As long as they dont cry about it being done when its used against the party they like.
Excellent idea – although I would personally put the bar higher than 50%. But making it relative to the last election’s turnout is a brilliant detail. Not sure how I feel about the time limit restriction, though – that could encourage despots to do their damage much faster.
Sadly this isn’t a good idea. It’s just going to breed more division. Part of the vote includes accepting defeat, not just continually demanding another chance. It’s a max of five years. I see no reason to change that…
Sure way to guarantee populism.
Using PR as a voting method for GE, would be better.
The issue we currently have is one party had a huge majority. So it’s impossible for the rest of the parties to try and call a GE.
PR would, in theory, stop huge majorities.
I refuse to believe that Burgon is real. He must be a parody surely?
unfortunately this would backfire for a number of reasons…
it would force constant electioneering and encourage short term initiatives over longer term investments (which might cause initial pain but pay off later on)… popularism on steroids basically
there’d be a fraction of the populace who’d always be calling for a general election as their side didn’t win, so you’d need a fairly high threshold of the population to trigger it (which itself might be biased towards certain demographics)
sometimes measures are genuinely necessary but unpopular, I think NHS reform is going to be such an issue in the next decade or so, the ability to call elections would make these issues even more politically unpalatable than they already are
as a job, the role of MP would become even more tenuous discouraging people who aren’t already financially secure – I think we’ve got enough of those types in government already!
the real answer is likely PR, and a government of coalitions, it encourages compromise and longer term planning as it would be much more likely at least a fraction of your party would be represented in subsequent governments, so there’d be higher accountability (you can’t just shit the bed and leave it for the next guy, as it’s quite possible you’ll be cuddling up to him later on!)
Coming from the public that brought you Brexit….nah, you’re good.
Oh I’m sure there’s no way this could possibily go wrong. In fact I’m going to start a petition to have this man installed as the Baldrick Professor of Cunning Plans at Oxford.
Labour get elected and the DM, Sun, Express, Telegraph, Times etc. start a campaign to have call a new GE because the Tories were clearly cheated.
I don’t like this idea, I guess it would create chaos, but would like to see a parliamentary term restricted to 4 years instead of 5
Giving any power to the UK people is really not a good idea .. see brexit.
The Russians and Chinese can manipulate the media and people’s opinions way better than good ideas can.
[REMINDER] Yes the general election is likely ages away BUT there are local election happening in less than 14 weeks. The turnouts of which are usually depressingly low. If you want to protest this government this is one way you can actually do that by voting or even taking part as an activist. A lot of you will live in Tory councils, and a lot of you will have a Tory councillor. They should all definitely face a challenge, which is good for democracy at the very least.
I’d encourage people (if they’ve the time and energy) to get offline and try some campaigning locally for an opposition party. If anything it’s good practice for the real thing in 2024/2025. Also you get to meet IRL a lot of cool people, that’s been my experience anyway. Way less depressing than complaining away on social media (of which I am very guilty of).
Basically the British public name a boat , boat mc boaty . Can you imagine having the power to call elections.
There should be a way for the public to indicate that what the government is doing is in conflict of what was expected and/or promised. We’re supposed to have this already – Parliament of representatives – but that has been corrupted by Parties (the political organisation kind) and, especially, the party whip.
I share the same concern for it being a direct thing, and would expect it to be invoked far too often by the public.
Just give us Proportional Representation ffs.
I think if a ruling party replaces a PM mid-term they need to restrict themselves to what was in the original manifesto. Any other laws passed should expire soon after the end of that term.
This should stop things like Theresa May’s school reforms, which were her pet project and had no mandate at all.
Have Labour top brass told Burgon to keep quiet recently? There have been much less of the usual moronic Tweets from him
In a world where people are sensible and rule their own thinking, this would be a good idea. But it’s the UK and too many people are idiots and so easily led they’ll vote for things that fuck us up because someone put some catchy slogan on the side of a bus.
