The Tories tried Tony Blair MkII and failed. That's the Tory party - the cuddly face of the racist right wing - they've been around forever and everybody knows who they are, with a young and shiny and airbrushed Eton old boy fronting their campaign, and even they couldn't manage to scrape together a majority with a completely ****ed FPTP electoral system.
Actually yeah I can see how that would be problematic too. AV might result in a guaranteed Labour majority in too many cases (purely because all Liberals' second-choice votes would be Labour, not Tory), and a guaranteed majority for any party is a shocking idea.
That's settled then. We need proper PR. AV won't work. If this parliament manages to bring in PR I will shit a brick, frankly.
Let me get one thing straight - the Liberal Democrats want an electoral system that suits them best. As do Labour as do Tory. This idea Lib Dems are all for real electoral reform is nonsense and what we are witnessing with all these back room deals proves that.
Like Cameron or not he was right! This hung parliament nonsense is chaos, and chaos we'll have to get used to.
The Lib Dems are completely allowed to complain about the validity of the system, because they had 23% of the popular vote, but only earned 8% of the seats. They may well want a change for selfish reasons, but Labour and the Tories want the status-quo for selfish reasons too!
I'm not naive enough to think that the Lib Dems are above partisan manoeuvring, but they are right in that the democratic process in the UK is outdated and broken, and yes it will benefit them to fix it but you cannot fairly judge PR as anything other than fixing a broken system. At least if you intend to continue to describe that system as democratic and not elitist.
You could look at it the other way: The Tories didn't win a majority. In reality that means that only around 20% of the British electorate wanted the Tories to govern us. So why should they be guaranteed to be the ruling party if they can't agree with any of the other parties? It's not really going against the popular vote if the Lib Dems and Labour form a government. If the Libs' vote was properly represented they would have a majority when paired with Labour anyway.
Your assuming people would vote the same way if we had PR of course.
After all these back room dealings and goings on I can't imagine the public have an appetite for more of the same that you would inevitably get with hung parliaments. Of course FPTP caused this but when Cameron said hung parliaments are messy, many said it was propaganda. He is being proved correct and if we do have a referendum on voting reform it may not go the way you think it will.
The right is only split between the Tories and extreme marginal nobodies like UKIP and the BNP.
The left vote gets split between Labour and also national parties like Plaid Cymru and the SNP, Liberal Democrats and Greens.
If you took the house elected as of the 6th May, the Tories took the largest number of seats and indeed the largest proportion of the vote, but as a proportion of the electorate they are still outnumbered. And I honestly think that a coalition of all other parties excluding the Tories would work.
And - this is the point you need to consider - the Tory vote represents 36% of the vote, whereas the Labour + Lib Dem vote represents 52% of the vote. They might still not have a parliamentary majority but that is a failing of the current electoral system (and the reason I keep bringing it up).
Given PR, we would see clearly that the Tories only managed to secure about 1/3 of the vote. And the other two popular parties combined outnumber the tories in polling percentage by a huge majority. It might not be a majority in the commons but that's a great demonstration of exactly how much the current democratic system is skewed against the Liberal Democrats.
The rainbow coalition would force England to take a massive chunk of the cuts. No way the Welsh, NI, and Scottish Nationalists would supports cuts without some sort of deal.
The markets (our creditors) are losing patience and a rainbow coalition would be the final nail in the coffin for them. Every time a Lab-Lib coalition has seen to be more likely the pound has weakened. It's quite clear what they think. Even some within the Labour party recognise anything other than a Lib-Con deal would be a disaster! The best thing for the Cons would be to let the children play and wreck what's left of UK PLC and the mop up at the next election.
If you take the Intrepid slant away, what they've actually said is that the pound may suffer as a result of a Lib-Lab coalition policies, not as a result of the coalition itself. This therefore is made on the pretext that a Con-Lib coalition would yield better policies.
In other words, it's speculation.
Of course the Conservatives are seen as more business friendly, they always will be seen that way.
Personaly i'm not in favour of a Lib-Lab coalition, I don't think having Labour in government for 4 terms will do anything to stem the tide of corruption.
But at the end of the day if all I get out of this parliament is a better electoral system then that's a good little victory. You can't win a war in a day and all that.
It's just prejudice and discrimination. Everyone on here thinks if you have aspirations to actually do something in this country you must inherently be a toff.
... and lefty left Nick Clegg. What about his schooling? He a toffy toff toff too?
And there's nowt wrong with good schooling. I'd rather have that than what I had at school - constant risk of knife attacks and violence! Didn't learn much either other than what I learnt at state school I could have learnt in 5 minutes on the net.
When does someone's background come into credibility though? Brown had a 'working class background' and despite all of that 'real living' he's bankrupted the country leaving us in serious shit. My life growing up was pretty tough and went to a terrible school. Does that make my views better than those of a rich boy who's had it on a plate? nope!
In fact I think all of the present or now past leaders are as not much better than each other regardless of where they are from.
