Britons keep voting against their own best interests & expect anyone to sympathize. FFS look at who they voted for as their last four prime ministers!
A large part of why the last leaders of both major parties have been populists, out of keeping with UK history, is because parties let their own private memberships play significant roles in choosing their leader -- this has handed the choice of PM from directly elected MPs to profoundly unelected party members.
The only reason the current PM is sane is because the ruling party decided to ignore the members this time, having seen how basically incompetent their members have become.
The last time the country voted for a new prime minister in an election (and by that I mean they voted for a majority of MPs) was 1997. Before that was 1979 with Thatcher.
Major was appointed in 1990, Brown was appointed in 2007, Cameron came to power with coalition dealing, but at least had a plurality, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak all appointed by their party membership at most.
Out of 46.5m registered voters, 17.4m voted to leave the EU. That's 37% of voters, and about 26% of the population. Unfortunately, 13.3m people just didn't vote at all in the referendum.
Theresa May got a hung parliament in her election (2017), and was propped up by the DUP. She won 42% of the vote, with about 13.6m votes cast - that's about 30% of eligible votes and 21% of the population.
Johnson won 365 seats in the UK Parliament (a majority of 80 seats) in 2019 with only 43% of the vote - about 14m votes. Still not the majority of Britons.
About 81,000 people voted for Liz Truss. It was only Conservative party members who were eligible to vote.
No member of the public outside of the Tory party has ever voted for Sunak. He ran against Truss in the previous leadership election and got about 60,000 votes. He became PM when Truss resigned and he ran unopposed.
Please explain how it is that Britons "keep voting against their own best interests", when the majority have actively resisted, abstained or not been able to participate in every vote from the Brexit referendum through to the appointment of the last four Prime Ministers.
We need Parliamentary reform - an act like the Great Act of 1832, perhaps - and we need better politicians, but don't dare blame this on "Britons".
Cameron had promised to rescind the rule that prevented 15yr+ expats from voting on Brexit before the vote would be held. He never fulfilled that promise. How many of the 3M+ expats do you think might have voted against Brexit?
But then, maybe not. I remember the week after the vote reading a letter in one of the quality papers (I think The Times, quite likely), from a lady who had voted Leave and was shocked to discover that her plan to retire to the South of France was now going to be much harder to achieve. "I think we should have been told about these sorts of consequences", she complained. It really boggles the mind.
Sigh.
Also: https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/alerts-archive/issue...
> Between 8 December 2023 and 7 February 2024, the entire population in the Gaza Strip (about 2.2 million people) is classified in IPC Phase 3 or above (Crisis or worse). This is the highest share of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity that the IPC initiative has ever classified for any given area or country.
But sure, let's leave it at "they voted for Hamas" -- when "Hamas is using them as shield, so..." doesn't cut it, that is.
This video explains how the Palestinians voted for Hamas in theory but not in practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJ9PKQbkJv8
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...