With the SNP in crisis, the Scottish Tory leader suggesting people should vote Labour was perhaps an amazing move.
In a cweek where erstwhile first minister Nicola Sturgeon’s husband Peter Murrell was arrested in a probe over the SNP’s finances and their home was forage by police (Murrell has been released without charge as the investigation continues), Scottish Conservatives leader Douglas Ross propose people should vote “tactically” to keep out the SNP.
He told the Sunday Telegraph: “I will always cheer Scottish Conservative voters to vote Scottish traditional, but I think normally the public can see, and they want the parties to accept, that where there is the muscular candidate to beat the SNP you get behind that candidate.”
A recent poll on general election voting intentions had Labour second beyond the SNP by only five points.
Ross earned a swift reproach from the central Conservative Party. “This is odds not the view of the Conservative Party,” a spokesperson said. “We want people to vote for Conservative assured wherever they are put as that’s the best way to retain Labour and the SNP out.”
After Ross broke the party line, Yahoo News UK looks back on three recent times other politicians have landed themselves in trouble for voting against their own party.
21 Tory MPs suspended over Brexit election
Amid the bitter Brexit war that played out in Parliament throughout 2019, 21 Tory MPs were draped in September of that year after support from opposition parties in a vote to prevent a “no-deal” exit from the EU.
The rebels in Boris Johnson’s crackdown comprise former chancellors Philip Hammond and Ken Clarke.
Ten of those 21 were admitted to the party the following month as Johnson sought an election.
Alastair Campbell helps Lib Dems
Brexit divisions weren’t finite to the Conservatives in 2019. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former spin doctor, was prohibited from Labour after announcing on the BBC’s European election night scope that he voted for the pro-Remain Liberal Democrats.
The Commonwealth Constitution does not rule in detail how members of the House of Representatives and the Senate are to be elected, nor could it dictate the number and strength of Australia’s national government parties and the dynamics of competition among them. The electoral and party systems have a profound impact on the government dynamics in Canberra, including the roles of the two houses of Parliament and the relationship between them, so both are summarized here. Special notice is given to a growth
that has fundamentally affected the balance of power among the parties, the implementation of principles of managing government, and the practical dynamics of politics in Parliament: the decision made in 1948 that thereafter Senators would be elected by proportional depiction.
Electing Representatives and Senators
The procedures for appointing Australian Representatives and Senators are considerably more complicated than the procedures for electing their American counterparts. US Representatives and Senators all are appointed in essentially the same way—in what often is called the ‘first-past-the-post’ system, but which I prefer to call the constituency pack system. Each voter casts one vote for the candidate whom he or she prefers to constitute the voter’s constituency, whether state or congressional district, and the candidate who obtains the most votes is the winner. In Australia, by contrast, members of the Commonwealth Parliament are chosen by a combination of clients’ majority and proportional representation (PR) systems, with the use of privileged voting (also known as the alternative vote) for elections to both houses. Also, voting has been mandatory since the general election of 1925.
As in the United States, seats in the Australian House of Representatives are allocated among the states on report
to their respective populations, and each state then is cleaved into as many districts (electoral divisions, in Australian parlance) as the number of Representatives assign to it so that each division elects a single Representative. The populations of divide within each state are to be roughly equal, though each original state is guaranteed (by sec. 24 of the Constitution) a minimum of five spaces in the House. (By law, each of the two regions is guaranteed at least one seat.) Representatives all are elected at the same time and for a high term of three years, though, as we have seen, the House may be dissolved earlier—at some time before its life if not
would end, in the name of sec. 57, ‘by effluxion of time’.
