The far right are part of several coalitions in countries with PR, though. It doesn’t vaccinate your political system against that. The main thing you can do to reduce the march of the far right is to make people feel like their lives are getting better and better.

The party list system would mean that Nigel Farage was never out of parliament in the last ages. He would win every time.

To be fair, the PR result is far, far worse than what we have - only 4 Reform seats. It’s not a great time to be selling PR.

You make very good points.

Title: George Carlin Doesn’t Vote. Reaction: Idiot.

Subtitle: George carlin speaks the truth, Voting Is another way to keep you in a closed distracted bubble. Reaction: George Carlin is working to bring about the end of democracy in the USA. Clearly he doesn’t believe in it. I do.

I think being an independent suits Corbyn. He’s always been more of an independent campaigner than a party MP. All the best to him now he’s free of the whip.

Slime is the word.

Well he’s a bit of an idiot if he’s supporting Putin for free.

I think it’s a bad day to be criticising first past the post. Labour stole a bunch of seats from Farage with his kill-the-NHS policies, a turd who oughtn’t to be allowed to attend D-day celebrations, given that he stands against almost everything that we fought the war for. Not sorry one bit for that disproportionality.

Yes, but I think you’re overstating how right wing Labour pitched it. There were no claims to be anti woke. I think it was a pretty firmly centrist pitch. It’s the Conservatives who are going to panic and try to out-nutcase Farage. Labour are going to try and be responsible and fix the broken ship. It’s just whether they can do it fast enough for people to notice a big improvement in the cost of living vs wages problem.

Thank you. But we don’t blame regular Aussies. You’re good with us.

Yeah, the writer of the article seems to think that the Brexiteers were honest politicians trying to achieve what they believed would be good things for Britain. I don’t think that’s a widely held view in Britain.

You can’t out-Farage Farage. The Putin-sponsored shyster has no limits. Elections are won in the middle ground in the UK. The Conservatives could easily win next time. They just need an affable leader, some more centrist policies and some headlines about how they’ve had a change of heart and want to be nice to poor people now and balance the books again. Worked for Cameron. Starmer, meanwhile, had to make a difference in the cost of living crisis so large that people notice they’re getting better off, and restore hope that our children will be better off than us. Tall order.

She is one remarkably stupid, reality-blind narcissist.

I lived through the Blair government. Some left wing people were upset because he was on the right of the Labour Party, but things did indeed get a lot better in those ten years. Not everything by any stretch of the imagination. But no one expected him to make things better for gay people but not only did the legal situation change but the mood music affected the nation’s morals for the better for a while. It became socially far less acceptable to hate on gay folk. Could happen again, but I get why you might be cynical.

It’s altogether the wrong question.

Imagine a class who are excited to have a new teacher because the old one was a git and the new one seemed to be not a git, and one of the kids says “I’ll get bullied either way.” If one of the other kids says “What classroom rules do I have that you don’t?” that kid is starting an irrelevant discussion and either doesn’t understand, doesn’t care about, or supports the bullying that the first kid experiences and no adult would be particularly surprised if it turns out that the kid counting rules was in the same friend group as the bullies.

You see, if there’s a rule saying don’t pick on kids who have red hair and you start a conversation about how many rules there are about brown haired kids vs red haired kids, you either don’t understand why that rule exists at all, or you get it perfectly well and want to abolish it.

If you’re complaining that you have fewer rights than someone who has the right to not be discriminated against because they have a protected characteristic under the human rights act, you’re being self absorbed and insensitive at best, and no adult will be surprised if you turn out to have said a lot of very unkind things about trans people in the past.

Well, the shit of foxes, but yeah, bit unfair that.

With fox shit, you can put it in the bin and never see it again, but Farage is more of a stinky, greasy, smearing, permanently unflushable turd that’s been hanging about in the loo for decades. Every so often you think he’s gone away, but it turns out he was just lurking the other side of the u bend and pops back again.

If Rory Stewart were standing in my constituency, I would be very tempted to vote for him. In his work he’s now an advocate of alleviating many of the problems in the poorest communities globally by giving no-conditions cash. Who knew that the problems of poverty could be solved with money?!!!

He’s also a reasonable person and one who I think genuinely wants good things for the country in general rather than just for rich folk. He actually wants Britain to be governed well and in the interests of the population. He has some blind spots of course, he wouldn’t be a Conservative of he didn’t, but he’s decent and there’s hope that he can be persuaded by evidence of benefit.

This is surely right - we really don’t know where the undecided voters will go, and if a week is a long time in politics, five of them is an eternity.

I need my arsehole, though.

I mean it’s not a lot of fun, but the alternatives are much worse.