Corbynomics: A Dystopia

wotsthat

I think Corbyn will be gone by Christmas. Please note when I first said this I was talking about Christmas 2015.

Can he hang on until the GE in 2020?

Spidernick

westernpromise wrote: »

Hilarious really. The electoral system is broken because Labour's not winning. All that's needed to make it fair is for it be rigged so that Labour does win. As it is, the fairest thing about it is that Labour's sure to be second in MPs no matter how loony it gets.

Excellent, delusional stuff!

Presumably if Khorbiyn advocated liquidation of the middle classes and royalty, abolition of rival parties, total disarmament, and the adoption of Russian as the national language, and Labour dropped to 5% in the polls, that would be the fault of the electoral system also? To ensure an effective opposition, we must gerrymander the voting system so that no matter how overtly deranged and evil Labour's policies are, it's still in with a shout.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

Wake up children. If you want a strong opposition, come up with some policies that appeal to the electorate. It's how it's been done in the past. Khorbiyn, Miliband, Broon, Major, Kinnochio, Foot, Callaghan and Heath all bombed for a reason. Try thinking about what that was.

Demanding electoral reform for party political advantage because your party has freely chosen to make itself unelectable is not a mature response to your problem.

Why do you assume that is the reason? It's not. That is far too simplistic.

I despise UKIP with a passion, but find it totally wrong that they have just one MP for their four million votes in 2015. It has nothing to do with Labour's prospects. If you had bothered to think it through rather than going into default sarcasm mode, you'd realise that PR would give Labour fewer seats, so it has absolutely nothing to do with that and I wanted Electoral Reform even when the bias was in Labour's favour (in Blair's time).

A large number of seats are decided before a vote is cast, which is a reason why I think the turnout for the referendum was so high, as every vote mattered, which is patently not the case under FPTP. As I have said before, in safe Tory Fareham hardly a soul turned up and the literature was virtually non-existent in the run up to the 2015 General Election, yet a few miles down the road in marginal Southampton Itchen you would hardly move for the political parties and leaflets.

Can I suggest that you think before posting assumptions like the above. Believe it or not, it is possible to believe in fairness in politics. The fact that the Tories are more than happy to keep an unfair system solely because it works to their advantage (at the moment), says a lot about them.

westernpromise

Spidernick wrote: »

The fact that the Tories are more than happy to keep an unfair system solely because it works to their advantage (at the moment), says a lot about them.

They were also happy to keep it when it didn't, for example in 2005, when Blair got a 66 seat majority off a 36% poll share, and 2010, when they were 30 seats short of a majority with the same 36% poll share.

People who want to change the electoral system always want a differently unfair one that they imagine will give unfair results they would prefer. However, this is to assume that the votes would be cast exactly the same way regardless of the voting system, which is manifest rubbish.

kinger101

Spidernick wrote: »

Why do you assume that is the reason? It's not. That is far too simplistic.

I despise UKIP with a passion, but find it totally wrong that they have just one MP for their four million votes in 2015. It has nothing to do with Labour's prospects. If you had bothered to think it through rather than going into default sarcasm mode, you'd realise that PR would give Labour fewer seats, so it has absolutely nothing to do with that and I wanted Electoral Reform even when the bias was in Labour's favour (in Blair's time).

A large number of seats are decided before a vote is cast, which is a reason why I think the turnout for the referendum was so high, as every vote mattered, which is patently not the case under FPTP. As I have said before, in safe Tory Fareham hardly a soul turned up and the literature was virtually non-existent in the run up to the 2015 General Election, yet a few miles down the road in marginal Southampton Itchen you would hardly move for the political parties and leaflets.

Can I suggest that you think before posting assumptions like the above. Believe it or not, it is possible to believe in fairness in politics. The fact that the Tories are more than happy to keep an unfair system solely because it works to their advantage (at the moment), says a lot about them.

I have a very strong hunch that if PR was offered, it would have also been rejected. I find it a little odd you on one hand criticize the Lib Dems for entering into a coalition, and on the other, want an electoral system which could only result in coalitions.

If you run the 2010 numbers under PR, you still get a Tory/Lib Dem coalition. The Lib Dems aren't just Labour with ginger hair. There's no way Labour could have formed a viable government with them in 2010.

cogito

Interesting to hear McDonkey blaming Blair and Mandelson for influencing the Copeland result. They gave one speech each and had a greater effect on the outcome than all the Momentum types and party officials had in the run up? Maybe McDonkey should be arranging to see Blair and Mandelson for some advice.

Filo25

michaels wrote: »

I think the Tories might have preferred to just lose Copeland and for UKIP to take Stoke. Labour lose both and Jezzer is toast, UKIP gain Stoke and potentially Labour is toast (for good).

