I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with British culture. How do they keep electing such garbage politicians? It’s like every decision they make looks awful to everyone but Brits only realize it after the fact.
While you are not wrong it’s worth noting he was not elected by the public and even worse before he was basically handed the job he ran (internaly) on a platform of fixing the economy he fucked as chancellor of the exchequer
Well someone keeps voting in the fucking tories. If they didn’t, he wouldn’t be PM right now.
While true, the Tory party that won the last election looks a bit different to the gobshites that are in government now.
Don’t get me wrong, I thought the last lot were assholes as well, but while technically legal, swapping out basically all of the government several times seems like a bit of a bait and switch.
Yeah same can be said for republicans. Seems like conservative parties around the western world are going batshit crazy lately
Oh really?
Unfamiliar with the uprising of right leaning politicians going around I see. Perhaps you should peek in at the Netherlands.
I’m not sure you read my comment correctly
Yea unfortunately fascists are taking hold worldwide.
Just wait until their dimwitted voters find out that they don’t give two fucks about them, and will eat their faces to seize more power.
That doesn’t really help the situation but it’s better than nothing I guess
I’ve actually lived in both The Netherlands and the UK and the situation is not at all comparable.
In the UK, which has a First Past The Post parliamentary seat allocation system, a party with 41% of the votes like these guys has 60% of parliamentary seats, more than enough to change any law they feel like because there is no written Constitution (hence no laws require passing the 75% threshold needed to change the Constitution, so a simple 50% + 1 majority is enough). Also and as a side effect of FPTP there are de facto only 3 parties that might ever be part of government, and one of them - the LibDems - maybe once every half a century in average. Winning the most votes in Britain almost invariably means getting near absolute power because a simple parliamentary majority requires only about 37% of votes cast (and remember, in systems rigged so that votes for smaller parties are usually wasted, votes concentrate on large parties), which without a Constitution means very few limits on which laws they can make or change.
Meanwhile in The Netherlands they have Proportional Vote so their Parliament - the Tweede Kamer - represents quite closely the votes cast and every government is in practice a coalition because nobody gets 50% of the votes (and here you see the very opposite effect you see in FPTP systems - people vote for their favorite option, not for “electable” “lesser evil” options, so voting is naturally very fragmented), plus there is a written Constitution (the Grondwet). Winning the most votes in The Netherlands guarantees nothing in terms of power: it’s pretty much impossible to form government without other parties so if you’re basically “the assholes’ party” you’re not going to get any power at all. Even if you do manage to somehow find enough parties to form a government cohalition (usually it requires 3+ parties), you will still not have enough seats to push through the kind of deep changes to people’s rights that require a change to the Grondwet.
Unsurprisingly, the Far Right in Britain already took over power, during the Leave Referendum when UKIP supporters became members of the Tory Party (one of the two parties of the de facto power duopoly there) to internally vote in that party’s leadership context so that it was the politicians who those far right people saw as representing them - far right populists who claimed to want to “Free Britain From the EUSSR dictatorship” - who took power in the Tory part, hence took over Government and one of the only 2 trully electable parties over there. Only a few tens of thousands of people were required to, through their vote in the internal Tory Party leadership elections, shift the UK government from Conservative to Far Right Populist.
Meanwhile in The Netherlands the Far Right have 37 seats (of 150) in the Tweede Kamer and can’t find supporting parties with the needed 39 seats to form a coalition government - they’re about as likely to get power as a chicken to grow teeth and, due to the Grondwet even less likely to be able to pass the kind of changes to the Law that impact the most basic of rights at the Tory Government has been doing in Britain.
Very knowledgeable and spot-on comment, at least as far as the Dutch situation is concerned (can’t really judge for the English). This is the kind of stuff I come to Lemmy for, thank you!
No it’s the same gobshites. Boris was leader at the last election, Sunak and co are part of the same group. The anti-conservatives conservative party. All the conservatives were culled from the party. The people in the party causing trouble for Rishi are those further to the right and people who believe Boris can turn it all around again.
A minority voted for them, and not even a large one.
Who did the majority vote for?
Other parties; the votes are always split between lots of parties, which themselves have lots of factions.
All I can say is it wisny me
I hate this excuse, everyone knows how parliaments work. You vote for representatives that form a government. Everyone votes for their own constituency only but not everyone ends up with dickheads so consistently.
