Sooo... GOOD thing. Right?
I am deliberately ignorant, because I know if I learn all the details about BJ, they will enrage me, but there's nothing I can do about them. Though, I suppose, it doesn't matter now. So, educate me.

He isn't retiring - he has resigned as Leader of the Conservative Party.

Unfortunately he hasn't seen fit to resign as Prime Minister (which is usually the position held by the leader of the political party with the most votes in parliament).

He wishes to continue as Prime Minister (so continue in power on a technicality).

He appears to cling on better than a limpet in a glue factory!

Even when he is eventually removed from office, he will probably go on to earn millions on the circuit as an 'after dinner speaker' or such like, maybe on the boards of a few companies, or even go back to journalism where he came from.

He is a serial liar.
His latest crisis came about because he appointed a serial sex abuser to a position of power in his Government.
When the facts came out, he denied any knowledge.
Then a retired senior Civil Servant went public and revealed that BJ had received a 1-1 briefing about this person.
Get rid of bad, lying, rubbish.
He will be followed by another member of the rich club.
God Help Us.
Peter

Oh god FUCK it....I knew he'd pull shit like that.
And FUCK the news media outlets who WRONGLY report him resigning as PM.

UK has a Green Party, right? Nothing stopping anybody from voting Green Party, right?

We do and they're well fine. I don't think they go far enough and they have some internal issues that stunts true liberation. That's less of a problem though compared to our electoral system itself here. First pass the post usually necessitates to a limited party system since you have to localise a vote, compared to a proportional system. It's why the SNP does well in spite of a general lack of overall votes (obviously they don't run in England). So the Tories can essentially rule forever if the right amount of gerrymandering occurs (they're trying this at the minute by limiting the number of parliamentary seats available obviously they're not cutting the areas they do well in)

Anyhow parliament in my opinion doesn't provide an adequate path to an overturn of the system. That would come from a militant street worker movement since this is how pretty much all vast changes occur. Such a movement would have to be built up in Britain (thatcher fucked us a while back so this has taken some time) so until then, stuck with the fuckin pantomime. Johnson will be replaced with someone just as crooked, rich and fucked. Just this time less scandal prone and sleazy.

"Johnson will be replaced with someone just as crooked, rich and fucked. Just this time less scandal prone and sleazy."

Truer words have never been spoken.

BJ is often referred to as the UK Donald Trump. I got a kick out of that. UK wanted to be just like USA and elected an idiot. Then when (barely) enough people had enough of him, they can get rid of them - barely.

Europeans put clowns like Macron, BJ in office then pretend America is so much worse, comical.

At least they got an official "I'm leaving" speech out of Boris. It might not be much of one, but here in America, we are still waiting.

Nessie

Yes, the electoral system. Unlike most of Europe, the UK still uses "First Past The Post". The country is divided into "constitiencies" (about 600 of them), and there's an independent commission that moves their boundaries every few years to make sure they all have roughly the same number of voters in each one at each election - in England it's about 30,000 voters per constituency I think.

At a general election, all the voters in each constituency vote for who they want to represent them in Parliament. There are usually loads of candidates because as well as the three main parties (four in Scotland) there will be minor parties, independents, assorted single-issue local loons, and the odd joke canditate like Lord Buckethead or someone from the Official Monster Raving Loony party.

Only the candidates from the main parties, which in England are Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Conservative, have any real chance of getting elected.

If a Green candidate stands, what's most likely to happen is they'll get some votes that would otherwise have gone to Labour or the LibDems, and as a result the Conservative gets in.

UK politics is very much a game of tactical voting to keep the worst option out, rather then voting for the candidate you actually want to win.

The Greens do have one MP, Caroline Lucas in Brighton. Brighton is the UK's San Francisco, the de-facto gay capital and before that a hippy stronghold. So there's enough critical mass of environnmentally swiched-on voters there that Green is actually the main party and it's people voting Labour or LibDem who are the biggest risk of letting the Conservatives take it back. But that's a unique situation.

What desperately needs to happen is for Labour and the LibDems to form a pact and field just one anti-Tory candidate ion each constituency. That might just get enough votes to oust the Conservatives. But with the way the electorate is moving to the Right here, I suspect time is running out for that.

I'm fully expecting the Conservatives to win the next election regardless of the Boris debacle.

