Soy Adrián

Those differences are well within the margin of error.

I'm not necessarily in favour of it in general, but I don't see why you'd need a 'none of the above' option when people are able to spoil their ballot. Automatic registration on the other hand is hugely important.

By most measures our economy is already far stronger than the EU average - even moreso before the referendum. Interesting that you're setting such a low bar for "success".

Define successful.

There is a point at which the economic costs of Brexit would hypothetically convince most Leavers that it was a bad idea, although it doesn't look like that will happen until after we've left.

You have no idea what a safe space is, do you?

Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign chief, has surrended to the FBI as part of the investigation. This is big.

They've conceded six goals in ten games. Make all the John Stones jokes you want, but that's a very good defensive record.

That's my point - they won't do anything until they're sure that it's in their interests. The only Senators who have really dared to criticise or undermine Trump in any meaningful way are those who aren't up for reelection in 2018, because it will be incredibly difficult for an anti-Trump incumbent to survive a primary challenge in most states.

On the O'Mara thing - Hallam was my CLP for three years up to 2015 and from what I've heard, since then it's been deeply dysfunctional since then and was always likely to select a Corbynite candidate once it got down to a shortlist. Given that everything was pointing towards us struggling to hold seats let alone gain new ones, and given the tight timescale of the snap election, it's not surprising in the slightest that the NEC didn't get round to checking a load of archived 15-year-old forums to see if anyone on their longlist had said anything terrible. Hallam would have been an especially low priority given that there's still a very strong Lib Dem presence at the local level and the constituency backed Remain very heavily, so it was widely assumed (understandably) that we'd missed our chance in 2015. That said, it's deeply disappointing for everyone who busted a gut to get rid of Clegg in both 2015 and 2017 that we've been let down by the seat's first ever Labour MP like this.

I wouldn't expect anything to get seriously moving until after the midterms. It's unlikely that the GOP will lose the Senate as the majority of seats being contested are already Democrat-held in a real mixed bag of states, but if they perform relatively poorly a lot more people may wonder if continuing to support Trump is worth their while. If it ever comes to that, we can only hope that whatever brings Trump down also implicates Pence.

Why do you think that might be?

There are countries in the world other than the US who have an elected head of state. Consequently there's a myriad of options if we ever were to abolish the monarchy. Given the way that Parliament currently has a lot of power due to our head of state being mainly ceremonial, it would be an enormous task to write a British Constitution in a way which gave the powers you'd expect to a directly elected head of state and took them away from Parliament. I'd therefore imagine that if we ever do get rid of the monarchy, it would be replaced by something more similar to the German model, where the head of Parliament is the more powerful figure but the president has the power to veto laws if they are deemed unconstitutional.

Can we please not derail the discussion by slinging personal insults - you know who you are, and there was actually quite an interesting discussion going on before you showed up.

Pointlessly provocative. Closed.

I didn't know you were 13.

There's a theoretical argument for lowering it to the age of criminal responsibility (which I believe is 10 or 11?) but it's obviously way, way off. I don't see a problem with it being 16.

I don't mean to bang on about this, but the Tory manifesto didn't even try and cost its pledges.

It's not that simple though. The housing crisis, which is a big part of this for obvious reasons, is a huge, structural problem and you can't convince voters that you can be trusted to solve it with some tiny reforms to social housing and a handful of manifesto pledges at the next election. Granted that the Tories are far from the only culprits for the crisis, but due to the make-up of their party they are uniquely badly placed to solve it.

Direct democracy doesn't just take power away from MPs, though. As an example, a potential use for direct democracy would be for major planning decisions - which would swiftly lead to no houses being built anywhere.

I'd be completely on board with this. I like STV generally for the reasons outlined by various posters above. It'd be more difficult in general elections as we're so used to being represented by small, single-member constituencies but most (all?) local councils are multi-member so no problem there. Also hadn't realised that Scotland used AV for by-elections - not an issue I'd ever considered with STV, but a neat solution.

There are at least two large topics which have ended up revolving Brexit. You've started multiple polls on very narrow aspects of the Brexit debate and I don't see the point in having any more.

I'll hold off on taking advice from someone who didn't even know the previous leader had been gone for weeks.

And you have to remember not to make excuses for inexcusable behaviour.

Who do you think signed the Maastricht Treaty?