Off Topic Thread too point uh

irishbucsfan · 08-05-2015 07:19AM

Beeb predicting a majority now

irishbucsfan · 08-05-2015 07:21AM

UKIP took 13% of the vote in my constituency. Their popularity seems really strange, I'm not sure who is voting for them around me, none of the usual demographic is around here.

dregin · 08-05-2015 07:28AM

irishbucsfan wrote: »

UKIP took 13% of the vote in my constituency. Their popularity seems really strange, I'm not sure who is voting for them around me, none of the usual demographic is around here.

Who is their demographic? I would have thought it was the noisy tabloid disciples AND the quiet conservatives.

Clearlier · 08-05-2015 10:03AM

dregin wrote: »

Who is their demographic? I would have thought it was the noisy tabloid disciples AND the quiet conservatives.

Plus the protest vote that the Lib Dems would have more traditionally picked up. A bit like the lib dems if they ever actually get into power they'll be kicked out at the first opportunity.

irishbucsfan · 08-05-2015 10:12AM

dregin wrote: »

Who is their demographic? I would have thought it was the noisy tabloid disciples AND the quiet conservatives.

Yeah I'd imagine the vast majority of the 7k votes around me are fiscal conservative euro-skeptics who are alienated by the Tories more centrist policies. I still found it surprising.

It's also an extremely safe conservative seat (66% of the vote for Dominic Greave this time) so it could well be that some of those votes would have gone tory if there was a stronger left wing opponent.

I'm interested to see what the Tories do with their majority. I'm interested to see if they do anything. This is a great time to be a Tory backbencher

Podge_irl · 08-05-2015 10:21AM

irishbucsfan wrote: »

I'm interested to see what the Tories do with their majority. I'm interested to see if they do anything. This is a great time to be a Tory backbencher

Naff all I imagine. The Conservatives may have increased their vote but the government majority has become weaker. Anti-EU backbenchers are going to cause a lot of headaches I imagine.

Clearlier · 08-05-2015 10:36AM

Podge_irl wrote: »

Naff all I imagine. The Conservatives may have increased their vote but the government majority has become weaker. Anti-EU backbenchers are going to cause a lot of headaches I imagine.

I agree. All of the restraint imposed on the party by their being part of a coalition made them relatively disciplined. With a majority I expect all of the sectional interests who have been told that they couldn't have what they wanted because of the coalition will feel much more free to make their demands.

sydthebeat · 08-05-2015 10:36AM

Farage didnt manage to win his seat *snigger*

Podge_irl · 08-05-2015 10:39AM

Clearlier wrote: »

I agree. All of the restraint imposed on the party by their being part of a coalition made them relatively disciplined. With a majority I expect all of the sectional interests who have been told that they couldn't have what they wanted because of the coalition will feel much more free to make their demands.

Not just that, the government majority will be relatively thin. They're not as idiotically zealous with the whip as we are in Ireland. They need to keep the backbenchers on board to stop some embarrassing vote failures.

08-05-2015 10:41AM

sydthebeat wrote: »

Farage didnt manage to win his seat *snigger*

Beaten by an ex UKIP Deputy Leader!

thomond2006 · 08-05-2015 11:22AM

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Beaten by an ex UKIP Deputy Leader!

Well that must have hurt.

errlloyd · 08-05-2015 12:04PM

The UK electoral system is bull****. I'm no fan of ukip obviously, but they got what 10-12 percent of the polls? They're the third largest party in terms of popular vote. And after the tories, labour, snp, lib dems, uup, dup, Sinn Fein, plaid cymru and the greens they're the 10th largest party in parliament.

SNP got less than half the votes in Scotland, and are getting 95 percent of the seats.

What sort of crap democracy is that.

Buer · 08-05-2015 12:10PM

errlloyd wrote: »

SNP got less than half the votes in Scotland, and are getting 95 percent of the seats.

What sort of crap democracy is that.

Do yourself a favour and don't read up on the US Presidential election system....

Podge_irl · 08-05-2015 12:14PM

errlloyd wrote: »

The UK electoral system is bull****. I'm no fan of ukip obviously, but they got what 10-12 percent of the polls? They're the third largest party in terms of popular vote. And after the tories, labour, snp, lib dems, uup, dup, Sinn Fein, plaid cymru and the greens they're the 10th largest party in parliament.

SNP got less than half the votes in Scotland, and are getting 95 percent of the seats.

What sort of crap democracy is that.

Yes it is.

But they pretty massively rejected any change to the current system a few years ago. Mind you the campaign around it was utterly ludicrous - the Conservative campaign was basically "you're all too stupid to understand this very simply process" yet it worked!

