Can you believe this?
Under a further change to the bill, video footage that shows people crossing the Channel in small boats in a “positive light” will be added to a list of illegal content that all tech platforms must proactively prevent from reaching users.
Donelan said posting positive videos of crossings could be aiding and abetting immigration offences. Natalie Elphicke, the Conservative MP for Dover, had originally tabled an amendment proposing the change.
There will be a day when the boats going accross will be coming towards France.
However much I liked living in the Uk - this is getting absurd…
Out of control.
“ capture cases where senior managers had “consented or connived in ignoring enforceable requirements,”
How the Hell will they do that?
“ video footage that shows people crossing the Channel in small boats in a “positive light””
Well that knocks sailing on the head.
So much for 2nd world war films then 
Dunkirk banned 
I’m inclined to think that, in a democracy, a population always gets the government it deserves.
Up to a point - most people did not vote for the Tories, yet they are still in power thanks to first past the post.
My mum’s boat ‘My Tata’ was commandeered for Dunkirk.
She used to keep it at Bucklers Hard.
The case [to take away the right to camp on Dartmoor] was pursued by a man called Alexander Darwall… The standard retort of those who seek to justify our political system is that if you don’t like a decision, you should write to your MP. But what do people living in southern Dartmoor do? Anthony Mangnall, who claims to represent Totnes and South Devon, won his seat in 2019 with the help of a £5,000 donation from Darwall, the man who brought the case. Here, in microcosm, is everything that’s wrong with our politics.
The English need to go full Boudica. Voting isn’t working.
I reckon we should have the ‘Single Transferable Vote’ system to ensure that every successful candidate has at least 51% support.
Whilst the extreme policies will be gone next year the economic reality will remain for several years unless Labour radically alter what they’ve said they’re going to do.
Perhaps you didn’t see the appalling films of the devastation left by people who came out wild camping after Covid.
Responsible campers can always ask for permission to wild camp.
I was listening to Farming Today where a farmer in Buckinghamshire was threatened with prosecution by his local planning department for temporarily blocking access to certain fields using concrete blocks and old tractor tires to stop night time joy riding and then setting fire to the car. His staff are threatened and hare coursing takes place run by criminal gangs.
The farmer has the backing of his MP, the local police and his local community, but the planning department have done nothing to help or listen to him.
Rural crime has been ignored for too long.
You’re confusing two separate issues - rural crime and traditional or legal rights.
There has always been, and probably always will be a small minority of walkers, picnic-ers, etc, that leave litter or otherwise create a nuisance. If you think this is reason enough to remove everybody’s rights then you would presumably argue that nobody should be allowed to use the roads because some drivers cause accidents.
However we had a vote for electoral reform in 2011 which fell flat on its face. I think partly because the system proposed was not much fairer than FPTP and does not give “proportional” representation when used to elect a single MP per constituency.
So I think people either did not see the reason for change (and hence voted against) or saw that AV was not PR and hence also voted against - perhaps hoping for a further opportunity to revisit the issue.
STV with “super constituencies” returning multiple MPs to parliament would be proportional but I think the proposition would be difficult to sell to the UK electorate who are too wedded to the idea of “their” MP, even when having a single MP represent them works against their interests - as identified iin the Guardian article linked by Geof.
A further downside of PR is that it gives a voice to extremists, sometimes quite a big voice - in 2016 UKIP polled 12.6% of the vote which would have given them 81 seats.
We would benefit overall from PR, but I’m not sure we’ll ever get it unless a major party (i.e. the Tories or Labour) put it in their manifesto and then make the change without further reference to the plebiscite. I can’t see the Tories ever doing so and I don’t see Labour doing it under Starmer.
That comparison doesn’t work.
In most jurisdictions (UK and France, for example) there is a distinction between what people in general can do unless prohibited, like wild camping
and what an individual can do only if licensed, like driving.
I swing one way and then the other, but I think I’ve settled on (the right form of) PR being a good thing.
As you say, a key argument against PR is that it gives power to extremist parties, but the sad experience in UK and - perhaps - France is that parties move towards the extreme anyway if the extremist party offers ideas which the population agrees with (and, indeed, that’s reasonable in a democracy, however much we might deplore it).