Sure, but Sunak wasnt even the second choice for the Tories during the last election. He’s in the Gerald Ford grey zone where no one feels like they voted for him, making him seem illegitimate. The British public voted for the Tories in 2019 (because they are morons) with the expectation that Boris Johnson would be in charge. Now the head of the party has resigned twice since then. In theory it’sall standard procedure for Parliament, but it’s a clearly unstable government and viewed as a farce at this point.
with the expectation that Boris Johnson would be in charge
I’m not sure this make it any better. It’s not like Boris Johnson hid the fact that he was a Tory. At a certain point I’m just going to stop saying “I told you so” and start calling you an idiot.
It’s still possible to be unfair to idiots, though.
If an idiot believes he can face down a speeding freight train, but only if it’s yellow then, in his eyes, it’s just not cricket if the one that turns him into jam is in fact blue.
In what way was Johnson better than Sunak?
He wasn’t better, he just had more legitimatacy since he was the party leader during the last election. Hell, Sunak resigned from said government before Johnson resigned. That’s why there were calls for a new election after Truss resigned, but the Tories refused because they knew they would get clobbered at the polls.
Silly hair funny.
everyone knows how parliments work.
I think you vastly over estimate the knowledge of your average love island watching, down the pub every night after work, get their entire worldview from Facebook, British person.
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It’s not an excuse. While you correct in that’s the mechanics of how it works here very few could even tell you the name of the representative they are voting for they just base their vote on the team and or team leader.
Hell. I remember my mum discussing how she couldn’t vote for kinnock because she can’t stand him. In her Scottish constituency
The guy that was elected by the public was Boris Johnson, who is arguably even worse.
I agree but sadly that gave him more legitimacy than this bell end
He lost the only party member leadership vote he took part in. He lost to someone completely detached from reality, that immediately sought to destroy the value of most people pensions that only benefitted a few hedge funds looking to profit from the UKs demise.
Your preaching to the choir. If it were up to me the whole party wouldn’t get a wiff of power from the first time I was old enough to vote.
Instead “I got my way” once with these asshats running this shithole even further into the ground ever since
Britain elects parties who then choose the leader. Thats how weve had so many different PMs. Its not like for example where the people elect an individual for four years.
We had a PM who lasted less time than a lettuce. All chosen by the conservative party
USA doesn’t really elect our leaders either. It’s basically the same, we have a bunch of people that are expected to vote the way their local population votes but they don’t have to, they can vote anyway they want. Popular vote means nothing. Only difference is once elected they get the whole 4 years.
Happy to be wrong since Im not American, but I thought for the presidency it was a ballot that literally had people on them (which are from certain parties / independents)
I’m a different person than you replied to. You are both correct.
When we, Americans, vote for president we vote for an individual by their name on the ballot. Technically, we’re voting for electors who have been chosen by our candidate. Those electors get to vote for the actual presidency and can technically change their vote (relative to the popular vote), but in many places they would be penalized for doing so. To my knowledge there have been few, possibly no, legal cases which have tested these laws or systems. So in practicality it doesn’t matter.
So in practicality it doesn’t matter.
The Republicans are working on changing that.
Appreciate the clarification! thanks
You are wrong, sadly. While the ballot does have candidates for president, technically what you’re doing is a district election for your presidential delegate, who then casts a vote for the president however they want. Usually this means they vote whatever way the popular vote goes in their district, but sometimes you get a “faithless elector” who legally overrides democracy and votes for a different candidate.
It’s supremely fucked up.
Edit: not false elector, it’s faithless elector
Ah right the electoral college and that sort of thing. Thanks!
but sometimes you get a “false elector” who legally overrides democracy and votes for a different candidate.
Genuine questions - how often does that happen? It can’t be a lot, and it can’t make the deciding vote, right, otherwise the whole system would have been ripped apart by the media long ago…
It happens frequently enough there’s a Wikipedia page:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector
Looks like it happened in 2000, 2004, and 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector
As of the 2020 election, there have been a total of 165 instances of faithlessness, 90 of which were for president, while 75 were for vice president. They have never swung an election, and nearly all have voted for third party candidates or non-candidates, as opposed to switching their support to a major opposing candidate.
USA doesn’t really elect our leaders either. It’s basically the same…
It was supposed to be basically the same, back when Electors were chosen by state legislators instead of by popular vote (a choice deliberately made to dilute the power of the public/prevent what the founding fathers saw as ‘mob rule’). Now it’s just a fucked up half-measure midway between a parliamentary system and direct democracy that flat-out doesn’t work right.
Look who is voting and who isn’t.
