The Chairman Mao resembling, Monarchy hating, threat to Britain, Labour Party thread

[meregreen]

14 hours ago, Jareth said:

I'm wondering what any self declared socialist MPs, or members, are doing staying in Labour. Is the hope that there will be another shot at a leadership election? Obviously the strategy has been to purge them or demoralise them so that they go, and it's looking quite effective - so why not go? 

The Tories would love that. The Left, and I include the Liberal Democrat’s in that group, have split their vote over many years, thus allowing the Tories to rule with a minority of the vote. Splitting it more would simply enable Bunters mob to rule forever. The splintering of the National vote in Britain should be addressed  by the introduction of PR. Hopefully it will happen.

Edited August 24, 2021 by meregreen

[HanoiVillan]

3 minutes ago, meregreen said:

The Tories would love that. The Left, and I include the Liberal Democrat’s in that group, have split their vote over many years, thus allowing the Tories to rule with a minority of the vote. Splitting it more would simply enable Bunters mob to rule forever. The splintering of the National vote in Britain should be addressed  by the introduction of PR. Hopefully it will happen.

You shouldn't do the bolded, and doing it leads to weak analysis. Lots of Lib Dems are not 'left' in any meaningful sense, and very large parts of their vote - probably a majority - are traded with the Tories, not Labour.

[bickster]

Regardless of labels, the Not-Tory vote is split constantly

The only way to really stop this is PR and to do that right now I think you'd need some sort of Labour / Lib / Green / Plaid electoral pact. Labour are the major stumbling block in that equation

[HanoiVillan]

3 minutes ago, bickster said:

Regardless of labels, the Not-Tory vote is split constantly

The only way to really stop this is PR and to do that right now I think you'd need some sort of Labour / Lib / Green / Plaid electoral pact. Labour are the major stumbling block in that equation

The whole problem comes from conceptualising *both* that there is such a thing as a Not Tory vote *and* that it is the most powerful motivating force. It isn't, and if it were there would be no other parties except Labour.

[blandy]

28 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

The whole problem comes from conceptualising *both* that there is such a thing as a Not Tory vote *and* that it is the most powerful motivating force. It isn't, and if it were there would be no other parties except Labour.

Disagree with all 3 parts of of that.

There is definitely an anti-Tory vote. For many it is the most powerful force (me being one of them). From my sample of one (me), my kind of voting process goes like this:

Of all the candidates in my seat, who is least unlikely to beat the Tory? if there is one, they get my vote. If there isn't, then part B applies: of all the non-tory candidates who are standing, which best deserves my vote and the potential few pence for their party (if they're not an independent). The Tory will win, here, because they always do. Anyone but those bastards would please me immensely. Now I am not typical, I accept - others will have a preference for a particular "party that isn't the tories", which brings me to the third part of your post  - The notion, somehow that there would be no other parties but Labour if  anti-tory was the motivation. I don't even know where to start with that! But say your reason to hate the tories was because of the Environment/ Rampant Free Marketism / South & London Bias / You want Independence for Wales or Scotland or Unifying Ireland / The decline of local democracy / Wars / etc. - Labour is not a catch all for those things and many more. Various other parties are and were always better alternatives.

 

 

[HanoiVillan]

10 minutes ago, blandy said:

Disagree with all 3 parts of of that.

There is definitely an anti-Tory vote. For many it is the most powerful force (me being one of them). From my sample of one (me), my kind of voting process goes like this:

Of all the candidates in my seat, who is least unlikely to beat the Tory? if there is one, they get my vote. If there isn't, then part B applies: of all the non-tory candidates who are standing, which best deserves my vote and the potential few pence for their party (if they're not an independent). The Tory will win, here, because they always do. Anyone but those bastards would please me immensely. Now I am not typical, I accept -

LOL I don't think you should extrapolate to the rest of the electorate from your 'sample of one'.

 

Edited August 24, 2021 by HanoiVillan

[dAVe80]

1 hour ago, bickster said:

I think the former leader may be one of those exceptions but even that's just a maybe

Yeah I was thinking, JC, Abbott and maybe Johnny Mac. I don't think any of them would stand down to do that though. Although I guess JC might end up having his hand forced. 

