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Wonder Dave’s party gets 36.1 percent It is amusing to be honest. The Tory party faces a PM with no actual mandate, who is as charismatic as a bowl of cold Scottish porridge and who has presided over economically calamitous times… and the best the Tory Party can do is… 36.1 percent.
I now look forward to some bracing political paralysis and hopefully the unedifying mess of a hanged… I mean hung parliament… hanged would be most edifying indeed. With a little luck the inevitable steaming pile of discordant political prima donnas will further discredit the whole establishment with their antics.
I can only hope that in the coming months this period will do lasting damage to the Tory party in order to provide a wedge of daylight for the likes of Libertarians and UKIP to exploit.
The ‘Middle of the Road’ is where you generally find road kill.
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I think your post is insulting to cold Scottish porridge everywhere…
Since emigrating to Texas, watching Larry, Curly and Moe squabble over snout space at the trough has become purely a spectator sport for me. That said, a hanged parliament would truly be a site to behold.
It was the mass debates. Common problem. It caused electile dysfunction.
Chuckles does it again!
Maybe we could have some kind of TV thing, where they have to live in the jungle for a week, and the audience vote them off one at a time.
Well the LP candidate in my area managed to get 141 votes after producing a leaflet that said absolutely nothing about Libertarianism, LP policies or even himself. UKIP only just broke the 1000 mark, with election material that was ungrammatical and incoherent. On that basis I don’t see either of them making much impression a few months down the line at the inevitable next General Election.
On the other hand, the material from two of the main candidates (I never saw anything at all from the third) contained out and out lies, so next time looks like None of The Above.
To be honest that was my intention yesterday, but at the last minute I held my nose and voted Lib Dem on the basis that they were the most likely to introduce a general buggeration factor to the whole disgusting process. I’ve discovered since that the candidates have to collectively examine ‘spoilt ballots’ so next time I won’t waver, but – politely – tell them where to insert their ballot.
While I watch the chaos I have a sickening feeling of smugness washing over me. I said years ago that if the the Tories didn’t pull their finger out this would be the result. Cameron is a complete failure as his project.
Cameron tried so hard to sound and look like Blair-lite or a LibDem in blue that it worked too well. His brand of politics is fine for those days when the stock market was forever rising, the economy was buoyed on a sea of central bank funny money, and the lame-brained chattering classes were fretting about Carbon Footprints, Corporate Social Responsibility (one of my pet hates) and all the other self indulgent BS. He’s not the man to deal with a world returned to reality. He’s not a man who can, really, deal with a Britain that is re-living the 1970s all over again.
Cameronianism has failed. True, he got a lot of new seats. But he should have obliterated Brown by a country mile.
Here’s a scary thought…
What about a NuLab/Tory pact?
Well there’s only a fag papers width between them ideologically these days isn’t there?
They would certainly represent most of the voting electorate and then they could tell Corporal Clegg to get stuffed with his PR gimmicks.
All they have to do is swallow a large amout of historical pride, and they could keep on troughing for evermore. 😉
You mean it never happened yet???!!! Well then, they can certainly take a leaf from our book.
Brown following in the footsteps of Ramsay Macdonald?
Surely there has never been a government that has been easier to oppose than this one, everything that they touch turns to shit. So Cameron’s response has been to say that he would do things just a tiny bit different.
Labour are really crap but we are a minute amount less crap than they are, so vote for us.
Not a chance, RAB. A Lab/Tory pact would expose the great lie that there’s any difference between them and voting serves a useful purpose. Even though they stopped making more than a token pretence some time ago, I don’t think they’re ready to go that far. Yet.
Well that was my Machiavellian purpose there, the other rob, in suggesting such a thing. In keeping with what Perry originally wrote.
Once the public finally realise that the Reds and the Blues are exactly the same wolves in sheeps clothing, but just pretending to be different, and that Kingmaker Clegg would suck Satan’s pecker for a sniff of power, then they may get it into their heads to vote for really radical alternatives.
What is this Constitutional nicety all about that we find ourselves with Gurnin Gordon still in 10 Downing st?
Is it like the honour at golf or something, you won the last hole so you are allowed to tee off first?
The Tories have the largest amount of seats and votes, but do not have an overall majority. Well all that means is that they could not pass any legislation if all the other parties vote against it. I’d be well bloody pleased with that situation. No more laws for 5 years?!! Lovely jubbly!!
But then Labour and Lib/Dems would have to keep explaining to the public why they keep on blocking Tory Legislation wont they? and sheer bloody mindedness will not do for an excuse in the long run.
