The whole point of democratic elections is to allow for a peaceful transfer of power—without violence—when a government embodying one type of policy has become widely unpopular.
The problem we've gotten into in the UK (and also the USA) is that extremists have seized control of one of the regular incumbent parties, and the other parties have responded perversely by moving towards them. Removing the ability for a course change after an election.
Labour or Tories, they're still neoliberals.
@rpluim Whenever I look at Kier Starmer I can't stop myself humming the first verse of "First We Take Manhattan" by Leonard Cohen:
"They sentenced me to thirty years of boredom,
For trying to change the system from within—"
Is this the same Biden who stopped the rail strike?
The same Democrats who propelled America to be the largest producer of fossil fuels in the world, under Obama?
As for the "Inflation Reduction Act", the money spent there is a tiny fraction of the fossil fuel subsidies that US pays.
What happened to single payer medicine? The same system that all other developed countries have had for fifty years?
My week was dominated by Biden invoking the Railway Labor Act, asking Congress to implement the deal he and Marty Walsh and worked out with the rail companies and unions back in September. Congress then did. There was an effort to include seven sick days in the contract, but Republicans naturally filibustered it, with help […]
I and every other human certainly heard about his completely symbolic appearance on a picket line.
I read that article at the time: "I explained that nearly every president would have done the same thing." That's because every President since Reagan has been hostile to unions.
And again, what about socialized medicine? Cutting the fossil fuel subsidies? Decreasing the military budget?
1/
@asociologist @cstross When we left America in late 2016, people thought it was because we thought Trump was going to be elected.
But in fact, Obama and Hillary Clinton were the ones that drove us away. Oh, either of them on a bad day is better than Trump on the best day of his life. But that doesn't make them good.
Obama had a simply horrifyingly bad record in every way. I really thought I had kept my expectations as low as possible and yet I was still devastated.
2/
Here's a long thread, and that still doesn't have all of it: https://toot.community/@TomSwirly/111363300490042037
When it came down to it, Obama was business as usual in every single way and America got neither Hope nor Change.
US Democrats ask for nothing, get less than that, and are simply happy with "not the Republicans". This is certainly very desirable but at some point America would have had to have stopped moving backwards and started moving forwards.
This did not happen.
3/
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] I've lived in the UK, Austria, Canada, 30+ years in the US, and now the Netherlands. I waited over thirty years for some sort of medical reform. The ACA fixed nothing about America's terminally broken health care system - it simply extended the horrible insurance system to more people. Medical bankruptcies are higher than ever, and outcomes are worse. 1/
@asociologist @cstross We left. We shan't be back. Thirty+ years is too long to be in a relationship with a country where my political ideas, completely boring and regular elsewhere, are generally considered childish, contemptible and stupid. I was no longer willing to have my taxes pay for endless genocides while schools crumble.
But most Americans can't do that and I don't understand why they aren't calling the DNC every day screaming at them.
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/325355
/thread
A perfectly good word, past tense of get.
Originally American, it seems now to be accepted in the UK as well:
@cstross It's a shame you don't have preferential voting.
You'd still likely end up with two major parties, but it is safe for people to express their true preferences without wasting their vote. So it becomes obvious if the left-ish party isn't left enough for the electorate, or vice versa for the right.
@jamesh Yes, I think the defeat of AV in the 2011 referendum was perhaps an even worse setback for the UK than the Brexit vote. Not least because under AV it seems to me that both Labour and Conservative parties might have split over Brexit leading to more forceful remain campaigning.
Also, with more parliamentary parties, and so more coalitions, there'd be more of a culture of negotiation rather than the current culture of screaming at each other then taking a vote and whoever wins just saying sucks for you to the losers. This might have served to make the actual Brexit negotiations after the referendum less of a shambles.
@edavies @cstross preferential voting alone won't necessarily increase minor party representation or encourage coalitions.
Here in Australia, The Greens received 12% of the vote but only won 4 out of 151 lower house seats. Single member electorates inflate the influence of the major parties. That only really changes when you also have multi-member electorates.
@jamesh I don't disagree that multi-member seats are better (which we have in the Scottish Parliament, though with some odd quirks).
But, even with single-member seats preferential voting will reduce the need for and power of parties to apply so much discipline and also reduce the penalty for parties splitting.
The Tories got such a large majority of seats in the last UK general election because they got more votes than each of Labour, Lib Dems, Greens, etc, individually in quite a few constituencies but nothing like an overall majority of votes. It seems likely more Lib Dems would put Labour as their second preference and vice-versa so in a preferential voting system maybe a Labour or Lib Dem candidate would have won in quite a few of those seats.
The Lib Dems are, at least in part, a split from Labour via the short-lived SDP.
But, yeah, a simple change of voting system keeping single-member constituencies wouldn't immediately bring a change of culture but it would have opened the way to further voting reform and longer-term culture change.
@cstross We're reclaiming our state and our country, but it's a slow process because unlike the GQP, we don't consider armed and violent sedition to be acceptable political "speech".
That said, we Ohioans gave our gerrymandered Republican wanna-be overlords two collective middle fingers yesterday (or two sets of two fingers, if you prefer), and next year we're going to take away their ability to draw district lines and give it to a non-partisan citizen panel, and maybe even ranked-choice voting might make the ballot.
If you piss off enough people, then enough people will show up to vote you down. We had nearly 50% turnout for an odd-year issues-only election, which is about on par with midterms and about 20% higher than we normally get on odd-year elections. The only silver lining for our wingnuts in the state house is that the vote was *this* year, rather than *next* year when it would have boosted Democratic turnout.
@cstross You have to look at lower down.
Why have the populace in general accepted that only fascist-flavored policies could ever work?
It's the media. The corporate-owned media.
You can't get anyone worthwhile elected without taking that incessent "too caring, won't work" drone out of the equation.
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