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The strange case of Britain’s demise

economist.com

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Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#521

Post by wpietri »

scatters wrote: post #367
Tycho wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people criticise FPTP using these hypothetical scenarios that do not resemble the actual outcomes.

Because they do resemble the actual outcomes. The 2 major parties in the UK regularly get majorities in Parliament on far less than 50% of the vote. In the USA gerrymandering has been brought to a fine art. How can this not contribute to discontent, when the majority of people get a government they didn't vote for?

Exactly. A good example in the US is Wisconsin, where FPTP has been exploited heavily. See the top graph here: https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-most-serious-c...

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#522

Post by tobylane »

TapWaterBandit wrote: post #205
tobylane wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think overwhelming is the right word, his vote share was around Blair’s average. Now that half of Tory MPs have been cabinet members, it’s harder to demand loyalty by dangling a job for votes. Especially the ministerial roles that the public are aware of. The article seems to be avoiding the term "lame duck period". It reads an excessively selective set of opinions, and it's unclear who should be trying harde…

I'm astounded people are STILL burying their heads in the sand about Corbyn. But I suppose that is a large part of the reason why labour was losing for so long they kept denying the obvious reality that the electorate just did not like Corbyn but wouldn't get rid of him for internal political/ideological reasons.

I reject the idea that I'm burying my head in the sand, if that's your reaction to my post. I'm wary of expanding on it on HN. The short version is that there were genuine policy reasons to dislike him (even from a POV left of Blair), overwhelmed by the media and the Labour party disinformation. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-62226042

Do you know who the article is saying should try harder?

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#523

Post by brigandish »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #476
brigandish wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> whose talent base was massively thinned by a Brexit Purity witch hunt How many MPs were removed in this witch hunt? And why is it a witch hunt if the electorate is told "this is the most important question for at least a generation", they vote on it, and the representatives in parliament do their damnedest to prevent carrying out the thing voted for, and thus the electorate decide to remove some of them? That sound…

The “witch hunt” refers to the actions taken by the incoming Johnson government, who kicked a bunch of generally respected, experienced parliamentarians out of the party because they weren’t “Brexity” enough. We’re not even talking about anti-Brexit people - just the ones that resisted the obviously broken approach that was being taken. The result was a government forced to bang on about how great an objectively bad…

My first question would be, respected by whom, and my second would be, whose respect matters? My guess would be that it was the voters who were most important as they provided a majority to the next most important people, the executive. Do you think those voters respect those MPs? Let's see.

21 Tory MPs had the whip removed for defying the party line and signalling their intent to defy Brexit:

- Kenneth Clarke, sniffed the political winds and stood down. Got given a golden handshake to the Lords.

- Philip Hammond - you must be joking, right? Still managed to get a seat in the Lords though.

- Rory Stewart. Do you think those who voted Brexit respect him? Might win in a contest with Hammond over who is disliked less. So well respected he couldn't even keep his campaign for mayor of London going to the start line, even with London being a remain stronghold.

- Dominic Grieve would not even beat Guy Verhofstadt in a contest voted on by leave supporters over who is liked less, as evidenced by losing his seat to his Tory replacement. I half expected Guy Fawkes day to be renamed Dominic Grieve day. Still could.

- David Gauke has an instructive Wikipedia entry[1]:

> Gauke stood in his constituency as an independent candidate, and came second with 26% of the vote, by far the best result of any of those former Conservative Members who sought re-election as independents.

That'll make the rest of the list an anti-climax but let's have some fun drilling the point home:

- Antoinette Sandbach, stood as a LibDem and lost.

- Sir Oliver Letwin, didn't stand again. I don't know anyone that respects him[2].

- Justine Greening, did not stand. Why not? She was savvy enough to see what was coming.

- Sam Gyimah, stood as a LibDem, lost seat to Conservatives, coming third behind Labour.

- Guto Bebb, didn't stand. Previously managed to gain much respect by bullying a man with Asperger's[3].

- Anne Milton, lost seat in 4th place. Tories kept her seat with a leave supporter in her place.

- Alistair Burt, Caroline Nokes, Greg Clark, Sir Nicholas Soames, Ed Vaizey, Margot James, Richard Benyon, Stephen Hammond, Steve Brine and Richard Harrington had the whip restored. Soames didn't stand at the next election, Harrington, Vaizey and Benyon got bumped up to the Lords where they love remainer Tories. Stephen Hammond and Steve Brine kept their seats with much reduced majorities.

Jo Johnson and Amber Rudd also resigned from the cabinet in support of the rebels and stood down at the next election. Johnson was bumped up to the Lords, because there aren't enough anti-democratic lords, apparently, though their record (and entire structure and history) would suggest otherwise.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gauke

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Letwin#1985_Broadwater_...

[3] https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/aberconwy-...

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#524

Post by dragonwriter »

Adverblessly wrote: post #487
dragonwriter wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here in Israel with proportional representation, every small party has outsized power since every one of them has enough power to vote down the current government by joining hands with the opposition. Unless there are no minor parties outside of government, isn’t that offset by the risk of what they currently get from being in government being lost while the rest of government continues by bringing in one or more c…

You are correct in theory, it is certainly a technical possibility to avoid such a problem. In practice, this isn't done and isn't possible since the major factions are too at odds with each other to create such a situation. In particular, everyone in the center-left knows that there's no point in trying to cooperate with Binyamin Netanyahu because he is guaranteed to betray them and not uphold his part of whatever b…

> In particular, everyone in the center-left knows that there's no point in trying to cooperate with Binyamin Netanyahu because he is guaranteed to betray them and not uphold his part of whatever bargain they make. Everyone in the right knows that they can't cooperate with anyone outside of Binyamin Netanyahu because they'll be accused of being evil terrorist supporting leftists and will lose many votes in the next election.

