he once called Camerons plans for a British Bill of Rights "Xenophobic and a legal nonsensity".
To clarify the parent, that's because Cameron was proposing repealing the act that gave the ECHR legal force in the UK courts (the Human rights act 1998).
So your solution to the complexity of determining how to vote is to disenfranchise myself? Interesting.
If you re-read my whole post, you'll see that's not what I said at all.
As for STV working, surely the results in Scotland demonstrate that it's rather flawed. Both the SNP and Labour got 50% more seats for each percentage of the vote than the Conversatives and Lib Dems. Hardly proportional.
In the local council elections where STV is used? citation please.
Citing Scotland as a democratic example is inherently flawed anyway, given the Scottish MP influence on Westminster and their demonstrated willingness to fuck over England with laws that wont apply to their own constituencies. But I digress..
Like I said, I was talking about Scottish local council elections, not the General election. As you raise it, however, here's my solution to the West Lothian question: make the commons the English Parliament and kick all the Scots and Welsh to an elected Lords as a UK parliament.
With STV you're allowed to stop at 1; you don't have to fill in 2 - 5 if it's a real problem for you. So in your scenario, I'd fill in "1" then stop. Or perhaps I'd remember that we vote for people, not parties in the UK, and vote on the basis of their respective election campaigns. Forcing people of the same party to campaign against each other is a feature, not a bug.
Furthermore, we know STV works in the UK because IIRC it's already used in the Scottish & Northern Irish Local council elections.
What's exactly complicated about putting 1,2,3,4,5 etc. next to candidates in order of preference? That's all that STV requires of the voter. Then my City will get 3 or 4 MPs, but elected proportionally. Instead of the same 3 or 4 MPs elected to keep the Tories\Labour out.
I agree, although i do need to read into all the systems properly.
The Lib Dems want something more proportional and call for PR, but I do fear the removal of the constituency link. The fact that a person represents ~70k people in a local area is a good thing and provides for accountability. If we remove this you could end up with some very unpopular people put at the top of each party's list resulting in them never being removed from power.
With the constituency link they would need to be able to find anywhere that would actually take them!
The Lib-dems actually want STV. That keeps the constituency link.
I was not aware that there were still such variances in British parliamentary districts. In the US, of course, there is a Constitutionally mandated census every ten years (we're having one right now, as a matter of fact), followed by redistricting based on that Census, including requirements that each district in a state have very close to the same voting population. What provisions does Britian have for census and redistricting?
A similar one, we also have a census every 10 years. And constituency are regularly re-drawn (every 8-12 years) by the boundaries commission using population data.
However, PR means you vote for parties and not for individuals.
Not necessarily, The Lid-dems prefered system is the Single Transferable Vote, which maintains the constituency link & you vote for individual, the 1997, Labour, Jenkins commission reccomended a system called AV+ here also most MPs are voted in in person, a minority of 15-20% come from a party list.
you can always just pack up and walk across the border whenever you want
Sweet innocence... in no country under a dictatorship can you just pack up and leave. I should know, I spent my whole childhood in such regime and I had a neighbor who tried to cross the border and failed. They made a lesson of him.
He was stretching the analogy of Apple being a fascist country; not saying that real dictatorships are like that.
Getting back to my original point, PR-STV does not give me a single MP to represent my views in government.
No, it gives you four or five or however many depending how big the constituencies are. That means you have multiple people fighting your corner in Westminster, that's surely a better thing. An example; my city is split into 3 Constituencies, if they were merged into one, and 3 labour + 3 Tory + 3 Lib-dems + N others were fighting it out it would be great, Politicians from the same party would have to fight against each other to prove that they will represent you best, but at the end of the day my City will still only have 3 MPs and none of them could tell you to go elsewhere because you live one street out of their area (i.e. I could actually complain to the Labour MP about his parties policies rather than not being able to do much because my Lib-dem MP already opposes them)
The single transferable vote (STV) is a preferential voting system designed to minimize "wasted" votes, provide proportional representation, and ensure that votes are explicitly cast for individual candidates rather than party lists.
emphasis mine. What makes you think that it's not PR?
