To think the Green Party are just making themselves look ridiculous?

[curiousgeorgie]

They really seemed to be gaining support...

But this new 'we will evict the queen from Buckingham palace and put her into a council house' just makes them sound stupid?

I've seen Green Party supporters on facebook sharing this post with excitement and glee but... Really?

meanwhile, green activists have moved from desecrating world heritage sites, to vandalising the offices of their political opponents.
Charlotte Leslies (con) office in Bristol has some nice new misogynist décor

order-order.com/2015/01/29/anti-fracking-eco-loons-aerosol-protest/

lovely people these greens

Why would you think actions like those represent "these greens"? Who has endorsed that action? There are misguided folk in all walks of life.

That voteforpolicies website that is always trotted out to apparently 'prove' people should support the Greens. Well quite. But only if it was rigorously neutral and it doesn't appear to be.

Partly because it's out of date, but also it asks you to pick policies out of a group which you prefer. But it doesn't seem to show all of each parties policies unless you click to see more, it just shows a select few.

And all the parties on the right seem to have either their boring or bonkers policies on the top with their more popular ones hidden, and the partied on the left their popular policies at the top with the boring or bonkers ones hidden.

And they don't have 'unspoken' policies on there. For example we all know Labour is going to re-encourage mass migration from outside the EU again. But they don't openly declare that.

I think MP's should have to live in council houses instead of having second homes. Put them in the Olympic Village. We pay for it either way.

How are the policy summaries compiled?

The summaries are taken from the official websites and manifestos of the political parties. There is no editing - except to remove any references to political party names - so that the style of each political party is retained. We display a maximum of eight key points for each issue from each party, and we take them in the order in which they are published. If there are less than eight points we show them all. For a full picture we recommend you continue your own research after completing the survey, starting with the official party websites. You can also refer to our terms & conditions for more details on this.

We've been in contact with all of the political parties included here and are keeping an eye out for changes as the election manifestos are released. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay up to date with these changes.

Is Vote for Policies politically biased?

No! This site is completely non-partisan. This project is completely unfunded (i.e. we're doing it for free), and we don't have any kind of connection with any organisations - political or otherwise.

voteforpolicies.org.uk/content/faqs

They're also very open that the site currently refers to 2010 elections and that they are in the process of updating. I still think it's a useful tool.

I'd just like to congratulate worksallhours for one of the best posts about dismantling the monarchy I've seen on MN since 2010. I despise the concept of the monarchy, completely.

However, getting rid of it is more than "red tape", and I don't want anyone in charge of getting rid of it who thinks of it as bypassing "red tape". Maintaining and improving division of power in government isn't red tape! If you go into it thinking of it all as nonsense, you're guaranteed to come a cropper and unwittingly create a tyrant's playground, frankly.

Also, I do think that comparing extending the vote to more citizens to abolishing the monarchy is like comparing apples and dogs. Not oranges. Dogs. To give the vote to men who weren't aristocrats, then women over 30 took four Acts of Parliament, IIRC. (Dropping the minimum property threshold was a slow process.)

I think getting rid of the monarchy is going to be more complex than offering the vote to all men who can prove they have property over £x and then dropping it to all men with property, for example.

it did occur to me that if Scotland had decided to be an independent country, then it might have signalled the end of the Monarchy anyway.

If they had decided to keep the Queen (remain a monarchy) then we would have had the situation where the rUK monarch - who is privy to extremely classified information - was also the monarch of a foreign power. Even if Scotland chose not to include the Queen in confidential matters, it would start a conflict of interests that could not continue. A temporary solution may have been to abdicate the Scottish throne in favour of Charles, but as soon as the Queen died, you'd have the same problem.

If they had decided not to remain a monarchy, that would have left her as Queen of rUK, which (I believe) would have kick-started a national debate which could have led to a republic.

All hypotheticals now.

I suspect any pressure for abolition of the Monarchy will come from people who think it's not viable for the Head of State to also be the head of the approved state church. The UK not have separation of church and state in any meaningful sense of the phrase.

