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UK Teresa May's post-brexit immigration policy


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The US is pretty much split in two also.  Actually, it's split into more  than two divisions; we only have two major parties, but within those parties there are very ugly divisions with various sectors yelling at each other.   The frustration with Trump has heightened our natural surliness.  

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I think at the moment Trump is a step too far for most Brits. I have a couple of Brexit supporting relatives[1] (I try to avoid discussing the subject) and at least one of them is horrified by Trump. There are a few Brits such as Farage who like him, but I can't imagine him getting a significant portion of the vote.

 

[1] However my two living grandparents (who are on opposite sides of the family) - at the time 88 and 90 - voted Remain, defying the stereotype that all older people voted leave. Maybe the generation before the baby-boomers are more likely to support Remain? Who knows...

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Apparently my great grandparents were in favour of joining the EU. They had seen Europe ripped apart by war twice and wanted peace.

 

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59 minutes ago, ben8884 said:

Apparently my great grandparents were in favour of joining the EU. They had seen Europe ripped apart by war twice and wanted peace.

That's what my grandparents say too.

 

Of course this kind of thing triggers the inevitable "ooh Project Fear - you're saying there's going to be World War 3 if the UK leaves the EU??" response. No, I don't think there will be another European war immediately on leaving the EU (though we already came closer than I would have expected over Gibraltar!) No, I don't think the EU and its predecessor the EEC is the only reason we've had peace in Europe for over half a century - I'd give NATO at least equal credit.

 

However the cooperation of a continent that was twice at war in the last century is not something to be sniffed at and thrown away at least without a thoroughly thought out alternative plan. Which of course we never had.

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On 12/23/2018 at 11:46 AM, Anthracite_Impreza said:

I'd vote for Corbyn, he's a decent bloke. The media has done an excellently biased job painting him as an anti-semetic, 'evil communist' though, and people are stupid enough they won't do any thinking for themselves on the matter.

That may be, but it is not really a good idea to choose your politicians based on whether they are decent and nice people. Of course, I haven’t met Mr Corbyn, but I do get the impression from what I do know that he probably is a decent and genuine bloke with honest intent, and if we did meet, I am sure we would get along well. (I think he is probably a nicer person than Mrs May or Monsieur Macron). I don’t believe any of this anti-Semitism nonsense, that is just the usual pathetic print media picking up on the slightest insignificant thing and twisting it and blowing it out of all proportion.

 

However, crucially I also believe that Mr Corbyn is not competent enough to govern and run a country. He and his colleagues have shown that they are woefully ignorant of matters of finance, and the Labour party seems to have a “magic money tree” policy, which essentially means borrow and spend money they don’t have and worry about the consequences later. That is just a recipe for disaster.

 

That is a situation we have already been through in France after Nicolas Sarkozy went up against François Hollande for the presidency in 2012. I do suspect very strongly that it is highly likely that Sarko is not a very nice man (as demonstrated by the infamous «Casse-toi, pauvre con» incident) but he was without doubt the right man to hold the role of president at the time because he was an experienced and extremely competent politician with realistic policies. Hollande was portrayed as the “ordinary” nice bloke, but he also had a "borrow our way out of this mess" policy and he too thought he had a magic money tree.

 

As it was, Hollande prevailed, and look what then happened - by the end of his term, he had screwed up so badly with his unsustainable social policies that he didn’t even bother standing for re-election because he knew he didn’t stand a chance.

 

3 hours ago, michaeld said:

However my two living grandparents (who are on opposite sides of the family) - at the time 88 and 90 - voted Remain, defying the stereotype that all older people voted leave. Maybe the generation before the baby-boomers are more likely to support Remain? Who knows...

 

1 hour ago, michaeld said:

However the cooperation of a continent that was twice at war in the last century is not something to be sniffed at and thrown away at least without a thoroughly thought out alternative plan. Which of course we never had.

 

Yes, I have thought exactly the same thing. But to expand a bit on what you’ve said, I think that people who were of a mature age at the time of the second world war and who have real memories and understanding of it are likely to have a more favourable view of the European project and what it strives to achieve than those who are a little bit younger. By my calculations, your grandparents would have been around 17 and 19 in 1945, old enough for the war to have affected them and shaped their opinions on life.

