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> It's a small country, and power is concentrated in a vanishingly small number of hands This is very true, I chatted at length with my neighbor who lived his

> It's a small country, and power is concentrated in a vanishingly small number of hands This is very true, I chatted at length with my neighbor who lived his entire life in the UK(up to a few years ago) and was shocked how stratified the society is. Basically there is small group of people(who went to Eton, are lords or knighted, from famous families) that form a clique that runs everything in the country. No matter how much money you make or how successful you are, you can never join that circle. An example was told to me that even David Beckham (famous soccer star) is looked down upon by that segment and does not associate with them and could never join that part of society.

mattmanser 6y ago
Err, same in America man. Bushes? Father and son were the president. Kennedys? Brothers were almost presidents, one was a President, the other governor. Clintons? Spouses were almost presidents! If that's not cliquey I don't know what is. Your mate is also massively over-egging how bad it is, there is still an Eton clique (the present/last government being a good example), but we've had a range of recent prime minister's educated normally, outside of the Eton clique. Brown, Blair, even Thatcher just went to a Grammar school (generally a better school you have to pass exams to qualify for, which is semi-meritocratic, though gamed by the rich) Our election system is even worse than America's though so we keep getting conservative governments who win 40-45% of the popular vote but somehow get landslide majorities. Also, what do you mean by "small", it's got 70 million inhabitants. At worst a country with a population of a size of France and Germany might be called "medium".
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  The people who really control things in the US aren't politicians. That is way beneath the scions of multi-generational wealth. Even T* isn't in their club.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    If anybody thinks they are really in control of things they are highly arrogant and out of touch at best or an outright delusional at worst. Especially when it comes to the US. Where even the overly rigid minutae obsessed military take pride in being considered unpredictable madmen who don't even pay attention to their own doctrines consistently and are at home in chaos. The people of the US aren't even consistently individualistic and would make herding cats look easy - you can get them to follow you with a tin of tuna. There isn't "the" Man. Why would there be when even positions of petty power are contested for so tightly and dirtily and there are so many striving to rise? Consequences are not a strong deterrent - if they were the world would look very different. Wealthy individuals may have power but nobody has control over the a process of contention across all layers with nominal goals served imperfectly with cargo-culting and skewed priorities. All of this and there is nothing inherently special about the people - human nature and control oppose each other.
- pasabagi 6y ago
  I said small country in the original post, because while I imagine the US has similar levels of dynastic cliquey stuff going on, it's a colossal nation, so it doesn't hurt so much. In the UK, I think Eton is more a symptom than a cause. The problem is, London is a world-class city that concentrates the entire political and financial establishment. It's also a city with very obvious parallel worlds, where if you move in certain circles, you meet the same people, so while it is a massive city, it sometimes feels quite small. To me, the worst part is not that both Johnson and Cameron went to the same school, the same university, or even the same exclusive dining club - the bad bit is that because any given person with political, social or economic power in the UK is so closely connected with any other, there's a real incentive not to rock the boat. You get an enormous amount of cohesion, because if you go around making enemies, you're ultimately making things awkward for a lot of your friends and acquaintances. On top of that, the fact most people in this world have similar backgrounds makes a lot of them 'on the same page' by default.
- triceratops 6y ago
  > we keep getting conservative governments who win 40-45% of the popular vote but somehow get landslide majorities. Can you explain more about this? Is the UK heavily gerrymandered? EDIT: It's an honest question. I don't know anything about UK politics, other than that it's a parliamentary constitutional monarchy.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > Is the UK heavily gerrymandered? No it isn’t gerrymandered. And if it is very slightly accidentally gerrymandered in some places, that works against the Conservatives - Labour MPs often have smaller constituencies. So no that’s not relevant or part of what is being talked about here. The reality is that 43% popular vote for a single party in a system with four major parties, 10 percentage points more than their nearest rival, is nothing but an enormous popular vote landslide. The Conservatives are popular amongst broad sections of society, incomes, ethnicities, regions. All other parties serve limited niches so are fundamentally constrained. Why don’t they form a coalition? Well I’m not sure they really have deeply shared values to do that. Many struggle to share values internally!
