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inspectorst

@ inspectorst @feddit.uk

Posts
12
Comments
69
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Most voters in Great Britain now live in a constituency where the top two parties are not Labour and the Conservatives

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  • One of the key elements of the boundary reform that went through between the 2019 and 2023 elections was to ensure that constituencies have broadly equal numbers of electors. Prior to this there had been more variation (and a few big anomalies), whereas the boundary reform means that all seats now have an electorate of 73,393 +/-5%. (I think this was a pretty uncontroversial change but had been held up for years because the Tories kept trying to accompany it with a change to the number of MPs, which was a lot more controversial.)

    I haven't bothered doing the calculation on a seat-by-seat basis, but the electorate distribution would have to skew really badly in favour of the +5%s being Lab/Con and the -5%s being non-Lab/Con for your concern to come to fruition.

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  • Telegraph: UK 'winner-takes-all' system causes skewed results

    Also Telegraph:

  • Welsh Government promises ban on lying politicians

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  • Whilst I love the idea of more truth in politics, I think the only way to do that sustainably is behaviourally through a political culture that values this, not legalistically through political rules. The latter isn't a substitute for the former.

    Without a political culture that prioritises honesty and respectful debate, either this law will have to be a toothless gimmick, or it will become weaponised by malevolent populists against their political opponents. Neither of these outcomes would be a good thing.

  • ‘Blue wall’ of Tory seats collapsed because of green issues, say Greenpeace

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  • I was saying exactly this to someone the other day. It's striking how many of his stunts took place in/on/next-to water and that was very deliberately linked to how much the Lib Dems were talking locally about water quality and sewage, which their polling had already identified as a resonant issue in their target seats some time ago.

    Davey's campaign was so impressive - the Lib Dems usually struggle at the 'air war' during an election, but he found exactly the strategy to garner media attention in a way that coordinated perfectly with the ground campaign Lib Dem activists were running in their target seats - effectively the electoral version of a blitzkrieg. It's going to be the textbook model campaign for how a third party should fight elections under FPTP in future - literally the best third party campaign we've seen in over a century.

  • Most voters in Great Britain now live in a constituency where the top two parties are not Labour and the Conservatives

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  • The 99 seats where the Lib Dems are top-two are the really interesting ones here because a) most of these seats are now ones they actually hold rather than ones where they're runners up, and b) their main challenger in these (typically middle-class Southern) seats is almost always the Tories. The Lib Dems winning 72 seats this time is an enormous part of why the Tories had a record-breaking bad night as opposed to just a regular bad one, and their ability to sustain this next time will be key to keeping the Tories out of government in future.

    For the other parties (e.g. Greens are top-two in 43, mostly in big cities; Reform in 103, mostly white working-class Brexit areas), they're almost always the runner-up party (usually by quite a big margin) behind Labour.

  • How the 2024 election could have looked with proportional representation

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  • That's so short-sighted. FPTP is hugely majoritarian. The risk we all should be worried about is that Reform either now supplant the Tories as the main party of the right, or the Tories effectively become Reform to head off the threat, or the two merge or fight elections in an alliance where they don't stand against each other (as Boris and Farage did in 2019) - which means that next time Labour loses power, it's going to be to a majority Reform/Reform-like government. Labour's current majority is illusory - they benefited from the Tory/Reform vote splitting in many of their seats - and so this reality could come to pass as quickly as five years from now if the political right get their act together and reunite.

    Electoral reform today is the only way to truly vaccinate our political system against the threat of Farage or a Farage-alike in Number Ten in the future.

  • Starmer kills off Rwanda plan on first day as PM

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  • No they're not:

    • 1st Labour 412

    • 2nd Conservative 121

    • 3rd Liberal Democrats 72

    • 4th SNP 9

    • 5th Sinn Fein 7

    • 6th= Left-wing pro-Gaza Labour defectors (not a party as such but they are pretty well aligned) 5

    • 6th= DUP 5

    • 6th= Reform 5

    • 9th= Greens 4

    • 9th= Plaid Cymru 4

    • 11th SDLP 2

    • 12th= Alliance 1

    • 12th= UUP 1

  • England vs Switzerland (Düsseldorf, 18:00)

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  • England through, Tories out, what a week!

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  • The LibDems who have regularly campaigned for PR may now be changing their tune. Due to the nature of how the party’s support is clustered in particular geographical areas the LibDems they have disproportionately from FPTP. The LibDems polled 3,499,933 or 12.2% of vote and received 71.

    Yeah this is nonsense. The Lib Dems still got a smaller % of the seats (11.3%) than they did of the votes (12.2%). They're getting better at navigating the electoral reality of FPTP but it is still disadvantaging them. They're not about to give up a century-long campaign for voting reform because in one election in one year, FPTP was only somewhat unfair to their voters...