What price democracy?

Would you have raised this issue if the Brexit vote had resulted in a victory for the remainers WW?

I think the question should be not 'Would ww have raised the issue but 'Would anyone have raised the issue?'

Had the referendum result been Remain and Leavers felt that there had been funding for the Remain campaign which contravened the spending rules I think they would have been perfectly justified in raising the issue. We are talking about practices which undermine democracy here. The rules are supposed to ensure that elections/referenda fair and open. Wrongdoing from any quarter should be exposed.

George Monbiot might well have done. If the donations were illegal, they are illegal whether they succeeded or not.
All the accusations seem to be against the Leave campaign though, Remain weren't illegal, just incompetent

Ah, but were they 'incompetent' partly because they didn't have dodgy sources of funding?

After all, there's also the question of the role of Cambridge Analytica providing data for targeted ads. That must have been very costly.

Could you clarify, ww. Is your whole post taken directly from a George Monbiot article?

I don't care about who voted in or out. We're leaving now and that's the end of it but I do worry about how elections and referendums are funded. I don't think there should be any anonymous donors to any party. All donations should be made up front and publicly listed online. The time limit for the public listing should be limited but on a sliding scale. £Millions should be listed within 3 days, £100K+ within 7 days, £10K+ within 14 days and the remainder within 3 months. It should be illegal to spread the donations so that they appear to be less and therefore listing delayed. Listing online makes it simple to stick to these guide lines.

At the moment I'm more concerned that the Conservative Party is using £1billion of public money to bribe the DUP to support them in government. They are using our money. Think what £1billon could do for the NHS or education or social care across the four nations. Also bribery is illegal in this country yet the government are openly bribing the DUP and no one is questioning the legality of it.

Yes it is maize but in all honesty it is an issue that I find concerning, as I think the democratic process is definately under threat . We know for sure that Russia has interfered in America, and potentially in Europe, but I am also aware that there is alarm relating to underhand behaviour, not only from the DUP, but also from Breitbart, and various companies registered in the U.K.

The question is whether we can trace all the funding, how it was spent and where it was spent.

It would seem to me that the remain funding has no issues but there is a lot of unease about the leave funding.

Outfits such as the DUP have been allegedly associated with gun running from Pakistan, the loss of £500m of tax payers money
which they have never fully explained and which contributed to the breakdown in Stormount as well as the funding during the referendum.

Our democracy should not be played fast and loose with.

So how is democracy aided by a two year term and 3 month summer holiday-any ideas!?

I think May is hoping it will consolidate her position, but it certainly won't assist our democratic process

Don't worry, it won't last any longer than the 5-year fixed term :-)

Presumably peole voted for the Tories because they liked what they saw in their manifesto.

So now that May has completely trashed the manufestl only 2 weeks into government how is that democracy?

We now have a goverenment about which we havent a clue what it is going to do and for 2 years at that!!

Our so called democracy is flawed because of the FPTP system. This means they many of us vote against the party we don't like rather than the party we prefer. This squeezes out the middle
ground (Lib Dems and Greens) in favour of the two main parties.

Most countries in the world have a variant of PR where every vote actually counts. It does mean that you won't get a majority government but that can be a good thing because it stop the destructive swings from left to right and back.

The fact that a total of 82.5% voted for the two main parties doesn't mean 82.5% prefer them. It does mean a good number of the 82.5% voted against the one they hated to stop them getting in. That is not real democracy.

cinder

We have a variant of PR here in Scotland for Scottish elections to Holyrood,thats why it was so amazing that the SNP got a majority in 2015 ...the system was designed so no one could get a majority.56 out of 59 seats was truly remarkable .Even the 35 out of 59 we got this time is pretty darned good in the circumstances .

Surely the figures you quote are for Westminster elections, not Holrood. Westminster elections are run on FPTP in Scotland, just as they are everywhere in the UK. Because of the Scottish parliament being elected by PR the SNP do not now have a majority and had to rely on the Greens to support their separatism agenda. I believe that PR is infinitely more democratic.

The Welsh Assembly is a mixture of the two voting systems - some seats in a FPTP system and the remainder on a variant of PR.

If the Welsh Assembly can have such a system why can't the whole country.