With a First Past The Post representative allocation system and no Constitution (so, for example, the current government which got a bit over 30% of the votes cast has over 50% of MPs and thus can make or change ANY law they want in any way they want since nothing is limited by a Constitution that can only be changed with much more than a simple 50%+1 majority), a head of state who gets their position by inheriting it and an unelected second parliamentary chamber, the UK has never been a Democracy.
Oh, they harp on and on about how they’re “The oldest Democracy in the World”, which is exactly the kind of compensation you would expect when a certain quality isn’t actually true, same as when some people go around claiming they’re beautiful, charming or intelligent - if you have it you don’t need worry about convincing others that you do.
I’ve lived in a couple of countries in Europe, including over a decade in Britain, and that country is mainly bullshit (very poshly and elegantly done - just check the way the BBC uses Manufacturing Consent techniques to promote Israel or their constant spinning of news about foreign affairs into “we’re much better than them” Nationalism) and the LEAST democratic of all was Britain.
This isn’t normal, we can feel the rise of Reform UK…
Okay Europe, show us Americans how it’s done. Fix this shit.
Europe is pretty fucked too. MAGA inspired political parties (many, if not all, sponsored by tge same people who support MAGA) with the same idiots or evil people you guys have in America in several countries… the future’s unfortunately looking VERY bleak. :/
Basically the world is fucked. Its bad only going to get worse I can only assume this is the start of a trend that is going to take a 80+ years to run its course… Fuck me
Medieval 2
propaganda against lgbtq+ always increase when there is internal economic turmoil CAUSED BY THE same politicians railing on anti-lgbtq+ people as a distraction or START some nonsensical war or sabre rattlling.
That shit has been painfully visible in the US for over a decade: the Political “Fight” between the two parties of the Power Duopoly in highly rigged voting systems (like First Past The Post) naturally moves to being just the Moral plane and away from all the other things that shape people’s Freedom and Happiness (most notably anything controlled by Money) as those parties become thoroughly corrupted (when politicians tell you “Greed is Good”, they definitelly also mean it for they themselves) thus having pretty much the same policies in all fields where they can make some “greateful friends” who will shower them with their “gratitude”, which leaves Moral as the only field where they can play politics to see whose next with their snouts in the trough.
IMHO in this shit Britain runs maybe 1 to 2 decades behind the US and the rest of Europe runs maybe 1 to 2 decades behind Britain.
Just a reminder that, in politics, nothing is inevitable and nothing is permanent.
It’s permanent for the people irrecoverably scarred/maimed/killed by these hostile policies.
1930s Germany wasn’t permanent either… unless you opposed the Nazis or were anything other than able-bodied, able-minded, white, not jewish or any other minority s,stematically tortured or killed. And people don’t learn from history because most survivors are those who hadn’t been persecuted.
Does that mean we only had Democracy when Trans Rights were introduced?
Like, if the removal is the end of democracy, then is the opposite also true?
Do you clap with your fingers spread?
Scottish independence ftw 🏴
Same thing happened in Germany
Do you mean during the Nazis’ rise to power or recently?
I was referring to this specific event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut_für_Sexualwissenschaft#Raids_and_book_burnings
tf u talkin about?
Nazis first bigoted actions was going against LGBTQ, Especially trans. The first book burning was Hirshfield’s institute of sexology.
Yeah, it’s really fucking bad. Pair that with more and more restrictive demonstration laws and regulations, the proscription of Palestine Action which was already shot down by their own legal system as ‘baseless’, etc etc etc
It’s just Starmer’s leg up to another cushy job and nothing else. And Labour really showed us what Labour has become: a soulless job machine for the rich and careless. They may as well call themselves Tories at this point.
When I left Britain after over a decade living there (to were I had moved from almost a decade in The Netherland, so that was the reference against which I measured Britain), having been there for the 2008 Crash and all the way until after the Leave Referendum and just before the actual Brexit, I was thoroughly convinced that the country in Europe (excluding Russia, which already is) most likely to turn Fascist was Britain.
If you constrast it with that of a country with Proportional Vote, British “Democracy” is already thoroughly subverted, from the voting system itself being First Past The Post (thus the current government has more than 50% of members of Parliament only a little above 30% of votes) and unelected head of state (who has actual power to block laws) and parliamentary second chamber, to the entire Press being either in the hands of billionaires or controlled by boards of people with Royal Titles who went to very expensive, very exclusive schools (curiously called “public schools” in Britain even though only the rich and the upper middle class can afford them) and the Judiciary being entirelly in the hands of the exact same slice of society (not the billionaires, the “lords”, “sirs” and public school educated types).