How would PR allow me to vote for an Individual to represent me and my constituency in parliment?
The Single Transferable vote system has larger, multi-member constituencies; the geographical link is not broken, and you can still vote for individuals, not party lists. It's already used in the UK and around the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
Of course they're proposing proportional representation, they've got the most to gain from it.
IMO it's also the fairest, most democratic system; I really hope we introduce STV for by the time of the next general election.
There is another view which says that you inevitably wind up with watered down legislation which in trying to pander to every party doesn't really solve anything. In essence, a true example of "a compromise is what happens when you come up with an idea that doesn't really suit anyone".
The examples of many European countries from Germany and Holland to Sweden and Finland and even the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish regional assemblies show this argument to be false. As long as politicians can be grown up about it PR works just fine.
LibDems, OTOH, seem to like the idea of even more taxes and even more bureaucracy... and frankly we're taxed heavily enough as it is, TYVM. Damned either way, IMV.
Whatever you think of their other policies, the Lib-dems are the only ones proposing PR, vote for them at this election, so that another party that you*do* support can get MPs next time. If we do get PR, watch the Tory party split over Europe, Old Labour split from New Labour and the Lib-dems old Liberal (recently relaunched as the "orange bookers") split from the newer SDP more left wing part. We'd actually get a proper choice!
Cosigned. I'd like to see a Pirate Party US movement.
There is one: http://www.pirate-party.us/ I believe the problem over there is that, (unlike here in the UK) you need to register your party state by state & they all seem to have different byzantine regulations. Here you only need to register once to cover all of the UK except Northern Ireland where not even the major parties put up candidates because it has a whole politics of it's own due to historical reasons.
From what I've heard it's also harder to get on the ballot over there (here any old person can stump up £500 and be put on the ballot at a general election, or in local elections find 10 friends\family to propose him\her and do it for free).
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
I don't know if what I am saying is 100% correct. But people who might vote for Pirate, Green, ect ect. are mostly geeks or people directly involved in this.
True, and it is unfortunate that the "geek" vote is being split so badly. The LibDems are the only one of the three major parties that stood up to this law (voting against it and calling for its repeal). Whether someone's agreement with them on this issue outweighs any disagreements they may have with them on other issues is an open question.
Us Pirates only have 9 out of a possible 650 candidates standing; I doubt we'll have an impact on the Lib-dem vote (hell, as there's no PPUK candidate in my area, I'll be voting Lib-dem).
Not quite, they are franchised. If you read "Freakanomics" you'll read about the only real time an economist has had access to the inner workings of a drug gang, and eventually even it's books. His opinion? If you were to draw an organization chart of a drug gang, it would look almost exactly like McDonalds. It's a good read, I would recommend the book to anyone.
It'd be unregulated within the scope of its own market-- the black market. In the scope of the broader economy, I'd say that contraband is maximally regulated-- it's hard to get any more regulated than "you shall not trade in this, and if you do, we'll toss you in the slammer".
Even in the scope of it's own market it's quite heavy regulated perhaps more so. There are various social and gang pressures regulating a dealers decisions up to the point of "don't trade his or we'll shoot you".
In all honesty, I think the US-American terms (legislative, executive and judicial branch) are clearer than the ones we use.
Oh, I totally agree, my point was just that it's only them that are that clear. The rest of us English-speaking countries are just as unclear as you Swedes...
There is something very wrong with a legal system where someone can sue you and then drop the case or lose, and you still have to pay and are not compensated for your time.
Who tells you to write the press releases and what to put in them?
Who wrote the clauses?
Because you don't seem to be in charge but rather a secretary or public affairs officer, who is actually in charge?