08-05-2015 12:22PM

Podge_irl wrote: »

Yes it is.

But they pretty massively rejected any change to the current system a few years ago. Mind you the campaign around it was utterly ludicrous - the Conservative campaign was basically "you're all too stupid to understand this very simply process" yet it worked!

Hence proving the statement?

Podge_irl · 08-05-2015 12:29PM

Deleted User wrote: »

Hence proving the statement?

I guess.

Electoral reform would have definitely been on the cards with a hung parliament, but the conservatives managing a majority might completely shove it off the table. The results vis a vis votes versus seats are utterly ludicrous, but the UK likes stable, single-party governance.

molloyjh · 08-05-2015 12:37PM

errlloyd wrote: »

The UK electoral system is bull****. I'm no fan of ukip obviously, but they got what 10-12 percent of the polls? They're the third largest party in terms of popular vote. And after the tories, labour, snp, lib dems, uup, dup, Sinn Fein, plaid cymru and the greens they're the 10th largest party in parliament.

SNP got less than half the votes in Scotland, and are getting 95 percent of the seats.

What sort of crap democracy is that.

You don't need to get a majority vote to be the preferred candidate. If an SNP candidate got 40% of the vote then they are probably going to get elected. That's because the Tory candidate may have gotten 20%, the Labour candidate 10% etc. Spread that out over the country and you could easily end up with a situation where the SNP get less than half the votes yet are still the most popular party. It's not a simple 2 party system where it's one or the other, just like here. So they don't need overall popular majorities. Usually you'll see some correlation between % of popular vote and % of seats, but there's nothing to guarantee it. Aberrations like this are feasible and still totally democratic.

08-05-2015 12:40PM

Easy example.
2 Parties
Consider 10 seats.
100 votes cast in each constituency.

Party A Party B
1 51 49
2 52 48
3 51 49
4 53 47
5 9 91
6 51 49
7 52 48
8 51 49
9 49 51
10 53 47

# Votes 472 528
% of Votes 47.2% 52.8%

# Seats 8 2
% of Seats 80% 20%

Gotta win your seats. Just like in soccer...
Goals win Games, (Votes win Seats), but most goals don't necessarily mean most Seats (Wins).

W L D GF GA GD Pts
Team 1 8 2 0 8 8 0 24
Team 2 4 6 0 16 6 10 12

errlloyd · 08-05-2015 12:52PM

molloyjh wrote: »

You don't need to get a majority vote to be the preferred candidate. If an SNP candidate got 40% of the vote then they are probably going to get elected. That's because the Tory candidate may have gotten 20%, the Labour candidate 10% etc. Spread that out over the country and you could easily end up with a situation where the SNP get less than half the votes yet are still the most popular party. It's not a simple 2 party system where it's one or the other, just like here. So they don't need overall popular majorities. Usually you'll see some correlation between % of popular vote and % of seats, but there's nothing to guarantee it. Aberrations like this are feasible and still totally democratic.

Either simple AV that they proposed or our hilarious system would have produced better results. Simple alternative voting would have stopped the tactical voting that helped the tories so much. It seems absolutely ridiculous that you'd walk into a polling station and vote for your third choice (as people in thanet did) because you're afraid of farage. That is not good democracy.

Twice as many people voted for ukip as live in Scotland. Again I hate ukip, I despise them in fact. I just think the UK needs multi seat constituencies.

No minority party will ever do well in Britain, it is a nation designed for two parties.

Can't multi quote on phone so I'll just say you don't need to get me started on the US system beur. Two houses, out of sync elections, electoral colleges duopoly of power. The US is a nightmare. But the UK is a European democracy, it should do better.

Podge_irl · 08-05-2015 12:59PM

molloyjh wrote: »

Aberrations like this are feasible and still totally democratic.

It's not even really an aberration though. It happens like this all the time - it's essentially designed to happen like this.

errlloyd · 08-05-2015 01:08PM

Deleted User wrote: »

Easy example.
2 Parties
Consider 10 seats.
100 votes cast in each constituency.

Party A Party B
1 51 49
2 52 48
3 51 49
4 53 47
5 9 91
6 51 49
7 52 48
8 51 49
9 49 51
10 53 47

# Votes 472 528
% of Votes 47.2% 52.8%

# Seats 8 2
% of Seats 80% 20%

Gotta win your seats. Just like in soccer...
Goals win Games, (Votes win Seats), but most goals don't necessarily mean most Seats (Wins).

