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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Purgatory: UK Election 2015
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Barnabas62
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# 9110
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Posted
Well, when the constituency boundary reforms take place (and not before time) the prospect of a future Labour majority will recede further. With current boundaries, Labour have an inbuilt bias in their favour since they have always done better in the smaller urban constituencies. Once constituency sizes are evened up, this advantage will disappear. And that is going to happen, sooner or later, in the next government.
I think Labour are now in long term trouble and the Lib Dems may never recover.
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
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Leorning Cniht
Shipmate
# 17564
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
But I don't see FPTP delivering that either.
No, it doesn't.
Party lists are completely evil, though. The people absolutely have to be able to vote out a particular person, and not keep getting him anyway because he's top of his party's list.
If you want PR, you have to do it with large multi-member constituencies, and we can argue about the voting algorithm.
You'll still get boundary effects, though - there will be a party who keeps just failing to get an additional seat, and they will get fewer seats than that "should", but I think these should usually be fairly small. We don't need to achieve mathematical perfection - if 50.5% of the people vote one way and 49.5% vote the other way, the result is close enough that there's nothing much wrong with selecting a winner at random.
Posts: 5026 | From: USA | Registered: Feb 2013
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Jane R
Shipmate
# 331
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Posted
Karl: quote:
And Cameron has a hat-trick. All three scalps - Farage, Clegg, Miliband.
I daresay that's how he thinks of it, too.
Still... at least Farrago didn't get in.
Posts: 3958 | From: Jorvik | Registered: May 2001
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Ad Orientem
Shipmate
# 17574
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Posted
Hybrid system works well, I think. That's what we have over here. You still vote for a particular candidate who represents a certain area.
Posts: 2606 | From: Finland | Registered: Feb 2013
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Karl: Liberal Backslider
Shipmate
# 76
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jane R:
Karl: quote:
And Cameron has a hat-trick. All three scalps - Farage, Clegg, Miliband.
I daresay that's how he thinks of it, too.
Still... at least Farrago didn't get in.
Aye, cloud, silver lining. And that Reckless bloke is out on his ear as well. I mean, between him and the Tories it's "a plague on both your houses" from me, but still vaguely satisfying.
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Might as well ask the bloody cat.
Posts: 17938 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: May 2001
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shamwari
Shipmate
# 15556
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Posted
IMO Labour made ( and still makes) the error of claiming to be for working class people. That is divisive. Many 'middle class' people also work! Engaging in verbal class warfare limits the appeal of any party which must win seats across all 'classes' to be elected.
Posts: 1914 | From: from the abyss of misunderstanding | Registered: Mar 2010
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Ad Orientem
Shipmate
# 17574
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by shamwari:
IMO Labour made ( and still makes) the error of claiming to be for working class people. That is divisive. Many 'middle class' people also work! Engaging in verbal class warfare limits the appeal of any party which must win seats across all 'classes' to be elected.
The thing is though they're not. New Labour is just another Thatcherite, neo-liberal, party. I suppose it's academic as I don't live in the England (though I was brought up there), but old Labour I could have voted for. They betrayed their roots.
Posts: 2606 | From: Finland | Registered: Feb 2013
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orfeo
Ship's Musical Counterpoint
# 13878
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Demas:
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
quote:
Originally posted by Demas:
quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
quote:
Originally posted by Demas:
The Guardian's current count has SNP with 1.4m votes which gets them 55 seats, and UKIP with 3.2m votes, which gets them 1 seat.
Wow. I mean, I know why it happens, but still, wow.
Oh not this again.
1.4m votes in 59 seats, versus 3.2m votes in close to 650 seats.
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif) Thanks for the lesson, professor. As I said, I know why it happens.
But, still, wow.
But the total figure is completely meaningless! Why are you quoting it?
The figure is the number of people who voted for a UKIP candidate. That's its meaning. Why are you behaving as though my surprise was some sort of ghastly social faux pax?
Because you didn't quote one figure, you quoted two and compared them, and the two figures are simply not comparable in any meaningful fashion. It is utterly pointless to compare a vote across multiple countries with a vote in 1 country, because the number of people who were even eligible to vote for SNP is so much smaller than the voter pool for UKIP. If you want a sensible comparison to UKIP, use the Lib Dems.
[ 08. May 2015, 13:57: Message edited by: orfeo ]
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Technology has brought us all closer together. Turns out a lot of the people you meet as a result are complete idiots.