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      > And if it is very slightly accidentally gerrymandered in some places, that works against the Conservatives You're right that there is comparatively little gerrymandering in the UK, but the political decision of how many members of parliament there should be does have a partisan bias. The Conservatives had planned to reduce the number of seats in parliament, which would have the effect of making each constituency (district) bigger and thus more rural. They had to abandon that scheme, though, after enough of their own MPs feared that their constituency would disappear from the map. There are still other controversial redistricting plans in the works though.[0] > The reality is that 43% popular vote for a single party ... is nothing but an enormous popular vote landslide. As I responded above, this is more attributable to vote splitting between parties that are much more similar to each other than they are to the Conservatives, and that collectively enjoy a greater share of public support, not to mention the feelings of tactical voters and non-voters who feel disenfranchised due to living in a "safe seat". A more meaningful figure would be that the median Conservative MP was voted for by only 37% of eligible voters (in the 2019 general election), although both that number and your 43% are less than the popular vote share received by the loser of the 2020 US presidential election. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/02/uk-government-accused-of-power-grab-over-redrawing-of-boundaries https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/02/uk-governme...
- lou1306 6y ago
  But at least the US has a pretty sognificant percentage of people that reach the upper echelon of society from basically nothing (Obama, RBG, Biden). And the dinasties you mention are what, 50 years old? In the UK it seems that the ruling circle has been at the wheel literally for centuries.
- subsubzero 6y ago
  I think the point I am getting at is there is a group of people that largely descends from the British aristocracy that is extremely cliquish and has a large majority of its members in positions of power. My neighbors wife knew Eddie Redmayne and his brother(I think both went to Eton) and although she said they were nice, they were in a totally different world and only really associated with people who also went to Eton/had large trustfunds. In England you would never see people like Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs etc who came from middle class families move to the highest strata of society and be accepted by those in that highest strata. I am by no means bashing England, I think the country is awesome and have family that lives there, I am just not keen on the stratified nature of its society.
  - hcho 6y ago
    And yet British have James Dyson, Richard Branson and so on... Old money vs new miney strife is an age old thing and I can assure you none of the tech barons is rubbing shoulders with former barons let alone American gentry.
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    While Jobs and Brin had middle-class upbringings, Musk's father was quite wealthy: he had a large and successful engineering business (South Africa's equivalent of Tutor-Perini, the multi-billion dollar construction company that built the ports of LA and Long Beach and much of its metro system among other projects) and was a millionaire before he was 30.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > who win 40-45% of the popular vote but somehow get landslide majorities In a system with four major parties, 43% is an absolutely huge popular landslide. How can you describe it as anything else? Ten percentage points above their nearest rival? How much more of a majority do you think it could possibly be?
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    > Ten percentage points above their nearest rival? Perhaps you've heard of the problem of "vote splitting": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting > How much more of a majority do you think it could possibly be? Well, try 51% for a start.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      > Perhaps you've heard of the problem of "vote splitting" What vote do you think is being split? Some kind of generic not-Conservative vote? People vote for other parties - they aren't split among a vote not for the Conservatives. If it really were simple vote splitting then coalitions would form, and they don't - because the other parties aren't a simple platform of not-Conservative and they disagree with each other as much as they disagree with the Conservatives. In fact one of the only two parties to successfully coalesce was the Conservatives! As a concrete example - the second choice in most parts of Scotland isn't Labour, it's Conservative. Are the Conservatives and Labour splitting the not-SNP vote? If you think that then is any party that stands except the ruling party a vote splitter? Seems a silly definition to me. > Well, try 51% for a start. An absolute popular majority? I don't think that's realistic and it would be extremely unhealthy if that was the case.
