General Discussion for politics in the UK.
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!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
The problem with FPTP is that you can't just vote based on policies.
You also have to consider who is most likely to win the seat and whether you have to vote AGAINST who you don't want rather than FOR who you do want.
CGP Grey explains it succinctly, here: https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
I'm pretty sure that Labour will win in my area, but I really just want to vote for who I want to win.
Maybe you peoples should a change of the system.
Many of us would love that, but it's in the hands of those in power...and they won't change it unless they think it'll be to their advantage, which neither of the two main parties are ever likely to do as the current system supports them as being the two most likely to win power.
I would recommend taking it to the streets. General strike, protests, blockades, demonstrations, a lot of shouting and possibly pitchforks. Has worked before!
We'd all get arrested, our lovely Conservative government has essentially made many forms of demonstration illegal! Besides, no-one is that desperate as yet. There'd need to be some massively bad situation to drive people to go that far and we're some way from that. We're also the antithesis of the French in terms of inclination to strike! Stiff upper lip and all that!
I think everyone's just rather hoping that they won't have to do that. Let's just see how the election goes shall we we can have a rebellion later if required.
The 51% who want to fuck everything up voted against it when we had the referendum on changing the vote.
you can vote based on policies. the real takeaway from that video should be that strategic voting consolidates parties while values voting gives you a chance for your values to be reflected in the politicians you vote for.
Their summaries of all parties stances but Reform are close to identical for the vast majority of issues; how can they write them and think "yes, people will be able to pick exactly one of these, and that should have as much weighting against the identical policies to the ones you picked as the ones you actually disagree with"
It'd be so much better and probably easier to not have the shortlisting/final pick system and just let you say "I agree with this" or "I disagree with this" and leave it at that
Yeah I did notice that a lot seemed the same or very similar. It would good if you could rank them but I suppose they don't want to make the process more complicated.
It'd make it simpler if they skipped the shortlisting part and just treat the ones you added to the shortlist as "agree" policies though; it also would vastly increase the usefulness of the tool as well.
I'm glad it wasn't just me that was downvoted for posting this a few days ago. 🤣 Some people here are crazy. Why would you downvote this 🤣?
Anyways, glad that more people know about this website it's ace!
My guess for the downvotes would be that it's just not feasible to vote for policies unless your views align with one of the two major parties, but as it is we're all basically stuck with voting tactically. Had the Alternate Vote gone through in 2011 then this site would no doubt be invaluable.
Under FPTP there is not much use for this site. And while I believe, until proven wrong, that this site was created with the best intentions, the cynic in me thinks it could be a conservative plan to encourage a split in the votes for their opposition.
I can't see the up/down ratio on desktop web so I didn't realise it was receiving downvotes! I dunno what goes through peoples minds when they downvote, it's something I rarely ever do personally.
If we had PR, I would consider policies when voting. But at this point, even if I agreed with all conservative policies, I would not trust them to implement any of them. So my main consideration is which party has the best chance of beating the con artists in my area, not which party has the ‘best’ policies.
Yeah both Labour and Conservatives have a long history of not delivering election promises once in power. So much so it's pretty much expected. It's a pretty useless way of trying to decide on who to vote for unfortunately! I personally look at the character of the party members as a guide as well as the base principles of the party when there's not an election due.
33% Green
33% Labour
33% Lib Dem
So I'm off to stopthetories.vote I guess too see if it's Lib dem or labour who's most likely to overturn the 70% odd percentage majority my Tory MP has.
Very interesting! I got 100% Green Party. I don’t feel like I can risk eroding the Labour vote though.
I've been torn between Lib Dem & Greens so thought I'd use this tool to help me decide, but not sure it's exactly helped!
I'm deciding between those two (again!) myself. I really like the Greens social policies, but they ran Brighton and Hove council pretty badly from what I've heard so not sure they've got the personnel to do the basics. I'm edging towards libdem but if only Ed Davey wasn't involved in the post office scandal...
I adore this website! So much! ❤️
Lots of people have issues with the concept of voting based on policies, for valid real world reasons,
but this survey does a great job of making you sit down for the better part of a hour to compare all the high-level policy promises and weigh then against each other, and at the end giving you an idea of which party at least claims to be more your cup of tea.
It's an educational tool, and a way to get the brain working and thinking about the election a little differently.
Will I vote for who I got in my results? That's between me and my ballot, but I certainly found the results eye opening! :-)
I wish the greens would come up with some kind of coherent policy. On literally anything at all.
Their manifesto is basically just "we don't like things that destroy the environment" which isn't a bad, but it's also not exactly compatible with the modern world.
They don't like HS2 for example because it might harm some trees. I would love it if we can somehow figure out a way to build magic hover trains that fly over all of the foliage, but since that haven't been invented I think cutting a few trees down is an acceptable compromise for progress.
I did the survey on all topics and agreed with greens on more points than any others, in a blind test they seem sensible, almost everyone I've sent to the site has fed back more agreement with the greens than anyone else.
It's easy to agree with them, none of their proposals have to be tempered by the reality of being possibly implemented. They can promise the world and they know it's fine because they'll never have to deliver same with Reform, but just left-wing rather than right.
I would like to see their policies have some kind of relationship with practical reality. That includes the realization that sometimes you need to build nuclear power stations, sometimes trees need to be cut down for infrastructure projects, and occasionally you have to do things people don't like.
For example we need more housing, that's going to cut into the environment and will necessitate building on old green belt land. They can't just be against it, that's not a practical response so I'd like to see a nuanced understanding of the topic rather than a blanket "no more building"
Lol.
33% Green, 33% Labour, 33% Lib Dems.
Sounds about right.
Green 43.8% Lib dem 31.3% (surprised me somewhat) Labour 18.8% (also surprised me somewhat) Tory 6.3% (it was the pension question, and that's the Tories target demographic, so makes sense, don't lambast me for that)
I'll be voting labour though as reform are polling higher than Tory and greens in my constituency, and they really need to stay the fuck out.
It’s interesting how progressive the tories become for their target demographic.
I can’t fault you for liking those policies, though I don’t think they’re affordable (in the sense that we do not have the money to treat everyone that well, they only manage it for pensioners by disregarding the needs of practically every other demographic).