Comment by OtherShrezzing
1 day ago
>2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win.
As a rule of thumb, governments don't take actions which reduce their power.
1 day ago
>2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win.
As a rule of thumb, governments don't take actions which reduce their power.
The types of quotes get bandied about all the time, but I don't think they are accurate.
Politicians don't want to reduce their power, but politicians != governments. Lots of scary stuff actually empowers the civil service more than it empowers politicians. The main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections.
Do you live in a parliamentary democracy? If not, you may be unaware that in those systems (like Canada and the United Kingdom), the ruling party is referred to as ‘the government’.
There are many western democracies where there no single ruling party. 'The government' is made by an alliance of many different parties (eg: 25% + 15% + 10% + 5%.) They might share a common overall view of the world but each party can have a very different take on many subjects. The actual government has to do only what all of them agree upon, and the 5% party may have a disproportionate weight because that party leaving the government is as important as the 25% party leaving it.
So, the government is the people in the government and the small parties can be very vocal against it. Opposition from inside is a double edged tool to attempt to get more votes in the next elections, even from within the same coalition.
6 replies →
> main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections
This isn't true most actually gain more power because once you're out of the frankly trash job of being the figurehead of the country you can then take advantage of all the deals, favors and contacts you made doing it then move into NGOs/thinktanks/board position at meta/etc and start actually making real money and having real influence without the eyes on you.
This isn’t power until it scope creeps into surveillance, to protect the poor kids obviously.
They do if they are libertarian governments. Although it's popular to pretend they don't exist, there are plenty of examples of governments reducing their power over history. The American government is a good example of this having originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its own power. And Britain has in the past gone through deregulatory phases and shrunk the state.
Unfortunately at this time Britain doesn't really have a viable libertarian party. Reform is primarily focused on immigration, and the conservatives have largely withered on the vine becoming merely another center left party. So it's really very unclear if there are any parties that would in fact roll this back, although Nigel Farage is saying they would. His weakness is that he is not always terribly focused on recruiting people ideologically aligned to himself or even spelling out what exactly his ideology is. This is the same problem that the conservatives had and it can lead to back benches that are not on board with what needs to be done. Farage himself though is highly reasonable and always has been.
>The American government is a good example of this having originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its own power
Since its foundation, has the US government ever actually reduced its powers? It established itself with limited power.. But since then, its power has only increased via amendments, to the point where the President is effectively an uncontested emperor type figure.
If you define the US as the federal government then yes it has rolled back its powers several times:
- The Prohibition was implemented and then ended, i.e. the state gave up its power to ban alcohol.
- The Bill of Rights itself post-dates the founding of the USA. Those amendments were limiting the power of the state!
- Income tax rates were once much higher than they are today. Of course you could argue that this isn't a reduction of its power given that once upon a time there was no income tax. But it has nonetheless fallen from its once great heights.
- The federal government gave up its power to regulate abortion quite recently.
- In the 60s (or 70s I forget) the US government deregulated the airline industry and has never gone back.
- The War Powers veto. One could argue that it's not been effective because POTUSes have ignored it, but in theory Congress took away the ability for Presidents to declare war.
> The American government is a good example of this having originally bound itself by a constitution that limits its own power.
This is not an example for an existing government reducing its power. It's rather an example of revolutionaries recognizing this very problem and attempting to prevent it. As we have found out since then, their solution isn't as foolproof as they had hoped.
I gave some examples of reductions in power post-dating the founding of the US in a reply to someone else above.
Ah yes, the “Center-left” party that wants to:
- eliminate taxes on farm inheritance and private education
- reduce benefits spending by stricter eligibility criteria
- reduce immigration by making legal immigration more onerous while also blocking asylum
Per the top policies on their prospectus: https://www.conservatives.com/our-policy-prospectus
I’m surprised anti-trans stuff isn’t in there with how much airtime they’ve given it, but I guess they feel there’s not enough distance between them and Starmer’s Labour.
Every party says they want to reduce immigration. Labour says they will "stop the boats" etc. Neither have done so, of course, it's all lies.
The Conservatives don't want to reduce spending on benefits. They always defended the triple lock that makes their pensioner base so happy, of course. They are merely slightly more willing to admit that huge cuts are inevitable than Labour is. Labour also tried a tiny reduction in benefits - there's not much difference between them really - but their MPs are in total denial of the scale of the problem and blocked it.
UK benefits are going to evaporate, it doesn't matter who is in power. Tweaking eligibility criteria is rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic at this point. It's become a financial inevitability post-COVID, just look at the charts. The austerity that's coming will show the 2010s era as the weak sauce it truly was.