Pesky Splinter posted:

ewe2 posted:

Love the OP recap, terrific summary. If my country (Australia) wasn't already more hosed up than yours, I'd almost feel sorry for you.

Breath Ray posted:

Can you take us through the process you blokes and sheilas had to get through to have mandatory voting? We're campaigning to have it here too.

quote:

Compulsory voting was first advocated by Alfred Deakin at the turn of the 20th century. Voting was voluntary at the first 9 federal elections.

Compulsory enrolment for federal elections was introduced in 1911.

In 1915, consideration was given to introducing compulsory voting for a proposed referendum. As the referendum was never held the idea wasn’t pursued.

Also in 1915, compulsory voting was introduced in Queensland by the Liberal Government of Digby Denham, apparently concerned that ALP shop stewards were more effective in "getting out the vote", and that compulsory voting would restore a level playing ground (ironically, Denham went on to lose the 1915 election).

The significant impetus for compulsory voting at federal elections appears to have been a decline in turnout from more than 71% at the 1919 election to less than 60% at the 1922 election. The Bruce-Page government (a conservative coalition of the Nationalist and Country parties) was reluctant to be too closely identified to such a proposal.

In 1924, a private member's bill to amend the Electoral Act was introduced in the Senate by Senator H. J. M. Payne (Nat. Tas) sponsored in the House of Representatives by Edward Martin (Nat. Perth). It was only the third private member's bill passed into law since 1901.

The impact was immediate, with turnout at the 1925 election rising to over 91%.

Victoria introduced compulsory voting in 1926, NSW and Tasmania in 1928, WA in 1936 and SA in 1942.

When enrolment and voting at federal elections was introduced for Australian Aborigines in 1949 it was voluntary, and continued to be so until 1984 when enrolment and voting became compulsory for all eligible electors.

Sion posted:

Almost the olympics. How are we feelin' about that as a sporting event UKMT?

Oberleutnant posted:

When you get to the point at which you need either a carrot or a stick to get people voting it might be time to start considering that something in that system is basically broken and needs fixing.
But forcing or bribing people to engage isn't a fix, and won't produce a satisfactory outcome.

Figure out why people don't care or bother voting (hint: it's not simple laziness at root) and start there.

Breath Ray posted:

Can you take us through the process you blokes and sheilas had to get through to have mandatory voting? We're campaigning to have it here too.

quote:

There is compulsory registration of births or deaths without objection, and compulsory vaccination in regard to which we only occasionally hear any protest. There is compulsory military service throughout the Commonwealth [of Australia] with very few objections; and also compulsory census and statistical returns by individuals. There is compulsory registration of persons practicising professions, or following certain businesses; and there is compulsory education in every State of the union. We have compulsory notification of infectious diseases, and we are compelled to comply with the requirements of Sewerage Boards.

Sion posted:

Almost the olympics. How are we feelin' about that as a sporting event UKMT?

ronya posted:

perception of modernity/scientific management of society/social good of mass mobilization/progressivism at the end of the long 19th century:

(chomp)

quote:

(there are some remarkable parallels between 20xx neoliberalism and 19xx progressivism in the sense of appeals to 'scientific', 'rational' quantification in the face of urban machinery, but I digress)

Baron Corbyn posted:

The idea of politics being some kind of sport that you "win" or "lose" is one of my biggest loving pet peeves. I still get wound up about political commentators on television comparing a potential electoral pact between Labour and the Lib Dems in the event of the Conservatives getting a plurality to "Chelsea and Arsenal combing their points to overtake Man Utd in the Premiership" or something along those lines and I'm pretty sure that was after the exit polls in 2010.

HJB posted:

It's good to start your Monday morning with some brain training, or even better, some mental gymnastics:

ewe2 posted:

There's some nice historiography there, but I would add a couple of claims to what I started with above:

1. Australian government has always tended to be centrist and fairly authoritarian. Such "fixes" are natural to such a culture, although the rational edge added the final justification. They gave the hoi polloi the vote, not a reason to riot.

2. One of the reasons why compulsory voting works in Australia is that it removes a lot of work for the parties. It's a big country, it's hard enough to make noise in one electorate, have you seen the size of some of them? Voluntary voting gets reviewed every so often but the punchline is that means an extra cost, to get a turnout, on top of your policy platform/personality politics angles. That's expensive, and much better paid for by the taxpayer who wanted the vote in the first place, goes the thinking.

