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So having heard about some of the policies that the Tories are proposing I have to say I'm slightly somewhat worried for us voters over here in the UK. It also got me mulling over things. Obviously the Tories were voted in via a democratic election, which is how things should be. This isn't necessary a pop at them either, it did happen under Labour as well, it's just some of the stuff they are coming out with is worrying.

Ok, back to the conundrum. Just a bit of a build up to it, so please hang in there )

The election countdown has started, all involved political parties start their campaigning and producing manifestos that will appeal to the voting public. As know most of the contents of these manifestos get discarded after the election, more so with the Tories (it would appear) as they were trying to be a bit careful in case they had to work with the Libs again.

Once the votes are counted a party is elected, with a small majority, but enough to be able to do what they want politically. Six months later that party starts to roll out policies that nobody was were aware of before.

In the last election the Tories came to power, with a small majority and probably the support of a lot of voters who chose them just because they were disillusioned with their usual party. The result didn't make you stop and think that the majority of the country was Tory leaning.

The Tories are now in a position to roll out policies as and when they like, with nothing to stop them. If you are just the average voter who chose to vote for them, based on their election sales pitch, you may not agree with this / these new policies, but there is now nothing that can be done until the next election... which is what politicians are well aware of. Notice how the extreme stuff is racketed back and more general generic bribes, sorry 'manifesto promises' are made. They are fully aware that the average voter will fall for these ploys, especially if the more extreme ones don't really affect you. It could be they make you uneasy, but at the end of the day you don't make use of tax credits (for examples), so it's not an issue for you.

In defence of the Tories, Labour were the same, but at least you felt that due to the strength of their majority they were reflecting the feelings of the country, but they still came out with stuff that made you stop and think, "hold on a mo".

When I stop and think about it I get the feeling it's really a 'token' democracy, enough is done to make people feel that they are in control, but in fact we aren't. Is there a fix though or some way to make the buggers more accountable?

The Tories scored only one in four of available votes (the total eligible electorate, a lot of people didn't vote) in the last election, and slightly over one in three of all votes cast. Yet they got over half the seats.

The UKIP scored over 1/8 of votes cast and only one seat. I hate UKIP as much as the next guy but this is simply unjust.

The current government does not have a democratic mandate. The Conservatives should not be allowed to do whatever they like for the next five years.

The answer to this is some form of proportional representation. Sadly, the referendum on this was so fethed up in 2011 that we are guaranteed not to be able to look at the issue again for another 15 or so years.

I wouldn't worry about the Tories - they have a knack of imploding over Europe, and the Europe question is looming large on the horizon.

In my lifetime, the Tories made life hell for John Major, and they stabbed one of their most successful leaders in the back (Thatcher)

Nobody does back-stabbing and self destruction like the Tories.

I agree, but they still have nearly 5 years to do what they want, even with problems over Europe. The Tory MP's don't tend to cause problems with home policies, just anything to do with Europe and unless it kicks off again at the next election, the manifesto bribes will be rolled out again.

 Wolfstan wrote:
I agree, but they still have nearly 5 years to do what they want, even with problems over Europe. The Tory MP's don't tend to cause problems with home policies, just anything to do with Europe and unless it kicks off again at the next election, the manifesto bribes will be rolled out again.

The Tories have two major problems looming on the horizon:

1) Europe. Like I said, Europe is a running sore for the Tories (cracks are appearing already) and it's likely to get worse.

2) Scotland, or more specifically, the SNP, who are on course to win another landslide in May's Scottish elections, thus giving us another referendum.

In my opinion, I seriously doubt the UK can survive another Scottish referendum.

Cameron hasn't got his troubles to seek.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The Tories scored only one in four of available votes (the total eligible electorate, a lot of people didn't vote) in the last election, and slightly over one in three of all votes cast. Yet they got over half the seats.

The UKIP scored over 1/8 of votes cast and only one seat. I hate UKIP as much as the next guy but this is simply unjust.

The current government does not have a democratic mandate. The Conservatives should not be allowed to do whatever they like for the next five years.

The answer to this is some form of proportional representation. Sadly, the referendum on this was so fethed up in 2011 that we are guaranteed not to be able to look at the issue again for another 15 or so years.

Perhaps the way to make them play fair is to make a Manifesto a legal document or a mini constitution that lasts the life time of the current Parliament? If the party in power wants to introduce a new policy, change it or not implement it, it has to go to a vote. Either cross party or e referendum. At least it would make them focus and plan rather than just say what they think we want to hear.

