Wilful Misunderstanding of Parliamentary Democracy

There seems little understanding (particularly in the UK) about the difference between Parliamentary Democracy and Presidential Democracy, and consequently little care for the essentials of democracy.

Twitter has been full of people saying that with the First Minister of Scotland resigning, there should be new Holyrood elections because the First Minister “had no mandate” and the new one won’t either. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how Parliamentary Democracy works. With the media, this misunderstanding and misrepresentation seems wilful.

(This post is a slightly amplified extract of a previous post, which on reflect conflated two associated issues.)

Voting ID

I used my Voter Authority Certificate today. The Polling Station staff had never seen one before – which does make me wonder whether this is “performative” in terms of voting integrity or just plain old voter suppression.

Two Presidential Elections today in UK

Today in the UK, I went through the charade of electing a “metro-mayor” and a “police and crime commissioner”. Apart from living in a rural area well outside any “metropolitan area” and really not wanting to see someone appointed to “commission crime”, I have a number of objections to this charade.

Internal Policing & BBC, MU, NHS etc.

In the past few weeks, we have had a number of instances where “well known brands” seem to have got themselves tied in knots about the boundaries between “employee misdemeanours” and “potential crimes”.

• The BBC (and ITV before them and GBNews since), who have had employees indulge in “unwise but not criminal behaviours” possibly connected with their jobs,
• Manchester United, who had a (very valuable and talented match-winning) player involved in very nasty (and public) accusations of criminal behaviour outside work, which revolted many fans,
• The NHS, which seems to have harboured a child-killer, where clinicians who believed she may have been killing patients, kept their concerns within the NHS disciplinary process.
• Perhaps Downing Street should also be added to this list – multiple times?

There is a pattern.

The Constituency Link

The “constituency link” is often quoted by opponents of PR as a key benefit of First Past the Post. I believe this undervalues the “constituent link” as well as being wrong as an argument.

5 Whys – 100 years on?

We don’t know what the world will be like in 100 years – there is huge uncertainty about both the robustness of the Western Economic System and the sustainability of the Global Climate System.

5 Whys is a Quality tool; if you face a problem, persistently asking the question “Why” will, once you have gone five questions deep, get you to something close to the real reason, the “root cause” of the problem. (Ref: Wikipedia 5 Whys). It is in some ways simplistic, but can raise useful issues.

How might our great-grandchildren apply 5 Whys to the world 100 years on?

Open Letter to Pod Save the UK

Dear Coco & Nish

I have just been listening to your podcast, Is Keir Starmer a Kid Starver? (Crooked Media: Pod Save the UK 20/07/23) and was struck by the juxtaposition of your obvious concerns about Labour’s “policy focusing” and Mhairi Black’s overtures to Labour being rejected by Labour – basically because they don’t like non-Labour politicians.

Why are Labour developing a policy platform that focuses on the swing voters in the Marginal Seats (the Lee Andersons of the voting world)? Because to win under the First Past the Post system, you focus not on your supporters and selling your vision, but on the thin fringe of the opposition’s support in “winnable seats”, and what might “win them away”.

Further twists to UK politics

Why is Labour’s leader, Sir Keir Starmer, “trimming” his party’s position on so many issues, and why is the response to last week’s by-elections (20 July 2023 – when Labour won a stunning victory in Selby & Ainsty and ran The Tories close in Uxbridge & South Ruislip), to trim even further?

“Our State Broadcaster” and Newthink

Over the last few days, we were distracted by a row about whether a freelance football “pundit” can in their own time tweet a political view. During that time, a very nasty piece of legislation started its way through the House of Commons almost unnoticed.

The furore also highlighted the almost proprietorial attitude some Conservative MPs have to the BBC and their “right” to control it as the “State Broadcaster”.

(I also wonder whether Tyrrell’s Crisps can complain about bias because a “BBC football pundit” advertises a competitor’s brand on other channels.)

(Representative) Parliamentary Democracy under Strain

Recent events in the UK have shown a lack of understanding of what it means to be a Parliamentary Democracy whilst also showing the weaknesses of the form of Parliamentary Democracy we have in the UK.

The partisan nature of British Politics means that a dogmatic group (party members) can select a new leader who becomes Prime Minister because their Party has a Parliamentary majority that is not justified by their minority support at the previous election.