All Pillars of Democracy have long been subverted in Britain and as things started getting worse for the majority of people in the aftermath of the 2008 Crash and the way to local powers decide to handle it (save the Bankers and the Asset Owners, make the rest pay for it with Austerity), the entire system at all levels moved more and more to scapegoating outsiders (the EU, immigrants and later when the consequences of Brexit were felt, the blame for it was “Russia interference” as if almost all of that shit hadn’t been mainly pushed by local people such as billionaires and their newspapers) thus redirecting the righteous anger of the rest of society away from the local power elites who did the deeds and are the ones mainly at fault.
Meanwhile at the same time there was the ever tighter surveillance net (that the Snowden Revelations exposed to a large extent, but are other scandals less known outside such as for example how coppers infiltrated Ecologist groups and left behind pregnant women whose children never knew their fathers), which has only been made ever more extreme ever more openly, hence the recent “age verification” legislation".
So yeah, the continuation of the scapegoating trend, the ever more intrusive surveillance and the ever more authoritarian use of force against peaceful civil society groups, are all the totally natural continuation of what was already happenning under the exact same machinery already in place more than a decade ago (whose last parts were probably put in place back when Thatcher approved Murdoch’s consolidation of the Press, destroyed traditional Unions, started the Economy down the path of dominance by Finance and other Rent-seeking activities and used extreme Force against the Miners) - the machine just kept chugging along towards its natural destination (there was a hickup when Corby was elected leader of the Labour Party, but all that was dealt with by, with the support of Israeli backed Jewish Groups, slandering him relentlessly in the ENTIRE PRESS - thus neatly showing just how hard rightwing and propagandistic all if it is, including the BBC and The Guardian - as an anti-semite, which by the way goes a long way to explain why the guy who got the leadership of that party after that and is now Prime Minister, is extremely pro-Israel) and that destination are the levels of Propaganda, Surveillance, Civil Society supression by Force behind “It’s the Law” excuses and control of the Judiciary that you see in Fascist Dictatorships.
At most the British version of Fascism is just going to differ in being posher (same steel fist, but covered with a satin glove - i.e. the abuse of Force disguised more with “it’s the Law”, the Press control with “it’s the Free Market”, the Civil Society Surveillance portrayed as “to protect the children”) than the “loudmouth rightwing populist” version of it of the likes of Mussolini or Trump.
there are a lot of reasons democracy is threatened in the uk, trans rights and palestinian protest are way down the list
Ah yes, cancelling rights (i.e. turning rights to privileges) and using politically charged litigation against citizens, also subverting their rights, is not a threat to democracy, of course! It’s what democracies are known for! Lol
Lots of people call them “Red Tories”.
Yeah, new labour was the fully coöptation of the socialist party by capitalism and machine politics.
Before that they were at least Democratic socialists so they tried to help the working class a little bit.
What the actual hell happened to Labour? Who can the left turn to now? Is it worth trying to salvage?
There was an internal coup by the stooges of rich donors, many of them also aligned with Israel’s current genocidal government.
Who can the left turn to now?
Your Party looks increasingly like a dead duck, so that leaves the Greens. Ignore the character assassination against Polansky, which will continue, but keep in mind that the Greens have been growing rapidly and don’t yet have a party organisation with good nationwide coverage. Also the party’s governance structures need to be strengthened to prevent fuckery like the entryism that stymied the Zionism-is-racism resolution at the last party conference. It’s got the most open governance system of any party (along with Your Party), which is good, but its openness makes it at risk of being gamed by bad-faith actors, and that part will have to be changed.
Is it worth trying to salvage?
It’s worth trying, but it might be better to consider other options. Almost the entire party apparatus and a significant percentage of sitting Labour MPs are aligned with Labour Together. As we saw during Corbyn’s time as leader, the parliamentary party is far to the right of the membership. That has only gotten wose as Starmer has purged the few leftists in the party. As for potential leaders once Starmer fucks off, Streeting is likely to be even worse than Starmer, Burnham has already said he’d continue Shabana Mahmoud’s Reform-parroting immigration policies and won’t attempt to reverse Brexit, and it’s still unclear what Rayner would do differently, having once been in Starmer’s cabinet.
It was galling to see „Your Party“ (still a stupid name) fall in line with every other British party on trans issues right from its launch. Talk about missing the point. I found out recently that I technically have British citizenship but I will never exercise it.
Burnham is also against nationalisation.
