Posts by giovanni tiso
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Deep breath, and you haven't quite hit you man-splaining third strike.
I do wonder if you could try blowing slightly less hard sometimes.
-
wax lyricists
Ew!
-
Well, I'm just getting rather impatient with the opportunistic conflation of "legitimacy" with "my preference" by commentators all over the show. Toynbee is entitled to be a Labour partisan, but I do wish she'd at least acknowledge that there are plenty of Liberal Democrats who are deeply ambivalent about flinging themselves into Labour's arms, and with pretty good reason.
And you're entitled to be a Tory partisan, but it would be equally nice of you to acknowledge that Lib-Dem voters generally lean a lot more towards Labour than the Convervatives, as per a number of polls. In that sense her analysis seems at least to be borne out by reality.
But hey, I know a number of Green voters who aren't happy that their party made a deal with National, yet it still was the politically smart thing to do.
-
And could I nominate someone else for the rather crowded media naughty step? I generally read Polly Toynbee for entertainment rather than insight, but her platitudinous scolding of Clegg for even talking to the evil Tories is not only tired, but another outburst from a (to coin a phrase) "born to rule prick" pundit who just hasn't got what really happened.
And yet to me this appears to be spot on:
The Lib Dem leadership must not be spooked by an inauthentic view of legitimacy. Nick Clegg knows full well from his European experience – where coalition-building of every kind is the everyday norm – that legitimacy falls on whatever grouping can command enough votes in a parliament to form a government. That is often not the party that happens on its own to have more seats than any other, while still failing to represent the majority sentiment in a country. After all these years of advocating pluralism, the Lib Dems will surely not be trapped by old first-past-the-post thinking that "strong and stable government" must be the least plural.
True legitimacy resides in a coalition of principle between the parties that stood for election on the most closely shared values. Their voters are the ones that confer legitimacy.
The communist party had the relative majority in Italy a few times, but never got close to forming a government, simply because there was never anybody else they could form alliances with. If the Tories are similarly reviled by the voters of other parties, then tough on them.
That said, I'd hate to be Clegg right now. He's not going to do well whichever way he goes - and I do agree that a confidence and supply sort of deal with the Tories might well be the least politically damaging route. But it doesn't invalidate the general validity of Toynbee's point.
-
ad nauseum
Always my favourite typo. Conjures the intriguing image of a museum of puke.
Okay. Karl just rebooted reality
Who's Karl? What did I miss?
-
Like it or not, Labour went into the general election -- and secured 8.6 million votes -- with the incumbent Prime Minister top of the bill. Those 8.6 million didn't vote for Harriet Harman (or Ed Balls or Ed Miliband),
Did they switch to Presidential elections without telling anybody? You could equally say that the only people who voted for Gordon Brown are the people who voted for Gordon Brown in his electorate. And you simply don't know how many people would have voted for Labour if somebody else had been the putative Prime Minister.
Really, what is with lacking a basic grasp of the electoral system in this discussion?
-
Has anyone done the maths on what this election would have looked like under mmp, assuming voting patterns were unchanged and no one split their vote? How low would the threshold need to be to avoid overhang from all of those minor parties?
I think it would be a very misleading exercise. We just don't know how many people would have voted for whom if the election had been held under MMP - you can't just translate the votes that the affiliated candidates received into party votes.
-
Labour plus Lib Dem are still nine short of the magic number. Even if Brown offered Clegg a referendum on electoral reform, I'm not sure they could pass it through Parliament.
Interesting times ahead though, that's for sure.
-
About as stupid as the other panelist who said that any government with less than 40% of the popular vote was somehow less legitimate.
37% of the vote means a little over one in three voters. If you think a party that gets that few votes should govern alone, as UK Labour has over the last five years, I guess your idea of democracy is different from mine.
-
Labour got to govern with 35% in 2005. How fair is it that the Conservatives won't get to govern with 36%?
It's ridicolous in both instances, nobody is disputing that. Still, this idea forcefully put forward by Jeremy Paxton just a couple of hours ago on the beeb that the conservatives have the moral right to form a government because they have a relative majority is just stupid. If Labour and the Libdems turn out to be able to reach an absolute majority or a workable minority (I doubt it) and Clegg decides he'd rather dance with Brown than with Cameron, then they'll form a government and that's that.