Posts: 18173 | From: Under | Registered: Jul 2008
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L'organist
Shipmate
# 17338
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Posted
Only 1 result left to come in - St Ives and the Isles of Scilly - expected to be a Conservative win.
I had a bet with a friend on the result and have won £150 ![[Yipee]](graemlins/spin.gif)
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Rara temporum felicitate ubi sentire quae velis et quae sentias dicere licet
Posts: 4950 | From: somewhere in England... | Registered: Sep 2012
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ad Orientem:
quote:
Originally posted by shamwari:
IMO Labour made ( and still makes) the error of claiming to be for working class people. That is divisive. Many 'middle class' people also work! Engaging in verbal class warfare limits the appeal of any party which must win seats across all 'classes' to be elected.
The thing is though they're not. New Labour is just another Thatcherite, neo-liberal, party. I suppose it's academic as I don't live in the England (though I was brought up there), but old Labour I could have voted for. They betrayed their roots.
Pretty much right. They also accepted certain Tory narratives, or myths, particularly that Labour had crashed the economy, and that austerity would make the economy grow. The Tories didn't even stick to the second one, as they could see it was choking growth. But Labour didn't have the bottle, and tried to be better Tories than the Tories. What a farce.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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Alwyn
Shipmate
# 4380
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
[..] With current boundaries, Labour have an inbuilt bias in their favour since they have always done better in the smaller urban constituencies.
Historically, that sounds right. It may still be right, and yet I wonder. My maths could be wrong, but this is what it looks like (based on current BBC numbers):-
Labour got 232 seats from 9,344,328 votes. This seems to mean that it, on average, it took 40,277 votes to elect one Labour MP. The Conservatives got 331 seats from 11,334,920 votes. On average, it took 34,244 votes to elect one Conservative MP. Unless I'm missing something, it looks like first past the post favoured the Conservatives this time - am I missing something?
quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
I think Labour are now in long term trouble and the Lib Dems may never recover.
I think you're probably right.
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Post hoc, ergo propter hoc
Posts: 849 | From: UK | Registered: Apr 2003
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lowlands_boy
Shipmate
# 12497
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Posted
I thought Jim Murphy's speech was very good. Certainly better than Ed's...
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I thought I should update my signature line....
Posts: 836 | From: North West UK | Registered: Apr 2007
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
Ken called it for the Lib Dems five years ago. To be honest, I'm surprised anyone ever thought anything different was going to happen. It appears Nick Clegg fundamentally failed to appreciate how much of the Lib Dem vote was based on the premise that they'd keep the Tories out.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by St. Punk the Pious:
I hope no one is actually thinking Red Ed lost because he wasn't red enough.
Actually, never mind. Yes, the way for Labour to win is to fly that red flag high! ![[Two face]](graemlins/scot_twoface.gif)
Well, Blair did a clever coalition between the affluent south in England, and the old industrial areas, including Scotland. Both have crashed and burned for Labour now, but they are left with the neo-liberal rhetoric, which convinces no-one. If you want Tories, why settle for ersatz ones? It's left Labour without meaning or aims, whether this is recoverable, dunno. It might depend on whether SNP buy into the austerity myth.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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Barnabas62
Shipmate
# 9110
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Posted
Alwyn
I think that shows the difference between a proportional representation system and a constituency (first past the post) system. Labour got one seat in Scotland but a lot more than average votes per seat in Scotland. And UKIP got 1 seat in England despite getting close on 4 million votes overall.
I think the boundary revisions are equivalent to Labour losing around 15 seats, but they will make for fairer constituency sizes. I like the fact that we do that kind of bipartisan (well, pretty bipartisan) equitable revision in the UK. If you don't do that, you get the kind of vile gerrymandered district sizing and location characteristic of the current arrangements for seats in the US Congress. We really don't want that in the UK.
[ 08. May 2015, 15:26: Message edited by: Barnabas62 ]
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by St. Punk the Pious:
I hope no one is actually thinking Red Ed lost because he wasn't red enough.
Well, yes.
Compare and contrast: the SNP's strong anti-Tory, anti-austerity message, Labour's austerity-lite, this-time-we-won't-fuck-up humility. How did that go for 'Red' Ed?
I didn't vote Labour because they had very little to say to me.
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Forward the New Republic
Posts: 9131 | From: Ultima Thule | Registered: Jul 2005
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
Labour are Tory-lite really. What is the point of that?