Surely all the commonwealth countries have the queen as their monarch?

Agree there should be separation of church and state.

ItsAllGoingToBeFine

Surely all the commonwealth countries have the queen as their monarch?

Yes, but her duties there are discharged by someone else - who would not be privy to confidential information about the plans of the rUK government.

It may have been possible to create a similar arrangement with an independent Scotland. But seeing the fuss they kicked up about the pound, it would be hard to imagine them accepting a "second best" queen.

Nope. Some of them retain the Queen as a figurehead (for example on stamps) such as Australia, but others are now completely independent, such as the Republic of India (full name) which has not had our monarch as a head since approximately 1950.

Oh, hang on. You mean the countries that are currently commonwealth countries as in having the queen on stamps, not the Commonwealth as in the association of 50+ countries that have been part of the British empire at some point. Sorry, as you were.

And now the "equalities spokesperson" (a man, naturally) is throwing around "TERF", like so:

"Have noticed more & more TERFs saying they won't vote Green. Not a bad thing."

And a longstanding gay activist and fundraiser with the Greens has left the party, after being called "transphobic" for not wanting to be labelled "cis" by a trans man standing as a Green candidate.

Well done, Greens. Keep digging.

WhistlingPot anybody who would take that at face value would have to be stunningly naive. Although they haven't edited the parts they've chosen to use of course they have been selective about what they've chosen. If they put every single item in the manifesto or on the websites for each policy for each party it would be huge. Plus they have selected which policies for which parties are put in the 'headline' for each party and which are hidden so you have to select to read more to see them.

Also a quick Google of the founder Matt Chocqeel-Mangan is massively left wing and publicly and vocally so. And of course it is just a complete coincidence that this massively left wing site flys completely in the face of what the electorate normally claim to think and vote for.

I really don't think it's possible to take the results on that website very seriously unless it's telling you what you want to hear.

It's clearly selective and presents the information it selects in a manner which is intended to return a result which is intended to influence voters rather than advise.

You're entitled to your opinion of course MoanCollins, but it's not really surprising that the notion of "voting for policies" stems from a more left wing perspective which questions the validity of the first past the post system.

I do find it surprising that the negative aspects you're implying don't appear to be backed up by any published criticism that I can see - if there was real concern as to the fairness of how the site works, I would have thought there'd be more outcry.

Before you advocate abolishing something as a serious politician, you need to be 100 percent clear about what would replace it and how you would get there (and how you avoid an enormous f'k up in the process).

that's a rather odd stance I think. Basically, we have a position that in every way morally is repugnant (inherited power), and extremely costly. It's literally from the dark ages. So, we have to be 100% sure of what the outcome is if we transition?

but to rebut that very point, there are two models which could easily be followed: Canada and Australia. In both cases the Queen is head, but the de facto head is the governor. the governor too has a lot of power that's rarely exercised. They have very similar systems with similar customs. It's reasonable to think that a transition to those systems would lead to similar outcomes.

But those aren't the only two models we can look at. There are plenty to choose from.

This monarchy is made more palatable by having a likeable monarch (I agree, the queen is ok). I can't wait until the Prince C becomes the monarch.

It's still misleading, presenting itself as unbiased advice when actually it's propaganda. Just because you agree with something doesn't make it right. And attempting to manipulate people into voting the way you wish without being upfront about your intentions is not right.

And I don't think that website is advocating PR, far from it, because according to that 6% of our MPs would be from the BNP. In fact PR has always done the left a favour by shutting out far right parties even when they could get a highish % of votes because they couldn't win a seat.
.

I'm not saying the website is advocating anything. I'm just unsurprised that it has been developed by someone with left leanings.

Your key argument seems to imply they are deliberately "selecting" which policies to headline and hiding the rest - as far as I understand they show the first four policies from each party's manefesto in the order they are published under each category, and you can click to see where there are more policies, up to a maximum of 8.

How is that cherry picking?

If anything, I think the findings are interesting and put weight to the argument that perhaps our media could do more in an independent way to educate more widely the policies of the main parties, so that voters can be better informed.