Guess what Nigel Farage is forcing me to do?

MikeG said:
Anyone else considering casting their vote in a tactical manner in this most unusual election?
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Luckily UKIP garnered less than 2% of the vote in the constituency I live in. Labour won with 43%, Lib-Dems second with 28%, and Conservative third with 24%. I expect the Lib-Dems will suffer, mostly to the benefit of Labour, so there's not much worth voting tactically for. The Labour MP is very popular locally, having fought all the right fights, so I can't see her being rejected any time soon. I would love to be able to contribute to adding another Green MP to Parliament, but that isn't feasible here.
 
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3point14 said:
I simply don't believe that a coalition government has a mandate from the people. A government, I believe, has to have a manifiesto that has been selected by the people prior to election not a manifesto simply made up of whichever bits of each manifesto the coalition choose to use. A hung parliment and a new round of elections is preferable to a party in power that do not have any mandate to enforce their manifesto. I believe it leads to an even further seperation of the actions of government from the people they are supposed to serve.

All of this is subject to correction by those that know more.
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I can see that, I suppose, but since I also feel that FPTP distorts any mandate we currently get, I can't see how a system could be put together that both represented the electorate and gave single party majorities.

So for me, it's the clash there that makes me accept coalitions, since they would be a fairly inevitable fallout of any system that was more representative.

If you get my drift, anyway...:)
 
Tolls said:
I can see that, I suppose, but since I also feel that FPTP distorts any mandate we currently get, I can't see how a system could be put together that both represented the electorate and gave single party majorities.
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Single transferable vote would give more of an accurate result and result in one party in power.


So for me, it's the clash there that makes me accept coalitions, since they would be a fairly inevitable fallout of any system that was more representative.

If you get my drift, anyway...:)
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I entirely get your drift. I just feel, possibly without justification, that a coalition government actually represents no-one and encourages career politicians who are prepared to compromise to obtain power. I realise that compromise is sometimes required but coalition governments just allow so much wrigling and backtracking (cf Libs education promises)
 
My constituency was Tory until 1997, labour until 2008, and now Tory.

At least the labour candidate is pretty decent, the previous one was a Blairite drone.
 
The parachuting in to safe constituencies of London candidates (Blairite drones, often with a PPE degree and little life experience) is a big issue around here, though my MP seems to have overcome that to some extent by buying a house in the constituency, raising her family here and being very hard-working on local issues.

I was chatting yesterday to a mate who lives in Wakefield, who says that he feels that since they got a parachuted-in MP that London has a representative in Wakefield rather than Wakefield having a representative in Parliament. Wakefield is somewhere where a donkey wearing a red rosette could get elected, but the disconnect between the MP and the electorate is one of the reasons, I think, that UKIP's "appeal to the common man" is so insidious.

I very much doubt we'll see a non-coalition government for a few years yet.

Today's forecast from electionforecast.co.uk suggests the Tories will be the largest party with 298 seats, but that means they would need more coalition partners than just the LibDems (forecast to win only 24 seats) to maintain a majority. http://electionforecast.co.uk/graphics/2015_predicted_winner.svg
 
I'll be voting for Sinn Fein. I suppose we all have our own versions of nationalism, especially when we have no opportunity to vote for a government party in the first place.
 
MikeG said:
For the first time in my life I am likely to vote Conservative in the forthcoming election, mainly to bolster the centre right vote against the extreme right of UKIP. My constituency has no chance of going to Labour or the Lib Dems (who normally get my vote), so I am almost certain to vote tactically to keep the nutters at bay.

It won't quite be like that French election where thousands went to the polling stations with a peg on their nose to vote for one of the main party candidates to keep Le Penn of the Front Nationale away from power, because this government has been pretty much exactly where my politics lie......centre right economically, with a restraining hand provided by the Lib Dems on the Eurosceptic, homophobobic illiberal element which unfortunately you get with the Tory right.

Anyone else considering casting their vote in a tactical manner in this most unusual election?
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You know what could fix this dilemma for you? Preferential voting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
 
Damien Evans said:
You know what could fix this dilemma for you? Preferential voting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
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I know.

We had a referendum on this voting system and it was rejected.

At the time I heard a lot of people complaining that it was a fudge but it was actually my preferred system because, the change would be that the least unpopular candidate would be elected instead of the candidate with the largest block of supporters. It would make it easier to remove MPs for that reason. I do prefer FPTP to list based proportional systems, as I think they are more likely to promote patronage - the electorate would vote for a party, and depending on the vote a number of party candidates would be elected sent to parliament. A prospective candidate could just be good at doing favours for party members and thus get high up the list and the voters would have to reject the party comprehensively for that person to be ejected from parliament. As it would also make coalitions more likely, such a person could also offer support to whatever party could form the government in exchange for a ministry, and keep that over several different coalition governments. It is a system that is ideally suited to promoting Italian politics.
 
