Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

It is worse because the Tories are incompetent bastards; we can subsume brexit within that omnishambles as it would never have happened under a Labour or coalition government.

Everything is out of sync. We should have done investment (especially on energy transition) when rates and interest were low (and unemployment relatively high), instead we did austerity.

Now we have high inflation and rates (and a very tight labour market), which is a context when austerity makes sense. But there's not much more that can be done and our need for investment has only increased - and, on energy, become even more urgent.

[Richard Hakluyt]

The government is letting the Bank of England take all the strain in attemting to tame inflation. The problem here is that increased interest rates are bad only for certain sectors of the population. For homeowners without a mortgage, or homeowners as I prefer to call them    , the increased rates just mean even more income due to increased rates on savings.

The other big tool for reducing inflation is fiscal policy, ie increasing taxes on the rich and comfortable; with increased taxes we would spread out the pain and get inflation down quicker. Not going to happen with this vile government of course; Mr and Mrs Sunak can't be expected to make sacrifices after all, that is the job of Mr and Mrs Ordinary living in mortgage hell in some unfashionable part of the UK.

[Gups]

The other big tool for reducing inflation is fiscal policy, ie increasing taxes on the rich and comfortable; with increased taxes we would spread out the pain and get inflation down quicker. Not going to happen with this vile government of course; Mr and Mrs Sunak can't be expected to make sacrifices after all, that is the job of Mr and Mrs Ordinary living in mortgage hell in some unfashionable part of the UK.

Not sure I agree that increasing taxes on the rich and comfortable is particularly anti-inflationary (it may be a good thing for other reasons) unless you have a very wide definition of "rich and comfortable". Inflation is being caused primarily by food and energy costs.

[Admiral Yi]

The other big tool for reducing inflation is fiscal policy, ie increasing taxes on the rich and comfortable; with increased taxes we would spread out the pain and get inflation down quicker. Not going to happen with this vile government of course; Mr and Mrs Sunak can't be expected to make sacrifices after all, that is the job of Mr and Mrs Ordinary living in mortgage hell in some unfashionable part of the UK.

The poor spending a higher percentage of their income on consumption, it would make more sense to increase their taxes rather than the rich, if the goal is to decrease demand push inflation.

[Tamas]

The other big tool for reducing inflation is fiscal policy, ie increasing taxes on the rich and comfortable; with increased taxes we would spread out the pain and get inflation down quicker. Not going to happen with this vile government of course; Mr and Mrs Sunak can't be expected to make sacrifices after all, that is the job of Mr and Mrs Ordinary living in mortgage hell in some unfashionable part of the UK.

The poor spending a higher percentage of their income on consumption, it would make more sense to increase their taxes rather than the rich, if the goal is to decrease demand push inflation.

But then that wouldn't actually help with the impact of high inflation on the poor, would it? Much easier to just tweak what's in the CPI basket and bring down the inflation number that way.

[Admiral Yi]

But then that wouldn't actually help with the impact of high inflation on the poor, would it? Much easier to just tweak what's in the CPI basket and bring down the inflation number that way.

Right.  So you have decide if your policy goal is reducing inflation or if it's mitigating the effects of inflation on a subset of the population.

[Josquius]

The millenials being different thing is only showing up in the Anglosphere polling though. In France, say, Macron's strongest vote is the over 65s, Le Penn did best in the working age 25-65, including millenials. It's more a U shape rather than a straight-line - similar in Italy and I believe that shape of vote is quite common in continental Europe.

I'm not sure on  France TBH. France is known for being weird in many things.
 But generally in Europe this goes against what I've heard. The big story in recent European elections, more so than the far right's steady rise, is the green wave largely resting on voters under 40.

I'm not convinced.

On a fundamental level I struggle with seeing a world defined by the rise of China and (to a lesser extent) India as one that is showing the death throes of nationalism - and obviously in both of those countries it is tied to economic success.

Is that nationalism though?
With China for sure nationalism seems the right word. Thats not the way China traditionally views the world and it seems ever clearer to me that modern Chinese don't particularly do so either. It seems to be more of a high-level civilization/ethnic based thing.

In India...its even weirder. With the Hindutva being described as ultra nationalists but when you look into it really they're quite opposed to the fundamental concepts of India and again have quite a civilizational-ethnic (-religious. But a religion tied to ethnicity) slant to things.

Also I disagree about the idea of the Chinese century et al. And with climate change.... I fear the 21st century will be one heavily defined by stuff happening to India rather than India doing stuff.