[HanoiVillan]

12 minutes ago, blandy said:

which brings me to the third part of your post  - The notion, somehow that there would be no other parties but Labour if  anti-tory was the motivation. I don't even know where to start with that! But say your reason to hate the tories was because of the Environment/ Rampant Free Marketism / South & London Bias / You want Independence for Wales or Scotland or Unifying Ireland / The decline of local democracy / Wars / etc. - Labour is not a catch all for those things and many more. Various other parties are and were always better alternatives.

Literally what you are saying here is that people have multiple reasons for voting. I agree! That's the opposite of just voting for whoever would beat the Tories.

[blandy]

5 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

LOL I don't think you should extrapolate to the rest of the electorate from your 'sample of one'.

You know the notion of writing about something generally, and then adding a personal element/angle, right?

2 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Literally what you are saying here is that people have multiple reasons for voting. I agree! That's the opposite of just voting for whoever would beat the Tories.

You may have heard of tactical voting? - You know where people put aside their personal preference for (say) Labour to vote for the party most likely to beat the tory in their constituency.

[HanoiVillan]

1 minute ago, blandy said:

You may have heard of tactical voting? - You know where people put aside their personal preference for (say) Labour to vote for the party most likely to beat the tory in their constituency.

I'm not saying that *nobody* votes tactically, I'm saying that it is not the primary determining factor in how people vote, and that we can see this by just looking at actual election results in the UK.

To make this clearer - if the main reason for people's votes was preventing the Tories from winning, not just individual seats but the entire election, then there would only be two significant parties, which would be Conservative and Labour. Not just in 500 odd seats, but in every seat in the land. That's because only Labour can actually win a national election (we might note here that all minor parties except the Lib Dems in theory, but including them in practice, are not even trying to win a national election), so any seat taken by a minor party would be a risk that that minor party would choose to ally with the Conservatives. You would end up, in other words, with a politics that looked like America's, in which there are two parties that count and only two parties that count, each of which is a huge broad tent coalition.

We can see very obviously that this is not at all how British politics works. If someone votes for the SNP, they might not *like* the Conservatives, but it does not make sense to conceive of this vote as primarily an anti-Tory tactical vote; it quite literally makes a Tory majority more likely. Instead, that person is voting *for* Scottish independence, or to *positively* express appreciation for the Scottish government. Similarly, if a person in England votes for the Lib Dems in a seat in which they are a distant 3rd (and hundreds of thousands of people do so, in those seats), then clearly that is not a tactical vote. Minor parties matter in British politics, in a way they do not matter in America. Note that this is true even when people try very hard to organise non-Tory votes, as they did in 2019. We had three or four websites telling people how to vote tactically, and they got plentiful news coverage, and as far as I can see their only actual effect was to help the Tories win Westminster and Stroud.

People on this forum seem to love to believe that whatever their differences, voters of all non-Tory parties have a unifying dislike of the Conservatives that is more important than their differences. They don't, and revealed preference from actual real-life election results proves that they don't.

[bickster]

5 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I'm not saying that *nobody* votes tactically, I'm saying that it is not the primary determining factor in how people vote, and that we can see this by just looking at actual election results in the UK.

To make this clearer - if the main reason for people's votes was preventing the Tories from winning, not just individual seats but the entire election, then there would only be two significant parties, which would be Conservative and Labour. Not just in 500 odd seats, but in every seat in the land. That's because only Labour can actually win a national election (we might note here that all minor parties except the Lib Dems in theory, but including them in practice, are not even trying to win a national election), so any seat taken by a minor party would be a risk that that minor party would choose to ally with the Conservatives. You would end up, in other words, with a politics that looked like America's, in which there are two parties that count and only two parties that count, each of which is a huge broad tent coalition.

We can see very obviously that this is not at all how British politics works. If someone votes for the SNP, they might not *like* the Conservatives, but it does not make sense to conceive of this vote as primarily an anti-Tory tactical vote; it quite literally makes a Tory majority more likely. Instead, that person is voting *for* Scottish independence, or to *positively* express appreciation for the Scottish government. Similarly, if a person in England votes for the Lib Dems in a seat in which they are a distant 3rd (and hundreds of thousands of people do so, in those seats), then clearly that is not a tactical vote. Minor parties matter in British politics, in a way they do not matter in America. Note that this is true even when people try very hard to organise non-Tory votes, as they did in 2019. We had three or four websites telling people how to vote tactically, and they got plentiful news coverage, and as far as I can see their only actual effect was to help the Tories win Westminster and Stroud.

