Yesterday's events? Did something happen that I missed?

@Octavious: The DUP intervened to prevent Mrs May agreeing a deal with the EU that would have kept Northern Ireland inside the customs union.

That? The DUP not agreeing to something they've consistently said they won't agree to counts as news now? Frankly I'm surprised it's going as well as it is.

The point is that May's team managed it all so badly.

In what sense?

That they didn't have a DUP representative in the talks in the first place and thus she agreed to something and couldn't follow through, probably.

It's not really changed anyone's view of the government though. The incompetence has been consistently hilarious for months.

But that May agreed something with Ireland, and had not arraged that beforehand with it's partner DUP.... Amateurism at best.

If you are in a coalition of some sorts, you first have internal agreement before you make offers to outside parties. May apparently did not do so. Lack of experience with coalitions? Ever seen Merkel being called back by her coalition partners?

What point are you making here? Nobody in Britain thought May was a smart leader before yesterday either.

Octavious posted that he felt that the UK government was stronger and stable than Germany and Ireland.

Just this weekend in this thread

He said that the Irish, German, and Italian governments were weaker. Which, given Germany doesn't have a government, the Irish government almost collapsed on a vote of confidence last week (but does now appear to have got past it), and the Italian government has been on the ropes for months, isn't especially inaccurate. By no means does that make May's premiership any good either.

The Irish government apparently have a history of exaggerating the level of agreement as a negotiation tactic. I suspect that is what we saw here. In terms of having the DUP at the table, that would be politically impossible without also having the SNP et al there too, which would make the entire business unworkable.

May knows how agreeable the DUP aren't, and what their demands are. She will have been well aware that they would say no. It's just part of the back and forth of negotiation.

@ksako: Does Germany have a government yet?

Germany runs fine. Please note it took the Netherlands more than six months to form a new coalition, but all the while there was still a government and they are doing fine.
Agreeing a deal and then having to backtrack because you do not have an internal majority is weak and unstable. Merkel is at the moment still Bundeskanzler and Germany doesn't make a fool of itself on the international stage. The UK government made it clear to everyone yesterday that it doesn't seem to have a mandate to negotiate.
Germany is doing fine, it has a caretaker government and it participates strong and stable in the EU. Ireland seems to be giving the UK payback for the last 700 years but you think the UK is doing better than they are?

No deal is better than a bad deal. Kudos to the DUP.

Germany and NL have budget surpluses and considerably lower debt levels. Irish economy is doing very well, and just had a windfall of 13 billion euro. UK can't even post a budger surplus when the economy is strong and the debt to GDP is still growing.

Amsterdam will get the EMA from London, achieved "without a government". In countries that always have coalitions, they know how to manage after an election and before a new coaltion comes in. They do not go without a government in the mean time.

Germany and NL have trade surpluses, both from goods and services. And they had elections this year. Quite impressive "without a government".

Only the Irish could end up with 13 billion they argued passionately against getting. And the reminder of the Netherlands not having a coalition for 6 months hardly supports your argument of stable European politics. That nothing seems different regardless of whether a stable government is running things or not almost implies that it's kind of pointless having elections at all.

You're getting excited over nothing, ksako. The EU has almost never agreed anything with anyone until after the last minute, and the deadline for this particular bit of theatrics isn't until next week. Put your feet up for the next few days and look again when it matters.

I will put my feet up and watch. Still, my opinion of May and her government has not improved yesterday.

And on NL: there are differences, but by the virtue of coalitions, changes after elections are smaller than in FPTP systems. Look at the US: the most important thing on the mind of their current government is to reverse everything the prior government did. No progress, just vindictiveness. You don't see that as much in PR systems and I like that. Focus is more on keepng what works and improving what doesn't.

It depends on the PR system you're thinking of, I guess. The Greek PR system gives a bonus to the winning party sufficient for a single party to dominate, and you get the switch back and forth between left and right like in first past the post. The big difference being that you can't vote for your representative, just a Party.

The Austrian PR system, by way of contrast, has resulted in grand coalitions on a regular basis, so that it doesn't matter whether you vote left or right, you get a coalition of both regardless. An outcome so appallingly undemocratic that in the last election vast numbers of voters became so frustrated that they saw voting for the far right the only way to achieve change.

Yeah, gotta love PR

Well, I would argue PR in its various guises reflects the will of the electorate better than a first past the post system, and the criticism of not being able to vote for a presentative doesn't even hold for the parliament in Greece. The system does seem quite complicated by the looks of it though. But then again, Greeks have over 2000 years of experience with democracy...

And I don't understand why a grand coalition should be undemocratic as such, if this has been the only way to form a governing majority, it does reflect the will of the voters. The problem with a grand coalition, particularly in Germany, is an marginalised opposition, as many functions, including speaking time, are proportioned to the share of votes.

Change can be achieved even without parties being part of a governing coalition, the example is the German Green party which managed to put their goals onto the agenda of most other parties long before they became part of a government.

I intensely dislike FPTP, but PR is not a solve-all to general political problems. The rise of Golden Dawn in Greece... the total deadlock in Italy between the DL, M5S, and now the ridiculous prospect of Berlusconi returning to government... The Catalan crisis along with the multiple general elections Spain recently required...

Germany has been a model of solid governance for the last few decades because the Germans had a great example of what happened when parties refused to work together in the Weimar Republic... But let's not forget, the Weimar Republic used PR, too.

PR does not solve all, but I prefer it over FPTP. And that undesirable parties come up, like golden dawn: isn't that democracy? If that is what a part of the voters want. if the Weimar republic had had FPTP, the nazis would still have won, I think.

2000 years of Greek democracy? I think you might be slightly wrong there :p

What I dislike most about PR is the power it gives the Parties. It is all too easy for a Party to arrange its lists so that loyalists are on top and trouble makers on the bottom, essentially culling the independent thinkers. Whilst there are some temptations with this (Jeremy Corbyn would have been dumped by Labour long ago) it is not good for democracy or the country.

I understand your dislike, it can get like that.

In Greece, in elections, we vote for parties but choosing a party you can vote some of the candidates. The country is divided into constituencies, there are as many as the districts of the country with the two major cities having more than one constituency. Every constituency elects a number of MPs, some one, some two, etc. When you vote for a party you can vote who from this party will go to the parliament, the ones with the most votes are elected (so a party cannot shut up voices or get spesific people on parliament) the elections with a list are possible only in the event of elections happening in a very short time after we had again.
Our system known as the enhanced analogue was giving a bonus of 50 MPs to the first party and was meant to provide governments with a strong majority in the parliament, and it did for some decades, we had seen governments with 177 MPs out of 300. Nowadays though this is not happening for the past decade we had coalition governments. A thing that makes the whole system more complex is that the president is elected by the parliament, 181 votes are demanded to elect a president and if this doesn't occur the parliament is disbanded and we go for elections so a government or coalition has in its tenure a presidential election better have181 MPs or its tenure is cut short.
All these said democracy with its flaws is better than a military regime or other short of absolutism (we had enough of these too).

Thank you for the insight, Will. Always good to hear from someone who knows it well. Very much agree that it is a significant improvement over a military regime.