The two-state solution is - and has long been - UK official policy under governments of all three parties. So it’s unsurprising the UK would vote in favour.

The weird thing is that this is also US policy. Why the hell would the US vote against this?

Addressing the Middle East, the Assembly took up the report “Permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources” (document A/78/467), adopting the eponymous resolution by a recorded vote of 158 in favour to 6 against (Canada, Federated States of Micronesia, Israel, Nauru, Palau, United States), with 13 abstentions.

Why would the US vote against this? The two-state solution is US government policy!

‘Boy, have you lost your mind honour, cause I’ll help you find it!’

New Nokia, who dis?

Mate, even if it was the mayor of Upton Snodsbury in Worcestershire who had made this comment, I would be glad to see the Auschwitz Museum had responded to them. The fact it was a mayor in the country in question makes it even more relevant.

Never again means never again. It means challenging genocide and ethnic cleansing every time, at every step along the road that leads to these outcomes - not just waiting until the trains are already on their way to the death camps before your raise your voice.

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Spock died for our sins according to the scriptures;

And that he was buried, and that he rose again in the third movie according to the scriptures:

And that he was seen of Jim, then of the rest of the bridge crew.

-- 1 Roddenberry 15:3-5

Fair enough!

Whilst I love this, you do realise that 25 December is the first day of Christmas, not the twelfth? So the Twelve Days of Christmas run from 25 December to 5 January (which is why it’s considered bad luck to keep your Christmas tree up after 5 January, aka ‘Twelfth Night’).

You’ve started your countdown 12 days too early!

He’d like it to be an empire again…

Victor Orban is a fascist and he’s spent the last 13 years seeking to turn Hungary into a fascist state. He controls the judiciary. He controls the media. He scapegoats Jews, Muslims and refugees for the country’s problems. He aligns himself with Putin.

Fascists inherently don’t like cross-border cooperation and supranational governance - it runs against all their beliefs about their nation’s superiority. So he doesn’t like the EU either and blames it for things to his domestic audiences. There is no press freedom in Hungary and so Hungarian voters get bombarded with this nonsense.

The EU needs to recognise that an enemy of European civilisation has been given the keys to the castle. That is a dangerous situation. It is time to invoke Article 7 to recognise that Hungary is acting against the EU’s founding values, and remove Hungary’s veto.

None. They got a minority of the vote. They got a majority of the seats. It’s FPTP.

The Tories got a minority of the vote at the last election. Most people voted non-Tory. Most people voted for a second referendum.

Won’t make it through the Lords (and it wasn’t in the Tory manifesto so they can’t Parliament Act it) and even if does it might still fail its third reading in the Commons when the feral wing of the Tories start making more insane demands.

Forcing clearing houses to relocate from London to Paris is part of French industrial policy and it has been going on (unsuccessfully) for half a century.

It’s got nothing to do with Brexit - they were trying this long before that happened (and the Single Market be damned - at one point the UK had to take the ECB to court for breaking the Maastricht Treaty over this). And it’s got nothing to do with the EU’s regulatory reach - market infrastructures in London and Paris are regulated along the same lines under the globally-agreed Principles for Financial Market Infrastructures, and the UK clearing houses already opt-in to direct EU regulation as third-country CCPs post-Brexit anyway.

This is purely about the French state again trying to use the EU as a mechanism to deliver their industrial policy. For French politicians this just has a weird totemic significance.

It’s worth saying that both major parties are way out of line with the electorate on this - polling of whom shows:

• there were consistent majorities for Remain from about mid-2017 until Brexit happened; and

• there has been a consistent polling plurality for Rejoin pretty much since that point onwards (and sometimes outright polling majorities for Rejoin).

So neither of those parties are currently speaking for a large (and possibly majority) share of the electorate on this issue. When such situations arise, it’s rare for the electorate to be the ones who have to change their mind and accord with what the politicians think…

What I expect will happen in the coming years (particularly after Labour go into government next year) is that the Lib Dems will get increasingly bolshy on this issue and probably build towards announcing a Rejoin manifesto in the run up to the 2028/9 general election, and Labour will start bleeding votes to them. That will force Labour to shift its position (in the same way they shifted their position on a People’s Vote after the Lib Dems trounced them in Labour strongholds at the 2019 EU elections).

