Slashdot Mirror

The UK has bipartisan line drawing too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Does it work? Well not so well

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/2...

The abortive 6th boundary view was largely justified on the need to address some bias in the electoral system. You will notice this fairly quickly if you have a quick play about with the swingometer - if you leave the Liberal Democrat share of the vote unchanged then the Conservatives need a lead of 11 percentage points over Labour to win an overall majority, while the Labour party can achieve an overall majority with a lead of about 3 percentage points. Equally illustrative are the last two general election results - in 2005 Labour had a lead of 3 points over the Conservatives, and got a majority of over 60 seats; in 2010 the Conservatives had a lead of 7 points over Labour, but did not have an overall majority at all. Prima facie this appears unfair.

This is a different issue from proportionality. The currently electoral system, "First Past the Post", is not supposed to be a proportional system. The proportion of total votes received does not necessarily resemble the shares of votes case, and smaller parties in particular tend to struggle to get representation unless their vote is geographically concentrated. The fact that FPTP favours larger parties and punishes small ones is very much a feature, rather than a bug - its defenders would argue that the system is supposed to lead to a strong two-party system, with the winning party having a majority of seats, while its detractors would say that we would be better having a proportional system, such as STV. First Past the Post is intrinsically "unfair" towards smaller parties, and intrinsically favours the winning party - that's a different issue. This page looks only at the reasons why, even if both parties have the same level of support, the system apparently favours Labour more than the Conservatives.

Merkel is elected. Hollande is elected. Cameron is elected.

And it says something about the problem with democracy as it's practiced is that Merkel and Cameron don't represent the views of most of their respective countries. Merkel's party got 41%. Cameron got 36%. Only Socialist Hollande got 51%.

Germany's PR. Nobody gets 50%. She's Chancellor because the number two party got 26%, and refused to form a government with the Left Party because they're ex-Communists. Hollande got 29% in the first round when there were more then two candidates on the ballot.

Like it or not (and I don't particularly like it either), the consensus of the people world-wide is that Neo-Liberalism is the way to go.

Do you consider yourself a member of the Vanguard Party, Comrade? Thinking deep thoughts about the future of things in your own room, coming to conclusions, and then simply knowing that five years from now everyone will agree because you;re never wrong?

No, I went to one of Corbyn's Rallies. It was packed. As were all the other ones. The Labour party has grown to it's biggest ever from a low point, purely down to Corbyn. There's no lonely dreaming, this is the biggest mass party political movement in Britain in living memory. That's why your establishment is so worried.

The latest poll seems to indicate that a small section of the country (31%) is obsessed with him and thinks he walks on water. 34% are unhappy with his election. It would be much better if they'd done a simple head-to-head to see whether hie's convinced voter5s to drop the Tories, because presumably some of the "dismayed" 34% are Labour voters who will come home and some of the 31% are Tories who think he's beatable, but what we've got is what we've got. And the fact the only issue he's trusted on is NHS (which is dead simple to be trusted on -- all it takes is convincing people you would borrow money rather then cut their Doctor's pay) implies he's got work to do.

We're actually seeing this in the US with Bernie Sanders. As a white progressive almost all of my friends are obsessed with Bernie Sanders. They create internet memes, dogpile on anyone who pints out the guy losing in South Carolina by 50, etc. But blacks, other minorities, etc. see no reason not to support Clinton. And they're most of the primary electorate.

He's gonna go 2-48 in the primary, but we'll convince ourselves he's ahead because the first two states (Iowa and New Hampshire) have primary electorates that are overwhelmingly white.

For example, Nuclear Disarmament polls at under a quarter in the UK.

Actually that has a quarter in favour of replacing with something equivalent, a quarter with replacing it with nothing, and a third interested in somewhere between the two. You couldn't get more balanced than that.

He's not at the balance point. He's at the extreme of getting rid of it completely.

It's true Cameron is also at the extreme, but voters who say they want a smaller deterrent have historically been much more likely to give the Tory the benefit of the doubt then Labour. Whether this is because they care less about the issue then the Tory base does, or they figure that abolishing Trident won't be followed by buying two or three nuclear subs after the next election; I honestly don't know.

My problem is that these are arguments my parent's generation made, and lost.

Perhaps you ought to listen to your parents.

I do. They've given up on disarmament, because it only works as a political argument for the SNP and New Zealand, and we live in the American Midwest.

