Senate The UK Politics discussion

I would hope the British public would see past that but then they did vote for Brexit so.....


I'm meant to be easing into Christmas now and I'm just getting more and more furious again. I've told my missus not to get booze for Christmas as a result of it all.

 

Don"t suppose Amazon.de works out better for you?

 

yeah but you get an increase in fees from one country and lose access to one country

We have it x27

 

In my industry, there’s a lot of work in Norway and The Netherlands. Because of Brexit, it’s now more trouble than it’s worth for an employer in these countries to consider me for a job when there’s an EU citizen with the same qualifications. I was working with a Spanish friend today and he said that Brexit has reduced job competition for him whilst hugely limiting my employability and opportunities. Never mind all that though, I’m getting a shiny blue passport.

 

I work pan european. I've been informed that in a worst case scenario I'll have to have 6 visa's next year just to enable me to visit sites and work out of that I've had no challenges in doing over the last 4 years with the company I'm with

 

Yesterday we made a day trip to London to apply for the baby’s Slovak birth certificate at the Slovak Embassy. It can take up to three months for it to be issued (don’t ask, Slovak bureaucracy sucks), but once we have it we can finally apply for her Slovak passport (she already has her British one). Thank God she and I still have our EU citizenship. Everton, of course, is a second rate citizen in our household, because he lost his...

 

Last month, BoJo announced a £16.5 billion rise in the MoD budget over the next four years. Yeaterday, we’re told about £1 billion cuts to defence spending over the next year (including the unprecedented suspension of the maritime reserve force) in order to plug a gaping black hole in the defence budget. I’m no economist, but it feels like BoJo
inhabits a different realm of reality than the rest of us do.

The wheels are coming off and I think the UK economy is in a lot more trouble than most people realise at the moment.

 

Well, yes, but optimism and inexhaustible lasers! Optimism! With extra moon shots.

 

I reckon BoJo was just intrerested in copping off with with Urrsula von dilion von whassername .

 

I just can't get my head around that people didn't just let Brexit happen, they pushed for it. There are still people out there in favour of it. And I can't remember the last time we had a government that I felt knew what they were doing, even a little bit. I mean, we were screwed even before Covid, the virus just seems like overkill.

 

The last time I remember an almost competent government was Blair (pre war nutcasery) as his government built a solid social net, invested in the UK and maybe theres a rose tinted 90's memory in there but the UK at the time actually felt like a positive place, then came the war followed by Brown and then the architect of our current debacle with Cameron.

We've been punch drunk since the Banking crisis and we have the most incompetent political class I have ever had the misfortune to see.

 

I don’t think it’s a rose-tinted memory. I think you and I are of a similar age and I remember a very different UK in the 90s. There was a much greater sense of hope and optimism. Being a teenager back then, we all felt that we had more opportunities than the generation that preceded us. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the current generation of young people. Things weren’t perfect then either, but we had a sense of stability and security.

 

I trained as a nurse under New Labour's 'Agenda for Change' programme, between '03 and '06, which meant no student fees and 6.5K pounds PA to support me. I worked paid shifts on top of this (who needs sleep?) as a health care assistant, and I emerged from my training, debt-free and in fact with money banked. The AFC programme ended the following year as I recall, and suddenly NHS trusts, who were used to having cash lying around had far less. In my graduation year, everyone got a job quickly. Out of the following year's cohort, one person got a job straight away, and that was in Ireland.

In short, I think NL were good for Britain after 18 years of Tory misery, but the wheels began to come off in the mid 2000s. I could see the storm on the horizon and so I emigrated to Australia in '07.

Labour started off with some fine ideas, and despite their centrist politics, after the Tories they were practically a breath of fresh air. They introduced a minimum wage (remember this didn't even exist before this: employers could pay you as little as they wanted), devolution for Scotland, Wales and NI, and impressive levels of investment in a clapped out rail network. But it couldn't last.

I saw a few interviews about a decade ago with certain Labour MPS who quite openly admitted that they came to Parliament in '97 upon Labour's election win with all the frothy optimism of a new fresh start. They set eyes on the interior of the Houses of Parliament, and within months, not years, were settling into the cosy benefits of office. It was, and remains, a very exclusive club.