Another commenter said this but the last two prime ministers were only chosen by the conservative party membership, not by general election. So about 30,000 people have decided the ruler of the country for the past couple of years. You can argue about PMs before then but First Past the Post voting also has a lot to answer for.
From an American: We have no idea!
(Tongue in cheek)
We didn’t vote for him, and i did not vote for his party at the last election. Now i get to take it in the butt by his policies.
It bugs me when they say that they are doing this and that “for the will of the people” when the majority of the people didn’t vote for them. And even if they did, it might have been for a different reason than the thing that they are talking about at the time.
Idealistically, you’d hope that the leader of the country would be looking out for their people and doing things that help the people primarily.
Usually when they say that though it’s when they’re quietly handing out huge contracts to their friends and family to do the thing they’re talking about, for example Sunak corruptly giving his wife’s company allocations from the national budget.
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Labor could run a rotting horse penis mounted to a piece of dull slate and it would still represent a more ideologically defensible position than anything the most reasonable Tory has uttered for going on 70 years.
I mean come on. It’s not like they even make an effort to hide their terrible ideas.
If Labour run anything more left leaning than a rotting horse penis (see Jeremy Corbyn), they will be destroyed by the press and establishment by any means necessary.
Hence the usual choice being akin to Rotting Horse Penis vs Pig Fucker.
Like that’s a problem with just Britain?
I would not say that it is not unique to Britain. However, this dude is polling at -49. That is quite incredible.
Something is wrong with British culture? https://youtu.be/N_oIys5KS4A?si=mrsIxQ2hypNxAUa8
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We only get to elect our local member of Parliament, who represents a party. They elect the actual prime-minister, and when one is kicked out before election time, they get to pick another one.
That’s how we’ve had so many without having multiple elections, cause we didn’t pick them.
Also, for some reason loads of young people just don’t vote, meaning the old fogies who do vote the Tories in over and over, who (in theory) benefit them but fuck everybody else…
In actuality they fuck everybody except the rich, but as long as they say and do some racist/xenophobic things now and again, the old fogies run to the polls to vote them in over and over.
Americans get too excited when they read headlines like this. Nobody voted for Rishi, they voted for the Tories what felt like a decade ago. The Tories have had a revolving door policy, and new rubes keep taking the PM position after the last one leaves/is forced out. Some portion of that 70% are Tory voters who just want another spin on the PM wheel.
How long has it been since the last election?
Last election was in 2019, and they’re usually every 5 years. The next one has to be set for no later than January 2025, but could be earlier than that.
Ummm… Why the variable timeline? I don’t really understand US politics, and I’m an American. I’ve no hope of really understanding the UK system… Still, how do you not just vote in a new government/PM/MPs on a set schedule? That’s the most not British thing I’ve ever heard of. I thought you guys love routines.
We have the same system in Australia. Constitution sets a maximum govt term but a parliamentary majority can call an election at any time before then.
Ok, but why does the same party stay in power if a vote happens early? Seems like the conservatives have had control of England for the last 40-50 years, basically since Thatcher.
You’re right but only because New Labour was basically Conservative.
So the same thing as the “Neo-Liberals” in the US, gotcha.
So, voters elect Members of Parliament during general elections not a prime minister, the political party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons usually forms the government. Since we don’t elect the PM the king ‘invites’ the leader of the majority party to form a government since they’ll likely have the support of the majority portion of MPs, that person becomes the prime minister.
This leads to the slightly unusual situation where the incumbent party can essentially decide to replace the prime minister at will, this is usually accomplished by either an internal party process (1922 committee for the Conservative Party) or if the prime minister decides to ‘resign’. The incumbent party can then elect a party leader using whatever process they like iirc, once they have chosen a leader the king asks that person to become prime minister.
tl;dr the uk electorate don’t choose the prime minister directly, you elect a local MP, and the party leader of the majority party becomes PM so replacing the party leader replaces the prime minister.
ETA: the government can call a general election early and have done in the past but it’s not always in their best interest if they think they’re going to lose
Thanks for the explanation. I assume this is the compromise that England arrived at sometime around the signing of The Magna Carta?
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The UK. Not just England
Think back to the time George W. Bush was around and we had Tony Blair and Gordon Brown - both from the Labour Party
Blair I remember, Brown I don’t. I thought Blair was a Tory.
Is that because he is a twat?
No, it’s because he’s a Conservative MP
A distinction without a difference
Same thing.
