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Comment by gmac | Hacker News Reader

Please, enough of this nonsense. What we need is for people to vote for better politicians. To my mind, the main obstacle to that is the awful UK press, and the increasing extent to which the BBC is a government broadcaster rather than a public broadcaster.

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It will be hard for people to vote for better politicians, so long as those politicians who are allowed to represent an existing party have to be selected by the party itself.

A large part of the problem is some of the existing parties, sure. But in Brighton, for example, we have Caroline Lucas, who is a wonderful MP.

Jeremy Corbyn for example is actually a decent human being (can vouch for this as work with him a bit in Westminster), despite some of his policies. However he is hounded out by the media and political class.

You don't know he's a decent human being. He seems nice but has never been tested. Lots of tyrants throughout history have come across as nice in casual interactions and then shocked people with their behaviour once they got power.

Corbyn catches flak because despite loudly proclaiming how straight talking and honest and pure he is, he refuses to disavow Marx (rather: dodged a question asking him to in a classic politician style), and praised Fidel Castro, both men whose ideas and policies caused profound suffering on a massive scale. That rather implies that if Corbyn ever got anywhere near actual power he'd rapidly start abusing it.

No, fair point but I do know for sure that people like May, Cameron, Osborne, Duncan Smith, Gove, Johnson aren't decent people to start out with...

Maybe. But where was he, and where were the rest of his party when this abomination was being shoved through parliament? Abstaining in the commons and cheerleading it in the lords. So pardon me if I don't buy him being a decent chap having any bearing whatsoever on this issue.

He is clearly not in control of his MPs in the commons, and even less so in the Lords (which are now stacked with Blair cronies). He has to pick his battles very carefully.

Mandatory reselection after boundary changes should see to that.

>What we need is for people to vote for better politicians.

Doesn't the UK have a similarly entrenched party system to Canada and the US, with first-past-the-post districts for MPs and all that?

It does. And we even voted against reforms to introduce a more proportional system in the recent past[1].

But trying to coordinate your constituency to vote for someone from a minor party makes arguably a little more sense than demanding that politicians be sent to the guillotine, which is where my comment started.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_Alternative_Vot...

The problem is that the system is quite rigged. Not only in UK , in Spain when new parties have tried to enter the stage, the media, own by the corporations who benefit from the politicians , have attack them fiercely , blatantly lying and manipulating the truth so they could not disrupt the establishment, including personal attacks. You could not believe all the bad news about Venezuela we have seen, and being tied to a new Spanish party like they were trying to do the same in Spain, suddenly, the day after elections Venezuela disappeared from the news and many more things like that

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