 

I think those senior leave voters are those who are a little bit younger, who were maybe 10 years old and younger when the war ended. Those are the people who never had real first hand experience of the true meaning and sacrifices of the war (Because when you are ten years old, unless you are exceptionally mature for your age, you never have a true understanding of current affairs and you are largely sheltered from them).

 

I think that many of the people who did go through World War II but were no longer with us to vote in 2016 would have been extremely happy and humbled by what the nations of Europe have achieved and built together since those dark times, but they would also be extremely disappointed and saddened to see that their children have decided to make Britain the rogue nation by throwing all that away. My British grandfather who was born in the 1910s decade died years ago, but I am confident that would have been his viewpoint.

 

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Anthracite_Impreza
20 minutes ago, Ortac said:

Labour party seems to have a “magic money tre

Except, that's exactly how a sovereign nation works. The government of a sovereign nation can NEVER go bankrupt as it can produce its own money. It doesn't need to borrow anything.

The first few paragraphs explain how it works:

https://dailyreckoning.com/modern-monetary-theory-mmt-fiat-money-works/

 

*This doesn't work with Euro countries individually, because they can't produce the Euro, but it works the same with the EU as a whole.

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On 12/23/2018 at 11:58 AM, michaeld said:

If they'd still been in the coalition after the 2015 election, they would have thrown out the Brexit referendum and we wouldn't be in this mess. Cameron would probably have been relieved to have a get-out.

I reckon that was Cameron's intentions all along. The referendum idea was a promise to get elected, but he didn't believe that the Conservative party would win a majority; he thought the coalition would continue as it was and then he could throw out the promise of holding a referendum and blame it on the Liberal Democrat party. Unfortunately the plan backfired.

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15 minutes ago, Anthracite_Impreza said:

Except, that's exactly how a sovereign nation works. The government of a sovereign nation can NEVER go bankrupt as it can produce its own money. It doesn't need to borrow anything.

The more money you print, the more you devalue your currency. This means your entitlement to assets goes down, for a given amount of money.

 

That isn't to say that printing money is always a bad thing. It can be the best thing to do in a given circumstance. But it always comes with a price, even if not immediately obvious.

 

This is really a separate topic - maybe a thread split?

 

11 minutes ago, Ortac said:

I reckon that was Cameron's intentions all along. The referendum idea was a promise to get elected, but he didn't believe that the Conservative party would win a majority; he thought the coalition would continue as it was and then he could throw out the promise of holding a referendum and blame it on the Liberal Democrat party. Unfortunately the plan backfired.

Yes that seems very plausible.

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5 minutes ago, Anthracite_Impreza said:

Except, that's exactly how a sovereign nation works. The government of a sovereign nation can NEVER go bankrupt as it can produce its own money. It doesn't need to borrow anything. 

 

That is not the case. Well, in theory, a government could do that and produce its own money. Indeed they have done it with quantitive easing, but it had to be done in an extremely careful and measured way. The actual value of money cannot be created. All that printing money does is effectively re-distribute funds, it does not create them. Producing money makes no difference to the level of goods and services that are available for that money to purchase, and as such you have a greater amount of money chasing the same goods and services which causes inflation. So in effect, by producing more money for itself, a government would be taking money off ordinary people and business who had saved it and utilising it for their own ends. If a government did that excessively, that would have dire consequences.

 

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Anthracite_Impreza

The government is taking no money off anyone; did you read the analogy? The government has to create the money in the first for the people to have any; taxes are simply destroyed/wiped off the sheet. A government deficit (government spending) is a surplus to the people (more money in the real economy), which is what makes it so sad that everyone seems to believe this "debt" nonsense.

 

MMT simply states how it works, not how it should be handled. Indeed, if run correctly, taxes would take excess money out of the economy and reduce inflation. They also create a desire for the currency and give it worth (if you have to pay in that currency, rather than grain bushels, the currency gains a value). They can also incentivise a behaviour (tax breaks if you recycle more etc.).

 

I'm aware this is against what you've been taught your whole life, but read up on it. MMT simply is how it actually works and some very nasty people are benefitting from this idea the government has to borrow/tax to fund spending (because they make money from it). The only constraints we do have are resource/workforce ones.

