You put your right arm in, you pull you right arm out...

[Osc]

I really cannot believe that he fired Julian Smith, the first NI SoS in years who wasn’t totally useless. It was notable that he was able to work with all sides, and all side have spoken well of him since his sacking. He got in there and in short order got the Assembly up and running again. He was such a breath of fresh air after the utterly clueless and incompetent Karen Bradley - I heard a story about her the other day that didn't surprise me. Apparently she was introduced to someone in NI and asked where he was from. He said “Kerry”, and she said “isn’t that sometimes called Londonkerry” I am assured that it is a true story.

[cromwell]

She was notoriously dim Osc.
If Julian Smith did as well as that he should still be in post imo.

[Workingman]

Smith will have been sent to NI specifically to get the Assembly up and running as Bojo desperately needed that particular feather.

He will have known how effective Smith was because he will have had plenty of run-ins with him when Smith was chief whip under May and Bojo kept voting against her deal.

So now it's pay back time. Smith got the job done now it's "thank you and goodnight".

There were two Karen Bradley's, the one rehearsed by her PPS and the one speaking off the cuff. They often appeared in the same interview in a silly scary way.

[Suff]

Banging on about May's time in office FFS! She created the problem with her opportunist general election over an unmentionable subject. We, the electorate, were almost evenly divided on it and so we handed back a hung parliament. It was not a normal political period and to use it as an excuse to support what the Johnson and Cummings are doing to our parliamentary democracy is pretty low.

Actually it is not low at all.

At a time when things go to hell this is when people, or MPs can prove their mettle.

In this case the MPs proved that they could only be trusted to serve their own self interest and the country could go to hell as far as they are concerned.

That was the result of the last election. Bojo was handed a large majority so he could Govern. If he doesn't have 100% support from his parliamentary party over the next 5 years, he will not be able to do what he has been given the mandate to do.

If the voters do not like what he is doing, they can fix it at the next election.

The people clearly do not want a strong opposition right now.

Or they would have voted for one.

[Workingman]

A mandate eh?

He got 44% of the votes but under our flawed system he got 56% of the seats.

By one measure, seats won, he does have a mandate, but by another measure, votes gained, he is in a minority.

As for an opposition, we do want one because we need one, and I return to my Labour example. If they were in with a huge majority and putting in place all of their socialisty type things I can think of quite a few who would be howling for some opposition, and they wouldn't give a damn where it came from. In fact they would be cheering from the rooftops if a lot of it was from Labour rebels.

So, for consistency's sake, they should be fine with a few Tory back benchers keeping Bojo's and Cummings' feet to the fire.

[Suff]

And the next closest party got what % of the votes exactly? 32.2%.

32.2% of Westminster seats is 201 and they got 203.

It is not as if Labour got 40% of the vote but 30% of the seats.

It is the Lib Dems who lost out as their 11% would have delivered them 71 seats. But, still, no single party would have been a valid opposition on their own even then. Just another hung parliament.

This is what PR roduces, hung parliaments.

We, the people, did not want another hung parliament and we did not get one.

[Workingman]

PR produces coalitions and they help keep out the extremes, and I dare say that if the public was asked the direct question of whether they would want an extreme right or left party in government the vast majority would say a resounding "No".

But never mind, we've got a very right wing government with an utterly ruthless narcissist as leader who has found a big bag of magic money credit cards to max out and there's nobody to stop him.

But if the shoe was on a different foot.........

[Suff]

But if the shoe was on a different foot.........

Then we'd have a government led by an anti semitic trotskyite who would be building half a dozen printing firms to print money to give to companies so that he could say our infrastructure was "under new management".

Or, on the other hand, we could have a really nasty piece of work who lied to everyone, including himself, about, well, everything and eventually left us with a complete disaster when the party ended.

Or we could have the other lot, the "well meaning socialists" who drove the country to 26% inflation and mass strikes. They even negotiated to have parts for our NATO tanks made in the USSR.

Right, so the press led caricature is running the show now. The voters put him there. Against the wishes of the press.

Even then, what he intends to spend, against the Alice in wonderland story of the other shower, is hardly world shaking.

As ever, it is a wait and see.

Although I do wonder if those who want PR would have been happy with Farage with 80 seats in Parliament??

It goes both ways, just ask the Swede's. The SD has been gaining ground decade on decade. PR gave them a platform and it was impossible to shut them out because PR ensured they got a platform. Far from being shut down by the press, PR gave SD the exposure to show the people who they really are.

If we had PR when the BNP were a possibility, we would have seen at least one BNP MP. So how does that exclude extremism?

The more coalitions there are and the more parties in the coalition, the more power you give to radical minorities. Witness Golden Dawn holding the Greek government to ransom and the total chaos in the Israeli Knesset which has a 2.5% threshold on party seats and creates a very democratic parliament and a country which is, at times, almost impossible to govern. Esecially with 25% of the voting population being of Palestinian descent.

It is all very well "saying" this or that, but the PR and other voting systems have not kept the impact of extremism out of the it government's. Golden Dawn, SD, AFD, FN and that is just what comes to mind. Then the far right in power, FPP, the Polish equivalent, ditto Hungary.

The reality is that our milk sop Socialist steamroller where everyone should be ashamed that they are not paying someone else enough, whilst receiving less of the services, is slowly grinding to a halt.

Then we talk about our NHS as if it is some shining example of Nationalised brilliance. It is, in fact, a black hole down which we pour more and more money yet the services get worse and worse overall.

This is consistent with other nationalised businesses (yes, health ser ices are really is a business). Like the joke that was National Rail.

This maniacle insistence that nothing can be paid for at the point of use is killing the NHS. In France, A&E is not free to walk in. You have to pay a small sum (around €30), and you claim it back from your insurance. They don't demand it at the point of service, you are sent a bill.

The result? A&E is empty unless someone actually has an emergency. If you really need to be seen, you are seen in minutes.

There are so many fallacies in the UK but they are held up as the most wonderful successes. 12 hours in A&E is not a success.

[Workingman]

I do wonder if those who want PR would have been happy with Farage with 80 seats in Parliament??

It would not have bothered me one bit. Combined UKIP and Cons would not have had a majority so would have still needed the DUP. However, there were more than enough sensible one-nation Tories who would not have worked with UKIP, thus making governing impossible and probably destroying the Tory party. Cameron knew this and we now all know the lengths he would go to to stop UKIP / BP / Farage - before running away to his shed.

BTW there are all sorts of PR. France does not use it for the National Assembly and the FN have a whopping 8 seats out of 577. Germany uses a college system and AfD got 93 seats out of 709. Poland and Hungary have a mix of direct elections and party lists and neither has a coalition government. Sweden is the nearest to pure PR and the SD got 62 of the 349 seats but as they are not aligned with either of the two main blocs (who will not work with them) they do not have a chance in Hell of taking part in government.

Golden Dawn is a special case. It was a reaction to decades of mis-management and a cultural aversity to paying taxes. When that came to a head with the EU and measures were taken to change things it gained ground. It won 21 of 300 seats, then it dropped to 18, then 17. Remind me where it is now. Oh, that's right - 0 seats.

PR might not stop extremes being represented, but in mature democracies it generally keeps them out of power while simultaneously keeping their heads above water so that we can see what they are doing.

[Suff]

Well that is the hope anyway. But that is all it is. Hope.

We have a system which has see sawed between less and more liberal governments for more than a century, allowing the voters to directly evict those who extract the Michael.

PR does not guarantee to fix this, in fact it pretty much guarantees more of what we have seen in the last 3 years.

Personally I'd rather have 5 years of Corbyn than be fixed to centuries of PR coalitions.