UK General Discussion: Rishecession

[Zinneke]

Some people are going to be in very big trouble.

Oh a certain British institution has sealed it's fate. And it's not the Beeb.

No, Murdoch is too powerful. Osborne likely called in a favour too, and Starmer is a weakling on these kind of issues, he sucks up just as much to the right-wing press to avoid Ed Miliband syndrome as the last Labour leader who got their endorsement.

A little name change like News of the World to Sun on Sunday and that will be that.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The issue isn't so much regulatory changes (which are fairly likely anyway and, for whatever it's worth, relations with The Sun are really very cold: Starmer pressed the 'go' button on the prosecution of the present CEO of News UK when he was DPP and she only got off by throwing one of her co-defendants under the bus in the most spectacular manner imaginable: I wouldn't read much into the odd staffer-written piece with the by-lines of Shadow Cabinet members attached) but the potential for extremely costly legal action as a result of this from Edwards and/or his family.

[Conservatopia]

The Sun has done nothing wrong that I can see.

They reported on a prominent individual who was behaving like a proper weirdo.

That's their job surely?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

It isn't 1983, 'high profile public figure is bisexual' is not in the public interest as generally defined (and it wasn't great that it was seen to be so back then). They don't have any excuses about the supposed criminal elements (which they're pretending they never stressed now: nice try, won't work) as they will already have been informed there was no case to answer and there's no way they didn't check.

[Silent Hunter]

It isn't 1983, 'high profile public figure is bisexual' is not in the public interest as generally defined (and it wasn't great that it was seen to be so back then). They don't have any excuses about the supposed criminal elements (which they're pretending they never stressed now: nice try, won't work) as they will already have been informed there was no case to answer and there's no way they didn't check.

Also, they started off by implying pretty strongly he was a paedophile, because purchasing sexual images of a 17-year-old is a criminal offence.

[MayorCarcetti]

As well as that, and while it may have not being their intention, they helped pushed someone who's known to have mental health issues almost over the edge.

[Estrella]

The Sun should have the living financial daylights beaten out of them for this, but is it actually something they can be sued over if they didn't mention anyone by name?

[MayorCarcetti]

The Sun should have the living financial daylights beaten out of them for this, but is it actually something they can be sued over if they didn't mention anyone by name?

It'll be a legal minefield probably, but the argument could be made they were pointing people in the direction of it being him - they were saying he was a BBC presenter and the bit about the 35k for photos made it obvious it was one of the high earners, and with him being off-air and the others denying it, it soon became obvious it was him. Also you had their notorious ex-editor Kelvin MacKenzie straight out say it was him on twitter this morning before his wife made the statement (while not a current employee, he's still heavily associated with the paper and would have likely heard directly from current employees about this). And his identity being revealed was always endgame - they may not legally have been able to name him but they helped created such buzz around this that he (or rather his wife) basically had to come out and say it because everyone knew (bit like they did with Schofield).

[Meclazine for Israel]

Advice When Dealing With People Under 18

https://fb.watch/lK_8QYRb8V/

[Zinneke]

The Sun will argue Edwards should sue all the twitter people who speculated on the name

[Zinneke]

The issue isn't so much regulatory changes (which are fairly likely anyway and, for whatever it's worth, relations with The Sun are really very cold: Starmer pressed the 'go' button on the prosecution of the present CEO of News UK when he was DPP and she only got off by throwing one of her co-defendants under the bus in the most spectacular manner imaginable: I wouldn't read much into the odd staffer-written piece with the by-lines of Shadow Cabinet members attached)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/09/rupert-murdoch-keir-starmer-labour-party-power-no-10

Sorry but I just don't think Starmer will be the knight of the realm valiantly tackling the ills of the British politico-mediatic elite. All the indications are he will run a steady ship but will not actually tackle the underlying issues to make the political culture in the UK a healthier one. House of lords reform, wrestling the press from oligarchs, getting rid of tax havens, some form of more proportional representation...all of these are actually net benefits for rank and file Labour members, but the paranoia about wanting to please the select few and not having armageddon headlines on the second day in office is too strong a force for him to actually act.

[afleitch]

It isn't 1983, 'high profile public figure is bisexual' is not in the public interest as generally defined (and it wasn't great that it was seen to be so back then). They don't have any excuses about the supposed criminal elements (which they're pretending they never stressed now: nice try, won't work) as they will already have been informed there was no case to answer and there's no way they didn't check.

It's also part of a wider narrative, particularly around LGBT people, to bring back a moral panic; the rather loose usage of the term 'youth' to apply to twenty somethings which also serves as part of the 'young people can't make decisions' narrative that ticks the TERF/boomer grievance box. And it's good old 'don't trust the establishment media' playbook.

