I am moved to write this by a couple of stimuli. First of all by a UK Labour Party National Executive Committee delegate (I think on the NEC as “youth” representative) to some recent conference in Cuba, and who said something like how wonderful it was to be in a country which showed how real socialism worked.
The second impetus came from an interview I heard on BBC World Service radio: an interview with an “artist” of whom I had never heard, called Tania Bruguera. Apparently, her father had been a Cuban diplomat and politician, and had actually handed her over aged 7 (or maybe I misheard and it was 17) to the security police with the statement that she had said anti-“Fidel” things and that the security police should do with her what they liked. She now says that that was a result of the Cuban system of selfish save-your-own-neck denunciation (rather than her own father being a complete shit, which is what she probably really thinks).
I looked up her “art” (“installations”, “performance art” etc). Unimpressed. To me, it looks like talentless rubbish. Having said that, she has the right to do it, which right is not accepted in Cuba. She is allowed to travel fairly freely. These days, she gets hassled and threatened, at times arrested, though not simply shot or chucked into a concentration camp or prison, which is what might have happened in the 1960s or 1970s.
There is the nagging feeling that Corbyn and many around him actually view states such as Cuba, 1980s Nicaragua, or even the Venezuela of recent years as success stories. I have previously blogged about Corbyn’s almost fossilized politics and policies, as well as his friendly or supportive attitude towards Cuba:
https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/castro-and-cuba/
As regular readers of this blog will know, I am not totally hostile to Corbyn and at least some of his supporters (vis a vis the misnamed “Conservatives”), inasmuch as the Corbynists want to create a more equitable society in the UK, want to control or remove the Jewish-Zionist influence which has been so pervasive since about 1989, want people to have decent health, housing, social security etc. The devil, however, is in the detail.
The intellectual inconsistency of many of the Corbynists is shown by the fact that while they oppose Jewish exploitation of and behaviour toward the Palestinian Arabs, they ignore the same pattern when Jews exploit British, German or French (or Russian!) people; they also often still unthinkingly parrot “holocaust” propaganda. Corbyn and John McDonnell are themselves prime examples.
Another example: Most people accept that, in any market economy, more labour available means lower unit labour cost. Many of the Corbyn-Labour people disagree. They say that mass immigration makes no real difference to pay, even at the lower levels. Employers are to blame for exploiting employees and government is to blame for not simply setting a high minimum pay level. Faced with that kind of economic illiteracy, one tends to shake head and refuse to argue. Those people, though, genuinely think that all that has to be done for paradise to descend is for the State to lay down and enforce pay levels and, indeed, price levels.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said, many years ago, that one can have a welfare state, and one can have open borders (and consequent mass immigration), but one cannot have both. When will Labour MPs and members wake up to this?
While there is room for relatively minor tinkering with pay and prices (minimum pay, enforced cheap prices in targeted areas such as public transport etc, even Basic Income —which I favour—), for the State to overwhelm the economic sphere is to invite the economic paralysis that caused even Cuba (and, famously, 1980s China) to introduce quasi-free market reforms, as indeed did Lenin himself in the Soviet Union, via his New Economic Policy of the 1920s. Complete State control of the economy leads to shortages or even economic collapse, as we see in Venezuela. I do not see much understanding of these truths in Corbyn or McDonnell.
It is in relation to mass immigration that we see the madness most obviously. In a sense, this is unsurprising. Polls have shown for some years that Labour is mainly voted for by the “blacks and browns”, in the sense that the one demographic which is very pro-Labour is that of the ethnic minorities (except the Jews, who hate Corbyn’s anti-Zionist tendencies).
I should not let anyone reading this go away under the misapprehension that I “prefer” the Conservatives to Labour. I oppose both main System parties, and Labour is at least (in parts, in some senses) anti-Zionist now. I also despise what the Conservatives have done since 2010 to trash society. However, anyone who thinks that Labour is a real alternative need only look at the total deadheads around Corbyn. Look at Diane Abbott, Dawn Butler (both of whom might well be Cabinet ministers under a Corbyn prime ministership!), or the recently disgraced MPs Kate Osamor and Fiona Onasanya (the latter will almost certainly be in prison soon). Not only blacks, by the way: Angela Rayner, for example, would probably be a Cabinet minister under a Corbyn government. Words start to fail…
I favour Labour over Conservative not because I imagine that Labour’s idiots are actually able to operate a government, but because
- Corbyn and many of his supporters are now fighting directly against Zionism here in the UK, not merely in the Middle East; and
- a weak government under Corbyn can lay the ground for social nationalism.
