251–260 of 651 posts
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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...
What happens next will be interesting . At this point, a general election would be the obviously correct solution. It's clear that the conservative party don't have a platform and can't agree major policy points amongst themselves. However that would require conservative MPs to vote for it, which is the turkeys voting for Christmas so unlikely to happen, so I'd expect we'll have to wait till 2024 for that election. T…
> a general election would be the obviously correct solution As much as I'd love a GE and to see Tory MPs swept from power en-masse, that's just not how a Parliamentary system works. Everyone in the UK voted for (whether they think it or not) an MP to elect them for five years. Those MPs get to choose who leads them.
1) I really like that in the UK system if the leader is crazy the party can just kick them to the curb rather than basically having to support them even when they do terrible things. 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 2…
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One of my favorite C-Span shows was The Prime Minister's Questions[0]. Don't mess with British politicians. Even the grumpiest old dogs can savage most American politicians, as the folks that tried roasting Galloway found out[1]. [0] https://www.c-span.org/series/?PrimeMinisterQue [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5u1skEoqLs
This always seemed to me like pure theater. Have there ever been any serious consequences to anything anyone ever said during the Prime Minister's Questions? Or are they (like every other politician the world over) just putting on a good show for the folks back home?
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Technically speaking, King Charles III does not actually need to PM to ask in order to dismiss parliament and force a new election. Given that Charles I and Charles II both dismissed parliament maybe Charles III will grow a pair and do the same. It is somewhat ironic that while dismissing parliament caused the downfall of the monarchy for Charles I is it likely to buy a significant amount of time for the monarchy if…
The other way round. If he gets out of his limited role and engages into politics, it will be the end of monarchy.
One reason is that the British nationalized services that Thatcher sold off to private investors in the 1980s (railroads, electricity, etc.) no longer exist, other than the national health service, which the British public would riot over if it was privatized. With nothing left to cannibalize, there was no way for the government to boost the financial markets, leading to the collapse of the pound.
This is good news, as it signals that the era of neoliberalism, with all its intellectual hypocrisy and disastrous outcomes, is suffering one death blow after another, and will finally be discarded on the dustbin of history once and for all.
I know this topic is important in substance and the thing I'm about to say is an aesthetic issue, but as an American watching this unfold I have admired the Brits for the sense of heart that still seems to be present in their politics. I'm referring to the parliamentary sessions in which, even though they're savagely roasting each other, they're doing in a way that feels somehow good-hearted and doesn't lay bare the…
That's roughly 1 member per 100,000 people. You know your member. Parliament is dissolved every 5 years. So elections are pretty regular, but not overwhelming.
There's a House of Lords, but they seem to have far less power. The work of Parliament gets done in the Commons.
The main legislative body of the US is Congress, comprising of the Senate and the House of Representatives. There are 100 Senators and 435 Representatives. The US has roughly 330 million people. So about 5 times the population being represented by more than 100 fewer people.
Senators are a little weird. They serve for 6 years but about a third of them are up for election every two years. And never two from the same state. So a Senator is either on Cycle 1, Cycle 2, or Cycle 3. So every 2 to 4 years, a state gets to choose one person to represent the entire state in one of the houses of Congress.
Then for Representatives, all of them are up for reelection every two years. As soon as they are sworn in, they're already thinking about reelection. And the number of representatives are set by the Census taken every 10 years. Right now, California has 53 representatives for 39 million people. About half the population of the UK, but being represented by under a tenth.
So in the US, politicians are more akin to personalities than actual people. We essentially elect brands, not people.
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We've had two female Prime Ministers before her, one of whom was quite successful as a politician (bloody awful for the country though). It wasn't sexism, she is genuinely completely useless. Fractally shitty, in that if you examine any part of her stint in politics it is every bit as shitty and inept as the whole.
It's been clear for a long time that she's totally incompetent, the part that mystifies me is why Tory MPs gave members the choice of her or Sunak. That outcome was also obvious, for obvious reasons. Some of the other candidates were at least unknown quantities and at least one even gave the impression of being not entirely mad.
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Not all the tax cuts announced were bad or badly received. Especially, I think that the cancellation of the rise in corporation tax was very welcome and in fact economists now say that the rise to 25% will make the recession deeper and longer (unsurprisingly, frankly). The issue was that the other cuts, especially abolishing 45p income tax rate but frankly also the decrease of the basic rate, were not discussed, not…
Now that the rise in corporation tax to 25% is back, the UK press are of course pushing claims by economists that it will make the oncoming recession deeper and longer. That narrative was nowhere to be found prior to the u-turn though, with the media consensus being that of course lower corporation tax wouldn't help grow the economy and only ideologically-driven right wingers who ignored the evidence believed otherwi…
It's quite a hike and it sends the UK among the highest taxed countries in Europe...