None of this is new of course, but there's an inflated belief that there are more people on the side of this conspiratorial culture war than there actually are.

Huw Edwards isn't sometime people have an opinion about.

Forcing people to have one, particularly a misinformed one, is a huge misstep.

[Хahar 🤔]

The issue isn't so much regulatory changes (which are fairly likely anyway and, for whatever it's worth, relations with The Sun are really very cold: Starmer pressed the 'go' button on the prosecution of the present CEO of News UK when he was DPP and she only got off by throwing one of her co-defendants under the bus in the most spectacular manner imaginable: I wouldn't read much into the odd staffer-written piece with the by-lines of Shadow Cabinet members attached)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/09/rupert-murdoch-keir-starmer-labour-party-power-no-10

Sorry but I just don't think Starmer will be the knight of the realm valiantly tackling the ills of the British politico-mediatic elite. All the indications are he will run a steady ship but will not actually tackle the underlying issues to make the political culture in the UK a healthier one. House of lords reform, wrestling the press from oligarchs, getting rid of tax havens, some form of more proportional representation...all of these are actually net benefits for rank and file Labour members, but the paranoia about wanting to please the select few and not having armageddon headlines on the second day in office is too strong a force for him to actually act.

How would proportional representation benefit Labour Party members?

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

The issue isn't so much regulatory changes (which are fairly likely anyway and, for whatever it's worth, relations with The Sun are really very cold: Starmer pressed the 'go' button on the prosecution of the present CEO of News UK when he was DPP and she only got off by throwing one of her co-defendants under the bus in the most spectacular manner imaginable: I wouldn't read much into the odd staffer-written piece with the by-lines of Shadow Cabinet members attached)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/09/rupert-murdoch-keir-starmer-labour-party-power-no-10

Sorry but I just don't think Starmer will be the knight of the realm valiantly tackling the ills of the British politico-mediatic elite. All the indications are he will run a steady ship but will not actually tackle the underlying issues to make the political culture in the UK a healthier one. House of lords reform, wrestling the press from oligarchs, getting rid of tax havens, some form of more proportional representation...all of these are actually net benefits for rank and file Labour members, but the paranoia about wanting to please the select few and not having armageddon headlines on the second day in office is too strong a force for him to actually act.

How would proportional representation benefit Labour Party members?

Let their votes actually count towards the composition of parliament for one?

*I suspect that even during periods of labour government, labor members dispraporinately live in conservative/non-swing seats.

[TheTide]

The issue isn't so much regulatory changes (which are fairly likely anyway and, for whatever it's worth, relations with The Sun are really very cold: Starmer pressed the 'go' button on the prosecution of the present CEO of News UK when he was DPP and she only got off by throwing one of her co-defendants under the bus in the most spectacular manner imaginable: I wouldn't read much into the odd staffer-written piece with the by-lines of Shadow Cabinet members attached)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/09/rupert-murdoch-keir-starmer-labour-party-power-no-10

Sorry but I just don't think Starmer will be the knight of the realm valiantly tackling the ills of the British politico-mediatic elite. All the indications are he will run a steady ship but will not actually tackle the underlying issues to make the political culture in the UK a healthier one. House of lords reform, wrestling the press from oligarchs, getting rid of tax havens, some form of more proportional representation...all of these are actually net benefits for rank and file Labour members, but the paranoia about wanting to please the select few and not having armageddon headlines on the second day in office is too strong a force for him to actually act.

How would proportional representation benefit Labour Party members?

Let their votes actually count towards the composition of parliament for one?

*I suspect that even during periods of labour government, labor members dispraporinately live in conservative/non-swing seats.

The Labour membership makes up less than 2% of the electorate.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

The issue isn't so much regulatory changes (which are fairly likely anyway and, for whatever it's worth, relations with The Sun are really very cold: Starmer pressed the 'go' button on the prosecution of the present CEO of News UK when he was DPP and she only got off by throwing one of her co-defendants under the bus in the most spectacular manner imaginable: I wouldn't read much into the odd staffer-written piece with the by-lines of Shadow Cabinet members attached)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/09/rupert-murdoch-keir-starmer-labour-party-power-no-10

Sorry but I just don't think Starmer will be the knight of the realm valiantly tackling the ills of the British politico-mediatic elite. All the indications are he will run a steady ship but will not actually tackle the underlying issues to make the political culture in the UK a healthier one. House of lords reform, wrestling the press from oligarchs, getting rid of tax havens, some form of more proportional representation...all of these are actually net benefits for rank and file Labour members, but the paranoia about wanting to please the select few and not having armageddon headlines on the second day in office is too strong a force for him to actually act.