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
Indeed. A question I asked of a Labour party activist friend over on F***Book last night: if Labour aren't the party of the left, what are they for?
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Forward the New Republic
Posts: 9131 | From: Ultima Thule | Registered: Jul 2005
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
Indeed. A question I asked of a Labour party activist friend over on F***Book last night: if Labour aren't the party of the left, what are they for?
Well, we can do neo-liberalism with compassion!
I can remember Callaghan bellowing at the Labour party conference, 'you can't spend your way out of a recession'. Thus, they dumped Keynes and embraced neo-liberalism, and they wonder why they have no clear identity. That was 1976, by the way, before Thatcher.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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Karl: Liberal Backslider
Shipmate
# 76
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
The racists all vote UKIP now.
This is true. The racist Party de jour, Britian First, has been telling its knuckle-dragging followers to do just that.
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Might as well ask the bloody cat.
Posts: 17938 | From: Chesterfield | Registered: May 2001
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Honest Ron Bacardi
Shipmate
# 38
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
Indeed. A question I asked of a Labour party activist friend over on F***Book last night: if Labour aren't the party of the left, what are they for?
Well, we can do neo-liberalism with compassion!
I can remember Callaghan bellowing at the Labour party conference, 'you can't spend your way out of a recession'. Thus, they dumped Keynes and embraced neo-liberalism, and they wonder why they have no clear identity. That was 1976, by the way, before Thatcher.
True, but 1976 is probably a poor example, as that was a debt crisis, i.e. although the national debt as a % of GDP was lower than now, the government lost confidence of the markets that they had a credible plan for repaying the debt. There is no point in borrowing if you need to pay 20% p.a. to service the debt. It's ironic as the (bond) markets would probably have been prepared to countenance a programme involving less austerity this time round. However it would be touch and go - Keynes also said that you should be paying off the debt in the good times in order to create the stimulus in the bad times, and that's the bit that's rather been forgotten of late.
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Anglo-Cthulhic
Posts: 4857 | From: the corridors of Pah! | Registered: May 2001
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Honest Ron Bacardi
Shipmate
# 38
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Posted
Earlier, Barnabas62 wrote:- quote:
I think Labour are now in long term trouble and the Lib Dems may never recover.
I agree with that. The collapse of the left and the rise of the far-right is a long story, but an increasing number of commentators, from left and right, seem to be agreeing increasingly on why. It's not just a UK thing of course.
But the nu-labour pact represented an abandonment of what the left had traditionally focused on, i.e. a better deal for the workers, and replaced it with a programme owing more to American politics, with an indecent love of Big Money and a string of must-do projects identified in the rise of identity politics. The former led to 2008, and the latter means little to most working people. Ask them* and you would likely get agreement to A, disagreement with B, and a qualified answer to C. After a while it always was going to lead to "got bored, walked away".
And of course some walked into the arms of the far right.
So yes, if labour is going to survive, it really does need to be more left-wing, in the traditional understanding of the phrase. Though in doing so it needs to bear in mind why there was a crisis in the first place that led to the rise of nu-labour.
Though if we do cravenly all go down the American way (dear Lord please no), then the Liberals could become culture wars liberals, though I think that would more depend on the Conservatives first turning into neocons or teaparty-type loons.
(* I'm now retired, otherwise it would be "us")
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Anglo-Cthulhic
Posts: 4857 | From: the corridors of Pah! | Registered: May 2001
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Alyosha
Shipmate
# 18395
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Posted
Did anyone hear the reversing vehicle sound during Cameron's victory speech outside number 10? It was a subliminal message/spell to cause as much depression as possible, I tell you (probably).
Posts: 162 | From: UK | Registered: Apr 2015
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quetzalcoatl
Shipmate
# 16740
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Posted
The dominant narratives for 40 years have been to the right, e.g. privatization, deregulation, wage control, high bonuses, flexible working. Labour bought into them, and are now paralysed by them, so they appeal neither to workers nor the affluent middle class. Is the left extinct? Well no, but I don't think Labour will be its vehicle.
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I can't talk to you today; I talked to two people yesterday.
