Seizing back control: The ILX lol brexit is how we're all gonna die thread.

*Greens

is he liked or disliked locally? Thats a lot of signatures!

It is a lot of signatures but it’s also 2k fewer than the number of people who voted Lib Dem last time. idk.

I don't know how the recall process works but the words "MP" and "expenses" elicit a kneejerk in lots of people who mightn't read into the specifics or indeed give it a second's thought beyond clicking the "bun dem" option

3 years today since Brexit result.

any MP pushed to the petty crime of minor expense fiddling these days is obv not playing the game right, it could could be a sign they just aren't corrupt enough and need to read the Barry Sheerman guide to professional lobbyism.

Apologies for the never-ending naïveté but I still don't get why 160,000 Tories get to elect the next PM, especially in light of the current climate. Wouldn't a proper GE make more sense?

Canada is also subject to the Westminster system and we've had plenty of snap elections over far less.

johnson telegraph column today is strong stuff. no idea how he’s going to get us out on 31/10 short of going for no deal

: |

Fixed Term Parliament Act *hollow laugh*

a proper GE makes 100% sense

just look at the press’ supine head nodding when the tory front runners argue that they don’t want a GE because they’d lose. blatantly know they can’t carry the country and yet they’re never confronted with how arrogant and undemocratic this is

a key difference between UK and canada is the fixed-term parliament act of 2011, which creates obstacles for calling or forcing snap elections -- before 2011 each of may's large losses on the WA wd have led to an election, but since 2011 a VONC was also needed and that never happened

(canada i think has a fixed-term election structure but snaps are still relatively easy to call?)

(canada i think has a fixed-term election structure but snaps are still relatively easy to call?)

It varies from province to province but at the federal level, the PM is indeed more or less free to request a GE at their leisure.

Denmark changes prime ministers without elections every now and then as well. Though I'm not sure it has ever happened that the party in charge needed to have a leadership election partway through, mostly it's just like the Blair->Brown handover. There was a fun one in 93, though, where the Conservative government got caught up in a major scandal, and just handed over power to the Social Democrats with no election or anything. The joy of a multi party system. Actually, that might be the key difference, in a multi party system mostly governed by minority governments, it's much more likely that a smaller party would take down the new prime minister.

In Holland you can't change PM's without an election. If the PM goes it's the end of the government and new elections are held. The situation in England has bemused me as well - you've a failing/leaving PM, and just the members of PM's party get to pick another one? Sad! - but it's not without precedent. A year ago Spain got a new PM (Sanchez), after his initiated VONC on Rajoy won a majority. So Spain got a new PM from an opposing party, without elections. Imagine Corbz launcing a VONC on May, winning it, and by proxy becoming PM himself.

In a sane country the media would be demanding one and attacking Johnson or whoever the way they did Brown, but this stopped being a sane country a while ago.

For people outside UK: Geoffrey Boycott is a former cricketer with a conviction for beating up his girlfriend, not an expert in trade agreements or N. Ireland. Good Morning Britain is broadcast nationally and my home country is officially off its tits. https://t.co/BCHIzgc3eT

— Graham Fallowes (@Bloodyromcom) June 24, 2019

Jingoism is a helluva drug.

Went to see David Olusoga at the Southbank yesterday, premiering a doc he did on the unofficial history of the Hostile Environment pre-May: Attlee trying to bring Windrush immigrants to peanut picking jobs in Africa instead, Churchill's proposal to fight an election on a promise to "keep Britain white", a tory commission asking civil servants to keep a secret tally of how many ppl claiming benefits were black. It sadly jumps straight from the early 70's to the Windrush scandal with only some short footage of Thatcher, Blair, Cameron engaging in xenophobic rhetoric, presumably because this is the story of a particular generation of immigrants. Gentleman was there, as were a lot of witnesses from that generation, including ppl who had gotten orders to leave during the Windrush scandal. It's on tonight on BBC2.

Do these fuckers realise we only finished paying for world war 2 just over ten years ago?

xp: sounds good (its the continuity I was talking about from Enoch Powell to Ed M a few weeks ago).

The Brexit party is to launch a formal legal challenge against the result of this month’s Peterborough byelection, where it was narrowly beaten by Labour, alleging that allegations of corruption connected to postal votes need to be investigated.

