Comment on UK households face tax rise of £3,500 a year by next election, finds IFS

• Blake@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  No. Nothing to do with voting. Just forget that voting exists. Imagine that the politicians are unelected. How would you go about changing the system in that scenario? That’s how you need to be thinking, because that’s essentially the situation that we’re in.

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  • Syldon@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    No elections just means a dictatorship. Who would get to decide who runs the country.

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    • Blake@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      No, it doesn’t, that’s a very narrow perspective - I’m guessing that you’re quite young and you’re not familiar with alternative systems of organising society.

      There are many alternatives, but I like the idea of consensus based decision-making. It’s a little bit like direct democracy - instead of voting for people to represent you, instead you directly get to support or block decisions made about the society you live in.

      For example, currently, we elect politicians to represent us, and we try to elect a politician who would solve climate change. But that doesn’t seem to work. Imagine if, instead, we could all directly vote on an idea - whether or not we should end fossil fuel subsidies, for example? That’s direct democracy, but it gets rid of electoral politics. For full context, I don’t support that kind of direct democracy, but there are countless alternatives to representative democracy, I just wanted to share one which was simple and easy to explain.

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      • Syldon@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I’m guessing that you’re quite young

        This made me smile. It infers naivety is present when clearly it is not.

        Now that you have gave it a name I know exactly what you mean. Switzerland are the most prominent that I knew who use direct democracy. Full list here.

        I think we need to agree to disagree on that one. I am not in favour of direct democracy because it relies on the people being educated on all issues. Brexit showing just how bad an issue can go.

        I don’t know enough about the different STV systems to favour one over the other. Wales has adopted STV. Mark Drakeford speaks highly of it, but I do not understand if it is fully protected against manipulation as FPTP is. I favour a PR voting system, while keeping an open mind on STV. I dread that Labour may look at STV over PR. Simply because you will not know just how corruptible it is until someone does it.

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