Peter Kyle was one such MP, and now he's making statements like:
> I see that Nigel Farage is already saying that he’s going to overturn these laws. So you know, we have people out there who are extreme pornographers, peddling hate, peddling violence. Nigel Farage is on their side.
It's maddening. The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage.
I've come to believe that is the point of forcing people to choose between extreme polarizing positions. It makes disengagement feel like the only moderate move.
But in better circumstances, there is enormous social pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the nation toward a positive future.
(Yes, I think that political reform could be of some use in the UK. Some. The underlying problems would mostly remain.)
Labour has been part of the reigning duopoly in British politics for most of the last 100 years. How could they not be part of the establishment?
You talk about the lesser evil here, well, it is exactly what is written there.
Some parts quoted:
> Democracy suffers from many more inherent contradictions as well. Thus, democratic voting may have either one of these two functions: to determine governmental policy or to select rulers. According to the former, what Schumpeter termed the “classical” theory of democracy, the majority will is supposed to rule on issues.[23] According to the latter theory, majority rule is supposed to be confined to choosing rulers, who in turn decide policy. While most political scientists support the latter version, democracy means the former version to most people, and we shall therefore discuss the classical theory first.
> According to the “will of the people” theory, direct democracy—voting on each issue by all the citizens, as in New England town meetings—is the ideal political arrangement. Modern civilization and the complexities of society, however, are supposed to have outmoded direct democracy, so that we must settle for the less perfect “representative democracy” (in olden days often called a “republic”), where the people select representatives to give effect to their will on political issues. Logical problems arise almost immediately. One is that different forms of electoral arrangements, different delimitations of geographical districts, all equally arbitrary, will often greatly alter the picture of the “majority will.” [...]
See the italic bit ("we must settle for the less perfect").
He talks about IMO the greatest contradictions after this part:
> But even proportional representation would not be as good—according to the classical view of democracy—as direct democracy, and here we come to another important and neglected consideration: modern technology does make it possible to have direct democracy. Certainly, each man could easily vote on issues several times per week by recording his choice on a device attached to his television set. This would not be difficult to achieve. And yet, why has no one seriously suggested a return to direct democracy, now that it may be feasible?
The whole thing is worth a read with an open mind.
Another major problem is the lack of clear bounding principles to distinguish public questions from private ones (or universal public questions from public questions particular to a localized context).
Together these problems result in political processes that (a) treats every question as global problem affecting society an undifferentiated mass, and (b) uses majoritarianism applied to arbitrary, large-scale aggregations of people as means of answering those questions.
This leads to concepts like "one man, one vote" implying that everyone should have an equal say on every question regardless of the stake any given individual might have in the outcome of that question.
And that, in turn, leads to the dominant influence on every question -- in either mode of democracy Rothbard refers to -- being not the people who face the greatest impact from the answer, nor the people who understand its details the best, but rather vast numbers of people who really have no basis for any meaningful opinions in the first place.
Every question comes down to opposing parties trying to win over uninformed, disinterested voters through spurious arguments and vague appeals to emotion. Public choice theory hits the nail on the head here, and this is why the policy equilibrium in every modern political state is a dysfunctional mess of special-interest causes advanced at everyone else's expense.
Democracy is necessary, but not sufficient. And I think the particular genius of the American approach has been to embed democracy within a constitutional framework that attempts to define clear lines regarding what is a public question open to political answers and what is not. The more we erode that framework, the more the reliability of our institutions will fray.
Always go for your gut feeling, not for what people are blaring. Especially populists will, as the name suggest, crave for people's attention and a cheap "Yeah, they are totally right!". That's how they win elections. And three months into the new period, they will show their real intentions.
However, I think the key reason why Conservatives and Labour are so entrenched is that people make their voting habits a part of their identity. I had a number of face to face conversations about politics with people born and raised in the UK. Every single one agreed with me about many stupid things the back then conservative govt pushed (the idea to ban encryption and more). And every single one of them said they will continue voting Conservative. Why? Because this is who they are. It's a part of their family identity (being quite well off financially, having expensive education etc). And they only see two choices, with the other being much worse.
This is how democracies die. They even agreed with this being far from optimal, but they see no other option.
Reform are leading in the polls, the lib dems are picking up disaffected tory wets, new left wing parties are threatening labour from the left on gaza etc.
A long time until the next election but right now it's all to play for
Unfortunately the atheism movement of a about ten years ago didn't go far enough in making people aware that religion isn't just about big men in the sky who are the same colour as you. What it actually is is a deficiency in human ability, a bypass for the logical centres of the brain and a way to access the animal areas that can get people to do terrible things to each other. Some of them, like Hitchens, definitely understood this, but nobody seems to be talking about it any more and we didn't learn to be vigilant of this deficiency.
He seemed pretty fixated on "monotheism" being a particular problem, as though two gods were fine.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-08-06/hacker...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/nov/21/immigration...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/cybersecurity/britains-nh...
I’m going to guess that our MP’s are tech illiterate enough as it is, that when an opaque term like “what is a category 1” came up, someone hand waved over it and said “think Facebook or Twitter”
Or rather euroscepticism was the dog-whistling for racist arguments that, since Brexit happened, don't need to camouflage anymore.
[1] https://hansard.parliament.uk/ [2] It was a very quick search.
I feel like during an election, policies and election promises are what should be presented, make it illegal to vote for a specific candidate, or for specific candidates to say what their policies are; they can only register policies with the election process.
Then people vote on the policies/promises they'd like to see implemented and whoever made those then gets in.
If policies and promises are not upheld during an election cycle, then that is illegal and those involved get charged and sentenced, though allowing for mitigating circumstances (say if the Tories promised x houses built in the last cycle, the pandemic would be mitigating circumstance for fewer houses built - but not _not_ houses built).
But meh, nothing will change and I really cannot be bothered with many people out there. Nothing will change the way people act, how apathetic they are.
It's the UK's Stop Making Me Defend Trump[0].
[0] https://pjmedia.com/charlie-martin/2017/01/20/stop-making-me...
I don’t like Farrage. At all.
He’s also currently the only MP questioning this law and he’s making fair points about it.
The government response is not a clever rebuttal but Jess Philips and Peter Kyle making ad hominem arguments comparing him to one of the nastiest people in our country’s history.
This is government overreach and they know it.
1. It’s stupid not because of its goals but because it doesn’t protect kids but does expose vast numbers of adults to identity fraud just to access Spotify or wikipedia.
The only people moaning about this are the ones ashamed of jerking off. Just own it, and this issue goes away. Who cares if a random company has your mug shot to do an age estimation, they know you jerk off, so what?
Just keep porn away from your kids please and let's hope we do better for the next generation.
Sorry but that misses the point. This isn't about porn or being embarrased about it. It's about having to present identification to gain access many different types of site.
We now have the situation where a site, any kind doesn't have to be porn, can look legitimate and ask for required personal identifcation but actually be a run fraudsters.
You might personally have an issue identifying sites like that many adults will and once they're handed over a copy of their passport or drivers licence they are in for a lot of trouble.
