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>any party being in power for too long is a bad thing regardless of their politics Indeed. I live in Wales, which has only ever been led by Welsh Labour. Since

>any party being in power for too long is a bad thing regardless of their politics Indeed. I live in Wales, which has only ever been led by Welsh Labour. Since having our own devolved parliament in the late 90's, it's been Labour in charge. As we've been talking about the state of healthcare, conditions here in Wales are much worse than the UK as a whole. This also happens to be true of practically every other form of governmental function.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
It's been my observation in Norway that with a leftist government social services will become better at first, then at some point will become increasingly bloated and bureaucratic. Whereas with a conservative government they will go in and trim the fat, which is helpful at first, but eventually they'll trim so much fat there's nothing left at all. The only thing that seems to actually work is switching between them often enough that you get mostly the initial improvement, with some regression that is corrected by switching sides, and then rinse and repeat. A lot this applies to things like taxes and financial regulation too, I've found.
- fderwgtjrsewa 4y ago
  Excellent observation. Can't disagree!
  - mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
    If you're curious, this observation only became clear to me when I started thinking about politics in a (very loose, hand-wavey) cultural evolutionary framework. I'm sure there's serious theoretical work on this, but I'm not hugely read up on the social sciences. The general idea is that representative democracy can be seen as a sort of evolutionary algorithm, evolving a set of laws and regulations. Think of elections as your fitness test. Whatever things feed into the election results, like debates and media storms can be seen as selective pressures. For a democracy to function you need a healthy multi-party system, healthy independent media, political parties with strong grassroots control internally, a reasonably educated populace, and minimal corruption. All of these make the total selective pressures more aligned with what's best for everyone. If one party gets power for too long, we're essentially overprioritising selective pressures from one subset of society, causing an effective power imbalance that starts to cause more and more problems. I might blog about it since it's a bit complicated to explain years of private, abstract thought like this, but hopefully that was an interesting read anyway.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

It's been my observation in Norway that with a leftist government social services will become better at first, then at some point will become increasingly bloated and bureaucratic. Whereas with a conservative government they will go in and trim the fat, which is helpful at first, but eventually they'll trim so much fat there's nothing left at all. The only thing that seems to actually work is switching between them often enough that you get mostly the initial improvement, with some regression that is corrected by switching sides, and then rinse and repeat. A lot this applies to things like taxes and financial regulation too, I've found.

fderwgtjrsewa 4y ago
Excellent observation. Can't disagree!
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  If you're curious, this observation only became clear to me when I started thinking about politics in a (very loose, hand-wavey) cultural evolutionary framework. I'm sure there's serious theoretical work on this, but I'm not hugely read up on the social sciences. The general idea is that representative democracy can be seen as a sort of evolutionary algorithm, evolving a set of laws and regulations. Think of elections as your fitness test. Whatever things feed into the election results, like debates and media storms can be seen as selective pressures. For a democracy to function you need a healthy multi-party system, healthy independent media, political parties with strong grassroots control internally, a reasonably educated populace, and minimal corruption. All of these make the total selective pressures more aligned with what's best for everyone. If one party gets power for too long, we're essentially overprioritising selective pressures from one subset of society, causing an effective power imbalance that starts to cause more and more problems. I might blog about it since it's a bit complicated to explain years of private, abstract thought like this, but hopefully that was an interesting read anyway.