UK Election June 08

[peejaye]

Classic example above of someone possibly not voting for a political party because he doesn't like a particular person from that party!
For the record; I am a member of the Labour Party but I am not a fan of Diane Abbott! It wouldn't make me go out & vote for another party!
I'm not having a go at holzz but this is how a lot of voters think! Hundreds of thousands of working class people, some of them poor, would of voted Conservative in 2015, some of them trade unionists!

[Laphroaig]

She's right to call it, and to be fair she has a good chance of winning.

As for broken promises..haha..what? are people dim, politicians lie. its how it works.

First part, probably true.

Second part, ever thought about a career change?

[Stavros]

The striking fact at present is that conditions in the UK and other advanced countries - stagnant wages, rising inequality, economic insecurity - should have been tailor-made for left-leaning parties, yet it is the right-wing populists who are prospering. Unfortunately it is much easier to target scapegoats (aided by the tabloid press) but the centre-left will have to do a better job of developing solutions and articulating a narrative that addresses the the practical concerns of ordinary people.

I think that one of the trends that helps to explain this was begun in Australia when Bob Hawke transformed the Labour Party into an election winning machine in 1983, following the disarray that crippled the party in the wake of Gough Whitlam's dismissal from power. Blair, Mandelson and Phillip Gould based a lot of their tactics on the Australian experience, in which the key to an election victory was seen as the replacement of the opposition in 'the centre ground' of politics. For New Labour, this meant endorsing most of Thatcher's policies, on housing in particular, but also by not 'threatening' or 'promising' to raise taxes and to maintain a light regulation of the banking and financial sectors in order to persuade the middle class they could trust New Labour not to eat into their prosperity. In previous years it had been claimed the traditional Labour model of 'tax and spend' would damage the City and lead to capital flight, whereas Mandelson made a point of saying he was comfortable with people being filthy rich (which is what he wanted to be himself).

A similar trend enabled Bill Clinton to win the Presidency, the key being to win the support of 'Reagan Democrats' and pursue popular policies like being 'tough on crime'. Blair and Clinton were close at the start of the Blair government, but one wonders if in both cases, the fetish for centre ground policies led to a lapse in their attention to the needs of the poorest members of society. Democrats, today talk about 'the middle class' for obvious reasons, but what about the working class, the poor and the homeless? They used to be on the fringes of society, but in recent years, as the rise in food banks has shown, more and more people are on or just above the poverty line, and many people in work in the UK claim benefits because their wages are not enough to meet the cost of living.

Globalization has been blamed for this alienation between government and the governed, but it is more complex I think. The traditional town centre in France had its baker, butcher and grocery store, along with the cafes and other shops and services. But since the 1970s the growth of out-of-town hypermarkets has shredded town centres and left many looking semi-derelict because it is cheaper to shop in the hypermarket, and town centre businesses find the local council to compensate for falling tax revenues raises them to a level that makes a small business unprofitable. This has happened in the UK. A few years ago I made the mistake of thinking a day out in Nuneaton, birthplace of George Eliot was worth the trip. Within an hour of arriving, I was almost running to the station to leave.

Where globalization has taken effect, the free flow of capital that began in the 1980s, and the transformation of China in particular, has provided people with affordable clothes, affordable cars, affordable long-haul holidays, and affordable computers, smart phones and tablets. In the UK, however, lax rules on home ownership mean that segments of cities like London are stacked with exclusive apartment blocks that nobody appears to live in on a regular basis while local people are bought out and any local character a district has is lost. A major weakness of the New Labour policy was the failure to impose strict limits on borrowing by high street banks, the availability of credit at a time of historic low interest rates meant many people borrowed more than they could repay over time, and it was only a matter of time when the system collapsed. But again, this was not an issue of globalization as much as a domestic political decision not to seek more government control of money and finances, to leave it to the markets, markets which we found out were in any case rigged by the banks. Canada and Australia with stricter rules on borrowing did not suffer as badly as the US and the UK.

