Explain to an american how lizz truss resigning can happen

[shakahislop]

the UK electoral system very much needs to be changed. I think the system itself, where you only need about 13 million people to vote for your party to do more or less whatever you want, explains a lot about what the UK is like politically.

It's not going to happen any time soon though.

 

[Leo]

Charles kind of called it

 

[craner]

Poor @linebaugh had to come to Dissensus to learn how a parliamentary system works.

 

[IdleRich]

So this could be put down in large due to liz truss being chosen by the party and not by the citizens?

You have the citizens and the party, but the party is split into MPs and members, she was selected by the members but not the MPs or the ciitzens, that made her position pretty tenuous I'd say yeah, it was a problem from the start. Maybe not a mandate to change everything.

 

[shakahislop]

So this could be put down in large due to liz truss being chosen by the party and not by the citizens?

It's really hard to say. Personally I think quite a lot of people involved in the Tory party didn't expect financial markets to react in the way they did. I think they didn't really believe that thier room for action was so constrained by the judgements of people working in the financial world / how these kinds of markets work. So it came as a surprise when, despite being the PM and having a huge parliamentary majority, they couldn't just do what they wanted

Which was a bit of a surprise to me as well

 

[linebaugh]

Poor @linebaugh had to come to Dissensus to learn how a parliamentary system works.

I know this is a joke but its not the parlimentay system Im curious about. I understand the basic structural differences

 

[IdleRich]

the UK electoral system very much needs to be changed. I think the system itself, where you only need about 13 million people to vote for your party to do more or less whatever you want, explains a lot about what the UK is like politically.

It's not going to happen any time soon though.

Yeah it's a problem, too many safe seats, the government decided by a small number of marginals, huge majorities on a minority vote.

 

[shakahislop]

like ripping off the band-aid, best to do it quickly. painful but brief.

Yeah. Electorally speaking I think it's undeniable that the Tories are dead focused on retaining power, and so they do stuff like this. It's one advantage they have over labour.

 

[linebaugh]

But I think Ive figures it out. Ousting truss doesnt alienate the conservative voting base so they have liberty to do that

 

[IdleRich]

It's really hard to say. Personally I think quite a lot of people involved in the Tory party didn't expect financial markets to react in the way they did. I think they didn't really believe that thier room for action was so constrained by the judgements of people working in the financial world / how these kinds of markets work. So it came as a surprise when, despite being the PM and having a huge parliamentary majority, they couldn't just do what they wanted

Which was a bit of a surprise to me as well

Equally there were a lot of people who knew exactly what would happen and told them in no uncertain terms, but they did it anyway.

 

[IdleRich]

But I think Ive figures it out. Ousting truss doesnt alienate the conservative voting base so they have liberty to do that

or it's already alienated which is the same thing effectively

 

[shakahislop]

The UK's inability to solve some basic problems faced by its people is a product of the electoral system I think. Housing is the obvious one, where the electoral incentives are all wrong. Distribution of wealth is another. The other component of this is how centralized power is, in England at least.

 

[IdleRich]

Sorry to harp on about it but Brexit is a big thing here I think. Basically after the vote it became increasingly unpopular and the Tories got in with forty three percent of the vote, then you had a minority party with a huge majority forcing through a policy that was no longer popular - result, huge schism.

 

[shakahislop]

Equally there were a lot of people who knew exactly what would happen and told them in no uncertain terms, but they did it anyway.

Yeah but it depends who you listen to. This is one of the main things that happens when you're in power, you have a load of people telling you what they think is going to happen, and you have to decide which of them to listen to. Coz obviously for a lot of decisions, you don't really know what the consequences will be, and no-one does.

 

[linebaugh]

or it's already alienated which is the same thing effectively

But pms resign all the time you say. So kt seems to me the difference here is that individuals politicians in the UK are less respinsible for drumming up support in their voting base than they are in america.

As in you cant oust trump/biden because you also oust all your votes

 

[Leo]

All will be well once Boris is back in charge.

 

[craner]

so, your country is run based on the whims of a very small number of unqualified people.

that goes far in explaining why you are so fucked.

Both parties have ludicrous ways of electing their leaders, which is partly due to the weakness for 'party democracy' in mass membership parties which now afflicts Labour and Tories. It usually favours purity candidates because most party members who don't have their own ambitions for power of some kind tend to be cranks, weirdos, obsessives and lunatics. It was a major cause of Tony Benn, for example, who was the Patron Saint of Idiots and therefore wanted to empower them; the fruit of this was you know who.

 

[Leo]

Thanks, Craner. That has some similarity to our primary election system, the vote among people registered with a party to nominate the candidate they want to face the nominee of the other party in the general election. It's hard enough to get people to vote in the general election, so it tends to be mostly the hardcore supporters who vote in the primaries. and that sometime results in far-right or far-left candidates winning primaries and then getting crushed in the general election when more moderate independents and party voters tend to cast their ballots.

 

[IdleRich]

But pms resign all the time you say. So kt seems to me the difference here is that individuals politicians in the UK are less respinsible for drumming up support in their voting base than they are in america.

As in you cant oust trump/biden because you also oust all your votes

I dunno about all the time, seems that way lately... things have gone crazy. I mean Blair to Brown was a deliberate handover of power, always agreed from the start, these things now are totally different, but Thatcher was ousted when I was a kid in a similar way.

 

[IdleRich]

Yeah but it depends who you listen to. This is one of the main things that happens when you're in power, you have a load of people telling you what they think is going to happen, and you have to decide which of them to listen to. Coz obviously for a lot of decisions, you don't really know what the consequences will be, and no-one does.

This is true but I feel that here you had experts on one side and idealists on the other.