I've actually gotten depressed at the results of the election. I was scheduled to go back to the UK in a few months, but decided to move to another country instead.
Cameron is on a rampage. I've never feared rapid descent into dictatorship until now. I'm well and truly afraid of what the UK will look like in 4 years.
Cameron is on a rampage. I've never feared rapid descent into dictatorship until now. I'm well and truly afraid of what the UK will look like in 4 years.
A lot of people said that about Bush in 2004. People are alarmist. Status quo is generally maintained with only minor changes in course - that's what our political systems are designed to do.
The US has direly changed since 2004 and not for the better. The UK is a much, much smaller country than the US; what do you think will happen to it on the same time scale?
I'm not saying Cameron will start WW3, but I really am afraid of what will happen.
> The US has direly changed since 2004 and not for the better.
It's complicated.
Since 2004 we're finally getting to the point where some of the insanity put in place in the aftermath of 2001-09-11 is starting to go away.
On the flip side, the ways some of that is being done (see TSA PreCheck, put in place in 2011) are quite odious... but I have a hard time blaming Bush for a policy put in place in 2011.
While I agree that the changes from 2004 to 2008 were fairly negative, the ones from 2008 to 2012 were just as negative if not worse.
All of which is to say that the two major parties were quite happily marching in lockstep toward creating a security state for a while there. I'm glad to see that at least the electorate and the judiciary are now moving in the opposite direction.
Well it's only my dumb opinion but Cameron merely comes in second place to ISIS for this year's entry on the things the media want us to be scared of - previously populated by CJD, Y2K, anthrax, avian flu, worldwide economic collapse, swine flu, Eurozone collapse, North Korea and Ebola.
I'd dare say most Americans think the US is worse today than it was before Bush. While the US isn't under the rule of a dictator, an increasingly large number of people are wary of if not fearful of the government.
People may be alarmist, sure, but when an ever-growing number of people worry about governmental actions, there tends to be some reason for it.
I honestly think you've got blinders on if you believe that. The right track/wrong track polls and congressional approval ratings are usually a good indicator of that - even Obama's meteoric rise couldn't put a dent in the way that people still feel like the US Government is a wholly owned subsidiary of corporate america.
Pretty much. I'm not sure how many western countries are left which have not succumbed to the dark side of global surveillance and "security at any price", if any. Maybe Iceland?
IIRC, Iceland is indeed pretty privacy-conscious as a whole. If it were easier for me to move there (which would be difficult to do right now both financially and because I'm not already in Europe), I probably would.
A campaign to make Manchester part of Scotland has gathered momentum after a surprising 72 per cent of respondents voted in favour of secession. The results of an online poll conducted by the Manchester Evening News revealed that thousands of people want the city to be ruled from Edinburgh, rather than London. A Twitter campaign with the hashtag #TakeUsWithYouScotland is being used on social media, and a Change.org petition has already been signed by 17,000 people.
Can anyone share why exactly the Liberal Democrats, who seem to have been against this sort of stuff, got crushed at the recent elections? Was it because of some unpopular positions or were there many "scandals" that appeared regarding their candidates (perhaps about personal issues?).
- In the election 5 years ago there was no clear winner, the Lib Dems chose to go into a coalition government with the party who received the largest proportion of the vote.
- This coalition meant compromising on several key issues, for example tuition fees for university, in exchange for getting through other policies (raising the free tax allowance for the lower paid).
- The lib dems failed to properly communicate their achievements as a liberal/progressive force within government, and spent their time apologising for every compromise.
- Scotland moved strongly to a nationalist party, hurting a traditional source of seats.
- The polls looked as though there would be another coalition, and the people who previously voted lib dem were damned if they were going to vote effectively for another coalition in which they felt the party betrayed its values
tl;dr they got burned for doing the "right thing".
As I've said before on HN, people here seem to think that security is a huge issue. Surveillance, police state etc. In all of the election content I saw, it was mentioned maybe once or twice and barely scrutinised. The people of the UK did not care about it, and the politicians left it in the manifestos.
As for the GP comment suggesting something about dictatorship, it's probably the most ridiculous thing I've read in some time.
The Liberal Democrats did extremely well at implementing some of their policies (notably increased personal allowance), obsoleting that part of their manifesto. I think they are right to be proud of that record, but it means that some of their strongest policies are now irrelevant.
The Liberal Democrats did extremely poorly at implementing some of their promises (notably tuition fees), going back on their word and making themselves non-credible in these respects, obsoleting the other part of their manifesto.
