I'm taking my kids (11 & 15) to London for the first time for half term. Been a since I've been for leisure, mostly works and conferences. Besides the obvious ones, any recommendations?
A stroll along the Southbank starting at Waterloo and heading towards London Bridge. Loads to see and browse along the way. The graffiti tunnel at Waterloo is quite an alternative site.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
I think that is a fair criticism of safe seats, and one of the strongest against FPTP.
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
STV in multi member constituencies means that many more people would have be represented by a local MP from the party they voted for.
Your MP is your MP regardless of how you voted. They represent the constituency, not just their own supporters.
That is exactly what I think gets lost in a lot of the PR case. It starts from the premise that voters ought to be matched up with a representative from their preferred party, as though Parliament were a customer service desk. I think that weakens the representative principle rather than strengthening it.
I'm sorry, but that seems a bit delusional to me.
You're arguing that on national issues, it's better for your representation that you have a single local MP elected on (conceivably) 30% of the vote, who might hold views diametrically opposed to yours, than to have someone you actually voted for in Parliament on your behalf ?
The glorified customer service / social worker thing already exists for MPs, and often takes far more of their attention than the business of Parliament.
Again, the way to address that is surely stronger local government ?
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Whereas a few on here (a massive minority) continue to cheer on the senile pedophile and his genocidal puppet master.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
I'm taking my kids (11 & 15) to London for the first time for half term. Been a since I've been for leisure, mostly works and conferences. Besides the obvious ones, any recommendations?
Have them figure out the right Tube routes to get where you're going.
lol... true, true
Is it worth getting visitor oyster cards (especially for the kids)?
I'm down there so infrequently I just wave and pay - but I have no idea how that works with a traveling family group.
If they are 5-10 they get free travel with an adult (up to 4 children)
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Whereas a few on here (a massive minority) continue to cheer on the senile pedophile and his genocidal puppet master.
Me I'm on the fence!!
Tha has proved to be rather uncomfortable for our PM!😫
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
Just to take one example:
An obvious point of danger for the regime was Khameini's death. And as he was in his 80s and had cancer, that was fairly imminent.
When he died, as his earlier successor (Raisi) was killed in that helicopter crash, there would have been a power struggle. Mojtaba would have been front runner, but a son succeeding his father a la the Shahs would not have been universally popular and his links to the RGC might have counted against him.
As Khameini was killed in war the usual channels were circumvented and Mojtaba confirmed in a great hurry to avoid this scenario.
Which has brought the RGC into the centre of things and basically sidelined the civilian government.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
I think that is a fair criticism of safe seats, and one of the strongest against FPTP.
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
STV in multi member constituencies means that many more people would have be represented by a local MP from the party they voted for.
Your MP is your MP regardless of how you voted. They represent the constituency, not just their own supporters.
That is exactly what I think gets lost in a lot of the PR case. It starts from the premise that voters ought to be matched up with a representative from their preferred party, as though Parliament were a customer service desk. I think that weakens the representative principle rather than strengthening it.
Your MP is your MP however you voted, true.
Before Starmer every PM was PM for everyone however they voted. But in his first days in officer Starmer said he was only PM for those who voted Labour. Truly vile man.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
I think that is a fair criticism of safe seats, and one of the strongest against FPTP.
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
STV in multi member constituencies means that many more people would have be represented by a local MP from the party they voted for.
Your MP is your MP regardless of how you voted. They represent the constituency, not just their own supporters.
That is exactly what I think gets lost in a lot of the PR case. It starts from the premise that voters ought to be matched up with a representative from their preferred party, as though Parliament were a customer service desk. I think that weakens the representative principle rather than strengthening it.
Your MP is your MP however you voted, true.
Before Starmer every PM was PM for everyone however they voted. But in his first days in officer Starmer said he was only PM for those who voted Labour. Truly vile man.
You can make 100% certain money by laying people who are not in the field.
93 players have qualified. One final extra place will be added for the Texas Open winner on Sunday.
Betfair currently lists 113 players. But within this there are a number who are not in the 93 already qualified and who are not playing in the Texas Open.
These people are literally 100% certain losers. They don't have even a one in a million chance.
One such player is currently well under 100 on Betfair and anyone can lay over £300 of bets on him at an average price of below 100. For certain money.
(Hint: The giveaway is he is a LIV player not already qualified and who obviously can't enter the Texas Open. And then look for other LIV players who haven't already qualified).
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Step away from GBNews!
The standard response I'd expect from someone without an argument. But hey enjoy your *ank fest.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Ok, I criticise people for comparing Trump or Netanyahu to Hitler, but here there is a valid comparison:
You can't use diplomacy successfully against people who (a) don't care about diplomacy (b) won't abide by any agreements and (c) actually want to use force to enact their agenda.
It just doesn't work.
As Neville Chamberlain could explain to you and did explain to the War Cabinet in 1940.
There is no point in negotiating with Trump, as he won't abide by an agreement, or with Netanyahu, who needs a war. Or for the matter of that, the Ayatollahs who see negotiation with infidels as something to be honoured only when advantage is to be gained.
So we don't need diplomacy. We need to find a way to be independent of the USA so we can tell Trump to get stuffed.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Here's the view of a US (non MAGA) Republican.
The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick. https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494
I'm taking my kids (11 & 15) to London for the first time for half term. Been a since I've been for leisure, mostly works and conferences. Besides the obvious ones, any recommendations?
A stroll along the Southbank starting at Waterloo and heading towards London Bridge. Loads to see and browse along the way. The graffiti tunnel at Waterloo is quite an alternative site.
The only advantage of AV is that it could be introduced without a boundary review, preserves the single member constituency link (which was only ever worth anything in marginal seats, since your safe seat MP never gave a XXXX about you and your problems), and ensures that each MP is elected with at least majority support from their patch. On the downside, AV can easily produce results that are even more disproportionately distorted than does FPTnP.
Labour should be bold, and go for STV, introduced relatively easily by knocking existing seats together into sensible multi-member constituencies. But, as we all know, any sentence that starts with the premise that Labour might be bold is doomed to irrelevance.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Ok, I criticise people for comparing Trump or Netanyahu to Hitler, but here there is a valid comparison:
You can't use diplomacy successfully against people who (a) don't care about diplomacy (b) won't abide by any agreements and (c) actually want to use force to enact their agenda.
It just doesn't work.