No one tells me what to write. Usually some sort of request from a journalist will come into my inbox (and the others on the press team - it's a mailing list), or a big story will be in the news and one of us will start a new PiratePad* and the team will start working on it. It's like a wiki in real time all of the team available will work on it. Once we've agreed on the wording we proof read it, and email it out to our contacts list. All press releases are also available here: http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/press The ultimate responsibility for anything that gets sent out falls to the Campaigns Officer on the National executive committee (NEC), but for most day to day tasks he helps out like anyone else; there's no sense of hierarchy as we're all volunteers (including all the NEC members; there are no paid party posts not least because we're only ~8 months old and can't afford to pay anyone).
As for the manifesto, it was debated on the PPUK forums and an initial straw poll taken, the options on the official ballot on were ultimately decided by the NEC (I'm not sure of the exact mechanism, but I suspect it's in our constitution), the members of whom were elected by a vote of all party members, and the positions were open to any party member who wished to stand; there was also a re-open nominations option on the ballot. To control the PPUK, the Swedes would have had to rig multiple ballots, even supposing they tried to do that, our copyright policy is different from theirs, so they weren't very successful. I hope I've put this conspiracy to bed.
I notice you do not refute his claim, but rather attack him. Perhaps you should try refuting the claim with respectable, verifiable information.
How about this, I'm a member and volunteer with the Pirate party UK, I help write our press releases; I've never met nor heard from a member of the Swedish pirate party, they certainly don't tell us what to do; our manifesto went to a clause by clause vote to the entire membership. So unless all party members are being mind controlled from Sweden the original claim is rubbish.
Just as having *every* single candidate who desires to run in a general election on the ballot is unworkable.
Here in the UK *anyone* who can afford the £500 deposit gets onto the ballot at a general election, you get the money back if you get more than 5% of the vote, so it discourages most of the cranks.
Slashdot Mirror
he once called Camerons plans for a British Bill of Rights "Xenophobic and a legal nonsensity".
To clarify the parent, that's because Cameron was proposing repealing the act that gave the ECHR legal force in the UK courts (the Human rights act 1998).
So your solution to the complexity of determining how to vote is to disenfranchise myself? Interesting.
If you re-read my whole post, you'll see that's not what I said at all.
As for STV working, surely the results in Scotland demonstrate that it's rather flawed. Both the SNP and Labour got 50% more seats for each percentage of the vote than the Conversatives and Lib Dems. Hardly proportional.
In the local council elections where STV is used? citation please.
Citing Scotland as a democratic example is inherently flawed anyway, given the Scottish MP influence on Westminster and their demonstrated willingness to fuck over England with laws that wont apply to their own constituencies. But I digress..
Like I said, I was talking about Scottish local council elections, not the General election. As you raise it, however, here's my solution to the West Lothian question: make the commons the English Parliament and kick all the Scots and Welsh to an elected Lords as a UK parliament.
With STV you're allowed to stop at 1; you don't have to fill in 2 - 5 if it's a real problem for you. So in your scenario, I'd fill in "1" then stop. Or perhaps I'd remember that we vote for people, not parties in the UK, and vote on the basis of their respective election campaigns. Forcing people of the same party to campaign against each other is a feature, not a bug.
Furthermore, we know STV works in the UK because IIRC it's already used in the Scottish & Northern Irish Local council elections.
STV is, frankly, fucking complicated.
What's exactly complicated about putting 1,2,3,4,5 etc. next to candidates in order of preference? That's all that STV requires of the voter. Then my City will get 3 or 4 MPs, but elected proportionally. Instead of the same 3 or 4 MPs elected to keep the Tories\Labour out.
I agree, although i do need to read into all the systems properly.
The Lib Dems want something more proportional and call for PR, but I do fear the removal of the constituency link. The fact that a person represents ~70k people in a local area is a good thing and provides for accountability. If we remove this you could end up with some very unpopular people put at the top of each party's list resulting in them never being removed from power.
With the constituency link they would need to be able to find anywhere that would actually take them!
The Lib-dems actually want STV. That keeps the constituency link.