 Wolfstan wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The Tories scored only one in four of available votes (the total eligible electorate, a lot of people didn't vote) in the last election, and slightly over one in three of all votes cast. Yet they got over half the seats.

The UKIP scored over 1/8 of votes cast and only one seat. I hate UKIP as much as the next guy but this is simply unjust.

The current government does not have a democratic mandate. The Conservatives should not be allowed to do whatever they like for the next five years.

The answer to this is some form of proportional representation. Sadly, the referendum on this was so fethed up in 2011 that we are guaranteed not to be able to look at the issue again for another 15 or so years.

Perhaps the way to make them play fair is to make a Manifesto a legal document or a mini constitution that lasts the life time of the current Parliament? If the party in power wants to introduce a new policy, change it or not implement it, it has to go to a vote. Either cross party or e referendum. At least it would make them focus and plan rather than just say what they think we want to hear.

Except that goes against Parliamentary Sovereignty. No parliament can be bound by a preceding law. That would be going too far into that territory to be legally binding.

Us British don't do constitutions for that very reason.

 welshhoppo wrote:

 Wolfstan wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
The Tories scored only one in four of available votes (the total eligible electorate, a lot of people didn't vote) in the last election, and slightly over one in three of all votes cast. Yet they got over half the seats.

The UKIP scored over 1/8 of votes cast and only one seat. I hate UKIP as much as the next guy but this is simply unjust.

The current government does not have a democratic mandate. The Conservatives should not be allowed to do whatever they like for the next five years.

The answer to this is some form of proportional representation. Sadly, the referendum on this was so fethed up in 2011 that we are guaranteed not to be able to look at the issue again for another 15 or so years.

Perhaps the way to make them play fair is to make a Manifesto a legal document or a mini constitution that lasts the life time of the current Parliament? If the party in power wants to introduce a new policy, change it or not implement it, it has to go to a vote. Either cross party or e referendum. At least it would make them focus and plan rather than just say what they think we want to hear.

Why would they be bound? All they being told is that if it wasn't in the Manifesto then they have to get it voted on, by whatever means. There is nothing binding a government to the previous policies, they just have to say in their manifesto that they are going to remove / change it. It means they have to actually think about what they telling us and that there is some recourse to making them put them in place. Not telling the public what they want to hear then dropping them once in power. It would also force them to get their own house in order. They couldn't lie to get into power then drop a policy to get a chunk of their own MP's happy.


Except that goes against Parliamentary Sovereignty. No parliament can be bound by a preceding law. That would be going too far into that territory to be legally binding.

Us British don't do constitutions for that very reason.

I would still say that it is very much a bind on the parliament. They are the highest authority in the land, and nothing can force them to do anything, even themselves. Having a manifesto as a legally binding document, would be impossible to do with parliament as it currently is.

Your only real recourse is to burn it down and start over from scratch.

Really, the only thing you can do is to vote differently next time, and to remind others about the broken policies.

I think the electoral system in the UK is particularly fossilised though. You've very little choice, and among the choices for many years pretty much everyone has been a centre right neoliberal.

 Da Boss wrote:
Really, the only thing you can do is to vote differently next time, and to remind others about the broken policies.

I think the electoral system in the UK is particularly fossilised though. You've very little choice, and among the choices for many years pretty much everyone has been a centre right neoliberal.

Let me give a run down of the "parties" at the last election.

Conservatives - Tories
Labour - Pretty much Tories, but not as good at it.
Lib Dems - Claim to not be Tories, but are actually Tory underlings.
UKIP - Racist party for not racist people.
SNP - Not Tory Scottish Party.
Plaid Cymru - Not Tory Welsh Party.

I'll leave out Ireland because it is a much different kettle of fish.

But basically, apart from the two national parties. Nearly everyone is a Tory. Just they aren't as good at is as the Tories are.

What is a torie

yellowfever wrote:
What is a torie

Tory (pl Tories) is the slang term for a member/supporter of the Conservative party here in the UK.

welshhoppo wrote:
But basically, apart from the two national parties. Nearly everyone is a Tory. Just they aren't as good at is as the Tories are.

This is very much the issue; last time round it was a choice between Tories, Tories with a Nicer Smile (Labour) , and... well, that's about it, really. The LibDems were spent, UKIP were never going to gain as much traction as some liked to assume, and the same goes for the Greens. So we were left with the choice of a Labour party that didn't actually stand for what the Labour Party existed to stand for, and Tories. As such, if you were vaguely centre or centre right, you went Tory as they were the more committed to that, and it was only those who actually believed in traditional Left Labour that voted that way, despite knowing that they probably weren't going to get that even with a Labour win.