People on this forum seem to love to believe that whatever their differences, voters of all non-Tory parties have a unifying dislike of the Conservatives that is more important than their differences. They don't, and revealed preference from actual real-life election results proves that they don't.

And how do you imagine that would change IF the four parties (ignoring the SNP for now) previously mentioned all stated that they were turning it into a two horse race and that they would be seeking to change the way the country votes in the future.

[blandy]

4 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

I'm not saying that *nobody* votes tactically, I'm saying that it is not the primary determining factor in how people vote, and that we can see this by just looking at actual election results in the UK.

You said that "

Quote

The whole problem comes from conceptualising *both* that there is such a thing as a Not Tory vote..."

- well clearly there is such a thing, as tactical voting evidences.

Quote

*and* that it is the most powerful motivating force.

Well clearly it is for the people who vote tactically. If it were not, they would not.

Quote

if it were there would be no other parties except Labour.

But it demonstrably is the case, and there are other parties than Labour.

Not everyone votes tactically. Not everyone votes based on the same motives or motivations or beliefs or views or anything. If you're somehow (I may have misunderstood) talking about this "most powerful motivating force" applying universally, or to the overall electorate, then I think I kind of get what you're trying to say - if you look at the country's voting as a whole then you (in your opinion) can see that [whatever]" then OK.

I think my point is that there is a very significant part of the electorate that absolutely detests the tories and that detestation is their primary motivation for voting as they do.

[HanoiVillan]

2 minutes ago, bickster said:

And how do you imagine that would change IF the four parties (ignoring the SNP for now) previously mentioned all stated that they were turning it into a two horse race and that they would be seeking to change the way the country votes in the future.

Well firstly, we are in the realm of pure hypotheticals, because it will never be in the Labour party's interest to form such an alliance, and without the Labour party's involvement, such an alliance is meaningless.

But to toy with the idea for a few seconds, a number of things you are likely to see would include:

• The parties - which have huge ideological differences - would hugely struggle to come up with a platform that they could agree on, and that voters would want to vote for. If it were a full manifesto, the process would probably fall apart long before the election. If it were just on the basis of winning, implementing a new electoral system and then collapsing, it would run into people'e well-known disinterest in consititutional affairs, and status quo bias (people actually don't mind the current system, see 2011 AV referendum for details);
• Even if the above could be surmounted, and an inspiring vision somehow emerge, many voters would either not vote for who they were told to vote for (out of principled disagreement with the enterprise, or out of dislike for their non-usual choice) or because they had bad information about who to vote for (constituency level polling is rare and usually bad, the tools used to organise tactical voting have a bad track record in 2019 and are inevitably biased). Alternatively, if there were no other options at the ballot box, there would be a risk of mass non-voting and/or resentment.

Another possibility is that you might be able to do all that - and then the Tories win anyway (because they're actually quite popular, because people are angry about the stitch-up, etc).

There is no One Cool Trick To Change The Electoral System And Get Non-Tory Majorities On The Regular.

[HanoiVillan]

@blandy I was trying to make clear, by highlighting *both*/*and* that both conditions need to be true, not just one of them. It seems that we both agree that there are voters who are primarily motivated by trying to prevent a Tory majority, though I suspect we don't agree about the proportion of those voters among all voters for non-Tory parties.

Just one other key point here from your comment above is that there is often a tension between voting tactically to prevent a Tory majority, and detesting the Tories and having detesting the Tories be your primary motivation. As I say above, lots and lots and lots of SNP voters detest the Tories, but by voting SNP they are enabling and ensuring Tory majorities, whatever the strength of their personal feelings.

[blandy]

8 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

As I say above, lots and lots and lots of SNP voters detest the Tories, but by voting SNP they are enabling and ensuring Tory majorities, whatever the strength of their personal feelings.

It's a dichotomy for sure. Once upon a time, Labour used to win most of the Scottish seats. Over time, the SNP came to dominate in Scotland because they kind of cleverly both weaponised the Tories contempt for Scotland and because Labour kind of took Scotland for granted and just atrophied.