I was not aware that there were still such variances in British parliamentary districts. In the US, of course, there is a Constitutionally mandated census every ten years (we're having one right now, as a matter of fact), followed by redistricting based on that Census, including requirements that each district in a state have very close to the same voting population. What provisions does Britian have for census and redistricting?
A similar one, we also have a census every 10 years. And constituency are regularly re-drawn (every 8-12 years) by the boundaries commission using population data.
However, PR means you vote for parties and not for individuals.
Not necessarily, The Lid-dems prefered system is the Single Transferable Vote, which maintains the constituency link & you vote for individual, the 1997, Labour, Jenkins commission reccomended a system called AV+ here also most MPs are voted in in person, a minority of 15-20% come from a party list.
Don't you find funny that the image displaying the slashdot show an american flag on a UK election article ?
We're the 51st state in all but name anyway. From that angle, it makes perfect sense...
Sweet innocence... in no country under a dictatorship can you just pack up and leave. I should know, I spent my whole childhood in such regime and I had a neighbor who tried to cross the border and failed. They made a lesson of him.
He was stretching the analogy of Apple being a fascist country; not saying that real dictatorships are like that.
Getting back to my original point, PR-STV does not give me a single MP to represent my views in government.
No, it gives you four or five or however many depending how big the constituencies are.
That means you have multiple people fighting your corner in Westminster, that's surely a better thing. An example; my city is split into 3 Constituencies, if they were merged into one, and 3 labour + 3 Tory + 3 Lib-dems + N others were fighting it out it would be great, Politicians from the same party would have to fight against each other to prove that they will represent you best, but at the end of the day my City will still only have 3 MPs and none of them could tell you to go elsewhere because you live one street out of their area (i.e. I could actually complain to the Labour MP about his parties policies rather than not being able to do much because my Lib-dem MP already opposes them)
STV is not PR. Would you like to try again?
Yes it is; from the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article:
The single transferable vote (STV) is a preferential voting system designed to minimize "wasted" votes, provide proportional representation, and ensure that votes are explicitly cast for individual candidates rather than party lists.
emphasis mine. What makes you think that it's not PR?
How would PR allow me to vote for an Individual to represent me and my constituency in parliment?
The Single Transferable vote system has larger, multi-member constituencies; the geographical link is not broken, and you can still vote for individuals, not party lists. It's already used in the UK and around the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
Of course they're proposing proportional representation, they've got the most to gain from it.
IMO it's also the fairest, most democratic system; I really hope we introduce STV for by the time of the next general election.
There is another view which says that you inevitably wind up with watered down legislation which in trying to pander to every party doesn't really solve anything. In essence, a true example of "a compromise is what happens when you come up with an idea that doesn't really suit anyone".
The examples of many European countries from Germany and Holland to Sweden and Finland and even the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish regional assemblies show this argument to be false. As long as politicians can be grown up about it PR works just fine.
Between news and your review, it seems as though I've found my next ISP.
LibDems, OTOH, seem to like the idea of even more taxes and even more bureaucracy... and frankly we're taxed heavily enough as it is, TYVM. Damned either way, IMV.
Whatever you think of their other policies, the Lib-dems are the only ones proposing PR, vote for them at this election, so that another party that you*do* support can get MPs next time. If we do get PR, watch the Tory party split over Europe, Old Labour split from New Labour and the Lib-dems old Liberal (recently relaunched as the "orange bookers") split from the newer SDP more left wing part. We'd actually get a proper choice!
Cosigned. I'd like to see a Pirate Party US movement.
There is one: http://www.pirate-party.us/ I believe the problem over there is that, (unlike here in the UK) you need to register your party state by state & they all seem to have different byzantine regulations. Here you only need to register once to cover all of the UK except Northern Ireland where not even the major parties put up candidates because it has a whole politics of it's own due to historical reasons.
From what I've heard it's also harder to get on the ballot over there (here any old person can stump up £500 and be put on the ballot at a general election, or in local elections find 10 friends\family to propose him\her and do it for free).
