UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
view the rest of the comments
It is great to see Tories standing up, but doing this before the election is due is a tad too little, too late. He has been very proactive on the green policies of the Tories in the past, but I have seen little evidence of calling out the rhetoric from the likes of Braverman, Patel and 30p Lee.
By all means point me out if this is wrong. I certainly do not believe all Tory MPs are bad, I just feel they have favoured their jobs more than doing what is right.
What's got me is the line that he no longer feels the need to vote with his party due to loyalty and is now focusing on what his constituents need.
**That's what they're voted in to do, look after their constituents, not the party. **
I listened to too much Joe Rogan back in the day and I'm still convinced that the way politics is right now is a dusty bullshit, not democracy.
We used to have to vote for someone to represent us in Parliament because it was a 4 day ride on a horse to get to London, but we're currently living in the age of AI and Blockchain, not horses and carriages.
I'm not saying I have the answer to what new age democracy should look like, but relying on a Party to look after us is not it. Not when we can instantly communicate around the world.
Personally I think the future should be none stop referendums on ideas that we can vote on electronically. Cue the "Oh no, but looks what happened when we had a referendum that one time" and I'll say yes, because it was a one time thing everyone went a bit silly, but when it's an everyday occurrence it will just be another boring thing that nobody but the interested would pay attention to.
So should we legalise weed in this country? The only people bothered to vote would be pot heads, medical users and those that are rabidly against weed. Most of the rest of society would just ignore it.
Net Zero? That would be an interesting one, but the oil barons would have to buy off more votes than the Stop Oil side instead of a few political types.
I'm used to Reddit, so I'm expecting lots of replies off people telling me I'm dumb, so let's see if I'm surprised.
I feel like I remember reading about a hypothesised digital voting system where every voter can either vote for themselves, or pass their vote to a representative, that can in turn pass their own and any collected votes to another representative. But each voter can withdraw their vote from a representative at any time.
So you could still have a representative body, which I think is important for getting work done. But citizens are far more empowered; if you disagree with your elected representative over a particular issue, you can rescind your vote from them temporarily and vote directly on the issue yourself.
I like the idea of this, although there'd need to be a robust verification system in place to make sure people aren't being bullied into passing their votes off to others.
I think it'd generally lead to people being more engaged and politically literate, though. And it could even lead to individuals bargaining with people they know. Like, I could say to my neighbour, "hey, I'll vote your way on this policy that I'm indifferent about if you vote my way on this other policy".
I do wonder how much of an issue disinformation campaigns would be under such a system. Would it increase their influence? Would hate rags like the Daily Mail find themselves with more influence? Or would people start to cotton onto the fact that nothing they suggest improves anything?
Absolutely it would, just look how Cambridge Analytica influenced the Brexit vote, it was basically brainwashing. But that's happened now, it's history and could be taught in schools if it hadn't been swept under the rug...
But that's the thing, "Western Democracy" could flourish because we would have all the debates on the public forums with the outside interference from other states and our own propaganda campaigns going too.
It would still be Politics, but with less Politicians.
My first thought was of thousands of people mindlessly giving their votes to their favorite celebrity, and how horribly that could go.