General election results 2015

[Beef Oven!]

The Scottish result seems to show that ............

Nationalism is alive and well, over the border.

[MrGongGong]

I have no idea if voting for one's prospective representative has become out of date.

It's about time we got rid of this quaint idea that somehow you are voting for someone to represent your locality
With a few exceptions, politics doesn't work like this at all anymore.
The nice young man in the suit who helped you sort out your planning dispute with the council is likely to be actively involved in supporting the sale of arms to oppressive regimes.

[Serial_Apologist]

Nationalism is alive and well, over the border.

But clothed in a left-wing rhetoric unusual for latter-day nationalism.

Or was/is it just rhetoric? We don't really know much about the SNP's record of administration in Scotland because we haven't been told. How have they managed to get away, if they have, with carrying out policies Nige among others on the right would have told us contravene EU strictures on "restrictive business practices" unless with the support of the canny Scots?

[pastoralguy]

It's about time we got rid of this quaint idea that somehow you are voting for someone to represent your locality
With a few exceptions, politics doesn't work like this at all anymore.
The nice young man in the suit who helped you sort out your planning dispute with the council is likely to be actively involved in supporting the sale of arms to oppressive regimes.

Sad but true.

[Richard Barrett]

Here is an interesting view from Paul Krugman in the New York Times, written before the election result was out, but it would apply equally no matter which party had won:

“Words,” wrote John Maynard Keynes, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.” I’ve always loved that quote, and have tried to apply it to my own writing. But I have to admit that in the long slump that followed the 2008 financial crisis — a slump that we had both the tools and the knowledge to end quickly, but didn’t — the unthinking were quite successful in fending off unwelcome thoughts.

And nowhere was the triumph of inanity more complete than in Keynes’s homeland, which is going to the polls as I write this. Britain’s election should be a referendum on a failed economic doctrine, but it isn’t, because nobody with influence is challenging transparently false claims and bad ideas.

(...)

Like Mr. Obama and company, Labour’s leaders probably know better, but have decided that it’s too hard to overcome the easy appeal of bad economics, especially when most of the British news media report this bad economics as truth. But it has still been deeply disheartening to watch.

What nonsense am I talking about? Simon Wren-Lewis of the University of Oxford, who has been a tireless but lonely crusader for economic sense, calls it “mediamacro.” It’s a story about Britain that runs like this: First, the Labour government that ruled Britain until 2010 was wildly irresponsible, spending far beyond its means. Second, this fiscal profligacy caused the economic crisis of 2008-2009. Third, this in turn left the coalition that took power in 2010 with no choice except to impose austerity policies despite the depressed state of the economy. Finally, Britain’s return to economic growth in 2013 vindicated austerity and proved its critics wrong.

Now, every piece of this story is demonstrably, ludicrously wrong. Pre-crisis Britain wasn’t fiscally profligate. Debt and deficits were low, and at the time everyone expected them to stay that way; big deficits only arose as a result of the crisis. The crisis, which was a global phenomenon, was driven by runaway banks and private debt, not government deficits. There was no urgency about austerity: financial markets never showed any concern about British solvency. And Britain, which returned to growth only after a pause in the austerity drive, has made up none of the ground it lost during the coalition’s first two years.

Yet this nonsense narrative completely dominates news reporting, where it is treated as a fact rather than a hypothesis. And Labour hasn’t tried to push back, probably because they considered this a political fight they couldn’t win. But why?

Mr. Wren-Lewis suggests that it has a lot to do with the power of misleading analogies between governments and households, and also with the malign influence of economists working for the financial industry, who in Britain as in America constantly peddle scare stories about deficits and pay no price for being consistently wrong. If U.S. experience is any guide, my guess is that Britain also suffers from the desire of public figures to sound serious, a pose which they associate with stern talk about the need to make hard choices (at other people’s expense, of course.)

Still, it’s quite amazing. The fact is that Britain and America didn’t need to make hard choices in the aftermath of crisis. What they needed, instead, was hard thinking — a willingness to understand that this was a special environment, that the usual rules don’t apply in a persistently depressed economy, one in which government borrowing doesn’t compete with private investment and costs next to nothing.

