I wouldn’t call the 2-party system “flawed”, more like “not optimal”.
But relegating decisions concerning the public to a “representative democratic vote” on how the power of the state will be applied is the price we pay for taking it out of the sphere of “negotiation”…because some issues are so big and impactful that when left to negotiation, they spiral into violence and war.
So as much as I wish we were WAY more prudent with which issues we escalate to state-based enforcement, I do accept that the downsides of that methodology of problem-solving are the price we pay to avoid the more historically prevalent option: ceaseless cyclical violent conflict.
I would say it’s a pretty big flaw when the majority are so worried about the other party getting in, that they end up entrenched with hating the opposition and not being able to see the wood for the trees.
Many end up getting caught up in the never ending whirlpool of the left/right paradigm… rather than having real independent and free thought and seeing the insanity of it all.
In the Uk & US particularly, no real new parties emerge as everyone is too worried about splitting the vote and letting the others in.
Some people even pay for their own propaganda that keeps them in this cycle. That blows my mind.
I’m afraid I would also called it flawed. Because it means that pretty much all of time it’s just two parties that have a say in things, and in time it evolves into a competition of who out of those two can win, at the expense of other considerations like pragmatic policy. It becomes instead focused on the surrogate target of ‘what can we say to make ourselves popular’ rather than ‘what is the best course of action for the greater good’
Interesting take. I wonder what he would say about the dropping testosterone levels. I would imagine that has some impact on our will to act out our more aggressive instincts.
Do we live in an expert world, where only these are allowed to have a voice, and all the others have to shut their mouth? Is that a democratic process?
Seems like a straw man. There are very few people who’d suggest that only an elite of ill-defined ‘experts’ make decisions on behalf of the rest of us.
I could just as easily make a counter straw man by saying that ‘everyone gets a voice’ politics too often means that everyone’s voice (and opinion) is considered equal, regardless of experience or qualification, and that the only discerning factor left to us, when we go deep into the rabbit hole of ‘who’s really to say what’s right and wrong?’ is the flat mathematics of majority opinion.
After all, there are a great many politicans ready to exploit that line of thinking under the supposed name of ‘anti-elitism’ and ‘democracy’.
Of course, what’s needed is nuance and consideration, where we recognise that all people can and ought to have a voice, and that meaningful and important views and perspectives can emerge from places not traditionally recognised as ‘expert’, but that we need to engage with and assess opinions and propositions in a reasoned and evidence-led way, otherwise we just fall into majoritarian nihilism.
We need to move away from the childish belief that our ideas, beliefs, etc are an inherent part of us. If someone disagrees with or disproves a perspective of mine, that’s not an affront or an act of war. I don’t deserve to have my opinions and beliefs coddled and held up as ‘just as valid’ as every other opinion out there.
It’s an insidious (and increasingly dark) aspect of our current political debates that we think aspects of self (race, nationality, gender, location…) are inherently tied to perspectives and beliefs, and vice-versa, and it greatly limits our ability to argue and assess, to reach agreement, and to move together as society rather than fractured interest groups who are forever suspicious of ‘the other’.
The IMF consigned Britain to the economic doghouse on Tuesday. As the only leading economy likely to contract this year, the UK’s growth forecasts were revised down by the fund at the same time as it boosted those of most other countries. Even Russia is expected to grow more than the UK in 2023, in the fund’s outlook.
I remember a time when Labour was against the EU and the Tories were all for it…
I lived many many many years in the UK and most of my life in the EU. Inflation, poor economy performances etc. I can tell you that a lot of the sh*t happening in the UK since Brexit is not a UK only phenomenon, but cynical politics (which i despise more than anything) will point at Brexit rather than at their own crooked party and incompetent colleagues.
The funny thing is that the UK had actually a pretty good deal with the EU, and a lot of people in Europe wish they had that for their countries.
From my own experience my own country doesn’t have anything close to democracy and the EU layer on top of that just took us further away from it. We vote for liars who take their guidance from a higher institution that have a sort of politiburo of self designated bureaucrats.