I do not have a full accounting of what happened exactly but broad strokes are, Thatcher broke their brains and they went New Labour, meaning they would coddle the capitalists even more than they already had been doing. This kept up, Labour became more about getting fancy jobs, the started and supported deeply unpopular wars (especially unpopular among the left), Labour started tanking again and then they chose racism to try and claw back. The only reason they are in power now is because the Conservatives fucked up so much they became functionally irrelevant. But now the attempts by the cons and labs to out-racism each other will come home to roost with Reform on the horizon, quickly gaining momentum, so Labour and especially Starmer are trying to appease both the soulless capitalists who know the end of this economic cycle is coming (and will be disastrous) and the actual fascists of Reform and their voters. They are chasing fictional voter groups that will never vote for Labour while hemorrhaging their actual voter base to the Greens because hey, wasn’t Labour supposed to not be a fascist island of job-hopping dickholes?
Oh and a lot of social-democrats literally just died. Not even kidding, in statistics a not-insignificant voter base they had just straight up died and now Labour is standing on their graves going ‘please vote for us again, we’re racist now please’
Yeah, the rot started with Blair got in and killed off Clause IV. Before that, at least lip service was being given to public ownership.
And the reason there aren’t young socialists and social-democrats is because young people know that Labour, as currently constituted, is just Tory Lite. And the Tories have become a Reform clone.
Someone from the UK trans community would know best but from the news I’ve been following, “Your Party” (i.e. the people aligned with Zarah Sultana at least) could turn out to be the most dedicated to trans rights but they’re probably the least likely to win a seat anytime soon, while the Green Party has the right to self-identify on the platform for both trans and nonbinary folks, and is gaining in momentum. Plaid Cymru in Wales also has this.
What the actual hell happened to Labour?
The Party bureaucrats turned on Jeremy Corbyn like lupus.
It wasn’t just the Party bureaucrats. The main faction behind the anti-Corbyn coup was organised by Mandelson and his Mini-Me McSweeney, with Blair lurking behind the curtains. And the money behind Labour Together was deliberately obfuscated, but much of it appears to have come from donors whose quid pro quo was unconditional support for Israel.
The capitalists need number to go up. They can’t generate more, so offloading costs to and eroding rights of the workers is the easiest way to do it.
The Power and Money elites will never ever accept to not keep getting “more cake”, so when the Economy doesn’t grow anymore, they switch from capturing pretty much the entirety of Economic Growth to Pillaging the existing wealth in the rest of society.
So the Economy has become more and more one of rent-seeking (which, thanks to increased indebtness, has expanded to such an extreme level that it is effectivelly taking existing wealth away from the people who own the least money-producing assets, who are mostly the younger generations and the working class) and less and less one of value adding activities, plus the share that the rest of Society (read: mainly workers) gets from the wealth still created has fallen so Consumption keeps falling.
All of this just makes the Economy grow even less (all that extra money for the wealthy ends up as Investments, which in turn end up as more Production, not Consumption, and as even that has stopped delivering any returns more and more of that money ends up in speculative assets, hence the various bubbles, from Realestate to Crypto and AI) so there is more and more overt Pillaging, which comes with more Authoritarianism in the form of Civil Society Surveillance and Forceful Suppression of Civil Society Movements to keep the victims from changing the system than enables and supports that Pillaging, and similarly with the Press (even those parts of it which had an image of independence) becoming even more intenselly Propagandistic than they were before.
Add to this the notion that the extreme Far Right in Britain (i.e. Reform) are the paid for political puppets of the ultra-rich (hence why the billionaire owned newspapers all support them) and almost all of the shit going on in the UK right now is explainable as pieces of a broad policy of keeping the elites in power and stopping the civil society from effectivelly challenging those power structures (by spotting them early via surveillance and cracking down hard on even the most peacefull challanges against the dictatums of those in power).
Looks like the UK will face their own MAGA situation.
I mean, they kinda already did a decade ago.
We’re kinda still in it because the knuckledraggers want to vote in one of the same architects of their own demise
Only males that own land should be able to vote, the rest have not shown the responsibility required to vote for the status quo.
I get it.
Yes, it’s not discrimination, it’s just what’s best for the country.
But apparently only males that own land understand it, which is obvious proof of the point.And OK just in case:
/s
Sorry but this is a nonsense doom-mongering take. The Trans rights issue is a complex mess but it’s not the end of democracy. That is hyperbolic nonsense.