As Neville Chamberlain could explain to you and did explain to the War Cabinet in 1940.
There is no point in negotiating with Trump, as he won't abide by an agreement, or with Netanyahu, who needs a war. Or for the matter of that, the Ayatollahs who see negotiation with infidels as something to be honoured only when advantage is to be gained.
So we don't need diplomacy. We need to find a way to be independent of the USA so we can tell Trump to get stuffed.
That's almost what I said originally. And I repeat - it ain't gonna be easy or cheap or quick. But yes I agree.🤣
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Here's the view of a US (non MAGA) Republican.
The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick. https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494
Shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very little prick?'
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
I think that is a fair criticism of safe seats, and one of the strongest against FPTP.
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
STV in multi member constituencies means that many more people would have be represented by a local MP from the party they voted for.
Your MP is your MP regardless of how you voted. They represent the constituency, not just their own supporters.
That is exactly what I think gets lost in a lot of the PR case. It starts from the premise that voters ought to be matched up with a representative from their preferred party, as though Parliament were a customer service desk. I think that weakens the representative principle rather than strengthening it.
Your MP is your MP however you voted, true.
Before Starmer every PM was PM for everyone however they voted. But in his first days in officer Starmer said he was only PM for those who voted Labour. Truly vile man.
Starmer is a truly useless Prime Minister but I believe we need a citation before accepting that post as gospel. Starmer is useless at politics but surely even he isn't that useless.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Here's the view of a US (non MAGA) Republican.
The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick. https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494
Shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very little prick?'
I don’t have much time for Leon myself, but nevertheless would struggle to see how this fiasco is all his fault?
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Ok, I criticise people for comparing Trump or Netanyahu to Hitler, but here there is a valid comparison:
You can't use diplomacy successfully against people who (a) don't care about diplomacy (b) won't abide by any agreements and (c) actually want to use force to enact their agenda.
It just doesn't work.
As Neville Chamberlain could explain to you and did explain to the War Cabinet in 1940.
There is no point in negotiating with Trump, as he won't abide by an agreement, or with Netanyahu, who needs a war. Or for the matter of that, the Ayatollahs who see negotiation with infidels as something to be honoured only when advantage is to be gained.
So we don't need diplomacy. We need to find a way to be independent of the USA so we can tell Trump to get stuffed.
That's almost what I said originally. And I repeat - it ain't gonna be easy or cheap. But yes I agree.🤣
Ah, I thought when you said 'good diplomacy' you were referring to America, not forging alliances without it. My bad, sorry.
Poland has refused a US request to send a Patriot missile battery to the Middle East.
Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz: “Our Patriot batteries… are used to protect Polish skies and NATO’s eastern flank… we have no plans to relocate them anywhere.”
Slightly random idea, but which could partially solve the problem: Bin the Lords, and replace it with a weighed national vote.
So imagine Reform get 30% nationally, Labour, Tories, Greens get 20% each, Libdems 10%. (I'm pretending the nationalists and minor parties don't exist for simplicity.
The Commons (and government) function as now. Reform Majority gov.
The Lord's is replaced by the votes of the MPs weighed by their parties national share. This weighed vote cannot ammend legislation, but a bill must win a straight up yes/no vote by the weighed to become law.
So, for the numbers I give above: Each Ref MP gets a vote worth 30%/350 = 0.086% Each Lab MP gets a vote worth 20%/75 = 0.267% Each Tory MP gets a vote worth 20%/60 = 0.333% Each Green MP gets a vote worth 20%/90 = 0.222% Each Lib MP gets a vote worth 10%/75 = 0.133% (the whole chamber should sum to ~100%)
Lots of wins with this, including the following obvious ones: You retain the constituency link. You generally have a majority government, but that government is constrained by only being able to pass legislation supported by MPs supported by >50% of all voters. There's no duplication of representation, saving loads of cash.
The catch would be that some MPs support would become more valuable than others. If you use the results of the last election, you'd essentially be having a second chamber vote where each Reform MP's vote counted for 18 and each Labour MPs vote counted 0.5. Would be like the 1970s TUC/Labour conferences with the block vote. Clacton would have twice as much clout as the whole of Merseyside combined.
Transport policy for instance would end up being weirdly skewed to antiquated seaside towns.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Ok, I criticise people for comparing Trump or Netanyahu to Hitler, but here there is a valid comparison:
You can't use diplomacy successfully against people who (a) don't care about diplomacy (b) won't abide by any agreements and (c) actually want to use force to enact their agenda.
It just doesn't work.
As Neville Chamberlain could explain to you and did explain to the War Cabinet in 1940.
There is no point in negotiating with Trump, as he won't abide by an agreement, or with Netanyahu, who needs a war. Or for the matter of that, the Ayatollahs who see negotiation with infidels as something to be honoured only when advantage is to be gained.
So we don't need diplomacy. We need to find a way to be independent of the USA so we can tell Trump to get stuffed.
That's almost what I said originally. And I repeat - it ain't gonna be easy or cheap. But yes I agree.🤣
Ah, I thought when you said 'good diplomacy' you were referring to America, not forging alliances without it. My bad, sorry.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Here's the view of a US (non MAGA) Republican.
The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick. https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494
Shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very little prick?'
I don’t have much time for Leon myself, but nevertheless would struggle to see how this fiasco is all his fault?
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Here's the view of a US (non MAGA) Republican.
The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick. https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494
Shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very little prick?'
I don’t have much time for Leon myself, but nevertheless would struggle to see how this fiasco is all his fault?
Trump is the 27th incarnation of Leon?
Huge, if true.
Unlike Trump's prick.
Your exam question today in your MA world affairs and political history course is:
The world would be a much better, calmer place if all men were born with a dick of exactly the same size; discuss.
The UK government has confirmed there are no plans to fit 30mm naval guns to HMS Queen Elizabeth or HMS Prince of Wales, despite growing concern over drone threats to warships. https://x.com/UKDefJournal/status/2038885041707663413
No R-ESM sensors (for passive drone detection) either.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Here's the view of a US (non MAGA) Republican.
The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick. https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494
Shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very little prick?'
I don’t have much time for Leon myself, but nevertheless would struggle to see how this fiasco is all his fault?
Trump is the 27th incarnation of Leon?
Huge, if true.
Unlike Trump's prick.