Notes
The title of this blog post of course refers back to the 1920 Leninist pamphlet usually referred to as Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder [Детская болезнь “левизны” в коммунизме], perhaps more accurately translated as The Children’s Illness, “Leftism”, in Communism. However, in using the words “infantile” and “disordered” to refer to some aspects of “Corbynism”, or some people in Corbyn-Labour, I do so advisedly…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tania_Bruguera
https://ianrmillard.wordpress.com/2018/12/02/troop-cartload-barrel-or-family/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy#Disagreements_in_leadership
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Economic_Policy#Influence
Further Thought, 2 January 2019
I thought to include a few examples. Here’s one. Stupid enough to state on UK TV that she is “literally a Communist”! Hardy ha ha…but note that her absurd statement did not make her a pariah, despite the hugely bloodstained history of Communism/Socialism. Now what if she had said that she was “literally a National Socialist”? Hm…Ash Sarkar’s statement did not prevent her from continuing to write for major newspapers occasionally, and also to appear on TV from time to time. The Jewish influence over the mass media is right in front of us, and in the case of TV, “literally”!
Check out her Twitter profile!
“Ash Sarkar
@AyoCaesar
Senior Editor @novaramedia. Literature bore. Anarcho-fabulous. Muslim. THFC. Walks like a supermodel. Fucks like a champion. Luxury communism now!“
Here is her Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_Sarkar which, unbelievably, states that she “lectures in global politics at Anglia Ruskin University” [former Anglia Polytechnic].
Wikipedia adds that “Sarkar’s great-great-aunt, Pritilata Waddedar, was a Bengali nationalist and an active participant in armed struggle against the British Empire in 1930s Bengal. Her grandmother is a hospital carer…Her mother is a social worker who was an anti-racist and trade union activist in the 1970s and 1980s. Sarkar’s mother helped “organise marches…“
“The Times has described her as “Britain’s loudest Corbynista“…and Dazed magazine said she is one of “the voices resetting the political agenda in the UK”.” [Wikipedia]
Basically, an enemy of the British people.
and take a look, or rather listen, to one “Liz from Leeds”, whose incredibly naive and just plain wrong (inaccurate, ahistorical) idea of, inter alia, “why Soviet socialism failed” is actually unintentionally funny. “Novara Media” (the collective of Corbyn supporters Ash Sarkar, Aaron Bastani etc) tweeting that “Liz from Leeds” was correct! [the black woman shown is the TV show presenter]
Hey, “Liz from Leeds”! If you ever read this, I saw the cartoon below and thought of you!
As for Ash Sarkar, she is not universally respected, even on Twitter! See below…
https://twitter.com/dbmarkets_/status/1080226423476875264
https://twitter.com/DogKenobi/status/1079884141750112257
https://twitter.com/zeireen/status/1079483335859150853
Update, 4 January 2019
More criticism via Twitter…
https://twitter.com/gloria_tuesday/status/1080930970784677888
and here is another idiot, Hevreziya-Something, attempting to sound like a real “Communist” (who thinks that he –sounds more like she, but apparently not– can be “Anarchist” and –a male–“Feminist”, and a “Populist” etc all at the same time!…oh, and an economist…once he has finished school, that is, though he claims to have been commenting for years; age does not preclude political infantilism, I suppose)
https://twitter.com/HRZ_MRZ/status/1080892069365907456
he offers political advice in the tweet below, which made me laugh out loud (the bit about a General Strike in UK and USA, but the first tweet is also amusingly naive):
https://twitter.com/HRZ_MRZ/status/1080563549276176384
More?
https://twitter.com/HRZ_MRZ/status/1078171449490399237
Well, I think that I shall draw a veil over that particular “Communist/Anarchist/Populist” now! He/she probably has to go and wash its hair or something…
The trouble is that there are literally thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands, quite as stupid. Most support Labour. Many, such as Ash Sarkar and the Hevreziya-someone tweeter, above, are of non-European origin, but there are many others, such as the Englishwoman tweeting below, calling herself “Countess Helen Nonny Nay” [since this blog post was written, altered to Cringing Peasant Helen Nonny Nay], who thinks that white British families who want a better life should just “fuck off” as the UK welcomes the dregs of Africa and Asia to our shores…
Actually, the sad thing is that some of these people have their hearts sort-of in the right place in some respects— animal welfare, a better society, anti-Jew-Zionism (though most are still brainwashed by the “holocaust” scam/myth). The white Northern European ones would support social-nationalism were they not so indoctrinated and silly.
