Nobody ever criticises the UK/US electorate

He cares about staying in power hence the whip yesterday. Ik mn is still more Starmer / Labour I doubt the local elections will back this up.

Plus he uses more lines, sound bites and doesn’t answer anything really. Probably why he had to avoid the privileges committee.

I think that the electorate still carry some responsibility. It appears that no fact checking takes place anymore, and that anything people read on social media is just believed as being factual. Don't get me wrong, the politicians are not helping this either (looking at you Boris with your bus slogans), and there is also an increase in foreign disruptors making posts to further muddy the waters.

It used to be that a government was elected to make decisions on behalf of the people, who were not necessarily in touch with all the detail required, however now it seems that many politicians are only interested in serving themselves.

Interestingly, and while Labour are not covering themselves in glory at the moment, I do believe that Starmer cares about the country to a much greater degree than many of the more recent PMs.

Perhaps you need broader news sources.

So how it is with Labour now

What's the difference between that imagined future and the present that we have whereby we have a significant portion of people who viscerally despise our current PM and his policies? Our FPTP system means that we sometimes/frequently get leaders and parties that are unrepresentative of many of us. You obviously despise what Reform and its ilk stands for. How did you feel (if you were an adult) during the years when Blair ran the country? Did you feel that he and New Labour fairly "represented all British people"? I didn't (and I even voted for him to get in the first term!). Apart from everyone who thinks like you leaving the UK, what do you think is a "solution"?

@Sheeled
Do an advanced search.
Type in the words "stupid electorate".

You will be inundated with thread after thread and thousands of posts criticising the electorate. You could fill a book with posts that say things like "At least now Trump's been elected again we have proof that there is an electorate more stupid than ours".

You clearly haven’t been here long if you’ve never seen posts saying people who voted for Brexit are X or people who vote for Reform are Y.
Plenty of posts on how can people vote for Tories, Corbyn, Green Party, Trump…and what their vote says about their IQ.

I'm not a fan of Reform or Farage, and haven't decided who I will vote for even at next week's local elections.

Who are you going to vote for and who do you want everyone else to vote for?

"There seems to be a big trend on this website to slagging others off, "you know fuck all.about politics"

Isn't that point directly contradicting the premise of your original post?

I get the feeling that, even though we're all stupid if we don't vote the way she wants us to, we're not going to be told who the OP actually wants us to vote for

There’s a famous poem about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_L%C3%B6sung

bertholt Brecht. Suggesting dissolving the people and getting a different one.

I think the electorate gets quite the pasting regularly. Blaming the people for their own pain is easy.

Most of what has happened in both countries has had nothing to do with the elections - most of what Labour is doing right now is no where to be seen in their electoral promises. They didn't run on Digital IDs and handing over the digital infrastructure of the NHS, schools, the Met and more to American companies, but here we are.

Much of what Trump and the Republicans are doing wasn't in their promises either - he specifically ran on and bragged about not being a war president. He's a bit notorious for changing as the wind and those paying him blow. The Democrats failed to realise that just running on 'not Trump' wasn't going to be enough a second time.

Personally, I'm more concerned about the quality and integrity of the candidates that we're forced to pick between, that on both sides of the pond politics has developed more into voting to keep a group out than actually supporting the group one's voting for and the political parties know and play into this to the point of losing elections over it, and that a lot of the things that impact us in daily life are people we can't hold accountable through elections (I'm talking 'advisors' and lobbying corporations rather than the House of Lords, which has actually been the challenge to the government we've needed at times).

Sure, we can call a significant portion of the population of either country fools and say they're responsible, but I think that rhetoric is more smokescreen to ignore that our politicians are not and have not been listening to the public in a very long time. Those responsible are those they're listening to, the one's they're giving over large portions of the budget to, having policies written for - like the companies our government is selling our digital autonomy off to, leaving the UK is a far weaker position in actually making its own decisions. No amount of people voting for the "correct" party is going to change how much harder people have to work compared to corporate heads to be barely heard by our politicians.

But you said that people who vote differently to you are wrong and significantly implied that they are or were so stupid that they deserve to be punished.

There was a poll out this weekend that found there's a huge split among wealth in the UK re how people vote.

Reform and Conservative are comfortably first and second for poorer people, while Labour poll in first place among the richest people in society.

Do you therefore think that poorer people are more likely to be stupid?

Why won't you say who you voted for?

Ok who do you prefer, Polanski?

NOT ONLY. they tear each other daily on social media, the various supporters - whole families have been torn apart over politics, especially in the USA

Are you seriously saying you think you're more intelligent than most other people because you vote Green, SNP, PC or Lib Dem?

Can you not see a certain irony in all this?

I linked to a specific post. To make it clear, here it is:

Another 'people who don't vote the same way I do are stupid' thread.

It's so boring and, no, you're not a clever person if you vote for people who tell you that women can have penises.

If you are unhappy with the results of elections in the UK & US, it's not so much "the culpability of the electorate" as to how the electoral system is arranged so that it doesn't represent the electorate in a fair manner. In the UK we have first past the post and the US has its ridiculous Electoral College; both don't always give a result that reflects "the will of the people".

I guess you weren't around during Brexit then.

I know I shouldn't indulge you, but here is a post from a few minutes ago.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/politics/5517932-are-we-all-looking-forward-to-david-lammy-becoming-pm?reply=151947407&utm_campaign=reply&utm_medium=share