W L D GF GA GD Pts
Team 1 8 2 0 8 8 0 24
Team 2 4 6 0 16 6 10 12

But this isn't football, and while I accept the premier league is important, this is much more important. We all accept that often the best team doesn't win in sport, and that sports are created to prevent the best team from winning, but the best party should win in politics, and this is a political system that actively blocks the best parties from winning.

It also doesn't really understand the problem, I can manipulate any political system to give a party marginally less popular vote but more seats. Al Gore lost the presidential race with more votes than Bush, but the problem here is that it happens every single year.

It is impossible to get the seats in the House of Commons to come even close to representing the popular support for the parties.

08-05-2015 01:54PM

Amazing that UKIP got more votes than SNP and Lib Dems yet land only a single seat. There really isn't any at all sense of democracy in that, even if I think it's a complete crack-pot party.

dregin · 08-05-2015 01:57PM

sydthebeat wrote: »

Farage didnt manage to win his seat *snigger*

http://waterfordwhispersnews.com/2015/05/08/nigel-farage-to-go-back-to-being-full-blown-racist/

Buer · 08-05-2015 02:04PM

To highlight an extreme example of how this can be, the voting in the American presidency is based on the collegiate system where each state is attributed a certain number of votes. The winner of each state claims all the votes for that state.

Candidate A can take California (55 collegiate votes) in a 51/49 majority. California has a population of 38 million (for arguments sake, lets say 50% of each state is eligible to vote and does so) so that's 9.69 million versus 9.39 million. Candidate A then takes all of those 55 collegiate votes.

Candidate B can win Texas (38 collegiate votes) and Michigan (16 collegiate votes) with 100% of the votes which adds up to roughly 18.5 million votes using the assumption 50% of the population can vote and do so.

So candidate A now leads the election 55 collegiate votes to 54 collegiate votes despite candidate B having 27.89 million votes to candidate A's 9.69 million votes.

The British system doesn't seem so ludicrous to me, relatively, when it's broken down by seat count throughout the country to elect their leader compared to the extreme version that the USA employ.

Fireball07 · 08-05-2015 02:52PM

CatFromHue wrote: »

The Devlins - Waiting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajBjkOKWZFs

100 Irish albums of all time, from 2005 I think.

http://rateyourmusic.com/list/John_K/hot_press_readers_top_100_irish_albums_of_all_time_/1/

Some quality albums on there!

Damien Rice at #2, haven't heard the full album but it's ahead of some quality ones I have!

Wouldn't be a fan of that list. Fcuking U2.

And I think the Pogues are definitely Irish, despite not being formed in Ireland or their members being born in Ireland. Shane MacGowan is Irish though, despite being born in England; they play Irish music, they write about a lot of Irish topics... that's Irish.

Synode · 08-05-2015 03:26PM

Fireball07 wrote: »

Fcuking U2.

What's wrong with U2?

CatFromHue · 08-05-2015 03:28PM

Ah I wouldn't be so harsh.

I'm not a major U2 fan but there's some of my favourite all time songs on The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, and then how many times have they sold out Croker? Nowadays they're a part of the furniture but back then they were really brilliant.

08-05-2015 03:41PM

CatFromHue wrote: »

Ah I wouldn't be so harsh.

I'm not a major U2 fan but there's some of my favourite all time songs on The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, and then how many times have they sold out Croker? Nowadays they're a part of the furniture but back then they were really brilliant.

Jesus, this can't be a measure of whether or not someone is any good...

Buer · 08-05-2015 04:20PM

Synode wrote: »

What's wrong with U2?

People lose their reason when discussing U2 in this country. There was a change in public sentiment towards them around the turn of the century when they moved from current to older rockstars with vast amounts of money and a bit unsure of how to remain relevant and popular. It almost became fashionable to dislike them with an almost "I disliked U2 even when they were popular" sort of vibe.

Is Bonzo a sanctimonious earache on legs? Of course he is.

But that shouldn't take away from the fact that some of their albums are among the best ever made. The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby are just fantastic albums. People work pretty hard at disliking them and criticising them.

08-05-2015 04:25PM

Deleted User wrote: »

Jesus, this can't be a measure of whether or not someone is any good...

That entire episode still completely baffles me. I mean, I don't get One Direction but I have a vague understanding of my nieces so can see why they have become a thing, but I know ordinary sensible people that were buying 2 and 3 different nights to see Garth Fcuking Brooks.

The hysteria over that entire thing really made me question a lot about the world around me. Only that it went on for so long I'd probably have thought it was some kind of weird completely far fetched dream.

I mean, Garth Brooks. Jesus.

Off Topic Thread too point uh

Comments