Spuckuk posted:

So, Owen Smith held a rally in Liverpool on Saturday. It was..not well attended.

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

Just continuing the mandatory voting chat from last thread, it's great, but you'd never get anyone in power to agree to a 'none of the above' option. You just need to make people aware that it's showing up to a polling booth and getting their name ticked off that's compulsory. If they want to draw a vulva or cock on their ballot paper and hand that in as an informal vote that's their democratic right.

The Saurus posted:

http://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/labour-the-way-ahead-78d49d513a9f#.iuv4j635t

This Article is absolutely fantastic and a must-read for anyone interested in the future of Labour and the left in general in the UK

quote:

nobody close to power in Britain actually proposes to break with the economic model of the past 30 years except Corbyn and his shadow chancellor McDonnell.

quote:

In turn this creates an opportunity for Labour to put itself — as the Libdems never have and never will — at the head of a progressive movement.

Its aims should be:

to resist racism, nationalism and xenophobia;
to retain the UK’s membership of the European Economic Area;
and to protect workers’, consumers and environmental rights.

Guavanaut posted:

August, the last month of Summer Back by appointment next July

Welcome to the UK Marxism Thread, where we discuss dialectical materialism and high voltage pulse generators. And Oberleutnant writes us a reading list. And hope dies.
(Also UK Mega Thread; UK Manga Thread; Uberwachung Kommandant May, Theresa)

The Story So Far
A long time ago, the United Kingdom was under a coalition government. Elections were upcoming, and all the polls predicted another hung parliament.
David Cameron was not popular among his back benches, and he came up with a genius plan to promise an in/out referendum on a dead pig the European Union to secure Tory support.
He did this in the knowledge that in a second coalition he could throw it away immediately as a bargaining chip.
This did not work.
Liberal Democrat support evaporated and the Tories had a slim majority. Cameron had an election promise for a referendum that he didn't want.
Labour, having lost under Ed Miliband and a sandwich, called a leadership election.
They nominated a Red Tory, two Moderates, and a Socialist Jam Grandad. The latter was part of a tradition of the party left nominating a candidate each time, and the party as a whole being certain they would not win.
Part of the reason that they were so certain this time was because they had moved to a new system which gave the leftist trade unions less power and the sensible centrist membership more power.
This did not work.
After a landslide win by Corbyn, his Unity cabinet immediately started leaking internal memos and trying to backstab him in a huge game of Mafia.
Despite repeatedly calling Corbyn unelectable and Labour under Corbyn unelectable, Labour continued to pick up seats in local elections, as well as the London and Bristol mayoral elections.
The entire press turned on Corbyn with the possible exceptions of the Mirror and Morning Star. The Guardian especially proved that Phil Ochs quote about liberals.
During this time, a date and question were agreed for the EU referendum. The Conservative Party began to form two rival factions based on their Remain/Leave stance and campaigns began.
Cameron and Osborne headed up the Remain camp with Liberal Democrat support. Johnson and Gove headed up the Leave camp with UKIP support. A few fracturing sides formed and vied for dominance for a while.
Leave campaigned mostly on 75 million Turks clawing at the borders and the EU having 700 laws about your mattress. Remain campaigned mostly on the economy, confident that the facts would win out.
This did not work.
Immediately after Leave won the referendum, both the Tories and Labour fell into complete disarray.
Angela Eagle led a Labour coup, citing Corbyn's failure to share a platform with Tories and Lib Dems as the reason that Remain lost. Her campaign website was revealed to be set up before the results came in.
The Tories began a comparatively clean set of backstabbing, Cameron resigned, Johnson didn't show up to Parliament, Gove and Fox and Pube Beard dropped out of the leadership rapidly.
This left former Home Secretary Theresa May (a remainer) and relative unknown Andrea Leadsom (a leaver). The Conservatives began to prepare for a leadership election.
This did not work.
Leadsom dropped out of the race citing almost exactly the same 'media pressures' as Chuka Umunna did when they found out about his gay mephedrone brandy parties.
In Leadsom's case it was supposedly because she made some comments about motherhood or was a mother or something.
This meant that May strolled into the PM position uncontested and began to build a cabinet.
It was revealed that Gove and his wife plotted to backstab Johnson, in the hope of a shot at the title or a higher cabinet position.
This did not work.
Johnson was invited back to a great office despite his fuckery, possibly just to keep him out of the way.
A Unity cabinet of Leave and Remain backers was created with some new and old faces.
Meanwhile on the other side of the floor, Labour's coup was continuing its descent into complete poo poo. Their timed hourly resignations completely overshadowed the original Tory chaos, and Eagle had stepped up and down about a dozen times.
The PLP decided that the best way to run this was to ratfuck Corbyn out of his position by claiming that incumbents still needed the same number of nominations as challengers, thus meaning they could run someone unopposed and maybe win.
This ended up going to the NEC, where they believed by having a secret ballot everyone's inner anti-Corbyn would allow them to safely remove him from the ballot.
This did not work.
The party also started to think of ways to undo all that tiresome membership stuff that got Corbyn elected in the first place. They decided that any member who joined in the past 6 months should be disenfranchised.
They also raised the registered supporter fee to £25 and cut the application time down to three days, half of which the server was out of action, hoping that the grassroots Corbynites would be scared off by the poll tax.
This did not work.
Having raised millions through the supporter scheme, and getting more registered supporters than they did the first time around at £3, the PLP looked increasingly nervous that they would have to actually run an election.
The local CLPs got a bit tired of this and started threatening deselection for MPs involved in the coup. This got classed as 'abuse' and CLP meetings were suspended until after the leadership elections.
The PLP finally managed to find a candidate to represent their values, whatever they are, in the form of Owen Smith, former Pfizer PR man.
Eagle stood down again.
As a last ditch attempt, major Labour (brain?) donor Michael Foster launched a lawsuit to get Corbyn removed from the ballot by force of law.
This did not work.

