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UK Politics: The Edge of Destruction


Chaircat Meow

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1 hour ago, Nothing Has Changed said:

Farage is already out in front in this poll. If we exclude Labour the Brexit party is already beating the combined forces of Remain and that's discounting UKIP.

Bad, although I have to say I would never vote Green and would be unhappy about voting either Lib or Change. Remainers really need to win these elections.

 

BREX: 27%

LAB: 22%

CON: 15%

GRN: 10%

LDEM: 9%

UKIP: 7%

CHUK: 6%

 

via @YouGov, 15 - 16 Apr

Interesting, that is a far bigger lead than I saw earlier last week. I assumed he would be sharing votes with UKIP, but clearly not. UKIP have really messed up their base with all their associations with your Tommy Robinsons, and without a focus on Brexit they don't seem to have anything to say. 

 

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Yeah.... you guys realise there is no actual change in UKIP, right? They were always racist and they were always associated with racists.

The difference between Farage and Tommy Robinson is that the media are willing to call Robinson a racist, because of how he presents. Farage has nicer manners and the good sense not to harass people and call it 'journalism'. That's literally the difference between them. UKIP members under Farage and UKIP members now are almost entirely the same people. 

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2 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

without a focus on Brexit they don't seem to have anything to say. 

UKIP's whole set of policies was effectively hijacked by the ERG and is now mainstream Tory policy. The only way "UKIP" could stay relevant was to focus on the nastiest, racist, Islamophobic stuff. Clearly, that's got naff all to do with the Euro Parliament elections, so all their votes will go to Farage.

If Labour come out univocally in favour of a 2nd Referendum, the pro-Europeans have 50% of the vote. If Labour prevaricate, the extreme right clear up.

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1 hour ago, Mosi Mynn said:

Oof - not good.

I really hope this is a wake-up call to the Remain parties to put some effort into this.

Farage is cunning - UKIP is out and out unabashedly racist now, which will put off a lot of people.  Labour and the Tories have been horribly scarred by this Brexit mess.  So his party is the new all-in-one "respectable" fresh party for Leavers.

Farage is one of those politicians who is outstandingly good at generating publicity and a bandwagon effect for his cause.  People like Alex Salmond and Ken Livingstone, at the height of their powers, had that same ability.

Labour's best argument is to pitch its appeal squarely to Remainers as the only party that can beat Farage, and that voting for anyone else is a wasted vote.

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20 minutes ago, mormont said:

Yeah.... you guys realise there is no actual change in UKIP, right? They were always racist and they were always associated with racists.

The difference between Farage and Tommy Robinson is that the media are willing to call Robinson a racist, because of how he presents. Farage has nicer manners and the good sense not to harass people and call it 'journalism'. That's literally the difference between them. UKIP members under Farage and UKIP members now are almost entirely the same people. 

Oh for sure.

But they don't have Farage to distract from the racism any more.  

ETA: or what Sean F said

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11 minutes ago, SeanF said:

voting for anyone else is a wasted vote.

Ah no, because proportional representation is used here. But as for your previous point, yes - I've already argued that Labour must commit to at least a 2nd Referendum. The Tories are split down the middle over Brexit and will implode; if Labour prevaricates they'll throw away a golden opportunity and destroy themselves too.

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5 minutes ago, House Cambodia said:

Ah no, because proportional representation is used here. But as for your previous point, yes - I've already argued that Labour must commit to at least a 2nd Referendum. The Tories are split down the middle over Brexit and will implode; if Labour prevaricates they'll throw away a golden opportunity and destroy themselves too.

The D'Hondt system of PR does result in wasted votes, if you're electing three to six people at regional level.  I'll give an example:-

East Midlands Region returns five MEP's.  Suppose you get the following vote shares:

Brexit Party 30%

Labour 20%

Conservative 16%

Lib Dem 9%

Green 8%

Change UK 8%

Others 9%

Brexit Party therefore wins seats 1 and 4, Labour wins seats 2 and 5, Conservatives win seat 3.  The Greens, Lib Dems, and Change UIK win nothing, despite gaining votes from the same pool of voters.  

 

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3 hours ago, Nothing Has Changed said:

Farage is already out in front in this poll. If we exclude Labour the Brexit party is already beating the combined forces of Remain and that's discounting UKIP.

