[Jefro118]

Apologies, I've only just seen this, thanks for replying.

I don't agree that Cummings was happy to let Farage bring in the anti-immigrant votes. They maintain that Farage/Banks cost them votes overall because they turned off a lot of swing voters whereas people who were very concerned about immigration were going to vote Leave anyway.

You make a good point about marginal policies like cannabis decriminalisation (something I support too) not making progress under FPTP, I think the UK system certainly has its downsides too.

Re democracy, you may be right that the EU is more democratic in terms of how the cross section of concerns are mushed together. The fundamental issue is error correction though, the EU is unresponsive in the face of problems when it might require them to row back on the idea of deeper and deeper integration across Europe. They keep on pushing the same path, even when it appears to be causing damage (e.g. Greece). The empirical evidence on political forecasting suggests that everyone, including those at the top of institutions, is frequently wrong in the medium/long term and I think the EU will keep compounding errors. Of course, this is itself a forecast and it's possible that the EU will seriously reform and we would have been better off inside after all, I assign low probability to this though.

Yes I agree the HoL is very flawed too.