please empty your brain below
/Pedant
Just because he does not strut about in a fancy uniform, it does not mean he isn't another Mussolini or Franco.
He brooks no opposition and rides roughshod over the rules and conventions to get his own way. He now plans to remove the few remaining barriers protecting us.
This is how facism starts - he needs no army, just complacency.....
I'd turn this around and suggest that the increasing propensity for some on the left to call others Fascist is in itself fascistic and opens the way for actual fascists such as Antifa to shut down debate with violence.
Lets's stop using these lazy labels and discuss the issues.
Let's move the debate on.
voteforpolicies.org.uk
I would strongly recommend everybody takes this survey to reaffirm or question their choice.
If Boris is a fascist, why is it that the Labour party are the ones who are proposing state control of the Internet in this country? That would be the first step for a totalitarian government.
When the Conservatives try to point out the troublesome Labour policies, we get shouts of "Project Fear" or "Fascism!", but when Labour do the same with Conservative policies, it is called reasonable debate. I challenge you to honestly read the Labour manifesto and ask the question "how is all this going to be paid for?"
London, Yorkshire and the Humber, North West, West Midlands, North East, Scotland, Wales (especially the last three)
Regions which would gain:
East Midlands, South West, South East, East Anglia (especially the last two)
Easy one. They're not.
Indeed, before the dawn of Thatcher's privatisation both post and telephones were run by the GPO (unless you lived in Hull). I don't remember people thinking of that as totalitarian.
The Labour plans for broadband provision are half-baked for many other reasons, but I don't think the rise of a totalitarian state is one of them.
Voter fraud statistically doesn't exist, as per the original post.
State provision of fibre broadband will be cheaper than the existing policy of giving vast subsidies to openreach.
How are the tories policies going to be paid for while carrying out their flagship policy of destroying the UK economy?
I could go on but won't. Very boring. Make no mistake - what Boris and Dom quietly propose, whilst not perhaps being full blown fascism, certainly lays the groundwork for an alarming extension of unchecked executive power. DG is quite right to highlight this, and anyone truly committed to freedom/democracy should be taking a very close look at this. I rather suspect that the majority are not.
Whether you believe this or not depends on your political views. My personal view is that Labour have repeatedly demonstrated a desire for state control and it wouldn't take much for them to want to control what people can see and do on the Internet.
DG - just to say, I disagree with your political views, but I still enjoy your writing. I apologise for politicising these comments.
Previous surveys have shown that certain policies prove to be very popular but become less so once they are revealed to be from the Labour manifesto. Then we get the 'don't believe it', 'can't afford it', 'too good for the likes of us', 'the Tories must know best' reaction. How else can you explain that 'working class core Labour voters' in the Midlands and North of England, we're told, seem set on voting against their best interests, by voting Leave in the referendum and for Johnson in two weeks time. I suppose a look at resent coverage in the popular press might provide an answer, with 'Corbyn's Tax Robbery', 'Corbyn's War on Marriage', 'Marxist Blitz on Business', etc. And that's just the Daily Mail!
I am in a safe Labour seat so my interpretation is effectively worthless anyway! But I wish we could have political discussions without Rik-style cries of fascist the moment someone disagrees.
Of course decent and humane policies will cost money, but the money is there, as set out in the 'Grey Book', and is mostly reinstating the cuts we've suffered in recent years, as well as investing for a better future. But if people prefer the policies of a disreputable trickster, known liar and philanderer, to those of two principled and mature 'old men', then I dispair for our future!
In nearly all western european democracies it is close to impossible to wote twice. How is that so?
Tip: Some kind of identification is a vital part in the process!
/TKO
It's also quite a concentrated reminder of just how much shaking of the money tree is being propositioned by all and sundry.
A) Very few here actually remember the 1970's and just how horrible it was politically and socially. MacDonald / Milne are unreconstructed 1970's hard left marxists. Corbyn is just a harmless looking sock puppet. The people who control Labour at the moment mean everything they say.
B) Most people only read the Guardian / BBC and have no real exposure to the day to day news from various sources in the rest of the EU. Every trenchant anti-Brexit person I've run into so far was singularly uninformed about the wider world.
C) They are neither Jewish or have no close Jewish friends or relatives. People who trust them enough to talk about their deep unease at the moment. I have had two such conversations recently. Conversation which I never ever thought I would have about UK politics. Corbyn and the people around him are Anti-Semitic, pure and simple. It shows just how far it has gone when the Chief Rabbi felt need to go public.
