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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Hung Parliaments are becoming the norm and we have to get used to it
The British political system has a reputation for producing strong governments. It is often seen as one of its virtues. For a long time, it was true. From December 1918, the first election in which women could vote, until February 1974, a single party had a majority in the House of Commons for all bar 3 years 3 months of that period.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RturpZ8Ato
Eye-catching initiatives will be administrative steps taken under
Reference 2 existing laws rather than new legislation that might come under inconveniently harsh scrutiny.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/article-50-and-negotiations-with-the-eu
AMeeks has written an article which says - Hung Parliaments Now The New Normal, Therefore TMay Didn't Fail After All.
So the thread header will be ignored all day as it does't fit the lefty narrative.
Quite a shock and very brave for AMeeks to go so completely and publicly to war against MSmithson.
https://twitter.com/PoliticalLine/status/900184109225582593
In fact, more than 80 per cent of voters backed either Labour or the Tories – the biggest proportion since 1970:
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-the-general-election-in-five-graphs
Which, given a different distribution might make Hung Parliaments less likely......
If the SNP continue to go backwards at the next election then we could well be back to a much higher two-party share of seats, which makes a hung Parliament less likely. Of course, I could be completely wrong, and we’ll see another LD resurgence on the back of Brexit, or some mad man might try and set up a new single issue party which gains traction.
Well done to all those writing headers by the way, can’t be easy in the middle of a very quiet August.
This is an interesting post by Antifrank and we should be grateful to have such a thoughtful thread writer.
UK politics is a two-horse race between the Conservatives and Labour at the moment and it doesn't take much swing either way to bag a lot of seats.
I suggest tha it’s not only the LD’s and other potential junior parties who should reflect on that outcome. He writes later that the LD’s and SNP are resolutley opposed to dealing with the Tories, and I suspect that for the LD’s that situation will maintain for some considerable time, due to their experience of Cameron’s Tories. May is lucky in that there is a party in Parliament which, at the moment, will not do any sort of deal with the the Leader of the main opposition party; would that have applied in the case of a Milliband led Labour party?
If things get really difficult, is there a market on a Grand Coalition under a non-party figure? The Tories would be up for that, and Labour's leaders right now are so dim they might not notice the risks.
Brexit is your car crash, own it.
Brexit with continuing Budget contributions, transitions, and the CJEU still having competence over the UK sounds a lot like BINO.
The SNP in particular should be equally brazen. It's not as though they should be in a hurry for a fresh election, is it?
I am intrigued at how close Labour and the Conservatives are on Brexit. Essentially, the presentation is different. While Labour have sometimes asked questions to which there are no immediate answers, they show no signs of having answers themselves.
John Redwood would cheerfully sell his soul to get Brexit and agreeing not to laugh at Jeremy Corbyn given he shouldn't be laughing now anyway is probably a smaller price to pay.
Labour's rank and file would hate it - but when did Corbyn ever care what his MPs think? They voted him out once and keep resigning from his shadow cabinet and he still ignores them
I don't think it especially likely, but nor do I think it is impossible. The big stumbling block might be finding someone to lead it.
That said, I feel May could and perhaps should have offered to talk to the SNP - then when they rebuffed her it would have made it more difficult for them to criticise her when she ignored them going forward.
(Before anyone says such a thing would never happen, it did at Holyrood in 2007 - the SNP surviving by the grace of Unionist support.)
The recent election was very different because there was a lot of tactical voting because of Brexit. Labour attracted a lot of votes from remain supporters, who would not normally have voted Labour. Corbyn also managed to retain the support of enough leave voters, by saying he would implement Brexit, but it would be about protecting rights of people etc.
I think another election is likely during 2018, because i think the Government will struggle to gain Political support for their version of Brexit. Labour will not work with the Tories to achieve Brexit, as it is not in their interest to do so. What i think will happen, is that Labour and other parties will seek to undermine the Tories position, working with Tory remain backbenchers to promote single market/customs area membership. It is possible that it will be difficult to get the EU withdrawal bill passed unamended.