In the end, if both the major parties are in effect, offering the same menu of policies or a variation of the same, what is the point of them? The Conservatives have also transformed their party, to some extent at least, with a crop of MPs who are openly gay (two of whom are in the government), Muslim, of African heritage which would have been unthinkable in the 1980s when the only known Conservative MP who was gay was referred to as 'the colourful Norman St John-Stevas' and as recently as 1992 when a black candidate selected by the party to fight Cheltenham Spa -John, later Lord Taylor- was disowned by his local constituency who voted in a Liberal Democrat in the subsequent election for the first time since 1945.

Even now, Labour is trying to offer something different, but not on Brexit, where it has voted with the Conservatives so that anyone opposed to Brexit has limited alternatives, unless you live in Scotland where there is a clear choice. Crucially, I think that while Corbyn is trying to re-position Labour as the party of the 'forgotten people', his lack of credibility and the weakest front bench team in living memory is going to make success very difficult. Dianne Abbott lives in a world of her own, and doesn't even seem to be in touch with the people of Hackney, by contrast Emily Thornberry doesn't appear to be living in this world at all, and is as good a reason for not voting Labour as I can think.

[holzz]

Ok, so FOUR national holidays?

hahaha...nice gimmick Mr. Corbyn.

Offer a gimmick to make Mr. Wenger better at his job, that would be more transparent.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk...-a7697296.html

We're not stupid. We know YOU know you're the underdog, and are doing anything for votes.

[peejaye]

So people are happy with a pledge tax rises and 0.7% of GDP still going to Foreign aid to places like India(parts of it full of millionaires)
That's 7 pence for every £10 spent in this country! No wonder this place is fucked. I wouldn't of thought Corbyn would have to do or say anything to get in?
You are stupid, because you will probably still vote these evil c**ts in!

[Laphroaig]

So people are happy with a pledge tax rises and 0.7% of GDP still going to Foreign aid to places like India(parts of it full of millionaires)
That's 7 pence for every £10 spent in this country! No wonder this place is fucked. I wouldn't of thought Corbyn would have to do or say anything to get in?
You are stupid, because you will probably still vote these evil c**ts in!

Not necessarily. Already there's an opinion poll (and we all know how reliable those are...) showing the Tories lead cut by 11 points in the few days since the election was announced. Can't find the link to it, but basically, who really knows how this election will go?

[Stavros]

So people are happy with a pledge tax rises and 0.7% of GDP still going to Foreign aid to places like India(parts of it full of millionaires)
That's 7 pence for every £10 spent in this country! No wonder this place is fucked. I wouldn't of thought Corbyn would have to do or say anything to get in?
You are stupid, because you will probably still vote these evil c**ts in!

Foreign Aid is one of those topics which can never be fully resolved because it generates so much division. Most of the attacks on Foreign Aid come from the Mail, the Murdoch press and an assortment of people who simply don't like the idea of sending a penny to Africa if it can be spent here. But if the Foreign Aid budget was shut down, where would the money go? Not to the projects its critics say it should be spent on in the UK.

The UK's commitment to Foreign Aid comes out of the Overseas Development policy that was created in the 1960s as the Empire was replaced by the Commonwealth. When the UN adopted North-South development issues in the 1970s to get a commitment from governments to spend money to combat poverty and disease, the UK responded by seeking to meet the 0.7% gdp target which in time it did.

Yes, you can find any number of daft-sounding projects in Ethiopia and Pakistan that appear to make a mockery of the concept of foreign aid, and yes you can complain the admin costs alone take too much money and local officials pocket some of it for themselves, but 37% of aid is spent in UN agencies, such as the WHO where money is part of the GAVI alliance that runs vaccination campaigns in rural Africa, for example, and is a crucial part of the fight against diseases such as Meningitis, Polio, Diarrhoeal diseases, pneumonia, TB and malaria.

