Posts by Idiot Savant
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Matthew: you can keep your straw man, thanks - I don't want it.
The legislated size of Parliament sets an obvious limit on democratic representation. We have 120 MPs. And as Graeme points out, using St Lague that sets an effective minimum threshold, in the extreme case, of around 0.4% of the vote.
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Are you including New Zealand First in that? Because of lot of their economic policies: reserve bank, protectionism, minimum wage, etc. have been to the left of Labour for some time.
No, I wasn't. But that was because I was assuming that a "new left" party wouldn't be interested in the votes of racists.
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At present, the constituency votes of Epsom voters are worth five times more than the constituency votes of everyone else. Given the option between keeping *this* problem and removing it, I (now) say we get rid of it.
Whereas I would rather have the votes of voters in Epsom count for five times more than those of everyone else than have the votes of ACT voters count for nothing. Universal unfairness is still unfair. Procedural fairness isn't. Any solution which involves restricting people's rights is a backwards step, not a forward one.
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I was meaning more, despite a couple of statements that Goff has made recently, there seemed to me to be a lot of room to the left of Labour for another party.
Room ideologically, sure (that space is infinite; one can always play "lefter-than-thou"). But what matters isn't the ideological space, but how many people are in it. That's the core issue a political party has to grapple with. And based on recent voting trends, the answer is "not a lot". At the last election, the "left of Labour" vote was ~182,000 votes, 7.72% of the total - and a great chunk of that will be off-axis Greens. This is not a lot of space to support a new party. In order to be successful, they would have to move large numbers of people into it, which is a very big ask.
I still struggle to put Labour into the left-wing pile.
Sure. But would the former Alliance's core non-Green voterbase of betrayed former Labour voters have the same problem?
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Somehow when I wasn't looking the real estate on the left shrunk.
More that Labour, in publicly repudiating NeoLiberalism, has occupied more of it. Though notably, that's only on economic interventionism; they're still leaving that social justice ground vacant.
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One point I'd make in response to Giovanni is that Labour's 'leftward shift' - is opening some actual ground for discussion in the political landscape that has been exceedingly hard to dig over of late.
And having the conversation started by a major party rather than a minor one makes it harder to dismiss. The Alliance have been calling for this stuff 9and more) for years. But then, its what they always say...
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It's not going to work this time either. Not with Labour - at least rhetorically - pulling so decisively away from the neoliberal reforms. And I'd be the first to cheer if we discovered an hitherto unknown reservoir of Marxists.
And that's the real problem for a new left party: Labour has just eaten their ground. The Alliance did well when Labour was on the right; their vote share was declining as Labour drifted back towards the left. And since their implosion, Labour has only shifted further in that direction. Which means that as much as I'd like to see such a group, I think they'd end up as RAM mk II.
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Dropping the threshold requirement as soon as a party gets an electorate seat gives us the nonsense of Rodney hauling in Garrett and the Zombie of Parliaments Past whilst Winston gets nothing despite having more popular support. I don't particularly object to Winston getting nothing, but it sure does rankle that the 3.4% Mussolini gets to bring a supporting cast of four off fewer party votes.
Sure. But the solution is less unfairness, not more. Retaining the threshold at a non-trivial level while abolishing the "electorate lifeboat" means people who would be represented under the current rules going under-represented. And that makes the problem worse, not better.
The goal of our democracy should be to ensure that every vote counts. Currently, only the votes of people who vote for big parties count. That's not fair, and its not democratic.
It will possibly mean more extremists in parliament, though.
Where "extremists" equals Bill and Ben and the Kiwi Party. I don't think we have anything to fear from them. But even if we did, they are as deserving of democratic representation as you or I, and our system should do its best to ensure they receive it.
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And off-topic, apparently we have been too mean about our MPs so we are not allowed to know specific details about their travel perks anymore.
Just remember this next time an MP complains about how we regard them as corrupt, self-serving arseholes. They really have no-one to blame but themselves.
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Ben: I'd just seen it as focusing too heavily on the purity of a metaphor which was ultimately made up by a guy with a stick up his arse, who thought that arguments were polite things you had at dinner parties (or at least, the participants ought to behave like they were). But real arguments in the real world aren't like that. Quite apart from being rather more robust than a courtroom or a dinner party, on any serious dispute they stem not from faulty reasoning (which two rational individuals could uncover and correct), but from incompatible axioms (which are, by definition, not amenable to rational argument, otherwise they wouldn't be axioms). And when that happens, you really have nothing to say to each other, so you might as well call a cunt a cunt...