What’s the main difference between Lib Dems and Labour to a layman like me? Is Lib Dems a credible alternative to the 2 traditional top parties?
Is election being held for all councils and all seats in the councils? What does Third of seats up mean?
Not really, although if you were buying a house, you would need a bank account and a solicitor (lawyer) who will both carry out their own background checks.
There are a lot of these that are quite circular because it assumes that the individual already has documentation. When my son applied for a UK bank account, he had to get a letter from his school as proof of address as he had no other documentation. He was too young to have utility bills and the like. (As it was, he joined my bank in the end as they accepted my word as proof of address.)
As an example, this is what you need to open a UK bank account:
For Personal ID:
- HMRC notification of National Insurance number.
- HMRC notification of tax coding
For address:
- Bank statement from an existing bank
- A recent utility bill
- Tax documents
- A full or provisional UK driving licence.
The driving licence is probably the nearest to an ID card and you can apply for a provisional one (which allows you to take driving lessons) even if you don’t want to drive. For that, you need personal ID which sends you back to “Go” without collecting $200, so to speak.
Ultimately, you can go back to having a birth certificate, which can be obtained without ID, even if it is a dead individual. This was the plot of “The Day Of The Jackal”, although I think that particular loophole has been closed.
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The Labour party is a centre-left party. Typical of democratic socialist parties across Europe. It’s origins are largely tied to the trade union movement although the ties have ben looser in recent years. Their traditional support was amongst the working classes. The Lib Dems were formed from a Liberal party that had a middle-class support and were in favour of social and economic liberalism, and the Social Democrats, who were a more centrist group that had split from the Labour Party.
I would say that, at times, the Lib Dems have been more progressive on social issues than the Labour party (for example, it was a Liberal MP that pushed for legalisation of abortion in the UK) but it rather depends on their prospective leaders at the time.
In terms of credibility, the FPTP system makes it difficult to break through. They have been in coalition both in Scotland (I had a Lib Dem minister at one time) and in the UK between 2010 and 2015. The latter one rather destroyed their reputation as they had traditionally been seen as closer to the Labour party than the Conservatives.
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There are different elections in different areas. Some are local council elections (i.e. the authority that runs local services such as schools and bin collections) but these are not in every place in the country.
“Third of seats” refers to the number of councillors standing for re-election. Typically, there will be three local councillors for each ward (the area within the council that they represent) and one of these councillors will stand for re-election each year: hence, a third of the council seats will be contested.
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I know the libs stemmed from the current form from labour , but wasn’t they the Whigs from years ago originally,?
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The origins were the Whig party and they rebranded as Liberal somewhere in the 19th Century. They went into rapid decline after the First World War and sort of rebranded themselves in the 1960s, essentially trying to be socially radical but not socialist.
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This part from Wikipedia made me smile.
"The Whigs took full control of the government in 1715 and thoroughly purged the Tories from all major positions in government, the army, the Church of England, the legal profession, and local political offices. The first great leader of the Whigs was Robert Walpole, who maintained control of the government from 1721 to 1742, and whose protégé, Henry Pelham, led the government from 1743 to 1754. Great Britain approximated a one-party state under the Whigs until King George III came to the throne in 1760 and allowed Tories back in. But the Whig Party’s hold on power remained strong for many years thereafter. Thus historians have called the period from roughly 1714 to 1783 the “long period of Whig oligarchy”.
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Seems the history of the libs was the persecution of the conservative party back in the day…
That’s a slippery slope.
In America it’s become if it’s important to you, you’ll stand in line for eight hours without water or toilets because there is one polling station to cover hundreds of thousand of people in black communities.
Voter ID might not be a big issue for you, but as the electoral commission have warned, it is a barrier for poor and minority people.
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Yes, we’ve all missed you 
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The odd thing is that, until the growth of the social democratic movement in Europe, it was often conservatives like Disraeli and Bismarck who actually put in progressive social programmes (public health, education and the like).
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No chance. They’ll leave it as long as they can, in the hope of some positive news coming their way, and giving their attack dogs in the media as much time as possible to undermine Labour.
It will also allow them extra time in which to line their and their supporters’ pockets.
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I’ve just been reading the regulations on storing ID card numbers in Germany and I think I actually understand a bit more about the difference between that and what was proposed in the UK.
Essentially, the German system is used for the individual to identify themselves, whereas the proposed UK system was so that the state (and a mind-bogglingly high number of private companies) could identify the individual.
It might sound like it is the same thing, but from a privacy and data protection perspective it is like night and day.
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And I’ve missed poor attempts at sarcasm in response to a perfectly reasonable post.
Nothing changes.
Remind me, because I genuinely don’t know, other than taking along the voting card you received in the post.
What was the voting protocol/requisite before the need for ID?
And yes, I know there are homeless people with no address.
That wasn’t even a requirement. It was just a case of telling your name and address to the polling station staff.
In terms of security, that is all that is really required because taking someone else’s vote is difficult to get away with. If you go into the same station more than once, there is a very good chance that you will be identified. Given that turnout is typically high (even low turnout local elections have a 1 in 3 turnout) you are likely to be uncovered.
When I last voted in a German election it was a case of providing the polling card or personal ID if you didn’t have it. That was the only adjustment that was remotely needed.
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So we want a fully democratic process, but people (not you) are arguing against proving who you are to lodge their preference on which party will make important decisions on how the country is run?
I think they are arguing that it should not be made difficult for some people to vote. Requiring a polling card or ID (as a backup) would be fine and I doubt whether anyone would have a problem with that.
The only way the polling cards could be realistically compromised is if the Royal Mail was interfered with, which, as I pointed out the other day, requires RM staff to be identified when they are receiving the cards.
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Actually it’s not odd at all. Bismarck hated and prosecuted the Social Democrats and Socialists and everything they stood for, but they were growing in support, because the conditions for workers were frankly unbearable - he put in place social reforms mainly as a way to undercut their appeal, sort of appease the public and prevent an uprising.
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