preference for which major party leads a Government. Throughout their history as a third party, the result of a hung parliament or coalition arrangement has always been to hurt them (1924, 1931, 1974, 1979) because the act of choosing offends a significant part of their support base. In 1924, Tory-leaning Liberals were outraged they let Labour into power, in 2010, Labour-leaning Liberals were outraged they let the Tories into power.

However they made this natural dynamic much worse by mismanaging the coalition. Rather than spread themselves across the entire Government, they should have concentrated their ministers in key departments. They should then have used these ministries to protect their supporters from the worst of Tory Rule. This is why going along with the rise in tuition fees, Gove education reforms and NHS reorganisation was so toxic - if the LibDems had a base of support it was the type of middle class centrist that predominates the public sector. Being the protectors of Health and Education would have also given them a much greater sense of positive identity.
Formerly WIll@The Nexus

Will Cooling

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 27 September, 2016, 12:23:06 PM
Quote from: Professor Bear on 27 September, 2016, 11:32:46 AMThe LibDems could have put their money where their mouths were and attempted a broad coalition of parties of the center and left
How realistic would that have been? Political figures from the time have said Labour itself was deeply divided and during talks couldn't nail down key elements of its own policy, let alone how it would work in coalition. And Lab/Lib combined would have been 11 seats short of a Commons majority. So who fills those spaces, and how much effort would have been required to get any policy through the Commons? How much misery would backbenchers have caused?

This was, note, nonetheless my preferred route at the time, and I was gutted when it didn't happen. Yet even on the day of the results, you had Labour capitulation, with MPs suggesting people had had enough of Labour and that it was time to let someone else have a go. (Surely, any MP should want their party to always be in power, to do good things!)

I also suspect people hadn't realised quite how far the Lib Dems had shifted. Under Ashdown and especially Kennedy, they had shifted into a somewhat socialist position, and certainly a fairly libertarian one. By 2010, they had lurched rightwards and also become more authoritarian, which was even more evident by 2015. (Oddly, their manifesto, at least, seemed true to the party's roots and ideals, but their actions did not.) So perhaps people didn't realise we had a soft-right/authoritarian-right coalition, rather than something more centrist in nature.

On Brexit, I do think it's a pity even despite everything the Lib Dems did or didn't do, many people are unwilling to do anything other than dismiss Clegg. He's in it for the money, apparently, or to get some kind of cushy EU job if we somehow stay in. Or, you know, he actually has loads of experience in this and is for the most part talking and writing sense.

Quote from: Will Cooling on 27 September, 2016, 12:14:45 PMGay Marriage would never have become law if the Tory Government hadn't support it. So whilst you note/criticise the Tory party for having a large proportion of homophobes...Cameron's Government clearly deserves credit for supporting the measure (i.e. drafting bill, championing the cause, allotting parliamentary time and allocating resources to implementation).
The problem is more that they took all of the credit, despite this all being a legal requirement from the coalition agreement. In other words, the Conservatives had no choice to do all those things, otherwise the government would have fallen. I think Cameron deserves some praise – it's one of the few things he got right, despite not having the support of the majority of his part – but the Conservatives as a whole? Not really. And them whitewashing this being Lib Dem policy was pretty distasteful, but then that also showcases the naivety of the Liberal Democrats – as Clegg as mulled since, they simply didn't realise how ferociously the Conservatives would gobble up every piece of good news and frame it as their own, rather than the coalition (and certainly never the coalition partners).

What's most depressing about this is it knocked back electoral reform yet again. The choices in the referendum were ridiculous (FPTP vs AV), and then the broadly disliked coalition put loads of people off of the general idea, further cementing the reactionary and partisan nature of British politics. I fully believe we would be a better country politically with more coalitions, with smaller parties that could then join together to form government. In Iceland, for example, you have two parties that broadly map with the UK Conservatives, and they sometimes form coalitions. But they each have their own identities and policies to fight with. (And, most importantly, that country as PR voting, so every vote actually matters.)

Er, but off topic there, but, hey, it's the politics thread...

A few things.