The UK Supreme Court ruling is a reflection of a huge problem facing all countries: how do you reconcile women’s right and trans rights? The Supreme Court ruled that in the UK Equality Act, the terms “Man”, “Woman” and “Sex” referred to biological sex at birth, not gender identity and that a Gender Recognition Certificate does not change a persons biological sex under the law.
This was a clarification of the law as it stands; this was the way the legislation had been written and it ensures the Equality Act is applied clearly. It is not anti-democratic; Parliament makes the law and the courts interpret how it is written and remove ambiguity.
As this article mentions: it is up to Parliament now to change the law if it wants to. Parliament IS sovereign and can amend the Equality Act or provide a new definition for gender/sex. But there is a brutal reality why it is not doing so: this is a hugely divisive issue particularly for the Labour party. Women’s rights and Transgender rights are in conflict, and it’s extremely difficult to reconcile that. We’ve already seen how this played out in Scotland for the SNP, and Labour are in the same position. It can be argued to be cowardly and weak of them not to try to resolve this issue, but it is not fundamentally undemocratic. Labour don’t want to discuss this because they want to focus on other issues that they see as helping them stay in power.
It’s a nonsense to say this is the “start of democratic collapse”. It’s correct that the Right-wing have moved against trans rights, but for the Left it’s a paralysis of inaction due to there not being a simple solution that can please both sides. Women’s rights activists fundamentally hold that biological sex is immutable as that underpins their rights; Trans rights activists fundamentally hold that gender is not immutable as that underpins their rights.
Other countries are or will go through similar issues. Other rights like gender equality, race equality, Gay rights etc were controversial but they did not as fundamentally bring two groups rights into conflict. Arguably Gay rights and rights of religious expression did come into conflict and remain in conflict, and that was a long drawn out process but eventually there was a form of consensus. That is constantly under attack in multiple countries, and the balance may shift again on issues like Gay marriage if the Right-wing have their way. But with Trans-rights we have not even reached a stable political consensus of any form - it remains hugely controversial on the Right and Left for different reasons.
People seem to look back at the various rights issues over the past century and see a pattern of inevitability of the “good” winning, and people gaining their rights. Instead it’s a story of constant fighting and battles by different groups to be heard, and for their rights to be established and recognised. That war is ongoing in all those areas whether that is gender, race, sexual orientation etc. For Trans rights, we’re still in the worst part of the fighting. As with other rights issues, it may ultimately be resolved to some extent as we have generational changes that society changes and the law changes. Just as Gen X and Millenials had to come to the fore before Gay rights were finally recognised and enshrined properly in law in most countries, it may well be that it won’t be until Gen Z and Gen Alpha come to the fore in politics that their own social and political views on this are reflected in the law. Gen Z and Gen Alpha seem to be much more comfortable with seeing gender as changeable and not immutable like biological sex - that will inform the way things go long term.
This is not a failure of democracy. This is democracy in action. It is slow, it is flawed, and it seldom makes everyone happy. But change does slowly happen and things do generally get better over time as we have seen across the last 100+ years. People who believe in Trans rights need to keep fighting, they need to keep drawing attention to the issues and their plight and they must be organised and influence those people standing in the next general election, and the one after that and so on. Change can be achieved but it is seldom easy. But at the same time, Women’s rights activists also need to be listened to and the fundamental concerns around encroachment on their rights have to be addressed. I can’t pretend to know what the final answer will be - it is hugely complex and controversial with reason on both sides.
Yeah, I’m not reading all of that. Suck my girl dick
Dw about the downvotes. Worldnews is botted.
There is a failure of democracy here, if both the current pm and the prospective new pm treat the supreme court result as somethibg they have to “implement” democracy has failed.
They can (must!) set the law, yes its difficult for labour, but to be able to shrug it off as not thwir job and have the entire press nod along is a direct failure.
You dont even need to agree, or care, who is right to see this is a real democratic problem.
Women’s rights and Transgender rights are in conflict
Some of us would strongly disagree with this fundamental premise of yours. You state it like it’s a solid basis on which these matters should be debated, but it’s actually a controversial point that could only emerge as the conclusion of an argument. It needs justification at least.
What do you think the current conflict is about ?
The conception of an identity as a woman being rooted in sex and sex based rights being fought and won for by successive generations against a male dominated and sexist society is in conflict with the the conception of an identity as a woman not being rooted in sex but in ones idea of gender which could include people of the male sex.
