I can't get over how insane it is that the sitting party gets to look at their polling numbers and decide if it's a good time to have an election or not. I get why they are so insistent on keeping the monarchy because the rest of the system is kept together by tape and random bits of string
this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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It’s not just the UK, it’s actually quite common wordwide.
Isn't that because it was spread by the British in the first place?
Somewhat true, but there's lots of parliamentary systems that were never under British rule. Nobody has followed the US's weird system. Not even ones where the US had a direct hand in setting up the democratic government, like Iraq.
The weird system of... predictable elections? Because that's what we're talking about. You can have predictable elections with a parliamentary system.
And any government is only as good as the people in it, as we can see from Brexit. They threw away their future because of a non-binding vote, which was very close and done only once.
Weird in having a whole bunch of compromises between big and small states, and separating the power of the executive and legislature. Countries looked at both of those and picked the one that's more chaotic, but less clumsy.
There's no reason why the current government should be able to pick the date of the election. What's the reason behind that besides "The Prime Minister wants it that way"?
I dunno, with the American system you have like 2 year long campaigning cycle for president. There's almost no break and it's exhausting. In Canada when an election is called the campaign is only about 6 weeks give or take a week.
Also, if the government becomes dysfunctional, it can be dissolved and a new government elected. The US system doesn't allow for that flexibility.
If your campaign is only 6 weeks, you have to be campaigning all the time too. Do you think people just say "oh there's an election in 6 weeks? Maybe I'll run for office!"? They have to have everything ready to go immediately. All politicians are campaigning all the time.
It's really different though. The politicians are expected to be working at the national capitol during normal sessions. While they are 'campaigning' in that they'll be trying to score sound bites and such for the media, they're not allowed to spend money on regular campaigning until the election season starts.
How many rallies for president haver been held already with the election still 166 days away? How much money spent? It's utterly exhausting.
It's a consequence of parliamentary sovereignty.
Parliament can always dissolve itself and call an election, and it's an important mechanism for getting rid of the government.
The problem is that the prime minister also has a majority in parliament, and that means he can make parliament dissolve itself when he likes.
This was actually a problem for Johnson. Initially, he didn't have enough of a majority and it wasn't clear he could call an election without Corbyn's support.
So is dictatorships.
I'm just like a dictatorship we also know the outcome of this election before it's even announced.
The guardian were saying that they decided "this was the best they're going to get"
The Sun had something like Rishi picks his moment and "it caught starmer on the hop!"
It's a corrupt convention but it wasn't always the case. An important reform by the 2010-15 coalition government was the Fixed Term Parliaments Act, which took this incredibly important decision out of the prime minister's partisan hands and have elections on a predictable 5 year cycle (barring the government falling or a supermajority for early elections).
After Boris Johnson won the 2019 election though, he set about dismantling checks and balances such as this. He also changed the electoral system for mayoral elections to First Past the Post (with no consultation or referendum - which the Tories have always insisted was needed to change the electoral system away from FPTP...) because FPTP tends to favour Tories.
Wait? Is the current political leader allowed to just change how votes are counted for the next election?! Is this why the Wikipedia article for how election in England work is just incomprehensible garbage?
All of our constitutional law takes the form of Acts of Parliament that can be amended or repealed with a 50%+1 vote in Parliament - unlike most countries where the constitution sits above the parliament and changing it requires a supermajority and/or a referendum. Boris had a majority so he could change the constitution. It's a totally messed up system.
One reason British liberals as so passionate about internationalism and the European Union is that international treaties and EU law are some of the few mechanisms we have had for constraining executive overreach, since they sit outside and above Parliament's remit. For example, even if Parliament were to repeal the Human Rights Act, Britain remains a party to the European Convention on Human Rights (which is why some Tories now talk about withdrawing from this too). Without international safeguards external to the UK, in theory all that stands between Britain and despotism is a simple majority vote in Parliament.
Everything is eventually decided by the majority of votes in the house of commons. Even if you put a law in saying that the pm can't do this without a 80% vote, that law itself could be repealed with a 50% vote.
Theoretically it would only require a 50% vote to remove elections or something crazy. (Although in practice that might not get past the king who technically has the final say)
There is no formal constitution that has more protection like in some countries.
Holy shit, no wonder the empire is fucking dying.
Can't they create a law which says that the PM cannot do something without 80% of the votes and that the law itself requires the same amount of votes to be modified or superseded in any way?
It's been a while since my politics A level, so I may get some of the terms wrong but hopefully the facts right.
As the UK doesn't have a formal constitution, it relies on convention and that parliament is effectively all powerful (under the crown) in that if parliament (encompassing both houses in this context) votes for something it can do it. (As it represents the will of the people and has the authority of the crown (less relevant in the modern day))
Parliament can't therefore lock a decision in such a way that a future parliament can't change because the future parliament is still all powerful.
In practice though this isn't entirely the case. You can make a law like you said, and while a future parliament can break it, it would (probably) look bad on them. But what does that do to stop politicians?
A further note on the previous chain - we go have two houses of parliament; the house of commons is the main one with the green benches that most will recognise. It has our elected representatives (MPs) in and (normally) where the PM is selected from.