Conservative MP is only a subset of twat species, and I would say a more severe variety.
Not all twats are conservative but all conservatives are twats.
Conservative MP is a euphemism.
Surely the next Tory PM the British voters elect won’t try to implement all of the terrible and unpopular policies that the tories openly espouse!
Two nitpicks
1st: the UK never voted for Rishi Sunak. Truss (also unelected) left and the Conservative party internally chose their new leader, who they appointed as PM since they’re the party in government.
2nd: most people in the UK vote against the Tories and always have. All they need to do is get a couple of percent above the next most popular party and it gives them 100% say. The worst part is that if another anti-Tory party comes around, all it serves to do is split the anti-Tory vote more, and hand them more power.
It’s our voting system that is broken. People in general do not like the Conservative party.
To clarify for those who never lived in Britain and as I explained above:
- In the UK even as little as 37% of votes cast (which can be less that the votes from 1/4 of voters, due to abstention) can translate into a 50% + 1 majority in Parliament and the country has no written Constitution, so a simple majority in Parliament can easilly changing laws around things most people consider essential, unlike in countries with Constitutions were certain things can only be changed with 66% or even 75% - depending on the country - of parliamentary votes.
People in, for example, the rest of Europe, get all surprised when the UK government just makes demonstrations de facto unlawful and add extreme requirements for labour strikes so that it’s extremelly hard for unions to organise them, because in most of those countries, unlike the UK, changing such essential rights is not something a party that only got 25% of voters on their side can do whenever they feel like it.
This time it will be different!!!
did you know that any time a child is born in britain that child has a 10% chance of becoming a tory PM when the sitting one resigns in shame?
What do you mean “any longer” ?! We never wanted him. 4th choise of one party.
He wasn’t even elected in the first place.
Hardly feels like it matters…is the next person going to be just as bad, it’s exhausting…
Start the lettuce.
Then call for an election and kick the Conservative sods out of the chambers.
Looking as who is voting, you’re not going to remove any Tories.
The blue Tories are absolutely finished. The red Tories are definitely getting in next election.
What is this turnout for? There aren’t general elections every two years.
That dropoff with the older ages though
That number seems low considering how incompetent the Tories are.
When only the elderly vote, you get shit government.
I’m not from the UK but from what I have seen the UK seems to really be heading in the same direction as the US where there are two absolutely awful parties to vote for and one is like 10% better.
Only if you buy into the Murdoch press. Similar thoughts tend to be expressed about Australia’s Labor party also, when the actual reality is markedly different.
Seems like a simple answer to vote for the one that’s 10% better
Something something bOtH sIdEs.
The last labour government that was in power was the most right wing, neoliberal one there has ever been, and yet they still massively improved the country over the shit state that Thatcher and Major got it into.
-
Over doubling of NHS funding, bringing it up to being the highest ranked health service in the world for a time.
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Homelessness massively cut down, with rough sleeping virtually
irradiated(EDIT) eradicated. Bizarre autocorrect there lol -
The minimum wage and a bunch of other workers rights improvements.
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Parliamentary processes made more transparent
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Devolution of powers to Scotland, Wales, NI
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Massively improved schooling
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Massively reduced crime, especially violent crime.
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Longest period of sustained low inflation since the 60s despite having a rapidly growing economy
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More years in economic surplus than the Tories
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Didn’t interfere with the BBC, even going as far as to put in place a Conservative chairman, because he was the best suited for the job, rather than appointing a mouthpiece for the Labour party.
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Help for childcare costs
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Drastic improvements for people with disabilities in terms of infrastructure, schooling, care
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Expansion in LGBT rights, including the right to adopt
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probably a bunch of stuff I’ve forgotten.
I’d much, much much rather have an actually competent government that broadly seeks out to improve people’s lives, even if they do have failings (e.g. failure to do much about the housing crisis) rather than the Conservative party, under whom the UK has got worse in practically every single way.
Young naïve me got excited by the hung parliament back in 2010 thinking Lib Dems even in a coalition could get so much good done.
Then Nick Clegg folded to the Conservatives on literally every issue like the soggy biscuit he is.
-
I am from the UK and let me tell you, we’ve been there for a while. We had a progressive in the 10% better party that made it actually substantially better but the media decided that supporting Palestine is tantamount to antisemitism and basically crushed his chances. Obviously backed by the stupidity of the average voter, who decided that some vague assertions of antisemitism were more important than the numerous failings (e.g. brexit) and verifiable racism of the other party.