How would proportional representation benefit Labour Party members?

Let their votes actually count towards the composition of parliament for one?

*I suspect that even during periods of labour government, labor members dispraporinately live in conservative/non-swing seats.

The Labour membership makes up less than 2% of the electorate.

They asked how it'd benefit Labour Party members.

[Zinneke]

The issue isn't so much regulatory changes (which are fairly likely anyway and, for whatever it's worth, relations with The Sun are really very cold: Starmer pressed the 'go' button on the prosecution of the present CEO of News UK when he was DPP and she only got off by throwing one of her co-defendants under the bus in the most spectacular manner imaginable: I wouldn't read much into the odd staffer-written piece with the by-lines of Shadow Cabinet members attached)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/09/rupert-murdoch-keir-starmer-labour-party-power-no-10

Sorry but I just don't think Starmer will be the knight of the realm valiantly tackling the ills of the British politico-mediatic elite. All the indications are he will run a steady ship but will not actually tackle the underlying issues to make the political culture in the UK a healthier one. House of lords reform, wrestling the press from oligarchs, getting rid of tax havens, some form of more proportional representation...all of these are actually net benefits for rank and file Labour members, but the paranoia about wanting to please the select few and not having armageddon headlines on the second day in office is too strong a force for him to actually act.

How would proportional representation benefit Labour Party members?

Labour is sh**t at winning elections, let's be honest. And I said more proportional representation, not pure PR. STV would massively benefit the largest left of center party.

Starmer won't want to change it because "it's how we do things here" is a convincing argument at Murdoch style dinner parties and Oxbridge mafia orgies.

[Cassius]

PR will not lock the right out of power. You just have to look at all the countries that use some variant of PR to see that this won’t be the case. On the other hand, PR would (barring unusual circumstances a la New Zealand in 2020) make a Labour majority government a near impossible thing to achieve, as well as making it much easier for disgruntled groups of Labour MPs to split off from the main party (would Labour have managed to hold itself together in the early 80s or the late 2010s under PR? Possibly not). Committing to proportional representation when the Labour party is on the cusp of what could be its biggest electoral victory in a quarter of a century would be a… strange, decision to make.

[Alcibiades]

There is pretty robust empirical evidence that PR leads both to more frequent left-wing governments, and to more left-wing policy being passed. As Cassius says, though, there are pretty obvious self-interested reasons why Labour would want to keep FPTP. On the whole, I suspect PR would mean that Labour would lead government more frequently, but of course they would never (and nor would any party) win a majority again.

[Cassius]

There is pretty robust empirical evidence that PR leads both to more frequent left-wing governments, and to more left-wing policy being passed. As Cassius says, though, there are pretty obvious self-interested reasons why Labour would want to keep FPTP. On the whole, I suspect PR would mean that Labour would lead government more frequently, but of course they would never (and nor would any party) win a majority again.

I’d be curious to see that empirical evidence. Whilst you could certainly point to some of the Scandinavian countries to exemplify that (although, using post-war Sweden as an example, the SAP vs borgerlig rivalry functioned to all intents and purposes in a very similar way to the UK Labour vs Conservative rivalry, despite the different electoral systems), during the post-war period I think it would be legitimate to argue that government policy in the UK was to the left of most of its other (non-dictatorial) continental counterparts, not least because Labour was able to use its massive 1945 majority to move domestic policy substantially to the left across the board.

Of course, Thatcher was then able to do the same thing in the 1980s, which led to UK domestic policy shifting substantially to the right of most other European countries, but I don’t think that it’s the case that FPTP produces inherently more right-wing/conservative outcomes. If anything, given that FPTP tends towards producing one-party majorities, it allows for more flexibility and for radical policy changes to a greater extent than a lot of PR systems (especially now, given how badly fragmented some of the parliaments in pure PR nations are at the moment), which I think is basically a  good thing.

[CumbrianLefty]

The issue isn't so much regulatory changes (which are fairly likely anyway and, for whatever it's worth, relations with The Sun are really very cold: Starmer pressed the 'go' button on the prosecution of the present CEO of News UK when he was DPP and she only got off by throwing one of her co-defendants under the bus in the most spectacular manner imaginable: I wouldn't read much into the odd staffer-written piece with the by-lines of Shadow Cabinet members attached)

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/09/rupert-murdoch-keir-starmer-labour-party-power-no-10

Sorry but I just don't think Starmer will be the knight of the realm valiantly tackling the ills of the British politico-mediatic elite. All the indications are he will run a steady ship but will not actually tackle the underlying issues to make the political culture in the UK a healthier one. House of lords reform, wrestling the press from oligarchs, getting rid of tax havens, some form of more proportional representation...all of these are actually net benefits for rank and file Labour members, but the paranoia about wanting to please the select few and not having armageddon headlines on the second day in office is too strong a force for him to actually act.

