Jenna ([info]hope_rising) wrote,
@ 2009-06-05 22:58:00
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SO ATROPA, WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING WITH THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT?

From what I understand: everyone hates Brown, Jackie-what's-her-face bought porn for her husband with her expenses, and there are elections.

I'm confused.

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[info]chlorhexidine
2009-06-06 01:51 pm UTC (link)
Same old, same old, actually.

Local elections have just happened, which chooses the representative in parliament.

Everyone hates Brown anyway because he got the top job too late.

A big list of what MP's have been spending their expenses on has come out and a lot of people aren't happy, because that's taxpayer's money that's supposed to just keep these guys living comfortably so they can do their job, not what they've been spending it on.

And a reshuffle, which is just where Brown gives individual MPs jobs like chancellor of the exchequer as well as their jobs representing the areas that voted for them.

I'm fairly sure the whole thing is a repeat of a few years ago, to be honest. It all sounds eerily familiar.

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[info]hope_rising
2009-06-06 07:44 pm UTC (link)
Disclaimer: I'm completely ignorant of how the British government works beyond "lol Parliament" SHUT UP WE BARELY LEARNED ABOUT OUR OWN GOVERNMENT IN SCHOOL ;;

I got the MP's expenses drama. Does this mean you guys will have to hold elections again?

And oh dear god idk what it means but Conservative is CRUSHING Labor holy crap.

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[info]chlorhexidine
2009-06-06 09:39 pm UTC (link)
Basics: Local elections pick the representative in parliament. General elections pick which side gets the head jobs. It's stupid and convoluted, and nowhere near that simple, but think of it like a vote for the President versus a vote for the guy who runs your area.

No, the MP's expenses drama just means that those MPs have a much greater chance of being tossed out onto their ear during the next local elections, and have dragged Labour's name through the mud, which will take a lot of rectifying before a General election.

Conservative crushing Labour means that the Labour government is now a minority government and will have a really hard time getting their ideas through parliament. They'll have to pander to the Conservatives to get the majority vote for everything.

Labour are our Democrats. Conservative are our Republicans. Or near enough. Everyone's more centred here than they are in the states, so even the Conservatives more closely resemble the Democrats than they do Republicans, but that's the line drawn between them.

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[info]hope_rising
2009-06-06 10:28 pm UTC (link)
Ooooohhh I think I gotcha .D.b I truly am an American, I need analogies using my own government to understand yours orz orz orz

From what I've read, they kinda brought this on themselves by abusing their expenses. Still, sucks for Labor. Was that all because of the MP's spending habits being revealed, or was that just kinda the icing on the cake for something else?

That sounds eerily familiar to... a lot of things with the Senate, actually.

Politics are weird :V

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[info]chlorhexidine
2009-06-06 10:46 pm UTC (link)
Don't worry. Ours makes no sense whatsoever because General and Local elections are basically exactly the same thing (General elections are also votes for local representatives into parliamentary seats), but only one of them affects who the Prime Minister is. Our system is retarded.

Well... Having expenses abuse like that come out into the open in the middle of a recession really hasn't done them any favours in public opinion. Brown's been under fire almost ever since he got the job because he's too much like Tony Blair. In contrast to a few years ago when being too different from Tony Blair was the problem.

The poor guy can't win, basically.

But I think this is the only really big scandal that's hit. Some MPs have been pushed to step down, the speaker of the House, and a whole bunch of others have been pushed to step down, and it's been a massive blow. People had been disapproving anyway; Gordon Brown inherited the job, he wasn't voted into it, so these elections are also like opinion polls on the Labour leadership and... it hasn't gone well.

Which is really bad considering he has to call a general election by next year at the latest.

Politics are very weird. Especially in this country. Whatever Parliament decides then has to go through the House of Lords for approval, and they're not easy to convince, and then it has to be ratified by the Queen before it's valid. Theoretically, the Queen can turn around and veto any law parliament attempts to make.

I swear they make it as convoluted as possible so they can screw people around better.

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[info]hope_rising
2009-06-06 11:21 pm UTC (link)
I just know we have primary elections where we pick the President and others for our senator, mayor, etc. Yours sounds really confusing D:

Yeah, the recession + this = well, looks like those guys are BONED. I really have nothing intelligent to add to what you said. Soooo this mean you guys are getting a new Prime Minister soon?

Ours isn't too much better. "Checks and Balances" is bullshit, except for the times where it works against progress. See: Prop 8 and the whole gay marriage thing. Technically it's completely unconstitutional for states to not recognize same-sex marriage, but, well, there you go. At least Maryland is fighting for it.

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[info]chlorhexidine
2009-06-06 11:36 pm UTC (link)
Easiest method: General elections pick who runs the whole country. Local elections pick who represents an area. Beyond that, it's all unnecessarily convoluted and dumb.

LOL Yeah, they're boned. Within the next year, we'll be having another General election, and if we don't have a new Prime Minister after that I'll be very, very surprised. It will mean Gordon Brown shits miracles. Or money. The Conservatives are bound to play up on things, and the recession won't be over by then by a long shot. Labour are fucked unless they pull something really good out of their arse between now and then.

They should start with their heads. (Despite all this, I'm a Labour voter. Most students are, because they're the lesser of the evils.)

Yeah, the Prop 8 thing is kind of baffling to us. We have "Civil Unions" which is gay marriage but oop, we won't call it marriage because some people are nuts about shit like that. It makes the US look really backwards when the people in charge actually listen to the nutso fundies. It also looks really weird when Ohio is being more progressive on an issue than California. We pretty much just sit here with our legalised abortions and medically necessary late term abortions and civil unions and NHS and sip tea in your direction with our monocles firmly in place.

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[info]hope_rising
2009-06-06 11:43 pm UTC (link)
OKAY THAT I UNDERSTAND.

Brown better start digesting pure heavenly energy if he wants to accomplish that any time soon.

Yeaaaahhhhhhhh I dunno. We have the Mormons, and I'm not sure why. The way I reason it, everyone else had their opportunity to be crazy at some point or another. Hopefully the US will chill out in our lifetime. I feel like this would be accomplished if they FUCKING LEGALIZED POT ALREADY. Seriously, we have magazines on how to grow your own weed. I'm not entirely sure what the big deal is over it, other than the gov't hasn't found a way to tax is properly yet :T

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[info]chlorhexidine
2009-06-07 12:06 am UTC (link)
Well, to be fair, the UK has some 2000 years of history and we were fucking batshit through most of it. It's only since the end of WWII that the country settled down any and started to be a bit less fidgety and uptight. It's not like we don't still have problems, but it's only been within the last century that we've really improved our stance on things. It's only been recently that blasphemy became no longer illegal, ffs.

I'm going to agree hard on legalising pot, though. I recognise that it's awkward to create a set of laws to deal with it and get people agreeing on them (but the laws and rules and etiquette regarding alcohol can be extended to pot reasonably well) but seriously, legalising it, selling it like cigarettes, stick the warnings on if you're that worried, but people are going to smoke it anyway, it's just a case of whether you want some of that money or not, and there's no way pot is more harmful than cigarettes.

But this is something our government can't hack, either. They downgraded it for a while, so that it was legal to have in small amounts, just not provide, and society didn't collapse, but then they reversed that... No idea why.

I expect that if tobacco hadn't been taken up so readily when it was introduced and hadn't become the upper class thing to chew, that'd face the same problems nowadays, though. I'd hope so, anyway.

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