And then the SNP independence stuff actually also strengthens the tories in Scotland, in terms of the people who don't want to break up the UK - they've really only got the tories to vote for (through gritted teeth) to preserve unionism.

Labour's in a proper mess.

[HanoiVillan]

16 minutes ago, blandy said:

It's a dichotomy for sure. Once upon a time, Labour used to win most of the Scottish seats. Over time, the SNP came to dominate in Scotland because they kind of cleverly both weaponised the Tories contempt for Scotland and because Labour kind of took Scotland for granted and just atrophied.

And then the SNP independence stuff actually also strengthens the tories in Scotland, in terms of the people who don't want to break up the UK - they've really only got the tories to vote for (through gritted teeth) to preserve unionism.

Labour's in a proper mess.

The bolded is true of course, and helps the current situation to perpetuate. Another element that helps it to perpetuate is that the strength of many Scottish voters' hatred of the Tories helps the SNP win, because many voters can't bear to be in the same country as the Tories. Hence the SNP actually prefer a Tory government at Westminster (it expands their vote), and why they would have no interest in playing games with projects to change the electoral system.

Edited August 24, 2021 by HanoiVillan

[blandy]

1 minute ago, HanoiVillan said:

The bolded is true of course, and helps the current situation to perpetuate. Another element that helps it to perpetuate is that the strength of many Scottish voters' hatred of the Tories helps the SNP win, because many voters can't bear to be in the same country as the Tories. Hence the SNP actually prefer a Tory government at Westminster (it expands their vote), and why they would have no interest in playing games with projects to change the electoral system.

Hmmm.

Agree with most of that, just not so sure about the PR bit. With PR the SNP could (as part of a coalition) form the UK government. And the UK government has the say so/veto on Scottish Independence referenda and such like...

[HanoiVillan]

2 minutes ago, blandy said:

Hmmm.

Agree with most of that, just not so sure about the PR bit. With PR the SNP could (as part of a coalition) form the UK government. And the UK government has the say so/veto on Scottish Independence referenda and such like...

Perhaps counter-intuitively, I strongly suspect - and think they believe as well - that they would be *more* likely to be in a coalition under FPTP than under PR. While Labour keep making a big show of 'categorically ruling it out', they would be under huge pressure to change course on that if they were the largest party but didn't have a majority. And it's also partly a numbers game too; while the SNP can win 50+ seats in a good year under FPTP, (depending on the system) they might win only around 30 with the same share of the vote under PR, which would make them easier to exclude from the coalition (which would include larger numbers of other alternatives, as there would be a lot more Lib Dem and Green MPs). It's worth remembering that no party, including the Tories, 'outperforms' more than the SNP under FPTP.

[blandy]

7 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Perhaps counter-intuitively, I strongly suspect - and think they believe as well - that they would be *more* likely to be in a coalition under FPTP than under PR. While Labour keep making a big show of 'categorically ruling it out', they would be under huge pressure to change course on that if they were the largest party but didn't have a majority. And it's also partly a numbers game too; while the SNP can win 50+ seats in a good year under FPTP, (depending on the system) they might win only around 30 with the same share of the vote under PR, which would make them easier to exclude from the coalition (which would include larger numbers of other alternatives, as there would be a lot more Lib Dem and Green MPs). It's worth remembering that no party, including the Tories, 'outperforms' more than the SNP under FPTP.

Fair comment. As you said (I think) I think it suits the SNP as much as it suits the Tories to have each other in their places of power. Which is one more reason the system as it is, is so effed.

[HanoiVillan]

7 minutes ago, blandy said:

Fair comment. As you said (I think) I think it suits the SNP as much as it suits the Tories to have each other in their places of power. Which is one more reason the system as it is, is so effed.

It's (sadly, from my perspective) a feature of first past the post systems that they benefit regionally-concentrated parties with high floors of support. We can see a similar dynamic in Canada, where the NDP are the national third party (similar to the Lib Dems in status but not ideology), but the Bloc Quebecois have (had, they're about to have an election so this may change) 32 seats to the NDP's 24.

Edited August 24, 2021 by HanoiVillan