David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election • Hacker News Board

Re: David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election

#41

Post by mseebach » Fri, May 08, 2015, 2:24 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #34

mseebach wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not random at all, it's just that the national vote doesn't factor at all (only the vote in each seat does). It has the (often overlooked, IMO) benefit of a strong 1:1 connection between constituent and MP: even if you didn't vote for the MP, a majority of your neighbours did, and the MP is still your representative in parliament. Organising locally to boot out your MP is much, much simpler than organising natio…

The existence of "safe seats" in the current FPTP system, into which parties can (and do) parachute their key players makes your take on FPTP too optimistic. See my comments elsewhere for links about voting systems, already in use in the UK, that seek to balance local representation and proportionality. PR (and FPTP for that matter) can encompass a variety of actual voting systems with important differences between t…

I did not mean to imply that FPTP is flawless, it certainly is not - merely that it has some benefits and PR has some drawbacks that often get overlooked in the pursuit of "numerical fairness".

Re: David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election

#42

Post by mseebach » Fri, May 08, 2015, 2:32 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #36

mseebach wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems they went all in on becoming king-maker to a Labour minority government. That didn't work out. I see two possibilities: 1: They try to keep up the energy kick and scream bloody murder at every turn, but never achieve anything, as they have exactly zero leverage to affect anything in Westminster. They fizzle out, and nothing much happens and things return to normal. Their big shot, independence referendum, ha…

They got "their hands dirty on actual politics and compromise" as (intially a minority) government in Scotland, and have continued to gain support ever since. I believe Alex Salmond was one of few political leaders ever to leave with a higher approval rating than when he started. Apologies if you already knew that, but there's a lot of commentary about recently that seems utterly ignorant of those facts. It's probabl…

Getting their hands dirty in Westminster after the heavily anti-Tory (and anti-Labour, too) campaign is quite different from doing the same in Holyrood. I lack the required insight, but was local Scottish campaigns ever that aggressive?

Unionists leaders would certainly do well to make sure the Scots feel part of the union - but with a SNP in scenario one, Westminster is unlikely to be the venue for that.

They could work directly with Holyrood on efforts, or work directly through non-devolved powers.

Re: David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election

#43

Post by coob » Fri, May 08, 2015, 2:42 PM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #36

mseebach wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems they went all in on becoming king-maker to a Labour minority government. That didn't work out. I see two possibilities: 1: They try to keep up the energy kick and scream bloody murder at every turn, but never achieve anything, as they have exactly zero leverage to affect anything in Westminster. They fizzle out, and nothing much happens and things return to normal. Their big shot, independence referendum, ha…

They got "their hands dirty on actual politics and compromise" as (intially a minority) government in Scotland, and have continued to gain support ever since. I believe Alex Salmond was one of few political leaders ever to leave with a higher approval rating than when he started. Apologies if you already knew that, but there's a lot of commentary about recently that seems utterly ignorant of those facts. It's probabl…

> one of few political leaders ever to leave with a higher approval rating than when he started

Clinton, who else?

Re: David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election

#44

Post by adamc » Fri, May 08, 2015, 2:46 PM UTC

aaardvark wrote: post #30

GordonS wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the significance of being an American in your wondering?

"As an American" has apparently become a euphemism for "I know nothing about the subject, so explain this to me like you would to a small child".

It means I read the papers but make no special claims to regional understanding. Sheesh.

Re: David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election

#45

Post by ZeroGravitas » Fri, May 08, 2015, 3:00 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #42

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They got "their hands dirty on actual politics and compromise" as (intially a minority) government in Scotland, and have continued to gain support ever since. I believe Alex Salmond was one of few political leaders ever to leave with a higher approval rating than when he started. Apologies if you already knew that, but there's a lot of commentary about recently that seems utterly ignorant of those facts. It's probabl…

Getting their hands dirty in Westminster after the heavily anti-Tory (and anti-Labour, too) campaign is quite different from doing the same in Holyrood. I lack the required insight, but was local Scottish campaigns ever that aggressive? Unionists leaders would certainly do well to make sure the Scots feel part of the union - but with a SNP in scenario one, Westminster is unlikely to be the venue for that. They could…

The Labour party has adopted something referred to as "The Bain Principle" which means they voted against anything that the SNP voted for, even ideas that they initially supported or suggested themselves.

That's fairly aggressive.

Meanwhile the SNP where working together with the Tories in the devolved parliment to get things done (despite popular lore, there are actually Conservatives in Scotland and with PR they get a proportionate number of votes in the running of the parliament).

Re: David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election

#46

Post by protomyth » Fri, May 08, 2015, 3:19 PM UTC

thret wrote: post #2

This makes no sense to me. Ulster Unionist Party had 114,935 votes and got two seats. UKIP had 3,841,346 votes and got one seat. Conservative had 11,207,547 votes and received 326 seats.

Its a matter of what exactly you want to represent in your government.

If you want to represent political parties then First Past the Post is horrible and seats by percentage is what you want. That would mean that their is really no reason to represent local needs since you really need to run a full country campaign and will probably pick dense packed areas to spend advertising.

If you want the geographic region (however you define it) to have a representative then the opposite is true. First Past the Post means they have to campaign locally if they want to get in. Percentage of seats by party means local campaigning is just a bit of nostalgia and a waste of campaign money.

It comes down to what do you value and what relationship you want between the voter and national government.

Re: David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election

#47

Post by aaardvark » Fri, May 08, 2015, 7:06 PM UTC

adamc wrote: post #44

aaardvark wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As an American" has apparently become a euphemism for "I know nothing about the subject, so explain this to me like you would to a small child".

It means I read the papers but make no special claims to regional understanding. Sheesh.

Just a joke, lighten up.

Re: David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election

#48

Post by yarper » Tue, May 12, 2015, 3:16 PM UTC

madaxe_again wrote: post #25

fulafel wrote: post #10

Interesting that Liberal Democrats still have larger % of votes than Green Party after all that happened.

Many here voted lib dem in a bid to keep the Tories out, but would rather have voted green. We're a Tory seat for the first time in decades. Ho hum.

This also happened in my constituency

Re: David Cameron Wins a Slim Majority in UK General Election

#49

Post by yarper » Tue, May 12, 2015, 3:32 PM UTC

I posted on HN a while ago saying that there was no chance of this happening. Obviously it did and I was wrong, but I still don't think it's a big win for the conservatives.

Two or three things happened that undermined the competition and swung it imo;

1) SNP won big in Scotland

Although the SNP has pretty much pulled the policy sheet from labour and added a few Scotland specific things in, the vast majority of seats they took were from labour. Fears of the SNP deciding politics in Westminster also diminished labour support in England. For example, I vote labour but am pro-union so could never support the SNP directly or indirectly. Therefore I can't vote labour.

In a sense they were damaged by their own success, their whole plan was hinged on being the kingmaker for labour which actually instead of hooking onto labour support, actually cut labour support (drastically).

2) The crushing of libdems.

The lib dems lost 50 or so seats, a crushing defeat but a big loss was expected. The thing is, most of those seats flipped conservative, so we voted to punish libdems and the conservative party profited the most from it.

3) UKIP leveler

At the outset, Labour was set to be split by the SNP, and the conservatives split by UKIP. While the first happened (SNP won a lot of seats), the latter did not. UKIP did not make a lot of headway (for good reason probably). FPTP while it does have its flaws, does tend to keep "hated" parties out. Given the choice between conservative and UKIP most people vote conservative (tactically).

tl;dr scotland voted conservative, and we hated libdems more than tories