Bad, although I have to say I would never vote Green and would be unhappy about voting either Lib or Change. Remainers really need to win these elections.

 

BREX: 27%

LAB: 22%

CON: 15%

GRN: 10%

LDEM: 9%

UKIP: 7%

CHUK: 6%

 

via @YouGov, 15 - 16 Apr

 

So Lord Hawhaw the second of his name and Lady Annunziata (I hoe I got that name right) Rees-Mitford are up in the polls. FWIW I think that27% are the WTO die hard ERG nutjobs, who are unhappy with the Tories hnadling of Brexit. Those 15% might roughly be the people happy with May's deal. Anyway, I am obviously not telling you who to vote for, but you really have to decide here what's more important to you, policy or party allegiance. To sweeten the pill, as things stand, your MEP might not serve the full term.

2 hours ago, SeanF said:

Labour's best argument is to pitch its appeal squarely to Remainers as the only party that can beat Farage, and that voting for anyone else is a wasted vote.

No, it really isn't. Quite the contrary, a remain vote for Labour is a wasted vote. Labour and Tories are not remain parties. They simply aren't. A vote for Labour is a vote for the fence sitting policy Corbyn performed for the last two and a half years. And as has been pointed out before, it's not FPTP it's proportional representation.

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5 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

 

So Lord Hawhaw the second of his name and Lady Annunziata (I hoe I got that name right) Rees-Mitford are up in the polls. FWIW I think that27% are the WTO die hard ERG nutjobs, who are unhappy with the Tories hnadling of Brexit. Those 15% might roughly be the people happy with May's deal. Anyway, I am obviously not telling you who to vote for, but you really have to decide here what's more important to you, policy or party allegiance. To sweeten the pill, as things stand, your MEP might not serve the full term.

No, it really isn't. Quite the contrary, a remain vote for Labour is a wasted vote. Labour and Tories are not remain parties. They simply aren't. A vote for Labour is a vote for the fence sitting policy Corbyn performed for the last two and a half years. And as has been pointed out before, it's not FPTP it's proportional representation.

Yea, I am obviously very much against the juvenile Brexiteer smear that remainers are traitors and the EU is equivalent to the Third Reich. These comparisons should be treated with the contempt they merit. But I think it is also fair to extend the same basic maturity in the other direction.

Thanks for your comments though, they were scintillating as usual. 

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Just now, Nothing Has Changed said:

Yea, I am obviously very much against the juvenile Brexiteer smear that remainers are traitors and the EU is equivalent to the Third Reich. These comparisons should be treated with the contempt they merit. But I think it is also fair to extend the same basic maturity in the other direction.

Besides me likening Farage to Nazis had actually more to do with him being a raciest POS than him being Pro Brexit (particularly with his Breaking Point poster in mind) - you can argue of how much of a conincidence him being a racist and him being pro Brexit is. As for Unity Annunziata, you can argue it's a lazy rip on her, which it is - I am obviously not denying that. But upper class English Lady throwing her lot in with aforementioned racist, sorry, if you feel offended by that association.

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13 hours ago, House Cambodia said:

Ah no, because proportional representation is used here. But as for your previous point, yes - I've already argued that Labour must commit to at least a 2nd Referendum. The Tories are split down the middle over Brexit and will implode; if Labour prevaricates they'll throw away a golden opportunity and destroy themselves too.

Rather overlooks that Labour can't win a general election without the support of Leavers as well as Remainers.

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2 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Rather overlooks that Labour can't win a general election without the support of Leavers as well as Remainers.

Conversely, they will also need some of the Remainer votes that their current intentional vagueness policy is pushing away.

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16 hours ago, SeanF said:

The D'Hondt system of PR does result in wasted votes, if you're electing three to six people at regional level.  I'll give an example:-

East Midlands Region returns five MEP's.  Suppose you get the following vote shares:

Brexit Party 30%

Labour 20%

Conservative 16%

Lib Dem 9%

Green 8%

Change UK 8%

Others 9%

Brexit Party therefore wins seats 1 and 4, Labour wins seats 2 and 5, Conservatives win seat 3.  The Greens, Lib Dems, and Change UIK win nothing, despite gaining votes from the same pool of voters.  

