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Jack Graham

Jack Graham writes and podcasts about culture and politics from a Gothic Marxist-Humanist perspective. He co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper. Support Jack on Patreon.

7 Comments

  1. Anonymous
    April 13, 2015 @ 1:52 pm

    Deducing that a Liberal vote won't block the Tories from a single election whose electoral mathematics yielded a majority for a Conservative-Liberal coalition and a minority for a Labour-Liberal coalition doesn't really seem like a fair test. The effects of a vote (if you don't live in a safe seat) are surely probabilistic, depending on how the greater election goes. Tipping seats from Conservative to Liberal could have blocked the Tories, if we were lucky. (Or at least, this isn't disproven.) But too many seats went blue, so we weren't.

    Reply

  2. SpaceSquid
    April 15, 2015 @ 4:46 am

    All of this.

    Reply

  3. Larry Franzon
    April 26, 2015 @ 9:02 am

    You could start a movement for getting rid of the single-man constituency system and adopting the objectively better party list system that the rest of the democratic world seems to prefer.

    The probability of such a movement doing an actual difference? Quite low, I'm sure, but hardly lower than the chance of Jack's home constituency voting for a candidat who isn't "a dog turd if it had a blue rosette stuck on it." So it might still be worth a chance.

    Oh, and please don't blame the democracy, Mr-blogger-sir. The fault lies with the Labour party, whom have not even considered changing the obviously rigged "anti-change" voting system because it just so happens to be rigged in their favor.

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  4. Kit Power
    April 29, 2015 @ 5:52 am

    "The fault lies with the Labour party, whom have not even considered changing the obviously rigged "anti-change" voting system because it just so happens to be rigged in their favor." – Apart from in 2010, where a shift to AV was in their manifesto, and AV+ referendum was also offered.

    Of course since then we've had the disastrous AV referendum, which will ensure this broken system is perpetuated for at least another 15 – 20 years. And that is squarely at Nick Clegg's door, not Labour.

    Reply

  5. Josh04
    May 7, 2015 @ 3:12 pm

    AV+ was invented at Labour's behest, and they promptly ignored it's existence for the rest of their time in power. There's no reason to think that one more term would have changed that.

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  6. Kit Power
    May 11, 2015 @ 10:50 am

    Except they offered AV to Clegg as part of their negotiations, and had in in their 2010 manifesto. Clegg turned it down, sure he could win a referendum vote, because of course two in the bush is always more attractive.

    Even if a rainbow coalition had collapsed in 18 months, they could have gotten AV on the books first, which would have been a huge achievement. Instead, we got all the stability we could handle, and are about to get more. And it really is all Nick Clegg's fault.

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  7. TommyR01D
    September 18, 2016 @ 1:38 pm

    There was never any real possibility of a Lib-Lab coalition in 2010. Even accounting for how 57 Liberal Democrats plus 258 Labour MPs still wouldn’t have made a majority, there’s the issue of legitimacy.

    In 1974 (the most recent precedent for a hung parliament in Britain) the Liberals turned down Edward Heath on the basis that they couldn’t prop up an incumbent who had clearly lost his popular mandate. That was after an election in which the Conservatives had actually won the plurality of the vote. In 2010, Gordon Brown was perhaps the least popular leader in living memory and Labour had gone down to 29.0% (yes, a whole 1.7pp below what the Conservatives had gotten in their landslide defeat of 1997). There was no way that a Brown-Clegg deal wouldn’t have looked at least mildly hypocritical.
    Cameron had a greater popular mandate in 2010 than Blair got in 2005, so to deny him the premiership would have looked like some sort of anti-Cameron cartel, especially if the “progressive alliance” of all and sundry from the left had come to pass.

    Reply

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