Actor Steve Coogan and presenter Carol Vorderman have backed Liberal Democrat pledges to reform how the UK’s general elections are run.
Labour are the ones to convince. LD doesn’t have the power to bring it to fruition.
Didn’t they play this game when Nick Clegg ran the party? After which they gave up on it as soon as they entered into a coalition with the Tories?
LD have been asking for PR voting at least since the 70’s. They have never took it away from their manifesto AFAIK.
They could not get Cameron to accept it. There is a huge difference between negotiation and removal.@theinspectorst@feddit.uk answered this properly https://feddit.uk/comment/2961968Labour and Conservative are happy with FPTP because it is easy to bribe the small amount of people in the swing vote areas. The rest of the country gets ignored. Smaller parties cannot compete in the funds to do this.
Got a source for that? Here’s one that contradicts you: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/sep/24/keir-starmer-defies-call-for-changes-to-first-past-the-post-voting-system
Sorry everything I have heard is the to contrary of that. Do you have any source to indicate that?
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You must be young.
The tactics that were played out with Brexit, all the false adverts and claims were first played out with the Voting Reform.
There were things like
This child needs a ventilator, not a different form of voting
And
This soldier needs a bullet proof vest, not a different form of voting
They were literally claiming that if you voted for AV, then you are killing babies and our military.
I’m not, but I don’t live in the UK.
Then it seems odd that you would make those claims. We had a referendum, and the No2AV group did some awful billboards. It’s no surprise that the group went on to repeat the same crap about the EU.
Here is a link to complaints at the time about the distasteful adverts.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/feb/25/no-to-alternative-vote-baby-ad
They held the balance of power and could’ve made it the core demand of entering the coalition. I do take the point that there was a referendum about it, I forgot that happened.
@jonne
They were very much the Junior partner & wholly nonsensical & unrealistic expectations never help. They did a terrific job of holding back the worst excesses of the Tories for 5 years. We saw what happened when their restraining hand was no longer on the tiller. They were entitled to expect some respect & understanding & support from the electorate, but the electorate were too stupid and/or uninformed to realise what was actually happening & had actually happened in that 5 years.
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I didn’t think I’d love long enough to see the UK leave the EU but it happened… I’ll be long dead before the king maker here (Labour) supports PR. They’re the issue here, Tories were never going to agree Labour might have had a chance to push it through with support from Greens and LD but they choose to support the Tory policy instead. 🥹
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Actor Steve Coogan and presenter Carol Vorderman have backed Liberal Democrat pledges to reform how the UK’s general elections are run.
The Lib Dems have long called for first past the post (FPTP) to be replaced with proportional representation (PR).
By contrast, PR is the idea that parties’ seats in parliament should be allocated so that they are in proportion to the number of votes cast.
Versions of proportional representation are already used to elect representatives in the regional legislatures of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Coogan, who in the past has supported Labour and appeared in the party’s election material, said he plans to vote for Lib Dem candidate in Lewes, James MacCleary in a bid to oust Conservative MP Maria Caulfield.
And when they finally decide to call time on so many years of shambles and sleaze, the Liberal Democrats will be ready," he said.
The original article contains 403 words, the summary contains 147 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I don’t think there’s many millennials that would vote LD now
I would. I live in the south west, where the Lib Dems have traditionally been strong and Labour typically won’t even acknowledge that we exist. There’s a perception here that Labour only care about the cities and the Red Wall. The Lib Dems, for all their faults, have an active presence and a much deeper awareness of the issues that affect the south west, and are therefore a much more viable option to vote for if we want to oust a Tory.
Same here, although I grew up in Cheshire & now live in London… Even within the cities, Labours local policies seem very copy paste when what people want in (eg.) Westminster is going to be different to what they want in Hounslow, which will be different to what people want in Dagenham.
Lib Dems seem to have a far better understanding of their constituencies/local areas than either of the major two parties (there are some good Labour MPs and slightly fewer good Tory MPs, but as a percentage they’re way lower), eg what Tim Farron is up to now in parliament, every speech is standing up for his constituency rather than hiding away in a large party letting the frontbenchers do the talking.
I think this is why the Lib Dems do so well in by-elections but struggle at general elections. When they’re only fighting one election, they can put all that local knowledge to good use and make a really tailored campaign that resonates with the electorate in that constituency. But in a general election, it’s much harder to put across a broad, national-level campaign, but that’s what general election campaigning has to be, because you have to speak to the whole country not just a small subset of it.
It’s a shame, because I actually think they’re a very under-appreciated option. They’ve struggled with their branding after the coalition, and I think to an extent it was unfair given that they were very much the junior partner in the coalition and didn’t have as much power as people think they did.
Why not? Labour are the party that introduced tuition fees in the first place.
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