Let’s give the public the power to vote Brexit and Tory…worked out brilliantly so far.
What about having it so that if the ruling party needs to change leaders more than twice in a term a GE if called. (Death would be an exception)
We could even have a governing body with actual teeth to hold misters to a standard. If they don’t adhere to those standards a local by-election needs called.
How would you enact that?
Have a vote on whether to have a vote or not? lol
No no no. Let the tories stay in power for another 2 years. The longer they are in power, the better chance or them never winning again.
The people who voted for tories need to have as much time with this as possible so they learn.
Or just change the law so that whenever a PM resigns/dies erc it triggers a general election after the party leadership contest.
Solves the major problem.
obviously there needs to be contextual boundaries on this, rather than allowing knee jerk election calls, but overall i think it’s a good idea. if there’s a change of PM, without election, for example, GE within 3 months. Breach of rules / ethics / breaking the actual law while in power, for example – GE within a shorter period. reach a certain amount of petition votes, take it to a commons vote.
Yeah right, like the Tory kleptocrat scum will vote for that.
I think this is a nonstarter.
There’s a good point about accountability, unpopular governments stagger into defeat and with the incentive to wreck as much as they can, and get back in next time.
The answer is not to undermine every government, because you’ll always find 10% willing to overthrow a government, and never find 50%.
I would like to see more accountability for the executive. A prime minister is picked by the MPs of the largest party. We should require a general election to confirm that change in leadership, to prevent another Truss scenario. We have a weakness which countries with elected executives don’t have.
Another awful idea from the man with single didget brain cells
Oh wow I’m really surprised at the near universal disdain at this idea in this thread.
Instead of just hypothesising what it would lead to, why not look at actual implementations and see how it works out?
I was quite surprised to find that the Taiwanese people have the power to initiate a legally binding petition to remove elected officials when I found out 2 years ago, just because its so rarely used. There were stages with time limits to get to certain thresholds of signatures milestones, and the requirements are not trivial to meet, but they did manage to unseat a Mayor that was embroiled in scandals.
I was honestly really impressed. I’m became quite convinced that the measure of the success of a democracy lies not with whether the ideal candidate can be elected, but whether the people have the power the remove politicians from power.
Let’s be honest here, most of the western democracies are so old, and they were set up when the aristocracy still had lots of power, we have to reflect onhow much of the “traditional” or “normal” approaches were set up for them to retain their power.
And I think its actually a good way to avoid populism, the kind where you have a government just trash the entire country for years and just give out some breadcrumbs a couple months before an election. Not that it still won’t be done, but there’s a bigger limit to how much shit they can throw out if we actually have a reasonable shot at removing them rather than relying on some stupid archaic parliamentary etiquette.
If you want even more short termism in government then this is the way to go. Having every government constantly chasing only the quick popular wins. Nothing controversial ever being done for fear of a knee jerk reaction election getting called. Not to mention the cost and disruption. Idiotic idea.
We don’t need to give the public this power, we need to reform parliamentary procedure so that the executive is not in direct control of the legislature.
We saw through the EU exit crises that Parliament wanted to go one way, the executive another and because the executive controls the schedule of business in Parliament to a great extent, the executive effectively won the argument.
Do people remember the public is what voted for brexit and boris???? This is so dumb.
If a party drops to less than 25% support in the polls for multiple days/weeks/months/quarters in a row then in my mind that’s the equivalent of a public vote of no confidence.
Another stupid idea from possibly the most stupid and irrelevant MP’s of all time. Kier needs to dispose of this liability.
Please, no.
Giving the public a say doesn’t tend to turn out well, because they’re mostly idiots.
What a stupid idea, it’d be every week!
This is the quality of the Opposition….
General elections no, but I feel like we should be able to force by-elections for members of parliament somehow
Start by fixing the voting system itself, ditch FPTP, and then see if you still want this.