      - dane-pgp 6y ago
        > What vote do you think is being split? Some kind of generic not-Conservative vote? People vote for other parties - they aren't split among a vote not for the Conservatives. I think there are a few factors that make things more nuanced than "People vote for other parties". As I mentioned in another comment, FPTP leads to constituencies where people feel that their vote doesn't count, so they either don't vote at all or vote for the "lesser of two evils", which both inflates the support for the Conservatives and also prevents new parties from gaining traction. > If it really were simple vote splitting then coalitions would form, and they don't That's a great point, but actually the UK has seen informal coalitions with parties standing down candidates in specific seats. This idea is so entrenched in British politics that it even has its own Wikipedia article.[0] The fact that the Conservatives have been the only major party since WW2 to form a coalition government is mostly due to the fact that in other general elections, the party with the most seats hasn't needed to form a coalition (perhaps with the exception of 1974), and it would make even less sense for the opposition parties to form one. > Are the Conservatives and Labour splitting the not-SNP vote? If you look at the 2016 Scottish Parliament election[1] (which uses a voting system that rewards honesty better), the Conservatives and Labour received 44.6% of the constituency vote, combined. That is less than the 46.5% that the SNP received. Even if you add the constituency vote share of the fourth largest party (by seats won), Scottish Green, they still don't match the success of the SNP. In any case, vote splitting is not such a concern under the Additional Members System. > An absolute popular majority? I apologise if my "51%" comment was unhelpful. You asked "How much more of a majority do you think it could possibly be?" and I wanted to highlight the fact that 43% isn't any kind of majority at all, but maybe you meant "plurality". In any case, I agree that it would probably be a bad sign if a party had a majority of the popular vote, and I would say it can also be a bad sign if a party gets a majority of seats without a majority of votes. Big parties effectively tend to be coalitions within themselves anyway, so I would prefer if the dynamics of those coalitions were played out on the national political stage, rather than as internal party scheming. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_alliance_%28UK%29#21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_alliance_%28UK%29#... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Scottish_Parliament_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Scottish_Parliament_elect...
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Err, same in America man. Bushes? Father and son were the president. Kennedys? Brothers were almost presidents, one was a President, the other governor. Clintons? Spouses were almost presidents! If that's not cliquey I don't know what is. While the Bushes, Kennedys, and Trumps came from wealthy backgrounds, the rest of the recent presidents came from lower-income brackets. Ronald Reagan grew up poor in Illinois. Bill Clinton grew up poor in Arkansas and went to college and law school on scholarship, and his wife grew up in a middle-class family in Illinois and attended public schools. Obama and his wife grew up middle-class in Hawaii and Illinois, respectively. Biden also grew up middle-class, in Pennsylvania; his second wife came from an upper-middle class background.
- throwaway3699 6y ago
  > Our election system is even worse than America's though so we keep getting conservative governments who win 40-45% of the popular vote but somehow get landslide majorities. If we had a popular vote then UKIP would've had nearly 70 seats back in 2015, with a huge swath of representation for London. Somehow that sounds even worse than what we have now.
krona 6y ago
David Beckham is looked down upon by 50% of society (conservative estimate.) The clique of which you speak doesn't seem very exclusive at all.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Lio 6y ago
I once tried to explain to an American friend what “middle class” meant in the UK vs USA. Long story short; it’s complicated. It’s not entirely related wealth or education but they are big factors. You can’t join the aristocracy via wealth alone. At best you’d probably end up upper middle class if you were educated i.e. Public School followed by Oxford or Cambridge. Maybe your children or grandchildren could if you really have enough money. Becoming an MP would probably help you turn money into a title. “Public” schools, like Eton, are the fee paying alternative to a “private” tutor. They’re not be confused with schools “for the plebs”. You’ll certainly need land if want to join the Gentry. Traditionally, the difference between a Forest and a Wood is that the Forest was once land populated by Commoners (that’s the middle and working class) that someone in the Aristocracy put a fence around and claimed exclusive right to hunt deer on. To this day councils have to pay people to walk the ancient Footpaths and Bridleways every year to stop would be aristocrats claiming the as part of their land. And if you wear brown shoes and a white shirt to the wrong interview in the City you’re not getting the job. As I said, it’s complicated. Complicated and silly.