Getting the UK out of the EU won't make the EU more centralized (and thus smarter), it will just make it smaller. And then getting back in becomes an amazing trick, because they ain't gonna go with a parallel EU set up by Corbyn.

The opinion polling industry here in the UK got got last month's General Election badly wrong. Not only did almost all of the pre-election polls (conducted by a wide range of companies, some of whom use telephone surveys while others use an online approach) get the vote-distribution wrong, over-estimating Labour support and under-estimating Conservative support, but they also misread the mapping of those vote-shares into Parliamentary seats (which is, admittedly, not always simple in the UK's first-past-the-post electoral system).

Only the exit-poll conducted on the day of the election itself got relatively close to the actual result (and even that under-estimated the scale of the eventual Conservative victory).

There's a major industry post-mortem in progress at the moment, which is scrutinising various aspects of previous methodological orthodoxy. UKpollingreport has a fairly good write-up of the state of play here.

There's been a fair degree of political acrimony about the inaccuracy of the pre-election polling. In particular, there have been questions raised about whether inaccurate polling caused the parties or the voters to change their behaviours in a way that accurate polling (or no polling) wouldn't have. There are also some calls for the UK to follow the example of some continental European countries and ban the publication of opinion polls in the 2-3 week period before an election.

One other point worth noting is that there was one particular data-analytics organisation (sorry, can't find the link right now) which looked at the raw data from the opinion polls and made a call a few days before the election which predicted the outcome fairly accurately.

Nate Silver called it badly wrong, in this instance.

I was against the war, but am more against revisionism. ~30% in the UK supported the war in March 2003. This does not represent "almost universal opposition". Similarly in the US, ~30% were against the war, despite supporters' claims that "everyone" was for it.

http://ukpollingreport.co.uk/iraq
http://pollingreport.com/iraq18.htm

Now you linked to the daily mail, otherwise know as the daily hate. To show the bias read its article on the survey versus this one and you will see the hate filled anger the daily mail is going for.

The headline of the daily mail article is

Almost a quarter of Muslims believe 7/7 was justified

but the question asked in the survey was

To what extent do you agree that the July bombings were justified because of British support for the war on terror?

(To which 11% strongly agreed, 11% tended to agree, with it saying all agree was 22%. I don't know where they got the 24% I think maybe channel 4 shifted the figures slightly for some reason).

Now as you can see the question is not as the title of the article suggests, "Do you believe the July bombings are justified?" but "...were justified because of British support for the war on terror?".

This is really badly worded, I can read it to mean did the bombers justify it because of the British support for the war on terror, in which case I would also agree with this statement. I'm not saying everyone who read the question interpreted it that way but I'm sure some did.

On doing a little reading around this study, I found this blog and specifically this comment, that reflects my views on it, I'll the relevant part below

Posted by: Bernard Bumner Author Profile Page | October 7, 2009 5:53 AM

If, on the other hand, you are using this to support your case:

To what extent do you agree that the July bombings were justified because of British support for the war on terror?

22% All Agree

Then I would have to say that I don't really understand the question - the bombers certainly justified their unjust actions by reference to British support fo the war on terror.

It is an ambiguous question. I suspect that many people were expressing support for the bombers, but I cannot reasonably conclude that it is all of that 22% of respondents, and in the absence of properly published methodology and data, I certainly wouldn't extrapolate this to represent British Muslims as a whole.

Actually, the presentation of that survey data is rather worrying, because it conflates (via proximity) the 7/7 bombings (the qeustion above) with what could easily be benign insight into social discord; 13% of respondents agreeing that,

I can understand why young British Muslims might want to carry out suiceide [sic] operations

At the same time, offering up the absolutely meaningless:

It is acceptable for religious or political groups to use violence

(Which only 9% agree with, and tends to cast further doubt on the idea that 22% agree with the actions of the 7/7 bombers).

It be blunt, it is not well-presented data, and is therefore difficult to draw conclusions from.

On other matters: I'm not sure why anybody on this thread would assume that anti-semite, Holocaust denier, and convicted racist Nick Griffin is not a racist leader of a racist political party.

You guys really vote some Pirate party to your parliament to properly put an end to this crap properly tho.

If by some fluke we do manage to get one of our 9 candidates elected we'd actually have a real voice this time around as the polls show we're heading for a hung Parliament