And you should get on Mastodon again!

*Orrrrr* we get Matt to do another few thousand hours of unpaid labour and update Beehive to work with ActivityPub.

From other thread:
> ... wondering whether, in the upcoming election, I'm going to not bother voting or cast a pointless vote for the Greens.

I'll probably vote for the Greens, because even though it wont change the result, it might at least help them over the 5% threshold for retaining their deposit... :/

Late 1984 the Tory government started to talk about the numbers of "minor" candidates standing at general elections. It was (they said) a significant problem that so many frivolous and joke candidates were standing. To be fair, it was more of a thing in the 80s and it was common to see as many as a dozen or more candidates in addition to the (then) big three. On the other hand, there didn't appear to be any evidence that it actually was a particularly difficult task to run an election with that number of candidates. You might spot the coincidence that electoral law has recently been tampered with to fix an alleged problem of which there was no evidence at all, and draw your own conclusions.

In 1985 they decided to fix this supposed problem and a number of proposals were made. Two ideas emerged as front-runners. First was a simple increase in the deposit required to stand as an MP. Second was that a candidate would require the support of at least a number of local signatories (I forget the actual number, but it would be down to the candidate or local party to provide the required proof that each signature was genuine and belonged to a valid voter within the constituency). This second proposal, that you need the support of, say, a hundred local voters in order to stand, seems complicated, but in fact it was all down to the candidate to do the work. Get valid signatures or no standing as an MP. It seemed to many people that this was an ideal solution, demonstrating the candidate's earnest intent, and that there was at least some local support.

Naturally enough, the deposit was raised to £500 from the existing £150. This means that a prospective national party would need to raise £325,000 just for deposits. This was a massive disincentive to any group with aspirations to national significance, other than the wealthy. For the Tory party, £325K is the kind of cash thrown at a party drinks get-together, or dinner for a few MPs. Nothing at all. Neither was it an issue for forces like the BNP with their backing from wealthy right-wingers and foreign agencies. Nor, ironically, was it a disincentive for many of the genuinely frivolous candidates who only intended to contest a single seat anyway.

It still is a huge problem for perfectly serious national parties such as the Greens. If you need convincing that using money as a way to regulate political participation is practically and morally wrong, this is a clear illustration.

Most modern democracies swiftly evolve to a form of minority rule. Many start out that way.

At the previous UK general election, the limit that could be spent per party, providing that every seat was contested, was just under £19 million. That covers advertising, expenses, the lot. The government has just increased the amount to about £34 million. The money spent on a particular seat may not exceed 1/650 of the total. Nationwide advertising is permitted and is not set against any particular seat, but the total must not be exceeded.

Similar rules were applied during the EU referendum but appear to have been massively breached by the leave campaign using techniques such as setting up bogus campaign groups with there own entitlement to account for spending by the main group, and simple under-reporting of expenditure. Two prosecutions took place for spending infringements of comparatively minor amounts (2 x £20,000) one of which succeeded and one which was set aside on appeal. 

 

Worth noting though that (based on reporting) the Remain campaign spent (significantly) more than the Leave campaign overall.

Cos it's easy to give the impression that Remain played fair and Leave bought their victory, which isn't really true.

Leave made spurious claims and ran a more manipulative campaign for sure. But it also addressed (and fanned) peoples' actual concerns (whether legitimate or not), which Remain failed to do.

(I say this as someone who's EU-ambivalent)

Yeah, on reported figures, Remain spent about half as much again. Remain about £19.3m and Leave about £13.3m. Set aside arguments about whether those are honest figures, the interesting points are about the natures of the campaigns.

Actually, that's not true. I don't really care about that. It's been said over and over and it isn't going to make one iota of difference.

What really bothers me are the actual arguments for and against, which we heard precious little of at the time. We heard a lot of vague bollocks about "stronger together" just like the devolution arguments. We heard a lot of scare stories which were a piece of piss to describe as scare stories. (several if not most turned out to be true but wtf). On the leave side we had a load of stuff about how our borders were being overrun with Turks and refugees, but very little about why we might legitimately fear the EU: the consolidation of political and economic power into every smaller and more anonymous power groups. The distancing of policy decisions from people actually affected. And so on.

Of course, the reasons are obvious - or rather, some of them are. The leaders of Leave and Remain had huge amounts in common. They both saw the anti-woke culture war as a positive force. They both wanted the forces that allow accumulation of personal wealth to remain intact. Neither side wanted to describe racial and cultural mixing as a positive. The truly incredible benefit of the EU, that it is almost impossible to have a fighting war when you share a trading union, have free movement, and elect people (including shits like Farage) to a shared parliament, was never even considered. Yeah, there was some comment about a war-free Europe, but it was pretty low key stuff. Even the old cunt Churchill knew it was a good idea. In the end, the remain side simply wanted to share the values of the leave side too much to give the arguments a decent airing. I blame Corbyn as much as anybody for this. He was horribly stuck in the anti-corporate distrust that he shared with Tony Benn. Benn always identified the loss of sovereignty as his big objection, but I don't believe this.

That's all really well put and I agree entirely.

The Turks are at the fucking gates.

Not sure how much I'd blame Corbyn, since he was really born (as a public figure) into the aftermath, but if you're saying he failed to put forward the *actual* pros and cons then, yeah. Though strategically I do think it was better to just say as little as possible about brexit at that point.