This now leaves the UK in the state of an upcoming Brexit (but not this year), a Labour Party in disarray, and a Labour leadership election at some point in the future, probably with Corbyn running against a pumpkin with a Tony Blair mask.

In Summary
Conservatives:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95I29rCaFjA
Labour:

Liberal Democrats:

UKIP:

The United Kingdom as a Whole:


What Else Is Happening?
• UKIP leader Nigel Farage resigns again, starting a hunt for a leader conditional on a minimum of five years membership.
• After a 7 year wait, the Chilcot Inquiry report into the Iraq War is released. Tony lied, thousands died.
• The Trident nuclear weapons platform is voted for renewal by a high majority. Theresa May would use it in retaliation. Owen Smith might use it on Trump.
• The European Data Protection Supervisor has spoken out against government (or corporate) mandated backdoors into encryption. Hopefully May will not be able to wriggle out.
• A heatwave of 95F (308K in the Express) hits the South.
• The Isle of Man opens up both marriages and civil partnerships to same and mixed sex couples. Northern Ireland burns a witch or something.
• Distributed ledger technology GovCoin is being used in trials of benefit payments, to allow monitoring of spending. There is no way this will be terrible.
• Wales did a football, it was good. My hen laid a haddock on top of a tree &c.
• The skies are opened up for Amazon drone delivery in the UK, reminding everyone that clay trap is a fun sport for all the family.
• UK economic activity fell to 47.7, the lowest level since April 2009 and falling at its fastest rate since the aftermath of the 2009 financial crisis. Typical Remainiac scaremongering.
• Labour MP Conor McGinn accused Corbyn of bullying, and claimed that he threatened to call his "Sinn Féin dad".


The May Coups

Glorious Revolution
UKMT July 2016
UKRIP June 2016 Brextravaganza!
UKMT May 2016
UKMT April 2016
UKMT March 2016
UKMT February 2016

Saxon Peasants' Revolt
Brexit Financial Crisis Thread

Act Anent the Demission
Scotpol Thread

St. George's Night Uprising
EDL/Fash Thread

Beer Hall Putsch
Europol Thread

Young Turk Revolution
Paedogeddon/Press Corruption Thread

Great Upheaval
Trainchat Thread

Regime of the Colonels
Political Cartoons Thread

Cauliflower Revolution
#ukgoons on synIRC. It's mostly active during Question Time, but there's always some people around (thanks crispix).

Finally, keep the following in mind

ronya posted:

someone should let John "IRON DISCIPLINE" McDonnell know!

but actually, wait...


EEA, eh. This is what radical change in an economic system looks like, comrades.

ronya posted:

Reading Owen Jone's latest with amusement.

Some of it feels familiar.

Guavanaut posted:

You'd think there's be a bigger turnout for someone who likes writing pieces in the Sun daring to set foot in Liverpool.

namesake posted:

Yeah that bit totally lost me. I can understand the leftwing Remain argument but a leftwing Rejoin? That's madness.