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Believe me, I've read the arguments on this. I'm well aware there are renowned economists who make exactly this case. As far as my best judgement goes, they are dead wrong. I'm not an economist (I'm a mathematician whose research doesn't really intersect economics) but as far as I can tell, their arguments are flawed.

 

My views are somewhat closer to

https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2012/10/why-dean-baker-and-paul-krugman-were-wrong-on-the-debt-burden-for-at-least-11-months.html

and

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/06/do_we_just_owe.html (see also link within).

 

Again maybe this should be split to a separate thread?

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I mean, I don't think that Europe will now descend into civil war because of Brexit or that the EU is the only reason it hasn't happened yet. That being said, the EU was created for peace and since its creation none of the EU countries have been at war with themselves-it surely served its purpose and I think to this day is still a major factor in a peaceful Europe. 

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On 12/23/2018 at 10:23 PM, Skycaptain said:

Trouble is that here it's not just TM. This whole charade has split the country in two. Like apartheid in South Africa only not divided on race, but your political view. 

In my opinion if this goes ahead I will be stripped of my European citizenship. To remove someone's citizenship is a capital crime persuant to the Geneva Convention on War Crimes. Nuff said really 

Not saying I'm not agreeing with you but isn't their argument that EUropean citzenship doesn't really exist as the EU isnt a 'country' as it were and therefore we can't be stripped of something we never had?

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47 minutes ago, Lil said:

Not saying I'm not agreeing with you but isn't their argument that EUropean citzenship doesn't really exist as the EU isnt a 'country' as it were and therefore we can't be stripped of something we never had?

The EU isn't a country, true, but EU citizenship definitely exists. It entitles one to reside in any EU country.

 

I don't know if removing EU citizenship is covered by the Geneva Convention though.

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I don't think it can be, or there'd have been a major outcry by now 

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17 hours ago, michaeld said:

The EU isn't a country, true, but EU citizenship definitely exists. It entitles one to reside in any EU country.

 

I don't know if removing EU citizenship is covered by the Geneva Convention though.

There is also if a person is travelling outside of the EU and end in trouble (lost passport, robbed, bitten by rabid dog and need rabies shots etc etc), if their EU country is not represented in the country, another EU country who have am embassy there would be obligated as a member of EU to assist the person

 

https://ec.europa.eu/info/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/eu-citizenship/eu-citizenship_en

 

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On 12/30/2018 at 9:22 PM, michaeld said:

The EU isn't a country, true, but EU citizenship definitely exists. It entitles one to reside in any EU country.

 

I don't know if removing EU citizenship is covered by the Geneva Convention though.

There's a concept of EU citizen and EU citizenship but it's not really the same as traditional citizenship, and is designed to be supplemental.

 

In any event, the suggestion that revoking citizenship without consent is a war crime is bizarre. The UK has the power to revoke British citizenship in certain extreme circumstances under S.40 British Nationality Act 1981 - without the person's consent. 

 

In any event, I think the convention you're all thinking of may be the UN Convention on Statelessness 1961- which doesn't come into play because the EU isn't a contracting state so... Not sure where the reference in the Geneva Conventions is, though I must confess I didn't read through them in detail.

 

https://ijrcenter.org/thematic-research-guides/nationality-citizenship/ for a list of international treaties etc addressing deprivation of citizenship/nationality.

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44 minutes ago, Blaiddmelyn said:

There's a concept of EU citizen and EU citizenship but it's not really the same as traditional citizenship, and is designed to be supplemental.

 

In any event, the suggestion that revoking citizenship without consent is a war crime is bizarre. The UK has the power to revoke British citizenship in certain extreme circumstances under S.40 British Nationality Act 1981 - without the person's consent. 

 

In any event, I think the convention you're all thinking of may be the UN Convention on Statelessness 1961- which doesn't come into play because the EU isn't a contracting state so... Not sure where the reference in the Geneva Conventions is, though I must confess I didn't read through them in detail.

Thanks for the info, Blaidd and iff!