This is why I hate proportional representation. It is the little guys who nobody voted for, holding a gun to eveybody elses head until their precious demands are met.
So if I were Cameron (I would kill myself if I was!) I would demand to form a Government, and not make deals with anyone.
If Clegg had any honour and convictions, he would refuse to do deals with either side until he too had a majority of the votes and a damn sight more than 57 poxy seats.
And if Gurnin Gordon had any honour, he would take himself up to the belltower of Big Ben and toss himself off. Then jump.
Ian B:
Not bad but the US version of the show had the slogan “outwit, outplay, outlast.” Subjecting them to a Darwinnian process of screwing each other merely worsens the risk of getting a genuinely crafty one at the end.
I’d rather have them live in the Amazonian jungle for a week, by the end of which they’d all have been eaten by snakes and Candiru catfish and cannibals and mutant three-toed sloths. I’ll volunteer for the search-and-rescue party, which due to the utter futility of their mission (said politicians having already been eaten by cannibals on television) and the need to perform a proper elfansafety risk assessment will sit on a Rio beach with a bunch of rum and cigars.
Massive danger. Little chance of pay. Volunteers sought.
For years the electorate thought they were rich enough to afford socialism.
Conservatives within the Conservative Party knew this wasn’t true and that eventually the wheels would come off and the electorate would turn to the Conservatives. Socialists within the Conservative Party believed socialism would last forever and that they should get on the bandwagon.
Right.
What Cameron should do now is nothing. If the LibDems wish to support him, fine. He can form a Conservative government and implement Conservative policies. If the LibDems wish to support Labour, that’s fine too. The wheels will come off the economy, there will be an election, the Conservatives will win and they can form a Conservative government and implement Conservative policies.
The only way the Conservatives can stuff this up is by being in coalition with the LibDems, unable to implement Conservative policies, when the wheels come off.
So I guess we know what’s going to happen then.
RAB, that’s precisely what I like about a PR system. Perhaps it’s because I’ve lived my entire life in a FPTP single-district plurality vote system, and haven’t gotten to see first-hand the effects of having a few of these “little guys who [sic] nobody voted for” win seats in the legislature, but it seems to me that is clearly a more representative process than ours. When you’re locked into a rigid, two-party duopoly, where the chances of a third-party candidate winning any election are somewhere between vanishingly small and nil, PR looks mighty attractive. Why do you think it is unhealthy to have an odd handful of Greens, BNPers, Communists, and even (dare I say it?) Libertarians in the legislature? We’re certainly seeing precious little in the way of outside-the-box thinking coming from the party apparatchiks; some cross-pollination would seem welcome, even if their ideas are ultimately rejected. At least you’ll occasionally find someone with the courage to state out loud that the emperor has no clothes!
You appear to have read an awful lot into my comment that just plain aint there Laird.
I have no objection to other parties winning seats, the more the merrier, but they have to win them first past the post fair and square, not some percentage deal, or transferable vote or whatever dumb scheme the Pols can think up to keep them all troughing along.
The Lib/Dems love proportional representation because most forms of it will guarantee them far more seats than they have achieved this time round. The Lib/Dems are one of the oldest parties in Britain, decended from the Whigs they are far older than labour, which is just over a hundred years old. Why cant they do better than 57 bloody seats?!!
The Tories (for whom I didn’t vote, I voted UKIP despite them not having a hope in hell in my Ward, which is Lib/Dem) have the largest majority and the largest amount of seats, yet cannot form a Government. The reason for this is that over many years the boundary changes in UK have been jerrymandered in favour of the Labour Party. They can win landslide victories with far less percentage of the vote than their opposition.
Given the figures, we could still be facing the possibility of the two losing parties, Labour and Lib/Dem doing a deal to take power, then changing the rules so they keep it for evermore.
Being an American of course, you have your great Constitution and proper separation of powers between the Legislative and the Executive. It doesn’t matter that your Presidents have been of one party and the Congress and Senate from another, and hence cannot get any of their pet legislation passed, they are still allowed to be elected President.
In Britain however the Legislative and the executive are the same people, then the whole thing gets muddied beyond belief.
We dont need PR, we need equal level Constituencies in Britain and a definate seperation of power between the Legislative and the Executive, oh and the beginning of the people thinking for themselves and not following blind tribalism.
I was born in Socialist S Wales. Look at the electoral map today. Apart from Cardiff North, it is a sea of red.
The old joke that a dead sheep could get elected in the Valleys as long as it was wearing a red rosette, is no joke at all, but the honest truth.
PR means jobs for the same good ‘ol boys in perpetuity.