100% true people hadn't realise the change in the Lib Dems. It makes sense really, if counter-intuitively. Ashdown, Kennedy, Campbell and Cable are all centre-left politicians who joined the Liberal Democrats because of how left-wing Labour was in the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas the likes of Clegg and Laws are centrists or even centre-right politicians who joined the Liberal Democrats because of how right-wing the Tory Party was in the 1990s and 2000s.

Reason the manifesto was significantly to the left of the leadership is that Liberal Democrat members through conference still have significant control over writing it. Indeed, one of the issues with tuition fees, is that Clegg and Cable had been fighting to water it down since they took control of the party, but activists kept rejecting their proposals. Significantly they did leave it out of the pledge card the leadership issued as their key red lines. Alas for them the NUS brilliantly seduced them into making a much bigger deal of the policy.

Anyone who says the LibDems could have avoided going into Coalition with the Tories is insane. A Lib-Lab pact would have had no majority without the nationalists and the Brownite approach to politics just didn't overlap with Clegg's.

As several issues proved, the Coalition Agreement had no legal force. In any case Gay Marriage wasn't included in the original Coalition Agreement.

The Coalition massively set back the cause of electoral reform by enshrining the idea that even a pretty miserable change such as switching to AV needed to be approved by referendum. Sadly, a referendum on AV+ would never have escaped the Commons (Milliband struggled to stop rebels on the AV Referendum, and some Tories would surely want to kill it) and in any case with Labour supporter sore about the Coalition it would have lost similarly badly.
Formerly WIll@The Nexus

Theblazeuk

Quote from: Will Cooling on 27 September, 2016, 12:14:45 PM
Quote from: Theblazeuk on 27 September, 2016, 11:25:48 AM
Tories taking the credit for the gay marriage bill* and avoiding any blame for Iraq** is the reason we can't have nice things.

*134 against vs 126 for, vs Labour's 217/22 and Lib's 44/4. So really I'd say it's taking credit for what Labour did.
**146 for and 3 against, though in this case it's simply that Labour couldn't have done it without them tho.

I liked the Lib Dems enough to vote for them in 2010. Compromise would have been one thing but the Dems rolled and surrendered where they didn't actively assist.

But that's not how politics works - oppositions can't push laws through, only Governments can. Gay Marriage would never have become law if the Tory Government hadn't support it. So whilst you note/criticise the Tory party for having a large proportion of homophobes...Cameron's Government clearly deserves credit for supporting the measure (i.e. drafting bill, championing the cause, allotting parliamentary time and allocating resources to implementation).

Likewise on Iraq. You can attack IDS as a blithering idiot who failed to hold Blair to account (unlike Milliband over Syria), but no matter how much the Tories supported the war, it would never have been considered if Blair hadn't have wanted British involvement.

Agree entirely, I am just amazed at how many people throw shit around but get away without anyone noticing the brown stuff on their hands. Cameron's government pushed through Gay marriage, but the Conservative party voted against it. And likewise (inversely) on Iraq. Blair's government pushed it through, but the tories voted for it.

IndigoPrime

Will: I agree with much of that. The smarter move would have been to secure 'control', so to speak, of key areas, but then you wonder how much the Conservatives would have allowed. Clegg was a natural Foreign Secretary, but he'd never have got that post. Cable was the most popular choice for Chancellor, but there was no way a junior coalition minister would have been given that post. Clegg in health could have been interesting, but might have been considered too junior. I guess we'll never know. For me, the Lib Dem Lords really killed everything by supporting the health bill. Too many fingers in pies; then again, Lib Dem support for the NHS as a whole is split, no only among MPs but also the membership – another thing people as a whole are unaware of.

On electoral reform, though, I lay the majority of the blame with Labour. Of course the Conservatives will never go for any meaningful reform. That party has always benefited hugely from FPTP. But Labour hubris from 1997 onwards made that party think everything had changed, when in reality they just saw a rare switch in circumstances (and then used that to crap all over the Lib Dems and all promises made prior to the election).