The Liberal Democrats were not observed to take any position that would contradict the two major parties during the election campaign. They were criticised for being "blank tiles", easily able to meld with either of the major parties in coalition. A vote for the Liberal Democrats could easily be a vote for the worse of two evils, whichever side you think that is. And many (former?) Liberal Democrats would think that the worse evil would be their coalition partner.
The major parties and UKIP have been very effective in pushing an anti-immigrant and anti-human rights agenda with the help of the press. The Liberal Democrats did not appear willing to stand openly against this in the election campaign.
During the election debates, the Green Party, Scottish Nationalist Party, and Plaid Cymru made a convincing claim to stand for human rights. The Liberal Democrats did not.
I'll add that anybody who actually believed in what the Lib Dems were offering in 2015 (a centrist party) knew that after the election the Lib Dems would probably revert to being a left-wing party anyway.
So they managed to alienate both their prior left-wing vote and their new centrist vote. Quite an achievement!
In the run-up to the 2010 election, they promised to oppose any rise in tuition fees, then reneged on this in government.
On its own, that's probably not that significant, but it appears to have helped cement their reputation as untrustworthy, not least among those who thought they were voting for a party more left-wing than Labour have become in recent years.
But... they came last out of the three main parties, so it is hardly surprising that they weren't able to implement the entire of their manifesto. The conservatives reneged on many of their manifesto pledges too.
I suspect it is more that the conservatives have much stronger support by the media.
It wasn't that we (I was a Lib Dem candidate in the election) promised it in the manifesto; it was that individual MPs made a personal promise to vote against an increase in tuition fees, and then voted for it.
In addition to the "got blame but no credit" answer that others have offered I would also suggest that they have previously been the preferred "none of the above" response for people who wanted to express dissatisfaction with either Tories or Labour depending on who happened to be the more popular party in their riding; by being somewhat between they two major parties they picked up a lot of votes from dissatisfied by somewhat engaged voters. Once they were a part of government they were a part of 'the establishment' and so the protest votes went ukip or green depending on the voter's base political preference.
Speaking personally, I voted lib dem in 2010 on the basis that they were a party broadly of the left, but distinct from the Labour party of the time in a number of positive ways. To then form a coalition with the party of the right and support a number of measures that I think were quite regressive did not match with the party I thought I voted for.
Of course after seeing 10 days of government without the lib dems to moderate I'm starting to re-evaluate how positive an influence they likely were...
One theory I've heard is the way votes are counted.
I've heard that UKIP had around 3.881.129 votes and got only one seat, Green party with 1.157.613 won a single seat and Scottish national party had 1.454.436 votes and got 56 seats.
I'm not sure it's plausible, but it could be a valid explanation.
The SNP only stood candidates in a small fraction of the country:
UKIP: 3881129 / 624 = 6,220 per area, winning 1/624
SNP: 1454436 / 59 = 24,651 per area, winning 56/59
Non-proportional voting systems are barbaric and anti-democratic, but when they're in place you might consider that voting for parties that can't realistically win to be a measure of how little your voters understand the political system or at best a protest vote. On the other hand, without large numbers of people publicly wasting their votes, then there's no push for change. The Green party explicitly told their voters to "vote with their heart" i.e. waste their vote, and have now suggested that the progressive candidates work together to avoid splitting their vote.
There was no change to the way votes were counted that I'm aware of. This is a FPTP political system in action.
There was a referendum to move to a more grown-up voting system, but the majority voted against it. Depressingly, many of those who voted against were too stupid and too uninformed to actually know what they were voting against. I could only weep as someone left the polling station proud to have taken a stand against proportional representation.
I suppose they could have been balanced by people who voted in favour who were too stupid and too uninformed to actually know what they were voting for, but I suspect that is less likely.
The AV system we voted on wasn't actually PR, any kind of PR got veto'd by the conservatives, and the Lib-Dems were perhaps foolish to try to continue with such a meagre reform, as it now gets used as an excuse to not implement PR in future as "the country voted against it" (except of course they didn't, as it wasn't one of the two options they were allowed to vote for).
Yes, that's why I said I wept as people left the polling station having thought that's what they were voting about. That's my point. Lots of people didn't know. They thought that's what they were voting on.
My particular hatred was for the people who chanted "One man, one vote", like only being able to express yourself in favour of one candidate was some kind of superior state of being, rather than the kind of democracy you have to introduce to a society coming out of a millenium of dictatorship to get them used to the idea before they can move on to a grown-up political system.