My own-politics are centre-left, I believe in reasonably free markets and well-regulated capitalism, but want progressive social policies, LGBT rights, sex-worker rights, and a strong social security safety net for those who aren't able to work or run a business. That used to be the standard UK position but the mainstream is moving to the right.

I think the biggest problem we have is that most people don't understand how it works, so a lot of people vote for who their parents voted for - the " I have always voted XXXX " types.

Then you have those who deliberately 'spoil' their voting slip (by not filling it in correctly or writing a protest) because they do not like any of the choices listed for them. There is no option of 'I wanted to vote, but I dont like any of the options listed'.

Or you also have people who are so disengaged with the whole thing that they just don't bother to vote at all - again possibly in protest.

All this does is give advantage to the 'ruling party' so therefore make it difficult for them to be removed, which - obviously - is their intention...

I no longer vote, I think they're all shit. My politics are a sort of combination of left and right. Economically I am left wing, I favour public ownership and trade union/workers rights, I was opposed to Brexit, and I don't like flag waving nationalism.

Socially, though, I am quite conservative, I can't be doing with a lot of this woke agenda which the left have latched onto as they seemed to give up on the economy

Not original with me:


The sinking ship is leaving the rat.

I agree with you totally. Labour, the Lib Dems, Greens, and even the Nationalists share much policy with each other. But Sir Keir Starmer has ruled out any sort of electoral pact with anyone.

It is all of 25 years since Labour last entered government. They had a massive majority then, and there was talk of Tony Blair inviting Lib Dems and others into his government, to form a broad coalition around shared centre-left values. If this had been combined with electoral reform, we might have enjoyed an era of consensus politics rather than leaving the way open to the ever more right-wing Conservatives to govern alone. But this opportunity was lost.

The average constituency size in the UK is about 73,000, although sizes vary as do the numbers in each constituency who actually vote.

It is worth remembering that since 1945 no winning party in the UK has ever received more than 50% of the total popular vote, and majority governments have been formed with the winning party receiving as little as 36% of the total votes cast.

We're irrelevant, the Tories sold the country's arse off, on the cheap, to foreign corporations, while wrapping themselves in the flag.

If we were an American state, we'd be somewhere like Alabama.

Stop pretending or acting as though ANYBODY is responsible for this OTHER than Tory voters.

Then take every opportunity to cheer and celebrate the deaths of Tory voters
any chance you get, since you just said they force unfair unjust gerrymandering
voting laws, which is just another word for weighting votes differently.
No different than if I pushed through a law giving animal rights vegans ten times the votes
meat-eaters get.
Bottom line: those who don't get to vote (prisoners, the young) have no obligation
to obey laws they did not get a chance to vote on.

I can legally advocate war against the UK, since I'm an American, not a Brit.
Especially to free Julian Assange. Though, I don't understand him. He's an idiot
for going to the UK in the first place, if his entire fear was "being extradited to the USA",
because he could be extradited to the USA from UK even more easily, probably,
than from Sweden or in whatever Scandinavian country he was charged with a sex crime.
First JA has never broken any USA laws,
especially since he's never been to the USA,
no matter what any USA politician says.
So, JA should not have been antagonizing the USA by endlessly repeating the myth
that he and the USA were at odds. He should have just been drumming over and over
that the USA was on HIS side, over and over - even if it were not true.
Remember: politics/law is DUMB.

Secondly, he SHOULD have been emphasizing that there is nothing special about the USA:
Assange spoke the truth about a LOT of countries, as was his job as a journalist.

Feel free to advocate war against the USA. Unlike many here, I am for freedom of speech.
All nationalism is hypocritical bullshit.

I don't tolerate anyone saying anyone's actions, choices, decisions, votes
(anyone includes lawyers, judges, magistrates etc) blaming or laying it on bullshit like "culture" or "tradition" or "society", UNLESS you openly lay the blame for poor people stealing and having to kill to do it on society. EVERYBODY gets to use that excuse/reason or NOBODY gets to.

I suspect you underestimate the tory party

Oh, who is the Telegraph promoting today?

I'm well aware tory voters enforced this on the rest of us, it just aligns with their class goals simple as that. If they want to be in some death cult to secure their wealth for at most 50 years before inevitable collapse then that's on them. It's my problem to stop them from encroaching on my class and shit them up harder than they're trying to do to us. Class war is the modus of history and we're still in it so that's all there is to it for me. Votings just a fuckin pantomime in the meantime.

