Psychoactive Substances: Rolling UK Politics in The Neo-Con Era

The joke legislation Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 to come into force on 26th May. Still don't really understand how poppers managed to get an exemption for apparently 'not acting on the brain'.

I'm glad that one guy who makes all the world's poppers got a reprieve

bloody hell, how many crosses did i just have to draw ..
2 on one card, 3 on another.
i nearly shouted out 'cat ran round it' afterwards.
given i have never heard of any of them i had to go tribal (postcode/party affiliation).

reports of low turnout giving me a squeaky bum moment atm

being honest, i was tempted to not bother,
but i decided that i needed to show an example to mk2, so i killed his ps3 groove and dragged him along.
kids gotta learn.

You'd have fun with an Irish election ballot then
http://www.irishtimes.com/polopoly_fs/1.2346967.1441884614!/image/image.jpg

ok, that's actually ridiculous.
like anyone give a top 10 rundown on a bunch of political hopeful unknowns.

Voted Sexton.

I think you misspelt 'glorious', mark.

Haha and fair fucks to whoever filled in that ballot, that's the ex-webmaster from my old (Dermot Desmond-ran) company for the Socialist Party at #1.

I think you misspelt 'glorious', mark.

fair play, i scrunched my eyebrows, and then i laughed.

https://londonelects.org.uk/im-voter/election-results/live-count-progress-2016?contest=23

In previous elections, the leader after 20% or so have been counted has been the eventual winner. Based on that, I'm calling in for Khan. And I for one welcome our new bus driver's son slightly resembling a tortoise that's lost its shell overlord.

LibDems in fourth place!

Khan would surely be ahead on second-preference votes as well?

You'd think. This one's done.

Looks like the counters in Bexley and Bromley really want to knock off early for Friday afternoon pints.

Gap likely to get bigger as the other constituencies catch up. Wonder if Khan can do it on first prefs?

In a move to make you guys feel old, Amber voted for the first time yesterday.

Jesus! Congrats Amber!

lol @ Havering and Redbridge, where Labour's Ivana Bortoletti is leading the Assembly vote, but Goldsmith is leading for Mayor. Stay classy, Essex borders.

Wait, Amber is a small child. That can't be right.

xposts

In a move to make you guys feel old, Amber voted for the first time yesterday.

0_o

Tories gained 16 seats in Scotland? The fuck's going on.

now the tories can be tartan tories too along with snp and labour

Unionists being honest for a change?

Also Ruth Davidson.

lots of "she's a genuinely nice person" stuff about Davidson, and while I think some effective opposition to the SNP is long overdue, a good person she is not.

Quite possibly starting with the fact that Ruth Davidson is more credible than Kezia Dugdale (tbf, that's quite a low bar) - ha xpost. They're making an argument on BBC right now that it's because she's disassociated the Scottish Conservatives from the national party and concentrated just on what they can do for Scotland.

Also the list vote is a load of old arse. The #bothvotesSNP thing has spectacularly backfired (I gave my second vote to the Greens, but I suspect a lot of people went SNP both.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/14471421.Iain_Macwhirter__How_to_handle_the_weird_science_of_Holyrood_list_vote/

Under the d'Hondt method, the number of votes a party wins on the regional list is divided by the number of constituency seats they have won plus one. This sounds like weird science, but it’s actually fairly simple. In Glasgow there are nine constituency seats and seven list seats up for grabs. Say the SNP win all nine constituency seats in Glasgow and also get 100,000 list votes. Their list votes will be divided, in the first round, by their nine seats plus one, meaning that they effectively have only 10,000 votes in the list. That may not be enough to win any list seats.

If Labour win no constituency seats in Glasgow, but get 80,000 votes on the list, they would end up possibly having all 7 of the list seats. Though, obviously, other parties like the Tories or Greens, might also win seats here. There are seven rounds of calculations on the list votes. It's estimated that if a party gets around six per cent of the list votes in any region it will get a seat. On recent polls, the independence-supporting Scottish Green Party could get around eight list seats across Scotland

As I understand it, the SNP got about 110,000 list votes in Glasgow, which wasn't enough to get them a single list seat due to taking all the constituency seats

(note, I read that earlier on Twitter, will see if I can back that up at all)

lots of "she's a genuinely nice person" stuff about Davidson, and while I think some effective opposition to the SNP is long overdue, a good person she is not.