 

I don't know any of the details here; all I'm saying is that EU citizenship exists at least in a certain sense, at minimum that of free movement within the EU and a few other countries. Anything further is new to me...

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There's more discussion on EU citizenship in this BBC article.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-44871876

 

Under "What is EU citizenship?", the article states

 

Quote

EU citizenship is described in Article 20 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and includes the rights to:

  • Travel and live anywhere in the EU
  • Vote and stand as a candidate in European and local elections in another EU country
  • Get diplomatic protection and consular help from any other EU country in another part of the world.

The EU treaties say EU citizenship "does not replace national citizenship" but "is additional to it". So EU citizenship cannot be acquired by giving up UK citizenship.

The article also mentons a "European Citizens' Initiative" attempting to change EU law to make EU citizenship permanent, for the benefit of those of us who stand to lose it.

 

As this was almost 6 months ago and I haven't heard anything about it since, I assume it didn't get anywhere. Even if they did somehow get the required number of signatures, I very much doubt the other EU countries would be happy about a setup in which UK citizens are free to travel and work in the EU (and EEA) but not vice versa...

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On 12/23/2018 at 9:20 AM, Skycaptain said:

It's a bit off topic, but many people don't trust Labour after the Blair/Brown years of unfettered borrowing, wars of questionable legality etc. The Lib-dems lost credibility by jumping into coalition with the Tories. UKIP got us into this mess. 

I agree with part of this but I think a lot of what we now think of parties other than the tories is the result of gameplay and clever manipulating/marketing by the tories. I think it's not necessarily all ukip that got us into this mess but Cameron/the tories giving in to them. the lib dems were stupid to join the conservative boat (but not sure if sharing power with labour would have been an excellent idea either - we will never know). An example is their push for a change to proportionate representation. The tories manipulated that to such an extent that the only option was stay as it is or a rubbish representative system that would never get through. Labour - you've got a point. However, Labour under blair was far to the centre, which got a lot of people to vote for them. Whereas now, it's so far to the left that a lot of centrist will have to be really disappointed with the tories to vote for them. Ukip - enough said... IMO they are/were poison to a healthy modern society and rooted in a Britain that doesn't exist and never existed in the past. When it comes down to it, nationhood is a fiction, but there's fiction and Fiction.

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On 12/23/2018 at 11:46 AM, Anthracite_Impreza said:

I'd vote for Corbyn, he's a decent bloke. The media has done an excellently biased job painting him as an anti-semetic, 'evil communist' though, and people are stupid enough they won't do any thinking for themselves on the matter.

I agree that Corbyn is a decent bloke, but a decent bloke does not a successful polititian make... sadly and unfortunately... 😞 I think the anti semitic thing has been grossly manipulated and used by the tories to discredit him and to make themselves look better. That kind of manipulation makes successful politicians unfortunately, as a lot of people seem to fall for this bumph and other things that happened in the past, like the 350 million thing.

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21 minutes ago, Acing It said:

An example is their push for a change to proportionate representation. The tories manipulated that to such an extent that the only option was stay as it is or a rubbish representative system that would never get through.

I know I have said what I am about to say several times before, but I make absolutely no apologies for repeating it: The UK's first past the post system of electing politicians is an absolute disgrace and needs to be changed. It amazes me how most Brits are oblivious to this fact and how poorly it reflects on how the UK is perceived by other nations. 

 

Proportional representation is definitely the fairest and most democratic, but that would be a seriously complicated and no doubt controversial overhaul. What the UK could do extremely easily however is implement preferential and transferable voting, or alternatively a two round system with a run off vote. It beggars belief that they have never done that. 

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As a personal view on this: I will be one of those people who will lose out, no matter what. I’ve lived in the UK since 2001 and have an EU nationality and yes… apparently I can get settled status, but that doesn’t mean in reality that I will be able to stay. That will depend on a lot of things. I’m likely to lose my job next year as our contract with the local council ends and because they are really strapped for cash, it will not be renewed. I have one of those jobs that is really misrepresented and misunderstood, however necessary what I do is. It’s also not protected, so any fool is allowed to do what I do (badly). In addition, I’m of an age where it’s generally more difficult to find work and I’m physically incapable of doing quite a few lower end jobs, the ones they don’t want me in this country for. So employers are likely not to give me a job (my name will be a giveaway when applying for jobs). These are just a couple of reasons why I’m fearing looking for a new job this year…

 

A consequence may be that I lose my house. You may say, you can use the money to get by… that money is part of my pension pot and if I have to pay £600 out of my pension I’ll have a miserable life. I’m also of an age where my parents have a good pension and the people younger than me were/are told to save, having enough time to do so, I don’t have that luxury and saving now is very, very difficult anyway.

