No definitely not red kestrel. Significantly brighter but i would hazard a guess very similar politics.
RK was somewhere to the left of the Socialist Workers Party. By somewhere I'd say the next planet heading out of the solar system.
I think for it to really be a democracy you have to limit how long someone can be an MP for because right now all they want to do is get there and then stay there living on the backs of working people. If the decisions they made on our behalf affected them at the end of their terms they would be a lot more careful about the decisions they were making.
Strange one this. I got an A in gcse politics quite a few years ago. If I tried to make sense of these bent ******** I wouldn’t get a grade.
Absolutely not... where is the dividing line? It sounds like something that Hitler would introduce. It starts off making half the population servants rather than participants in society.
I think you have an interesting point but it’s not the voters that should meet an intellectual threshold it’s the MP’s who should have to meet a basic selection criteria ruling out anyone with a personality disorder and have a certain level of problem solving skills , it shouldn’t include academic ability . Granted this would rule out the majority of current MP’s on all sides
That wasn't proportional representation that was the alternate vote thing. It was the Tory compromise to get into power with the lib dems.
What is this rubbish comparing passing a driving test with a test for the right to vote about? Or becoming a pilot? Cars and planes are potentially extremely dangerous. Nobody ever killed themself or someone else by putting a cross on a bit of paper Why would someone in the bottom IQ quotient voting for eg Conservative be putting the country at greater risk than someone in the upper quotient voting the same way? What will the standard for the voting test be? Who will set it? How would they picked? How would we get rid of them if we don’t like what they are doing? Vote them out? And there the problem, we might not be able to
Great debating skills. If you think it is clap-trap, then why is it? As it stands, immigrants to the UK who wish to naturalize have to take a citizenship test. They have more knowledge of the British political system than many native-born UK citizens do.
Sorry to go all Godwin, but Hitler was elected in 1933 by a minority (~44%) of the German voting population. Yes, he took power in effectively a coup straight afterwards, but it killed about 50 million people across Europe as a direct result of this vote. So, votes are very important and can result in significant loss of life. BTW the German region with the lowest vote for Hitler in 1933 was Berlin, the German city to suffer the biggest loss of life during the war (about 2 million in 2 weeks). Closer to home, the change of government during the UK Potato Famine made the situation in Ireland worse and probably contributed towards the deaths of several hundred thousand people in Ireland. More recently, Tory austerity cuts are alleged to have been a factor in the deaths of around 120,000 people in the last 9 years.
I'm pretty sure they're different people mate! Red Kestrel posted on here at the same time as Vesp didn't he?
Chortle. He accused me of being a Tory for saying that Ken Clarke has been known to talk sense (I'm a member of the Labour Party)
OK ..so having read the entire thread I have concluded that there are only two possible alternatives..... A In spite of it's shortcomings -Democracy with Universal suffrage B Absolute Dictatorship, provided it is me who is the dictator with full backing from the military of course. Personally I favour B
The simple fact is that your premise is flawed. An idiot is just as likely to vote one way as another based on social conditioning, in exactly the same way as an 'intelligent' person. The whole reason we have universal suffrage is to even out the bumps in the road. However - your point very much shows why referendums are the polar opposite of actual democracy, and shows why they're so rarely used in most democracies. There's an awful lot of 'undemocratic' situations in the UK that are higher on the priority list than a few thick people voting.
its claptrap because people fought and died for the likes of you and I to have a vote,regardless of sex,background or intelligence or any other obstacle ,it is everyones democratic right. I also doubt very much that the citizenship test delves into the fundamentals of our democracy and without even looking i'd hazard a guess that questions relating to our political system dont extend much beyond 'who is the prime minister'? some of you need to have a listen to what you are saying because if it were the tories peddling such claptrap they would immediately be labled as fascists.