Not about whether she's nice or not so much as impressive in a Sturgeonesque manner, if you like. Scotland's politics now seems so divorced from England's it's almost on its way to some sort of Ulster situation.

Go down the bottom here and click on regions:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2016/scotland/results

SNP had 41.7% of the regional vote and got 4 list MSPs. Tories had 22.9% and got 24.

A bit more awareness of how it works wouldn't have gone amiss.

xp yeah that's a good way of putting it.

lol @ Havering and Redbridge, where Labour's Ivana Bortoletti is leading the Assembly vote, but Goldsmith is leading for Mayor. Stay classy, Essex borders.

No idea why I feel like reading this charitably but this gap could be explained (in large part) by UKIP voters tactically voting Goldsmith because they know the UKIPdude has no chance?

yeah, I noticed that, just fancied a cheap shot.

:) Fair enough.

Has the Corbyn team put any particular effort into Scotland over the past few months or have they just let Dugdale and co get on with it in the hope that some vague socialist cred might win people back? I can't recall seeing Corbyn talk about Scotland at all.

I basically think a lot of people didn't realise that the regional list is basically a top-up system. It's not a bad system if you get how it works. Like, I knew the SNP were going to take Renfrewshire, so we weren't going to get to top up our regional MSP allocation with even more ScotNats, so I went for who I'd like to see in Holyrood alongside them. The SNP failing to explain this and going "vote us for everything and let us take over the whole country" (which people thought could happen) handed the Tories a lifeline.

The Tories got a decent percentage of the votes across the country (why that happened is a separate issue) and got a fair representation in Holyrood as a result. That's pretty democratic. But if people had used their regional vote to dilute the pool rather than going "SNP good, everyone else bad", then perhaps the Tories wouldn't be the second largest party in Scotland right now.

xpost - I don't think that hope realistically existed - from a brutally pragmatic point of view a lot of the MSPs were dead men walking and setting Scottish Labour to rights is going to be a lot easier without them.

Nothing Corbyn could've done in Scotland.

So in places like Southampton it looks like Corbyn isn't excatly unelectable. If Khan is confirmed as London mayor I expect Corbyn remain leader by 2020 election.

Back to the future. It's taken them a long time but the Scottish Tories seem to have managed to put some distance between themselves and the 'national' party, in a way that Scottish Labour has been unable, and possibly unwilling, to do.

The Tories haven't really moved their Scottish vote an inch: share is at 22%, which is where it has hovered since 1997. It really is a matter of Labour undertaking them, afaict

They have been under-represented in the past and now they seem to be over-represented - a bit like the Doors being overrated in the past and being underrated now... or vice versa.

No idea why I feel like reading this charitably but this gap could be explained (in large part) by UKIP voters tactically voting Goldsmith because they know the UKIPdude has no chance?

Goldsmith and Labour assembly candidate both ahead in my constituency, Camden and Barnet, too.

But this is all first-place votes. May be quite a lot people (like me) who put a small party candidate first for mayor and Khan second. Doubt that happens as much for Goldsmith.

Dunno could be a few UKIP voters doing that?

OK, but I doubt there are many in Camden.

Bastards are everywhere these days

Just going by this, really: https://londonelects.org.uk/im-voter/election-results/live-count-progress-2016?contest=25

Thanks for link. Good to see my previous home borough appears to have voted Labour in massive numbers, Chingford wankers notwithstanding.

The only election I could've voted in yesterday was for a police commissioner and as it was I was out of town for the entire time the voting office was open, so I have to live vicariously through the London elections instead.

Lol at the Evening Standard dedicating their entire front page to Boaty McBoatface rather than acknowledging the whipping their boy is getting.