Your exam question today in your MA world affairs and political history course is:
The world would be a much better, calmer place if all men were born with a dick of exactly the same size; discuss.
The size isn't as important as the way it's deployed.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Here's the view of a US (non MAGA) Republican.
The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick. https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494
Shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very little prick?'
shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very tiny button mushroom shaped prick?'
The UK government has confirmed there are no plans to fit 30mm naval guns to HMS Queen Elizabeth or HMS Prince of Wales, despite growing concern over drone threats to warships. https://x.com/UKDefJournal/status/2038885041707663413
No R-ESM sensors (for passive drone detection) either.
Isn’t the plan to roll out the swanky new laser system on everything? Slightly let down by the cost, of course. A Properly Expensive system.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Here's the view of a US (non MAGA) Republican.
The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick. https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494
Shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very little prick?'
I don’t have much time for Leon myself, but nevertheless would struggle to see how this fiasco is all his fault?
Poland has refused a US request to send a Patriot missile battery to the Middle East.
Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz: “Our Patriot batteries… are used to protect Polish skies and NATO’s eastern flank… we have no plans to relocate them anywhere.”
If only we had such sensible people running the UK.
The UK government has confirmed there are no plans to fit 30mm naval guns to HMS Queen Elizabeth or HMS Prince of Wales, despite growing concern over drone threats to warships. https://x.com/UKDefJournal/status/2038885041707663413
No R-ESM sensors (for passive drone detection) either.
Isn’t the plan to roll out the swanky new laser system on everything? Slightly let down by the cost, of course. A Properly Expensive system.
Meanwhile Zelenskyy is in Dubai and Doha, trading thousands of cheap offensive drones for a few Properly Expensive Patriot missiles.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Here's the view of a US (non MAGA) Republican.
The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick. https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494
Shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very little prick?'
I don’t have much time for Leon myself, but nevertheless would struggle to see how this fiasco is all his fault?
Trump is the 27th incarnation of Leon?
Huge, if true.
Unlike Trump's prick.
Hmmm
Colour Sergeant Bourne was delighted with his bet on the numbers, as he came up totally Green.
The UK government has confirmed there are no plans to fit 30mm naval guns to HMS Queen Elizabeth or HMS Prince of Wales, despite growing concern over drone threats to warships. https://x.com/UKDefJournal/status/2038885041707663413
No R-ESM sensors (for passive drone detection) either.
Probably the right move, putting the Bushmasters on the carriers mean they have to be crewed and maintained while there is already a shortage of sailors. The ship then needs 30x173 in the magazine which means complicating the logistical tail, etc., etc.
If the drones are getting past the escorts to the carrier then the whole job is fucked anyway and they should be retreating with all possible haste.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Here's the view of a US (non MAGA) Republican.
The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick. https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494
Shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very little prick?'
shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very tiny button mushroom shaped prick?'
The obsession with what's in Donald Trump's y-fronts is, let's say, rather niche.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Here's the view of a US (non MAGA) Republican.
The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick. https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494
Shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very little prick?'
shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very tiny button mushroom shaped prick?'
The obsession with what's in Donald Trump's y-fronts is, let's say, rather niche.
True but given that courts have found that Donald Trump's prick is as I described I thought it best to correct the description to it's US Court confirmed description
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
I think that is a fair criticism of safe seats, and one of the strongest against FPTP.
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
STV in multi member constituencies means that many more people would have be represented by a local MP from the party they voted for.
Your MP is your MP regardless of how you voted. They represent the constituency, not just their own supporters.
That is exactly what I think gets lost in a lot of the PR case. It starts from the premise that voters ought to be matched up with a representative from their preferred party, as though Parliament were a customer service desk. I think that weakens the representative principle rather than strengthening it.
Your MP is your MP however you voted, true.
Before Starmer every PM was PM for everyone however they voted. But in his first days in officer Starmer said he was only PM for those who voted Labour. Truly vile man.
Please provide a link for that quote or withdraw it. He's not a very good Prime Minister so you can criticise without this sort of bullshit followed by hyperbole.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Step away from GBNews!
The standard response I'd expect from someone without an argument. But hey enjoy your *ank fest.
Point of order. You didn't get a flag from me. I am quite happy to debate Trump's unsuitability for office, his criminality and his undeniable stupidity. I can give you plenty of examples.
The UK government has confirmed there are no plans to fit 30mm naval guns to HMS Queen Elizabeth or HMS Prince of Wales, despite growing concern over drone threats to warships. https://x.com/UKDefJournal/status/2038885041707663413
No R-ESM sensors (for passive drone detection) either.
Probably the right move, putting the Bushmasters on the carriers mean they have to be crewed and maintained while there is already a shortage of sailors. The ship then needs 30x173 in the magazine which means complicating the logistical tail, etc., etc.
If the drones are getting past the escorts to the carrier then the whole job is fucked anyway and they should be retreating with all possible haste.
DK Brown argued that secondary armament on battleships and carriers was always a waste of topweight and space for that reason.
He presented trade studies that showed that it was cheaper and took less manpower to put them on another escort, every time.
The UK government has confirmed there are no plans to fit 30mm naval guns to HMS Queen Elizabeth or HMS Prince of Wales, despite growing concern over drone threats to warships. https://x.com/UKDefJournal/status/2038885041707663413
No R-ESM sensors (for passive drone detection) either.
Probably the right move, putting the Bushmasters on the carriers mean they have to be crewed and maintained while there is already a shortage of sailors. The ship then needs 30x173 in the magazine which means complicating the logistical tail, etc., etc.
If the drones are getting past the escorts to the carrier then the whole job is fucked anyway and they should be retreating with all possible haste.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
I think that is a fair criticism of safe seats, and one of the strongest against FPTP.
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
STV in multi member constituencies means that many more people would have be represented by a local MP from the party they voted for.
Your MP is your MP regardless of how you voted. They represent the constituency, not just their own supporters.
That is exactly what I think gets lost in a lot of the PR case. It starts from the premise that voters ought to be matched up with a representative from their preferred party, as though Parliament were a customer service desk. I think that weakens the representative principle rather than strengthening it.
I'm sorry, but that seems a bit delusional to me.
You're arguing that on national issues, it's better for your representation that you have a single local MP elected on (conceivably) 30% of the vote, who might hold views diametrically opposed to yours, than to have someone you actually voted for in Parliament on your behalf ?
