Britain is going to be Tory for at least 10 years.

[PsychoSerenity]

You do talk some utter arse dribblings sometimes, mistermack. Life is too short.

[JimC]

I'm sure you meant "purr betters", because indeed we should leave all major decisions to the kittehs...

[mistermack]

I guess that's why we should leave the serious business of politics to pur betters.

That's what works.
They didn't fight WW2 by majority vote. A bit of democracy is ok, but not too much.
We don't bother with democracy much at all in the armed forces, especially if our very existence is threatened.
We leave it to times when decisions aren't so important.

[Brian Peacock]

And what makes one of our betters better than the us? How does one become a better, or even a better better?

[JimC]

And what makes one of our betters better than the us? How does one become a better, or even a better better?

Competence, skill, knowledge...

Sure, we need elected representatives to reflect the will of the people, but it is vital that those representatives have a certain minimum level of understanding and technical competence (as well as personal integrity), something that tends to be lacking in many politicians. I'm not pretending to offer a solution, but it truly is an issue...

[mistermack]

And what makes one of our betters better than the us? How does one become a better, or even a better better?

Well, when it comes to deciding to fund hi speed rail, (or not) I would prefer people with a brain, who have experience of big projects, who know a bit about national finance and transport to have more of an input than the Birmingham bin men.

Similarly, when choosing the leader of a party like Labour, who might even be Prime Minister one day, I would prefer the MPs to choose him rather than the Birmingham bin men, or the Surrey train drivers.
By all means, if a bin man got to be an MP, then he probably has some sort of ability to deal with people, rather than just dragging wheelie bins.

We had a reasonable system for choosing a credible leader of the Labour Party. But it's gone. Probably never to return.

[Brian Peacock]

And what makes one of our betters better than the us? How does one become a better, or even a better better?

Well, when it comes to deciding to fund hi speed rail, (or not) I would prefer people with a brain, who have experience of big projects, who know a bit about national finance and transport to have more of an input than the Birmingham bin men.

So not a politician then?

Similarly, when choosing the leader of a party like Labour, who might even be Prime Minister one day, I would prefer the MPs to choose him rather than the Birmingham bin men, or the Surrey train drivers.
By all means, if a bin man got to be an MP, then he probably has some sort of ability to deal with people, rather than just dragging wheelie bins.

So politicians then?

We had a reasonable system for choosing a credible leader of the Labour Party. But it's gone. Probably never to return.

Yes, it was reasonable when rubberstamping the nominations of the PPL was all that was required of the membership - like the good old Tories eh?

[mistermack]

Yes, it was better. For Tories and Labour it works better.

And it's not a question of politician or non politician. It's more, or less democracy.
Too much democracy is a bad thing. If you think you CAN'T have too much democracy, you need to make the argument for it. Not just assume it as a given, which is the attitude of a lot of people.

Why not have the national electorate elect both party leaders? That would be more democratic.
And why not have a democratic referendum, to decide on how your heart operation should proceed?
Let the passengers vote on how to land the plane.

It all makes wonderful sense.

[JimC]

In Oz, members of the local branches of any given party have a big say in deciding who the local candidate might be. However, leaders and deputy leaders of the party are elected by the parliamentary members of the party. To me, that seems to be the wisest course, so I'm with mm on this one.

[pErvinalia]

Labour are quietly going further and further left, under Corbyn.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 54826.html
They seem to be getting away with it without hardly any adverse comment from the media.
They are going to reduce the minimum number of MPs needed to get someone on the ballot for the leadership from 15 to 10 percent. That will make it much easier for a far left candidate to actually stand, and with the new voting arrangements, as we've seen with Corbyn, the left are virtually guaranteed to win the election now that the members have so much power.

Like I said earlier, they now have too much democracy.

Yeah, those pesky leftists and their penchant for democracy. Imagine thinking that democracy is a good thing. Won't somebody think of the authoritarians??!

It's now built in that the Labour Party will be a hard left party for long into the future.

By "hard left", you actually mean run of the mill left from a few decades ago. The cheek of these people!

They are also consolidating their hold on the party quietly in the background, step by step.
However, I'm not so sure that the voters have actually woken up, or been made aware by the media, just what a bunch of reds are running Labour now.

Yeah, 70's and 80's standard left policy is communist. And the fact that most people favour those policies when they are presented apolitically is definitely evidence that the people need to wake up.

So maybe there IS a chance that we will have a hard left government, led by Corbyn and Abbot in five years time. In fact, there is a fifty fifty chance, according to the bookies.
Swap May for Boris Johnson and that would go up to odds on, I would have thought.
But what do I know?

Fuck all it seems. Weren't you one of the ones who were predicting that Labour would be out of government for decades because of Corbyn?

[pErvinalia]

In Oz, members of the local branches of any given party have a big say in deciding who the local candidate might be. However, leaders and deputy leaders of the party are elected by the parliamentary members of the party. To me, that seems to be the wisest course, so I'm with mm on this one.

That's not the case with Labor. 50% of the vote for leader comes from the party membership.

[JimC]

In Oz, members of the local branches of any given party have a big say in deciding who the local candidate might be. However, leaders and deputy leaders of the party are elected by the parliamentary members of the party. To me, that seems to be the wisest course, so I'm with mm on this one.

That's not the case with Labor. 50% of the vote for leader comes from the party membership.

Fair point, I'd forgotten that. However, that is a smaller amount than the new British Labour process, I think...

[pErvinalia]

Labor only adopted that recently as the MM model of letting the "experts" pick the leader resulted in 3 Labour Prime Ministers within a couple of years. Strangely now, with too much democracy, the Labor leadership has been really stable and he's been able to concentrate on policy instead of internal party politics. We really need to get rid of this "too much democracy" model.

[Hermit]

"If voting could change anything, it would be made illegal" First appeared in print in The Lowell Sun, 24 Sep 1976, Fri, Page 7. Variously attributed to Emma Goldman, Philip Berrigan and of course Mark Twain. Other popular authors such as Einstein, Gandhi and Lincoln miss out this time.

Election have always been carefully structured to maintain the status quo. It does not matter whether the Tories, Liberal, Labour, Democrats, Republicans, Greens or whoever else got into government, the wealth continues to accumulate at the top,albeit at different rates. If any individual or any organisation as much as look like being able to upset the apple cart, the media,all owned and controlled by the very rich, go into hysterics. Every. Fucking. Time. Too much democracy will be the end of civilisation. Bad thing will happen. The unwashed masses will get the wrong person at the plane's controls. Some garbo, no doubt. Given the chance, they always do.

Evangelical fundies could learn a thing or two in terms of predicting another imminent apocalypse.



Unfortunately, the scaremongering works. The vast majority of people who vote to maintain the status quo vote against their own interests. Again and again. And that includes the majority of self-described moderates, centrists and lefties.

As for me, Corbyn is the right man precisely because Murdoch and Co say he is the wrong one.

[Svartalf]

I have no betters, only wealthier morons who think they should rule over me because they are 'successful'