So… in the ultimate bad case I may be forced to leave a country that’s been my home for so long, with nowhere else to go as I don’t have a stake in any other country and the one I have the nationality of makes me ill, which is part of the reason why I left and which is why I can’t move there – if there was anything of a foothold there anyway.

 

In addition to this, the pound has dropped so far that I can only buy a hovel there, if that – likely nothing at all. This is on a very different scale than people having their holidays affected by a lower pound.

 

Professionally, the situation is worse in that my profession is appreciated in some countries but I have a degree in the wrong subject, so I will struggle getting in. The other reasons why it will be difficult to find a job here, will apply there as well.

 

I loved living in the UK and always had links with the UK. I loved the people and really felt at home here, until the referendum. Although I have had very little nastiness, I’ve switched off from the UK to quite an extent and feel for the first time I live in a foreign country where quite a few people would rather see me go than stay. I treat every new encounter and every visit to another part of the country with caution, which I didn’t feel I had to do before. Part of this is an anxiety condition and so far all of it has been subjective, but still, the feeling is real and not ‘put on’. As a further bit of background, my one neighbour, who is in her 80s and with whom I got on with well in a neighbourly way, voted out and I don’t know what to think. My other neighbour doesn’t bring up the subject which makes me think she also voted out and doesn’t want to jeopardise our relationship as neighbours.

I have now about 11 months at most to come up with a plan A, B, C and so on and don’t even know where to start. Every solution is sh*t as far as I can see and I’m tired and fed up with it all, not knowing how I’m going to get through the next year. I don’t have the physical and emotional energy to make all these challenges easy to cope with.

 

BTW – I don’t earn £30000, like many others whose jobs require significant skills and qualifications to do. You used to have to have a postgraduate qualification to do my job, and that’s what I have from a UK university. I don’t think that wage level is any indicator of skill level. Maybe it is when you’re a deluded tory, I don’t know.

 

Why don’t you apply for UK citizenship, some people will think. You need two people to vouch for you and I have one, our company’s accountant, I don’t have a second one and I’m on the one hand scared to ask (my neighbours for instance) and on the other hand I don’t have any friends I can ask.

Others in the country will have a similar situation going on, which is why I decided to post this to provide an inside view as it were.

For me personally, this is on top of my difficulty being an asexual non-binary person and associated real difficulties finding friends who take me as I am without me having to put on a mask (not literally of course! 😊)

 

This is not intended to be a moan or a ‘pity story’ btw… and I know that a lot of people will come up with lots of reasons why it won’t turn out that way and about what I should do next, it’s a realistic possibility and I only sketched broad lines on here, not a lot of detail.

 

So... 2019: sh*tstorm or lucky escape with only minor mess?

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42 minutes ago, Ortac said:

I know I have said what I am about to say several times before, but I make absolutely no apologies for repeating it: The UK's first past the post system of electing politicians is an absolute disgrace and needs to be changed. It amazes me how most Brits are oblivious to this fact and how poorly it reflects on how the UK is perceived by other nations. 

 

Proportional representation is definitely the fairest and most democratic, but that would be a seriously complicated and no doubt controversial overhaul. What the UK could do extremely easily however is implement preferential and transferable voting, or alternatively a two round system with a run off vote. It beggars belief that they have never done that. 

I agree. It's a backward system (in the sense of not of this time and age) that in an effective two party system creates a lot of instability and to and fro-ing in policy where each of the two parties feels they have to put their own stamp on everything. I deal with the fall out of this in my job all the time. Especially now, but generally always, a more significant proportion of the population won't feel represented at all in what the government does if there's a first past the post system. Being the first (arguably) and having the 'mother of all parliaments' doesn't mean you've got the best system and that you have a system 'to be proud of'. An analogy is IT systems. Companies tying themselves into a new IT system when it's very new soon find themselves outdated after the 'bugs' have been ironed out.

