Posted on 04/18/2017 3:15:08 AM PDT by naturalman1975
UK PM Theresa May announces plan to call snap general election on 8 June.
She said Britain needed certainty, stability and strong leadership following the EU referendum.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Sorry, but you’re out of date on this. The Boundary Commission (whose job this is) is required to review the boundaries of Parliamentary constituencies every five years. Its latest recommendations, due for ratification in 2018, are radical, including the reduction in the total number of seats from 650 to 600. In England, all but 68 of the 533 constituencies will have some changes to their boundaries.
Why?
The reasons May is doing this are numerous - but when it comes to Brexit, this election really can only strengthen her hand, by given her a clear mandate as Prime Minister. That puts her in a stronger negotiating position for the UK. It also means that she won't be fighting an election campaign in 2019 as Britain exits, so any short term turmoil that Brexit creates won't be as likely to negatively impact her campaign then and that will be a positive as far as she is concerned.
Appreciate the update. I obviously had some bad information.
So, she’s taking my advice after all. Hard to pass up a 20 point lead, it’s not gonna get any better than that. In fact if I’m Corbyn or Sturgeon (or Trout or whatever fish she is) I’d have voted against an election. Corbyn is looking at losing his job after the drubbing and Sturgeon already has almost every seat in Scotland, no where to go but down.
UKIP seems to be down and out, their only MP quit the party and wants to rejoin the tories if they will nominate him. I’d expect them to relish a chance to move up from zero but they are criticizing the election call. They are looking at zero seats, 4th place in the popular vote, and possibly no future. Achieving their goal and losing their big personality leader seems to have taken it’s toll.
I only wish she’d call for the House of Lords to be scrapped, that’s something that would be in the election manifesto, it’s the right thing to do and would win votes so it’s a no brainier.
I don’t agree with abolishing the House of Lords. In fact, I think the ‘reforms’ of the late 1990s were a terrible mistake.
The House of Lords, when it still contained a significant number of hereditary peers meant there were people making decisions on laws whose families had been intimately involved with Britain for centuries, and who expected their families to be intimately involved with Britain for centuries to come. It meant that any legislation was considered in terms of its long term consequences, not just the consequences for the next election.
Like the Monarchy itself, it’s not a system that I think any sensible person would today design from scratch. But it evolved over time into something that really worked well in my view.
I get you, I don’t so much mind what it was, I wouldn’t mind at all if I were an Earl or something myself ;d, you make some good points, but there is gonna be no going back to that, I can’t see it happening in a million years.
What it is now is a bunch of Labour (and Lib Dem lol they have more than 10 times as many members in the Lords now despite never having had a Prime Minister) *ucknut life peers appointed by Blair and Brown with the power to delay and make a stink and nothing else. Uncool.
So what could be done with it, May appoints several hundred decent people so they outnumber the scum and suddenly it has 2000 members? That doesn’t sound good. Blair should have had the balls to just abolish it rather than turn it into a farce.
I don’t see a point to continuing to have an upper house in the UK or Canada, where their Senate is almost as bad, unless they are elected. And your Senate in Australia makes me question whether an elected upper house is a decent feature of a Westminster democracy at all, though that may be in large part be due to the weird election system that empowers tiny niche parties aka the egomaniacs who found tiny niche parties.
Forget statesmanship, Brexit etc...this is old-fashioned party politics. May knows this is a once-in-a-generation chance to secure a huge Tory majority without even needing to try very hard. She’s finally been persuaded - perhaps against her better judgement, certainly against her repeated assertions to the contrary - that it would be daft to let that opportunity pass.
A man can dream... yes, I agree it’s hard to see how the House of Lords could be fixed in a way that takes it back to closer to what it was, but is it impossible? I thought Brexit was impossible - never thought that would happen. So I can dream a little more.
I certainly also agree that the House of Lords is somewhat broken at the moment, but the idea of abandoning something that worked well for centuries just because it’s had a couple of bad decades recently without at least trying to fix it, doesn’t sit well with me.
As for the Australian Senate, I actually do expect that to be sorted out, although it may take a little while - at the moment, the Labor opposition is certainly willing to take advantage of what has happened there to block government legislation, but longer term, both the Coalition and Labor know that something needs to be done to fix things so microparties can’t so easily get Senate seats, and I think even the Greens would come on board with that. What has happened at the moment, is somebody found a flaw within the system that they exploited (and were able to exploit because of better technology), and we’ve already started fixing things - if the most recent Senate election had been the normal half Senate election, rather than a full one triggered by a double dissolution, we’d be even further along. I think the minor party senators will also come to realise over time that the people will not tolerate a government’s mandates being blocked.
Labour are hopeless at the moment and the Conservatives have the largest lead over them since 1983. They are sitting ducks hence May's opportunistic decision to call a General Election even though they are only supposed to happen once every 5 years (the next one was to be in 2020).
The only political party who will reverse Brexit are the Liberal Democrats and they are the fourth largest party after the SNP and so have zero chance of forming a government. There is no way to reverse Brexit now short of a revolution. Some might call that a failure of the democratic process given that the government seems to advocate a policy of Brexit at any cost!
Glad to hear it.
So get this, the new leader of the Lib Dems is a “Christian” and has gotten major crap for continually dodging the question when asked if he thought faggotry is a sin. He finally said it wasn’t, the other day.
Practicing it is. That’s pretty clear, despite what the pop culture says.
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