The glorified customer service / social worker thing already exists for MPs, and often takes far more of their attention than the business of Parliament.
Again, the way to address that is surely stronger local government ?
I think that simply assumes the PR view of representation rather than proving it.
You are treating representation on national issues as if its purpose were to ensure that as many voters as possible have someone in Parliament who shares their opinions. I understand that logic, but it is not the only one, and not the one I find most constitutionally persuasive.
My view is that an MP is not there merely to echo back the views of those who voted for him, still less to serve as a partisan proxy for them in Westminster. He is there to represent a place, exercise judgement, and answer to that electorate for it. That he may have been elected on 30% in a fragmented field is a fair criticism of FPTP. But it does not follow that the better principle is to turn Parliament into a chamber of partisan delegates each speaking for their own electoral slice.
As for the customer service point, I agree entirely that MPs are now burdened with too much quasi-social work, and I would happily see stronger local government take much of that back. But that is rather separate from the representative principle. My argument is not that the present practical workload of MPs is ideal. It plainly is not. It is that constituency representation is still a sounder constitutional basis than trying to ensure that every voter has someone congenial in Parliament from their preferred tribe.
I also accept that my view of what an MP is, grounded in history, precedent and an older representative ideal, may now strike many as anachronistic.
But I am not sure that makes it wrong. It may simply mean that our politics has moved a long way from what parliamentary representation was once understood to be. My argument is really that this older conception, an MP representing a place, exercising judgement, and being answerable to the whole constituency, is still a sounder constitutional ideal than the increasingly consumerist notion that voters should each have someone in Parliament from their preferred tribe.
Karl Turner MP @KarlTurnerMP I am being told that I have had the whip suspended but I have not had any notification from the whips about this. It seems journalists have been told but I have not. 1:45 pm · 31 Mar 2026 · 1,666 Views
The UK government has confirmed there are no plans to fit 30mm naval guns to HMS Queen Elizabeth or HMS Prince of Wales, despite growing concern over drone threats to warships. https://x.com/UKDefJournal/status/2038885041707663413
No R-ESM sensors (for passive drone detection) either.
Probably the right move, putting the Bushmasters on the carriers mean they have to be crewed and maintained while there is already a shortage of sailors. The ship then needs 30x173 in the magazine which means complicating the logistical tail, etc., etc.
If the drones are getting past the escorts to the carrier then the whole job is fucked anyway and they should be retreating with all possible haste.
DK Brown argued that secondary armament on battleships and carriers was always a waste of topweight and space for that reason.
He presented trade studies that showed that it was cheaper and took less manpower to put them on another escort, every time.
During ze War, secondary armament was often sacrificed for masses of light to medium anti-aircraft guns, for example the wing 155mm turrets on Yamato and Musashi. That said, the four Iowa class ships retained their 127mm guns right till the end of their careers.
The Ayrshire hotelier is up and ranting about the UK.
Why is he up? Has somebody provided a 13 year old girl for him again?
All of those countries that can’t get jet fuel because of the Strait of Hormuz, like the United Kingdom, which refused to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the U.S., we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the U.S.A. won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us. Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil! President DJT
One other thought, what should China, which gets far more of its oil and gas from the region than we do, make of this suggestion ?
China and Iran to do a deal to guarantee the security of the country and strait. A total strategic failure for the US, and Israel. Also massively changing the global balance of power where China is seen as the safer pair of hands than the US.
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Desiring to see the Ayatollahs removed and thinking bombing Iran like a drunken sailor is going to be counterproductive in that regard is hardly an unreasonable position. The Iranian government is in some ways in a much stronger position than it was two months ago, although the fundamental crises haven!t gone away.
I agree. But Europe is also now in a very bad place - not to mention Ukraine. The need is for good diplomacy not sinking to Trump's level.
Here's the view of a US (non MAGA) Republican.
The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick. https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494
Shouldn't that be, 'destructive moron with a very little prick?'
I don’t have much time for Leon myself, but nevertheless would struggle to see how this fiasco is all his fault?
Trump is the 27th incarnation of Leon?
Huge, if true.
Unlike Trump's prick.
Hmmm
Colour Sergeant Bourne was delighted with his bet on the numbers, as he came up totally Green.
Good old Sgt Bourne, Youngest Sergeant in the British Army and last British survivor of Rourkes Drift dying the day after VE Day.
Karl Turner MP @KarlTurnerMP I am being told that I have had the whip suspended but I have not had any notification from the whips about this. It seems journalists have been told but I have not. 1:45 pm · 31 Mar 2026 · 1,666 Views
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
I think that is a fair criticism of safe seats, and one of the strongest against FPTP.
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
STV in multi member constituencies means that many more people would have be represented by a local MP from the party they voted for.
Your MP is your MP regardless of how you voted. They represent the constituency, not just their own supporters.
That is exactly what I think gets lost in a lot of the PR case. It starts from the premise that voters ought to be matched up with a representative from their preferred party, as though Parliament were a customer service desk. I think that weakens the representative principle rather than strengthening it.
I'm sorry, but that seems a bit delusional to me.
You're arguing that on national issues, it's better for your representation that you have a single local MP elected on (conceivably) 30% of the vote, who might hold views diametrically opposed to yours, than to have someone you actually voted for in Parliament on your behalf ?
The glorified customer service / social worker thing already exists for MPs, and often takes far more of their attention than the business of Parliament.
Again, the way to address that is surely stronger local government ?
I think that simply assumes the PR view of representation rather than proving it.
You are treating representation on national issues as if its purpose were to ensure that as many voters as possible have someone in Parliament who shares their opinions. I understand that logic, but it is not the only one, and not the one I find most constitutionally persuasive.
My view is that an MP is not there merely to echo back the views of those who voted for him, still less to serve as a partisan proxy for them in Westminster. He is there to represent a place, exercise judgement, and answer to that electorate for it. That he may have been elected on 30% in a fragmented field is a fair criticism of FPTP. But it does not follow that the better principle is to turn Parliament into a chamber of partisan delegates each speaking for their own electoral slice.
As for the customer service point, I agree entirely that MPs are now burdened with too much quasi-social work, and I would happily see stronger local government take much of that back. But that is rather separate from the representative principle. My argument is not that the present practical workload of MPs is ideal. It plainly is not. It is that constituency representation is still a sounder constitutional basis than trying to ensure that every voter has someone congenial in Parliament from their preferred tribe.