The smart move would have been for Labour to see the writing on the wall and shove through a PR bill. This would naturally have been seen as self-serving, but could have been argued was necessary due to changing in voting patterns, which had been obvious for a good long while. It would have passed with LD support, and 2010 would have seen a radically different election that could have resulted in a Lab/Lib coalition with a majority.

But even now, Labour is cool on electoral reform, under the misguided thinking that it can win alone. I have friends on Facebook convinced of a 2020 GE win. I ask: how? The numbers are not there. How can Labour win? Scotland isn't coming back. Welsh Labour just shat all over the electorate by voting with hardline Tories over the EU (which the Welsh are rapidly realising was really good for Wales). England? Labour seems unable to decide whether to go for a broad voter base or out-UKIP UKIP in order to secure its heartland. Either way, it's basically fucked. But under PR, we could feasibly have two Labour parties that could join forces in coalition, and where the 'split' non-Conservative vote would result in feasible governments rather than one party having absolute control with little over a third of the popular vote.

My wife's Icelandic and she looks on in horror at our electoral system. She thinks it's a bizarre relic, horribly unfair, and doesn't promote anything other than reactionary politics. I don't disagree. But it won't change when the Conservatives want no changes and Labour essentially supports that viewpoint (yet, bizarrely, is happy to try and force through PR-based Lords reform, which isn't needed nearly as badly).

Theblazeuk

With you entirely on that Indigo - the electoral system is badly broken. I can't believe that people campaigned against that referendum because 'it wasn't enough'. Some positive change is better than no positive change... and Labour really messed it up there. I get why the Tories will resist that forever but FPTP is an incredibly limiting system which makes voting an even more frustrating exercise than it would inherently be.

I am very happy that the London mayoral election uses SV and that small difference would still go a long way to improving our democracy. It would at least be an end to 'If you vote X you are wasting your vote", the explicit acknowledgement that the system is ****ed.


The Legendary Shark

    "That's the real issue this time," he said. "Beating Nixon.  It's hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years."

    The argument was familiar, I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it.  How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame, but "regrettably necessary" holding actions?  And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

    Now with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer.  I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing this year is Beating Nixon.  But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 – and as far as I can tell, we've gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.

    —Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72.
[move]~~~^~~~~~~~[/move]




Will Cooling

Quote from: Theblazeuk on 27 September, 2016, 04:08:49 PM
With you entirely on that Indigo - the electoral system is badly broken. I can't believe that people campaigned against that referendum because 'it wasn't enough'. Some positive change is better than no positive change... and Labour really messed it up there. I get why the Tories will resist that forever but FPTP is an incredibly limiting system which makes voting an even more frustrating exercise than it would inherently be.

I am very happy that the London mayoral election uses SV and that small difference would still go a long way to improving our democracy. It would at least be an end to 'If you vote X you are wasting your vote", the explicit acknowledgement that the system is ****ed.

There's plenty of good reasons why Labour don't support PR:

Labour is an incredibly tribal party. I went from right to left whilst at university and I was amazed at how much more passionately committed to the party even moderate Labourites were. So many people don't want PR because they want a single-party Labour Government rather than having to compromise with other parties...especially the Liberal Democrats!

There's then the traditional Bennite argument against PR. That's basically that's its almost impossible to get 50% of the country to vote for a radical platform but its more than feasible that a radical majority could be elected on 35%-42%. So the hard-left support FPTP, even though it makes an independent hard-left party impossible, to keep alive the dream of securing a majority that would push through their programme.

Perhaps the more important argument is that it would probably hurt the centre-left. The idea that PR helps the 'left' is wrong. Let's remember in the last election the Tories and UKIP actually got 51%. If you look across Europe, without the protection of PR it's likely that Labour would lose even more of its working class base to UKIP. It's worth pointing out that without the European Elections moving to PR in 1999, UKIP would probably never have broken through as a major party.

So for all these reasons it does make sense for Labour to oppose PR.

In terms of AV - it's both not that big a change and huge change at the same time. As someone who once run Students' Union elections that use AV, I can say from personal experience that it really is extremely rare that the person who is top on the first round doesn't ultimately win in the end. That has certainly been true of the London Mayoral Elections.

