231–240 of 651 posts
Now if only there was an instrument to create legitimacy for leaders, something where the entire population could make their own choice heard in a binding way. We could call it election.
The entire population was able to vote to elect the party, and the party then elected her as PM. Her position was 100% legitimate, whether you like it or not.
Can anyone explain why??
She was terrible. She introduced a dramatic tax cut for the rich, which immediately crashed exchange rates and the stock market, and was even criticised by the rich it was meant to benefit.
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>>a miserable failure who crashed the economy. Can somebody from the UK tell us what did she do that the economy crashed, in just under two months?
Lost the confidence of the market for UK government debt pushing up borrowing costs for government and for others (as well as causing problems for pension funds who own that debt). She did this by launching a series of unfunded tax cuts and doing so without an assessment of the impact on the UK's finances.
Another interesting difference between the US and UK. Republicans do this routinely in the US, and have done for many decades now.
The last Republican president who didn't do this was George Bush (the first one). After promising "no new taxes" during his campaign, he later agreed to do the fiscally responsible thing and raise taxes in order to offset spending increases. He was not re-elected. That was ~30 years ago, and to my knowledge no subsequent Republican president has made that mistake.
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Circa 2014, George Mitchell (D-Maine), Bob Dole (R-Kan.), Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) were known to be IRL friends. But that was back then. These days I think the hatred is more real than not.
I think part of it is that we're in the political equivalent of "total war" -- if a politician were seen as being friendly with political opponents they would probably be destroyed in primaries by party rivals using it as red meat for how they were "soft" or an "x in name only" or some similar idiocy.
Though interestingly the Obamas and Clintons don't get the same criticism for that, apart from occasionally being held up to suggest the centre left wing of the democrats isn't that different from the old bush-era republicans
Can anyone explain why??
Every day that politics has been operating since she took office has been one crisis after another. The first disaster was the mini budget that everyone pointed out and how poorly it was handled, but the nail in the coffin was the chaos in parliament yesterday. In short, the opposition called a vote on fracking, which is supported by Truss' "pro growth" government, but was opposed in the conservative manifesto. The g…
The need to put a UFC octagon in Parliament.
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Britain, Brazil, Australia, Philippines, India, Turkey, U.S … it is mind numbing that of all the good, talented people these countries have, only the dumbest, worst of the worst end up in positions of power. Depressing. At this point, we can just randomly pick a citizen to be President or PM. We might have better chances that way
It's not surprising though, who would really want to go into politics, in a country where no matter what you do, you'll have almost half the populace hating you? Anyone who has the skills to do well in politics could do well in business and lead a better, more private, more rewarded life. And I think that's exactly what happens.
2) The US system of open primaries where anybody can vote that we adopted in the 70s seems like a mistake in retrospect and there's a good reason no other country does things this way. The UK Conservative party's system, adopted in the 2010, of allowing people who pay party fees to vote in primaries seems like an even worse idea in terms of candidate selection though it does have the advantage of raising money for the party.
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Both countries suffer from winner-takes-all district systems, and would probably be much improved by a system of proportional representation.
Because Italy and Israel benefit so much from their proportional representation systems...
[1] yes governments were weak and were replaced often, but that's a feature, not a problem.