The EU failed. It’s very little more than a french type messy and oversized bureaucracy at the service of the german economy. All of that taking a bit more of people’s power to have a say on things happening to them through politicians decisions. A very sad state of affair.
The sad thing : it’s probably the last time that politicians will allow people to have a say. You will never have anything close to direct democracy after this. And even sadder: a lot of people will think it’s for the best and will still call themselves liberals/democrats/whatever.
The UK should have never entered the EU in the first place, entering it was the first mistake and to think you could leave it without paying the cost was the second one.
I wish my own country had done the same than Norway and Switzerland.
I don’t blame people who voted for Brexit, I blame that the wrong people pushed for Brexit for the wrong reasons and that others tried to deny the result of the referendum for so long.
It’s just another display of how rotten politicians are. Especially for the way they just smeared voters of each sides rather than look at themselves in the mirror.
Yeah but that’s a prediction isn’t ? But since Brexit ?
I just read that Russia is going to do economically better than ALL of the EU by 2024, but that’s just another forecast.
Anyway, this is a very interesting article in many ways
“The temporary problem is that Britain’s recovery from the coronavirus pandemic was too strong to keep inflation down and the Bank of England thinks the country needs a period of economic retrenchment to return to price stability.”
“On the third anniversary of Brexit on Tuesday, Jonathan Portes, professor at King’s College London, said there was scope to disagree about the effect of leaving the EU on the UK economy, but there was no doubt that “Brexit has, as economists predicted, reduced UK trade and investment”.”
Actually since 2008 most of western economic growth (if you can call that growth) was just fueled buy stupid amount of debt at very low rate. In Europe and the US, states were creating 2$ to create 1$ of GDP (the numbers are not exact, it’s just to tell the point).
I just think people living from the over polarization of society (I mean politics, journalists/medias) are a bit too quick at pointing the finger at Brexit… It’s really easy and lazy, and they should look at themselves maybe.
Brexit is a distraction from the sheer destruction of Lockdowns (400b+ for UK) and the vast printing of money which once its played out means a big reduction in peoples purchasing power.
That’s not to say Brexit isnt contributing, however nobody here is talking about the impact lockdowns have had.
IMF is as you say just a projection, they arent always right. They also had a hand in preventing the UK from lowering tax - was there a bigger agenda at play in doing so…
UK imported more goods from EU than exported to EU, by a significant margin, so I’d be interested to see how or if Brexit has impacted the EU as well, can’t seem to find any study on this though.
I think if they could have negotiated a customs union as the EU has with Norway, Switzerland etc then it would have been better. I think the UK not adopting the Euro currency has always seemed a bit at odds with being in the EU too.
Not sure about the pandemic borrowing and how that impacted the UK and the EU, but it seems reasonable to expect that this and the fuel price crisis is definitely a factor, and not easily accounted for, hard to separate political propaganda from facts when not all the facts are available.
The EU, in a spirit of payback/revenge, would have never accepted that.
“I think the UK not adopting the Euro currency has always seemed a bit at odds with being in the EU too.”
It’s true but one has to remember the disaster of Black Wednesday:
That costed Tories many elections and it completely changed the UK relation to the EU. At the time Labour was all out against the EU when the Tories were pro-EU.
When the fuel prices rocketed, why did the UK not remove/reduce VAT on it
Considering that would have helped slow the increase in cost of living, costs to business / supply chains / inflation and not affected the actual amount they would have received compared to pre-crisis income.
That´s so true.
Oskar Lafontaine (who was candidate for german chancelor in 1990) told everyone that uniting 2 countries takes a lot of time, effort and money.
This totally turned out to be true.
People in germany elected Helmut Kohl because he promised them flourishing landscapes (blühende Landschaften) which later on became a synonym for a partly misjudgement/lie to manipulate people.
“Economists Ana Andrade and Dan Hanson reckon the economy is 4% smaller than it might have been”
I wish I could read their analysis.
““The main takeaway is that the rupture from the single market may have impacted the British economy faster than we, or most other forecasters, expected.””
lol That’s why I take everything those type of people says with a massive grain of salt.