Hung Parliaments make Government and opposition parties work harder, which can only be a good thing.
https://reaction.life/karl-marx-must-fall-ahead-admiral-nelson-surely/
Indeed, I can foresee Corbyn attacking May for betraying the will of the people if she makes too many concessions. Remember he is, like her, a lifelong Eurosceptic turned unenthusiastic Remainer for political reasons, now finally given free reign to do what he always wanted to do.
I don't think it's any accident that these are being released in August whilst Parliament is in recess.
The new fascism.
Not least of which swingback, and the belief that campaigns don't matter.
Managing to do one of those, can be an accident but both?
Sadly, Mr. Meeks might be correct.
More power to minor parties, encouraging political fragmentation, pork-barrelling and probably a shot in the army to the well-meaning but 100% wrong Yorkshire Party.
Edited extra bit: repeat of yesterday's tip - I backed Raikkonen each way at 17 to win qualifying at Ladbrokes. He's got a very good record at Spa, and beat Vettel in qualifying last year. It's a four horse race and he should perhaps be 6 (give or take).
When Anne Marie Morris turned into someone from antebellum Virginia, some on the right cited Naz Shah as an example of why they couldn't get excited by Miss Morris.
I'm sure those on the left will use them same argument.
The correct answer is if there was any decency in politics both would have announced they were standing down at the next election.
Shah, on the other hand...
It is ironic to reflect the party that dealt most ruthlessly with defaulters is the SNP - although there were a fair number there who got away with some really quite nasty stuff they shouldn't have done.
https://twitter.com/Steven_Swinford/status/900247000314236928
My initial thought was that she was agreeing with satire and slagging off Owen Jones - ironically that might have been more damaging...
As an aside - do MPs really get that much benefit from Twitter?
Isn't it a bit like tempting fate... there will be things you see that seriously piss you off, and it must be so easy to respond in microseconds and regret later...
Labour: the party that cares for the vulnerable in society.......or perhaps not.
"Gordon Brown is not a popular figure among readers of the Daily Telegraph...Yet to his credit, Brown was also a man of big ideas, an attribute which seems sadly lacking in the mediocrity of today’s political landscape."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/08/22/britain-surely-doomed-doesnt-urgently-start-upping-investment/
"McConnell, in Private, Doubts if Trump Can Save Presidency"
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/us/politics/mitch-mcconnell-trump.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
His argument is better to do it now than get to the point where you have to do it because the choice is either no deal or totally crap David Davis deal.
hmmm.. his big ideas nearly destroyed the Country. Whatever this Country needs, its not a facsimile Gordon Brown.
Wait till Labour regain office again.
Any more that spring to mind?
Dominic Raab, justice minister, concedes UK will keep 'half an eye' on ECJ after Brexit and brands attacks on 'foreign' judges 'jingoistic'
Usually the negative consequences of big ideas are felt long after the thinker has left the stage.
Alastair's piece is well written and it is based on cold hard facts but I still don't agree with it.
The factors which have resulted in hung Parliaments have been strong minority parties. When the Lib Dems had 50+ MPs getting a majority was really difficult. Add in 50+ SNP MPs and it became almost impossible. Going forward it is hard to see the Lib Dems much above the low teens and the SNP are likely to fall back further to the benefit of mainly Labour and possibly a small number of Conservatives.
In such a Parliament majorities are possible, even likely, unless the major parties are very close in vote share as they were in 2017. Had May won with a lead in the share of the vote that matched Cameron in 2015 she would have had a handy majority. It took a campaign of stunning incompetence to fail to achieve that.
The real question is how likely is it that the major parties will be within 4% of each other next time out? If they are not someone will have a majority. You could argue that 2017 showed that the system has internal balancing factors that make that less than 4% more likely. It is quite clear that several million people who did not think Corbyn was fit to be PM voted Labour to stop Mrs May running rampant and I could see this working the other way too. We are, unfortunately, a deeply divided country. But I still think another election with the popular vote that close is unlikely.
No one saw the consequences of smoking, pollution and childhood obesity. Dreadful mistake. Ludd was right.
Stay in the cave.
Not what one would expert from a solicitor and a current Justice Minister.
You could argue that there was a massive lack of a big idea in the form of regulating the finance industry, but nobody else was interested in that either at the time iirc. Certainly not the Tories who wanted (still want?) even more deregulation and light touch.
