what a difference a day makes...

so what if the petition for a new general election gets more than 9.7 million votes? (the amount of votes  labour received at the last election). 

at that point more people will have 'voted' not-labour than voted for labour in the last election. 

but this amount is already less than the combined vote for the conservatives and reform (6.8 and 4.1 million respectively - people who we could reasonably expect not to want a labour government).  so shouldn't the petition have to have more votes than 10.9 million if it is to claim the situation has changed? 

the slight-of-hand here is that a vote in a yes-no referendum is not the same as a vote in a general election with many parties standing. third party effects rapidly lead to parties winning seats with less than 50% of the vote in that constituency. 

parliamentary logic is determined by seats won and all the other parties put together do not have as many seats as labour (411).

what this petition does expose is the insanity of the first past the post system of election and yet that is the basis on which governments are elected and it cannot be wished otherwise it must be constitutionally changed to be otherwise. (now there's a mighty can of worms). 

alternatively we could have a revolution (says horsemouth entirely straight faced). 

labour have proved themselves stunningly politically inept in their modern incarnation (so presumably they are going to get themselves tangled up in a crisis of legitimacy when they don't need to).  

the stomu yamash'ta is a recommendation andy edwards makes about 25 minutes into his video - he's conducting an experiment to find out what would happen if we actually listened to music live on his channel (similar to the review shows). instantly grumpy andy is replaced by musical enthusiast andy (this is a considerable improvement and may be worth the risk of demonetising his channel).