I think in the case we have had the last few years – where we’ve gone through 4-5 prime ministers, mostly without the public having any say, then it makes sense. We’ve had a bunch of useless, self interested people in charge, who are just filling their pockets as much as they can, rather than caring about the public or country. They’ve just made everything worse for everyone, yet still go on with no cares or consequences.
And for major policies, allow the public to have more of a say (like the politicians not allowing any confirmation vote for leaving the EU, then forcing it through – when it was not legally binding, was a tiny majority, and I believe wasn’t a huge voter turnout(?). And worst of all obviously a majorly self harming policy which stripped rights away from citizens).
Yeah that would work. Because the 100% public can be trusted 🤣
There would be an election every year.
Another half-baked and daft idea from Beijing mouthpiece Richard “Bunter” Burgon. I thought that referendums were the absolute worst idea to solve complex political problems, then I heard this little chestnut.
If you ask the public, they’d want to bring back capital punishment and free alcohol. The public need protecting from themselves.
There’d be elections called all the time lmao, stupid idea from a stupid man
What we need is to reform how elections are done, not have more of them. First past the post voting has been shown time and time again to be the worst method of selecting a democratic government as it promotes tribalism. Its how we ended up with an increasingly 2 party system.
LOL There would be a general election every five minutes with the selection we have to choose from.
Lets just have a voting system that’s actually fair and representative.
We’d have dodged all this shit.
I think that, when a primeminister is forced to resign or has to be removed, it should be assumed that the body put them there is culpable and/or just as untenable. This should trigger a general election.
If this were the case, we would have had a GE right when Cameron lost the brexit vote and quit, or when May quit, or when Boris quit, or when Truss quit.
These were all opportunities to do better things earlier on.
The sheer number of PMs we’ve had in the last few years alone is testament to a disruption greater than the same number of general elections would have yielded.
What we need is for MPs to be held accountable, bullying, lieing, tax evasion, law breaking, corruption, security breaches, racism, sexism, porn watching, theft, bribes, nepotism..one of those should be sacking and life time ban from public office.
45 comments
As long as they dont cry about it being done when its used against the party they like.
Excellent idea – although I would personally put the bar higher than 50%. But making it relative to the last election’s turnout is a brilliant detail. Not sure how I feel about the time limit restriction, though – that could encourage despots to do their damage much faster.
Sadly this isn’t a good idea. It’s just going to breed more division. Part of the vote includes accepting defeat, not just continually demanding another chance. It’s a max of five years. I see no reason to change that…
Sure way to guarantee populism.
Using PR as a voting method for GE, would be better.
The issue we currently have is one party had a huge majority. So it’s impossible for the rest of the parties to try and call a GE.
PR would, in theory, stop huge majorities.
I refuse to believe that Burgon is real. He must be a parody surely?
unfortunately this would backfire for a number of reasons…
it would force constant electioneering and encourage short term initiatives over longer term investments (which might cause initial pain but pay off later on)… popularism on steroids basically
there’d be a fraction of the populace who’d always be calling for a general election as their side didn’t win, so you’d need a fairly high threshold of the population to trigger it (which itself might be biased towards certain demographics)
sometimes measures are genuinely necessary but unpopular, I think NHS reform is going to be such an issue in the next decade or so, the ability to call elections would make these issues even more politically unpalatable than they already are
as a job, the role of MP would become even more tenuous discouraging people who aren’t already financially secure – I think we’ve got enough of those types in government already!
the real answer is likely PR, and a government of coalitions, it encourages compromise and longer term planning as it would be much more likely at least a fraction of your party would be represented in subsequent governments, so there’d be higher accountability (you can’t just shit the bed and leave it for the next guy, as it’s quite possible you’ll be cuddling up to him later on!)
Coming from the public that brought you Brexit….nah, you’re good.
Oh I’m sure there’s no way this could possibily go wrong. In fact I’m going to start a petition to have this man installed as the Baldrick Professor of Cunning Plans at Oxford.
