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Interesting by-election stats from the Indy’s John Rentoul – politicalbetting.com
Interesting by-election stats from the Indy’s John Rentoul – politicalbetting.com
Mischievous total votes in the two by-elections: @PeterKellner1 making a point about Lab and Lib Dem concentrating efforts pic.twitter.com/14TxsEwFyb
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by their own fptp petard
I was going to use this tweet to headline a piece on Sunday entitled
'The Tories are really going to regret opposing AV, they should champion electoral reform now'
Of course they aren’t going to introduce “miscegenation laws”. And any American lawmaker that tried to introduce such a clearly repulsive law would be howled down and driven out of town, ASAFP
@SeaShantyIrish2 has a point. This site can lapse all too easily into anti-Americanism. It is not pretty. Yes America is having a brutal, intense and sometimes ugly debate about abortion - but this is a fundamental moral difficulty. Where does life begin? When do we begin to protect it? This is not a small matter, and they take it more seriously than us
Just because they are having this terrifically thorny debate does not mean that Americans - 99% of whom are decent kind honest people - are about to accept laws banning marriage between different races. It’s nuts
On the broader point, Americans are like any other people in the world. They're a mix of good people, bastards and everything in between. I don't particularly love or hate them any more than I love or hate Japanese people or Indian people. I do, however, think they've built a system through a combination of inertia, bad initial drafting and political sclerosis which has led to some truly appaling outcomes in a nation that should be able to do better. I would never want that system and the political culture that surrounds it to come to these shores.
Labour did not benefit appreciably from tactical voting, the LDs in Tiv and Hon did. Its not rocket science.
The actual questions are
Will LDs continue to get high level tactical transfers in a GE?
Will Labour start getting any?
Edit - and will Tory vote strikers return?
RIP.
https://twitter.com/Haggis_UK/status/1540334029257465856
Anyhow, under AV the Tories would still have lost both seats. The anti-Tory votes congeal.
I want to know the result by Friday breakfast, not Sunday dinner!
I don't know where I'm going with this. I had a long drive today where someone tried to sell me a telly in a service station car park so I'm a bit frazzled.
First Super League game without a try in the 26 year history.
Warrington 4 Hull 0.
Also a rejected Housemartins album title.
For example, in primary for a specific non-partisan city council position (either district or citywide) vote could mark their ballot once for as many candidates they wanted. With the top two who got the most votes (but only up to one per voter) advancing to the general election.
Much easier to count than Ranked Choice (AV-STV) election. Candidates with broad support clearly having advantage, while candidates with narrower voter bases and/or higher negatives being at disadvantage.
So First Past the Post but without having to put your bet down on just one nag.
But America has saved itself before. We must pray for them again
Tactical voting is only bad when the Tories are losing
You hope that someone would not seek to introduce such a law. But if they did, based on today's ruling you could not be confident that the Supreme Court would overrule it.
This is not a debate about abortion, fundamentally. Todays ruling effectively allows states to rule what people can and cannot do in their most private and intimate moments: who they can have sex with, what type of sex they can have and whether they can use contraception. It gives the state power over a person's body. And when the state does have that sort of power, when a person loses full autonomy over their own body and their most intimate activities, they lose full personhood. It chiefly affects women. But it goes beyond them as well.
I would also say this: @rcs1000 always says that people will make a democratic choice to have abortion. That may well be so. But if such laws are challenged and go to the Supreme Court can one be confident that they won't rule that abortion itself is unconstitutional and that states have no rights to make such laws? There is it seems to me a real risk that abortion could end up being unlawful throughout the US.
And if that happens other rights - gay rights for instance - are also at risk.
There won't of course be any formal pact or arrangement between Labour and the LDs - as to whether the latter will stand aside for the Greens in any seat I don't know.
The Conservative attempt to whip up some kind of hysteria about an "electoral deal" is absurd. The only ones making any deal will be the electorate and they will determine, on a seat by seat basis, which of the opposition parties is best placed to defeat an incumbent Conservative candidate.
In some seats, that is obvious - in others less so. There are seats which will remain Conservative even if the anti-Conservative vote is maximised.
The Conservatives also know that, excepting the DUP, they have no potential allies in the next Parliament - the shape of any potential non-Conservative Government is unclear except it will be led by Labour - the relationship between that Government and other parties in the next Commons will depend on the post-election arithmetic.
I blame Trump.
It’s really not cool but the UK is not the US and I seriously don’t believe that if there was a change to abortion rules in any other country it would even be mentioned on Radio 2 news bulletins.
I get that the US has massive cultural reach/is past it and irrelevant so whilst bemused by the level of coverage over last few months on the Today programme I don’t see why it’s leading in a country that isn’t affected remotely by it.
Thanks in advance.
As if it is any business of theirs
https://twitter.com/JustinTrudeau/status/1540362024051408897?s=20&t=dVaSxCRyYI_FdrsOrWKecw
https://twitter.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/1540393817609740288?s=20&t=dVaSxCRyYI_FdrsOrWKecw
https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1540415877102837760?s=20&t=dVaSxCRyYI_FdrsOrWKecw
But then politics isn't a game.
