Poll: General election voting round 4

Voting intentions in the General Election?

  • Alliance Party of Northern Ireland

    Votes: 2 0.3%
  • Conservative

    Votes: 276 39.5%
  • Democratic Unionist Party

    Votes: 1 0.1%
  • Green Party

    Votes: 41 5.9%
  • Labour

    Votes: 125 17.9%
  • Liberal Democrats

    Votes: 50 7.2%
  • Not voting/will spoil ballot

    Votes: 33 4.7%
  • Other party (not named)

    Votes: 5 0.7%
  • Plaid Cymru

    Votes: 3 0.4%
  • Respect Party

    Votes: 2 0.3%
  • Scottish National Party

    Votes: 31 4.4%
  • Social Democratic and Labour Party

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Sinn Fein

    Votes: 1 0.1%
  • UKIP

    Votes: 128 18.3%

  • Total voters
    698
  • Poll closed .
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Soldato
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Alan Sked (born 22 August 1947) is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, and is politically active, opposing Britain's membership of the European Union; he several times stood as a candidate in parliamentary elections, and founded the party now named UK Independence Party.

According to Alan Sked, Farage said "We will never win the ****** vote. The nig-nogs will never vote for us" after UKIP failed to make a significant impact in the 1997 general election. Sked has been strongly opposed to the party's leadership since the late 1990s, and the quotation cannot be verified independently.

http://icyapril.com/post/57264351405/things-you-should-know-before-you-vote-ukip

Furthermore, unless you support even tax across all wage bands, then why would you vote for UKIP? The policy may have gone but what kind of insane people would write that?

UKIP are a pressure group, nothing more. If people merely want us out the EU ASAP then a one off vote for a pressure group that will disband after, is perhaps fair enough. Those who back it as though its a real political party that will be their choice for the rest of like need to detail policies that they really like, and statistically how it will actually improve their life...
 
Caporegime
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45,401
Were ukip the only people to have a financially sound and approved by a third party manifesto/budget whilst all the other parties were to scared?
 
Caporegime
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Perfectly fine? If you're insane/have no idea. People choose between candidates, and the best of them gets picked (arguably), but think for just a second who is put forward in terms of the candidate for each party. You could have a seat that's always going to be a Tory/Labour marginal, but where the choice is between a candidate picked by Tory HQ vs a candidate picked by Labour HQ.


But people get the choice. With many PR system that choice is removed and the parties choose who would be selected to fill seats, and even the other system still rely on the fact that the party s putitng forward ccandiates, exactly like FPTP.

With PR you have a whole load of added complexity, e.g. if you use a party list then there load sof choices on implementation: e.g.:
  • Macanese "d'Hondt method" (greatly favors small parties) [4]
  • Sainte-Laguë method, LR-Hare (slightly favor very small parties when unmodified, if there is no election threshold)
  • LR-Droop (very slightly favors larger parties)
  • D'Hondt method (slightly favors larger parties)
  • LR-Imperiali (greatly favors larger parties)


So which is the fair system, answer is there is non because it is provably impossible to have a fair voting system. All you can really do is choose where the bias is, who it favors etc. E.g. under the German PR system the SNP might not get a single seat because their vote i less than the threshold, so how can that be described where in almost every region of Scotland the majority of people want the SNP in power over anyone else and yet they don't see a single MP!
 
Caporegime
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You claimed FPTP was better in terms of candidate selection, when it's evidently not given our current system is often a joke and the public has no choice in who stands, then with PR you can easily have a system like open primaries where the public choose who gets on the list, then which party they vote for. You're wrong on this point - why can you never accept that? You're like a Castiel dupe account, or something :confused:.

The point is there is a myriad of PR methods used, so we can pick and choose the elements we want. With your SNP example - where you're either desperately clutching at straws, or are demonstrating a seriously poor understanding - we'd probably have regions within Scotland, or Scotland as a massive region (less desirable for a UK Parliamentary election), so say the SNP get 55% of the vote in Scotland, they'd get 55% of the MPs. It wouldn't be a problem that nationally they poll more like 3.5%.



I can accept that there are some advantages to PR, why can't you accept there are also disadvantages to PR and advantages to FPTP?

With the SNP you just raise the important issue, would the threshold be regional or national? I believe in Germany it is national and thus the SNP would get zero seats.
 
Caporegime
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I've never said one is absolutely better than the other. Clearly there are pros and cons with each. I was saying that the specific claim you made about candidate selection was wrong. It's simple.

They don't have a pure national system of PR. They have a mixed member system. Under the German system the SNP would not get zero seats - nowhere near. They'd get a shed load of seats. Again highlighting how much you're clutching at straws and are debating about something you don't know about :o.


So, the German example was wrong. How about the Turkey 2002 vote where nearly half the votes were thrown out because the parties didn't hit the requisite threshold.

You seem to think I don't like PR or think FPTP is better, which are are both wrong. I think there are pros and cons to each. I don't see changing the voting system is the biggest issue though. PR doesn't resolve the electorate biases, doesn't remove the political parties and their short termed policies pandering to the uneducated. Removing political parties and fixed term governance would be a big step forwards.
 
Caporegime
Joined
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No, I don't. I've said that one system isn't absolutely better than the other and accept most rational people think that, but there are varying conceptions of PR and we could pick and choose elements we want.

The key thread of this 'debate' was where you were wrong on a specific issue, then I pointed it out, then you desperately tried to escape rather than saying, 'ah, true. I was wrong tbf'.

Point out where I was wrong, apart from the hypothetical example where I used Germany incorrectly?


PR doesn't necessarily provide any better selection of candidates (only some forms of it), and it is not like you couldn't employ a variant of open primaries for FPTP.
 
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