In the 2017 GE the Tories had 42%, which was a disaster for May, now Boris got 43%. Due to the fucked-up systems they got 50 seats more this time.
The Tories will now redraw the borders of some of the voting districts so that they will have an even more comfortable margin at the next GE.
My own constituency was redrawn to include a chunk of a Labour voting city and then a huge swathe of rich farming/yachting Tory voting countryside.
Thank-you. Today has been horrible. I was a teenager during the Thatcher years and saw how all the promises and quotations from St Francis evaporated the moment they got power. Unchecked, the Tories laid waste to our industrial economy and devastated the manufacturing and mining areas which have struggled ever since. Now, using the EU as a convenient foil, they’ve sold the same lies to the people they screwed over last time round. The rich will get richer, the poor will get poorer and the UK will continue to fracture and diminish every day.
Labour lost this election plain and simple. Nine years of weak, indecisive, vicious government by the Conservatives, led by a charlatan and a thug, and Labour still couldn’t win. Damn each and every person who fell into the Corbyn cult = they were told he was electoral poison, but they refused to change track. It’s time to purge Labour of the extreme left again - they did it in the 1980s, they need to do it again if they want to win.
In the future we will all be Russian agents for fifteen minutes.
There were some polls that showed Corbyn’s economic plan getting the approval of a sizable majority. A Labour party without Corbyn himself and his antisemitic baggage might have done a lot better.
But it’s a lot easier for the right party to move left on economic issues than it would be for the left party to move right on social or nationalism issues. Boris is no Maggie, and it would not surprise me to see that happen.
That’s been the Remain position for some time now. Does not seem to be getting a lot of traction.
Probably not. One would think the Unionists would be more likely to agree to that than to agree to join the rest of Ireland, the Republicans would want no part of it though, and I can’t imagine it would sound particularly exciting to the Scots either.
This is a more interesting one, Scotland faces the same question and they think that because they are currently a member of the EU (though not for much longer), they would be able to jump to the front of the line in terms of membership applicants, as well as get around the requirement for taking up the Euro, and there is also the problem of their deficit (which is much higher than required for new members, NI would have the same problem - it is currently massively subsidised by the UK exchequer). These are not insurmountable problems, and the EU may be happy to negotiate - though Spain is worried about the precedent it would set for an independent Catalonia. There is also the question of whether NI has an economy developed enough to survive on it’s own, it would need significant EU support.
Mark Steel is so very angry.
Compare that with the German electoral system: Even if you redraw constituencies to favor one party, the number of elected representatives for each party will still be proportional to the party’s share of the votes.
Britain might have “won” WW II, but being able to start from scratch in 1945 and create a modern constitution had tremendous benefits for Germany, while Britain’s been on the decline for quite a while now.
We need to lose a war with America - that’s had good results for a couple of countries.
Maybe the USA needs to lose a war, they’d be much better of afterwards. I guess there’s a quite a few countries that would like to help them out here.
On the other hand, Germany lost substantial territory, fuelling irredentism and right-wing extremism, and it was divided into two nation-states, followed by an expensive and painful reunification which has fuelled right-wing extremism.
sighs
Yes, they are like that, and they seem to be happy with being like that. There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do. When will the usurer’s city cease? And famine depart from the fruitful land?
Okay, that’s a bit glum, but I have just had a night of nightmares inspired by recent events, and I am not feeling particularly perky right now. Will turn that frown upside-down next post, promise.
There is a threat of Gerrymandering from the next government, but they don’t get to draw the boundaries themselves, unlike in the US.
The trick that they’re trying to play here is more subtle, because the seat boundaries are drawn by non-partisan civil servants, and people can object to any proposed changes. What they’re doing is proposing to make it more difficult to register to vote, then drawing the new constituency boundaries based on registered voters rather than population. This will tilt the electorate and the seats even more towards older voters who own their houses, with obvious political effects.
Yeah well, they started a fucking war, that’s how it goes.
It’s not only the rushed reunification itself what fueled right-wing extremism, you can trace support for NSDAP in those parts of the east that are now again leaning to the far right, there’s simply a continuous history of racism. The GDR did fuck all to deal with Facism, they simply declared it as non-existent in their worker’s republic.
The FRG also was no role model here, however being open to immigration for the past 7 decades (starting with loads of refugees from the easter territories right after the war, and then lots of workers from e.g. Turkey and Italy), for people in the west of Germany it’s simply normal to interact with lots of different people.
The GDR did have some exchange with other socialist countries, e.g. workers from Vietnam, Tanzania, Cuba, but they were also met with racism and distrust when working here.
After reunification, people mostly fled the east, draining the eastern state of the young and the skilled. Increasingly only the racist unskilled old remain, providing even less incentive for other people to go there. A vicious circle.
Came across this today: Boris Johnson’s record of bigotry, antisemitism and far-right politics must not be forgotten | Letters | The Guardian
Obviously BoJo also carries a load there, but it didn’t hurt him so much, and there is a probably substantial part of the Jewish community who support Corbyn.
I really wonder, is there actually more antisemitism in the Labour Party than the Tories, or was there simply more discussion about it?
Antisemitism in the UK Conservative Party - Wikipedia contains quite a few examples over a long history.
On the other hand, Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party - Wikipedia explains a lot about systematic efforts for dealing with antisemitism, which I find absent on the page about the Tories.
I have tried researching this in a bit more depth a couple of months ago, but I was unable to arrive at a solid conclusion.
No, we are apparently that stupid…! 
would you care to explain the bundesrat?
I could not tell you more than this wikipedia article
Buy I can try: the Bundesrat (federal council) consists of 69 representatives of the governments of each of the 16 German states that make up the federal republic. All legislation that affects the competencies of the federal states has to pass a vote in the Bundestag after it has been passed in Bundestag (parliament).
If you care to take a look at the illustration in this article you will see that all state governments are currently coalitions of two or three parties, which typically leads to better outcomes than single-party governments are typical in UK or US, because it emphasizes dialogue and negotiation, not power and suppression.
My favorite factoid from the election. Unsurprisingly, it’s mostly overlooked by the establishment press because it undercuts their narrative that conservatives are awesome and TINA:
60% of voters bothered to vote of whom 43% voted Tory which, due to the anti-democratic fluke of the parliamentary system. So 43% of 60% > ~2/3 of Parliament being made up of Tories.
Perfectly democratic, so no wonder the media get excited by it.
Which, note to WaPo and its cohort, is how democracies die: In a spew of lies and distortions and biases from the media.