Of course, in Scotland you had the SNP, who were basically being a better Labour party than Labour... as an Englishman , if I could have voted for the SNP I would have done, their policies were the only ones that struck me as even remotely hopeful. On that note, and getting back to the original topic, I don't think the Tories have any mandate whatsoever to dictate policy in Scotland, given that they have (if I recall correctly) not a single MP in the country.

As far as a general wider mandate for the UK goes, it's still a bit shaky. As pointed out earlier in the thread, with just about a third of the votes cast, or a quarter of the potential electorate in support of them, the Tories now have an unchallenged majority, which I think is pretty ridiculous. I'm honestly not able to suggest a way around it, and I'm not sure Proportional Representation is the way to go (at least, not in the awkward and overly complex form that went through referendum a few years back). Still, it does concern me that we have 5 years of unopposed Tory policy. It's hard to call it unjust in principle, as they were democratically elected in a fair system and if that's what the people have chosen then who am I to argue, but on a personal level I am not pleased with the outcome.

Next time round, there will at least be a choice. Hopefully by then, Corbyn will have turned the Labour party back into something closer to its whole raison d'etre, and there will be a genuine decision to make between Left and Right. If at that point, the nation still votes Right then again, I can hardly call it unfair, but I'm hoping that, once the distinction is there, people that were hesitant to vote for the 'Tory-lite' Labour will get behind 'proper' Labour, especially if the choice is going to be them or a May or Osborne (or god forbid, Johnson) led Tory party, that is likely to go even further right than Cameron.

yellowfever wrote:What is a torie

It's a colloquial/traditional term for the Conservative Party in Britain, who occupy the right wing.

AAHHH ok. Thanks malus

PR is a very European thing, and our voting system is ancient. I think an alternative voting system would be the best one. But people tend to be afraid of change (hence why we have jumped between the same three parties since the early 20th Century.

The problem with the SNP, is that they only have a pool of 56 MPs, it is not enough to swing the elections in any direction. It allows them to be ignored.

What's wrong with PR being European? Britain is in Europe.

Ye gave us (in Ireland) the Single Transferable Vote style of PR just before independence. It was a cynical move at the time to try to give more sway to the Unionist voters who were spread out and in a minority in most of the country (north excepted).

But we've kept it in the Republic since, and it's a pretty okay system. It requires multiple seats constituencies, and then you have one vote that is given in order of preference to candidates. So if your first preference gets in, left over votes from that candidate are distributed to the other candidates in order of preference. It benefits smaller parties and leads to a more diverse parliament, so coalition government is the norm, but that does not mean instability if your political system learns to cope with it. I think currently the British politicians are not good at dealing with coalition politics, but I feel it is usually more representative. Society is a coalition of interests, government should be too.

I prefer it to some other forms of PR where there is a list system, because list systems mean there is less direct accountability to the electorate. STV means that your representative still has to answer to his local electorate, which I think is one of the advantages of FPTP.

There's a lot of options for PR, it's not just one system.

Boring/Interesting fact: The word Tory comes from the Gaelic Irish word for outlaw - tóraidhe - which was applied to the supporters of King James in the 17th century.

Yellowfever: In this thread, most people are using Tory as a shorthand for economically neoliberal light touch don't care about inequality politics.

 welshhoppo wrote:
The problem with the SNP, is that they only have a pool of 56 MPs, it is not enough to swing the elections in any direction. It allows them to be ignored.

Well, when they can only really run for that many constituencies anyway, you can't really expect them to do much more than they've already done! I see what you mean, though, but I don't think you can dismiss them on the grounds of not having a great number of MPs when they won the massive majority of the seats they were able to run for. Or rather, you can 'dismiss' them in saying that they're not in a position to make a difference on their own, but the fact they have been so successful is very telling, and can't be underestimated.

I just think it's utterly ridiculous that a Tory government can have any mandate in Scotland despite not having a single MP there. The people of England voted, for better or worse, for a Conservative government, but the people of Scotland most certainly did not.

Despite the UKIP "not gaining much traction", they scored almost 13% of votes cast in May. That is one in eight of votes cast.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Despite the UKIP "not gaining much traction", they scored almost 13% of votes cast in May. That is one in eight of votes cast.