I have family in France. I do not want the UK to go down the same road. Where Jews are regularly attacked and murdered. And not by people who vote FN. But PS and FI and that ilk. Think Momentum activists and the people they lionize and support.
In my world a vote for Labour, unless your candidate is old style moderate Labour, like Alan Johnson, who could save the party, is simply a vote for an authoritarian anti-Semitic party. So think carefully of who, and what, you are really voting for if you put your X beside a Labour candidate in the polling booth.
I noticed that someone above misused the term fascist. As these people always do. But the current leadership of the Labour party have beliefs that are remarkably similar to the early days of another Socialist Workers Party, the NSDAP. Those of you who actually know your history will know exactly what I am talking about.
I know myself and my Jewish friends, and soon to be Jewish wife, are praying for a Conservative landslide.
I read through the whole of the Labour party manifesto which at over 100 pages took me 5 hours to fully digest so I haven't bothered with the other parties' screeds and have just relied on the soundbites provided by our disinterested national media.
Thanks, excellent and informative summary.
jj - Voter ID disproportionately affects the elderly, poor and certain ethnic minorities who are less likely to have photo ID. It results in legitimate voters being turned away. Issuing IDs costs time and money. And it "solves" a problem that doesn't exist in the first place.
I am bemused that it is considered acceptable to throw out comments like “Boris Johnson is a fascist”. Of course he is not. He is no more a fascist than Jeremy Corbyn is a communist. They both believe in the fundamentals of democracy and have both demonstrated their commitment to the democratic process. To equate Johnson to Mussolini or Franco simply suggests a level of intellectual bankruptcy. Debate their ideas but don’t use labels which are frankly wrong.
As it happens, constituency boundary changes are a standard process - that is a core purpose of the Electoral Commission. There is nothing nefarious about proposing to update the boundaries - as you highlight, we are substantially overdue for such a change. It is only fair and right that constituencies are of equal size, otherwise FPTP becomes even more flawed and unrepresentative.
With respect to vote IDs, I see the arguments both for and against but ultimately it would be dependent on what ID would be acceptable. As you say, if passport or driving licence, then you run the substantial risk of exclusion.
Lastly, in terms of the relationship between the crown / government (executive), Parliament (legislative) and the judiciary, I personally do think this now needs to be defined in some way. Historically, we have avoided a constitution and relied on precedent. But the entire sorry Brexit saga has given people on all sides ammunition that the system may need to be properly defined and explained, so we do not have the situation repeat whereby people think that various entities have not performed as they should have.
This is an interesting election not because of Boris Johnson but because the current Labour Party really wants to deviate quite significantly from the traditional “centrist” politics which served it so well in the 2000s. Traditionally the British electorate has preferred “centrist” parties as both the Tories and Labour have sometimes discovered to their cost over the last 50 years. I personally do not believe the majority of the U.K. likes radical change so it will be interesting to see how this election develops.
As for the other matter, purple ink on a finger seems to be the answer to voter fraud in many countries.
My two Jewish friends who I had conversations with. One is from London, family arrived at the turn of the century, Father was fighter pilot in RAF during the war. Other has relatives in various parts of the UK and has long stays in UK going back many decades. Family originally German. They pretty much all survived because they had money and could buy their escape.
So how many Jewish friends or relatives do you have? And how familiar are you with Corbyn style Marxist politics since the 1970's? In fact Corbyns policies are pretty much the Socialist Workers Party policies of the 1970's. Just ask Vanessa Redgrave. Or how about what is going on in the rest of Europe? The Jewish children's school that was shot up a few years ago by a salafi in France is close to where my son lives.
As for my British credentials. The last time I worked in London full time and someone challenged me on it I pointed out that not only was I the only native born Londoner in the office (which I was) but I was the only one with a Blue Peter Competition Winners badge - and a rather nice letter on BBC letter-head signed by Biddy Baxter... end of that particular argument
Think of me as one of those regular ex-pat visitors who locals discover knows far more about whats going on in their locale because we tend to pay closer attention and where distance gives a better perspective on what is going on. In fact one of the reason I have reading this blog pretty much every day for 15 plus years.
In this election there is only one subject that matters. The utter unfitness of the current Labour party leadership for any form of political power. Maybe the next leadership will be. I sincerely hope so. But as it stands the currently leadership are as dangerous as the early days of the New Party in the 1930's. A splinter party from the Labour Party. Led by a certain Oswald Mosley...
