[geeks] Glad I don't live in Texas!

[David Cantrell]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2002 at 08:21:16PM -0500, Eric Dittman wrote:
> > In theory, that's what we have in the UK (dunno about the US).  In practice,
> > it's just another party system.  I see no way of stopping any system of
> > individual candidates from developing this way.
> I always hear about a lot of different parties in the UK.  How
> are they set up?

Not sure what you're asking, but ...

there are three main parties.  The Conservative Party (traditionally right
wing), the Liberal Democrat Party (traditionally centrist) and the Labour
Party (traditionally left wing).  Nowadays, the Conservatives and Labour
are both right wing, and are about as indistinguishable as your Republicans
and Democrats.  The traditionally centrist Liberal Democrats have moved
slightly to the left, and are now considerably to the left of Labour.

The parties' internal organisations are up to them to decide, but broadly
speaking they are pretty similar - the party leader is elected by members,
major policy decisions are voted on by members at their annual conference,
and each constituency has a local party nominally responsible for selecting
candidates to fight elections.  In practice - and especially in the Labour
party - the party central office has considerable influence in the selection
of local candidates.  And the process for selecting a leader of the
Conservative party is ... byzantine.

In theory, people standing for election are standing as individuals.  In
practice, they stand as representatives of the parties, and stand on party
platforms which often have nothing to do with local concerns.

In Scotland and Wales, the three main parties still exist, and in addition
there is a nationalist party in those countries.  That's nationalist in the
sense that they want power devolved from London, as opposed to nationalist
in the barking-mad Jorg Haider or Jean-Marie Le Pen sense.  Plaid Cymru and
the Scottish National Party are both moderately left-leaning.  The
nationalist parties usually do fairly well in elections.

In Northern Ireland, the sensible parties don't organise, for no reason
that I can figure out.  Instead, local sectarian parties are all there is.
The SDLP is approximately equivalent, as far as I can tell, to the Liberal
Democrats and Labour.  It, along with Sinn Fein is a nationalist party.
Then there is the Democratic Unionist Party and the Ulster Unionist Party,
both of which are roughly equivalent o the Conservative party.  I can never
remember which is which, but one (the one with Ian Paisley as their fuhrer)
is barking mad.

As an aside, Paisley is an interesting character.  I am told by someone
who knows him that he is actually a really good constituency MP.  However,
he also believes that the European Parliament is the Antichrist, and that
the Queen is a traitor (yet he still swears allegiance to that traitor).
He has a very amusing web site.

There are also plenty of smaller parties, such as the Greens, various
anti-EU split-offs from the Conservative party, Socialist Labour, a few
other socialist parties (who are actually getting their act together and
putting forward single candidates in some constituencies!), the Monster
Raving Loony Party (who have policies such as towing Britain to the
Mediterranean to improve the climate, and providing free heating to
pensioners by piping hot air from the house of commons).  Some of these
occasionally get seats in parliament, and often have seats in local
government and in the European parliament.

Parliamentary elections always attract a crowd of eccentrics standing on
utterly made-up platforms just for a laugh.  Especially in constituencies
being fought by party place-men and unpopular cabinet ministers.

> > > Another good idea would be to require the politicians to follow
> > > the will of the people they represent rather than their party.
> > 
> > And how, pray, does one divine "the will of the people"?
> 
> Look at opinion polls and read letters.  Have staff in the
> area keep a finger on the public pulse.

I don't trust opinion polls, as they are engineered to produce the results
desired by the questioner.  Letters sent to MPs will never provide a
balanced view, as they will invariably be from those with complaints, those
encouraged to write by pressure groups, serial whingers and the like.  The
vast majority of people never contact their representatives, and it is
well-known that in any field, you don't get feedback about how satisfied
people are, only about how unsatisfied they are.

-- 
David Cantrell | Benevolent Dictator | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david