“I have no objection to other parties winning seats,. . . but they have to win them first past the post fair and square . . .”
RAB, you’re arguing for the American system (single member districts, FPTP elections, winning by plurality, etc.), and my specific point was that it’s not a very good system. If you want to see real gerrymandering come over here; we invented it, and we’ve refined it to a high art (there are software programs specifically for that purpose). Take a look at the South Carolina 2nd Congressional District as an example (many state-level districts are even worse). Single-member districts are perfect for gerrymandering. Conversely, multi-member districts make it much harder to accomplish, and the larger the district the less effective gerrymandering becomes.
And I really like the idea that if a small party manages to garner a reasonable percentage of the vote it will have at least some representation. Under our current system, minor parties are never represented; the structure leads directly to the “wasted vote” argument which is essentially insurmountable. In my state, third party candidates frequently receive around 10% of the vote (especially if the major-party candidate is running otherwise unopposed, which happens far too frequently). If we had 10-member districts those parties would get at least one seat in the legislature. I like that idea.
Laird:
There are several problems with PR:
1. You can’t vote for an individual, only a party
2. Without districts, in theory you don’t have anybody actually representing you, in the sense that you can’t go to your local state senator’s office
3. There’s a not unreasonable chance we’d wind up with an even more entrenched Political Class. The people at the top of each party list would be assured of election, and could pretty much ignore the electorate. We’ve pretty much seen how the Political Class in the varoius European countries ignore the citizens on EU issues and immigrant issues.
The real solution, of course, is for the government to have less power to *uck up people’s lives. But we all know how likely that is to happen. 🙁
Well each to his own Laird. We have PR for the European Parliament elections, and most of us do not have a bloody clue who their MEP is, which party they are from, or what their principles are(not that it matters a damn of course!).
This fairly accurately sets out why I remain for FPTP, and favour a change to equal sized constituencies instead.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7696859/General-Election-2010-PR-wont-improve-our-government-or-our-democracy.html
So, what you’re kindly reminding me, Ted, is that no system is perfect and the grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the pond, er, fence, right?
Alisa, Christians have been cribbing Hebrew papers for millennia! Are you sure you want to encourage that trend?
And Happy Birthday to Israel in a few days time. As an esoteric christian, I am convinced that this was the signal that the new age was upon us. (Northern Hemisphere- Age of aquarius, here in the south- Age of Leo)
The Tories under Cameron got 3.8 percentage points more than they did at the last election. Given the events of the last several years, this is utterly pathetic. As Cameron clearly lost the election, he should either resign or be sacked as party leader. At that point, the Conservatives should decide what to do with respect to being involved in government. Ideally, they should refuse to do any kind of deal with the Liberal Democrats given the obvious incompatibilities between the two parties, and let the remnants of New Labour and the Libs self-destruct a bit until this leads to a new election.
I realise that none of this is actually likely to happen.
Yes the Tories should have won it easily. It is iDaves fault but he wont go.
The Tories did actually win it though, and look what is happening now, the Sociopath has been prevailed upon to step down, so that a second unelected Labour Leader leads a Lab/Lib coalition.
That means that the second and third losing parties have the sheer brass balls to piss in the faces of the electorate, ignore their main wishes, and form a Govt of losers with a very tight majority.
If my sums are right, NuLab have 258 and Lib/Dem 57. That gives them 315 to the Tories 306. If the Tories can pick up all the nationalists/Independents 28, that gives them 334.
Every vote on every bit of legislation will have to be whipped to the max (a new experience for parliament which has got used to it going through on the nod, making the fuckers work for our money! whatever next!).
There will be rebels and dissenters on all sides so it will be very fraught and touch and go.
The Tories should sign with no one, stick to their guns, because there is bound to be another Election probably inside the year.
And maybe they could lose Cameron the next time round, go with Hague again, start pushing real Tory policies and tell the fuckin truth as to how bad the financial situation is going to get whoever wins or more like “Governs”.
The Lib/Dems could well destroy themselves through their sheer selfish intransigence on PR, which only serves themselves and the rest of the political classes, when the real story is how far into the deep doo doo we are, and how we are going to get out of it.
The other Rob:
Texas – not as good as it was back (pre Sales Tax) 1960, but still a wonder.
I know Governor Rick Perry has his faults (many of them) but his one word reply to a certain question from the msm would lead me to follow him into battle against a dragon.
“Are you really against F.D.R’s New Deal?”
“Yes”.
Can anyone imagine Wonder Dave saying “yes” to a question like “are you really against Atlee’s Welfare State?” or “are you really against the reforms of Lloyd George?”.
Wow.