Craig B said:
I always believed that the loss of support currently suffered by the Lib Dems was an indication that the economic policies of this government are not in tune with mainstream rank and file liberal ideas.
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I believe it is because prior to actually being in power, the Lib Dem's support base was incredibly diverse, from libertarian to highly redistributionist. And they all managed to get along OK. And the party attracted votes from both Tory and Labour who were more towards the centre of their respective wings. When the LDs actually had to form a coalition, probably about half of that "support" fell away.

There is also the belief that they should never have broken any campaign promises. Which either means that they should probably never join a coalition, or that they should never make promises. . . .
 
Francesca R said:
I believe it is because prior to actually being in power, the Lib Dem's support base was incredibly diverse, from libertarian to highly redistributionist. And they all managed to get along OK. And the party attracted votes from both Tory and Labour who were more towards the centre of their respective wings. When the LDs actually had to form a coalition, probably about half of that "support" fell away.
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It's really easy to make all sorts of promises when there's no prospect of having to impliment and pay for them c.f. the Greens

There is also the belief that they should never have broken any campaign promises. Which either means that they should probably never join a coalition, or that they should never make promises. . . .
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Or, before they form a coalition they say to their potential allies "Hey, we've made this promise we can't break. We can't work with you if you're going to break it for us."
 
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3point14 said:
It's really easy to make all sorts of promises when there's no prospect of having to impliment and pay for them c.f. the Greens

Or, before they form a coalition they say to their potential allies "Hey, we've made this promise we can't break. We can't work with you if you're going to break it for us."
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I think the view is that this government is especially obnoxious, rather than that coalitions are never justified in any circumstances. A coalition involving middle of the road Labour along with the Lib Dems might have done the latter party less damage among its own voter base.
 
I'm certain that the LibDems would have gone into coalition with Labour had the latter been middle of the road. Or middle of the road enough to win the most seats, or enough seats that made a coalition work. But Labour had tracked rather to the left (not too left for many LibDems of course, just for the electorate)
 
3point14 said:
.....Or, before they form a coalition they say to their potential allies "Hey, we've made this promise we can't break. We can't work with you if you're going to break it for us."
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How would that work? That implies that there are some promises which can be broken without any comeback, and some which can't. What if the Tories promise to the electorate on the subject was the exact opposite of the Lib Dem promise? What then? (Here's a hint............the bigger party triumphs).

Frankly, I think the Lib Dems were wrong to apologise for the tuition fees thing. It just goes with the territory when you have coalitions, that you get some of your manifesto, but you don't get all.
 
3point14 said:
The Lib Dems credibility is shot. Breaking campaign promises is one thing but breaking their 'pledge' on student fees coupled with their admission that they'll climb into bed with anyone that gets them somewhere close to Downing Street has cost them a lot of votes, I think.

I will vote, but goodness knows who for. I see no connection between the desires I have for the running of the country and what happens in westminster. This is echoed by my self selected sample of colleagues and friends, most of whom probably won't vote. The upshot will be a coalition holding, between them, no more than 25% of the available votes with absolutely no mandate from the people. I find the concept of a coalition government distasteful.
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See I just don't understand this attitude. I will vote Green, because they are the only party not on the austerity bandwagon. The whole austerity thing is a con, and Labour and the Lib-Dems are just as culpable as the Cons in pursuing a false metaphor about household economies just to put us all into the same hole that the IMF have been imposing on "developing countries" for decades, and now they've got us all pegged down into their baloney.

If everyone pissed off with the mainstream voted Green, they would be the government, and we'd get stimulus and a recovering active economy a whole lot quicker.
 
Craig B said:
I think the view is that this government is especially obnoxious, rather than that coalitions are never justified in any circumstances. A coalition involving middle of the road Labour along with the Lib Dems might have done the latter party less damage among its own voter base.
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Whose view?

I find it a damn site less obnoxious than a government that led us into the Iraq war, for instance, and which spent money it didn't have like it was going out of fashion. In fact, I'd say this government was actually pretty bland and colourless, and has done very little other than get a grip of the economy. It hasn't failed at much because it hasn't tried to do very much. It certainly hasn't done austerity as drastically as it might have done.
 
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