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.
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
And the party didn’t even have a vote on him. He stood uncontested.
Literally the only group that had a say were the party MP’s who were responsible for nominations. However the party rules are designed to give the wider party membership a say; no opportunity for this was given. There wasn’t even a Count Binface option.
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.