Update, 6 January 2019
Another idiot, Laurie Penny, who was at one time on TV occasionally (like Owen Jones), until even msm people realized that (like Owen Jones) she is pretty much a one-trick pony…
and
and
Do these people, the Owen Jones’s, the Laurie Penny’s etc, realize that their intolerance (yes, their intolerance) might one day not only bring society (the Social Contract) crashing down, but bring down the skies on their own little worlds? I doubt it.
but then, the resistance…
Marxism-Leninism as a political force was destroyed or ebbed away to nothing by 1989 and a host of (other) devils have rushed in to fill the vacuum…
In the end, a complete cleansing of UK (and world) society will have to take place.
Further Update, 6 January 2019
I happened to see the photo below, a kind of “family portrait”: Ash Sarkar and Aaron Bastani in what is perhaps a room designed with reference to either “luxury Communism” or tasteless tat. You decide…
Below, Andrew Neil nails Ken Livingstone on Venezuela…
Not that everything said by Ash Sarkar (or Aaron Bastani) is wrong. This, below, is right (because grounded in reality, not incorrect theory):
What Ash Sarkar and her ilk cannot accept, if only because it might imply that they themselves should clear out of the UK, is that mass immigration is, ultimately, “white genocide” by replacement of real British (i.e. white) people by blacks, browns and others.
Here we see some reaction to Ash Sarkar’s and Owen Jones’s doormatting for the Jewish lobby…
https://twitter.com/niall_east/status/1101541980117585921
More recently
Seems that “someone” sees a vacancy in the msm-approved “licensed Bolshevik” slot previously occupied by Owen Jones (usually by Owen Jones; sometimes Laurie Penny or others). That way, the msm can say, “look! We are open to all shades of opinion, even radical and revolutionary ones!”, while in fact only inviting the kind of people who are in reality completely harmless to the ZOG/NWO System. Non-white or Jewish faux-rebels. White social-nationalists are, of course, banned…
Update, 20 July 2019
A late entrant, a comedienne (for the brainwashed, that’s “comedian”, apparently…), of whom I have never heard but who I am sure is very proud to have 130K Twitter followers (and I am sure at least a few dozen regularly read her tweets…). She believes in “anti-fascist action” and intimidating anyone standing up for free speech.
https://twitter.com/JosieLong/status/1152280599274696710
and, quelle surprise, she has been contracted at various times for those present gravediggers of culture, Channel 4 (usually a gravedigger) and the BBC (sometimes a gravedigger).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josie_Long
Update, 21 September 2019
…from the Independent, reporting on beach patrols at Dover; all too typical of the sort of persons now prominent in “Labour” and what is left of the trade unions:
“Riccardo La Torre, firefighter and Eastern Region Secretary of the Fire Brigade Union, branded the coast patrol “despicable” and said: “These have-a-go, racist vigilantes have no place in any kind of enforcement or emergency activities and will only serve to make conditions and tensions worse.”
“These groups claim to be the voice of the working class, but now they want to act as an arm of the authorities by patrolling beaches to apprehend struggling working-class people desperately trying to get to safety.”
[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/far-right-britain-first-beach-patrols-calais-dover-anti-migrant-a9113471.html]
So “Riccardo La Torre” (que?), a regional secretary of the Fire Brigade Union, thinks that migrant invaders from Africa and the Middle East are “working class people”, who are “trying to get to safety”?!
Safety from, er, France? There you have in a nutshell, the craziness that is much of “Labour” now. Alien migrant-invaders are “working class people”, who should be allowed to occupy the UK at will (and be subsidized too)!
Note particularly the fag-end “Marxism”, trying to shoehorn the facts into some 1980s polytechnic back-of-postcard Marxism-Leninism.
Ian Robert Millard 
The problem with Corbyn is – despite his “anti-zionism” a reluctance to really take on the City of London financiers and institutions – which will be less likely now because he is afraid of antisemitism allegations! If he thinks complaining about workers pay or the bosses will fix things he is severely deluded! But, as you say the conditions will be there for a growth in Social Nationalism, which will obviously be welcome!
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Corbyn suffers from cognitive dissonance: Jews in Israel/Palestine (mostly) bad, Jews in Europe (mostly) good…many of his followers are the same.