Where AV would be a huge change is that it would encourage people to vote for minor parties, safe in the knowledge they could vote for their preferred major party. That would mean the votes of parties such as the Greens and UKIP would be inflated without their chances of winning MPs actually increasing. That would strengthen the argument for PR. 

Personally, I would like to see a directly elected Prime Minister. That gives you the benefit of PR (every vote counts) and the benefit of FPTP (clear decision on who forms the Government guided by voters). I would then personally use STV to elect the parliament but I'm not too precious about that point.



Formerly WIll@The Nexus

Theblazeuk

#11213
QuoteIn terms of AV - it's both not that big a change and huge change at the same time. As someone who once run Students' Union elections that use AV, I can say from personal experience that it really is extremely rare that the person who is top on the first round doesn't ultimately win in the end. That has certainly been true of the London Mayoral Elections.

The Mayoral elections where despite clear guidance, lots of people didn't know how the system worked. The major argument to me is as simple as removing the idea that votes can be wasted. And once we've made the most minor improvement we might be able to get people more engaged with politics, when they don't just have to choose the best of two bad options - they can choose the best choice for them without effectively handing a vote to the worst option. And then we can maybe cross the bridge of getting politicians to grow up a bit and stop depending solely on the party whip.

Anything would be better than FPTP in terms of engaging people with politics. Your proposed system has a lot of benefits. I am dubious about electing a head of government directly but personality politics seem to be more important to most people than details or facts.

(And not to knock your point but Student Politics differ greatly in every way from a general or even local election for a lot of obvious reasons :P )

IndigoPrime

I think Labour's pretty united on being anti-PR, in the sense that all wings of the party hate the idea of compromise. The only difference is the so-called moderate wing still seems to labour under the misapprehension that the party can actually get a majority in the Commons. Mind you, plenty of Corbynites I know also think that, because, apparently, all polling is some kind of anti-left conspiracy.

Where I wonder, Will, is in your figures. If you rattle through elections over the past few decades, you very regularly find parties securing an absolute majority with about 40% of the vote, which then dips post-2005 to the mid-30s. We find ourselves in a weird situation where we could feasibly find the Conservatives with a huge majority on a third of the vote, which feels inherently undemocratic. And although the threat of UKIP does mean a Con/UKIP pact of some kind might push everything over 50%, there have been plenty of times where Lab/Lib could have formed a coalition under PR to oust the Conservatives.

Moreover, the assumption in such guesswork is always that people would vote the same way under PR, when that's unlikely to be the case. If you know your vote counts, tactical voting becomes broadly meaningless. I suspect we'd probably unfortunately see quite a few UKIP MPs under a PR system, but we'd also see a smattering of Greens and, for the first time in recent history, Liberal Democrats getting an actually representative number of MPs. In Scotland, MP numbers would be more representative too, rather than the absurd situation of the SNP claiming almost every seat on half of the vote.

So I'd like to see some change. I'm open to arguments about which system, being it AV+, STV or AMS, but what we have now is ridiculous. But the Conservatives and Labour also know that without FPTP, the chances of either party every securing a majority again is slim. What they don't factor in is that if voting trends continue, we will probably increasingly see hugely unpredictable swings that cannot be planned for nor controlled.

Professor Bear

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 30 September, 2016, 12:49:10 PMMind you, plenty of Corbynites I know also think that, because, apparently, all polling is some kind of anti-left conspiracy.

When Yougov did a survey whose findings suggested Corbyn was more popular than previously believed, they wrote lengthy qualifications to their own polling data explaining how and why the results were probably wrong, while the Guardian ran three separate articles by academics explaining why the polling was misleading - two of whom were Yougov employees - and all of this was within months of the disastrous 2015 polling fiasco, so you can't really blame lefties for the current distrust of polling.  Polling companies got themselves into that mess.

Will Cooling

Quote from: Theblazeuk on 30 September, 2016, 11:35:19 AM
QuoteIn terms of AV - it's both not that big a change and huge change at the same time. As someone who once run Students' Union elections that use AV, I can say from personal experience that it really is extremely rare that the person who is top on the first round doesn't ultimately win in the end. That has certainly been true of the London Mayoral Elections.