I also accept that my view of what an MP is, grounded in history, precedent and an older representative ideal, may now strike many as anachronistic.
But I am not sure that makes it wrong. It may simply mean that our politics has moved a long way from what parliamentary representation was once understood to be. My argument is really that this older conception, an MP representing a place, exercising judgement, and being answerable to the whole constituency, is still a sounder constitutional ideal than the increasingly consumerist notion that voters should each have someone in Parliament from their preferred tribe.
Given that most of the arguments you're making might be advanced in favour of the old rotten boroughs, or a system without female suffrage, it does seem a bit like that.
The first job of a Commons electoral system is to choose identifiable local representatives, rooted in actual places, who can collectively sustain or dismiss a government. On that test FPTP still has considerable strengths, whatever its defects.
Its great virtue is clarity. A constituency has one MP. Everyone knows who that is. That person is answerable to the whole seat, not to a list manager or party machine. If they are good, they can build a real representative relationship with the constituency. If they are useless, the electorate know exactly who to remove.
Much of the case for PR starts by treating a General Election as if it ought to be a single national plebiscite whose sole legitimate output is a proportional reflection of aggregate opinion. But that is not what our system was designed to do. A UK General Election is better understood as a series of local contests, fought in places with their own histories and interests, against a national backdrop. The national result is an accumulation of constituency choices, not the other way round.
Critics of FPTP often fault it for failing to perform a task it was never intended to perform.
PR advocates will say that this is precisely the problem: Parliament should mirror the national distribution of opinion more faithfully. But in doing so they tend to invert the relationship between representative and represented. The constituency becomes secondary and the party primary. In list systems especially, the route to office runs more through party favour than local endorsement. Even in multi-member variants, accountability becomes blurred. Who exactly is “your” representative?
None of this is to pretend FPTP is perfect. It plainly is not. It can produce disproportional outcomes, exaggerate swings, leave many votes without effective parliamentary weight, and create safe seats where the real contest is selection not election. Those are real criticisms.
But every electoral system has trade-offs. If your priority is that Parliament should reflect national vote shares as closely as possible, then PR will naturally appeal. If your priority is clear local representation, direct accountability, constitutional simplicity and the formation of workable governments, then FPTP remains highly defensible.
So I remain unpersuaded by PR, not because I fail to grasp the arithmetic, but because I think its advocates too often solve the wrong problem. They ask, “How do we make the Commons look more like the national vote totals?” I ask, “How do we ensure that each place has a clearly identifiable representative, answerable to it, within a system capable of producing a functioning government?”
To my mind, that is the more fundamental question, and it is one to which FPTP still gives the better answer.
It would a better answer were it not for the current importance of political parties. As has been pointed out several times, especially since WWII the candidates have been chosen by the various parties and often have little or no connection with the constituency they seek to represent.
I think that’s fair up to a point, but it cuts against PR as much as FPTP.
Yes, parties now choose candidates and some have little prior link to the seat. But that does not abolish the MP-constituency link, it just means parties mediate entry into it.
Under FPTP there is still one clearly identifiable member for one place, answerable to that electorate and removable by it. My problem with PR is that if parties are already too powerful, many PR systems strengthen them further, not less, by making lists, rankings or multi-member vagueness more central.
If the complaint is that parties have become too important, I struggle to see why the cure should be electoral systems that often make them more important still.
STV makes political parties less powerful. With STV, voters can choose/rank between different candidates from the same party.
Under FPTP, if you want to support a party, you have no choice but to vote for whatever donkey that party puts up.
Under STV the voter may get to choose between donkeys in slightly different rosettes, but the stable is still run by the party.
I would add that FPTP requires strong, principled MPs, because it rests on the idea that one identifiable person can genuinely represent a place, exercise judgement, and then answer to that electorate for it. That is both its strength and its weakness. If the political class is poor, the defects are brutally exposed. But I am not persuaded the answer to that is to dilute the representative principle still further and make party mediation yet more central.
FPTP presupposes MPs of some calibre. That may now strike people as an objection only because our political class so often disappoints the job description.
Your argument would be a better one if there were not dozens/a hundred or two Andrew Rosindells re-elected time after time because they have the right colour rosette and no other qualification. I might have been tempted to vote Conservative in 2010, but the candidate put up by that party made it a no-brainer for me to cast my vote against him. If there had been a more sensible candidate under STV I might have voted for them. So your last sentence summarises the whole problem, people vote for the rosette not the person, so calibre doesn't come into it in safe seats.
(I accept, that the local Conservatives being what they were at the time, they might have chose an even more ridiculous donkey as a second candidate)
I think that is a fair criticism of safe seats, and one of the strongest against FPTP.
Where a party label is so dominant that almost any candidate can be returned, the theory of personal representation is obviously degraded in practice. In such places the real election often becomes selection, and the electorate are left choosing less between persons than between entrenched tribal loyalties. I would not deny that for a moment.
But I still think that is a pathology of FPTP, not its essence. The underlying principle remains that one person is elected to answer for one place. My argument is that this is a sound representative ideal even if our degraded party culture often realises it badly.
Your STV point is a stronger one. It may indeed give voters within a party tradition more room to discriminate between candidates of different quality. I can readily see the attraction of that. My hesitation is that the cure comes with its own constitutional cost: one gains more voter choice within the party slate, but loses the clarity of one member being answerable for one constituency as a whole.
So I would put it this way: safe seats show that FPTP often fails to live up to its own representative promise. I am not yet persuaded that the answer is to abandon that promise in favour of a model that makes representation more diffuse and less clear, even if in some cases it offers a better menu of candidates.
Safe seats are a serious vice of FPTP. I just remain unconvinced that the remedy is to turn representation from a public office into a comparative shopping exercise.
STV in multi member constituencies means that many more people would have be represented by a local MP from the party they voted for.
Your MP is your MP regardless of how you voted. They represent the constituency, not just their own supporters.
That is exactly what I think gets lost in a lot of the PR case. It starts from the premise that voters ought to be matched up with a representative from their preferred party, as though Parliament were a customer service desk. I think that weakens the representative principle rather than strengthening it.
I'm sorry, but that seems a bit delusional to me.