By the end of this decade, Rejoin will be a very mainstream position among British politicians in the way it already is with British voters.

Agree that’s a stupid system, but 60 out of 100 senators can still vote to override it, right?

In the EU, on votes that aren’t subject to QMV, 26 out of 27 member states can fervently agree with something but still do nothing about a veto by the 27th state, whose veto can often have nothing to do with the question at hand and be more about domestic political posturing or some other such nonsense.

The veto existed from a time when the EU was much smaller (in both scope and scale). Having a member state veto today is approaching being as ludicrous as if each US state had a veto on national legislation - it allows small countries with extremist governments (of which there is always likely to be one in office somewhere) to clog up the gears of the entire union.

The European Council’s well-established alternative to member state vetoes also still does plenty to respect member state interests - qualified majority voting. QMV means big changes aren’t getting passed on a 51%-49% knife edge. QMV puts a two-step lock in place, requiring a) at least 55% of member states that also b) account for at least 65% of the EU’s population, to vote in favour.

But this is all moot. Abolishing the member state veto will itself almost certainly be subject to multiple member state vetoes at the Council so this is going nowhere.

That is exactly how the US system works, with a handful of exceptions.

For the election of a Senator or Representative - it’s almost always FPTP. The candidate that gets the most votes wins the seat, regardless of whether or not they got a majority of the vote. The state of Georgia is an example of an exception, as they hold a runoff election for Senator if the leading candidate falls short of 50% - as happened with the elections of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, both of which went to runoff.

For the presidential election, this also how it works in the vast majority of cases. 100% of a state’s electoral college vote goes to the candidate that gets the most votes, regardless of whether or not they got a majority of the votes in the state. You have a situations like Texas in 2020 giving 38 electoral college votes to Trump and zero to Biden (versus a proportional allocation of more like 20 Trump, 17 Biden and 1 Jorgensen). That electoral college system results in situations like 1992, when Bill Clinton got a 370 vote electoral college landslide on 43% of the vote because of Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy, as well as situations like 2000 and 2016 where a Republican candidate who came 2nd in the national vote still came 1st in the electoral college by virtue of coming first past the post in enough individual states. (I believe the exceptions are Nebraska and Maine, which split their electoral college votes.)

First past the post - the party with the most votes ‘wins’. It’s in contrast to a range of other systems that rely on proportionality or preferential voting to ensure that the party or parties with majority support wins.

For example, imagine a scenario where there are 10 constituencies electing a representative by FPTP. In each of those 10 constituencies, the result is identical as follows:

• Nazi - 40%
• Liberal - 30%
• Socialist - 20%
• Conservative - 10%

Under FPTP, the Nazi would be the top candidate in every constituency, and so win 10 out of 10 seats and have total control of the legislature, even though 60% of people voted anti-Nazi. This is the system in the UK and US.

Under a proportional system, you would allocate the seats in proportion to the votes cast - so 4 for the Nazis, 3 for the Liberals, 2 for the Socialists and 1 for the Conservatives. The non-Nazis would then have a legislative majority (6 out of 10 seats) that reflects how people actually voted, and could form an anti-Nazi coalition government. This is the system in the Netherlands or Germany for example.

Under a preferential system, you still elect seats on a constituency basis, but you make sure that the winning candidate is preferred by a majority of voters in the constituency - either by having multi-round elections or by having voters rank candidates instead of just voting for one. In a simplified system, you could rule out all but the top two candidates (in this case, Nazi and Liberal), and then have a second round of votes two weeks later for voters to decide between those two candidates to represent their seat. This tends to favour more moderate candidates so it’s likely under such a system that the Liberal would generally defeat the Nazi in the second round in most seats. This is the system in France.

There are also hybrid systems like Single Transferrable Vote, which simultaneously achieve proportionality and preferential voting - this is used in Ireland.

Geert Wilder wins Dutch election

35 of the 150 seats in parliament

Let’s please stop using FPTP language to describe very non-FPTP systems and outcomes.