Tag: united kingdom

Conservatives get clear majority in UK General Election. …And everybody is blinking in surprise.

Neil has hit this story over at RedState already, so let me just embed this…

…and note that it came out of nowhere. I was expecting the Tories to lose seats overall, honestly. I certainly wasn’t expecting to see three of the four other major parties (Labour, Liberal Democrats, and UKIP) to be suddenly bereft of leadership. I’d feel bad about getting last night’s results wrong, except that everybody else did, too.

Moe Lane

PS: Mind you, a ‘Conservative’ in the UK is like a Democrat here. Albeit one being hunted out to extinction.

Democrats choose European Union over Great Britain.

And the Democrats don’t even have the common decency to do it in public.

The Obama administration has warned British officials that if the UK leaves Europe it will exclude itself from a US-EU trade and investment partnership potentially worth hundreds of billions of pounds a year, and that it was very unlikely that Washington would make a separate deal with Britain.

The warning comes in the wake of David Cameron’s visit to Washington, which was primarily intended as a joint promotion of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Barack Obama, which the prime minister said could bring £10bn a year to the UK alone, but which was overshadowed by a cabinet rebellion back in London.

Continue reading Democrats choose European Union over Great Britain.

Alternative voting goes down in flames in UK.

The basic system in the United Kingdom is what’s known as ‘first past the post:’ essentially, whoever has a plurality of votes wins.  Plurality wins are in fact somewhat typical results in parliamentary systems, given that parliamentary systems tend to spawn viable third and fourth parties like rotten meat was once believed to have spawned flies*; but it can be a problem when one side of the ideological spectrum is fragmented among several different parties, and the other is not.  This is the situation in England right now, in fact; which is why the Liberal Democrats (who are the junior partners in a coalition government with the Conservatives**) were pushing an alternative voting scheme where you could indicate second and third choices, until somebody hit the 50%+1 vote mark.

As the PJ Tatler noted, the goal here for the British Left was to keep their fragmentation while eliminating the bad effects from it: presumably, the ability to reassign votes in divided elections would give Leftist candidates a better chance of actually winning seats.  Alas, the vote went against the Liberal Democrats 2-1; partially because the Conservatives were naturally opposed to the notion… and partially because apparently the Labour party was not entirely in favor of it, either. Continue reading Alternative voting goes down in flames in UK.

This Guardian article on the Falklands situation is not exactly illogical. #rsrh

It’s merely not based on Aristotelian logic.  I mean, when something starts like this:

If some supreme being could give British leftists of my generation the power to go back and stop one historical event, I have no doubt that we would rewind the tape and wipe out the Falklands war. Before General Galtieri’s fascistic junta invaded the islands Margaret Thatcher had no “-ism” after her name. She seemed a doomed prime minister surrounded by enemies, whose party was third in the polls behind the SDP, a political force I suspect many young readers have never heard of. After Britain’s victory, nothing could stop her and by the time she had finished, British socialism was dead, and the prospects for British social democracy did not seem much healthier.

…you would assume that we’re about to hear some solemn pontificating on how the UK needs to mediate its dispute with Argentina. Not so much: the title is “Obama should back our claim to the Falklands,” and the author is calling the President a neoconservative for not siding with the Brits.

No, really. Continue reading This Guardian article on the Falklands situation is not exactly illogical. #rsrh