Posts: 9878 | From: UK | Registered: Oct 2011
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GCabot
Shipmate
# 18074
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Posted
I am rather flabbergasted at the people saying that Labour needs to move farther leftwards. That is pretty much the same thing the insane Tea Party people say about the Republicans in the U.S. The last time Labour had a non-Blairite majority government was what? 1966 under Harold Wilson? Miliband was a return to Old Labour, and the result is that the Tories actually gained seats as a sitting government? Old Labour has spent nearly fifty years now in the wilderness. I fail to see what people believe has changed that would make a more left-leaning Labour Party successful.
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The child that is born unto us is more than a prophet; for this is he of whom the Savior saith: "Among them that are born of woman, there hath not risen one greater than John the Baptist."
Posts: 285 | From: The Heav'n Rescued Land | Registered: Apr 2014
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Arethosemyfeet
Shipmate
# 17047
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Posted
Miliband tipped his hat in the direction of a couple of populist ideas but the notion that he was Old Labour or in some meaningful way "red" is utterly fallacious. It's a measure of how pernicious our media is that this view has managed to gain a foothold in spite of the evidence. He wouldn't even countenance raising income tax, for goodness sake, never mind repealing anti-union legislation. Labour problem wasn't actually about too left or too right, it was about a lack of convincing vision for how to do things differently. All they were promising was to do the same as the tories, but better, and that's never going to inspire. It's noticeable that there were marginals where Labour put up genuinely radical candidates, and there's no indication they did any worse than the bland neo-liberals.
Posts: 2933 | From: Hebrides | Registered: Apr 2012
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
So just what is so wrong about the left? And so right about the right? (And why the heck did the flipping French Revolutionary government sit that way round? Imagine if the policies we think of as on the right didn't come attached to a word that implies they are correct.) People keep on going on about the left as though it is totally obvious and self explanatory that it is wrong, and never provide a list about just what it is they feel is so transparent.
What is wrong about moving towards a society that takes care of all its members, who are all regarded as valuable parts of the body politic, who are not measured by the amounts they can slip into the pockets of a particular party? (And why do those donors have to do it via expensive functions? Why can't they put their money where their mouths are without getting goodies back at the time, let alone in legislation later?)
What is wrong about supporting a society that makes health and education available to all, regardless of income? What is wrong about a society that remembers that "welfare" is a public good, a word that derives form being well, and arranges it without being mean and sneering about those who need it? What is wrong about wanting a society that helps the disabled to live lives more abundantly without having to jump impossible hurdles to prove their need? What is wrong with wanting a society which does not order people's lives so that they die early? Or, if it has, inadvertently, done that, recognises its mistake and corrects it in short order.
What is wrong about wanting a society that rewards work, recognising that the labourer is worthy of the hire, deserving of being able to live on their wage, and to live well, not in grudging dearth. Not one in which the same workers (I write of the support staff in schools here, cleaners, cooks) do the same jobs year after year, but the company that employs them is magically changed regularly, just before they become qualified for sickness benefit, redundancy rights and holiday pay.
When our masters were young, and they trashed people's livelihoods for fun, they put money down in an attempt to compensate for the harm they did. Now they have put away childish things, they do the first and think there is no need for the second.
But what do I know? I live in a state where people want the opposite, whatever public goods come in a right wing package.
I do enjoy a good rant, even if it is utterly, utterly pointless. I'm off to find my St John's Wort tablets.
[ 08. May 2015, 17:42: Message edited by: Penny S ]
Posts: 5833 | Registered: May 2009
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
Oh yes, and I forgot about asking what is wrong about wanting a society in which those who are wronged can access the law, whether in their private lives, or their working lives, where those ill treated in the workplace have some means of restitution, either through tribunals or the unions? There was a need for those, remember? Even against nice Quaker companies like Bryant and May and their girls with phossy jaw.
Posts: 5833 | Registered: May 2009
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by GCabot:
I fail to see what people believe has changed that would make a more left-leaning Labour Party successful.
The success of the SNP? That's a pretty big signpost right there...
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Forward the New Republic
Posts: 9131 | From: Ultima Thule | Registered: Jul 2005
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Doublethink.
Ship's Foolwise Unperson
# 1984
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Posted
And most people voting green, some ex lib dems and some ukip supporters would go for a left leaning party.
One way of addressing the concerns of the impact of immigration on low paid job terms and conditions, for example, is strong unionisation.
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All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. George Orwell
Posts: 19219 | From: Erehwon | Registered: Aug 2005
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Arethosemyfeet
Shipmate
# 17047
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Posted
Nothing wrong with the left, Penny S. My point was simply that Miliband was being attacked for something that wasn't true, and you can be certain the people doing the attacking thought it was bad.
