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Faith in Britons restored!

Power Armour

By Power Armour
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Aerion Brightflame Newbie

Aerion Brightflame

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Read the panama papers thread. Cameron got rich through offshore tax evasion and now he says 'his whole family did it' and he defends that.

 

Isn't that twisting the order of events? 

 

Firstly Cameron's dad was linked to it, and Cameron denied having any shares or having profited in any way from it. Then it came out that Camereon had in-fact owned a small part of his dad's company (But the amount he owned was tiny in the scale of things, he could have taken out an ISA and saved more money than what he got from the Panama papers from what I've read). 

 

Given that dishonesty, there are people calling for Cameron's head, because we don't like the man or his party very much in Britain. 

 

Most recently (As in half an hour ago), he has published his own tax returns for the press to look at to lay the issue to rest: 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-36007718

 

And on the surface, that actually looks kind of fair - He pays like 35% tax on his salary, Additionally he's actually scaled back how much of the PM's £20,000 non-taxable allowance he's been using each year in the office to the point he doesn't actually use it anymore. So on the surface it looks like he's actually be pretty genuine about paying his part of taxes. 

 

Now, the £500,000 in various inheritances he's gotten in the past few years is a bit annoying, but he's old money so that's not shocking. 

 

The issue here isn't that Cameron got rich off of it, it's that he lied in the first place. Because again, too my knowledge his actual avoided income is fairly minor. But the fact people are calling for him to resign isn't suprising; People have been calling for his head since he took the job. The instant these papers came out, people would've called for him to resign before his name was even there, because they'd expect him to be part of it. 

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Aerion Brightflame Newbie

Aerion Brightflame

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@Brightflame

 

I didn't really look into it all that deep. I knew his family had done it and it only came out now but yeah.

 

This is the biggest data leak in history, and it's affecting global politics on a huge scale, and David Cameron resigning would have massive repercussions on the country depending on who took his place. Because there's like 3 realistic options and 2 of them would be terrible. 

 

The least you can do is read a little bit into the story before calling for his head. Given it's not exactly hard to find some details on it. 

 

EDIT; Inheritance Tax avoidance. That might be a possible one. That might be a large sum of money. 

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Power Armour Newbie

Power Armour

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Never said I wanted his head, but take from my two or so sentences what you will. I don't like him, but the alternatives aren't much better

tbh

EDIT The only thing I am currently concerned about is the EU referendum, which, when you look at it, staying in the EU only benefits those who agree with the conservative party.

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Aerion Brightflame Newbie

Aerion Brightflame

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We'd still have a Conservative government no matter what the result of the referendum is. I'd actually be more worried about having one in the event of us leaving, because you know the Tories having the opportunity to remove EU labour laws must be a wet dream to some of them. People really don't think about stuff like that when talking about the referendum, and it affects a lot of people. 

 

But personally I'd rather keep Cameron in power. The immediate replacement, George Osborne is even more hated than Cameron. And woe forbid the day Boris Johnson gets into power. Because the man is clever, liked, and more conservative than most his party, and that's terrifying. Imagine the Tories having a likeable leader? 

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Zauls Newbie

Zauls

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The reality is, as long as we have a Tory government, it doesn't matter who is in power, little will be done about the tax evasion scandal. Even if David Cameron himself doesn't benefit from offshore tax havens currently, there are no doubt Tory politicians who do. There will likely be many Tory party donors using these schemes as well, and the government wants to keep them happy above all else. The Tories tackling tax evasion would be like Labour passing anti-union laws. They'd be shooting themselves in the foot.

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Power Armour Newbie

Power Armour

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In British Parliament, come voting time, everybody within a given county votes for an MP that represents their area within a specific party (i.e MP Joe Bloggs from Devon as a rough example) and people vote for them, and basically, the more seats your party gets in parliament, the more likely your party is to have their representative become Prime Minister. This is flawed, because not only do the have to reach a certain percentage,but in some areas, it is completely pointless voting for a particular party, because they will be overshadowed by everybody else (Worcestershire and Conservatives/Tories for example).

 

I think thats how it goes, anyway. Politics was never really my strong suit.

What we had before was a coalition government where we had two parties of which neither 'passed the post' so basically they took the two highest percentages and called it a day.

Which is again, stupid, but it could be worse.

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Zauls Newbie

Zauls

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I don't get it

 

Basically, Britain's electoral system operates by constituency. If a party gets a majority vote in a constituency, it gets the seat. Sounds ok on the face of it, but there are huge problems.

 

For starters, it creates "safe seats". Some areas, because of their relative affluence as well as other factors, are more inclined to vote for a particular party. Voting for any other party in these areas therefore becomes pointless. This is a particularly big problem for smaller parties, who don't have historical safe seats and whose support is generally more spread throughout the country (the Green party being the prime example).

 

Then there's the problem with dividing the constituencies. They say they try to make it "fair", but since the government in power is in control of constituency boundaries, they are more inclined to move them to suit themselves.

The Scottish National Party (SNP) got so many seats because Scotland is divided into I think 57 constituencies, despite the population being much lower and more sparse than England. That means a much lower number of the total UK population needs to vote for the SNP for them to get a lot of seats. Also, given their supporters are concentrated entirely in Scotland, rather than spread throughout the UK, they will get more seats.

 

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ihop Newbie

ihop

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Actually, Scotland's 59 constituencies are pretty much exactly proportional to the population of Scotland, they're only a few tenths of a percent higher. The reason the SNP has such an imbalance of votes to seats is that it got 0 votes in 589 constituencies because they didn't put up a candidate there. If they'd had a candidate in each non-Scottish constituency that got a few thousand votes they'd have a much better-looking proportion of the overall vote. It's still a lot, but all it shows is that Scotland as a whole votes SNP and 57 seats representing Scotland seems reasonable enough. It's a pretty unique situation though - if the UK used proportional representation Scots would probably complain that they had too few seats representing what they stood for - Germany, the success story of proportional representation, doesn't have any meaningful local parties. 

 

I'm still of the opinion that, while FPTP is not an ideal system there really isn't an ideal alternative. Proportional representation simply will not work in the UK for the reasons I mentioned and because the UK's parties are too ideologically opposed, and other voting systems such as voting for a president independently of constituency representatives has other issues such as the president being opposed by Parliament. 

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Zauls Newbie

Zauls

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So after doing the maths, I worked out Scotland, which is 8.3% of the UK population, is represented by 8.8% of seats (57/650 for the SNP), which is fair. However the SNP got 4.7% of the votes but are represented by 8.8% of the seats, which seems slightly less fair.

 

The biggest issues are UKIP and the Green Party. While it's probably a good thing that UKIP only got 1 seat, they gained 12.6% (!) of the vote, meaning they really should've got 82 seats for them to be fairly represented. While it's great that UKIP didn't get that many seats, it's still not necessarily fair. The Greens got 3.8%, which would equate to 25 seats in proportional representation. Instead they got 1 seat.

 

While there is no perfect voting system, FPTP is clearly ridiculous. It was designed to suit a country with only 2 really major parties, but there's significant enough support for 3 or 4 other parties now to justify a change in the system, whether that be to PR or whatever.

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