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
I don't know if what I am saying is 100% correct. But people who might vote for Pirate, Green, ect ect. are mostly geeks or people directly involved in this.
True, and it is unfortunate that the "geek" vote is being split so badly. The LibDems are the only one of the three major parties that stood up to this law (voting against it and calling for its repeal). Whether someone's agreement with them on this issue outweighs any disagreements they may have with them on other issues is an open question.
Us Pirates only have 9 out of a possible 650 candidates standing; I doubt we'll have an impact on the Lib-dem vote (hell, as there's no PPUK candidate in my area, I'll be voting Lib-dem).
They tend toward being somewhat decentralized.
Not quite, they are franchised. If you read "Freakanomics" you'll read about the only real time an economist has had access to the inner workings of a drug gang, and eventually even it's books. His opinion? If you were to draw an organization chart of a drug gang, it would look almost exactly like McDonalds. It's a good read, I would recommend the book to anyone.
(Note: armchair economist)
It'd be unregulated within the scope of its own market-- the black market. In the scope of the broader economy, I'd say that contraband is maximally regulated-- it's hard to get any more regulated than "you shall not trade in this, and if you do, we'll toss you in the slammer".
Even in the scope of it's own market it's quite heavy regulated perhaps more so. There are various social and gang pressures regulating a dealers decisions up to the point of "don't trade his or we'll shoot you".
In all honesty, I think the US-American terms (legislative, executive and judicial branch) are clearer than the ones we use.
Oh, I totally agree, my point was just that it's only them that are that clear. The rest of us English-speaking countries are just as unclear as you Swedes...
There is something very wrong with a legal system where someone can sue you and then drop the case or lose, and you still have to pay and are not compensated for your time.
Simon sing is going to go after the BCA for costs: http://www.badscience.net/2010/04/british-chiropractic-association-drops-shameful-libel-case-against-science-writer-who-criticised-them/
Who tells you to write the press releases and what to put in them? Who wrote the clauses?
Because you don't seem to be in charge but rather a secretary or public affairs officer, who is actually in charge?
No one tells me what to write. Usually some sort of request from a journalist will come into my inbox (and the others on the press team - it's a mailing list), or a big story will be in the news and one of us will start a new PiratePad* and the team will start working on it. It's like a wiki in real time all of the team available will work on it. Once we've agreed on the wording we proof read it, and email it out to our contacts list. All press releases are also available here: http://www.pirateparty.org.uk/press
The ultimate responsibility for anything that gets sent out falls to the Campaigns Officer on the National executive committee (NEC), but for most day to day tasks he helps out like anyone else; there's no sense of hierarchy as we're all volunteers (including all the NEC members; there are no paid party posts not least because we're only ~8 months old and can't afford to pay anyone).
As for the manifesto, it was debated on the PPUK forums and an initial straw poll taken, the options on the official ballot on were ultimately decided by the NEC (I'm not sure of the exact mechanism, but I suspect it's in our constitution), the members of whom were elected by a vote of all party members, and the positions were open to any party member who wished to stand; there was also a re-open nominations option on the ballot. To control the PPUK, the Swedes would have had to rig multiple ballots, even supposing they tried to do that, our copyright policy is different from theirs, so they weren't very successful. I hope I've put this conspiracy to bed.
*An implimentation of the OSS Etherpad
I notice you do not refute his claim, but rather attack him. Perhaps you should try refuting the claim with respectable, verifiable information.
How about this, I'm a member and volunteer with the Pirate party UK, I help write our press releases; I've never met nor heard from a member of the Swedish pirate party, they certainly don't tell us what to do; our manifesto went to a clause by clause vote to the entire membership. So unless all party members are being mind controlled from Sweden the original claim is rubbish.
Just as having *every* single candidate who desires to run in a general election on the ballot is unworkable.
Here in the UK *anyone* who can afford the £500 deposit gets onto the ballot at a general election, you get the money back if you get more than 5% of the vote, so it discourages most of the cranks.