No, with the party list system, any one party which gets north of something like 60,000 votes gets an MP and the party chooses who gets the seat, so the leader cannot lose their seat. They are immune from becoming unelected, no matter how unpopular.

In our current system, if you can’t find a locality that wants you, you lose. Reform might have got a lot of votes, but its candidates are very unpopular, for good reason, and they don’t win elections much. It’s only because the Conservatives have been a total shit show that they got any MPs at all.

He lost his seat! Let’s hope it’s forever.

That “99% certainty” isn’t aging well.

The far right are part of several coalitions in countries with PR, though. It doesn’t vaccinate your political system against that. The main thing you can do to reduce the march of the far right is to make people feel like their lives are getting better and better.

The party list system would mean that Nigel Farage was never out of parliament in the last ages. He would win every time.

To be fair, the PR result is far, far worse than what we have - only 4 Reform seats. It’s not a great time to be selling PR.

You make very good points.

I think being an independent suits Corbyn. He’s always been more of an independent campaigner than a party MP. All the best to him now he’s free of the whip.

Slime is the word.

Historically, people turn to the far right when things are going terribly wrong. The conservatives ran the country into the ground and legitimised everything the far right stood for, then were upset that people started voting far right. I say it was unsurprising. Why not vote Reform if you’re a rabid racist and your usual party are about the same policywise but have a boring British Asian leader instead of a white laddish thug of a politician?

If things get significantly better for folks, there’s less motivation to vote in desperation.

I think it’s a bad day to be criticising first past the post. Labour stole a bunch of seats from Farage with his kill-the-NHS policies, a turd who oughtn’t to be allowed to attend D-day celebrations, given that he stands against almost everything that we fought the war for. Not sorry one bit for that disproportionality.

Yes, but I think you’re overstating how right wing Labour pitched it. There were no claims to be anti woke. I think it was a pretty firmly centrist pitch. It’s the Conservatives who are going to panic and try to out-nutcase Farage. Labour are going to try and be responsible and fix the broken ship. It’s just whether they can do it fast enough for people to notice a big improvement in the cost of living vs wages problem.

Thank you. But we don’t blame regular Aussies. You’re good with us.

Yeah, the writer of the article seems to think that the Brexiteers were honest politicians trying to achieve what they believed would be good things for Britain. I don’t think that’s a widely held view in Britain.

You can’t out-Farage Farage. The Putin-sponsored shyster has no limits. Elections are won in the middle ground in the UK. The Conservatives could easily win next time. They just need an affable leader, some more centrist policies and some headlines about how they’ve had a change of heart and want to be nice to poor people now and balance the books again. Worked for Cameron. Starmer, meanwhile, had to make a difference in the cost of living crisis so large that people notice they’re getting better off, and restore hope that our children will be better off than us. Tall order.

She is one remarkably stupid, reality-blind narcissist.

The point of Betteridge’s law isn’t really that they’re false, it’s that the editor hasn’t got the evidence that it’s true because if they did it wouldn’t be a question.

In this case it’s a hard no. The main threat to Labour isn’t the greens it’s people thinking it’s a forgone conclusion and not voting, the new constituencies that reduce the number of city seats because poor people register to vote less than others, which reduces the number of Labour MPs, voter disenfranchisement, the Conservative Party election machine which will narrow the polls as we go through the weeks and biased coverage from the print and broadcast media.

Last night a BBC report on the election has several minutes covering Rishi’s “energetic” election campaign with plenty of clips of him claiming to like talking to people, then a single soundbite from each of Labour, Lib Dems, SNP and Reform followed by a still of Keir Starmer with a voice over saying he was campaigning too and then a one minute segment on controversy once Diane Abbot. The message was “Rishi is working hard to meet lots of ordinary people, here’s some quotes for balance, and Labour are divided.” I think the Conservatives are far more divided and that Labour will work far harder for ordinary people, but I’m not a conservative donor who’s been appointed to make editorial decisions about BBC politics, so what would I know?

No.

Wikipedia: Betteridge’s law of headlines

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not. The adage does not apply to questions that are more open-ended than strict yes–no questions.

History
Betteridge’s name became associated with the concept after he discussed it in a February 2009 article, which examined a previous TechCrunch article that carried the headline “Did Last . fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data to the RIAA?” (Schonfeld 2009):

This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no.” The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

A similar observation was made by British newspaper editor Andrew Marr in his 2004 book My Trade, among Marr’s suggestions for how a reader should interpret newspaper articles:

If the headline asks a question, try answering ‘no’. Is This the True Face of Britain’s Young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have We Found the Cure for AIDS? (No; or you wouldn’t have put the question mark in.) Does This Map Provide the Key for Peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means ‘don’t bother reading this bit’.

I hope James Daly loses his seat in Parliament. Permanently.

I know three.

In fact, come to think of it, I only know two trans women, so I know more trans men than trans women.