 

Finally went and resigned from the Labour party yesterday. There's so much cruelty, wickedness, and duplicity amongst the leadership and it's been apparent for so long. But recently, slashing the foreign aid budget, attacks on the civil service, but most of all the intent to cut Personal Independence Payments, have done it for me. I read Starmer's "justification" and basically it was that "these cripples should stand on their own two feet" wrapped up up in nauseating doublespeak about helping them. Nauseating is appropriate because I was very close to vomiting. What an inept and hateful little man he has become. So like an older, less competent George Osborne, pretending to be some kind of liberal. Not just him though. The whole leadership and party machinery is now almost totally proto-tory and will be for the forseeable future and I can't go on associating with it. I feel a bit sad and depressed, but I don't imagine anybody will notice.

I had a PIP "reassessment" after labour got in and my PIP has been cut in half. Which also means my council tax goes up because, insanely, that's how it works.

I could barely make ends meet as it was, and I live very frugally.

I put in an appeal but I'm not holding out much hope.

I don't think the Tories would dare do this, their vote share goes down as household income goes up, and vice versa for labour.

I honestly think I'd be better off under the Tories right now.

I just posted this sentiment on fedi - I don't get what their plan is electorally.

The latest YouGov voting intention poll puts them at 24%, down from 33.7% at the election. With the points they've lost mostly going to Reform.

They're sticking to Tory economic policy so there's not going to be any economic recovery. They're doubling down on US foreign policy (Ukraine aside) and genocide. And they're shitting on the working poor (proportionally most benefits go to people with jobs). Who do they think is going to vote for them?

They're going to be, as the Dems are becoming, a very well-funded party that no one has any reason to vote for.

I knew this Labour government would lean right, that was clear. But I was expecting Blairism. I'd fucking love some Blairism right now.

(I realise, of course, you can't do Blairism twice. But y'know what I mean)

So yeah, I feel for you. It's clear how important this party's been for you. It's depressing to me what they've become, it must be heartbreaking for you.

Sorry to go on but what's fucking maddening is that there's clearly a need *and* a public appetite for some social democracy. It polls well and it'd fix things. Why is the party that's supposed to be that so against it? I genuinely don't get it.

Sorry you're in the ever-growing group of people being made to suffer by this government, Drew. It's horrendous that Labour are behaving this way.
I left shortly after Starmer got in, I'd joined to try and throw some weight behind what Corbyn was doing and initially kept it just in case the warnings about Starmer turned out to be wrong but it was clear very quickly that they weren't... and now if anything it feels like they were understated. The party seems to have been thoroughly bought out by corporate interests while retaining lots of bad authoritarian instincts.

I don't know how we get something better up and running, I was hoping that Corbyn's Peace & Justice thing might become that but I haven't seen anything much come of it beyond some protest meetings, and the guy's too old to be spearheading this much anyway. We need an actual political party, and with the media thoroughly against any such thing it'd be a massively uphill struggle even though, as you say, when the public are asked properly they are overwhelmingly in favour of fairer policies.

Meanwhile, like with the Democrats in the US, vast quantities of money and energy are sucked away from genuine left-leaning work into this colossal counter-productive void. You could make a conspiracy theory of it all but there's not even any need, it's comfortable middle management classes wanting to have just enough virtue to talk about so long as they don't have to actually do anything. And I suppose I'm guilty enough of that myself since I don't do much about it nowadays beyond trying to help a few local causes.

My wife and I were talking about it this morning -- not the Labour gov or UK gummint woes -- but the global spectre of billionaire/authoritarian takeover, to extinguish undesirable things like taxes and too much democracy or anything that might slow down the wealth transfer from everybody else into their bloated bank accounts.

Yeah I had a similar path with Labour membership and Corbyn. We're clearly in the bad timeline. Honestly the timeline where Gore won (well, he did, but y'know, actually became president) looks pretty great from here.

And we shouldn't beat ourselves up. We've not been more disempowered for a long time. We need a mass, class-centered movement and there isn't one.

 

Consultant Psychiatrist, Health Professional, fully-qualified doctor, Wes Streeting (actually has a BA in history) says he believes: This "opinion" has nothing to do with his worry that proposed cuts to Personal Independence Payments might be opposed by the few remaining Labour MPs with a conscience. I love the use of "too many people being written off". It's a real piece of new Labour doublespeak, suggesting that some unwilling people go to their doctors for help and that somehow prevents them from being employed. I see all these doctors with their "thou shalt not work" rubber stamps being the guilty parties. I expect they're all woke.

I actually find it sickening that Streeting is trying to swing the narrative that these ill people aren't really ill. Presumably he's consulted widely and done a vast amount of research to form this view. Couldn't just be some crap from a labour/tory spin doctor?

Yeah the "too many people being written off" line is kinda fucking genius honestly. Sound compassionate while slashing benefits.

Unnecessary cleverness, maybe, in this era where the winning strategy seems to be to tell lies so fast that no one can catch up and hold you to account.

It really just feels like Labour's goal is to just tee Reform up for the next election.

Is Reform losing any ground because Trump scaring the bejesus out of just about everybody?

I don't think the kind of people likely to vote Reform would make a connection between them and Trump. And Trump's been quite insulting to Farage which reinforces a separation there.

I forgot about that last part. You'd think they have quite a lot in common, but maybe that's a problem.