mattmanser 6y ago

Err, same in America man. Bushes? Father and son were the president. Kennedys? Brothers were almost presidents, one was a President, the other governor. Clintons? Spouses were almost presidents! If that's not cliquey I don't know what is. Your mate is also massively over-egging how bad it is, there is still an Eton clique (the present/last government being a good example), but we've had a range of recent prime minister's educated normally, outside of the Eton clique. Brown, Blair, even Thatcher just went to a Grammar school (generally a better school you have to pass exams to qualify for, which is semi-meritocratic, though gamed by the rich) Our election system is even worse than America's though so we keep getting conservative governments who win 40-45% of the popular vote but somehow get landslide majorities. Also, what do you mean by "small", it's got 70 million inhabitants. At worst a country with a population of a size of France and Germany might be called "medium".

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
The people who really control things in the US aren't politicians. That is way beneath the scions of multi-generational wealth. Even T* isn't in their club.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  If anybody thinks they are really in control of things they are highly arrogant and out of touch at best or an outright delusional at worst. Especially when it comes to the US. Where even the overly rigid minutae obsessed military take pride in being considered unpredictable madmen who don't even pay attention to their own doctrines consistently and are at home in chaos. The people of the US aren't even consistently individualistic and would make herding cats look easy - you can get them to follow you with a tin of tuna. There isn't "the" Man. Why would there be when even positions of petty power are contested for so tightly and dirtily and there are so many striving to rise? Consequences are not a strong deterrent - if they were the world would look very different. Wealthy individuals may have power but nobody has control over the a process of contention across all layers with nominal goals served imperfectly with cargo-culting and skewed priorities. All of this and there is nothing inherently special about the people - human nature and control oppose each other.
pasabagi 6y ago
I said small country in the original post, because while I imagine the US has similar levels of dynastic cliquey stuff going on, it's a colossal nation, so it doesn't hurt so much. In the UK, I think Eton is more a symptom than a cause. The problem is, London is a world-class city that concentrates the entire political and financial establishment. It's also a city with very obvious parallel worlds, where if you move in certain circles, you meet the same people, so while it is a massive city, it sometimes feels quite small. To me, the worst part is not that both Johnson and Cameron went to the same school, the same university, or even the same exclusive dining club - the bad bit is that because any given person with political, social or economic power in the UK is so closely connected with any other, there's a real incentive not to rock the boat. You get an enormous amount of cohesion, because if you go around making enemies, you're ultimately making things awkward for a lot of your friends and acquaintances. On top of that, the fact most people in this world have similar backgrounds makes a lot of them 'on the same page' by default.
triceratops 6y ago
> we keep getting conservative governments who win 40-45% of the popular vote but somehow get landslide majorities. Can you explain more about this? Is the UK heavily gerrymandered? EDIT: It's an honest question. I don't know anything about UK politics, other than that it's a parliamentary constitutional monarchy.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > Is the UK heavily gerrymandered? No it isn’t gerrymandered. And if it is very slightly accidentally gerrymandered in some places, that works against the Conservatives - Labour MPs often have smaller constituencies. So no that’s not relevant or part of what is being talked about here. The reality is that 43% popular vote for a single party in a system with four major parties, 10 percentage points more than their nearest rival, is nothing but an enormous popular vote landslide. The Conservatives are popular amongst broad sections of society, incomes, ethnicities, regions. All other parties serve limited niches so are fundamentally constrained. Why don’t they form a coalition? Well I’m not sure they really have deeply shared values to do that. Many struggle to share values internally!