How would proportional representation benefit Labour Party members?

Labour is sh**t at winning elections, let's be honest.

Up to a point, yes - though looked at in another way the UK has had 21 general elections since 1945; of these the Tories have won 12 and Labour 8 (with one, February 1974, to all intents and purposes a draw) That's not as lopsided as some imagine (and might even be less so in a few GEs time) and also compares favourably with the left in a few other continental countries.

I support electoral reform, but let's get things in some perspective here.

And re your comments about Starmer - as with many others I think you overrate "leadership" above objective circumstances. The situation the UK is in demands radical action in many areas, but because people are so beaten down and cynical they may shy away from anybody explicitly offering it. It might just be that SKS is the right person for this occasion - a naturally (as well as politically) cautious man who is compelled by inescapable reality to nonetheless do some quite far reaching things.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes, the issue isn't that Labour is useless at winning elections, but that lengthy stretches in power have been the norm for both parties for a long time now. Labour were in office for all but three and a half years between 1964 and 1979 for instance, and then for thirteen years after 1997.

[Alcibiades]

There is pretty robust empirical evidence that PR leads both to more frequent left-wing governments, and to more left-wing policy being passed. As Cassius says, though, there are pretty obvious self-interested reasons why Labour would want to keep FPTP. On the whole, I suspect PR would mean that Labour would lead government more frequently, but of course they would never (and nor would any party) win a majority again.

I’d be curious to see that empirical evidence. Whilst you could certainly point to some of the Scandinavian countries to exemplify that (although, using post-war Sweden as an example, the SAP vs borgerlig rivalry functioned to all intents and purposes in a very similar way to the UK Labour vs Conservative rivalry, despite the different electoral systems), during the post-war period I think it would be legitimate to argue that government policy in the UK was to the left of most of its other (non-dictatorial) continental counterparts, not least because Labour was able to use its massive 1945 majority to move domestic policy substantially to the left across the board.

Here are a few papers which make the argument that PR leads to more left-wing governments and policy (especially redistribution):

Austen-Smith, D., 2000. Redistributing Income under Proportional Representation. Journal of Political Economy, 108(6), pp. 1235-1269.

Döring, H., and Manow, P., 2015. Is Proportional Representation More Favourable to the Left? Electoral Rules and Their Impact on Elections, Parliaments and the Formation of Cabinets. British Journal of Political Science, 47(1), pp. 149-164.

Iversen, T., and Soskice, D., 2006. Electoral Institutions and the Politics of Coalitions: Why Some Democracies Redistribute More Than Others. American Political Science Review, 100(2), pp. 165-181.

Persson, T., Roland, G., and Tabellini, G., 2007. Electoral Rules and Government Spending in Parliamentary Democracies. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 2(2), pp. 155-188.

The Iversen and Soskice is the seminal piece here, a very influential and well-known set of findings. The abstract of the Döring and Manow summarises the literature on this topic quite nicely:

How do electoral rules affect the composition of governments? It is a robust finding that countries with majoritarian rules more often elect conservative governments than those with proportional representation (PR) electoral systems. There are three explanations for this pattern. The first stresses the impact of voting behaviour: the middle class more often votes for right-wing parties in majoritarian electoral systems, anticipating governments’ redistributive consequences. The second explanation is based on electoral geography: the regional distribution of votes may bias the vote-seat translation against the Left in majoritarian systems due to the wide margins by which the Left wins core urban districts. The third explanation refers to party fragmentation: if the Right is more fragmented than the Left in countries with PR, then there is less chance of a right-wing party gaining formateur status. This study tests these three hypotheses for established democracies over the entire post-war period. It finds the first two mechanisms at work in the democratic chain of delegation from voting via the vote-seat translation to the formation of cabinets, while party fragmentation does not seem to co-vary as much as expected with electoral rules. These findings confirm that majoritarian systems have a substantive conservative bias, whereas countries with PR show more differentiated patterns.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

I suspect the main result of PR in the UK historically would have been much more frequent rotation of government and presumably a replacement of the tendency of governments of each party trying to reverse as much of what the previous government did as possible* with something more consensual.

_{*Needless to say 'possible' is a critically important word there.}

[afleitch]

Yeah the average length of party control, post war is just under a decade averaging out 'one' term governments with long stretches in power.

And of course we've had recent spells of 18 years of government, then 13 and now a likely 14 years.