The house of lords (red benches, appointed members for life) is generally considered the check chamber. It used to be able to block laws entirely, but I believe lost that power semi recently and it can now be overruled by the commons after 2/3 rejections.
But then parliament isn't all powerful, is it? See the omnipotence paradox:
A similar problem occurs when accessing legislative or parliamentary sovereignty, which holds a specific legal institution to be omnipotent in legal power, and in particular such an institution's ability to regulate itself.
And tbh, a parliament which cannot regulate itself is a fairly powerless parliament.
on the anniversary of the day they got their asses handed to them by some bluecoats????
My tin hat is they they will try and use the us election as some sort of smokescreen.
The one in November?
Polling looks good for Labour. Kinda crazy the prime minister basically torpedoed his own party because it was so bad.
They got to announce that inflation is more or less back down to normal levels, so this is about as good as the polling is likely to be. There was one a few months back that actually showed the Conservatives getting fewer seats than the SNP. To be clear it was only one poll and I do not think it will happen, but for readers that don't already know this, the SNP only even contest less than 10% of the total seats. The fact that that was ever even close to the bounds of possibility is wild.
i'd walk around with a smug grin for weeks if the tories didn't even win "official opposition"
Yeah I could see it being a strategy to keep as many seats as possible. After looking at the polling, the Conservative party has been declining in popularity since 2020. The best timing for them is ASAP because it's only getting worse. They are just about as unpopular as they were when Liz Truss was in office.
'Murica... well, Mercia, at least.
Interesting date.
UK elections are always on Thursdays for some unfathomable reason.
It's so the votes can be counted overnight and the announcement made on the Friday. Then the incoming government sorts things out over the weekend and we can have a new functioning government on Monday.
If they did the election on say a Monday then the announcement would be made on Tuesday, then the country would just be in limbo for 2 days while everyone tried to work out what was going to happen. This way, the limbo happens over the weekend where not much business needs to be done anyway.
Are you for real? This is hilariously absurd.
Forming a government takes much more than just a weekend if you are serious about it and in a democracy there should be a peaceful shift of power from the prior government so having that one run the day to day business until the new one is in place, should be no issue.
British democracy is even weaker than i thought it was.
I didn't design the system. It's just how it works.
Obviously they don't actually form the government over the weekend they know who they're going to have in various positions because they're already in the shadow cabinet positions. It exists because historically the MP who are now cabinet members, and therefore required to live near the capitol, may very well actually be in completely different parts of the country and it would take them a few days to get back to London.
Especially the government suddenly called an election like they've just done.
I know you didn't design it, or come up with that "reasoning". To me it sounds like it is just some excuse to have votes on a working day to disadvantage working class people from voting.
I know it sounds like that but it's been like this for hundreds of years. It's just a holdover, it made sense back then.
The problem with conspiracy theorists is sometimes they don't know when to stop. Sometimes there isn't actually a evil sadistic reason, it's just a thing.
Anyway the polls are open for like 10 hours. Somewhere in there you're going to find an opportunity to vote. I mean I didn't vote in the last local elections until about 6:00 p.m.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Rishi Sunak has vowed to "fight for every vote" as he called an early UK general election for Thursday 4 July.In a surprise announcement, the PM said he would go to the polls this summer as he bids to win a fifth term in office for the Conservatives.It overturned expectations of an autumn election, which might have given his party a better chance of closing the gap with Labour.Sir Keir Starmer said it was "time for change" away from "Tory chaos".
There was confusion in at least some parts of the Conservative Party about why Mr Sunak decided to call the general election sooner than was widely expected, the BBC's political correspondent Henry Zeffman reported.
In a TV statement shortly afterwards, Sir Keir argued Tory "chaos" had damaged the economy, and a vote for his party represented a chance to bring political stability.Adding it was "time for change", he criticised the Conservatives' management of public services, the NHS and record on tackling crime.
SNP leader John Swinney, who took over as Scotland's first minister earlier this month, said the election was a chance to "remove the Tory government and put Scotland first".Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey said it would be a chance to "kick Rishi Sunak's appalling Conservative government out of office", whilst Greens co-leader Carla Denyer said her party was aiming to elect "at least four" new MPs.And Reform UK leader Richard Tice said the Tories had "broken Britain" but Labour would "bankrupt Britain," and only his party would offer "common sense policies that can now save Britain".
Mr Sunak's statement is the start of weeks of general election campaigning for the 650 seats in Parliament.It will be fought on the first set of new constituency boundaries since 2010, redrawn to reflect population changes since then, and will be the first where voters have to show ID.The Royal Family has postponed engagements "which may appear to divert attention or distract from the election campaign", Buckingham Palace said, adding that the King and Queen sent their "sincere apologies" to those affected.
At the last election in 2019, Boris Johnson won an 80-seat majority after calling a snap poll as he fought to get his Brexit withdrawal deal through Parliament.It was followed by an extraordinarily volatile period in British politics, as the country was hit by the Covid pandemic and Mr Johnson was forced to resign, amid a cabinet revolt over a series of scandals.His successor Liz Truss lasted 49 days in the job before she quit, after a market backlash to her tax and spending plans announced at a hastily-arranged "mini Budget" in September 2022.This is the first general election since 2015 that has not required a vote in Parliament to approve the date, since legislation fixing the time between polls was reversed two years ago.
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