If you scrap the aid budget because you don't think the UK should be funding the Ethiopian Spice Girls, or running English Language clinics and a physiotherapy unit in North Korea, bear in mind that you will also be scrapping the UK's commitment to the WHO campaign against diseases which make life a misery across the world, and which local government often struggles to deal with. You may also raise questions among the recipients in those countries, such as 'Why did the British leave?', particularly if nothing similar replaces it. Corruption may be a way of life in Nigeria, but does that mean we should not fund campaigns against river blindness? In the end, if nobody does, this disease will just carry on ruining lives. The government of Nigeria has received several trillion dollars in oil revenue since 1979, where did it go? And if Nigeria is that corrupt, ditto Saudi Arabia, why are commercial firms so keen to get their hands on their oil money by doing business with them? Is it not hypocritical to argue we should not send aid to corrupt Nigeria, but yes we can trade with them?
A sensible debate on foreign aid is welcome, but there is more to it than a list of bijoux projects that inflame the retired colonels and their less serviceable friends. Some of it actually works.

[Laphroaig]

Not necessarily. Already there's an opinion poll (and we all know how reliable those are...) showing the Tories lead cut by 11 points in the few days since the election was announced. Can't find the link to it, but basically, who really knows how this election will go?

Found it, might have known it was from the Daily Mail.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ax-U-turn.html

[peejaye]

Found it, might have known it was from the Daily Mail.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ax-U-turn.html

Thanks Phroaig, first place I looked was the Mails website. Cheered me up a little as that, probably short term though?

I hear what you're saying Stavros, re. Foreign Aid, I was not aware however it was the far right mainly criticising it?
I actually believe taxes should rise for the benefit of all our public services, mostly to fund the NHS but what the Tories will do is raise taxes, not for the most wealthy of course, and still carry on with their austerity cuts on public services! A "spin Doctor" will come up with some excuse when the opposition question their motives or May will just say things were much worse under Labour or her favourite; "We are investing record amounts of £££££" but not explain where it will go!
However; declaring you are going to raise taxes in an election campaign is a very brave and dangerous move. I really hope it comes back to haunt them!

[Stavros]

I hear what you're saying Stavros, re. Foreign Aid, I was not aware however it was the far right mainly criticising it?
I actually believe taxes should rise for the benefit of all our public services, mostly to fund the NHS but what the Tories will do is raise taxes, not for the most wealthy of course, and still carry on with their austerity cuts on public services! A "spin Doctor" will come up with some excuse when the opposition question their motives or May will just say things were much worse under Labour or her favourite; "We are investing record amounts of £££££" but not explain where it will go!
However; declaring you are going to raise taxes in an election campaign is a very brave and dangerous move. I really hope it comes back to haunt them!

Not always the 'far right' who criticise foreign aid, but plenty of people who should know better do attack it.

On tax, I think general election campaigns produce the least convincing arguments. Before she was elected in 1979 Mrs Thatcher said the Tories had no plan to raise VAT, within a month of the election it had doubled. If anything, the issue of tax became so toxic New Labour maintained the generally low levels of income tax with some fiddling at the margins -raising the threshold for tax payments, and lowering the upper limit from 50+ to 45 then 40% over a set figure. We thus have a bizarre situation where some people are not paying income tax at all because they are on low wages, and they and others receive 'in work benefits' because they can't survive on their basic income, yet everyone who drinks or smokes pays increased duties on their delightful sins, and everyone pays VAT. Every government now makes claims about not raising taxes, says there are too many layers and the tax code should be simplified, but in office reform rarely makes radical change, and the argument that low taxes produces a healthier economy is not borne out by the evidence. At some point, however, I think the government will have to increase income tax, probably when the national income declines as a result of the UK leaving the EU if not before then. Interest rates will also rise. I think governments have no touched these two issues for years because they don't win elections. But if May wins this election, Brexit will take place within the lifetime of the new Parliament and there is no hiding place for hard decisions following a 'hard Brexit'.