So everyone, please think very carefully. Because this election is as important an election as 1979, 1945 or 1910. But for very different reasons. In this case its very much a case of voting against something rather than voting for something. We all wish it was otherwise, but it really isn't. In this particular case. And I'm not talking Brexit. That was dispatched, over, done with and finished almost two years ago by the "College" in Brussels. But their planned Lisbon Treaty style stitch up did not work. And they had no Plan B. Pure Système D...
This may not have been a good thing.
* If you live your life at more than one address you are eligible to register at each.
* You can only vote once for the *same* body at an election.
* You can otherwise vote for each body covering each address.
So you can only vote once for a general election. However you can vote for councils at both addresses on the same day. If, however, both addresses are in the same council area you can only vote for it once - e.g. when at the University of Kent at Canterbury my housemate was from Maidstone so he could only vote once for Kent County Council whereas I could vote for both Kent and Surrey CCs.
However this is very difficult to police. Each local authority runs elections in its area and there is no formal link between a person's registered multiple addresses. (They may not even have exactly the same name on both registers - initials, hyphens and other bits cause problems for databaases each year.) There are no comparisons between registers so it is very hard to tell if somebody exercised their votes more than once. Postal votes can be sent to a different address from the registered address with good reason given but IME the vast majority of PVs are mailed to the home registered address, perhaps with many picking them up at weekends.
Other posters are correct that voter ID would not solve *this* problem. What it would aim at are people exercising others' votes with no checks at polling stations. Concerns have been raised about this for years, especially by the Tower Hamlets Conservatives and others, but these have often been dismissed (one ex Lib Dem MP in the West Midlands tells how the police would dismiss their legitimate complaints as just "Operation Gripe"). It is also extremely difficult to prove - you basically need the legitimate voter to discover their vote has been exercised and complain but if the alleged registered person either never votes or has moved out of the area without being removed from the register or never actually existed then this is unlikely. As a result it is extremely rare for complaints to be submitted and get anywhere (and so many campaigning for this are not put off by quoting the number of convictions; note also that figure usually refers to Westminster elections when most concerns involve council elections), especially when authorities have a record of being instantly dismissive.
dg writes: Yesterday's post had a lot more.
There does need to be changes, which should be considered in the following approach "Good policy has three elements: it correctly identifies a problem, it finds an adequate solution, and it ticks both those boxes in a way that can command enduring popular support." (text borrowed from elsewhere but I think represents good practice.)
The problems: Valid registration of entitlement, and validating correct exercise of the entitlement (mitigating the crime of "personation" when voting)
Neither needs "strong ID" (newly specific to the purpose or existing) to address a large chunk of the problem, and evidence seems to show that requirement for strong ID will reduce engagement in democracy.
A national electoral roll (including multiple addresses to cover local bodies) would seem to be needed, and much could be done to validate entitlement through electronic checks of that roll, augmented by some basic physical checks initially and periodically, e.g. attendance at a post office with other evidence, "professional" vouching (GP etc.), to check for "liveness" and mitigate personation on the register.
The registration process could generate a unique code number which the voter would need to keep private and take to polling station to vote (or quote on postal vote, perhaps as part of a periodic postal vote request process). The code number would be validated against the register (systemically, with cryptographic obfuscation so the polling station staff don't see the number). With reminders of the unique number when polls are announced.
With this scheme, here would still be issues of abuse of proxy by "theft" of registration number, likely to be part of a broader set of abuses of personal liberty and agency, but that needs a different set of solutions, perhaps requiring all proxies to be handled by a registered voter who also has to quote their details when registering the proxy vote (to create an audit trail and limit the numbers of proxies that any one voter could handled, and other anti crime measures)
The Fixed Term Parliaments Act was an attempt to stop governments manipulating the date of elections - but that manipulation has sometimes gone wrong. The most clear-cut example was in 1978, where the (Labour) Government had a chance to go to the polls but didn't. With the benefit of hindsight many historians believe that, if it had done so, it would have won ... and Margaret Thatcher would probably have been forced to resign as Leader of the Opposition.
Also, one of the Chartists' demands in the 1840s was:
"Equal constituencies, securing the same amount of representation for the same number of electors, instead of allowing less populous constituencies to have as much or more weight than larger ones."
So the Boundaries Commission is trying to do exactly this. The sixth demand of the Chartists - annual elections - is extremely unlikely ever to happen, however.
As others have noted, the voter ID question is part of a much bigger issue (national elections are essentially conducted on a local scale) and a "commission" has, historically, been a talking shop.
That said, it would certainly appear to have something to talk about; that a referendum was 52:48 in one direction but had to be implemented by a Parliament which was probably 25:75 in the other direction ignoring party affiliations - so it wasn't implemented - has rather been skated over.
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