Posts: 2933 | From: Hebrides | Registered: Apr 2012
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
Wot abart the workers? Red Ken on Andrew Neil said it was Blair's fault for not creating working class jobs (miners?!) and social housing.
(And thank you, thank you for drawing a veil over my "it's". Love certainly covers much sin.)
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Luigi
Shipmate
# 4031
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by St. Punk the Pious:
I hope no one is actually thinking Red Ed lost because he wasn't red enough.
Actually, never mind. Yes, the way for Labour to win is to fly that red flag high!
Not saying they should be more left, just asking whether you think they would gain more votes by being even closer to the Tory position - as in the Lib Dems. The electorate seemed to think that if a party was closish to the Tories, they might as well vote for the Tories.
Posts: 752 | Registered: Feb 2003
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
quote:
Originally posted by St. Punk the Pious:
I hope no one is actually thinking Red Ed lost because he wasn't red enough.
Actually, never mind. Yes, the way for Labour to win is to fly that red flag high!
Well, Blair did a clever coalition between the affluent south in England, and the old industrial areas, including Scotland. Both have crashed and burned for Labour now, but they are left with the neo-liberal rhetoric, which convinces no-one. If you want Tories, why settle for ersatz ones? It's left Labour without meaning or aims, whether this is recoverable, dunno. It might depend on whether SNP buy into the austerity myth.
Well yes - that was a totally cynical ploy to gain as many votes as possible purely to gain power. It totally lost the plot in that the raison d'etre of gaining power is to apply the policies you truly believe in - replacing it with the gaining of political power for its own sake. The end result 10 years on is that regardless of the integrity of individual labour members - which I'm sure there is lots of - the party and the policy machine that comes with it has sold its soul to a compromise that the voters instinctively recognise as being unauthentic. So to call the original change "Machiavellian" is a parody of Machiavelli - who would not have made that appaling misunderstanding of the difference between tactics and strategy, or means vs end.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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itsarumdo
Shipmate
# 18174
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Posted
As for the voters as a whole, I find it appalling how most of the UK appears to swallow media propoganda hook line and sinker and fail to see any depth behind the past 5 years of Tory government. That a party can do so much to apply austerity to the lower incomes and fail to rein in multinational and corporate tax evasion is a pretty damning indication that the old boy network is looking after its own in style. The old British political tradition of paying lip service and then just sidelining anything they don't care about - e.g. prisons, treatment of immigrants, environment is alive and visible if one simply asks a few questions rather than accepting the bland pacifying press statements. That a few unnamed senior MPs stood by certain miscellaneous characters in the phone tapping scandal and that the cases have somehow collapsed and almost everyone except a few sacrificial pawns are off scott free - is a telling sign that power and favour is for sale on an unprecedented scale. Well, maybe not unprecedented, but it's been a while since the Tudors were on the throne.
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"Iti sapis potanda tinone" Lycophron
Posts: 994 | From: Planet Zog | Registered: Jul 2014
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Touchstone
Shipmate
# 3560
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Posted
If the opinion polls over the last 2 years had been accurate, would Labour have realised that their safety first "35 percent strategy" was not going to cut it and actually adopted some policies that were not just tweaks of Blairism?
The press would have crucified Ed (if he had remained as leader), but they crucified him anyway so what the heck...
In the event, the polls continued to whisper "all is well" even as the ship hit the rocks.
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Jez we did hand the next election to the Tories on a plate!
Posts: 163 | From: Somewhere west of Bristol | Registered: Nov 2002
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Barnabas62
Shipmate
# 9110
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Posted
The issue underneath the issue is the subliminal message that:
"Left Wing = economical naivety".
A moment's reflection should persuade anyone that the global economic crisis was not created by left wing values, but by short sighted greed supported by reckless banking. Bankers are not noted for their left wing policies so far as I can see.
Yet the mud sticks.
Oh, sure, that's an over-simplification. As is the assertion that the cost of reckless banking has been met, largely, by those who were poor to start with. I think privations imposed by "sound government" have pretty well assured that inequity. A kind of reverse Robin-Hood spirit is in the air.
This is one of those occasions where I really miss a good bullshit-clearing fulmination by the late, much lamented, ken.
Will "left wing naivety" ever come back into fashion? Maybe it will in time? I hear the Orwellian whisper of Animal Farm's Benjamin the donkey. "Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey".