In fact part of the problem is the Tories did quite well in Stoke, splitting the non Labour vote. Had the Tories been less popular UKIP might have carried it.

While a lot of UKIP voters might hold their nose and vote Tory, I'm not sure the same is true of all Tory voters, certainly I know quite a few who would never consider voting UKIP.

With turnout being so low UKIP could probably have won Stoke pretty comfortably if they had run something close to a competent campaign, but Nuttall had a bit of a shocker all round, it'll be hard for him to recover any credibility from this.

westernpromise

I've read that UKIP has real trouble even knowing where their vote is. AIUI, when serious parties contest a winnable seat, they get the foot soldiers to go out on the streets knocking on every door to find out how the occupants vote. They then map where their support is and where waverers are. This they call canvassing. Keeping canvass returns up to date is essential.

In the run up to polling they leaflet and doorstep everyone they've marked down as "persuadable", getting across whatever key messages they are campaigning on. If they are resourced to do so, they will note the demographics of each address too. So Labour in Copeland would have been telling little old ladies that the Tories were going to close the local hospital down, they'd be telling Student Grant types that Labour would kill all old people and give their houses to 20somethings, they'd be telling bearded Middle Eastern looking men that Labour would legalise honour killing and they'd be telling bearded vegetarian women that Labour would make men illegal.

On polling day itself they go round all these people, firm supporters especially, and remind them to vote, several times. Volunteers will drive them to the polling station if they are housebound. Ideally they'd have more volunteers at each polling station asking you who you are, but not how you voted, because the one tells them the other. Once you've voted they don't pester you again.

UKIP, apparently, falls at the first hurdle because in the typical seat, they can't find volunteers who can be ars3d to do the literal legwork of walking the streets of the seat, identifying who their supporters are. This could be because the typical UKIPper is a fat and blimpish old fool who can't be torn away from the golf course. But whatever the reason, their canvass returns are incomplete, out of date and completely useless. So they usually have no idea where their supporters are (to get their vote out) and no idea who or where the waverers are (to deliver tailored campaign messages to them).

With that hopeless level of disorganisation, their ability to attract a lot of SHOUTY UPPERCASE NUTTERS to message boards but inability to turn this into seats won makes more sense. They have no critical mass of genuine grassroots support anywhere in any seat. The actual number of angry w4nkers in any seat is low anyway, and those there are just want to shout at immigrants from a keyboard, rather than walk streets in the rain for five years between elections.

antrobus

Filo25 wrote: »

While a lot of UKIP voters might hold their nose and vote Tory, I'm not sure the same is true of all Tory voters, certainly I know quite a few who would never consider voting UKIP...

I have voted Labour. I have voted Conservative. I even voted for Plaid Cymru once. I wouldn't vote UKIP because they are a bunch of nutters. Although, come to think of it, I wouldn't vote for the Corbynist Labour Party, because they are a bunch of nutters.

cogito wrote: »

Interesting to hear McDonkey blaming Blair and Mandelson for influencing the Copeland result. ..

Blame? What do you mean by blame? Haven't you heard what Cat Smith (MP for Lancaster and Fleetwood) had to say about Copeland;

"To be 15 to 18 points behind in the polls and to push the Tories to within 2,000 votes is an incredible achievement"

OK. I've changed my mind; I wouldn't vote for the Corbynist Labour Party, because they are a bunch of complete and utter nutters.

antrobus

kinger101 wrote: »

I have a very strong hunch that if PR was offered, it would have also been rejected....

Depends on what kind of PR. There are a number of alternatives.

Personally I would have voted for STV and multi-member constituencies. But AV is just well, pointless. And I don't like party list based PR.

kinger101 wrote: »

...I find it a little odd you on one hand criticize the Lib Dems for entering into a coalition, and on the other, want an electoral system which could only result in coalitions. ...

Coalitions are an almost certainty under proportional systems. And, to be honest, selling you soul for a brief taste of power is what politics is all about.

kinger101 wrote: »

..If you run the 2010 numbers under PR, you still get a Tory/Lib Dem coalition.

And if you ran them for 2015 you'd have got a Tory/UKIP coalition.

kinger101 wrote: »

....The Lib Dems aren't just Labour with ginger hair. There's no way Labour could have formed a viable government with them in 2010.

Certainly not with Gordon Brown.

Thrugelmir

Filo25 wrote: »

While a lot of UKIP voters might hold their nose and vote Tory, I'm not sure the same is true of all Tory voters, certainly I know quite a few who would never consider voting UKIP.

For years Newbury struggled without a by-pass. The incumbrent Conservatives got a kicking. When a Lib Dem proactively supported the idea. Politics gets local when that's where the real issue is. UKIP is the protest vote. Where people believe that no is listening. One only has to look at the Brexit vote. The shires were overwhelmingly leavers. That's where the impact of immigration and lack of benefit are being felt.