• nantsuu@fedia.io
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    3 days ago

    John Oliver did an episode of Last Week Tonight on it recently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZL_TctrNco

    Basically, Andy Burnham has majority support within the Labour Party to be the next PM, but he wasn’t a member of Parliament, which is necessary to challenge a current PM for the role. So the Parliament member for Makerfield resigned to hold a special election so that he could (hopefully) win the seat, which he did, and now he’s set to become the new PM.

    • saltesc@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      And here I was trying to summarise the Westminster system with four paragraphs.

      Only thing worth noting is a PM isn’t some presidential position. It’s generally just the party leader in the leadership position of the other ministers.

      If a party decided they want to take turns of being leader each month, they’d each take a turn at being PM too.

    • dhork@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Ah, this explains it. I was wondering how some random person who won an off-cycle election could just jump into leadership like that. But it seems that he had the leadership support already, and the election was engineered to make him eligible.

      I was curious as to why none of the already elected Labour MPs would get the job. I guess none of them want it. Let’s see if he lasts longer than my salad.

      • wewbull@feddit.uk
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        2 days ago

        They’re all widely seen as either tainted by Starmer, not good enough, or too new (as about half of them came in at the last election 2 years ago). There are some who have ambition, but not sure if they’ll have the support necessary to challenge.

        • Simon_Shitewood@lemmy.ml
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          2 days ago

          The too news generally come under tainted by starmer - there was a lot of parachuting and overriding CLPs in the last election.