So, by your description, due to the polarizing influence of a particular personality (a—and I get that Netanyahu’s political longevity makes this east to forget—transitory situation) you have, despite (but not because of proportional representation) the dynamics of a two-party system with potentially influential potential defectors from a majority, rather than the normal dynamics of multiparty coalition building.

Guess what, that’s a fairly common state of FPTP independent of personalities; the potential defectors just aren’t conveniently marked with a different party label than the solid partisans.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#525

Post by MrMan »

sparks1970 wrote: post #496
ashwagary wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put simply, "when most of the thieving stopped, the thriving stopped." Britain faltering is not "strange" and has little to do with political party, rather its ability to use violence to extract capital from productive outside entities and support its welfare state is nearing an end. The Economist has a long history of avoiding the elephant in the room because the people running it are hopelessly biased.

Who are these productive outside entities who's capital is being violently extracted and why is this system (whatever it is) coming to an end? I'm genuinely interested but you don't support your assertion with any evidence.

I think they are talking about the long tail of colonialism maybe. I locate Britain's suicide as very very recent - when they left the EU.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#526

Post by Jochim »

hermitcrab wrote: post #517
Jochim wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The centrists of the Labour party conducted literal purges after intentionally smearing their own party with fabricated allegations of homophobia and anti-semitism which they spread through the media[0]. Not to mention sabotaging campaign activities by directing resources away from swing seats. There is certainly animosity from the left but largely due to the ironically Stalin-esque tactics employed by Labour centris…

That link is not happy reading. I guess it is not surprising that the centrists hate the left back. However saying someone is “truly repulsive” or “literally makes me sick” is not necessarily racist, just because they are from an ethnic minority (note: I don't know the full context). I have wondered how real the accusations of anti-semitism in the Labour party were. Is it a deliberate conflation of anti-Israel with a…

> I have wondered how real the accusations of anti-semitism in the Labour party were. Is it a deliberate conflation of anti-Israel with anti-semitism by political opponents (who I assumed were Conservatives, rather than Labour)?

This is precisely what seems to have happened. Unelected officials on the right of the Labour party appear to have been at the forefront however.

I don't doubt that there are some people in the Labour party that might harbour anti-semitic views. Those people should be removed. However, the only word I can think of to describe the reaction at the time is "Hysteria".

The thing I find most disturbing about this is the willingness of those in power at the Labour party to target at least 35 Jewish members with claims of anti-semitism[0]:

> An 82-year-old Jewish woman, who is being investigated by Labour for alleged antisemitism for the third time in less than three years, is threatening legal action against the party, claiming it has unlawfully discriminated against her based on her belief in anti-Zionism. [1]

> The Labour Party has expelled one of its most prominent Jewish members – by telling a right-wing newspaper first, and allowing a journalist to leak it. [2]

[0] https://www.jewishvoiceforlabour.org.uk/article/a-disproport...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/dec/20/jewish-woma...

[2] https://www.thecanary.co/uk/2022/12/16/labour-has-expelled-a...

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#527

Post by johnflan »

prof-dr-ir wrote: post #35

As a former inhabitant of England, I always thought that those in charge suffered from a uniquely wide 'competence gap' which I would like to define as the difference between someone's self-perceived competence and someone's actual competence. (The term is probably useful more broadly...) Maybe it is the historically class-based society alluded to in the article, but it always stunned me how those at the top, and in…

> kamikwasi budget First time I heard that, love it

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#528

Post by justin66 »

binarycrusader wrote: post #380
justin66 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> average age of a representative is 75 Come on. It's 58. I didn't even have to type to check this, just "Search Google for..."

Congress? Sure. But the Senate? Median age there is ~69 years. Median term length? Nearly 14 years! https://infogalactic.com/info/List_of_current_United_States_...

It would be a bit odd if the median term length were much longer, and if you look at an actuarial table you'll see why. I guess that's one advantage to electing the ancient: built-in term limits.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#529

Post by astrange »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #493
astrange wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immigration doesn’t lower wages. Telling people this usually doesn’t convince them because they just want an excuse to complain about immigrants, but nevertheless it’s true. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-immigration-doesnt-red... In particular Australia’s population is 1/3rd immigrants. Australia’s minimum and median wages are both significantly higher than the UK. Does that mean there are so many immigrants…

There's a very big assumption in your claim, which is that immigration is balanced among 'social classes', skills, jobs,etc. In that case, indeed overall demand grows along with overall supply. Australia has an immigration system aimed at achieving that. Things do not work out so great if immigration isn't balanced. In the UK there has been a huge influx of unskilled or low skilled workers from Eastern Europe that ha…

The papers I linked are empirical evidence, not assumptions. There’s two specifically on the UK that find no evidence of this.

They also find that skilled immigration systems don’t always work, because all immigrants tend to be unusually highly educated anyway, but also significantly downskill the jobs they choose after arriving. So you’d expect them to always compete with low end natives, but in fact they don’t because they mainly compete with other immigrants instead. And “compete” isn’t how labor works anyway, since all workers are also customers.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#530

Post by [deleted] »

csomar wrote: post #417
Quarrelsome wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the scale of Empires is anywhere near the same to make the two particularly comparable. Remember that Great Britain effectively bankrolled one side of the money incinerator that was the First Great War alone (at least for the first two years) which somewhat demonstrates the exceptional zenith of its power.

They also don't have the same size. Portugal has around 10million people. Would you say the British empire was x6 times larger than the Portuguese one?

[deleted]
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