Interesting Links for 29-08-2022

[andrewducker]

1. I've found the absolutely funniest thing that the Conservative Party could do next!

(tags:conservatives BorisJohnson funny viaCharlesStross )

2. Reminder that drowning isn't obvious and can kill in full sight of lifeguards

(tags:water death )

3. Tories may never recover if they lose in 2024 (if Labour reform the voting system to be proportional)

(tags:voting UK )

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

I'm sad I'm not in Douglas Ross' constituency but I suppose I could go and see John Lammont and ask him to VONC Truss as soon as she is declared the winner.

[andrewducker]

Tell him you want Boris back!

[danieldwilliam]

I'm backing Boris, back.

[fanf]

Has the Labour party decided that PR is good? I thought they were firmly against it

[andrewducker]

Last year there was a vote, where the vast majority of representatives backed it.

And then the unions blocked it.

Thankfully, the unions have now been having their own votes on it, and slowly coming around
https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/the-uks-biggest-union-just-passed-a-motion-in-support-of-proportional-representation/

[fanf]

oh, that’s unusually cheerful news for uk politics :-)

(otoh Labour promised PR in 1997…)

[andrewducker]

The difference this time around seems to be that Labour, internally, are recognising the need, rather than just promising it to the Lib Dems to keep them happy.

But I'm not entirely confident. We'll have to wait and see.

[calimac]

If Labour win a majority of seats in the next election, they'll drop PR again. Only if they're convinced they have no chance of winning a majority in the future under the current system will they stay coming around to it.

This in turn requires the LDs to do two things: 1) not to flirt with the Tories again; 2) stick with their insistence on full PR and not chicken out as they did last time.

[danieldwilliam]

I think the chances are reasonably high that the Labour Party won't win a majority of seats at the next election. The SNP have very efficient vote distribution in Scotland and have mostly established themselves as the centre-left go to option for Scottish voters. So there are perhaps 40 solidly centre-left seats in Scotland which which the SNP will hold in 2024 (or 2021 or 2022).

It is historically rare for the Labour Party to have won a majority of UK seats and not also won a majority of English seats. I think the current strong position of the SNP in Scotland makes it probably that the centre-left could win a UK general election, with the Labour Party winning most English seats but still being short of an absolute majority.

Hard agree on the Lib Dems holding their nerve on PR. They won't get another chance in the near future I think.

[calimac]

Oh, I agree Labour is unlikely to win a majority of seats. But if they do, I predict their interest in PR will vanish as quickly as it did in 1997, even though it was nowhere near as strong before 1997 as it is now.

But it's more interesting to think of what happens if they don't win a majority. That's where the LD position comes in. In such a circumstances, with Labour on the rise, LD is unlikely to consider a Tory deal, but if at some future point while PR is still unenacted, an election with the dynamics of 2010 should come up and the LDs deal with the Tories again, the same thing will happen: their support will disappear like drops of water on a hot rock, and we're back to a functional two-party system, in England anyway.

[danieldwilliam]

I don't disagree. I think there was something special about the 2010 General Election. The sense of panic in the air from the financial crash was very strong and I think the Lib Dems, or many of them, genuinely though that they had to help provide a stable government. I wonder / hope that if the same situation in seats happened in happier economic times the Lib Dems might be tempted to let the Tories try to govern as a minority government.

There's another set of constitutional demands baked in to any 2022-24 hung parliament scenario, which is that the SNP will want a significant transfer of powers to Holyrood - which has implications for Cardiff and Stormont, and ultimately the English regions. Chief amongst those powers will be the absolute right to hold an independence referendum.

Assuming both the Lib Dems and the SNP are successful in getting their constititional demands met they both have an incentive to dissolve Parliament. The Lib Dems to win seats under STV and the SNP to lose seats under STV but have Indyref2 or perhaps 3.


So we'll see how that all pans out. Interesting times.

[calimac]

I don't in and of itself criticize the LDs for making a deal with the Conservatives in 2010. In a multi-party system, deals will have to be made, and if the LDs aren't to devolve into an appendage to Labour, as Australia's National Party is to its Liberals, they have to be open to working with the Tories. But they boasted about how much leverage they had, and then they used almost none of it. As a result they accepted a lot of true-blue Tory policies, and as a result got shellacked in the next few elections.

I agree about the SNP too, and I wonder how open Labour is to the IndyRef as they now appear to be to PR. Old-school Socialists like Robin Cook and Jack Straw were, as I recall, entirely opposed to all such things, but I guess their breed is dying off?

[danieldwilliam]

The Labour Party is currently investigating changing the party constitution to prohibit a coalition with the SNP.

Reasons for this include
1) if you are a centre-left voter who is in favour of or neutral on independence you are probably already supporting the SNP
2) Labour's main point of difference in Scotland is being the centre-left party against indepedendence (see 1 above)
3) The Labour Party in England think Tory attack ads telling English voters that a Labour government will be in the pocket of the SNP are effective.
4) The English of all types, political persuasions and tribes seem to have a problem seeing Scotland as demos with its own agency and legitimacy. Whislt Tories harp on about *Britishness* the Labour Party views Scotland as a place that ought to have *solidarity* with the English working classes.

[andrewducker]

And here are several more unions now backing it
https://www.labourforanewdemocracy.org.uk/unions

[calimac]

3) In a conversation during the Blair regime, I actually proposed this point, as a new idea of my own, to a Conservative acquaintance (who supported Clarke in the 2005 leadership race, btw): that the worst thing that happened to the party was that it won the 1992 election. And she did not disagree.

[andrewducker]

Oh definitely. I don't remember much about post-Thatcher Conservatives, but I do remember them tearing themselves apart under Major, and the massive levels of incompetence and hypocrisy.

[calimac]

My favorite story of the time is the young MP who went a bit overboard with his autoerotic asphyxiation and who was found dead, naked except for stockings and an orange in his mouth. What a model for Major's "Back to Basics" movement that was.

1. I've found the absolutely funniest thing that the Conservative Party could do next!

[jack]

Block the Suez canal? Introduce proportional representation? Suspend Johnson over the middle of the Thames from a zip line and leave him there? Carve their core principles on tablets of rock?

Ok, that one would be pretty good. Although I really want both of them gone.

[bens_dad]

2. They didn't teach me any of that in my life guard training.
OK, it was nearly forty years ago, so maybe they didn't know.

[bens_dad]

1 The Telegraph suggests that Boris is up for it: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/09/02/boris-johnson-likely-run-pm-building-bank-balance/

[andrewducker]

Oh yeah, he clearly didn't want to go!