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Off topic, but I’ve just now read about the CAA persecuting yet another organisation, an outfit called Keep Talking, described by one of its founders, Ian Fantom, as a London-based investigative group (but which is described by Jewish News as far-right.) In an article written by Fantom published in Off-Guardian on Dec. 30, “To whom was Her Majesty referring in her Christmas broadcast,” Fantom relates that the CAA claimed responsibility for shutting down a meeting the group was to have held on the topic of Diana Spencer.
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Interesting. I have seen the names (of that organization and the founder) but know nothing of them.
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There are some insights in the Off-Guardian piece
regarding deficit financing and “‘Central Banks'”. Some explanation (maybe) of why EDM748 has gone nowhere
https://www.parliament.uk/edm/2013-14/748
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Interesting regarding the “Bradbury” pound – which in all honesty I wasn’t aware of! Anyway, why haven’t Corbyn and McDonnell pushed it more in Parliament, or included it, or something similar in Labour’s manifesto?
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My understanding is that the “Bradbury Pound” is effectively the same as the present-day Pound Sterling, i.e one which is not backed by gold. Britain left the Gold Standard in 1931 in order to attempt reflation of the then-depressed economy. See:
and
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/the_original_bradbury_pound
and
Click to access FOI2018-00037_Bradbury_Pound.pdf
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2018/01/08/novice-tory-mp-kemi-badenoch-put-charge-selecting-conservative/ Off topic Ian, what is your opinion of this? Surely decisions such as this will potentially alienate many middle aged and elderly Tories in the shires?
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The (misnamed, as Disraeli implied) Conservative Party calculates that the only demographic area where Labour is very strong is among the “blacks and browns”. Thus the idea of having black/brown and yellow (Chinese etc) “Conservative” candidates in various constituencies, to win the vital marginal seats as well as seats such as Saffron Walden which are heavily “Conservative”. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffron_Walden_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s
The calculation seems to be that most “Conservative” voters have nowhere to go and will not vote Labour or even LibDem in any event. “Conservative” voters also usually vote according to perceived economic self-interest, such as low tax, frozen council tax etc. By the time they wake up, if ever, it’s too late. So we see that they will vote for a non-Brit on that purely mercenary basis. In other words, they are mostly venal quasi-traitors and money-grubbers…The few elderly colonels etc who disapprove enough of the “Great Replacement” to cast a protest vote are of no account and, as I say, the only “alternative” will in any case be something such as UKIP, a no-chance party which is now itself replete with non-European-race candidates.
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My constituency of Brentwood and Ongar is not that far away from Saffron Walden and is even safer with us being the 10th safest for the CONS in the land (just one place and only by a tiny fraction of a percentage majority below Teresa May’s Maidenhead ie the percentage majority being an utterly ludicrous 45%. According to our local newspaper, when our previous Tory MP the left-liberal globalist Sir Eric Pickles retired we were due to get an ethnic Tory Indian imposed upon us with this person being a councillor in Epping Forest. The only reason we didn’t was because the 2017 election was called at short notice so our new MP who is English was selected under by election rules. Although we do not know much about him I suspect he is a PC liberal. The Tories seem to have a habit of selecting liberal candidates for their safest seats and only choosing true Tories like the former Tory MP Timothy Janman who was pro hanging and anti immigration for either no hope Labour strongholds or very marginal seats like Thurrock. To my mind the Tories view gays and bisexuals as lower in the PC bingo stakes than ethnics as they are hardly ever selected for safe seats like Brentwood and Ongar yet gays and bisexuals are far more likely to vote Tory than ethnics are (apart from Jews and Chinese) which only goes to show how stupid Britain’s stupid party is! I once voted Tory at a general election but will not do so now since the Tories are now fully fledged PC left liberal globalists and have clearly abandoned even the pretence of being a socially consevative party (not that I am opposed to gay rights as that is about the one aspect of social liberalism I have no problem with) so I would rather abstain or even vote Lib Dem as at least that party wants something approaching a fair electoral system.
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I took a look at “your” MP. Looks like a smug bastard, but I suppose that I could be wrong…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Burghart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brentwood_and_Ongar_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s
I do not know Brentwood or the area around it. I have only been to Brentwood once (c.1986), when my then girlfriend was collecting a Viennese lady from Heathrow and delivering her to people she had known since about 1946 or 1947. The old retired couple in Brentwood had been involved in some intelligence activities in post-war Vienna. In fact, we went around the recently-completed M25 from Heathrow to Brentwood; our first sight of the new motorway. I remember the trip mainly because of the house and garden the old couple (and grown-up daughter) had: they said that the grounds were 4.5 acres, all garden and kitchen garden, like a Garden of Eden with a tennis court.