 

How on earth does that work? Labor and Torries have enough for one seat (or less) each, how do they get a second seat???

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57 minutes ago, ants said:

How on earth does that work? Labor and Torries have enough for one seat (or less) each, how do they get a second seat???

The D'Hondt system aims to assign each seat to the largest number of votes. 

For simplicity's sake, lets assume the East Midlands region has 1.000.000 votes. In the example quoted Brexit Party has 300.000 votes, Labour has 200.000, Conservatives 160.000 and Lib-Dems 90.000 (we'll ignore the rest for now). So the first of the 5 seats should obviously go to the Brexit Party. This seat would represent 300.000 votes. Second goes to Labour, and represents 200.000 votes, and third to the Tories, representing 160.000 votes. Now we could give the fourth seat to the Lib-Dems, but it would only represent 90.000 votes. If we give it to the Brexit Party instead, though, it would represent 150.000 votes (half of the votes the Brexit Party got). Similarly with the fifth and final seat, if we give it to Labour it will represent 100.000 seats, which is more than the Lib-Dems got, so to Labour it goes.

Some people criticize the D'Hondt system for under-representing minority parties (which it does), but it has a solid rationale behind it. 

 

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4 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Rather overlooks that Labour can't win a general election without the support of Leavers as well as Remainers.

Sure they can. They don't need over 50% to win a general election, nor even as much as 48%. 

And as Denvek says, there's a more significant threat to Labour of losing Remain voters than of losing Leave voters. 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/15/numbers-labour-back-peoples-vote-election-party

Quote

Those majorities are big enough for the psephologists to agree that, in practically every current Labour seat, most of our voters voted remain. Meaning that the biggest threat we face in retaining support is losing remain voters disillusioned by our prevarication on a people’s vote. That fact also applies to the 80 seats that Labour has to win at the next election if we are to form a majority. Arguably, more so, as almost half of those target seats voted remain overall in 2016, whereas 60% of the seats we hold voted leave.

The UCL analysis shows that in every region of the UK, the majority of voters who put a cross next to Labour in the general election of 2017 but say they won’t vote Labour next time, are switching to a party they see as more pro-European. In London, where Labour dominated in 2017, a third of Labour voters who know how they intend to vote now say they will vote for another party, but voters switching to a party seen as more pro-remain outnumber those switching to a more pro-leave party by five to one. In the north of England, the number switching is fewer, at just 20% – but again the number switching to a more pro-remain party outnumber those switching to the Tories or Ukip by four to one.

In the Midlands, where a quarter of Labour voters say they are switching, remainers outnumber leavers by five to one. Starkest of all is Scotland, where Labour must win 23 of those 80 seats to form a government. There, 48% of our 2017 voters now say they plan to defect, 45% to a more pro-remain party, just 3% the other way – a ratio of 15 to one.

 

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35 minutes ago, Mentat said:

Some people criticize the D'Hondt system for under-representing minority parties (which it does), but it has a solid rationale behind it.

Yeah, the problem is trying to do PR with just 5 seats and a relatively large number of viable parties.

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Another way to put it would be that the problem is that the EU required the UK to use a PR system for Euro elections, and the UK government picked the least representative system they could and kludged its introduction with constituencies that were too small because they didn't like PR. Their assumption was that this would allow for the two big parties to retain most of the MEPs, with some going to the Lib Dems. But they failed to account for the fact that turnout in European elections was low for most voters but high for those who hated the EU. 

ps NI actually use a different system, it's worth noting. 

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1 hour ago, mormont said:

Sure they can. They don't need over 50% to win a general election, nor even as much as 48%. 

And as Denvek says, there's a more significant threat to Labour of losing Remain voters than of losing Leave voters. 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/15/numbers-labour-back-peoples-vote-election-party

 

Under FPTP, Labour's vote is the most efficiently distributed.  They might scrape a win on as little as 30%, depending on how their opponents' vote splits, although an overall majority has become much harder for them, due to their losses in Scotland. 

If Labour went all out for Remain, they'd certainly pick up both votes and seats in London and the South, but would have to write off some of their historic seats in the North and Midlands.

 

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