General British politics discussion thread

Election monitoring group that has permission to monitor election expressing concerns about a practice called "Family Voting". This practice was banned in 2023. Family voting is an illegal practice where two voters either confer, collude or direct each other on voting and can involve husbands telling their wives how to vote. Democracy Volunteers (the election monitors) say the rate of FV is 12%.

Labour and Reform UK expressing concern.

But a spokesman for the acting returning officer at the by-election slapped down the "extremely disappointing" claims. "Polling station staff are trained to look out for any evidence of undue influence on voters. No such issues have been reported today," they said.

Fantastic news

Stamer's gone after the locals now, surely. Not before, there isn't enough time to turn the ship; and letting the blame for a terrible set of locals land on him will avoid it hitting the new leader.

Going to be a lot of areas finding out if the Greens have learned how to run a local authority properly yet. They ran Brighton in to the ground.

That probably goes on in Ireland

Whole families marched down to the polling station to vote FG or FF or whoever

Glad it was Green not Farage. Sadly, Starmer swung to the right. The two child cap, not removing it, was as bad as FG introducing tax on childrens shoes here. Labour now starts picking a new direction and then a new leader, to be put in place after the local elections. Next GE may give a coalition of LB, LD, Green. UK has now five viable national parties instead of two.

The 2019-2023 Labour/Green latterly Green/Labour council isn't the one that ruined the place

Its the 2011-2015 Green one that did.

And no, that was not just due to the general malaise of the time as the place massively improved once the students union were put out of office, despite the UK being broke and tearing itself apart.

The Greens ran the council admin, holding all the cabinet seats.

This is like trying to claim that the FG/Ind government here 2016-2020 were not responsible for their actions because SF existed - nonsense basically.

Most interesting aspect for me is that much of the former Labour vote clearly went to the Greens and in large numbers. Starmer has made an absolutely disastrous error in taking the party to the right and being pro-Israel etc : a space already occupied by Reform UK, the Tories and this new Restore Britain crowd.

The 'we favour a two state solution' and 'we recognise Palestinian statehood' thing appears to be completely meaningless in the context of the chances of a Palestinian state being formed are around 0.0000001% right now (and something that Starmer is well aware of).

just as Reform have become the populist party for the disaffected right, the Hreens have become the populist party for the disaffected left/anti establishment types. Coupled with the traditional loony green policies, let’s hope they never get anywhere near actually running a country.

The two main British political parties seem to be a fair spot of bother going forward; on a combined total of around 35% in current opinion polls. Might be nigh on impossible for Labour or the Tories to form a majority government again.