Nigel Farage, the party leader, insisted the challenge was about more than the loss to Labour by 683 votes, saying the wider use of postal votes was open to abuse and needed to be investigated.

lol butthurt

more like Nigel Erdofarage

He's gone postal.

Nigel Erdofarage

Nigel Bolsofarage

It’s a depressing step in the road to voter suppression.

I think we all know which community it's aimed at.

The milkshake-hurling brotherhood, surely.

he needs to start funneling some of that dark money into building a proper party with activists/campaigners on the ground, rather than having a tantrum.

does he tho

they can't really exist as anything more than a one-issue pressure group imo

labour held it by campaigning on local issues.

Labour held it because of the first past the post system.

this shafted UKIP in the past also, in non-EU elections = no ground game or young eager foot-soldiers

(also CHUKTIG on 27% or whatever in a poll then having no actual membership or anyone at all voting for them lol)

Fwiw in Australia our PMs are regularly defenestrated and there's similarly no requirement to go to an election. Like the UK, we theoretically elect our local MP and it's up to them to choose a PM. People tend to think of it being presidential, voting for a leader, but its not how it actually works.

(also CHUKTIG on 27% or whatever in a poll then having no actual membership or anyone at all voting for them lol)

still funny, never not gonna be funny

also feels like it happened about four years ago

sadiq khan destroyed, now almost certain to resign in shame

Liam Gallagher has criticised London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, over rising knife crime in the capital and expressed his fears for the safety of his children.

The former Oasis singer, 46, said: “Every time you wake up in the morning, there’s some 16-year-old kid been knifed to death. I’ve got kids that age, out and about and that, doing their thing, living, being young. That freaks me right out – it does worry me. I’ve got teenagers.”

Gallagher, who lives in north London, has four children, including his sons Gene, 17, and Lennon, 19. He also has two daughters – Molly, 22, and six-year-old Gemma.

He singled out Khan for apparent inaction in the knife-crime crisis on BBC Breakfast on Monday.

He said: “I’d have a word with that mayor – he seems to not be doing a good job, all them kids getting knifed and all that. The only thing that ever comes out of his mouth is, ‘London is open.’ What, open for knife crime and dying and stuff?”

let's ask a mindless cretin all the big questions!

i believe in a unique mixed FPTP/PR system where you swap it around after the results are in to primarily best serve a marxist Corbyn govt and secondly to fuck over Farage and tory libdems the hardest.

I mean i almost kind of understand why the BBC might want to interview Liam Gallagher on an oldies light entertainment programme in 2019 but i'm fucking mystified how anything he has to say ends up on the news

his daughters really got off lightly when liam picked names huh

i'm fucking mystified how anything he has to say ends up on the news

Clickbait.

I regret that BBC radio's news service feels it needs to offer clickbait

Doubt LG votes or pays his full share of tax so can STFU

former ilx poster localgarda destroyed, now almost certain to resign in shame

Like his kids don’t have Uber accounts to go everywhere.

Initially parsed it as 'lawful good' and was suitably confused.

lol bg

LG going full-on 'For Britain' between now and five years seems eerily inevitable.

sounds good (its the continuity I was talking about from Enoch Powell to Ed M a few weeks ago).

Yeah, it did bring that discussion to mind - a continuity of structural racism propped up by both parties that May (and now Johnson) is the only the latest iteration of, if you're black in Britain.

To push back against that tho, one thing Olusoga said has changed is that when he was growing up in the 80's and faced racist abuse people's reactions were "well that's just the way it is", open racism was a socially acceptable position. It no longer is, and Olusoga is worried that this might change back - which is I think akin to what people fear from a Boris govt. Of course the structural stuff happens regardless, but open bigotry being acceptable or not does have a real impact on people's lives.

many xps but UK democracy problems are a lot bigger than just parliamentary system + FTPA + FPTP. The fact that a minority PM under this system still can use things like royal ascent and statutory measures is truly insane. Unfortunately failure of PR referendum and taste for "strong leadership" means this will not change. Or I dunno maybe we don't really want democracy as a country, except in one very specific case a few years back.