But it's going to take a while.
[ 08. May 2015, 19:12: Message edited by: Barnabas62 ]
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
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Honest Ron Bacardi
Shipmate
# 38
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Posted
ISTM, B62, that one of the failures of the Labour campaign was the failure to tackle that head-on. Why? This was the period that the Conservatives were whining about over-regulation of the financial sector. Labour could have had them by the short and curlies if they wanted.
Not an original observation I know, but it bears repeating again.
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Anglo-Cthulhic
Posts: 4857 | From: the corridors of Pah! | Registered: May 2001
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Penny S
Shipmate
# 14768
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Arethosemyfeet:
Nothing wrong with the left, Penny S. My point was simply that Miliband was being attacked for something that wasn't true, and you can be certain the people doing the attacking thought it was bad.
It wasn't your comment that drew my fire! I took so long writing it that you slipped in between what I was commenting on and my rant.
Posts: 5833 | Registered: May 2009
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Og: Thread Killer
Ship's token CN Mennonite
# 3200
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Posted
Question - is it these particular Lib-Dems that are dead, or is it the idea of a party between the two traditional ones that is dead.
Cause somebody is going to eventually beat the current ruling party - it always happens. And the way people are going on about it on here, you'd think that Labour is repurposing that tombstone.
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I wish I was seeking justice loving mercy and walking humbly but... "Cease to lament for that thou canst not help, And study help for that which thou lament'st."
Posts: 5025 | From: Toronto | Registered: Aug 2002
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Cod
Shipmate
# 2643
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Posted
Being a long-time Lib Dem voter and - from a decade ago - party member I have followed the party's fortunes closely. Needless to say I am dismayed by what has happened over the last five years. While I expected a vote share of something like 8%, I did not expect a reduction to 8 seats.
My thoughts on why their vote share unravelled is as follows. Some of what I say will probably be a bit out of touch due to my absence, but bear with me.
1. Support switching to Labour
There is a tendency to believe that Lib Dem support is entirely tactical, and that the majority of its voters' "real" support is for Labour, and in a few cases the Tories. It is true that in 1997 the Lib Dems benefitted from an anti-Tory vote, and were able to squeeze the Labour vote in the constituencies where they finished first or second. However, this is far from the whole story. You do not consistently poll close to 20% in election after election purely on tactical voting, especially when your candidates are generally finishing third and liable to have their own vote share squeezed. Speaking for myself, my preference was to vote for a party whose philosophical outlook was liberal and whose policies were designed accordingly, and I think there are millions like me.
However, in this election I really had to hold my nose very tightly as I voted. I voted Lib Dem chiefly because I liked my incumbent MP (who has now lost his seat) but also because the alternative was a Tory. However, I did so with no enthusiasm. Had Labour made a stronger showing, I'd probaby have lent my vote to them (again, without enthusiasm). The party has flirted with a right-wing version of liberalism, which I worry collapses into a sort of tea-party libertarianism.
2. Support switching to UKIP.
Yes, really. The Tory vote held up in the south west, the UKIP vote hugely increased, and Labour's low vote share increased somewhat. The best explanation is poorer voters who previously backed the Lib Dems shifting to UKIP and Labour. I note also that UKIP are somewhat like the Lib Dems in that they purport to be for the little people.
3. Loss of protest party vote.
By being in government, they were always going to lose this. I expect the Greens, the SNP and to a lesser extent UKIP were the beneficiaries.
4. Cock-ups and naivety
Here in NZ, coalition governments are normal. Everyone knows how they work, and the country got used to them pretty quickly. In order to do that, some of the older conventions were simply ditched because they clearly didn't fit, and observing them looked contrived. The most obvious one of these is ministerial disagreement. It is quite normal for ministers from one party to have public disagreements with those from another. This is all quite normal. It is also normal for minor parties in a coalition to name their price and stick to it. The Lib Dems did neither. They behaved like a minor party who had been invited into government. Once they were in government, they allowed themselves to be absolutely stitched up. They were too spineless even to stick to their personal commitment to oppose tuition fees. I think going into coalition was the responsible thing to do given the circumstances, but they should have behaved like a party who had just captured a vote share fully two thirds of that of the Tories and driven a much, much harder bargain accordingly. They should have insisted on a switch to a system other than AV, and they should not have done more to counter the belief that their desire for electoral reform was self-serving (AV probably wouldn't have helped them anyway).
