Once more unto the Brexit, dear friends...

Alas the nice refreshing break from Brexit is over. Talks between Labour and Conservatives have finished, at least in terms of direct, official meetings, while the MEP elections are imminent. Fortunately almost everything that needs to be said has been said a dozen times already, so there are just a few brief points I want to make.

First, talks between Labour and the Conservatives were in my view a good thing. I've previously said that the advantage of a first-past-the-post system is that you get to vote essentially directly for policies, thus making it a very democratic system. The disadvantage is that if you lose, you get no candidates, so it's not very representative. I have hitherto somewhat favoured the more democratic approach, but here I favour more cooperation than competition.

To be honest, I'm still not sure how the whole shambles has shifted my ideals - I still don't know if I'd favour the (more common elsewhere in Europe) approach of a more representative but less democratic system of coalition-based government in general. But I do think we need at least more cross-party cooperation than we have now. Sometimes the winner-takes-all approach is a good one, especially if the main parties are roughly equally placed : considered over the longer view of multiple elections, most people will have their views represented at some point. But often, compromise should be seen as a good, desirable thing. Many choices don't boil down to binary possibilities, so forcing one just alienates both sides. Combined with a political system in which political identity and worldviews are strongly coupled* and everyone ends up hating each other.

* Interestingly, in Puerto Rico this is not the case at all. The single issue dominating political identity is how the island should interact with the United States. Consequently the different parties have members who are as ideologically opposed as the most neo-Nazi Republican or most Stalinist Democrat.

I'll stop short of saying what kind of marvellous revolution I want to usher in a glorious pink fluffy utopia of civil harmony. I just want there to be more cooperation than we have now. Not total cooperation on everything, because that'd be stupid, but more than now. That's all.

Second, the Brexit party are undeniably doing well in the polls. It should be noted that variations are large and rapid, so I'm not going to attempt a prediction here. I don't think I have either the necessary data or the skill to analyse it to try and understand what's going on. All I want to say is that while yes, they're doing well, collectively the anti-Brexit parties are doing better : only slightly, but still better nonetheless. Here's a chart from the BBC :

Unfortunately they don't give precise numbers. According to Wikipedia, currently the numbers stand as follows :

• UKIP 3%
• Labour 24%
• Conservatives 14%
• Liberal Democrats 12%
• Greens 4%
• SNP 4%
• Plaid Cymru 1%
• Brexit Party 30%
• Change UK 3%
• Others 4%

Now, it is a bit uncertain as to what's motivating voters for some parties. Especially in the case of Labour, it's very unclear what voters would be voting for because the party position itself is very unclear. But on the other hand, only UKIP, the Conservatives and the Brexit Party are definitely pro-Brexit (though some Tory voters aren't pro-Brexit). Their share of the vote comes to 47%, which is a distinct lack of majority.

I wouldn't dare to infer too much from this. I just wish people would point out that it is at best hugely unclear if pro-Brexit parties are doing better than the anti-Brexit ones. They're certainly not wiping the floor with them.

The final thing I want to say is that I shall be voting for the Liberal Democrats. Last time I voted for them, I predicted and hoped that a surprise breakthrough was possible, given that Brexit was such a major issue and that they'd made surprising progress in a couple of by-elections. I was totally wrong about that. I have to conclude that I simply don't know enough about how campaigning works or how voters make their decision to be able to predict what's going to happen, so I won't.

We do have, though, a clearly very fluid situation. The current polling for Wales shows the Lib Dems on 10%, putting them in third place behind the Brexit Party, Labour, and Plaid Cymru. Wales gets four seats, so it seems possible they have a chance (though the voting system used for MEPs in the UK is, for some reason, horrendously complicated). Honestly I have no clue what's going to happen or if it's even possible to vote tactically, so dammit, I'm voting for the people I want to win.

EDIT : Apparently it is possible to vote tactically. If you want to vote for Remain parties, this website will tell you how (I don't know if there's an equivalent for Leave parties, though there probably should be). Fortunately it tells me to vote Lib Dems anyway.