To clarify, I agree that to be 'fair', they should have greater representation, given the votes they got; all I was saying is that they hardly provided the political earthquake that the media and they themselves claimed was coming. They may well be coming in to the position of the 'fourth party'*, but only because of the Libdems crashing and burning

If anyone had the scope to cause that kind of shakeup it turned out to be the SNP, and as mentioned above they're very limited in what they can actually do outside of Scottish affairs.

*except they won't, because UKIP as it currently exists has no future past 2017. Either we vote to leave the EU, in which case they're left with basically nothing anyway, or we vote to stay in, in which case UKIP are in the position of arguing for something that the nation has decided it doesn't want. Of course, there could well be a reform in the party coming, but I doubt they have the capacity to do that.

I may not be well up on UK politics but isn't the SNP a win for the Tories as it splits the labor vote in the north?
The UKIP are a bunch of crazies that will be swept away when economic situations get better. So once again we are left with labor vs tories and the labor vote is split in the north.

tis it not a win for tories?

Yeah the SNP are a disaster for Labour, but they are a disaster of Labour's own making. Labour have been Tory-lite since the Blair era, and the Scots are more socialist than the English so it annoys them a lot more.

 Da Boss wrote:
Yeah the SNP are a disaster for Labour, but they are a disaster of Labour's own making. Labour have been Tory-lite since the Blair era, and the Scots are more socialist than the English so it annoys them a lot more.

Agreed, my guess is that the SNP won in Scotland as well as they did not because of the Devolution/Independence part of their manifesto, but because they were a better Labour party than Labour.

That's why I think Corbyn has a chance of winning back some seats up there if he can get the party sorted in time, as I think/hope he's going to get back to the roots of a proper Labour party. At the end of the day, though, so long as either Labour or the SNP take a Scottish seat I call that a win, it's one less for the Tories. Like with the last election, I would be more than happy with a Labour/SNP coalition next time around (or even Labour/SNP/LibDem, but then that's going a bit too far towards the side of a coalition I don't like, where no one can actually get what they set out to achieve done).

Anything but the Tories would do me, really!

I think the vote on the EU is much more important than the next election personally. It's going to be one of the biggest decisions you guys have made in decades.

 Paradigm wrote:

 welshhoppo wrote:
The problem with the SNP, is that they only have a pool of 56 MPs, it is not enough to swing the elections in any direction. It allows them to be ignored.

Well, when they can only really run for that many constituencies anyway, you can't really expect them to do much more than they've already done! I see what you mean, though, but I don't think you can dismiss them on the grounds of not having a great number of MPs when they won the massive majority of the seats they were able to run for. Or rather, you can 'dismiss' them in saying that they're not in a position to make a difference on their own, but the fact they have been so successful is very telling, and can't be underestimated.

I just think it's utterly ridiculous that a Tory government can have any mandate in Scotland despite not having a single MP there. The people of England voted, for better or worse, for a Conservative government, but the people of Scotland most certainly did not.

That's the thing, by the sheer fact that they are sure SNP seats it allows them to be ignored by the other parties. They aren't going to try and overturn a massive majority, they will focus on closer run seats, like the Gower which went Tory by less than 100 votes. They are tainted seats with little hope of winning, so the return doesn't match the input.

Da Boss wrote:What's wrong with PR being European? Britain is in Europe.

Yes, but we're not attached.

Paradigm wrote:
I just think it's utterly ridiculous that a Tory government can have any mandate in Scotland despite not having a single MP there. The people of England voted, for better or worse, for a Conservative government, but the people of Scotland most certainly did not.

I personally, think that many more Scots would vote Tories if they had a different name. Seriously. We joke about how two party the USA is, but the truth is, many, many people vote Labour or SNP because they're the 'left' and hate the Tories because they're the wicked 'right'. If you swapped the policies interchangeably between the three, I reckon 90% of people would still vote the same way, because it's the impression of the brand, not the policies or people that count (which really aren't that different at the end of the day, everyone squats in the liberal centre these days). You could put Karl Marx's resurrected spirit in charge of the Tories on a socialist manifesto and most of Scotland would still call him a Tory pig and vote the opposite way. And they wouldn't be alone.

It genuinely shocks me the number of people I meet in real life (most of them) who vote a certain way because that's what their parents do, or because they got their views of politics through a mutual echo chamber of inaccurate political facebook shared posts. Or they read just one paper (usually the Daily Mail or Guardian) and base their opinions off whatever the columnists in that single paper say.