The Mayoral elections where despite clear guidance, lots of people didn't know how the system worked. The major argument to me is as simple as removing the idea that votes can be wasted. And once we've made the most minor improvement we might be able to get people more engaged with politics, when they don't just have to choose the best of two bad options - they can choose the best choice for them without effectively handing a vote to the worst option. And then we can maybe cross the bridge of getting politicians to grow up a bit and stop depending solely on the party whip.

Anything would be better than FPTP in terms of engaging people with politics. Your proposed system has a lot of benefits. I am dubious about electing a head of government directly but personality politics seem to be more important to most people than details or facts.

(And not to knock your point but Student Politics differ greatly in every way from a general or even local election for a lot of obvious reasons :P )

I really don't think AV will engage more people in politics. AV allows people to go through the charade of voting for a minor party but makes it no more likely for that vote to mean anything. Because the minor parties are still unpopular they will be eliminated before the climatic round of voting. So those annoyed that Greens and UKIP can't get into parliament will still be annoyed - although there will probably be more of them. The only possible benefit is that it would make it even harder for extreme candidates to come through a divided field with a low share of the vote (although anti-Farage tactical voting shows that probably already happens) - but that would actually increase hard-right/hard-left disillusion.

Again AV is only useful in terms of political reform as a staging post for PR. It would do that by inflating the minor party vote and breaking (this ludicrous, untrue) notion that the electoral system is this ancient system that has served the country well since 1066. Reality is that elections were very different before 1918 (lots of multi-member seats) and was still fairly different until 1950 (some surviving multi-member seats plus the various fancy franchises).

On directly the Head of Government - I just think its something that's going to have to happen if we're to stop devolved Government cannablising the country or done by second-rate politicians. When you think about it - its kind of absurd that the Mayor of London has less right to stand to be Prime Minister than some random backbencher. A directly elected PM would allow a broader range of people to stand for parliament. It would then empower parliament to hold the executive to account without the Government MPs being worried they were hurting their own chances of re-election.


Formerly WIll@The Nexus

Will Cooling

Quote from: IndigoPrime on 30 September, 2016, 12:49:10 PM
I think Labour's pretty united on being anti-PR, in the sense that all wings of the party hate the idea of compromise. The only difference is the so-called moderate wing still seems to labour under the misapprehension that the party can actually get a majority in the Commons. Mind you, plenty of Corbynites I know also think that, because, apparently, all polling is some kind of anti-left conspiracy.

Where I wonder, Will, is in your figures. If you rattle through elections over the past few decades, you very regularly find parties securing an absolute majority with about 40% of the vote, which then dips post-2005 to the mid-30s. We find ourselves in a weird situation where we could feasibly find the Conservatives with a huge majority on a third of the vote, which feels inherently undemocratic. And although the threat of UKIP does mean a Con/UKIP pact of some kind might push everything over 50%, there have been plenty of times where Lab/Lib could have formed a coalition under PR to oust the Conservatives.

Moreover, the assumption in such guesswork is always that people would vote the same way under PR, when that's unlikely to be the case. If you know your vote counts, tactical voting becomes broadly meaningless. I suspect we'd probably unfortunately see quite a few UKIP MPs under a PR system, but we'd also see a smattering of Greens and, for the first time in recent history, Liberal Democrats getting an actually representative number of MPs. In Scotland, MP numbers would be more representative too, rather than the absurd situation of the SNP claiming almost every seat on half of the vote.

So I'd like to see some change. I'm open to arguments about which system, being it AV+, STV or AMS, but what we have now is ridiculous. But the Conservatives and Labour also know that without FPTP, the chances of either party every securing a majority again is slim. What they don't factor in is that if voting trends continue, we will probably increasingly see hugely unpredictable swings that cannot be planned for nor controlled.

I'm not arguing against PR - just the idea it would help the left. And again - you can't count all LibDems as left-wing voters. Throughout the 20th Century the Liberals have been just as much an anti-socialist party as a anti-Tory one. Indeed whereas we have many occassions of Liberals and Tories sharing power without Labour, we've yet to see any Liberal MPs enter a Labour Government.