5. There are lots of others but I'll stop here.
The last 5 years have been an utter disaster for the Lib Dems. In terms of vote, this is their worst result since the Liberals in 1966. In terms of seats, it is their worst result since 1959. Most of the party's big hitters have been decapitated, their representation at municipal level decimated, and the membership has (I believe) more than halved. Given that the party is more reliant on old-fashioned activism than Labour or the Tories, and now has less members than UKIP or the Greens, they might have terminally lost their ability to get their vote out and put quality candidates up for election. The only upside is that remaining members will be the hard core.
However, I also worry that perhaps the voting public in general are less interested in liberalism than they used to be, and that conservatism is the order of the day. This election produced a very right wing/conservative result, in England at least. While I do see the possiblity of the Lib Dems being replaced by the Greens on the left and UKIP on the right, I don't see either party replicating policies on the same philosophical basis as the Lib Dems.
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"I fart in your general direction."
M Barnier
Posts: 4229 | From: New Zealand | Registered: Apr 2002
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Firenze
Ordinary decent pagan
# 619
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Posted
The millions who didn't vote Conservative or UKIP must and will find a political expression. Possibly in a regrouping of Labour, Libdems and Greens in a Progressive Alliance. All governments fail sooner or later, from a combination of internal complacency, dissent and scandal, and the rise of a coherent, ungrubby alternative.
It's never fun to be in the stooping and building with worn-out tools part of the cycle, but it's what we have to do.
Posts: 17302 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Jun 2001
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Curiosity killed ...
Ship's Mug
# 11770
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Leorning Cniht:
I'd love to know how the individual vote transfers worked out. Scotland is clear - a large chunk of the leftist vote moved from Labour and the Lib Dems to the SNP.
In the rest of the UK, the numbers show the Conservatives more or less holding steady (small gain), and a transfer of most of the LD vote to UKIP, Labour and the Greens. The transfer from LD to Lab / Green would seem to be the left-wing end of the Lib Dem support abandoning the party of collaboration ![[Devil]](graemlins/devil.gif) but a 10% transfer from Lib Dem to UKIP doesn't make much sense.
Is it a transfer from the Lib Dems to the Conservatives, and a simultaneous transfer from the Tories to UKIP, or did all the LD voters go Labour, and the UKIP support is mostly anti-immigrant sentiment in "white van man".
Essentially, who are the UKIP voters? They got almost twice as many votes as the Lib Dems across England, despite only maintaining the one MP. I suspect that the idea of summing the Conservative and UKIP vote and calling it a roughly 50% vote for the right of centre is probably not an accurate picture of what was really going on.
According to a retired guy I know and met this morning, who votes in one of the Essex constituencies that UKIP hoped to take, all the natural Labour voters he knew voted UKIP because they wouldn't vote Tory, but couldn't stomach voting for Ed Milliband and Ed Balls, who have not come over as competent.
Realistically, the LibDems would possibly have some credibility if they'd pulled out of the Coalition the first time they'd been stitched up, rather than rolling over, and Labour have looked unelectable for years. So this was pretty inevitable.
(I've seen Ed Balls on The Agenda live, and he was pretty unconvincing. Apparently Ed Milliband was positively embarrassing in his begging for votes from the audience, to the point he put people off who would have otherwise voted Labour)
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Mugs - Keep the Ship afloat
Posts: 13794 | From: outiside the outer ring road | Registered: Aug 2006
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Cod
Shipmate
# 2643
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Curiosity killed ...:
Realistically, the LibDems would possibly have some credibility if they'd pulled out of the Coalition the first time they'd been stitched up, rather than rolling over, and Labour have looked unelectable for years. So this was pretty inevitable.
Really? I think they would have looked as if they were stomping off and taking their ball with them. Their fate in this election was sealed when they signed up to that lopsided coalition agreement and decided to spend years pretending that they agreed with everything the Tories said and did, in the name of some stupid "constitutional convention".
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"I fart in your general direction."
M Barnier
Posts: 4229 | From: New Zealand | Registered: Apr 2002
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Cod
Shipmate
# 2643
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by IngoB:
quote:
Originally posted by Cod:
My view is that it is undemocratic for anyone to be in parliament who has not been elected by individuals.
And my view is that a system where a party can gain 1.4% of the popular vote but lose 26 seats in parliament, as Labour did in this UK election, is undemocratic. The systematic trashing of huge numbers of votes to uphold absolute individual representation is nonsense.