The conception of an identity as a woman being rooted in sex and sex based rights being fought and won for by successive generations against a male dominated and sexist society
That’s the part that’s not universal. It’s how the issue is portrayed in the UK, but I’ve never seen it described as such in Germany, for example. “Womanhood” is experienced by those who are judged femme by society and women’s rights are related to gender, not sex. James Barry didn’t advance women’s rights the way that Elizabeth Anderson did, because even after the autopsy, the culture didn’t look at Barry and call him a woman.
I lived in Britain for over a decade, but I’m not from there and my personal references are from Northern and Southern Europe.
In simple terms, Britain is incredibly sexist (even compared to Southern Europe), but they practiced what’s called “Benevolent Sexism” - “women are emotional sensitive creatures which must be protected”.
The “benevolence” here is the mask covering the denial of agency of women and of their capabilities (for example, this very argument is deployed to claim that due to their “sensitivity” women can’t handle the harsh environment of corporate top management) - women aren’t just treated as “less capable” than men, they’re expected to try to fit with the image, so you see a lot more and a lot thicker “performative masking” on at least English women (especially middle class and above) than you see in Northern or Southern Europe - women in Britain aren’t supposed to be emotionally strong individuals fully confident in themselves for being themselves and not caring about what other people think of them.
So yeah, from that discriminative take on women comes that idea (that also ends up in Law) that one has to “protect” women by treating them in a different way from the rest purely because of their gender (which is why “solutions” in Britain for sexism are invariably of the “treat women differently” kind), and on such an environment of sexist thinking and practice it’s pretty natural that the issue of “what makes a woman a woman” is taken to extremes and is framed as one of “protecting women”.
The hilarous bit is that, lacking references from having lived elsewhere with totally different cultural expectations on women, most Brits (including women) never EVER examine that axiom that “women are more fragile and thus must be protected” so genuinelly think that all these assumptions about women and the discriminatory behaviour “to protect them” is not sexism but the very opposite of it.
In such an context and under such an anti-egalitarian take on gender, transfobia anchored on “protect women” and even parroted by the local “Feminists” is very much a natural thing.
Okay, but there is a demographic in the UK who understands their identity that way and the law is apparently worded as such appealing to sex.
Thank you for bringing up James Barry, that’s very interesting.
Society being sexist and those being judged as femme being on the receiving end of that discrimination is something I agree with.
But this definition doesn’t account for someone who is female and understands herself to be a woman but didn’t conform to gender norms.
Is womenhood defined by sex, by how society sees you or by your own gender identity.
Maybe its all three in different circumstances and scenarios.
That people hold different values into how we should understand one and other in terms sex and gender isn’t necessarily a problem in a liberal society.
Its not the sole issue, but UK democracy is going askew. Tougher laws on protesting. Arresting citizens for free speech. Arresting people for wearing shirts about the genocide in Palestine.
Start
Bitch, you still have a king
The king is not a problem for democracy in UK.
FPP and house of lords are.
The King in Britain has the power to stop laws.
This has never been used in modern days but apparently the threat of it has been used multiple times, even by the current monarch when he was still a Prince (look up the “black spider memos”).
There is no such thing in most other Monarchies in Europe.
Then there’s all the soft power that comes from how the Monarchy controls who actually gets socially highly prized symbols such as Knighthoods and Lordships - there are quite a lot of high level and highly paid positions in Britain (such as membership of the BBC board) which are de facto almost impossible to get without one of those.
Don’t confuse the intense and very extreme (certainly when compared with, for example, The Netherlands) Royal Arse Kissing of the British Press often in the form of whitewashing the influence and actions of the Royals and misportraying their anti-democratic priviledges as normal, with the actual reality of how the Monarchy shapes policy in Britain and helps support what would be an extreme level of class stratification in any Democratic European country.
Some of the most democratic nations are constitutional monarchies, but let’s ignore that little factoid lest we upset some Americans…
That being said, I agree with you. The UK definitely needs democratic reform. The House of Lords being largely unelected and the House of Commons being elected through first-past-the-post is outdated at this point, and needs updating.
The king is not a problem for democracy in UK.
The queen’s gambit — new evidence shows how Her Majesty wields influence on legislation
Seems like the monarchy has significant influence
1 poorly documented example from 1973! That’s more than half a century ago.
Also the Queen had absolutely zero power to leverage influence on law givers, and the article doesn’t mention that any was used. So if she actually managed to influence the law, it must have been because the politicians responsible for it, thought it was reasonable.
The hypothetical corruption in this situation is not by the Queen, but by the politicians.1 poorly documented example
Looks like you didn’t read the article
Paywall
Edit:
The orange band across the screen can be closed at the upper LEFT side. 🤡PS:
Thanks for the downvote unhelpful user. 🙄