You're arguing that on national issues, it's better for your representation that you have a single local MP elected on (conceivably) 30% of the vote, who might hold views diametrically opposed to yours, than to have someone you actually voted for in Parliament on your behalf ?
The glorified customer service / social worker thing already exists for MPs, and often takes far more of their attention than the business of Parliament.
Again, the way to address that is surely stronger local government ?
I think that simply assumes the PR view of representation rather than proving it.
You are treating representation on national issues as if its purpose were to ensure that as many voters as possible have someone in Parliament who shares their opinions. I understand that logic, but it is not the only one, and not the one I find most constitutionally persuasive.
My view is that an MP is not there merely to echo back the views of those who voted for him, still less to serve as a partisan proxy for them in Westminster. He is there to represent a place, exercise judgement, and answer to that electorate for it. That he may have been elected on 30% in a fragmented field is a fair criticism of FPTP. But it does not follow that the better principle is to turn Parliament into a chamber of partisan delegates each speaking for their own electoral slice.
As for the customer service point, I agree entirely that MPs are now burdened with too much quasi-social work, and I would happily see stronger local government take much of that back. But that is rather separate from the representative principle. My argument is not that the present practical workload of MPs is ideal. It plainly is not. It is that constituency representation is still a sounder constitutional basis than trying to ensure that every voter has someone congenial in Parliament from their preferred tribe.
I also accept that my view of what an MP is, grounded in history, precedent and an older representative ideal, may now strike many as anachronistic.
But I am not sure that makes it wrong. It may simply mean that our politics has moved a long way from what parliamentary representation was once understood to be. My argument is really that this older conception, an MP representing a place, exercising judgement, and being answerable to the whole constituency, is still a sounder constitutional ideal than the increasingly consumerist notion that voters should each have someone in Parliament from their preferred tribe.
Given that most of the arguments you're making might be advanced in favour of the old rotten boroughs, or a system without female suffrage, it does seem a bit like that.
Not every appeal to constitutional history is an argument for its former injustices. That is a category error, not a rebuttal.
The UK government has confirmed there are no plans to fit 30mm naval guns to HMS Queen Elizabeth or HMS Prince of Wales, despite growing concern over drone threats to warships. https://x.com/UKDefJournal/status/2038885041707663413
No R-ESM sensors (for passive drone detection) either.
Probably the right move, putting the Bushmasters on the carriers mean they have to be crewed and maintained while there is already a shortage of sailors. The ship then needs 30x173 in the magazine which means complicating the logistical tail, etc., etc.
If the drones are getting past the escorts to the carrier then the whole job is fucked anyway and they should be retreating with all possible haste.
DK Brown argued that secondary armament on battleships and carriers was always a waste of topweight and space for that reason.
He presented trade studies that showed that it was cheaper and took less manpower to put them on another escort, every time.
During ze War, secondary armament was often sacrificed for masses of light to medium anti-aircraft guns, for example the wing 155mm turrets on Yamato and Musashi. That said, the four Iowa class ships retained their 127mm guns right till the end of their careers.
His argument included putting most of the AA on other ships. Because lining the decks with guns interfered with flight ops.
Notice that all carriers since WWII have had a token air defence system at best.
Karl Turner MP @KarlTurnerMP I am being told that I have had the whip suspended but I have not had any notification from the whips about this. It seems journalists have been told but I have not. 1:45 pm · 31 Mar 2026 · 1,666 Views
Have to say Trump is on the money with his comments about Europe and the UK. They decide not to support an ally - their absolute right but then all Gung ho about US bases - needlessly petulant when all agree about the Iranian regime but they want the US to do it all for them. It's now for Europe to organise its defence without the US. Probably about time but it's gonna cost a large fortune and surely means some big tax bills and harsh welfare cuts to pay it. Some on here all orgasmic about slagging off Trump hope they're as keen for the job ahead. Fine - or nasty words butter no new weapons.....to misquote the old saying.
Had Trump bothered to make the case, to his "allies", and to outline a coherent strategy, then he might well have received support.
Instead he spent 14 months insulting them, mocking them, sanctioning them, denigrating their war dead, fellating Putin, before launching an ill-judged attack, without bothering to consult them.
Karl Turner MP @KarlTurnerMP I am being told that I have had the whip suspended but I have not had any notification from the whips about this. It seems journalists have been told but I have not. 1:45 pm · 31 Mar 2026 · 1,666 Views
Another Reform leaflet ostensibly from Jenrick blaming the immigrants. Posted to see if the messaging here on the South Coast is different from elsewhere.
We have very few immigrants here (apart from my family) in this very white / true blue constituency. Wondering why we have his attention.
The UK government has confirmed there are no plans to fit 30mm naval guns to HMS Queen Elizabeth or HMS Prince of Wales, despite growing concern over drone threats to warships. https://x.com/UKDefJournal/status/2038885041707663413
No R-ESM sensors (for passive drone detection) either.
Probably the right move, putting the Bushmasters on the carriers mean they have to be crewed and maintained while there is already a shortage of sailors. The ship then needs 30x173 in the magazine which means complicating the logistical tail, etc., etc.
If the drones are getting past the escorts to the carrier then the whole job is fucked anyway and they should be retreating with all possible haste.
DK Brown argued that secondary armament on battleships and carriers was always a waste of topweight and space for that reason.
He presented trade studies that showed that it was cheaper and took less manpower to put them on another escort, every time.
During ze War, secondary armament was often sacrificed for masses of light to medium anti-aircraft guns, for example the wing 155mm turrets on Yamato and Musashi. That said, the four Iowa class ships retained their 127mm guns right till the end of their careers.
His argument included putting most of the AA on other ships. Because lining the decks with guns interfered with flight ops.
Notice that all carriers since WWII have had a token air defence system at best.
The Soviet Kiev class on the other hand were bristling with AA systems, ASW systems and anti-ship systems.
The UK government has confirmed there are no plans to fit 30mm naval guns to HMS Queen Elizabeth or HMS Prince of Wales, despite growing concern over drone threats to warships. https://x.com/UKDefJournal/status/2038885041707663413
No R-ESM sensors (for passive drone detection) either.
Probably the right move, putting the Bushmasters on the carriers mean they have to be crewed and maintained while there is already a shortage of sailors. The ship then needs 30x173 in the magazine which means complicating the logistical tail, etc., etc.
If the drones are getting past the escorts to the carrier then the whole job is fucked anyway and they should be retreating with all possible haste.
