[krisbolton]

Well, that links to EFF's own "propaganda" - perpetuating privacy at all costs. Inevitably the place law and regulation should is somewhere in between, balancing risk and striving for an acceptable position all things considered within a democratic framework.

[JoshTriplett]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_ground_fallacy

It is never "inevitable" that the correct place for law and regulation is somewhere in the middle on every issue. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but it's never inevitable.

Assuming that it is makes it far too easy to move the Overton window: regulation proposes something stricter than the status quo, "compromise" moves in that direction, repeat.

[A_D_E_P_T]

> all things considered within a democratic framework

The UK has a very funny (literally ha-ha funny) notion of "democracy" -- with people just voting against the status quo most of the time and with "first past the post" resulting in leadership that doesn't have, and cannot even credibly claim, genuine popular support. It's a totally broken system.

[BoxOfRain]

If there is one political change I could make to the UK it'd be the adoption of the single transferable vote. There's massive amounts of political alienation in the UK which have complicated causes (often related to the 'managed decline' policies of governments past) but a big contributing factor in my opinion is how many votes are completely wasted under first past the post, if you're in a safe seat voting often feels completely futile. FPTP means there's a lot of seats where a donkey with the appropriate rosette would win easily and there's not a lot of competition to win these seats, and so these seats get taken for granted by politicians.

A move to STV wouldn't be a silver bullet but at the very least it'd eliminate the phenomenon of wasted votes and make safe seats less safe, forcing politicians to care about all the seats rather than just currently competitive ones. The problem is there's no incentive for either major party to end their duopoly in the national interest, it's the same sort of problem the 'rotten boroughs' of old faced in that the people who benefitted from them were the only people with the power to deal with them. Labour in particular are notorious on this subject, they'll promise electoral reform in opposition and change their tune instantly once in power.

[pas]

are there term limits for these seats?

[BoxOfRain]

No, term limits aren't really a thing in the UK for elected officials in general and the longest-serving MPs today have been there since the early '80s. Even Prime Ministers can stay in their position for as long as they have the support of their party and can command the confidence of the House of Commons which in some cases will be for over a decade, although it's normal practice in the UK for a governing party to change their leader and therefore the Prime Minister mid term.

Some appointed positions have term limits (some 'machinery of government' kind of functions, some quangos and public bodies etc) but a few are for life or retirement such as members of the House of Lords.

[pjc50]

There are no term limits. (I don't think there's any term limit for any elected position in the UK?)

[pas]

how is it not popular support? or your point is that plurality is not enough? or that in a different voting system (alternate voting, ranked choice, etc..) the winner would be completely different?

[HPsquared]

Conservatives + Reform got more votes than Labour. More people voted against Labour than for them. In any other system they wouldn't have won, and at the very least wouldn't have a majority.

The other thing to consider is that the electorate basically moved to the right in 2024 (Tory voters moved to Reform), but parliament shifted hard to the left.

[pjc50]

The same is true of many different pairs of parties! It's been a long time since any winner had over 50% of the popular vote.

2024: 33%

2019: 43.6%

2017: 42.3% (Lab: 40%!)

2015: 36.9%

2010: 36.1%

2005: 35.2%

2001: 40.7%

1997: 43.2%

1992: 41.9%

The last election where the winning party got over 50% of the popular vote was .. 1931.

[HPsquared]

Yes it's been undemocratic for a long time. The 2024 one was just particularly egregious.

[foldr]

If you have more than two parties then the winning party may have less than 50% of the votes. That's just how the math works out.

Somewhat ironically, given your arguments, UK voters decisively rejected a plan to change the voting system to a more proportional one in a 2011 referendum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...

[throw646577]

It's not particularly egregious because it's not a national vote for a party, is it?

It's a series of (balanced) regional votes for elected representatives from equal-sized constituencies who are supposed to be responsive to that region.

Suddenly this is a massive problem for tories because it's red-faced angry right-wingers on the losing side. Whenever it contributed significantly to a tory win, it has not been a problem.

If you look at what actually happened you will see that, repeatedly, right-wing candidates lost out on a constituency-by-constituency level because the Conservatives were largely incumbents who had built up enough very personal bad reputation to be booted out, or inexperienced first-time candidates who are very rarely elected anyway and were parachuted at the last minute into seats where grandees were retiring, and the Reform candidates were a gaggle of weirdos, randoms, odd-bods, extremists and idiots who were lining up to stand for election for a party that had such a thin platform it ultimately resolves to "oooh we don' t like them", where "them" varied a little region by region but usually meant foreigners.

(And, of course, they split part of the vote between them.)

[monooso]

> In any other system they wouldn't have won…

I can think of at least one other system where they would.

[vogon_laureate]

The Online Safety Act came into being under a Conservative government.

[youngtaff]

Not sure what your point is bit Labour, LibDems, Greens, SNP, Plaid combined got way more votes than Tories + Reform

[HPsquared]

Now that's a good point. They would need to actually debate things if parliament had this composition.

[pas]

Okay, but what kind of voting system can capture this well (and what does it mean)?

We don't know how people would have voted in this hypothetical. (Likely there would be a lot more parties, which generally is good.)

Also C+R could have formed a coalition. (Or merge into a new party ... or - I haven't looked up how R came to be, but I assume it's a spin-off of/from C - R could have merged back into C, right?)

[throw646577]

Reform is a spinoff, yes, in the same way that UKIP is a spinoff: it's a party consisting of people who didn't/couldn't/wouldn't get selected as conservative MPs, plus on the odd occasion one or two who left (Lee Anderson, who is terrible, awful, self-serving and alarming, and before him for UKIP Douglas Carswell, who was largely better characterised as a nice enough bloke who was completely wrong)

[pjc50]

The Scottish and Welsh assemblies use AMS. The NI assembly uses STV. You can see how this produces completely different results from the Westminster elections held in those areas.

Reform are, like UKIP and the Referendum party, Trumpist parties organized around a popular figure and external funding (Richard Tice). They're not really spin offs although a few MPs may cross over.

[pc86]

Why is it inevitable that we should continually erode one's right to privacy?

[vogon_laureate]

Because pedophiles and terrorists exist and this is why we can't have nice things.

[pc86]

And things get nicer when you kill those people.

99.999% of the population of Earth will never be directly affected by either of those two things, so at the very least you're going to have to expand on how eroding the privacy of those 8 billion people will make their life better.

[latentsea]

Aren't the statistics on child sexual abuse pretty dire?

They certainly don't line up with 99.999% of the population of earth being unaffected.

[Nasrudith]

No we can't have nice things because of fascist lackies who use any excuse. If terrorists and pedophiles somehow didn't exist it would be spying or organized crime.