And aye the abolition of the US and the UK are fairly obvious goals. I'd just see it as a result of civil war then any glorious intervention. There's a common joke that some of us are waiting on Maduro or Xi or Assad to save us American bullshit intervention style lol. Would take a lot of hassle out but nah we'd overrun them like Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh ect.

The problem with the unrestricted free market capitalist economic model is 1, it's American shit which Thatcher imposed upon us and 2, it will destroy itself, it just eats up everything in its path like a pirahnaconda(shit monster film) then when there's nothing left, it eats itself.

It's short termist and unsustainable, and doesn't stand up to any analysis. Housing, for example. Totally unaffordable for most people, how can you get a mortgage when you're on some shitty zero hours contract?

One of Boris Johnson's potential replacements in the Tory leadership contest is Penny Mordaunt, who is, IMO, sploshable

Still don't like any of them mind

So, once again, if every single person who voted Labour or Tory voted for Green Party instead,
tell me again how, even in a fucked-up anti-democratic vote-weighting (weighting certain voters' votes more than others) -- just like the USA unfortunately has -
tell me how that would stop Greens getting elected.

That's a fantasy scenario that is never going to happen. Huge numbers of people just vote for whatever party their parents did. Others change on a whim but to one of the other major parties. Others vote tactically to keep the least-worst option in place. And some genuinely vote Tory because they hate immigrants, the EU, and anything that sounds progressive.

But much as how the US remains in the grip of the Republican / Democrat split, the UK will continue to mainly vote Tory/Labour/LibDem (and SNP in Scotland) for the forseable future. This is political reality and anyone who doesn't recognise it is doomed to failure.

That is the line you need to tell Felon Musk cultists whenever he brings up going to Mars.
That is the line you need to tell everyone who falls for cryptocurrency scams.
That is the line you need to tell every politician and their supporters who think
everything will be fine and economies will continue on fine without taking massive
collective action against Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)

"Those who says something is impossible are annoying those of us who are getting things done." is the line I tell people like you about elections.

How many countless times people's predictions about who "will win an election" or
"is unelectable" have been proved wrong.

The nerve of anyone (don't worry: YOU didn't) calling academics, PhD, medical doctors,
researchers of all kinds in STEM fields "arrogant" when they assert the absolute reality of something they have worked long and hard proving.


Then show some courage and address or attack them. Don't address or try to change the minds of those of us who disagree with your belief

Love it! Well said! As I've said many times, sometimes the Americans are right to invade and free some people from some dictator and sometimes that other country would be right to invade the USA. And, generalizing further, not just Americans invading, but ANY country invading any other country for justified reasons to help some oppressed people (and animals). Or a civil war. The existence of nations is not some "absolute" that just "has to be". They can be dissolved, changed, and have been: for good reasons and bad. So, I will fight for good reasons. As long as people are born without their consent, there is nothing sacred about the status quo.

That is DANGEROUS bullshit. So these morons and shitheads vote for whom their breeders did, but NEVER address WHAT POLICIES the candidate they vote for.

I seem to recall some mental inferior hypocrite spouting some BULLSHIT in some other thread that somehow I or others in minority are "responsible" for what moderates think or do.

Well, too fucking bad for YOU or anybody else who thinks some other political party's or activist groups are "extremist". That is YOUR problem. NOT theirs. NOT their responsibility.

If you don't address WHAT they are fighting for or against and whether what they propose is fair or not, if you don't address their REASONS, then by definition you are being unreasonable.

There is the class based, party identification, voting model, which tends to people voting along perceived class lines, and the issue based voting model where people make some attempt to analyse a party's stance on issues which affect them.

There is also a third voting model, the consumption/production model, which is based on how much use a person makes of either the public and private sectors.

I don't vote any more, I think they're all a waste of time. I'm left ish on some issues, like the economy, but right ish on others

I know what you mean.

Years ago, I cast my vote for a candidate (who will remain not-named as he was location-specific) who I thought would look hotter than hot if he was thrown into a mudpit.

Hint: It didn't work out very well.

Nessie

I came up with this analogy today:

Conservative Party leadership: The veritable kebab skewer of Tory politicians!