Labour get elected and the DM, Sun, Express, Telegraph, Times etc. start a campaign to have call a new GE because the Tories were clearly cheated.
I don’t like this idea, I guess it would create chaos, but would like to see a parliamentary term restricted to 4 years instead of 5
Giving any power to the UK people is really not a good idea .. see brexit.
The Russians and Chinese can manipulate the media and people’s opinions way better than good ideas can.
[REMINDER] Yes the general election is likely ages away BUT there are local election happening in less than 14 weeks. The turnouts of which are usually depressingly low. If you want to protest this government this is one way you can actually do that by voting or even taking part as an activist. A lot of you will live in Tory councils, and a lot of you will have a Tory councillor. They should all definitely face a challenge, which is good for democracy at the very least.
I’d encourage people (if they’ve the time and energy) to get offline and try some campaigning locally for an opposition party. If anything it’s good practice for the real thing in 2024/2025. Also you get to meet IRL a lot of cool people, that’s been my experience anyway. Way less depressing than complaining away on social media (of which I am very guilty of).
Basically the British public name a boat , boat mc boaty . Can you imagine having the power to call elections.
There should be a way for the public to indicate that what the government is doing is in conflict of what was expected and/or promised. We’re supposed to have this already – Parliament of representatives – but that has been corrupted by Parties (the political organisation kind) and, especially, the party whip.
I share the same concern for it being a direct thing, and would expect it to be invoked far too often by the public.
Just give us Proportional Representation ffs.
I think if a ruling party replaces a PM mid-term they need to restrict themselves to what was in the original manifesto. Any other laws passed should expire soon after the end of that term.
This should stop things like Theresa May’s school reforms, which were her pet project and had no mandate at all.
Have Labour top brass told Burgon to keep quiet recently? There have been much less of the usual moronic Tweets from him
In a world where people are sensible and rule their own thinking, this would be a good idea. But it’s the UK and too many people are idiots and so easily led they’ll vote for things that fuck us up because someone put some catchy slogan on the side of a bus.
Let’s give the public the power to vote Brexit and Tory…worked out brilliantly so far.
What about having it so that if the ruling party needs to change leaders more than twice in a term a GE if called. (Death would be an exception)
We could even have a governing body with actual teeth to hold misters to a standard. If they don’t adhere to those standards a local by-election needs called.
How would you enact that?
Have a vote on whether to have a vote or not? lol
No no no. Let the tories stay in power for another 2 years. The longer they are in power, the better chance or them never winning again.
The people who voted for tories need to have as much time with this as possible so they learn.
Or just change the law so that whenever a PM resigns/dies erc it triggers a general election after the party leadership contest.
Solves the major problem.
obviously there needs to be contextual boundaries on this, rather than allowing knee jerk election calls, but overall i think it’s a good idea. if there’s a change of PM, without election, for example, GE within 3 months. Breach of rules / ethics / breaking the actual law while in power, for example – GE within a shorter period. reach a certain amount of petition votes, take it to a commons vote.
Yeah right, like the Tory kleptocrat scum will vote for that.
I think this is a nonstarter.
There’s a good point about accountability, unpopular governments stagger into defeat and with the incentive to wreck as much as they can, and get back in next time.
The answer is not to undermine every government, because you’ll always find 10% willing to overthrow a government, and never find 50%.
I would like to see more accountability for the executive. A prime minister is picked by the MPs of the largest party. We should require a general election to confirm that change in leadership, to prevent another Truss scenario. We have a weakness which countries with elected executives don’t have.
Another awful idea from the man with single didget brain cells
Oh wow I’m really surprised at the near universal disdain at this idea in this thread.
Instead of just hypothesising what it would lead to, why not look at actual implementations and see how it works out?
I was quite surprised to find that the Taiwanese people have the power to initiate a legally binding petition to remove elected officials when I found out 2 years ago, just because its so rarely used. There were stages with time limits to get to certain thresholds of signatures milestones, and the requirements are not trivial to meet, but they did manage to unseat a Mayor that was embroiled in scandals.
