I understand that being voted out of parliament isn’t the will of the people, rather a lifestyle choice.
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I don’t see anyone leaving the decadent West and moving to the rising East though; quite to the contrary. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea are appalling states. Who’s left and you can say people are happy and doing well in this rising East? What an illusion the West-Eurpeans always seem to bite from. It’s all lies.
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I’m sure Jeremy Corbyn is auditioning for the lead role in the return of the TV series, Citizen Smith ( 44 years on ) where “The Tooting Popular Front” win their first seat in Islington North !!! Lol.
Yeah, about that. The news reported that Russia, India, surprisingly Pakistan, in fact all the countries with the “stan” suffix and most of the not so nice asian countries are signing agreement documents under the benevolent auspice of great China.
Begins at 4:47
No surprise here, really. It was a disaster in the making; the West “created” China and they don’t even recognise it. All the companies and the know-how and the capital they kept moving for 30 years with no conditions re. democracy, pluralism etc, absolutely nothing. Only too happy to court Russia for sooo long… Selber schuld!
Jeremy Corbyn is an excellent constituency MP and the people of islington North adore him. The proof is that he’s been their Labour MP since 1983 and when he recently ran as an Independent because of Labour’s undemocratic chicanery and shenanigans, the still voted for him and not Labour!
This is what British politics is about, every cabinet minister is still a humble constituency MP and no matter how good or bad they are, they first have to win the support of their constituents. Finally lets not forget that under his leadership of Labour in 2016, the party membership surged from 190,000 to 515,000. The media and right-wing establishment did an excellent hatchet job of bringing him down.
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Not knowing how the system really works…how long does Labour have to show it is turning things around? i.e. when is the next election?
Five years, but the government can choose to call one earlier.
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Parliament term is 5 years, or less if the PM calls a snap election.
In his speech I got the impression he was trying to manage expectations that things won’t change overnight. Some are saying it will take two Labour terms to put it right.
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That is exactly why first past the post is fundamentally undemocratic.
A quick and dirty calculation dividing the 650 seats by % of the vote and actual.
Lab. 219 411
Con 121 154
LDs 79 71
SNP 16 9
SF 5 7
Ref 93 5
Dup 4 5
Grn 44 4
PC 5 4
SDLP 2 2
APNI 2 1
UUP 2 1
Other 25 8
No majority. A Labour LD coalition would need another 28 seats to govern. So the Greens or (shudder) Reform.
A disaster. Be careful what you wish for.
And a proportional one with party nominates appointed by the party elites even more so 
Have you seen Italy with its collapsing road bridges?
In many Western European countries the workers class inflation-adjusted salaries haven’t increased for decades since the rise of the globalisation, and the aging of societies makes infrastructure renewal or other social transfers impossible when the pensioners take even larger share of the tax revenue.
The Genoa bridge?
It was a fancy one where the aesthetics took over engineering. As long as engineers make blocky and boring bridges we’re fine.
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I don’t want to spoil anyone’s enthusiasm now, but parties like your Labour always increase the taxes and the number of jobs in public administration. (and not necessarily the kind of jobs you really need) Just saying. For small and medium sized businesses is never good news.
Yeah, but they still built a lot with workers from EE. Who definitely didn’t have as many rights as the local ones. If you ever happened to walk near a construction site in the UK, Ireland, Italy, everywhere, you’d notice it’s not the locals (or very few locals) doing the hard jobs. Is it the salaries that are not attractive anymore or people simply wanting other types of jobs?
Like, you know, in commerce or public administration or something. 
Edit; even here in CH, the big projects have almost 100% foreign teams. I have seen posters with announcements on the site in a few languages. Sometimes their common language is Italian (but definitely not every worker here is Italian)
And in CH the salaries are still very attractive, mind.
I would say that these jobs are not given to locals because: Way too expensive, way too unionised, way too bolschie and way too demanding to be attractive for an employer.
In recent 5-10 years a few other highway bridges or overpasses collapsed as well, the boring ones. Clearly Italy was able to construct more in its heydays than it is able to maintain now. The A10/A12 highways in Liguria are an astonishingly costly project and it was built in the sixties.
I wonder if for young Italians it is like being born next to piramides in Egypt and not knowing how to build them
Italy was not doing very well in the sixties though. I expect everything built around that era (till way into the eighties) to be poorly designed and executed. But we digress.
(yes, there is such a thing as post-industrialisation though; we in the EE have suffered the most after the collapse of pretty much all industries in the nineties)
I was probably not alone in giving a tactical vote. FPP stops a lot of very able people getting into parliament. No-one knows how the vote would have gone in a proportional system. Most of the democratic world seems to function quite well with proportional representation - there are so many versions to choose from and I know only of countries that have moved to PR in the last fifty years, none that have moved in the opposite direction. Party lists are published in a ranking order so you know who you are supporting, they are not nameless party appointees.
It’s also remarkable that Iran yesterday elected a moderate candidate as the new President in a snap election following the sudden death of the ultraconservative President Raisi. The opposing candidate was so hard-liner that figures like Farage, Le Pen, Krah, and even the late Raisi seemed comparatively moderate. Most foreign media outlets, aside from BBC, Al Jazeera, RT, Reuters, and Israeli media, hardly covered this event in the past few days, as it was overshadowed by elections in the UK, France, and President Biden’s dismal debate.
While returning from Geneva to Zurich by train (because of my job, I frequently commute to Geneva), I stopped twice in Bern (once yesterday and once the week before) to vote at the Iranian embassy (two-round voting system), accompanied yesterday by my British-Iranian and Dutch-Iranian friends. This marks the first time I’m voting in four different countries in the same year. For my British-Iranian friend, it was her first experience voting in two major elections (UK and Iran) within a single day.
The election of Dr Pezeshkian is promising news for the beleaguered President Biden and PM Starmer, though perhaps less favorable for President Putin and President Xi, and certainly not good news for Netanyahoo.
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