UK General Discussion:The Rt. Hon Alex Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, Populist Hero

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Of course we realise this, and indeed know it from our own electoral experiences.

Total undiluted Trumpism, however, will not do well in this country or most other W European ones. I feel pretty confident in saying that.

At the risk of arguing semantics, what exactly do we mean by 'Trumpism' here? Depending on how you define the term, I could see a pretty convincing argument for how Berlusconi or Farage or LePen could fall into the Trumpist category and pretty clearly are capable of doing well.  

I'm glad you mentioned Berlusconi and not Salvini, because I think there's a case to be made that the former is more 'Trumpist' than the latter.

(or arguably, given the chronological order, that Trump is 'Berlusconian')

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I mean, the UK is still bizarrely centralised for such a large and regionally diverse country, so I’m not sure even more (re-)centralisation is the way to go. Federalism doesn’t seem to work too badly for Germany or Switzerland. By the way, if you want to reduce the SNP’s influence in a legitimate, democratic manner, get rid of FPTP, which allows them to win 80% of Scottish Westminster seats on 45% of the vote.

It's never a bad moment to do that.

Of course last time you tried to do that it was rejected everywhere outside of Inner London, Central Edinburgh, Central Glasgow and Oxbridge... though I am not sure whether AV would change the seat distribution in Scotland that much unless there's a heck of a Unionist tactical vote?
As a slight aside, is proportional representation perceived as, ahem, un-British in the UK?

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I mean, the UK is still bizarrely centralised for such a large and regionally diverse country, so I’m not sure even more (re-)centralisation is the way to go. Federalism doesn’t seem to work too badly for Germany or Switzerland. By the way, if you want to reduce the SNP’s influence in a legitimate, democratic manner, get rid of FPTP, which allows them to win 80% of Scottish Westminster seats on 45% of the vote.

It's never a bad moment to do that.

Of course last time you tried to do that it was rejected everywhere outside of Inner London, Central Edinburgh, Central Glasgow and Oxbridge... though I am not sure whether AV would change the seat distribution in Scotland that much unless there's a heck of a Unionist tactical vote?
As a slight aside, is proportional representation perceived as, ahem, un-British in the UK?

I think the results of not having PR or even AV have shaped our political culture in a number of important ways- mainly that the two large parties don't feel a need to do anything other than get ahead of the other (or in the Conservatives case get a large enough buffer between them & Labour+SNP+Lib Dem in recent years)

It's actually funny as the 2015 election was the one that was most dominated by the spectre of a non-majority government; the entire campaign was dominated by stories about A.) Will Labour sell out England to get SNP votes B.) What will the Lib Dems trade/cut from the main partiess... and the electorate answered by giving the Conservatives a majority.

I feel like it's a subject that most people don't care about- hence why the attack against AV in 2011 was 'why are we spending time on this when [issue you care about] needs to be fixed'. I believe there was a poster with a soldier saying he needs body armour not an AV vote... if you kept the constituency link (something that if fetished by MPs & politicians but honestly how many normal people know their MP?) I think the system could be changed without any hassle.

Something like the New Zealand system? That would be great.
And incidentally New Zealand had FPTP too before switching to MMP (of course it had, as a good Westminster system nation).

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I mean, the UK is still bizarrely centralised for such a large and regionally diverse country, so I’m not sure even more (re-)centralisation is the way to go. Federalism doesn’t seem to work too badly for Germany or Switzerland. By the way, if you want to reduce the SNP’s influence in a legitimate, democratic manner, get rid of FPTP, which allows them to win 80% of Scottish Westminster seats on 45% of the vote.

It's never a bad moment to do that.

Of course last time you tried to do that it was rejected everywhere outside of Inner London, Central Edinburgh, Central Glasgow and Oxbridge... though I am not sure whether AV would change the seat distribution in Scotland that much unless there's a heck of a Unionist tactical vote?
As a slight aside, is proportional representation perceived as, ahem, un-British in the UK?

I think someone ran the number and concluded that AV would have delivered an even less proportional result in one of the recent elections, although I think it is marginally more democratic than FPTP because each constituency MP would have to get majority support. I don’t think most people have strong feelings either way on PR, but I think it would get rejected in a referendum because most people would stick with the devil they know. The AV proposal was defeated so heavily because it was turned into a referendum on the deeply unpopular Nick Clegg.

I am aware of that. Not unusual for these things to turn into a referendum on [insert unpopular politician here], like our 2016 Constitutional referendum which failed mostly because people wanted to stick a middle finger to Renzi.
I find the debacle that happened to the Lib Dems in that period quite tragicomic. It halved its support in the polls in, like, eight months?

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Sorry for Italianposting but combining different memes into one is fun:

#quellavoltacheDraghi ("that time Draghi...") is the new Thing on Italian Twitter.

- SNIP -

That time Draghi took part at a Handforth Parish Council meeting and everyone respected Jackie Weaver's authority.

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Apparently Handforth was 91.6% White, 4.7% Asian and 0.8% Black at the 2011 Census, which by the way is less White than Cheshire as a whole.

Feel free to draw your conclusions.

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Apparently Handforth was 91.6% White, 4.7% Asian and 0.8% Black at the 2011 Census, which by the way is less White than Cheshire as a whole.

Feel free to draw your conclusions.

Is that 'White' or 'White - British'? My assumption would be the latter. Anyway it's a very ordinary and fairly boring Manchester commuter town - humdrum middle class with a couple of small postwar estates, remarkably unremarkable. Which makes all this even funnier.

No, that's White total.

Anyway, well this is the sort of thing that always happens in an otherwise unremarkable place, isn't it?