Another unelected labour PM

[voteanythingbutBNPplease]

Gordon brown resigns.
So if LIb dems do deal with labour - ANOTHER unelected PM.

hmmm

WetAugust
I am not oversensitive, and pretty much ignored your rude post. I posted about staying away from this thread on the Lefties thread - as a joke - because of the reference to Thatcher being a good egg. In the meantime I have put the DC to bed, chatted to my DH and made tea.

A discussion about politics is bound to get heated at the moment but we can still be polite to each other.

Policy
Good post, and food for thought.

Must read up on the AV thing.

The only thing that I can add at the moment is that IF we get PR at some point in the future, the electorate will have to get used to hung parliaments. It is not a bad thing. It has worked for almost 60 years in Germany, they have had stable governments for most of that time.

The fact that there are three parties in UK make FPTP system unworkable. It is always going to be unfair for the smaller parties.

do you think, possibly, people sid they wanted a hung parliament in a frivolous 'won't it be a fun change' sort of way?

after all, no-one could know how it would actually pan out.

How dare they?? How dare the Labour party offer to change our entire voting system in their cosy little club in parliament without so much as a query to their supposed masters of the electorate. Am raging. Do they still not get it? The Lib Dems were the ONLY party campaigning on any kind of electoral reform platform and they got 24% of the vote. Fewer than 1 in 4 people. How dare they then proceed to offer it as a bill as if it's something we've given a mandate for.

Just listened to John Reid on news24, hurrah for some sensible labour people still - let's hope the rest of the party listen to him. . Never been so tempted to f&blind online...

The fact that there are three parties in UK make FPTP system unworkable.

Unworkable? It's worked for a good while, and had hung parliaments before.

Perhaps unworkable is a bad choice of words.

Unfair.

LOL at people voting for a hung parliament. DH said it has been great entertainment, and can we do it again next month.

I heard John Reid as well I thought he was very good,are we really going to make this issue the fasctor on which we decide our Government for the next five years when there are much more pressing problems like how to get us out of the ecenomic mess we are in, and the fact that we have troops dying in Afghanistan and he raised the whole question of security and the Olympics .

This really is a true example of false vanity by the liberals none of whom have had real power in living political history and who despite having lost seats are now drunk on the possibilty of power;how can they really think that this is the most pressing problem facing the nation at this point....answer they don't but they do know that it is the most pressing problem facing the liberals and thats all they can see.

Excellent link amicissima, thanks.

minthumbug made such a good point on another thread i thought I'd post it on this one too -

Everyone who voted LibDem was supporting PR because that's a big part of who the LibDems are.

If we have PR Nick Clegg (or whoever the LibDem leader is) will have to do deals with the left and the right in future to get laws passed. That's how a coalition after a PR election works

So you are cross that you voted LibDem and then Clegg sells you out to the Tories or Labour - why did you want the LibDem manifesto which introduces PR which would mean ALWAYS doing deals with other parties that you might not like??

good point, no?

1997? 1997? And that's supposed to be a mandate for them to go ahead and change the system in parliament? Different party leader, different opposition, bloody massive majority and they didn't do it, on what basis do they think they have the mandate to do it now??

They did appoint a commission;The Jenkins commission,which came up with AV plus (incidently no country in the world uses this so it is untested).....it was buried by the Labour Party!

On BBC now they are saying that Labour have offered the Lib Dems AV without a referendum, with a referendum on a 'more radical' method of PR.

So they will just change the voting system with no reference to the electorate, without it having been in their manifesto?

Arrrgggghhhhh.

Although, Labour promised a referendum on Lisbon and we never got that so who can believe a bloody word they say.

Christ I am so angry. How can they just all change what they stand for after the election is over??

Agree with every word that John Reid said also.

LibLab pact will not be a good thing for the labour party, and every candidate for the Labour leadership should out themselves on where they stand on coalition governments. John Reid seemed to have no appetite to work with the SNP, and as a Scot I think he knows far more about them than most non-Scots.

I'm in favour of electoral reform and I think it's too big an issue to just decide in parliament. A referendum is the correct way of doing it --- if for no other reason that it's democracy!!!!

They can't offer it without a referendum,it is not in their gift because even with the Liberals they cannot guarentee to get it through the House of Commons and even if they do it will bre blocked in committee and by the house of Lords

Look, Reid is an old-school LAbour hack who hates the idea of losing what he sees as his right to rule in Scotland. That's long gone, if it was ever there. They are going to have to get less tribal and start talking. Too bad.

I think a lot of people liked the idea of no one party being in overall charge but didn't actually think about the practicalities of it. I don't think NC spouting off during the debates about working together (re deficit etc) helped either. Sounded a bit hippyish imo and not workable at all. Whatever flavour this coalition forms I give it a year max before the next GE.

The Libdumbs have really done it. How long will we be with no govt? If not careful they'll lose everything.

According to this link:

'A YouGov poll for The Sunday Times showed 62 per cent of voters favoured a more proportional system of voting. A BPIX poll for The Mail on Sunday found 60 per cent would prefer proportional representation to the current system. The Sunday Telegraph commissioned an ICM poll which found 48 per cent of voters favoured a move to PR while 39 per cent backed the current system.'

PR is not purely a LibDem issue.

Agree that it absolutely ought to go to a referendum though.

Edgar, I think most people who voted LibDem understand the consequences of PR - I know I did. But let's not forget, the current situation isn't the result of PR; it's the result of FPTP, a system that encourages antagonism and partisan politics. People I've spoken to from other countries that do operate PR say that the post-election period tends to be pretty calm, as the parties already know which other parties they are likely to do deals with, and the manifestos are written with this in mind.

No party should be able to unilaterally determine the way that it gets to stay in power.

That's how a dictatorship works and the lib dems, if they accept labour's offer, should reject a unilateral change.

Why not have a referrendum where the options are STV, AV and FPTP and a presumption of a move to AV. If no option gets 50%, we go to AV. At least that way there's no change without it going to the electorate in some form.

(The irony of this does not escape me and is entirely mischevious.)