Cycling UK Forum

Scotland have constituency MSPs with the overall party numbers balanced in proportion to the votes through a list.

Cyril Haearn wrote:In the German pr system there are local candidates too, not just lists

The Mixed Member Proportional System, variations of which are used for Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and London Assembly elections. It remains a scandal that the rest of the UK elections do not yet use it, but all of the ones where we do use it are recent creations. Will those currently in power ever vote to change the system that put them there? It probably needs a situation where the government feels it will lose power under winner-takes-all but might retain it under MMP.

I cannot help but compare the angst and turmoil created by the potential change in the political relationship with the EU, against the lack of any significant behavioural change with respect to Climate Disruption and all other aspects of environmental damage.

Rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic might be an appropriate analogy.

Graham wrote:I cannot help but compare the angst and turmoil created by the potential change in the political relationship with the EU, against the lack of any significant behavioural change with respect to Climate Disruption and all other aspects of environmental damage.

Rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic might be an appropriate analogy.

One way to see Brexit is as a symptom of several hysteresis curves that are approaching their cusps and are about to go over into rapid-descent phase. Climate change, population explosion, lethal levels of pollution, highly vulnerable networked economics, ..... All of these things and many more seem to be accelerating towards points of instability. Worse, many of these large "systems" are themselves part of an even larger system, with obvious connections between resource-scarcity, population growth, increasing opportunities for a pandemic, collapse of economic systems, war-like behaviours et al.

So yes, the titanic of liberal democracy and possibly Western-style civilisations as a whole seem poised for huge and unpredictable changes of the sinking kind. It always induces me to give a hollow laugh of despair when various humans pretend that they know "the solution". I fear we humans have no real control at all and are merely teeny-weeny motes in a great swirling complexity of evolution that can be neither understood or predicted. That, after all, is the nature of evolution.

But we do things nevertheless, all of which seem to have unintended consequences far, far greater than the intended ones; and often the very opposite of the intended ones.

Cugel

pwa wrote:This is a Brexit related question but it is not specific to Brexit. I am raising this as a philosophical question and hope you will reach beyond the immediate concerns about Brexit.

David Cameron gets a lot of flak for having promised a Referendum on EU membership, but that in itself shocks me. If we think of ourselves as a democratic nation we cannot, I think, avoid asking the people when an issue becomes a settled part of the national political debate. The alternative seems to me to be not asking the people because we are afraid what their answer might be.

What do we think about this point? Is democracy king or are there issues where the people should not be asked?

Democracy could be king with the proviso that it's carried out fairly and on a level playing field,the 2016 referendum along with much so called democracy in the UK isn't.
It's more like demockracy.
The system is loaded and money dictates who gets in power more often than not,to have real democracy money needs to be severerly limited to political campaigns and proprtional representation needs implementing ASAP.
As to whether that will happen anytime soon is another matter,turkeys and Christmas is a term that springs readily to mind.

Plusminus
Any right-thinking [correct-thinking] person would be for PR (alternative facts welcome), but there are so many different systems, surely there must be a fairly simple one that is much better than FPTP

Maybe we could have a referendum to decide if there is to be another Brexit referendum .

pete75 wrote:Maybe we could have a referendum to decide if there is to be the another Brexit referendum .

Plus One, that had occurred to me too, forby it must be like my polls on these fora with lots of choices including 'don't know'

Cugel wrote: I fear we humans have no real control at all and are merely teeny-weeny motes in a great swirling complexity of evolution that can be neither understood or predicted. That, after all, is the nature of evolution.

But we do things nevertheless, all of which seem to have unintended consequences far, far greater than the intended ones; and often the very opposite of the intended ones.

I blame the DNA, myself. . . . . . which gave us silly monkeys the keys to releasing billions of years of stored solar energy in one huge, orgasmic bonfire.

It's been fun, but . . . . I do worry about the lack of endless-economic-growth and the finest detail of our political relationship with the EU.

Graham wrote:

Cugel wrote: I fear we humans have no real control at all and are merely teeny-weeny motes in a great swirling complexity of evolution that can be neither understood or predicted. That, after all, is the nature of evolution.

But we do things nevertheless, all of which seem to have unintended consequences far, far greater than the intended ones; and often the very opposite of the intended ones.

I blame the DNA, myself. . . . . . which gave us silly monkeys the keys to releasing billions of years of stored solar energy in one huge, orgasmic bonfire.

It's been fun, but . . . . I do worry about the lack of endless-economic-growth and the finest detail of our political relationship with the EU.

And now,what's for tea(dinner if yer a southern softie)?

Supper?
Instant mashed potato and leaks and tea
..
Don't ask 'what can I do for my country?', ask 'what's for lunch?'

pwa wrote:This is a Brexit related question but it is not specific to Brexit. I am raising this as a philosophical question and hope you will reach beyond the immediate concerns about Brexit.

You're right in that the Brexit referendum has brought up lots of questions about our democracy in general and referenda in particular. And that will certainly be true if there is a second referendum. But I think overall the debate is still very focussed on Brexit. If there is an issue about our democracy it is still very much concerned with sovereignty in and outside the EU.

Democracy, what's that?
The constituency in which I live, Gainsborough in Lincolnshire had the following results in 2017:
Conservative 31,790 votes, Labour 14,767 votes, Liberal Democrat 3,630 votes, Green Party 1,238 votes.
The Conservative candidate has always had a huge majority and it seems to always be a safe Conservative seat.
In the past, I have seen little point in voting as I was not voting for the candidate that I wanted but the candidate who I thought had the best chance of displacing the Conservative. To my mind, this is not democratic and will never be under the current system until we get proportional representation.
I even resorted to deliberately spoiling my vote in the past as a protest against the system.

Might be worth trying to move to a marginal constituency

I remember years ago hoping the EU would impose Fair Votes on the UK, that alone would justify membership

But I am an awful optimist, just read that the UK shall be financially worse off, maybe economic growth shall be questioned, not sure how likely that is, but I experienced The Impossible after 1989, nearly 30 years ago. Seems like yesterday sometimes, +1

Cyril Haearn wrote:Might be worth trying to move to a marginal constituency

I remember years ago hoping the EU would impose Fair Votes on the UK, that alone would justify membership

But I am an awful optimist, just read that the UK shall be financially worse off, maybe economic growth shall be questioned, not sure how likely that is, but I experienced The Impossible after 1989, nearly 30 years ago. Seems like yesterday sometimes, +1

Perhaps imposing would not have been a good idea. One of the chief criticisms (justifiable or not) of the EU has been that it imposes things.

FWIW I reckon Brexit won't happen. Which I regret, but there we are. The Leave side cannot coalesce around one strategy, and the Remain side, whilst mouthing "we accept the result of the referendum" are just waiting for a second vote, by which time a weary electorate will have given in and just want the whole thing over so that they can get on with their lives.

And will I accept the democratic Remain vote? Yes I will. Just as I accepted the Leave vote. It may be foolish, but I have a romantic attachment to the idea of democracy and I do believe in asking the people even if they are going to make a choice I think is wrong.