UKC

Why should democracies fear parties of the far right? Across Europe they have caused a stir recently, mainly because they could hold the balance of power in forming coalition governments.

But the alternative is to try and absorb their support into mainstream parties - I think this is much more dangerous and, of course, is far more likely to happen in bipartisan non-proportionately represented systems like ours and the US's.

Support for UKIP disappeared after the referendum and is now rising again as a softer Brexit seemed on the cards.

I am quite sanguine about UKIP remaining a force in British politics. It's clear that the Tories weren't and so absorbed some of their rhetoric, this has now manifested itself as a powerful lobby within the Tory party. Surely better to have far right policies in the open, espoused by a separate party. The same would be true for a communist party in the UK. They can act as sinks for the extremities in the electorate, we just have to trust that there aren't enough stupid and/or racist people to vote for them in large numbers.

There is a risk that minority parties con prop up weak governments (e.g. the DUP) but democracy should offer a corrective for that even if it means repeat elections when governments can't be formed. The electorate will be forced to vote responsibly and will get what they pay for.

In reply to pasbury:

If the loss of votes to UKIP means the tories lose the next election then that suits me.

The alternative is that the Tories ditch May and install a more right wing leader to recover those votes which is a less attractive scenario.

JRG for PM anyone?

In reply to pasbury:

The problem isn't the fringe parties, their followers or their ideas (however disagreeable we might find some of them), it is FPTP leaving millions effectively disenfranchised and increasingly embittered, that we're stuck with indefinitely short of a real catastrophe forcing change.

jk

In reply to jkarran:

Agreed but given that we have FPTP it should make labour and tory more comfortable with extremists given that they can only nibble at the edges.

The big void in British politics at the moment is the moderate centre!

In reply to Removed User:

That's why they'll be determined not to let too much of that happen, and, amongst other things, have caved in and pretty much killed the soft Brexit plan.

With Corbyn as the alternative, they don't have the same worry about losing their centre-right support, so they're more concerned about keeping the far right happy and will do what they think is necessary to keep them on board.

In reply to jkarran:

The problem is voters who don’t read manifestos fully. 

There is plenty of space for other parties to stand for election, the problem is with politicians who are in it as a job rather than to serve the population and life voters who will vote for a party until they die. Plenty of independent MPs have been elected on a single issue manifesto.

Especially with labour and conservative becoming more and more polarised. A true centrist party that takes the best ideas from labour and conservative would get some pretty good results. unfortunalety  the LibDems or whatever they’re called now seem to have picked the worst policies. 

In reply to pasbury:

Who fears them? Not me. I just think they are a bunch of shi*s

In reply to pasbury:

No political party is going to be comfortable tolerating opposition near its turf which it could snuff out with small shifts in positioning or even just presentation.

I'd argue that if the void truly existed it'd be filled, it isn't being, yet so perhaps we are happier with our polarisation than we might like to admit.

jk

In reply to jkarran:

There was a sudden shift to the hard left at the last election and not enough time for a new party to emerge. Blair has been hinting at it for a while, but even he recognises he’s not popular enough to front it. 

Too many people are being distracted by Brexit. I can’t see any new party being attracted to the proposition of running UK plc after Brexit. 

In reply to pasbury:

In reality it is English politics that has the problem.  Scottish and English politics have diverged.   Scotland has proportional representation and a parliament designed for coalition government.  UKIP is nowhere in Scotland.  We feel far more European than the English seem to - perhaps because the balance of immigration has been different in Scotland - and our population is small compared to our land area,

What English politics needs is a charismatic figure to lead the centre ground/rational/remainer faction, someone with the nerve to take things outside of parliament when parliament isn't working.   The remain lobby has far more economic and social power than would be necessary to stop the government in its tracks but it doesn't have the nerve, leadership and organisation to exercise it.  

The other big problem we have at the moment is the amount of blatant cheating and general Trump like 'who cares if we get caught' attitude in the Tories.   The blatant lie about 350 million for the NHS and even worse the 'brexit dividend' nonsense getting repeated by government despite the officials with responsibility for modelling the economics concluding Brexit is going to cost money, the naked cheating on election expenses, the dodgy use of the DUP to launder money into mainland UK politics, Boris just ignoring the rules on private sector jobs after being a government minister so he can get his Telegraph column back and now the Tory whips instructing MPs to cheat on pairing arrangements.    There needs to be a meaningful sanction for politicians that engage in these tactics.  Like a drugs ban for athletes.   Maybe they should put a steaming sh*t emoji  beside their name on ballot papers for 5 years after they get an official sanction for something.

 

 

In reply to jkarran:

I'd say the problem isn't FPTP but rather the crippling fear of a hung-parliament or any sort of coalition government. FPTP is nothing but a symptom of this fear.

In a true democracy, with proportional representation, when a fringe idea was supported by some percentage of the populace, the party representing that idea would be represented by an equivalent percentage of members in parliament.

Countries like Germany add additional restrictions to reduce some of the noise in the system. For example, there is a somewhat controversial "5% hurdle" which requires that a party has at least 5% of the vote (I'm simplifying it a bit) before they can occupy seats in the Bundestag.

Under a true democracy, parties are free to distinguish themselves and nobody has to defensively assimilate threatening ideas that some upstart minority group have seized upon. The mature way to treat such ideas is to say, "Fine, if that is truly what you feel, be my guest. We disagree and will stay our course -- let us see how large your support truly is."