Lord of the Llamas posted:

I think the idea is to scupper leaving rather than rejoining. It's clear that the three brexiteers will make a complete mess of this thing and public opinion will swing back to remaining sufficiently to quietly drop the whole idea.

ronya posted:

Australian nationbuilding doesn't seem especially centrist or authoritarian as nationbuilding projects historically go, by the by.

(Australian lay historical narratives tend to be especially exceptionalist and parochial in a way that exceeds even American narratives, so I feel obliged to point this out).

quote:

I'm not sure about #2. Winning office does not entail gaining the most voters but getting more voters than the other parties; low turnouts are generally good for incumbents. If this the main salient point, parties would hasten to abolish compulsory voting, and they would be in power to do so.

Spuckuk posted:

To be fair, I walked past it by accident without realising it was supposed to be a 'thing'.

Niric posted:

This is a really good article, and deserves to be more visible here since it covers a lot of the ground that this thread (regularly) goes over.

quote:

I think the idea is to scupper leaving rather than rejoining. It's clear that the three brexiteers will make a complete mess of this thing and public opinion will swing back to remaining sufficiently to quietly drop the whole idea.

quote:

A new strategy must be based on the realisation that Labour’s heartland is now in the big cities, among the salariat and among the globally oriented, educated part of the workforce.

Geographically that means not just the big cities; it includes the small universtity cities; plus the places where the defence, shipbuilding and aerospace industries have survived enough to maintain a core trade union identity; plus pockets of absolute resistance to the destruction of class identity.

This new core of the Labour project is not “the centre”. The populations of the cities are, if anything, radical with a small “r”. Cities are populated with the new, “networked individuals” that Manuel Castells describes at at the centre of radical, horizontal social movements. They are also populated with small, often socially-conscious, entrepreneurs and large numbers of people who work in a globalised corporate environment. And they are some of the most diverse and tolerant communities on earth.

Though nobody planned it, it is no disaster for Labour to find its core support among this demographic — because it is the future of the workforce in any successful 21st century capitalism.

On the right of British politics are: the elite, their fake-tan flunkies, minders and PR people, and a large suburban middle class which will vote Conservative or Libdem forever, unless a major crisis disturbs them.

The major demographic battleground in politics is the small-town working class. Having been abandoned by Blair, impoverished by the Cameron administration, some have gone to UKIP; some have remained steadfastly pro-Labour; in Scotland many have swung to the SNP. Though often lumped together as C2DEs in electoral sociology, for this group place is as important as income.

quote:

To the beleaguered working class of the small towns it can only be: massive economic stimulus. Labour’s message has to be: we will flood your community with resources, jobs, training opportunities, transport links, nursery places and better schools. And even before we get into power we will bring decision-making power to your doorstep by putting you, the local electorate, in charge of the priorities we fight for.

quote:

The issues that are important across both groups are of course: equal rights, the defence of free healthcare, extended state provision of both childcare and elderly care — and a dramatic reduction of university fees.

Kurtofan posted:

I keep reading Guardian comment and it's crazy how right wing they are, especially when it came to Muslims.

And I took a look at a Daily Mail comment section... and the most upvoted comments were basically the reverse of what you'd expect

namesake posted:

Yeah that bit totally lost me. I can understand the leftwing Remain argument but a leftwing Rejoin? That's madness.

Sion posted:

Almost the olympics. How are we feelin' about that as a sporting event UKMT?

Baron Corbyn posted:

The idea of politics being some kind of sport that you "win" or "lose" is one of my biggest loving pet peeves.

Tesseraction posted:

The Graun used to be relatively decent but the moderators seemed to have decided JE SUIS CHARLIE and therefore any racist poo poo is acceptable as long as it doesn't call for immediate murder.

Sion posted:

Almost the olympics. How are we feelin' about that as a sporting event UKMT?

Renaissance Robot posted:

Truculent as usual. Much like inner city housing projects, it's poo poo because governments spend too much money on it up front and then largely abandon it once it's done.

I'd probably object less if improved public sporting facilities and a 10-20 year plan to get regular people interested in sports was the main goal, and the summer of competitions was more or less a glorified housewarming to celebrate the opening.


If politics was a sport it would be Upper Class Twit of the Year.

Sion posted:

Almost the olympics. How are we feelin' about that as a sporting event UKMT?