I was throwing shade on the conservatives by suggesting they had relegated themselves to a permanent position of unelectability. I was suggesting they’d need to change the electoral system to have a hope.
Unfortunately I know this isn’t true. Neither labour nor conservative countenance electoral reform. It suits both of them. Rupe loves it too of course. But he isn’t the only oligarch to take into account. I guess it makes things simple for the Mail and Torygraph etc. too but everywhere else manages to keep an ecosystem of similarly awful oligarchs afloat with shifting networks of coalitions and alliances. I mean the English political classes loved Borgen didn’t they? Was it just Sidse Babett Knudsen’s amazing English accent?
I don’t know if that can ever be quantified or true. E.g. Sinn Féin have reacted to energy/cost crises in a fairly centrist way. They may be left of English and Irish labour parties but that’s hardly noteworthy.
ETA
Here’s the article and their political compass of how far the Conservatives have goosestepped to the right of their voters is pretty stark. I have something of a bias against those diagrams as they always show the people with a more reasonable left/centre/libertarian belief than the parties.
No fucking way are Labour that economic left wing, unless they are including the backbenchers. The last two years of Sir Keith have been a rejection of the most milquetoast social democratic policies in the name of capitalism.
The only way that spectrum works is if it is possible to get a negative score.
They have them to the right of the US Democratic party which at least recognises the journey. Obviously their centre point is not one I agree with in the first place.
And the citation of “FT research” would suggest that they’ve used the survey’s questions to code up updated positions for Truss and Starmer’s current policies. So while not an ideal measure, it does have a robust methodology behind it.
If you are replying to the bit I think you are (my dislike of political compasses) it’s not that the methodology isn’t robust, it’s that there is a relatively empirical measurement of people’s political beliefs that isn’t self reported sentiment, it’s how we vote. In situations where people have options to vote with their sentiment the political compass still doesn’t match their actual voting.I understand that is not the case in the UK though.
They are both positioned left of centre though. I don’t think I could put either of them any lower than 4.5.
Maybe it’s because I have more awareness of left wing economics, and how Marxist-Leninist parties like the Cuban Communist Party are traditionally the right wing of communism. That’s why I suggested that it only works if you can get a negative score.
Well, he called that right, didn’t he. Not that it was a hard thing to call. But yet again he shows why he has long been one of the more admirable political/economic commentators.
This looks interesting. Al Jazeera have uncovered a load of files detailing the witch-hunts and deliberate self-sabotage going on at the heart of the Labour party as it tried to purge itself of a leadership elected by the membership.
King Charles III is reportedly abandoning plans to attend and deliver a speech at the Cop27 climate change summit on the advice of Liz Truss.
My takeaway from The Crown - a piece of fiction, I know - is that the show creators/writers/advisers have been mildly sympathetic to all of the important Royals (Andrew isn’t in it much), but they fucking hate Charles.
Story- Peter Thiel’s Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’
Here’s the next step in the privatization of the NHS- Panopticon builder and CIA “investment” recipient Thiel is now worming his way into the NHS, by buying up companies which have contracts with it.
Nope. That means Capita, Serco and all the rest of those evil fuckers. We should remove all the contracts they currently hold and perform a hostile audit on their previous performance. With criminal penalties for any jiggery pokery uncovered.
That might be sensible but given that the whole plan is turn the NHS over to US “healthcare” providers/insurance companies (who not coincidentally spend huge sums bribing “lobbying” UK MPs), the idea is not ideologically acceptable to the Conservative party.
And as @GilbertWham says, the nominally UK companies are also massively greedy incompetents.
But the free market must by definition be more efficient than a nationalised service, so here we are.