But hard thinking has been virtually excluded from British public discourse. As a result, we just have to hope that whoever ends up running Britain’s economy isn’t as foolish as he pretends to be.

[Serial_Apologist]

It's about time we got rid of this quaint idea that somehow you are voting for someone to represent your locality
With a few exceptions, politics doesn't work like this at all anymore.
The nice young man in the suit who helped you sort out your planning dispute with the council is likely to be actively involved in supporting the sale of arms to oppressive regimes.

Yes but the solution is in making them more, not less accountable; and that means having a system of recallability in place, as suggested upthread, standardised details of which (salary, length of on-job learning curve allowed etc) could be sensibly worked out, rather than abstaining.

[aeolium]

Which in all the models of PR of which I'm aware would divorce the voter even more than at present from his or her elected representative - long extolled as the chief purpose of voting, not support for a government - let alone the usual imponderables PR involves, e.g. legitimising post-election manifesto compromises in the bargaining process, which even with FPTP has been the main source of the LibDems' support loss.

I would have thought the chief purpose of voting is having fair representation, which certainly doesn't happen with FPTP. Once you begin to depart from a predominantly two (or at most three) party system FPTP starts to produce unrepresentative results. STV is pretty widely used, and it is even used in elections for devolved assemblies here, so is not unfamiliar. It's interesting that the SNP who have just won nearly 100% of the seats in Scotland on 50% of the vote are supposedly in favour of PR. Personally I don't see anything wrong with government through compromises - it's what happens in more democratic governments than not, and I don't see any particular advantage in having an MP as my representative even though I generally disagree with most of what he stands for.

[Beef Oven!]

But clothed in a left-wing rhetoric unusual for latter-day nationalism.

The scary variety.

[Richard Barrett]

Yes but the solution is in making them more, not less accountable

Indeed. PR and FPTP are basically tinkering with the same idea though, which is to keep accountability on a manageably low level where normally it only has to be thought about once every five years and then only in the broadest brushstrokes.

[mercia]

I don't know how typical Eastbourne is of Tory gains.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/politics/constituencies/E14000684

Their percentage share of the vote has actually gone down slightly on 2010, so where did the LD vote go ? ....... largely to UKIP it would seem. So is this what happened elsewhere ?

[french frank]

but the reason's to do with the LP historically garnering the working class vote and feeling part of that.

But that was what I was saying: that voter allegiance was to party first, and only secondly to the candidate.

[Serial_Apologist]

I would have thought the chief purpose of voting is having fair representation, which certainly doesn't happen with FPTP. Once you begin to depart from a predominantly two (or at most three) party system FPTP starts to produce unrepresentative results. STV is pretty widely used, and it is even used in elections for devolved assemblies here, so is not unfamiliar. It's interesting that the SNP who have just won nearly 100% of the seats in Scotland on 50% of the vote are supposedly in favour of PR. Personally I don't see anything wrong with government through compromises - it's what happens in more democratic governments than not, and I don't see any particular advantage in having an MP as my representative even though I generally disagree with most of what he stands for.

But at least voting for the person whom one is minded to get acquainted with has less opportunity to enact non-transparent compromises than STV (or other FPTP alternatives) will tend to encourage: out of sight, out of mind, etc., is what I'm saying.

[french frank]

Their percentage share of the vote has actually gone down slightly on 2010, so where did the LD vote go ? ....... largely to UKIP it would seem. So is this what happened elsewhere ?

That isn't a logical conclusion. All parties could have lost votes to UKIP, but the Tories could have taken from the Lib Dems and still ended down on 2010. The Lib Dem vote wouldn't have gone just to one party and UKIP won't have gained from just one party.

[Serial_Apologist]

But that was what I was saying: that voter allegiance was to party first, and only secondly to the candidate.

Yes but that in turn incorporates what party allegiance itself represents in one's choice.

[french frank]

Yes but that in turn incorporates what party allegiance itself represents in one's choice.

Yes, of course - but that applies with PR. Which is being 'extolled'?