Looking at the election history there, it certainly does seem to be rock-solid Conservative. As you say, the selection process now in the Conservative Party seems to favour the (superficially) “socially liberal/fiscally conservative” drones in the David Cameron-Levita mould.
“Democracy” was always a moveable feast, in the UK and elsewhere. Now, UK “democracy” is pretty much dead. Look at Nicola Blackwood. Selected for former Con/LibDem marginal Abingdon in 2010. Lost her seat (she was hopeless) in 2017. Lost your seat? No problem! First of all, made the Chair of the Human Tissue Authority (having had absolutely NO experience! In fact, I believe that she has never had ANY job outside politics!).
Now she has been tipped as a 2019 fake “baroness”, on £305 taxfree a day, to then become a Theresa May Cabinet minister (and stuff what the voters thought of Nicola!). She is also from a wealthy (South African) background and married to a City of London fund manager and CEO…https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Blackwood#Personal_life. “To him that hath shall be given”…
There are many MPs and fake peers like that in the Con Party.
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Perhaps many socially conservative voters have already abandoned the Tories? After all the last time the Tories had a decent majority was as long ago as 1987,they scraped a win in 1992 mainly due to Neil Kinnock’s unpopularity, his infamous rally and the fact Mrs Thatcher had bequeathed her party a stinking majority from 1987 and Cameron only won in 2015 by a pathetically tiny majority due to promising an in/out referendum on the EU.
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True, though only 3 Labour PMs have ever had a majority! It is true that the socially conservative (maybe still the majority of the British people) have largely abandoned the Con Party. However, there is nowhere (except silly no-chance UKIP) for them to go…Look at Sajid Javid, a disaster zone. I should like to know how much he lost Deutsche Bank when he worked for it! Imagine a UK Home Secretary, albeit ethnically alien, who expresses support for the “useful idiot” “antifa” thugs!
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The Bradbury Pound was issued by HM Treasury not just in 1914 to save the banks from a liquidity crisis but also again in 2008, the only difference being the first issue was paper and the second electronic! The point being (I thought) that unlike the credit created by commercial banks which serves as 97% of the money in the UK economy i.e. Pounds Sterling it’s not an interest-bearing debt; the interest whereon not being available “in the system” without the creation of further interest-bearing debt. And to get enough of the latter created you need ongoing big ticket items like commercial property redevelopment (vide the City of London being a perpetual building site*) or war: ‘War Cycles, Peace Cycles’ by Richard Kelly Hoskins.
* e.g. the north end of London Bridge where SG Warburg was or Standard Chartered’s former site on Bishopsgate – these have been redeveloped 2-3 times in the last 30-40 years. And the “Greens” (prop. Caroline Lucas MP) don’t bat an eyelid! She’s got the chops to “get it” (a 1st and a PhD) so she may be taken as being complicit.
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Yes, we are a very ‘true blue’ Tory seat but now the Tories as of the 2017 result have a completely loony majority here which makes the result of Robert McCrindle in 1987 at the height of ‘Thatcherism’ look pretty moderate! Quite literally our Tory MP could be an axe murderer and provided he retained the confidence of the local Tory association he would be re-elected with a landslide victory. Basically, if you don’t vote Tory here you may as well not turn-up on general Election Day. The thing is although most people in Brentwood and Ongar are not poor we are not as well to do as people living in Phillip Hammond’s seat in Surrey which contains private estates like St George’s Hill so the fact we are more safely Tory is kind of strange. I believe that there are still many Tories in Brentwood who haven’t yet worked out that the Conservatives are more PC globalist left liberals than social conservatives yet, on the other hand, perhaps some are as our turnout figure is a lot lower than it once was.
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That’s it. The UK “parliamentary democracy” has descended into a situation akin to the “rotten boroughs” that existed prior to the Reform Acts of the 1830s. Constituencies with huge majorities, constituencies where half or more of those eligible to vote do not vote (mainly because either they support the candidate who is sure to win by a huge margin, or because they do *not* support such a candidate and so their vote is completely wasted); then you have the “Nicola Blackwood” situations: a young woman who has never had a job is propelled via “connections” to becoming an MP, loses her seat, but is brought back into Parliament or even government as a fake “peer”.
