Stuart Bramley 🍏🇪🇺🇺🇦🍒

Manifestos and policy pledges are ditched all the time. They're constitutionally irrelevant. Principles are far more important.. It's a change to political culture that will be socially beneficial much more widely..

Brown was willing to resign to make a deal happen.. but it just wasn't viable.. would have been confidence & supply, a minority government or a tiny majority rainbow coalition..

PR obviously changes the calculations and power dynamics. They'd have been a much more equal partner with Labour.

Of course, under PR, we wouldn't have the two big broad church parties anyway which makes it all rather moot - they'd split and people could vote for the flavour of left/right that they actually believe in.

Why would they? Brown's Labour and the Lib Dems had far more in common but it couldn't have been made to work. They went into coalition with the Tories because the parliamentary arithmetic made that the only viable option.

I haven't talked about Israel because, frankly, I don't know a lot about Israeli domestic politics. I don't have time to change that right now. I do know that Likud is the biggest party and think it's unsurprising if they engage with other similar far right parties to form governments though.

PR is irrelevant to the rise of the NSDAP. It's all about the fragility of the Weimar Republic, post-WWI economic collapse, the treaty of Versailles and the shaming of German national identity, the desire of many conservatives and corporates to return to autocratic government and end democracy..

The fact as I have outlined elsewhere is that at no point did PR give the NSDAP the right to form a government. They had a bigger share of the vote than our current government do, and FPTP gave that government a large majority of seats in parliament. Goering even lamented this at trial!

Indeed, or Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the Heritage Foundation, Turning Point or any of the other numerous malevolent US actors.

It's fuel for their politics of grievance and it's designed to undermine faith in democracy so that their supporters will be OK with them ending it if they get into power..

The Lib Dems + Labour did not have enough seats to form a majority government in 2010. They would have been 11 short.

PR had nothing to do with the rise of Hitler. That's a myth that has been debunked over and over.

FPTP elected the ConDem coalition. The Tories had 36.1% of the vote but 47% of the seats. Labour 29% but 39% of seats. The Lib Dems got 23% of the vote but only 8% of seats.

Under PR the ConDem government never happens. It's a Labour-Lib Dem coalition instead.

The NSDAP were partnered in government by conservatives who voted with them to change the law, outlaw the communist party and pass the enabling act which allowed Hitler to pass laws without parliamentary consent. At no point did PR give them a majority or make it easier for them to gain power.

The NSDAP got 37.27% of the vote in 1932. That did not give them enough seats to form a government. Our Labour government got 33.7% of the vote under FPTP and that gave them 411 MPs, a majority of 167 - 63.2% of the seats. FPTP would have been better for the Nazis.

Bring back the trams

I know it's a shit result for us but.. lol@scotty parker

One of the worst refereeing performances this season. Absolutely lost the plot, no consistency whatsoever, some comically bad decisions both ways and ended up just forgetting basic laws of the game. We probably got away with one in regards Adams though, thought that looked a red where I was.. #afcb

VAR should be able to review and award yellow cards for simulation.. Le Fee was embarrassing today. #afcb

#afcb

You'd have to delegate full authority at the outset of the process.. it couldn't come back to the government of the day at any point. I don't know how/if that works from a constitutional point of view though..

My approach however, so that government could not be accused of reforming the system to one that suits themselves - would be to create a royal commission to produce recommendations for electoral reform, and then put that to a citizen's assembly to make a final decision.

I feel that losing the link between MP and constituency is a price worth paying to enfranchise millions of people. What value does Farage have for the people of Clacton? What value does a Tory MP in a safe Tory seat have for a progressive voter in that constituency?

STV electing one MP is just AV and will not produce proportional outcomes. There are many different PR systems, the stronger the link between constituency and MP, the less proportional they tend to be.

I would argue that it's FPTP that let Farage in because UKIP splitting the Tory vote is what scared their MPs and allowed him to have disproportionate influence over their policies. With PR, they'd have just been a minority party - they wouldn't have posed any risk to the government.

Is exhausting watching them try to exist in this broken electoral system. They can't be all things to all people in massive broad church parties which FPTP demands, when party membership is tiny, party democracy doesn't exist and link to voters is broken. Reality needs to be accepted and move to PR.

Honestly Clive - you seem to get it in the first sentence. Starmer hasn't shown he gets it *at all*. Corbyn was the same - just in different ways. Labour has taken the whole left of Genghis Khan for granted for decades. This has been a long time coming.

I say this because I'm very very very much living it at the moment.

Trust and security are enormous issues when it comes to enterprise adoption of AI.

Sending a signal to enterprises that you can't be trusted would be commercial suicide.

Mary, Gogglebox's least likeable person, lambasts young people for not being resilient enough.. but has the screaming abdabs if GIles puts on a French accent and can't tolerate boobies on TV without getting the vapours. Just a truly terrible person. Nailed on Reform voter 2029.

I stand corrected. I thought they showed tweets in the last episode I watched.. too much red wine I guess.

Burnham knew that would happen. They were never going to let him vacate the mayoralty.. he's played the politics of it well to end up sitting pretty at this point.

#isitok for them to still use x? No. No it isn't.