Who will win the UK election ?

zagfles

N1AK wrote: »

We voted for the FPTP system in a country wide referendum. It was a stupid decision, for stupid reasons, but it cannot credibly be called unfair that we use the electoral system we voted for 2:1 4 years ago.

There were only two choices. PR was never on offer.

michaels

zagfles wrote: »

There were only two choices. PR was never on offer.

The British seem to have a pretty strong distaste for regional party list PR.

Perhaps we should appoint all candidates who do not lose their deposit as constituency MPs but give them a fraction of a vote each, proportional to their share of the constituency vote, on each division?! We might need bigger constituencies to stop the number of MPs getting out of hand.

N1AK

zagfles wrote: »

There were only two choices. PR was never on offer.

Which would be a brilliant excuse, except for two things:
> Nowhere near a majority of people at the last election voted for parties that wanted PR
> AV would have led to results more similar to PR than FPTP. Rejecting AV when you want PR is like refusing a McDonalds meal when you're starving because it isn't the haute cuisine you'd ideally like.

Finally, even if those two gaping holes in the "it's unfair" argument are ignored, let's not pretend that if the referendum had been for PR vs FPTP that PR would have voted. If Nick Clegg was on the side of free cake in a referendum the British people would have voted the other way because they're fools.

purch

N1AK wrote: »

let's not pretend that if the referendum had been for PR vs FPTP that PR would have voted

It will change over time. There were far more people asking "what's the point.....", and young people nowadays are far less likely to accept the status quo. Over time peoples perceptions could change and calls for voting reform will become louder and accepted by more people.

It will come one day.

zagfles

N1AK wrote: »

Which would be a brilliant excuse, except for two things:
> Nowhere near a majority of people at the last election voted for parties that wanted PR
> AV would have led to results more similar to PR than FPTP.

That is rubbish. Analysis done at the time showed that AV wouldn't have changed the result of any election in recent history. PR, on the other hand, definitely would have.

Rejecting AV when you want PR is like refusing a McDonalds meal when you're starving because it isn't the haute cuisine you'd ideally like.

No it's like refusing to eat when you're thirsty. AV is completely different to PR.

AV is good for centre ground parties like the LibDems, which is why for them it was a lot better than FPTP (though not as good as PR).

For small parties on the extremes of the political spectrum, AV is totally useless, in fact probably worse than FPTP. But PR would definitely be better for them.

Finally, even if those two gaping holes in the "it's unfair" argument are ignored, let's not pretend that if the referendum had been for PR vs FPTP that PR would have voted. If Nick Clegg was on the side of free cake in a referendum the British people would have voted the other way because they're fools.

Quite possibly, like the thick "anti-Tories" who previously voted LibDem but didn't this time, and so given the Tories a majority. I'm sure they're delighted.

Thrugelmir

BobQ wrote: »

The fact is that whatever mistakes were made the GFC was not Labour's fault

Not the GFC but the root cause was the UK adopting the laissez faire regulation of banks that the US had adopted.

Balls introduced the Chancellor, while in opposition, to Summers and also to Robert Reich, another former professor who had become labour secretary in the first Clinton administration. A meeting with Alan Greenspan at the same time persuaded Brown of one of his young adviser's key beliefs - the desirability of an independent central bank.

There remains another nexus of connections between the two Treasuries. Stephanie Flanders, a colleague from the Financial Times, where Balls once worked, is a speechwriter for Summers. UK officials now regularly look to the US for models for the policies they are drawing up for Britain. It is hard to overstate the influence that the American experience has had on Balls, and therefore on the Labour opposition's strategies before the election and the Labour Government's policies to shape the British economy. Many of the measures announced in Brown's Budgets have their origins in US equivalents.

In a nutshell, the Summers approach combines clarity about the aims of policy with an aggressive pragmatism about the means. He taught Balls to rely on evidence, not prejudice, in designing policy. Equally important, Summers demonstrated the necessity of getting the politics right in order to be able to implement the right economic policies. Policies cannot be drawn up in a vacuum.

From 1999. the seeds were sown many years before. Hence why the US is ahead of the UK in the recovery cycle as well.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-saturday-profile-ed-balls-treasury-adviser--chancellors-golden-boy-1078592.html

Thrugelmir

michaels wrote: »

Agree with you that another coaliton would have ben the best outcome.

Between who though?

michaels

BobQ wrote: »

The fact is that whatever mistakes were made the GFC was not Labour's fault and their economic plans were largely supported by the Tories up to 2008.

However the GFC was not the problem, the problem was the failure to follow Brown's own Golden rule re balancing the budget over the cycle, instead by constantly redefining the cycle dates they were running a big deficit at peak when they should have been running a surplus.

N1AK

zagfles wrote: »

For small parties on the extremes of the political spectrum, AV is totally useless, in fact probably worse than FPTP.

Absolute nonsense. Why would AV be worse than FPTP for small parties?

There's a difference between changing an election and changing the make-up of parliament (if we currently had 6 green and 10 UKIP MPs we'd still have a Tory majority government), but even if there wasn't it's completely naive to think that people would have behaved in exactly the same way in past elections if an entirely different electoral system was in place.

IveSeenTheLight

chris_m wrote: »

Not really, they keep some people off the dole queues who would otherwise be unemployable

I'm sure there are plenty of more worthwhile jobs which could be carried out