In the news

The responses from @villa-ru & @snottyotter sum up my thoughts

PR results do require a shift to consensus and collaborative governing. If it comes in it will take a generation of politicians to learn how to work this way and move on from the ingrained adversarial politics we are currently at the depths of.

&

it's just fairer, even if fairer means some unwanted outcomes.

PR results do require a shift to consensus and collaborative governing

I don't think that's what these systems generate in practice. It seems more common that unrelated issues are traded off against each other with some kind of tally in the background, leading to a disjointed policy programme.

The experience of the coalition post 2010 in the UK bears that out for me. We didn't get a broad Lib-Con compromise, we got the Con programme with some random goodies like the AV referendum thrown to the Lib Dems.

I'm not sure that one example is a good way to judge how it could work under a completely different system

Maybe, but then which country would you point to as a successful model to aspire to?

I don't know, but a cursory Google might suggest some countries that actually used PR for examples, rather than an example of FPTP leading to a hung parliament

Hopefully the Labour members that support it have done a bit more research.

The Lib Dems and Tories was a minor inexperienced party getting screwed.

See also the Greens in RO Ireland.

PR does work ok in other countries. And Scotland Wales NI (if we had not had a
.. history here)

But yes, you need to think carefully on how to set up the governing structure.

I'm fairly certain I'd rather have a not massively good implementation of PR than the current FPTP clusterfuck we have at the moment.

Re the coalition - that is exactly my point that it will take a long while for politicians to work out how to effectively work in coalitions. But even at the start, IMO it'll be better and fairer than what we have now.

So the IMF telling the Government to have long hard look at themselves and come up with some better plans

The LibDems got totally stitched up by the Tories in that coalition, such was there desperation to be in power.

A change of voting system should have been their absolute minimum criteria. To agree to let it go to a referendum was naive and showed their inexperience, and, you could argue, was the event that gave Cameron the idea to offer one on EU membership as it was a non-event with very low turnout.

And those woke socialist libtards at Moodys Rating Agency are talking Britain down too I see.

They need to just believe a little bit harder obviously

Boris: "Fuck Business"
Truss: "Fuck everyone"

Where does Truss go feom here? She can double down and fuck us all or make the most excruciating u turn in recent political history. Either way, she's fucked it. I reckon she knows she's fucked it. I reckon she had no idea how out of his depth Kwarteng is and has been caught unawares by the breadth and depth of the response.

Month 1. With two weeks holiday. If it wasn't for the real suffering that will result from this, it'd be funny.

I reckon she had no idea

I'm going with this explanation

They're like the dog that caught the car; might be experiencing a degree of psychological trauma.

Marina Hyde in the Graun

Imagine spending your entire career extolling the value of free markets, but the first time the free markets get to seriously value you results in a bond market meltdown, the pound hurtling towards dollar and euro parity, and a bleaker prospect for your country than the one opened on Black Wednesday.

The BBC is hinting at what's probably coming next. Austerity 2.0: Back with a Vengeance.

These warnings echo an expectation in Whitehall that the government is now in a process of evaluation of its tax plan and borrowing numbers, by forecasters and the Bank of England, that will, in time, lead to a reversal on the tax plan or significant spending cuts.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63056417

Yeah, a few weeks ago I posted in this thread about whether this was the longer term plan (when it was about the energy bailout and rumours of tax cuts) but really did not expect it to be as soon as this year. Neither did Kwarteng/Truss I think.

I have no desire to deflect any blame from those currently in charge, but the UK (and other places too) seems like it's been in a pretty precarious position since 2008.

Remember the headlines about various European countries teetering on the edge of financial collapse? I'm not sure much has really been done to address that, other than the rest of the world taking on a bunch of liabilities to prop them up.

Whether or not anyone calls us on those liabilities we'll have to see (if you offer a loan guarantee it costs you nothing unless the other party defaults) but for the last 40 years we've been working very hard to ensure that we have transferred ownership of strategic assets to either cut-throat businesses (hedge funds, private equity, etc.) or other governments. Neither of these have much of an interest in the UK as an entity - they're either supra-national and we're just one part of the mix, or they are foreign and therefore will always place national interests first if push comes to shove.

As a result, I think we're pretty much beholden to forces we have very little impact over, which isn't helpful when you get a bunch of people in charge who seem to think the UK economy is a closed system they can manage with some dogmatic economic theory.

Also if your tax base is heavily dependent on jobs which only really involve typing things into computers - which we've pretty much proven can be done from almost anywhere - you end up with even less influence.

Over the last few years there has been a lot of fiddling with the tax system - things like increasing the personal allowance and increasing the returns to pensioners which (I assume - hey, it's the internet) has narrowed the proportion of the population contributing to the treasury (at least through income tax) which surely only makes the tax base less resilient?

I wouldn't even claim to be an armchair economist but surely you want as many people paying tax so they feel they have a stake in the game, even if lots of them get some, all or more than that back in government support (I won't say benefits because there's way more than just that and it certainly doesn't always go to those who need it most), as inefficient as that sounds.

Edit: I'm not nationalistic despite all that, but those in charge sure seem to be, and I just don't see how you can tackle any of this if you think nationally. The global economy is just too... well.. global now to get away with thinking small.

I think they've already said NHS future funding levels set pre-inflation are not up for review.

Daniel Hannan serving up the copium on Conservative Home

No, the pound isn’t crashing over a trifling batch of tax cuts. It’s because the markets are terrified of @Keir_Starmer.

https://twitter.com/benjameslucas/status/1574384669294039042

This and more in The Guardian because, well, why report on actual news when lol memes:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/sep/27/day-today-pound-stolen-sketch-goes-viral-after-sterling-tanks

To their credit even the CH readers are calling bullshit

Such a weird flex. He's basically saying that the leader of the opposition is seen as a credible GE winner and has more influence on the economy than the PM and Chancellor.