1. Child abuse is committed by people of all races, colours, faiths - and though largely by men - also some women.
2. Victims are both male and female.
3. There are different categories e.g. abuse within the home or within schools or within institutions (such as churches) or grooming gangs of teenage girls and those categories may show a preponderance of particular types of abusers or victims.
4. In the case of Rotherham-style abuse:-
(a) the majority of abusers are men of Pakistani origin and the particular combination of Pakistani/Islamic culture is a factor in that abuse;
(b) this does not mean that all men of Pakistani origin or those who are Muslim are child abusers; but
(c) the fact that (b) is true should not stop people worrying about (a) and taking the necessary action to stop these crimes happening.
For some reason some Labour politicians seem to find it impossible to accept (c). It's as if, deep down, they know that (a) is true, don't like the implications and therefore shout (b) as loudly and as often as possible in order to avoid taking action.
4 equally applies to other types of abuse eg see the reaction of the Catholic Church to abuse by Catholic priests.
"The British people gave a clear mandate for the UK Government to leave the EU and take back control of our borders, laws, money and trade. It is disappointing that today the court has chosen to ignore their decision.....a plain attempt to block Brexit by people who are out of touch with the country and refuse to accept the result. However, the vote to leave the EU was clear and they should not seek to obstruct it."
Yet today he's attacking people for attacking foreign judges.
https://twitter.com/naomiohreally/status/900255267056693248
https://mobile.twitter.com/JamesAALongman/status/900258824199835648
2. ECJ & immigration. So all will be the same as before, but we will be "in control". If anyone can point to the non-ontological differences I would be most grateful.
*which doesn't detract from a very good thread header.
Why have we got a Frenchman's statue up in the first place? He was buried in France and didn't speak English. He's not English/British.
Why not stick up a statue of Philippe Pétain as well?
....
Well summarised.
With the Catholic Church, I can say that the great majority of Catholics acknowledge that some priests had special access and used it to abuse children. The cover-up made things much worse. In Ireland, faith in priests has hit new lows. However, virtually all priests think that what happened was totally abhorrent. There is no excuse. No one is saying that the majority of sex abusers are not Catholic priests - that is irrelevant
As a reminder, for Jezza ... In Rotherham, Baroness Jay discovered that "Some councillors were said to have hoped the issue would "go away", thinking it was a one-off problem. Several staff members were afraid they would be labelled racist if they identified the race of the perpetrators, while others said they were instructed by their managers not to do so. Several councillors interviewed believed highlighting the race element would "give oxygen" to racist ideas and threaten community cohesion."
With these rapes, the default line from many on the left is that Professor Jay is wrong because other people do it too. Ask Sarah Champion about Labour's desire for openness.
Hypocrisy is rampant.
As for not speaking English, it only became the primary tongue of the royal court under Edward III. Do you think we should take down statues of Alfred? Or Constantine?
Edited extra bit: as an aside, Henry II doesn't get enough condemnation for his damned silly approach to continental territories.
I tend to agree though I feel that no decent political party should want to compromise its professed values for the sake of garnering votes from such people. Just as people have asked Trump to disavow the support of the Klu Klux Klan, surely Labour should disavow the support of those who deny or minimise the existence of child abuse within communities which support them.
I think it's something more, though. Some in Labour are so wedded to the doctrines of diversity and multiculturalism and immigration that they refuse to accept that these crimes might suggest failings in these doctrines and force them to rethink whether, for instance, this sort of diversity is worthwhile, whether all cultures are equal, whether immigration from certain groups is desirable etc.
And, to be fair, some worry that the existence of these crimes will be used by those with malicious motives and fear the consequences of giving such malicious groups more cause for complaint. The irony is that their silence creates the very problem they are worried about and prolongs the agony for the victims.
Now there's plenty of possibilities for that but politicians have a tendency to concentrate infrastructure investment on their vanity projects - HS2 and Hinkley C for example.
Not to mention that Gordon Brown thought of and called all government spending as 'investment'.
Mr. Eagles, saying there are others worthier of a statue is not the same as justifying tearing statues down.
The Lionheart was a successful war leader. When he was alive, we advanced, when he died, we were beaten back.