I’m curious how many Restore votes are former Reform voters who are attracted to the more hard-line stance, and how many are former Reform voters who are too dumb or inattentive to tell the two (admittedly quite similar) names apart
Based on my sample size of one, it’s that reform aren’t far enough to the right. Aren’t mother in laws wonderful.
Maybe that keeping that FPTP thingy isn’t the brightest idea.
It’s sadly never going to change. You’d need Green or Lib Dem in power with a majority of Green Lib Dem SNP in the house to push this through. Labour and Tories will simply vote it down. Or fiddle it such that the option is FPTP or an option nobody wants like they did in the last referendum.
I think theres a chance of a Labour minority needing green/lib dem support to form a government and them making voting reform their price. Labour members are in favour and a good chunk of the MPs are too.
This exact situation played out during the last coalition, where the compromise was a vote on it (because changing the method of voting without a clear mandate is unlikely to be popular) and once again everyone voted to keep FPTP, which was painful to watch.
The Lib Dems basically gave away their negotiating power in the coalition agreement for nothing but an expensive failed attempt to change from FPTP.
Note: “exact” isn’t accurate as it would be different parties but it would still be an incumbent relic of two party politics vs a less well funded party.
The Lib Dems basically gave away their negotiating power in the coalition agreement for nothing but an expensive failed attempt to change from FPTP.
Expensive is an understatement. They threw away their promise on student fees in the process of this. Causing their vote share to collapse at the next election. Meaning that Cameron’s plan to offer an EU referendum in the manifesto, but negotiate it away during coalition talks wasn’t applicable. Meaning he had to actually offer the Brexit referendum…
I hear what you’re saying. I just don’t think it will happen even in that situation. Labour MPs will be whipped into scuppering it. A minority of Labour MPs can’t overturn the Labour machine that rather loves FPTP to entrench their status.
The Labour party officially backs proportional representation, but yeah it benefits the Labour machine so it’s likely Labour would scupper it against the will of its membership
Yeah look at disability income as an example. No one thought labour would actually cut it since a majority of labour members were against cutting before the election.
But Starmer and the rest of Tory Lite made the MPs toe the line.
You mean the one where there was a huge Labour back-bench rebellion and the government backed down and made essesntially zero cuts?
Nah the government made getting PIP far harder all future claimants this will lead to an estimated 1 million less PIP claims by 2030. And slashed the UC health top up for new claimants (nearly removed 2000£ / per year).
Please don‘t fucking minimise how awful this is many disabled people are already barely surviving this will absolutely lead to excess deaths. I say this as someone on Disability income myself.
Official estimates by the government itself estimate this will lead to an additional 150‘000 working age people being in poverty.
Importantly, this estimate does not include any potential positive impact of the bolstered £1billion annual funding, by 2029/2030, or the additional £300million of support in this SR period that is being brought forward. These measures will support those with disabilities and long-term health conditions into employment, which we expect to mitigate the poverty impact among people it supports into work.
Oh look, only considering negative changes and not positive ones leads to seeing a negative outcome, very surprising.
Maybe, but I think that their desire for power will overwhelm the Machine’s hatred of getting a better voting system. If the other parties make it clear that they put this in their kings speach or they dont back it, I cant see Labour saying “no we’d rther collapse the government have another election and almost certainly lose seats” Especially when doing that would cause huge outrage in the party over something the majority want.
Maybe I’m just too jaded. But they’ve not shown any backbone so far. Why would they start? If they had a track record of voting for sensible policies then they would have defied the Labour machine and voted down enacting Brexit for a start. They might have voted against needless wars in the Middle East. They might have voted against making criminals of grannies that are against genocide. But they don’t. They only know how to grasp at power long enough to enrich themselves.
But like I said. I’m a jaded bitch.
I dont expect them to just choose to do the right thing for no reason, like you say, if they were going to do that then they would have already. But put them in a situation where doing the right thing aligns with them not losing power (and for individual MPs not losing their seat) and I think they would. Mostly for selfish reasons but it also helps that a lot of them are in favour of it and most of them know its the “right” thing to do.
But 👺Alternative Vote👺 is slightly confusing for the plebs! Impossible. We must keep this simple system that disenfranchises basically everyone.