"AV is not proportional representation and in certain electoral conditions, such as landslides, can produce a more disproportional result than First Past the Post (FPTP)"
Yeah they clearly bet the farm on it, lost it, and got hammered in the election. But had it passed, the Lib Dems could have been reaping the rewards for decades, since they'd almost certainly gain more seats.
I'm not sure that we are that stupid. I think that many people agreed with me that AV was a needlessly confusing system that the LibDems wanted only because it would boost their electoral chances in a country where there were at the time two left of centre parties and one right of centre one.
(I am a supporter of single transferable vote and I didn't see it on my referedum voting sheet only FPTP [rubbish] and AV [?more/less? rubbish but still rubbish].)
> We also thought that AV would probably increase the number of pro-PR MPs and therefore increase the chances of getting actual PR later.
Ahh I didn't think of it like this. I thought that AV would allow the Tories and Labour to say that we'd had electoral reform and that would be it for another 100 years... I'm hoping that the pressure will build against FPTP now - especially after the farce of an election we just had.
I do hope that we don't go full PR or even region based PR for the commons though (maybe for the Lords if it ever gets reformed?). Political parties already have enough power in deciding who gets to run. I don't want them controlling the list order as well. I want voters to control the list order with their ballots.
> (I am a supporter of single transferable vote and I didn't see it on my referedum voting sheet only FPTP [rubbish] and AV [?more/less? rubbish but still rubbish].)
Really? Because AV is what Ireland uses and called it PR-STV.
For elections to President of Ireland, there is only one 'seat' available. And it is elected under PR-STV. The PR-STV system works fine with only one seat. You select the quota the same way, you do transfers the same way. Ireland uses PR-STV for single-member constituancies just fine.
This is, at the end of the day, mostly semantics but you can't have proportional representation, in a vote that only elects one person. It's not possible for someone to be 40% blue party and 60% red party, because there's only one of them. So, in Ireland votes for the president, and for by-elections to replace a single member use AV.
STV and AV (and a bunch of variants of each) are closely related, but they do have differences, and repeatedly claiming that one is the other, when they're not, isn't that helpful to the conversation.
> This is, at the end of the day, mostly semantics but you can't have proportional representation, in a vote that only elects one person.
Proportional representation is really a matter of degree rather than a binary categorization -- a system doesn't magically become proportional when you apply it to a two-member constituency that would be not-proportional when applied to a single-member constituency.
OTOH, the maximum degree of proportionality you can achieve in an electoral system increases with the number of seats that are elected by the same set of ballots.
STV is an election method defined for any arbitrary number of seats, IRV/AV is exactly STV applied to a single-seat election.
It's got nothing to do with disagreeing with me. People who thought that they were voting for/against proportional representation were just plain wrong. That's just plain not what the referendum was for.
Are you saying that these people were not misinformed? That somehow, even though the referendum was not about PR, and they thought it was about PR, they were still right? Is this some kind of "prizes for all, everyone's correct in their own way" situation?
When faced with the exact same evidence, a majority of people will react the same way.
What's more likely is that the sum of the evidence isn't actually the same.
People will generally vote based on what they know (the evidence that's been presented to them). What they know isn't much for most of the population - it's whatever TV channel they watch, whatever newspaper or website they read.
IOW, anyone who disagrees with GP is, in fact, likely to be misinformed - at least from the point of view of GP.
I think one of the reasons was tuition fees which the Lib Dems were very much against. The moment they got into power (2010) - fees were hiked to £9k per year and many people treated that like a broken Lim Dem promise
In the run-up to the previous election, many Lib Dem candidates made personal pledges - above and beyond their manifesto - that they, personally, would never vote to raise tuition fees. And then did so (and not because they were required by the coalition agreement - the party made it a free vote).
That was how they lost my vote and those of others I know.
Because they were a small party in a coalition with a larger party that did some horrible things. Their core voters deserted them, since they were in government when things were brought in that their core didn't like.
Well, a very large proportion of the population is pleased at the results of the election. I think that things would be much, much worse if the hard-left Milliband Labour Party had won the election.
I am not sure of the context in which Cameron's quote came from, but societies and governments interfere all the time in activities that are legal. Take smoking tobacco for example, totally legal yet there is tremendous effort put into discouraging this activity.
Smokers are still left alone. We discourage smoking by limiting where it's legal and making it more expensive, but smokers are still totally free to do what they like within the law. Cameron seems to be saying that people who don't share his values will be harassed somehow.
"For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'."
Obeying the law is no longer enough. Great.