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    > And if it is very slightly accidentally gerrymandered in some places, that works against the Conservatives You're right that there is comparatively little gerrymandering in the UK, but the political decision of how many members of parliament there should be does have a partisan bias. The Conservatives had planned to reduce the number of seats in parliament, which would have the effect of making each constituency (district) bigger and thus more rural. They had to abandon that scheme, though, after enough of their own MPs feared that their constituency would disappear from the map. There are still other controversial redistricting plans in the works though.[0] > The reality is that 43% popular vote for a single party ... is nothing but an enormous popular vote landslide. As I responded above, this is more attributable to vote splitting between parties that are much more similar to each other than they are to the Conservatives, and that collectively enjoy a greater share of public support, not to mention the feelings of tactical voters and non-voters who feel disenfranchised due to living in a "safe seat". A more meaningful figure would be that the median Conservative MP was voted for by only 37% of eligible voters (in the 2019 general election), although both that number and your 43% are less than the popular vote share received by the loser of the 2020 US presidential election. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/02/uk-government-accused-of-power-grab-over-redrawing-of-boundaries https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/02/uk-governme...
lou1306 6y ago
But at least the US has a pretty sognificant percentage of people that reach the upper echelon of society from basically nothing (Obama, RBG, Biden). And the dinasties you mention are what, 50 years old? In the UK it seems that the ruling circle has been at the wheel literally for centuries.
subsubzero 6y ago
I think the point I am getting at is there is a group of people that largely descends from the British aristocracy that is extremely cliquish and has a large majority of its members in positions of power. My neighbors wife knew Eddie Redmayne and his brother(I think both went to Eton) and although she said they were nice, they were in a totally different world and only really associated with people who also went to Eton/had large trustfunds. In England you would never see people like Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Steve Jobs etc who came from middle class families move to the highest strata of society and be accepted by those in that highest strata. I am by no means bashing England, I think the country is awesome and have family that lives there, I am just not keen on the stratified nature of its society.
- hcho 6y ago
  And yet British have James Dyson, Richard Branson and so on... Old money vs new miney strife is an age old thing and I can assure you none of the tech barons is rubbing shoulders with former barons let alone American gentry.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  While Jobs and Brin had middle-class upbringings, Musk's father was quite wealthy: he had a large and successful engineering business (South Africa's equivalent of Tutor-Perini, the multi-billion dollar construction company that built the ports of LA and Long Beach and much of its metro system among other projects) and was a millionaire before he was 30.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> who win 40-45% of the popular vote but somehow get landslide majorities In a system with four major parties, 43% is an absolutely huge popular landslide. How can you describe it as anything else? Ten percentage points above their nearest rival? How much more of a majority do you think it could possibly be?
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  > Ten percentage points above their nearest rival? Perhaps you've heard of the problem of "vote splitting": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting > How much more of a majority do you think it could possibly be? Well, try 51% for a start.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    > Perhaps you've heard of the problem of "vote splitting" What vote do you think is being split? Some kind of generic not-Conservative vote? People vote for other parties - they aren't split among a vote not for the Conservatives. If it really were simple vote splitting then coalitions would form, and they don't - because the other parties aren't a simple platform of not-Conservative and they disagree with each other as much as they disagree with the Conservatives. In fact one of the only two parties to successfully coalesce was the Conservatives! As a concrete example - the second choice in most parts of Scotland isn't Labour, it's Conservative. Are the Conservatives and Labour splitting the not-SNP vote? If you think that then is any party that stands except the ruling party a vote splitter? Seems a silly definition to me. > Well, try 51% for a start. An absolute popular majority? I don't think that's realistic and it would be extremely unhealthy if that was the case.
