Both Starmer and Burnham were elected.
GMac@feddit.org 3 days ago
Well, if anyone had any doubt that Burnham is a paid up israeli stooge, i think those doubts can be considered settled.
Sick of these unelected prime ministers swapping the keys to number 10 whenever it suits a sufficiently wealthy lobby group.
blackn1ght@feddit.uk 3 days ago
Jrockwar@feddit.uk 3 days ago
Oh come on, you know what they meant. People might have voted for Labour, but not to have Burnham as PM. Nor Sunak, or Lettuce Lady.
mannycalavera@feddit.uk 2 days ago
That’s not how general elections work in the UK.
You vote for your local MP, and the party with a large enough selection of MPs gets to choose their Premier to be PM. So if the party wants to rotate their premier, so be it.
It’s quite simple but a lot of people seem to have trouble understanding this process. It just goes to show the dire state of education.
GMac@feddit.org 2 days ago
I have no misunderstanding of how the system is supposed to work.
We vote for an MP to represent us in parliament, knowing the policies of the party and of it’s leader who would step into the pm role. There has never been, on the history of parliament, and expectation that party leadership would change hands like car keys at a swingers party. If you tink otherwise, you ae normalising the dysfunctional behaviour and speeding the breakdown of the democratic process.
In my own, experience I have never had a local MP actually represent my view on anything that i have written to them about, they just quote and follow party or funded lines instead. ymmv This means the pm role and party policies are substantially more impactful.
As a result, ayone casting a vote without at least 50% of their choice being related to party leadership and policies is not understanding the system and is damning the rest of the population by voting for fictional authority over local concerns at the expense of national authority over real issues.
So to my original assertion, Burnham was not elected to the office of PM.
Tweak@feddit.uk 2 days ago
It’s permissible by the letter of the rules, but it absolutely is not what people expect to be happening with their democratic say.
Most people vote for whichever MP is in the party they want to vote for, run by the leader they want to run the country. Most people expect some stability, at least until the next opportunity to have their say.
And Labour party members are supposed to vote on the party leader, it isn’t supposed to just be a decision by MP’s. Because Burnham stood uncontested, there was no vote, and effectively the only people who got to decide were the MP’s at the nomination stage.
And Starmer had no good (publicly known) reason to leave. His controversies were never that damning, and they were contrasted with quiet competent successes.
You dismiss this as “all right and proper” according to British election rules, while ignoring that it is all dripping in slime.
blackn1ght@feddit.uk 2 days ago
No I don’t because that’s not how our democracy works. We don’t vote directly for the PM, we vote in a local representitive and they vote for the leader of the party. It’s either a misundestanding or just being dishonest to say that they’re unelected. They were elected by their constitutency and elected again by whatever mechanism the party uses.
Jrockwar@feddit.uk 2 days ago
MonsterMonster@lemmy.world 2 days ago
You need to read up about how our parliament works. We never elect a prime minister, we only elect a person to be an MP for that constituency. That’s the way it’s been for centuries.
GMac@feddit.org 2 days ago
Read my other comment. The revolving door of party leadership is recent and dysfunctional. And your vote is for your local MP AND the party they are a member of, knowing the policies and leadership of that party.
If you think otherwise you are ignoring a substantial amount of what you should have been considering in your voting decisions.
Tweak@feddit.uk 2 days ago
That’s the farce of it all. On paper people vote for an MP, but in their minds people vote for a party, and that party is led by the PM they hope will be running the country.
Literally no one voted for Burnham to lead the party. Starmer threw in the towel, over nothing in particular, and Burnham stood uncontested. There is nothing democratic about that.