This is a non-point which you make because, once again, you are assuming that democracy is inevitably about parties. My view is that it is about electing the individuals who govern us. While it makes sense for those individuals to organise themselves into political parties, the fact remains that government is carried on by real people who use their own minds and experiences to make decisions on behalf of those who have elected them. If this is not correct, then we ought to replace all members of parliament with a large computer.
There are all manner of electoral systems that allow voters to choose all those who will govern them: STV, AV, FPTP or direct election of heads of government. The system as used in places like Germany, NZ and Scotland subverts that principle, and to that extent they are less democratic than FPTP polities. I personally prefer AV or STV to FPTP as they allow voters more choice about how to vote and (in the latter case) who to vote for. However, I would certainly vote against a change to a system that removed voter choice as currently allowed by FPTP.
In any event, most electoral systems "systematically trash" the votes of those whose preferred candidate or slate of candidates does not win. Not many countries have party proportional governments. One side has to lose.
quote:
In particular so in modern times, where people are at least as aware of party leaders and party politics as they are of what their individual MP might be doing. In fact, I would posit that it is much easier to get a halfway unbiased idea about the former than about the latter.
If you are factually correct (and I don't think you are) this is as a result of party organisations strangling the independence of local MPs. This is a bad thing that reduces political 'biodiversity'. I really don't see why it is in any sense a good idea to enshrine this tendency in law.
quote:
quote:
Originally posted by Cod:
That sounds like a justification on pragmatism rather than principle. In any event, it sounds extremely unlikely that a country would suffer from that problem for any length of time, and even if it did, it would find ways of coping. It is more often justified as a way of excluding extremist parties (which strikes me as a somewhat problematic position to take).
Of course it is a pragmatic justification. All politics is pragmatic anyhow. Electing a representative to parliament is a pragmatic way of dealing with the organisational problems that direct democracy has. Democracy is a pragmatic way of dealing with the problem of finding an optimal solution among conflicting individual interests. Etc.
No. "Democracy" as currently understood is the principle that people choose who governs them. It is less about successful government than human rights.
I suppose you could argue that 'pragmatically' that's the best way to order society. But if so, everything in life is pragmatic, and the word loses its meaning.
quote:
The damping of extremist excess is a natural consequence of a hurdle system, given that extremism by definition is a small minority position. The problem is that an extremist party could gain undue influence if their small percentage is what one side needs to gain majority. But that really is just one particular example for the wider problem of destabilising governance through fracturing into small parties. Here the "steady" party politics of the big party would get disrupted by the need to accommodate the extremist party, so this is a kind of destabilising governance.
With the exception of Italy, this is really not a problem for mature democracies. In any event, if that's what the people choose, that's democracy. Once again, however, you are viewing the issue through the lens of "parties". If MPs squabble too much amongst themselves to form a stable administration, the appropriate solution is for the electorate to kick them all out and replace them with other MPs. Under a constituency-based system, this is simple. Under a system that is based on party vote share, it's just about impossible.
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"I fart in your general direction."
M Barnier
Posts: 4229 | From: New Zealand | Registered: Apr 2002
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Barnabas62
Shipmate
# 9110
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Honest Ron Bacardi:
ISTM, B62, that one of the failures of the Labour campaign was the failure to tackle that head-on. Why? This was the period that the Conservatives were whining about over-regulation of the financial sector. Labour could have had them by the short and curlies if they wanted.
Not an original observation I know, but it bears repeating again.
It puzzled me too. I think it was worth a try. But I never heard the argument made.
Interesting question on "Question Time" this evening. "Why did the electorate punish the Lib Dems for things the coalition got wrong and reward the Tories for things the coalition got right?"
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
Posts: 21397 | From: Norfolk UK | Registered: Feb 2005
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Lucia
Looking for light
# 15201
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Posted
I saw this before the election, which outlines the demographics of who was supporting which party in the UK. It might help answer the question of who the UKIP voters are.
And a little while back I came across an interesting discussion which proposed that the reason that UKIP is gaining votes from former supporters of both Labour and Conservative parties is that it is not about Left or Right but more about cultural values of cosmopolitan vs non-cosmopolitan. The rise of 'cosmopolitan' politics. I think they may be on to something.
Posts: 1075 | From: Nigh golden stone and spires | Registered: Oct 2009
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