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we should all adopt the French system. It might take a bit longer but at least its more representative. 

When is the deal being voted? In a week or so yes?

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7 minutes ago, ben8884 said:

When is the deal being voted? In a week or so yes?

I don't know and frankly and paradoxically don't care! (no offence intended). Nothing we can do anyway and frankly again, the referendum should never have happened the way it was with all the manipulation and lies. The european question is far too complex as it is, without coaxing a lot of people to vote on simplistic or naive terms and ideas.

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2 hours ago, Acing It said:

the lib dems were stupid to join the conservative boat (but not sure if sharing power with labour would have been an excellent idea either - we will never know).

They could not have made a majority with Labour - the numbers didn't add up. They would have had to make a coalition with not only Labour but also the Greens and Plaid Cymru, and even that would only just have got them over the line. I think these parties did look into making a coalition at first, but realised it would be too unstable to work. So the Lib Dems had to make a coalition with the Conservatives - the only other option was to let the Tories try to form a minority government, i.e. give up the chance of even faintly influencing government policy. That may well have got the Lib Dems destroyed at the next election just as badly as they actually did. In hindsight, it was a lose-lose situation.

 

This is just going from my memory of 2010 - I welcome correction if I misremembered something.

 

2 hours ago, Acing It said:

An example is their push for a change to proportionate representation. The tories manipulated that to such an extent that the only option was stay as it is or a rubbish representative system that would never get through.

I disagree - the proposal (AV = alternative voting) is actually a very good system. If anything the problem was it wasn't explained properly. I voted for the change and was very surprised the status quo won so emphatically.

 

One major advantage AV would have had over FPTP is it reduces the need for tactical voting. For example (ironically) the Tories would not have had to worry so much about UKIP "stealing" their votes, since if someone puts UKIP first they are fairly likely to put Tories second, so as long as UKIP don't win the constiituency vote (which would be unlikely) the vote still effectively goes to the Conservatives. The Tories' calculation was that, despite this, FPTP was better for them because it allowed the same thing to happen in reverse, with the Lib Dems and Greens "stealing" Labour's votes. I wonder if any of them, including Cameron, regret this stand now...

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9 hours ago, michaeld said:

They could not have made a majority with Labour - the numbers didn't add up. They would have had to make a coalition with not only Labour but also the Greens and Plaid Cymru, and even that would only just have got them over the line. I think these parties did look into making a coalition at first, but realised it would be too unstable to work. So the Lib Dems had to make a coalition with the Conservatives - the only other option was to let the Tories try to form a minority government, i.e. give up the chance of even faintly influencing government policy. That may well have got the Lib Dems destroyed at the next election just as badly as they actually did. In hindsight, it was a lose-lose situation.

 

This is just going from my memory of 2010 - I welcome correction if I misremembered something.

 

I disagree - the proposal (AV = alternative voting) is actually a very good system. If anything the problem was it wasn't explained properly. I voted for the change and was very surprised the status quo won so emphatically.

 

One major advantage AV would have had over FPTP is it reduces the need for tactical voting. For example (ironically) the Tories would not have had to worry so much about UKIP "stealing" their votes, since if someone puts UKIP first they are fairly likely to put Tories second, so as long as UKIP don't win the constiituency vote (which would be unlikely) the vote still effectively goes to the Conservatives. The Tories' calculation was that, despite this, FPTP was better for them because it allowed the same thing to happen in reverse, with the Lib Dems and Greens "stealing" Labour's votes. I wonder if any of them, including Cameron, regret this stand now...

On your first point, you may be right. I was also speaking from memory and not remembering the detail, I remember there being a choice for the lib dems, hence my comment. Even there was no good choicd for the lib dems, the tories still made the most of it imo to effectively 'get rid' of the lib dems as 'competition' as they are doing with labour now imo in a very manipulative way.

