Labour loses in a biiiig way!

[miriam_e]

I hope the Australian Labour party is sitting up and paying attention to the results of some local British elections. Labour over there have been so badly damaged by being defacto conservatives that they not only have lost, but for the first time have come third behind the Liberal Democrats!

Maybe this is the wakeup call that they need in order to understand that most people are NOT the right-wing conservatives that politicians think. Politicians surround themselves with selfish, power-mongering, avaricious conservatives and develop a distorted view of the world. They should get out more and meet some real people.

Unfortunately it won't happen that way, because the Liberal Democrats effectively divided the non-Conservatives vote and that let the Conservatives win. The Conservatives are predictably strutting around, happily wanking. The idiots think they got voted in, when actually Labour got voted out! Most politicians are such dopes!

Comments

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any analysis from those elections yet, but I have my own ideas on why the result was so dramatic.
It's not so much that the public are sick of Labour's shift from the left to the centre and then starting to move into right-wing territory, IMHO (though, this is a bad enough thing in itself and must have had some effect). I think it's more that they hate Dubbya with a passion and can see what an absolute cock Blaire is for dragging the country into Dubbya's mad war. One can only hope that Australia's voters punish Howard the same way.

[sleepyaardvark.livejournal.com]

Actually, I have to disagree with the running around wanking part. Maybe some of them are, but Michael Howard is far too astute of a politician; he's well aware that when the European parliament results come in, that could take some of the edge off the Tory "victory". So he's been rather reserved and modest, actually. The BBC even ran an article on that very issue yesterday but I'm too lazy to go look it up right now.

And stop your whining, I have no sympathy. The Democratic Party over here is so far out of touch with its progressive base that they are practically Republican-Lite now. Hell, some Senate Democrats might as well be Republicans, for instance Senator Zell Miller from Georgia who's actually been blasting Kerry and supports George Bush. At least you still have a viable anti-conservative movement there, as well as in the UK. Even the British conservatives are not nearly as right-wing as most of our politicians are, to say nothing of Labour.

Keep in mind, the Republicans here are NOT equivalent to UK conservatives, they are far closer to fringe groups like the BNP or UKIP--and yet, they are a MAJOR party here, not a lunatic fringe. So as I said, I have no sympathy, since it could be far worse for you. At least you don't have to put up with what we put up with here where the most absurd right-wing nonsense is not only taken seriously, but considered to be "objective".

That said, I do agree with you that UK Labour has pretty much betrayed the Left and for that reason, I'm rejoicing over what happened last week and I can't wait for Blair to come crashing down. But its still amusing to me to hear Brits and Aussies complaining about right-wing extremism...heh, you all don't have a clue about right-wing extremism. You should try reading Fox News (http://www.foxnews.com/) for a week and then you'll realize just how lucky you really are. *wink*

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

:)

Recently I thought of a scheme that would reflect people's feelings far more accurately and might persuade more people to vote. I don't know how it is done in USA or UK, but at the moment voting over here can be done either of two ways:

- You can mark the one you want most, and not mark any more
or
- You number from favorite to most disliked

The first makes it look like you idolise a particular candidate and spurn all competitors. However it is the easiest to do and least prone to error.

The second means that you have to give some kind of ranking to even those that you despise, but gives a better idea of how you consider the range of candidates. However it is easy to make a mistake and render your vote invalid.

Why not have a freeform vote where you can vote non-committal by putting a zero or an empty space next to a name, or place a number from 10 to -10 there. Anything less than zero means you express antipathy toward them. This would mean that we would have the opportunity of expressing our lack of confidence in all the candidates in a valid vote. If the majority party received more negative votes than positive ones then even if they got more than any other party then the election would have to be declared no-win and go back to the polls. It would be an opportunity to give some real feedback to the dipshits in office and the ruler-wannabes.

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

A nice side-effect of such a voting system would be that the divisive strategies so often used so effectively by politicians to inflame hatred would actually work against them. A very popular party that creates a lot of hatred would risk receiving enough negative votes to cancel out their positive votes. I can imagine the situation where two major parties caught up in a brawl of words would polarise debate so heavily and generate enough passion on both sides that they would cancel each other out and a more moderate party pips them both.

This would cause a major reform of many of the nastiest aspects of politics prevailing since the Ancient Greeks.

[sleepyaardvark.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've actually thought of a similar scheme myself where basically you'd have "none of the above" as a choice and if "none of the above" got a plurality, the election would be thrown out and we'd have a revote. I actually like your angle a little better though :-).