After all, politicians should be representing the will of the people and not their own careers!

In reply to Xharlie:

The fear is governing-party MPs voting for reform of the electoral system which brought them to power, of squandering their advantage. They'll dress it up any number of ways and we'll parrot them but it is this basic unwillingness to cede advantage that means meaningful reform is if not impossible, at least awaiting of a powerful catalyst.

Politicians should act in the interest of the nation as an entity, in the interest and with the support of their constituents and in the interest of their party/team. There are of course potentially tensions there.

jk

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

While you are correct to characterise UKIP as more of an English movement than a UK one you seem to have a very rosey view of Scottish politics.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Scotland has it's own nationalist party, I do believe we wouldn't be in this mess without Scottish nationalism.

 

In reply to Mike Stretford:

Yep, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. One of my employees ( hard Scottish type born and brought up in a very deprived area of Scotland 60 years ago) views the SNP as a far right nationalist party based  on history. Nothing will change his mind.

It is an interesting perspective!

In reply to Mike Stretford:

Scotland definitely wouldn't be in this mess if we'd voted for Independence. 

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

I agree, and it would be even harder for England and Wales to leave, and the British nationalists would be deflated.

Hence my frustration with Scottish politics, of 3 options they chose the worst for all of us.... voting SNP MPs in but not for independence.

 

 

In reply to Xharlie:

And to think we had a chance to move towards a more proportional system (not a very good one as it was proposed) and rejected it in the 2011 referendum by a large majority......

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

You would still be part way along a 5-15 year dissolution of a long standing union, with a huge number of unanswered questions. 

In reply to stevieb:

Alternatively https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_Czechoslovakia

In reply to pasbury:

The moderate centre is where TM tried to position herself when she took office, not remember her speech outside Downing Street about the “just managing” - she’s failed to deliver that as well as everything else. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Does that look better?

 

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Hahahaha - delude yourself - don’t try and delude us. What currency would you have? What revenue would you fill the oil and gas black hole with? 

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

We'd probably be in treble the mess - trying to extricate ourselves from the UK while trying to get into the EU while the UK tries to extricate itself from the EU.  A nightmare triangle.

Having said that I do now, in light of the Brexit f*ck up, have some sympathy with the nationalist cause and can even envision circumstances where I might even vote for independence,  but I really, really hope it doesn't come to that.

In reply to cander:

Either the pound or the euro.   But lets not rehearse the 'you can't use the pound' argument again.

You mean the 'black hole' of Scotland's oil and gas money taken by Thatcher and successive Westminster governments to balance the books while she shut down industries throughout the UK and transitioned the economy to financial services based in London?   And now, from the same people who classified the McCrone report so they could lie that there was hardly any oil under the north sea to win the first devolution referendum we get the  'we've already stolen the oil money, so you'd be silly to vote for independence' argument.

Ireland does fine without oil and gas as do a bunch of other small EU nations and Scotland would too, it's just an extra bonus.

 

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

You wouldn’t be in the EU

In reply to cander:

Oh yes we would.

And almost certainly England would have voted to stay in too.  There's just too many people with family or business connections to Scotland who would lose out if Scotland was in the EU but England wasn't.

In reply to pasbury:

Listen tosspot,

I’ve voted UKIP and I’m neither stupid or racist.

And since when were communist voters seen as extreme?

BNP maybe.

And look at the argument you’ve started with this thread.

Haven’t you got anything better to do?

In reply to baron:

I’d lay off the pimms old chap.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

We had/have such a character I think but he was compromised and taken advantage of, and also made a few severe errors of judgement. He may also have been a victim of an imbalanced coalition. Can you guess who I’m talking about?

 

In reply to pasbury:

Pimms?

At 7 o’clock in the evening?

What sort of chap are you?

In reply to pasbury:

No, racking my brain but I can't think of anyone that meets all the criteria in my post and yours.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

That’s the way the majority who voted leave feel. But their wish for indendence, following a vote for indendence, are being subverted by an arrogant political elite. Scotland got what it voted for, Remain in the UK. U.K. voters are being denied the independence they voted for by parties wedded to the old order. I would have thought Tom to have been a supporter of the people’s wishes. But, like so many Remainers, it seems he only agrees with that principle when the voters cast their votes for what they want. That has been the EU way all along. We should never have joined. Which is probably what Scots Nats feel about Union. 

In reply to Robert Durran:

You wouldn't, we wouldn't have had the Brexit vote if Scotland had voted for independence, and I'm sure a mechanism would have been found to fast track Scotland into the EU, or at least the EEA.

The current situation is the worst, dysfunctional, not fit for purpose democracy and a bunch of incompetents in government who can't decide what they are supposed to be negotiating.

 

In reply to Mike Stretford:

Unlikely that Spain would have been particularly helpful getting a recalcitrant breakaway province fast tracked into the EU.

In reply to cander:

I don't think they would have been obstructive, if 2 countries agree to split there's not much they can do. 

Scot's won't be happy you calling their country a province!

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

And under a MMT understanding of the economy, an independent Scotland absolutely should be issuer it's own currency.

In reply to Mike Stretford:

Sorry Scotland, I meant fiefdom.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Nick Clegg

In reply to DancingOnRock:

In reply to pasbury:

Oh yeah, that's true.

If he'd only had the integrity (or common sense) to keep a written promise the Lib Dems could be doing really well now.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

The only pact you can make with the tories is a Faustian one.