And actually my gut is that we've entered the opposite to wild swings. You listen to political scientists and the big problem is geographical polarisation, with Labour and Tory parties both overwhelmingly strong in their heartlands but weak outside. This has been made worse by the implosion of the Liberal Democrats who by default had been the natural party of opposition all over England. Unless Corbyn really tanks Labour's numbers (which is should be stressed hasn't happened yet - they're bad but they've been bad for much of the past seven years) its likely that even a snap election would only see the Tories gain a handful of seats.
Formerly WIll@The Nexus

Will Cooling

Quote from: Professor Bear on 30 September, 2016, 02:40:04 PM
Quote from: IndigoPrime on 30 September, 2016, 12:49:10 PMMind you, plenty of Corbynites I know also think that, because, apparently, all polling is some kind of anti-left conspiracy.

When Yougov did a survey whose findings suggested Corbyn was more popular than previously believed, they wrote lengthy qualifications to their own polling data explaining how and why the results were probably wrong, while the Guardian ran three separate articles by academics explaining why the polling was misleading - two of whom were Yougov employees - and all of this was within months of the disastrous 2015 polling fiasco, so you can't really blame lefties for the current distrust of polling.  Polling companies got themselves into that mess.

True but they got themselves into that mess by massively overestimating Labour's share of the vote. So you can forgive them for being a bit nervous about any pro-Labour outliers.
Formerly WIll@The Nexus

IndigoPrime

Professor Bear: I think there's a gulf between reality and their thinking, really. It's one thing to claim the polls are off or fixed, but they've historically overestimated Labour support. Even if they don't now, the Conservatives typically have anything up to a ten-point lead, when Labour needs to be some way ahead to have even a slight chance of a majority, given that Scotland's not coming back any time soon (a point seemingly lost on the more rabid Corbyn fans).

Will: Regarding AV, there's again the issue of assuming that people would vote in the same manner, but all the figures I've seen support the notion that it wouldn't make much difference regarding the current state of play. Chances are, we'd see a few wild cards (Caroline Lucas, for example), but in the main it only sometimes benefits a very large third party (20%+ Lib Dems, for example), and even then can sometimes bite all but the top two.

I'm not sure it'd work as a staging post, though. I suspect we'd see a round, little change, and general support for electoral reform fall through the floor. Plus in the unlikely scenario we did get AV, we'd see no further change for a generation, on the basis this was apparently what people wanted (and you can bet the Conservatives would be arguing it's a proportional system, as many do now when talking about the AV referendum).

On direct elections of a head of government, how would that happen? Do you wait until you know the party in power and then have some kind of reality show phone-in? Or are you saying that the head of government is an entirely separate things? Because that sounds an awful lot like a president to me (and also provides for the fairly absurd situation where you might end up with a Labour head of government but a Conservative majority, or vice-versa).

As for PR, I should probably clarify regarding my thoughts on the positions/relative positions of parties. I'm fully aware the Lib Dems aren't left. They've wiggled back and forth across that line, although if you track from authoritarian to liberal, they mostly stay below the halfway mark there. But whatever their failings, they aren't Conservatives, and from a manifesto standpoint, they appear to have more crossover with Labour than the Conservatives. (In fact, having read all of the 2015 ones at the time, it was pretty clear that if there was enough political will and egos were left aside, you could have feasibly knocked together a government or at least broad agreement with Labour, LD, the two nationalist parties, and the Greens – mostly, the devil was in the details, but all were running on broadly progressive platforms, with a lot of the same ideas.)

In terms of wild swings, I wasn't thinking between Con and Lab, but due to the spoiler effect and FPTP. Predicting a GE outcome has become increasingly tough, and that could continue if the Greens and UKIP continue to fare well and there's any kind of LD resurgence. That said, political scientists suggest quite a lot of UKIP voters have now returned home, strengthening the Conservatives. And I suspect Greens will fritter away at the party's lack of success beyond Lucas. Even so, I can see a 2020 GE being closer to 1997's in reverse than the Conservatives gaining only a handful of seats.