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I don’t know whether our new Tory MP, Mr Alex Burghart, is smug or not. He did say though when he was ‘elected’ that if his constituents felt he had failed us he would expect us to throw him out. Of course , he said that knowing that his majority here is so extreme that such a scenario is extremely unlikely so maybe that was a roundabout way of being smug!
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I admit that I am probably going mainly by his photo! I dare say that many think that I look unkind in some of my photos, but that impression given may not be entirely correct.
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Your mentioning of the uselessness of Nicola Blackwood as a MP (there are, of course, many other examples of incompetents, scounderals, time servers etc in the house) reminds me of why I think Britain should adopt Germany’s excellent electoral system of Mixed-Member Proportional Representation whereby EVERY German voter gets two votes one of which can be used for a constituency candidate in their local FPTP seat and another to vote for their favoured party in their home state. If we had this I would have an EFFECTIVE vote EQUAL to others who live in marginals and not the utterly valueless non Tory vote in a true blue stronghold like Brentwood and Ongar I have at present. With my first constituency candidate vote I could even do something I have never done before ie vote Labour if I thought their candidate would make an excellent and conscientious MP for Brentwood and Ongar whilst using my second PARTY vote to vote for another party much nearer to my political views.
In Germany every voter can ‘ticket split’ in this way with this meaning Germany’s constituency MPS have to work hard etc because the voters in their seats don’t have to vote against their favoured party if they want to punish a bad constituency member.
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About the only major disadvantage of Germany’s system is that half of their MP’s are elected on the ‘closed list’ PR list element thus they are elected by virtue of being at the top or near the top of their respective state party lists but closed lists are not essential to the operation of a mixed PR system you can have ‘open’ lists where the voters can choose to give their vote to an individual candidate on that part of the overall system with that vote counting for that particular candidate and their party. If we were to have Germany’s system this is one improvement I would wish to see as it can help to ensure ALL the MPS are personally accountable to the voters directly and rubbish MPS aren’t elected solely by belonging to the right party slate of candidates and their parties exercising control over them for being in a good position on the party’s list.
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Interesting, though slightly more complicated than a straight FPTP or straight proportional system. Israel has PR but with a 3.25% threshold. Germany has a 10% threshold, I think.
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Israel is, of course, the favoured bad example of PR voting that Labour and Tory dinasours bring up when they whinge about the alleged horrors of ALL PR systems. Of course, they conveniently forget to mention the fact that Israel uses a national list with the entire Israeli state forming one constituency with no division of the country into local constituencies like Sweden and previously having virtually no threashold (it was once as low as 1% of the national vote). Also, Israel has numerous tiny religious parties which even now with a higher threshold manage to get into into the Knesset thereby increasing the number of parties in the parliament and making effective governments hard to form. Israel has increased its threashold several times since 1992 to its still relatively low (by world standards) level of 3.25% now. Thus as Israel still has an very proportional system it can cause some problems.
As far as I am aware the Israeli system isn’t advocated by any serious electoral reform group in this country ie neither by the Electoral Reform Society who have an obsession with the weird and not straightforwardly proportional Single Transferable Vote system of the Republic of Ireland and Malta or the new organisation of Make Votes Matter.
Germany’s system is better than Israel’s as there is still a constituency link (another way Tory and Labour anti- democrats use to castigate every PR system ie by saying you can’t have constituencies with PR even though STV and MMP/AMS as in Germany proves to the contrary)
Germany has TWO threasholds whereby a party can gain the proportional representation of its vote by either passing 5% of the national vote or by having three of its candidates directly elected in the FPTP seats thus the AFD party would still have had a decent number of MPs elected in September 2017 even if they had failed to overcome the 5% threashold as they managed to elect 3 direct constituency MPs in the state of Saxony. These threasholds don’t apply to parties of nationally recognised minorities such as those of the Danish minority but their parties normally don’t compete in nationwide Bundestag elections.
Thus Germany proves you can have PR elections for a parliament by having a sensible PR system which has a reasonable threashold thereby preventing an excessive fragmentation of the political system by having large numbers of tiny splinter parties in parliament with this preventing effectual and stable governments being formed.
Irony of ironies, I believe I am correct in stating that we British designed this previously unique version of PR for Germany during our post war occupation. Nice to know that Tory and Labour think PR was good enough still for Germany even with its history of the Weimar Republic having failed and the rise of Hitler but not good enough for us at home!