Aside from that brief period, we’ve been forced to hold our noses and vote for the lesser of two evils for a long time. Starmer is generally disliked and nobody knows what he stands for (Because the answer is basically nothing) but he is still going to wipe the floor with the Tories. That isn’t because he’s good, just because the Tories are really that useless.
That is where we are now.
I mean okay but just like the US, you get what you voted for.
Honestly that’s the thing about when the UK talks shit about US politics - yeah, we have our problems but yall VOTED to destroy your economy and close your borders to your own detriment and you currently have a revolving door PM where one of them got outlasted by a head of iceberg.
In all fairness Britain are the only self-proclaimed Democracy (“Oldest in the World”, they tell us) with an even more undemocratic political system than the US, because in addition to a First Past The Post voting system, they also have a monarch with - as was exposed a couple of years ago - real power as head of state, an unelected Second Chamber with inherited and nominated-for-live positions and, probably worse, no written Constituition so any party in Parliament with a simple 50% + 1 majority can pretty much do whatever they want.
The FTPT + No Constitution combination is probably the worst part, as it means that a party with a mere 41% of votes of cast (so about the votes of only 1/4 of voters, due to abstention) - such as the current ones - can get a parliamentary majority (so, more than 50% of seats) and do things that in other countries would require constitutional changes (which generally require 66% or 75% of votes, depending on country), so things like changing the local definition of Human Rights.
Mind you, the Brexit vote isn’t at all affected by these things, so your point still stands unaffected by those considerations.
I appreciate the response, because this is actually fascinating. As much as I think America’s system is broken, it’s more to do with political spend and gerrymandering than literal centuries of aristocracy deciding it.
It mostly boils down to First Past The Post (single-representative electoral circles) IMHO - There is no such thing as Gerrymandering in countries were the matemathical method to allocate parliamentary representatives is Proportional Vote - such as The Netherlands - because all votes count the same and the party voted for or the party other people in the same area voted for makes no difference at all.
FPTP systems directly boost the number of representatives for the two major parties by quite a lot (for example, the Tories in the UK have around 60% of members of Parliament with only around 42% of votes cast) and indirectly because people switch their vote from smaller parties to “electable candidates” thus giving even more votes to larger parties which they would never get in a Proportional Vote system.
From there a ton of broader problems arise in terms of the behaviour of politicians (such as corruption) or simply not at all acting for the interests of their electorate (because people have no realistic option to replace one politician by a significantly different one, at most only by one serving the same lobbies but with a different discourse in the moral field). You even get insanelly adversarial politics (the more they’re alike in caring not economic equality and good quality of life for most people, the loudest the theatre they make around moral issues)
I also lived in The Netherlands which has Proportional Vote and its very different: even decision making tends to be all around seeking consensus (win-win solutions, if you will) rather than adversarial theatre on morals and behind-closed-doors deals on sharing the cake.
a monarch with - as was exposed a couple of years ago - real power
What is this in reference to?
He wasn’t voted for
Kind of, but if the president resigned and there was no VP lined up, so the party just kinda has a chat amongst themselves about who to replace them with (invariably causing the worst pieces of shit the public wouldn’t vote for to rise to the top)…
Also, US presidents don’t seem to resign in shame, so there’s that.
For what it’s worth, in 2019 a majority of people voted for parties other than the Tories. They received 43% of the vote, and their leader at the time was Boris Johnson.
The last two Prime Ministers weren’t elected by voters, though I suppose you could argue that the majority of voters didn’t elect Boris either.
The comments I’m seeing saying something like “well you voted for this” are incredibly misguided. We have a fucking terribly archaic voting system that doesn’t serve us at all, there are several large pushes throughout the UK trying to change that.
First past the post has to go. I believe it’s the most important issue in our country right now, because it’s stopping us from dealing with the actually important issues. To wit: we’re debating sending 100 refugees or less a year to Rwanda as a matter of the utmost urgency while the world is catching fire, in any metaphorical sense you care to mention. Geographical concentration of voters should no longer confer political power where the open internet exists.
There are two problems with the urgent need to change this broken broken system though: 1. I don’t know what better to replace it with, and 2. I don’t have enough faith in the British public anymore to actually agree on the more important issues once it’s gone.
Side note: the argument doing the rounds about “but the far right will get in” is irrelevant because our last two home secretaries have been irreconcilable, despicable far-right headbangers. They’re already in.
just skip to the next already.
And prepare his replacement straight away and streamline the process.