All those erstwhile Labour voters who voted Conservative in 2019 because they thought Johnson was a bit of a geezer who spoke his mind, will not be backing Johnson's successor.
It wouldn't work, of course, in terms of the electoral maths. A third force would likely just skew the system too much in favour of one of the existing two. But I can't help thinking that the discourse there needs an alternative option, something that makes it less "us v them".
Seriously. Look up who runs it and their links to the Johnson machine.
So any tactics will be informal
In FPTP, if your opposition is divided, it's easy for you to win. See the Conservative wins in 1983 and 2019, or the Labour win in 2005.
If you piss off your opponents enough for them to turn on you efficiently, you're in trouble. Roughly what happened to the Conservatives in the 1990s.
(Remember, the Conservative vote share went up from 2015 to 2017- what hurt them was that the opposition was more effectively arranged, so their seat count went down.)
This is simultaneously an absurdity of FPTP and a rather neat political lifehack that helps it give the right sort of result nationwide. (I don't think there's any GE outcome in my lifetime that hasn't matched the vague "feel of the nation's mood" vibe. Which spells trouble for the Conservatives, and points to a coalition, albeit of mild grumpiness rather than chaos.)
Abortion is uniquely difficult because two fundamental rights clash
The right of the unborn child to life, and the right of the mother to control her body
Personally I think we do this terrible balancing act OK in the UK. But I respect those who have firm moral beliefs that life begins at conception, and that the law - in America - should reflect that. It’s a deep philosophical dilemma
There is no deep philosophical dilemma about “banning interracial marriages”. Such a law would be barbaric and repulsive and it would be rejected out of hand by American voters and lawmakers. It is daft to suggest that this is within the realms of the possible
When it comes to a choice of system, FPTP is wrong where one party has a massive majority and so opponents votes are wasted. If the "winner" has less votes than the aggregate number of voters for others - how can the "winner" be speaking for people who voted against you. There is no relationship between the total number of votes cast for a party to the number of MPs that that party then has
MTV for multi-member constituencies is over-complicated and can result in a slate being agreed.
Multi-member constituencies dilute the concept of voters having "their" MP etc. Do all constituencies have the same number of additional members? Who is the lead member?
How are the "duties" allocated?
I doubt that "run-off" elections of the top two, as in France, would work in the UK.
That leaves the STV, where the most "popular" candidate wins.
> Forty years ago, or more, my mother telling me that she had zero problem with inter-racial marriage EXCEPT that she worried about the children, and how they would be treated.
> Maybe ten or fifteen years ago, in the aftermath of a major tornado somewhere in Mississippi, seeing the Governor of the Magnolia State standing next to a couple whose home had just been destroyed, pledging them and others like them his aid and support. An interracial couple, a Black man and a White woman. This from a guy who was once an active member in his hometown's White Citizens Council.
On the first point, believe my mom would have been greatly reassured by the election of Barack Obama.
One the second, when I saw that, damn near fell off my chair - the Governor of MISSISSIPPI not just willing to help a Black man and his White wife, but proud to do so on TV.
IF that ain't a sea change, what the hell is?
They don't like it up 'em, sir.
...
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I find that the same people who sneer at the US and say it’s declining are also the same who ramp up internal US matters as global news - can’t have it both ways.
Please.
It's the balance which is the genuinely interesting and difficult question. This here - the total removal of a safe and legal abortion choice for women in red states now facilitated - is what's nuts. It's rank bigoted extremism. It's not equivalent to racial segregation but neither is it on a different planet.
We need Cabinet resignations to end this clown fest.
That wont happen of course.
"Disgraceful scenes in U.S. Congress. The United States stands for democracy around the world and it is now vital that there should be a peaceful and orderly transfer of power."
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1346926138057220103?s=20&t=mNmJoRAkzZeCO1vygpRDtQ
Just seen your question at the end of PT.
You're right of course. Folk were locked up for homosexuality in this country within our life times. In the eighties in Scotland. That just about impinges on my consciousness.
Is that worse?
Well both are pretty bad. I don't think either are coming back.
But if I had to bet, I reckon we are more likely to see bans on inter racial marriage in certain US States first.
The US used to be a beacon of liberty. Massively oversold, and very often not observed. It isn't now.
More like 99.46%! Though few are all three of above all at the same time.
As Bill Murray once memorably put it (I paraphrase) "our ancestors were run out of every decent country on earth" and often for good reason. And we their heirs have NOT fallen too far from the tree, having at least our fair share of ripe, rotting and rotten fruit - for clarification, of any pronoun.
Anyway, few are willing to rag on a country that ain't worth a damn. One reason why nations should start worrying when they are catching too little flack from foreigners.
Which I perceive has been a danger for UK for some time now? Though Boris Johnson HAS made valiant efforts to redress, at least re: the EU.
Much less successful though in US, where Anglophobia appears to be at an all-time low, and where yours truly is just about sui generis when it comes to serious disdain for Boris Johnson. For the rest, he's either a superior Benny Hill impersonator or totally unknown.
So not much help in boosting number of incoming Brickbats (aka Bronx Confetti) for Britain.
Alabama, Indiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia etc all have majorities for making abortion mostly illegal. Until now they had no constitutional right to do so
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/compare/views-about-abortion/by/state/