P.S It is Turkey that has the stupidly high threashold of 10% for its PR elections. This has led to absurd levels of ‘wasted votes’ which have, on occasions, been nearly as high as our system regularly produces. Most countries set the threashold at a level of 3-5% which means that most voters will be able to elect someone , relatively few ‘wasted votes’ being produced and still preventing too many parties from being elected and making strong and effective governments hard to form.
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Thank you. I think that one could say that, in 2018 UK, there are only 3, maybe 4, parties capable of getting beyond a 5% threshold, though that would change were PR instituted, because a vote for a small party would not be seen as wasted. There might be, in that scenario, half a dozen or more parties capable of getting 5%+. As you say, a 10% threshold would only slightly change the present overall result.
The absurdity of FPTP is shown by the case of the SNP, whose members had even more patience than have had UKIP’s! Founded 1934, first contested General Elections in 1935, but only got their first MP in 1970! That was also the first GE when the SNP got over 5% of the vote in Scotland! 36 years in the making! FPTP ensured that, even when the SNP got 22.1% (1997), it still had only 6 MPs (out of a possible 72).
Then, the tipping point. In 2015, the SNP got 50% of the popular vote and so FPTP was suddenly in the SNP’s favour (after 80 years!): 56 MPs out of a possible 59! Thus FPTP was suddenly unfair to the OTHER parties, who got 50% but ended up sharing 3 seats…
In 2017, that reduced to 35 MPs out of 59 (on a 36.9% vote) but only if the vote reduced to below about 30% would there be a huge cull of SNP MPs.
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@ Ian Millard – I should have thanked you for posting those three links regarding the “Bradbury”. The terms of the FoIA request are confused – the purpose of these interest-free Treasury notes was well expressed by Thomas Johnston who said (at p46 of The Financiers and the Nation (1934)) “When the [gold deficient] banks re-opened [in August 1914], the public discovered that, instead of getting their money back in gold, they were paid in a new legal tender of Treasury notes (the £1 notes in black and the 10s. notes in red colours). This new currency had been issued by the State, was backed by the credit of the State, and was issued to the banks to prevent the banks from utter collapse. The public cheerfully accepted the new notes; and nobody talked about inflation.”
https://archive.org/details/financiersandthe033017mbp/page/n63
The financial lame ducks having been bailed out, they went on to demand that the War effort be financed with a nice juicy interest bearing loan!
Sir John Redwood (as he now is) in his piece raises the inflation bugbear (they all do – including UKIP). This aside is not the place but for those interested in hearing a contrary view, consider reading the excellent “Grip of Death” (1998) by Michael Rowbotham particularly at p208 onwards. And yes, the interest-bearing advances which succeeded the interest-free Bradburies not only included “recycled money” i.e. savings but also new bank ledger credit (ex nihilo) fresh as a daisy – now that’s chutzpah! (Also, at page 102 is a great apercu on the function of the so-called National Debt which is not remotely what 98% of the citizenry might first imagine it to be).
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There was an economist on the predecessor of Newsnight in about 1975, who wanted a return to the Gold Standard. A lone voice and maybe not the correct one. In the end, currency is a matter of confidence. Money and banking is quite metaphysical in a way. Keynes understood that, as witness his flippant and easily derided comment about burying money and paying people to dig it up.
Formal measures and rules are only a framework for an economy. I saw several Eastern European countries in the 1980s, all under a similar though not identical type of socialized economic system, but all were very different. The DDR/East Germany looked better-organized (though even less free) as compared to Poland, for example, though of course very poor when compared to the then West Germany.
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Yes, Ian, the recent electoral history of the SNP conclusively demonstrates what a crazy system FPTP is with that being shown by the SNP benefitting massively by having its vote concentrated in just 59 constituencies whereas it’s true level of public support would be more accurately reflected with an electoral system not ENTIRELY based-upon small geographic constituencies. Luckily for Labour, the Welsh have so far shown no real propensity to vote for Plaid Cymru as then that party would find itself in real electoral trouble.
Of course there have been many examples of random ‘lottery type’ results being produced by this absurd system down the years such as 1951 when it enabled the Tories to ‘win’ the election despite Churchill and company having fewer overall votes in the country than Labour and prevented Ted Heath forming another government in February 1974 in defiance of the fact that his party had more votes than Wilson’s Labour.
In 1983 the Liberal/SDP alliance polled just 2% less votes than Labour yet because Labour’s support was more ‘lumpy’ and thus more geographically concentrated Labour had nearly 200 more seats!