DK Brown argued that secondary armament on battleships and carriers was always a waste of topweight and space for that reason.
He presented trade studies that showed that it was cheaper and took less manpower to put them on another escort, every time.
During ze War, secondary armament was often sacrificed for masses of light to medium anti-aircraft guns, for example the wing 155mm turrets on Yamato and Musashi. That said, the four Iowa class ships retained their 127mm guns right till the end of their careers.
His argument included putting most of the AA on other ships. Because lining the decks with guns interfered with flight ops.
Notice that all carriers since WWII have had a token air defence system at best.
The Soviet Kiev class on the other hand were bristling with AA systems, ASW systems and anti-ship systems.
The Soviet love of festooning their ships with *everything* proved to be less than optimal.
"Mother of murdered Brianna Ghey calls for ban on smartphones in schools
She also tells Sky News she ‘fully supports’ a social media ban Esther Ghey told Mornings that there should be more investment in real-world spaces for young people, such as after-school clubs"
You can make 100% certain money by laying people who are not in the field.
93 players have qualified. One final extra place will be added for the Texas Open winner on Sunday.
Betfair currently lists 113 players. But within this there are a number who are not in the 93 already qualified and who are not playing in the Texas Open.
These people are literally 100% certain losers. They don't have even a one in a million chance.
One such player is currently well under 100 on Betfair and anyone can lay over £300 of bets on him at an average price of below 100. For certain money.
(Hint: The giveaway is he is a LIV player not already qualified and who obviously can't enter the Texas Open. And then look for other LIV players who haven't already qualified).
Same thing happens every year.
I thought if they not in the field when the tournament starts they get treated as non-runners so your stake is returned?
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi and his Pakistani counterpart Ishaq Dar have released a five-point initiative aimed at “restoring peace and stability” in the Gulf and Iran following talks in Beijing.
The five points are as follows:
China and Pakistan have called for the “immediate cessation of hostilities” and efforts to prevent the conflict from spreading. Peace talks should begin as soon as possible, while ensuring the sovereignty and security of Iran and Gulf states. The two countries added that they would support all parties in initiating these talks. Attacks on civilians and non-military targets must end. The Strait of Hormuz’s shipping lanes must be secured. A comprehensive peace framework, in line with the UN Charter, must be established.
Yet another blunder from Starmer this morning. He's decided to personally intervene in the employment dispute with doctors, and his idea is to threaten the withdrawal of "thousands of extra training posts". Does he not realise that extra doctors hugely benefits patients?
More generally, I am fed up with politicians who cover up their inability to deliver anything by picking a fight. The most egregious example is of course trump, but a portion of most parties seem to be keen on the idea, mostly because it makes them feel powerful. Yes, there is a portion of the population who are dumb enough to fall for this, and automatically pick a side to support in any dispute, but it's incredibly corrosive to society and ultimately it's a con - we need leaders who know how to make our lives better, not promises to make someone else more miserable.
Whatever the merits of your post, I am not sure the public are foursquare behind the Resident Doctors and their pay demands this time around under current economic circumstances.
Their beef is with Long- Osborne rather than short Starmer.
Let's take that as an assumption - and I agree it's likely a good one - Starmer has an open goal here. And yet he can't seem to help muffing it by threatening something that would hurt patients over the longer term. It's kind of incredible that someone so bad at politics became PM.
You evidently weren't around when Liz Truss set the bar at an all-time high in the Bad At Politics event for PMs.
Liz Truss at her worst did not poll as badly as Starmer.
She was only in office for 49 effing days! A few more weeks and she would surely have been polling worse than syphilis.
I’m not sure that we’ve yet seen the worst of Sir Phyllis’s polling
Fewer flights because of shortages by Friday, in Northern Europe and the UK. Looks as though we're about to get some unexpected carbon reductions, and economic tourism effects, in many different countries.
Trump delivering net zero on the qt. A true genius.
US Defence Secretary Hegseth has concluded a press briefing “in the name of Jesus Christ”.
What has Jesus done to deserve that ?
I thought Pete was progressing this war in God's name so Jesus returns to Earth to meet Pete
Why would Jesus be on the side of the Israelis? Particularly at this time of the year?
What if it turns out that "new" Jesus isn't Jewish, Christian or even white, but perhaps Mexican or Somali? That would demonstrate God has a sense of humour and MAGA would lose their minds.
Thinking on the Kings visit, it does play into Trump's narcissitic and troubled personality and may help assuage the worst rhetoric coming from him, because whether we like it or not he will be in Office for another 2 and a half years
Some siren voices want to see the US and Israel defeated but they are only playing into Putin and other malign actors hands
We have to remember we are hightly integrated into the US for defence and a huge trading partner, Trump will be gone and both the UK and the West have to hope a better relationship follows
I doubt the US will be prepared to fund NATO going forward no matter who is POTUS, and that is a real issue for the west
Thinking on the Kings visit, it does play into Trump's narcissitic and troubled personality and may help assuage the worst rhetoric coming from him, because whether we like it or not he will be in Office for another 2 and a half years
Some siren voices want to see the US and Israel defeated but they are only playing into Putin and other malign actors hands aalls r We have to remember we are hightly integrated into the US for defence and a huge trading partner, Trump will be gone and both the UK and the West have to hope a better relationship follows
I doubt the US will be prepared to fund NATO going forward no matter who is POTUS, and that is a real issue for the west
What does Kemi think? She gets all the big calls right.
Comments
The Graffiti Tunnel https://share.google/KDOcW1ytAxMglg16g
Camden or Brixton market are both good on a wet day.
You're arguing that on national issues, it's better for your representation that you have a single local MP elected on (conceivably) 30% of the vote, who might hold views diametrically opposed to yours, than to have someone you actually voted for in Parliament on your behalf ?
The glorified customer service / social worker thing already exists for MPs, and often takes far more of their attention than the business of Parliament.
Again, the way to address that is surely stronger local government ?
Me I'm on the fence!!
You might want to look at https://tfl.gov.uk/travel-information/visiting-london/visitor-oyster-card
"Teenage boy at centre of Scott Mills sexual offences investigation was under 16, police say"
He's Toast.
(Though, given they didn't charge him, I'm not sure why they released this information...)
An obvious point of danger for the regime was Khameini's death. And as he was in his 80s and had cancer, that was fairly imminent.
