Soy Adrián

She's literally a fucking fascist.

Broadly agree and can't be arsed to do my own. On the US points, I'd expect Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker to spend the year vying to be seen as acceptable to the Sanders wing of the Democrats with a lot of grandstanding against the GOP in the Senate and big statements on single payer healthcare etc. Bernie himself will probably continue to be Bernie, leading to speculation that he's going to run again in 2020.

Do they tolerate you not giving an answer to inconvenient questions there?

It doesn't stop that at all! You make your own point there - we had an election that wasn't supposed to happen. May decided she wanted to increase her majority and no opposition is going to turn the opportunity for an election down because of how it would look. I'll ignore the Clegg beatification as we've been over that enough times.

I mean... that's just not true at all.

Well done, again demonstrating that you have no clue what a safe space is actually for. No one is offended by a university briefing paper. Yes, net migration has caused the country's population to rise. I don't think anyone here ever denied that. The key point that several of us have tried to make is that immigration is generally a positive thing, and the country is a better place because of it. A growing population is generally a good thing - by global standards the UK's population increase has been relatively modest. Public services are strained because they've not been invested in properly. Most key services would actually be in a worse state with lower migration - because a high proportion of foreign workers end up in the NHS, for example, and boost the 'supply' of health services more than immigrants in general affect the 'demand', for want of a better term. Congratulations, by the way, on making another seemingly unrelated topic all about immigration or the EU. It's almost like you're doing it deliberately because you don't have anything else to say.

Care to say what you think those causes are?

I don't think you're understanding the point I'm making. The reason that Labour's seats have generally been smaller than the Tories' for the last few elections is because of the type of people voting for the two parties, and where they live. Historically, there have been declining populations in a lot of Labour seats and rising populations in a lot of Tory ones. The demographic shift in the two parties' votes in the 2017 election means that pattern has to some extent changed. A lot of the people who switched from Labour to Tory in 2017 (some via UKIP in 2015) live in those areas with declining populations. The party that holds those seats will be punished by the boundary changes whenever they next happen, as votes in those seats effectively won't be worth as much once the size of the seats has been equalised. Correspondingly, a lot of people who switched from Tory to Labour in 2017 are more likely to live in places where the population is going up. There's no reason to think that this pattern is just going to go back to what it was overnight. Since the referendum, the Tories under May have started to do better broadly among white, working class voters in the North and Midlands. There's very good reasons for that, which are linked to the way the party has positioned itself compared to how it did under Cameron. Likewise, Labour has surged in a lot of the South (and not just London) as it's started to do better among the socially liberal middle classes and university-educated under 40's who have been priced out of London and find themselves renting in places like Luton and Reading. That (as was the original point of this thread) also doesn't look like changing, as Corbyn appeals to a lot of these people and the Tories' preoccupation with Brexit means that a lot of their issues like the housing crisis are going to go unsolved. They very much aren't sheltered from the actions of their MP, though. Poverty and industrial decline? It's only the left that is talking about those issues!

Not really - if your point is that people act in self-interest and that homeowners are therefore more likely to vote Tory, then it doesn't matter why someone under 40 doesn't own a home - they're still going to have a different set of priorities and their self-interest will act in a different way. Particularly if there's no prospect for them getting on the housing ladder, as then they will assume that they are likely to be renting for a while, and vote accordingly for the party that best represents those interests. It does, because they now hold a different sets of seats to before the election. http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/boundaries2018.html This from Electoral Calculus suggests that under the proposed boundary revisions, which follow the rules you've suggested, the Tories would lose 16 seats and Labour would lose 22. That difference is far smaller than before the 2017 election, because the vote demographics for each party have changed. Broadly speaking, the largest seats (i.e. those where the incumbent party will do well if the changes were to go through) are in Southern England and include large swathes of the London commuter belt. This is an area where Labour's vote picked up a lot in 2017, partly because of the number of young-ish people living/moving there who wanted to live in London but were priced out of doing so. The Tory vote went up a lot where they gained votes from UKIP in declining areas of the North and Midlands where the population is shrinking. My point is that it won't happen in this parliament for the reasons I've set out, and the next parliament could well have a Labour government. Because the MP represents everyone in their seat, not just those eligible to vote. As I've said, that's a really simplistic picture. We do need to look at why some areas are experiencing population decline, but I don't really see how it's relevant to this discussion.

I don't think either of you really know what socialism is. You also completely failed to address the point on the way that the current trend away from home ownership, particularly among the under-40s, is going to affect Tory votes. On the redrawing of boundaries point - yes, in theory that will work in the Tories' favour in the future. However, three points: 1. Their upsurge among the socially conservative working classes in 2017 (and decline in the socially liberal middle class vote) means that the difference in size of a Tory seat compared to a Labour one is now a lot smaller than it was before this election, so redrawing won't help them anywhere near as much as it did. 2. They won't be able to amend the boundaries during this parliament as they have no majority, and the DUP would massively lose out from the changes. 3. A future Labour government may well recognise that it's far more sensible to draw boundaries based on population, not electorate. That would probably wipe out the remaining Tory advantage.

More like the cat among the other cats.

Two men holding hands, for example, would normally give it away?

Hey, you're learning!

Dave Gorman would be entertaining.

Good god. Can someone who doesn't presumably think that Roy Moore is a solid bloke please come up with a suggestion?

If they're seriously about retroactively banning divers, Herrera could be trouble. City weren't at their best and didn't really create that many chances from open play, but United were so insipid.

The website is already rather good, particularly compared to most of its competitors (Independent springs to mind as being disproportionately shit).

Convenient time for you to reappear. I assumed you were hiding with David Davis' Brexit impact papers.

What on earth is that supposed to mean?

Spoiler alert: They can't. As far as I understand it, there's basically three options on the border. 1. We try and sign up to a deal which involves a hard border between ROI and NI. The Irish government uses their veto to block this, and we fall out in March 2019 with no deal. 2. We try and sign up to a deal which involves NI effectively staying within the customs union and a sea trade border between NI and Great Britain. The DUP don't support it, and the government falls as Jeremy Corbyn won't bail them out when another early election would probably put him in Downing Street. 3. We cave and go for a deal involving full regulatory alignment on trade between the UK and the EU, effectively staying in the customs union. Hard Brexiteers in the government trigger a confidence vote in Theresa May and the bitter pill of somehow ending up with David Davis as PM is made slightly easier to swallow by the prospect of a reasonably soft Brexit.

Can you add an option for 'no difference'?

It's a news and politics discussion forum. Willfully disengaging with every rational argument and choosing not to respond half the time you're asked a pertinent question tends to render every 'discussion' you get into a predictable argument. Consider switching it up a little.

You're just as bad.

Please stop.

This, in a nutshell, is why you derailing every thread in this forum is getting rather tiring.