More recently, in 2017 it enabled the Green Party to elect an MP despite that party having slightly fewer votes than UKIP that year merely because national Green Party support has a true local stronghold of support in just one constituency in Brighton!.
With results like these being regularly produced by this system FPTP amounts to little more than a random lottery rather than a genuinely fair and accurate representation of the British electorate’s will.
https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk
https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk
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It is interesting to compare the cases of UKIP here in Britain in 2015 to Germany’s AFD party in 2017 with both parties polling a decent level of public support of around 12% of the national vote. With Germany’s eminently democratic Mixed-Member PR system producing 94 Members of the Bundestag for that party whilst UKIP had to be content with just a solitary MP in Clacton under the archaic and very primitive FPTP. It would be fascinating to know what is the maximum level of votes a UK-wide party can get before it manages to elect a single MP. UKIP got 12% and came within 4,000 votes of losing their solitary MP in 2015! I suspect such is FPTP’s inaccurate representation of the electorate’s democratic will it could be as high as 20% of the national vote!
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Higher. In my view. If you look at individual seats, anything over 50% for one candidate/party can be called “safe”, “marginal” starts as high as 45% in the case of 2-party marginals, but as low as 25% in the rare case of seats with a 4-party split, such as Brighton Pavilion *was* in 2010, when Caroline Lucas won it for the Greens (it is now a safe seat purely for her, imo); she won it with a 31% vote share but in 2017 got over 52%).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brighton_Pavilion_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s
If a party got 25% across the board, it would still probably not get a single MP, whereas the Greens (currently around 2% in the polls) will probably keep Brighton Pavilion as long as Caroline Lucas remains.
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Indeed. The Green Party of England and Wales (the Scottish party being separate)’s very low real national standing in the electorate which is even lower than UKIP’s under Gerrard Batten and the fact they have a seat and that seat being a ‘safe’ one at that whereas UKIP doesn’t is a perfect demonstation of FPTP’s absudity as it shows the system is unfair not just to bigger and long-established parties like the Liberal Democrats but even treats the small minority parties very differently. How anyone apart from a Tory/Labour time server MP in a ‘safe’ constituency with a ‘seat for life’ or a multi billionaire/multi millionaire staunch Tory/ my dad was a miner and always voted Labour so I must do so as well idiot can defend this rubbish system is beyond me.
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I can only concur.
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Yes, I can see your reasoning here. It is fortunate for the supporters of this dumb system that there have been relatively few heavily-divided constituencies ie true three-way or four-way marginals as if that had been the case then we would have seen the system produce even more ‘wasted’ votes not electing anyone and parties piling-up large vote shares across the country akin to UKIP’s in 2015 (indeed HIGHER than that) with either very few or NO seats to show for it! Basically, the results would be even more akin to a totally random lottery, FPTP is only designed for two large parties on more than 80 percent of the vote or more therefore when you introduce strong third or fourth parties etc into the equation the primitive nature of the system can’t cope.
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Liberal Party performance 1865-1987. Note the collapse during WW1, shown in the difference between the general elections of 1910 and 1918 (from 272 MPs to 36, and that despite a 5% increase in the total number of MPs in Parliament). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_(UK)#Electoral_performance
Also, 19.3% in one of the 1974 elections, yet only 14 MPs (out of 635)! Obviously “should have been” about 120…
Note also the effect of boundaries etc: in 2001, the (by then) Liberal Democrats got 18.3%, yet 52 MPs (out of 659). Compare that with the Liberals of 1974 with their 19.3% and 14 MPs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democrats_(UK)#General_elections
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Ah yes, the ‘tipping point’ feature of FPTP under which a party can gain substantial electoral support with few seats to show for it and once having passed it said party will gain many more seats than it should do out of all proportion to its real support level in the electorate. FPTP also sometimes produces a totally excessive ‘winners bonus’ such as in 1997 when Blair’s Labour had huge 20% or so more seats than its vote share and a bigger majority than Thatchers’s landslide in 1983 despite having a broadly similar level of support to what the Tories had in 1983.
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When you introduce strong third or fourth parties into the FPTP system its effects can often be akin to a fat person trying ever so desperately to appear slim by trying-on a corset!
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https://deutschlandwahlkarte2017.berlinermorgenpost.de
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https//deutschlandwahl17.morgenpost.de
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https://deutschlandwahlkarte2017.morgenpost.de
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