I don't know what the solution is, but I cannot help but feel, that like the US, politics is utterly broken in the UK. If the very institution of government itself is making politicians less effective, then maybe, honestly, seriously, someone needs to drop a bomb on that building and force them to meet in a village hall somewhere, or in a field, if they can avoid the cowpats. Humility could go a long way in bringing these people back to some semblance of reality, and reminding them of what they were put there to do. All of them; no matter their political persuasion.

 

Political seats are too safe in what is effectively a 2 party system

We've had ineffective politicians in place for years (Peter Bone for example) because of FPTP

We need to have electoral reform and shake the system up a bit.

 

UK politics for MPs - and likely a good few Councillors - is a job review every five years in the form of an election where their collective boss doesn't want to do their job, preferring to just wave them through on the basis of tribal loyalty.

 

Well, I say that I don't know what the solution is, but I kind've do: Getting rid of the FPTP system, and an introduction of a PR system, but ultimately a move towards abolition of political parties in their entirety. So long as you have career politicians, they can be bought, bent, and shaped, according to the whims of corporations who pretty much bankroll them.

Something along the lines of sortition would sort this: where ordinary members of the public (say 1K in total) would take turns (in increments of a few weeks, or months, like jury service) to run the country; quite literally. They would be backed up by advisers and civil servants- after all members of the jury are not expected to be experts on law- and fully primed on whatever legislation is in front of them. There would be a system in place that breaks down the legislation into incremental chunks, and voted on accordingly. There would be no political parties or shady backers to throw the vote. Biased reporting would have no political scapegoats any more.

Here's an interesting take on this, from the show QI of all things:



And it has been shown to work in the modern era on a smaller scale:

 

@CairnsTony I don’t think we’ll see sortition in the UK any time soon. That said, I’d happily replace our current government with a randomly-selected group of people.

 

As intriguing as sortition sounds, I don't think I have much faith in your average Joe Public to know what they're doing in a one-way system car park, much less in actually running a country...

 

I guess my main concern with that would be that what would happen would be the Civil Service would run things more than they already do.

 

That, too, as they would be the only people who knew what was going on.

 

Please watch the second video. He clearly explains that the evidence is there that the random selection of a large group of people leads to far more effective decision-making on the whole. He makes it clear that it isn't a panacea, but is undoubtedly better than what we have now.

The alternative is more career politicians being bought; and no one can tell me that many of them are even that well-informed on the subjects they are supposed to know about. Political parties are, by their very nature, part of the problem.

This is nothing like, say, the Brexit vote, because everyone would get the same objective information on the thing to be discussed and voted on. That's the entire point, and why it's different. Plus, everyone would have to vote. Of course you would need various checks and balances to prevent abuse of the system, but those are perfectly achievable aims; and as I say, sortition exists today and is being enacted in various ways.

I also think one of those checks could be, say a sequence of votes on the same thing (you would get people switching, because that's what they do, incredibly), and take the average outcome.

Trust me when I say I've no real hope of even seeing PR throughout the UK in my lifetime. But of course I would not expect something like sortition to just replace the current system overnight. But as the second video points out, the most realistic aim for now would be to see such a people's assembly replacing upper houses. Again, can anyone seriously expect me to swallow the idea that the House of Lords would be better?

I don't have much faith in humanity sometimes, but when I'm calmer and more objective in my thinking, I know that the majority of people are not morons, despite sometimes thinking they might be.

 

One of the biggest problems that I have with the UK is that it is not a country of equals. I’m not going on a rant about Scottish independence again. I mean that class and privilege by dint of wealth still play a huge role in life on these islands. The House of Lords is a good example of this. I once heard a Tory state that hereditary peerages are a very good way of randomly selecting people to sit in the House of Lords. There’s nothing random about the way the UK is run. The UK has had 55 Prime Ministers, 42 of which attended Oxford or Cambridge. These people run Whitehall as well.

Some form of sortition wouldn’t be a bad idea for the future because there’s a club that run our country and we’re not members.

 

Exactly. I threw sortition out there because I think it's one of the most intriguing ideas to solve literally all of the significant issues that plague politics as things stand; and in the case of the UK, rids you at a stroke of the elitism of the political classes, for one thing. Plus it's not just a theoretical concept: it is ancient in its origins and is increasingly being turned to today in various places.

There may be other systems with equal merit perhaps, but at the end of the day 'rule by the people' is literally what the word Democracy means. So it barely applies in a modern context.

 

This is all looking so stupid and depressing.