Out of curiosity, and because it is a) raining and b) I’m waiting for, and don’t want to miss, Jeff’s French cousin dropping off my new wellies I re-calculated the 2015 election results assuming PR.
Here is the result - apologies that it is a bit long.
Source for data - Electoral Reform UK
A couple of seats seem to have gone missing, counting the total No of seats in the “Nationwide” table gives 649, however there were 650 seats in parliament that year - possibly this discrepancy comes through not counting the Speaker, somewhere I’ve lost another seat in the PR totals, haven’t spotted where yet.
I have calculated the votes for the nations separately (which is why I used the Electoral Reform data as it was the first I found which broke down the four nations separately) - I very much doubt that PR would be applied nationally (Edit: i.e a single amalgamation of all UK votes) as doing so would wreck strong regional parties like SNP, Plaid or any of the NI parties. It would most likely be, as previously mentioned, “super constituencies”.
Obviously the big loosers are the Tories, Labour and, interestingly, the SNP while the big winners are the Lib Dems, Greens and, of course for 2015, UKIP.
So, clearly the result would be that no single party has overall control. Tory+UKIP+Unionists would have 328 seats vs Lab+Various Liberals+SNP+Greens+Plaid on 310. Sinn Fein and “others” I haven’t allocated to the most likely coalitions
Thus even with PR we’d have had a balance in parliament which would have almost certainly gone for the referendum and probably with a big UKIP component pushed for a hard Brexit afterwards. Would we even have had the 2017 election?
England |
533 |
||||
Tory |
41 |
219 |
|||
Lab |
31.6 |
168 |
|||
UKIP |
14.1 |
75 |
|||
LibDem |
8.2 |
44 |
|||
Greens |
4.2 |
22 |
|||
Other |
0.9 |
5 |
|||
Scotland |
59 |
||||
SNP |
50 |
29 |
|||
Lab |
24.3 |
14 |
|||
Tory |
14.9 |
9 |
|||
LibDem |
7.5 |
4 |
|||
UKIP |
1.6 |
1 |
|||
Greens |
1.3 |
1 |
|||
Other |
0.9 |
1 |
|||
Wales |
40 |
||||
Lab |
36.9 |
15 |
|||
Tory |
27.2 |
11 |
|||
UKIP |
13.6 |
5 |
|||
Plaid |
13.6 |
5 |
|||
LibDem |
6.5 |
3 |
|||
Greens |
2.6 |
1 |
|||
Other |
1.1 |
0 |
|||
NI |
17 |
||||
DUP |
25.7 |
4 |
|||
SinnFein |
24.5 |
4 |
|||
UUP |
16 |
3 |
|||
SDLP |
13.9 |
2 |
|||
Alliance |
8.6 |
2 |
|||
Other |
11.3 |
2 |
|||
UK |
649 |
Actual |
PR |
Change |
|
Tory |
331 |
239 |
-92 |
||
Lab |
232 |
197 |
-35 |
||
UKIP |
1 |
81 |
80 |
||
LibDem |
8 |
51 |
43 |
||
SNP |
56 |
29 |
-27 |
||
Greens |
1 |
24 |
23 |
||
Plaid |
3 |
5 |
2 |
||
DUP |
8 |
3 |
-5 |
||
SinnFein |
4 |
4 |
0 |
||
UUP |
2 |
3 |
1 |
||
SDLP |
3 |
2 |
-1 |
||
Alliance |
2 |
2 |
|||
Other |
8 |
8 |
|||
Total |
649 |
648 |
Quick explanation - the number after each nation is the number of seats in parliament for that nation, the number after each party is the percentage of that nation’s vote that the party received, then the number of seats that it would get if PR were completely fair.
The overall totals are the number of seats actually won, the number that would have been won under PR and the change.
Well done for reading this far down 
Fill your boots!
Wellies in your case
Hope Jeff’s cousin has been.
Jeff’s French cousin. Not yet - he’s out and about according to the tracking