As we've mentioned before (excluding Truss) I think Cameron and Osborne were the worst government in the last 13 years.

Define worse.
For sure they were given a better starter position and chose to fuck things up for ideological reasons with those who followed simply reaping their mistakes. But I do think it bares remembering that this wasn't necessarily entirely born out of ideological moustache twirling. There were those who genuinely believed austerity was the only way forward.
Regardless I have trouble seeing the Lib Dems as anything other than naiive sidekicks in it all and it really showed the divides in the Lib Dems. Clegg and the liberals happily aligning with the Tories have very little to do with any young Lib Dems I've met who are far more in the SDP Europhile vein.

I think it all depends on the system you introduce. Parties fragment depending on electoral system - particularly any thresholds to representation. So ranked voting or STV as in Australia or Ireland haven't historically produced much fragmentation of the major parties (in Ireland at least until the crash) but do have a strong tradition of local independents/personalist parties; German politics is less fragmented than Dutch or Israeli politics because they have a higher threshold to get into the Bundestag.

My voting reform preference would be for something more Australian - ranked, compulsory voting. I'm not sure that it would cause massive party splits - and based on literally all of world history, the left would split first, more and into factions that absolutely detested each other (I mean I'm fairly sure both sides of the Labour's factional wars right now hate each other more than they hate the Tories)

Mandatory voting is a big no from me. It doesn't make sense. Incentives for voting sure. But full on mandatory...no.

I used to be all for STV seeing the constituency link as all important but honestly with age I'm increasingly turning away from that and towards far more conventional PR. We can't totally eliminate the constituency link and it will be important to protect rural voters but county-sized constituencies with multiple MPs should be workable. As much as two types of MP is an iffy proposition potentially but some remainder of the region (/nation? Preferably not) seats on the side of this.

The left splitting would be completely fine in my book provided we had a democracy where 40% vote for various shades of red so we get around 40% of various shades of red MPs. The trouble at current is we don't have a democracy and vote splitting is a huge issue that hits everyone bar the tories hard.

The country needs to be more democratic = omg orban might as well get rid of voting?
How on earth do you figure?

I want to change the voting system to ensure one party can never again hold power = little bit Orbany

Also I wouldn't position it as less or more democratic. I think it's more of a question of what democracy is for in a system. Both PR and FPTP are democratic, they have different virtues and different flaws that I think appeal to different sides/purposes of democracy.

FPTP is democratic only on a very bare basic binary level. Its an outdated system that isn't fit for purpose in the 21st century. I have no issue saying basically any other voting system is more democratic than FPTP.

When that party is profiting from a democratic deficit.

How the hell are the Tories benefiting from a democratic deficit? 

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/latest-news-and-research/media-centre/press-releases/new-research-one-in-six-seats-in-the-commons-effectively-unearned-under-warped-voting-system/

And 2019 was a particularly one sided non-standard election....

[Tamas]

We can argue whether the Tories would benefit or not from getting rid of FPTP, but I don't think it's up for debate that FPTP is not the most democratic of voting systems when it comes to representation. I remember in one election UKIP receiving a grand total of one seat despite bringing very strong numbers. That was particularly ridiculous even though personally I of course did not mind.

[Admiral Yi]

Democracy stripped to its bare bones is the majority decides the rules.  FPTP doesn't impede this.

[Tamas]

Democracy stripped to its bare bones is the majority decides the rules.  FPTP doesn't impede this.

Splendid. But in terms of representing the preferences of individual voters, FPTP is inferior.

[Admiral Yi]

Splendid. But in terms of representing the preferences of individual voters, FPTP is inferior.

Democracy isn't about self expression, it's about making choices.

[Josquius]

Democracy stripped to its bare bones is the majority decides the rules.  FPTP doesn't impede this.

Yes it does.

Somebody is going to do the shopping for 5 people and they have to vote on what chocolate they're going to buy. 2 vote Snickers, 1 votes Milky Bar, 1 Galaxy, 1 Dairy Milk.

Snickers wins despite the majority not wanting it. We could well imagine the 3 who didn't pick snickers have a nut allergy.

[The Brain]

We could well imagine the 3 who didn't pick snickers have a nut allergy.

The British people clearly does not.

[Josquius]

We could well imagine the 3 who didn't pick snickers have a nut allergy.

The British people clearly does not.

I mean...have you been following how things have been working out here this past decade?

[Tamas]

Splendid. But in terms of representing the preferences of individual voters, FPTP is inferior.

Democracy isn't about self expression, it's about making choices.

Please quote the part where I wrote "self expression" to continue.