When he died, as his earlier successor (Raisi) was killed in that helicopter crash, there would have been a power struggle. Mojtaba would have been front runner, but a son succeeding his father a la the Shahs would not have been universally popular and his links to the RGC might have counted against him.
As Khameini was killed in war the usual channels were circumvented and Mojtaba confirmed in a great hurry to avoid this scenario.
Which has brought the RGC into the centre of things and basically sidelined the civilian government.
Does anyone think that is an improvement?
P S. By any metric he is not "on the money".
Before Starmer every PM was PM for everyone however they voted. But in his first days in officer Starmer said he was only PM for those who voted Labour. Truly vile man.
You can make 100% certain money by laying people who are not in the field.
93 players have qualified. One final extra place will be added for the Texas Open winner on Sunday.
Betfair currently lists 113 players. But within this there are a number who are not in the 93 already qualified and who are not playing in the Texas Open.
These people are literally 100% certain losers. They don't have even a one in a million chance.
One such player is currently well under 100 on Betfair and anyone can lay over £300 of bets on him at an average price of below 100. For certain money.
(Hint: The giveaway is he is a LIV player not already qualified and who obviously can't enter the Texas Open. And then look for other LIV players who haven't already qualified).
Same thing happens every year.
You can't use diplomacy successfully against people who (a) don't care about diplomacy (b) won't abide by any agreements and (c) actually want to use force to enact their agenda.
It just doesn't work.
As Neville Chamberlain could explain to you and did explain to the War Cabinet in 1940.
There is no point in negotiating with Trump, as he won't abide by an agreement, or with Netanyahu, who needs a war. Or for the matter of that, the Ayatollahs who see negotiation with infidels as something to be honoured only when advantage is to be gained.
So we don't need diplomacy. We need to find a way to be independent of the USA so we can tell Trump to get stuffed.
The strait was open. He starts a war. The strait closes. The world economy gets fucked. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, he gets bored, he declares victory, and he tells the rest of the world to open the strait, to clean up his mess. He’s such a prick. He’s such a destructive prick.
https://x.com/WalshFreedom/status/2038956650044809494
Labour should be bold, and go for STV, introduced relatively easily by knocking existing seats together into sensible multi-member constituencies. But, as we all know, any sentence that starts with the premise that Labour might be bold is doomed to irrelevance.
Poland has refused a US request to send a Patriot missile battery to the Middle East.
Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz: “Our Patriot batteries… are used to protect Polish skies and NATO’s eastern flank… we have no plans to relocate them anywhere.”
Transport policy for instance would end up being weirdly skewed to antiquated seaside towns.
Huge, if true.
Unlike Trump's prick.
The world would be a much better, calmer place if all men were born with a dick of exactly the same size; discuss.
https://x.com/UKDefJournal/status/2038885041707663413
No R-ESM sensors (for passive drone detection) either.
If the drones are getting past the escorts to the carrier then the whole job is fucked anyway and they should be retreating with all possible haste.
He presented trade studies that showed that it was cheaper and took less manpower to put them on another escort, every time.
It is.
And agreed.
You are treating representation on national issues as if its purpose were to ensure that as many voters as possible have someone in Parliament who shares their opinions. I understand that logic, but it is not the only one, and not the one I find most constitutionally persuasive.
My view is that an MP is not there merely to echo back the views of those who voted for him, still less to serve as a partisan proxy for them in Westminster. He is there to represent a place, exercise judgement, and answer to that electorate for it. That he may have been elected on 30% in a fragmented field is a fair criticism of FPTP. But it does not follow that the better principle is to turn Parliament into a chamber of partisan delegates each speaking for their own electoral slice.
As for the customer service point, I agree entirely that MPs are now burdened with too much quasi-social work, and I would happily see stronger local government take much of that back. But that is rather separate from the representative principle. My argument is not that the present practical workload of MPs is ideal. It plainly is not. It is that constituency representation is still a sounder constitutional basis than trying to ensure that every voter has someone congenial in Parliament from their preferred tribe.
I also accept that my view of what an MP is, grounded in history, precedent and an older representative ideal, may now strike many as anachronistic.
But I am not sure that makes it wrong. It may simply mean that our politics has moved a long way from what parliamentary representation was once understood to be. My argument is really that this older conception, an MP representing a place, exercising judgement, and being answerable to the whole constituency, is still a sounder constitutional ideal than the increasingly consumerist notion that voters should each have someone in Parliament from their preferred tribe.
Feck him off
Sell them Chagos.
An ideal base for the region
Totally fuck Trump off
Notice that all carriers since WWII have had a token air defence system at best.
Instead he spent 14 months insulting them, mocking them, sanctioning them, denigrating their war dead, fellating Putin, before launching an ill-judged attack, without bothering to consult them.
The lack of support is unsurprising.
But he might choose to pass over them now.
We have very few immigrants here (apart from my family) in this very white / true blue constituency. Wondering why we have his attention.
Police time will no longer be wasted investigating legal social media posts, freeing up officers to patrol the streets and tackle real crime.
By scrapping Non‑Crime Hate Incidents, we are balancing the protection of vulnerable communities while respecting free speech.
She also tells Sky News she ‘fully supports’ a social media ban
Esther Ghey told Mornings that there should be more investment in real-world spaces for young people, such as after-school clubs"
https://news.sky.com/video/mother-of-murdered-brianna-ghey-calls-for-ban-on-smartphones-in-schools-13526008
https://news.sky.com/video/brianna-ghey-s-mother-tells-sky-news-she-fully-supports-a-social-media-ban-13526107
NEW THREAD
The five points are as follows:
China and Pakistan have called for the “immediate cessation of hostilities” and efforts to prevent the conflict from spreading.
Peace talks should begin as soon as possible, while ensuring the sovereignty and security of Iran and Gulf states. The two countries added that they would support all parties in initiating these talks.
Attacks on civilians and non-military targets must end.
The Strait of Hormuz’s shipping lanes must be secured.
A comprehensive peace framework, in line with the UN Charter, must be established.
Some siren voices want to see the US and Israel defeated but they are only playing into Putin and other malign actors hands
We have to remember we are hightly integrated into the US for defence and a huge trading partner, Trump will be gone and both the UK and the West have to hope a better relationship follows
I doubt the US will be prepared to fund NATO going forward no matter who is POTUS, and that is a real issue for the west