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      > What vote do you think is being split? Some kind of generic not-Conservative vote? People vote for other parties - they aren't split among a vote not for the Conservatives. I think there are a few factors that make things more nuanced than "People vote for other parties". As I mentioned in another comment, FPTP leads to constituencies where people feel that their vote doesn't count, so they either don't vote at all or vote for the "lesser of two evils", which both inflates the support for the Conservatives and also prevents new parties from gaining traction. > If it really were simple vote splitting then coalitions would form, and they don't That's a great point, but actually the UK has seen informal coalitions with parties standing down candidates in specific seats. This idea is so entrenched in British politics that it even has its own Wikipedia article.[0] The fact that the Conservatives have been the only major party since WW2 to form a coalition government is mostly due to the fact that in other general elections, the party with the most seats hasn't needed to form a coalition (perhaps with the exception of 1974), and it would make even less sense for the opposition parties to form one. > Are the Conservatives and Labour splitting the not-SNP vote? If you look at the 2016 Scottish Parliament election[1] (which uses a voting system that rewards honesty better), the Conservatives and Labour received 44.6% of the constituency vote, combined. That is less than the 46.5% that the SNP received. Even if you add the constituency vote share of the fourth largest party (by seats won), Scottish Green, they still don't match the success of the SNP. In any case, vote splitting is not such a concern under the Additional Members System. > An absolute popular majority? I apologise if my "51%" comment was unhelpful. You asked "How much more of a majority do you think it could possibly be?" and I wanted to highlight the fact that 43% isn't any kind of majority at all, but maybe you meant "plurality". In any case, I agree that it would probably be a bad sign if a party had a majority of the popular vote, and I would say it can also be a bad sign if a party gets a majority of seats without a majority of votes. Big parties effectively tend to be coalitions within themselves anyway, so I would prefer if the dynamics of those coalitions were played out on the national political stage, rather than as internal party scheming. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_alliance_%28UK%29#21st_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_alliance_%28UK%29#... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Scottish_Parliament_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Scottish_Parliament_elect...
gamblor956 6y ago
Err, same in America man. Bushes? Father and son were the president. Kennedys? Brothers were almost presidents, one was a President, the other governor. Clintons? Spouses were almost presidents! If that's not cliquey I don't know what is. While the Bushes, Kennedys, and Trumps came from wealthy backgrounds, the rest of the recent presidents came from lower-income brackets. Ronald Reagan grew up poor in Illinois. Bill Clinton grew up poor in Arkansas and went to college and law school on scholarship, and his wife grew up in a middle-class family in Illinois and attended public schools. Obama and his wife grew up middle-class in Hawaii and Illinois, respectively. Biden also grew up middle-class, in Pennsylvania; his second wife came from an upper-middle class background.
throwaway3699 6y ago
> Our election system is even worse than America's though so we keep getting conservative governments who win 40-45% of the popular vote but somehow get landslide majorities. If we had a popular vote then UKIP would've had nearly 70 seats back in 2015, with a huge swath of representation for London. Somehow that sounds even worse than what we have now.

krona 6y ago

David Beckham is looked down upon by 50% of society (conservative estimate.) The clique of which you speak doesn't seem very exclusive at all.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Lio 6y ago

I once tried to explain to an American friend what “middle class” meant in the UK vs USA. Long story short; it’s complicated. It’s not entirely related wealth or education but they are big factors. You can’t join the aristocracy via wealth alone. At best you’d probably end up upper middle class if you were educated i.e. Public School followed by Oxford or Cambridge. Maybe your children or grandchildren could if you really have enough money. Becoming an MP would probably help you turn money into a title. “Public” schools, like Eton, are the fee paying alternative to a “private” tutor. They’re not be confused with schools “for the plebs”. You’ll certainly need land if want to join the Gentry. Traditionally, the difference between a Forest and a Wood is that the Forest was once land populated by Commoners (that’s the middle and working class) that someone in the Aristocracy put a fence around and claimed exclusive right to hunt deer on. To this day councils have to pay people to walk the ancient Footpaths and Bridleways every year to stop would be aristocrats claiming the as part of their land. And if you wear brown shoes and a white shirt to the wrong interview in the City you’re not getting the job. As I said, it’s complicated. Complicated and silly.