UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
view the rest of the comments
Maybe from a purely democratic point of view, however in the current environment it's better than what we have now and it's a reflection of the general mood of the country.
Blair had big majorities and we look back on this as a period of good governance up until the war and identity cards.
Blair had 418 MPs to 232 opposition MPs (including 165 Tories and 46 Lib Dems). So Labour outnumbered the opposition about 2-to-1, which wasn't great. Even then, Blair voluntarily chose to work with other parties, such as the joint committee on constitutional reform.
The Flavible prediction for these polling numbers would give Starmer 535 seats to 115 opposition - so Labour outnumbering the opposition nearly 5-to-1.
And far from working with other parties, Starmer is currently purging long-standing Labour pluralists like Neal Lawson. That's a very different proposition to 1997.
Also Blair went into the 1997 election with 271 MPs (the 1992 result plus defections and by-elections) - so around 1-in-3 of his 1997 party were rookie MPs. Starmer is going in with 195, so roughly 2-in-3 of his MPs would be rookies - yet, to a far greater extent than 1997, we'd be relying on those rookies to hold the government to account as if they were wily experienced old hands.