 

On your second point, we have to agree to disagree i think, although I agree on the plus point you mentioned. Although AV has its advantages over first past the post especially, it's a very niche system taken up by very few countries, indicating the initial point I made about the tories insisting on this as a choice. In essence, proportional representation is simple to explain and understand (some of the implications maybe less so), so if their intnetions were honest they could have left the specifics open as has happened with the brexit referendum, where paradoxically it would have been essential to be specific, but not in the way that accentuates the downsides or where the plus side was almost complete fantasy 'on the side of a bus' as it were.

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11 hours ago, michaeld said:

One major advantage AV would have had over FPTP is it reduces the need for tactical voting. For example (ironically) the Tories would not have had to worry so much about UKIP "stealing" their votes, since if someone puts UKIP first they are fairly likely to put Tories second, so as long as UKIP don't win the constiituency vote (which would be unlikely) the vote still effectively goes to the Conservatives. The Tories' calculation was that, despite this, FPTP was better for them because it allowed the same thing to happen in reverse, with the Lib Dems and Greens "stealing" Labour's votes. I wonder if any of them, including Cameron, regret this stand now...

See, this is where it all went wrong. AV might have been acceptable for the Tories, but I can't see how it could have been acceptable for supporters of small parties. They wouldn't have had a chance to get "their" party into parliament with the new system, so why bother? The only way to allow people to get represented by a party they actually (more or less) want, without any tactical voting involved, is proportional representation. (To give you an example, in German general elections there is currently a realistic choice between six different parties, and most people find at least one of those they are actually okay with.) There is still tactical voting in proportional representations, but it's about likely coalitions. Let's say someone would like a Labour/Green government and they're okay with both Greens and Libdems, they would vote Greens because it increases the chances of said coalition.

 

On the other hand first past the post would be an excellent system, and so would AV be, if and only if there were no parties. It's a good idea to vote for someone who represents a local area, but then that person needs to be completely independent and act only in the interest of their constituents.

 

Realistically only a permanent split in the Tory party (and ideally Labour too) can change this. If both major parties split up, they suddenly get an incentive to change the voting system. To be honest I think if the voting system was different the major parties would not exist in the current form any more, and that's a good thing. You and I might not like where parts of those parties would be going, but that's democracy. I don't see anything bad in parties like UKIP being represented in parliament - let them show how they manage to cope with everyday politics. Either they do well and thereby justify their existence, or they don't, which is more likely, and will be punished by the electorate sooner or later.

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6 hours ago, Acing It said:

On your first point, you may be right. I was also speaking from memory and not remembering the detail, I remember there being a choice for the lib dems, hence my comment. Even there was no good choicd for the lib dems, the tories still made the most of it imo to effectively 'get rid' of the lib dems as 'competition' as they are doing with labour now imo in a very manipulative way.

I looked up the numbers and it was even worse than I thought for the Lib Dems. Numerically it was impossible for Labour and Lib Dems to make the required majority of 326 unless they brought on board either the DUP or the SNP. Neither of those would have been remotely viable.

 

Their options really were either make a coalition with the Tories, or leave the Tories to try to form a minority government.

 

3 hours ago, timewarp said:

See, this is where it all went wrong. AV might have been acceptable for the Tories, but I can't see how it could have been acceptable for supporters of small parties. They wouldn't have had a chance to get "their" party into parliament with the new system, so why bother?

The Tories didn't find it acceptable but in my opinion they were being shortsighted.

 

I agree - AV certainly does not favour smaller parties. (Though it would definitely help moderate-sized parties outside the big 2, such as lib dems. Possibly Greens.) This has its advantages as well as disadvantages given the nature of some of these parties, as you'll be acutely aware (and indeed alluded to later). I'd simply be happy having a few more viable choices, obviating the second-guessing required when tactically voting under FPTP, and yet still voting for a local MP as well as a party.

 

Actually even PR disfavours smaller parties in a way, albeit not as much. Each individual still has to assign their entire vote to a party. To be truly proportionate, each voter should be able to split their vote as a percentage for each option. Of course the voters could vote randomly, based on their preferred distribution, and it would average out over the population to be equivalent to the split-vote system, but I'd be willing to bet that almost no-one would behave like that, even under PR. So in practice they'd be most likely to vote for their preferred candidate, which will disfavour smaller parties overall, compared to the split-vote system.

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