I was honestly really impressed. I’m became quite convinced that the measure of the success of a democracy lies not with whether the ideal candidate can be elected, but whether the people have the power the remove politicians from power.
Let’s be honest here, most of the western democracies are so old, and they were set up when the aristocracy still had lots of power, we have to reflect onhow much of the “traditional” or “normal” approaches were set up for them to retain their power.
And I think its actually a good way to avoid populism, the kind where you have a government just trash the entire country for years and just give out some breadcrumbs a couple months before an election. Not that it still won’t be done, but there’s a bigger limit to how much shit they can throw out if we actually have a reasonable shot at removing them rather than relying on some stupid archaic parliamentary etiquette.
If you want even more short termism in government then this is the way to go. Having every government constantly chasing only the quick popular wins. Nothing controversial ever being done for fear of a knee jerk reaction election getting called. Not to mention the cost and disruption. Idiotic idea.
We don’t need to give the public this power, we need to reform parliamentary procedure so that the executive is not in direct control of the legislature.
We saw through the EU exit crises that Parliament wanted to go one way, the executive another and because the executive controls the schedule of business in Parliament to a great extent, the executive effectively won the argument.
Do people remember the public is what voted for brexit and boris???? This is so dumb.
If a party drops to less than 25% support in the polls for multiple days/weeks/months/quarters in a row then in my mind that’s the equivalent of a public vote of no confidence.
Another stupid idea from possibly the most stupid and irrelevant MP’s of all time. Kier needs to dispose of this liability.
Please, no.
Giving the public a say doesn’t tend to turn out well, because they’re mostly idiots.
What a stupid idea, it’d be every week!
This is the quality of the Opposition….
General elections no, but I feel like we should be able to force by-elections for members of parliament somehow
Start by fixing the voting system itself, ditch FPTP, and then see if you still want this.
I think in the case we have had the last few years – where we’ve gone through 4-5 prime ministers, mostly without the public having any say, then it makes sense. We’ve had a bunch of useless, self interested people in charge, who are just filling their pockets as much as they can, rather than caring about the public or country. They’ve just made everything worse for everyone, yet still go on with no cares or consequences.
And for major policies, allow the public to have more of a say (like the politicians not allowing any confirmation vote for leaving the EU, then forcing it through – when it was not legally binding, was a tiny majority, and I believe wasn’t a huge voter turnout(?). And worst of all obviously a majorly self harming policy which stripped rights away from citizens).
Yeah that would work. Because the 100% public can be trusted 🤣
There would be an election every year.
Another half-baked and daft idea from Beijing mouthpiece Richard “Bunter” Burgon. I thought that referendums were the absolute worst idea to solve complex political problems, then I heard this little chestnut.
If you ask the public, they’d want to bring back capital punishment and free alcohol. The public need protecting from themselves.
There’d be elections called all the time lmao, stupid idea from a stupid man
What we need is to reform how elections are done, not have more of them. First past the post voting has been shown time and time again to be the worst method of selecting a democratic government as it promotes tribalism. Its how we ended up with an increasingly 2 party system.
LOL There would be a general election every five minutes with the selection we have to choose from.
Lets just have a voting system that’s actually fair and representative.
We’d have dodged all this shit.
I think that, when a primeminister is forced to resign or has to be removed, it should be assumed that the body put them there is culpable and/or just as untenable. This should trigger a general election.
If this were the case, we would have had a GE right when Cameron lost the brexit vote and quit, or when May quit, or when Boris quit, or when Truss quit.
These were all opportunities to do better things earlier on.
The sheer number of PMs we’ve had in the last few years alone is testament to a disruption greater than the same number of general elections would have yielded.
What we need is for MPs to be held accountable, bullying, lieing, tax evasion, law breaking, corruption, security breaches, racism, sexism, porn watching, theft, bribes, nepotism..one of those should be sacking and life time ban from public office.