I’m going to throw out an idea mainly for Labour supporters to discuss, though I know it won’t only be Labour commenter’s :-)
Considering Labour’s been in power 13 years, we’ve had two disastrous and very expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, ~10 years of economic success followed by 3 years of economic strife (not Labours fault per se, but they didn’t plan for bad times and you know how unforgiving the British electorate are!), political scandal after scandal bringing what the British people think of politicians to an all time low and still Labour secured 29% of the popular vote and 39% of the 650 seats.
Considering all this strife under a three term Labour government that’s looking tired that’s quite an impressive result.
The Conservatives are clearly not trusted by the British electorate, they should have cleaned up (40% plus of the vote not 36%) and I can see it not taking a great deal to turn the British electorate even further off the Conservatives for another decade.
I believe the best person to be in number 10 Downing Street for the next few years is Gordon Brown, but Greece is in the crapper, Spain and Italy though not as bad as Greece are in trouble, we may live on an island, but economically we are not an island and we all know we are in for massive public sector spending cuts (sorry, I meant efficiency savings :-)) to bring government debt under control no matter who is Prime Minister this time next week.
An Age of Austerity under the Conservatives
As Labour supporters do you really want an age of austerity on Labour’s CV for when we come to the next general election? Anyone seriously believe we’ll last 4+ years before another general election is called, election 2011/2012 I hear you say!
If Labour retain power they will be blamed for whatever economic measures that are required for the next couple of years and beyond, just like the Tories are rightly blamed for the economic disasters of the 80s and 90s.
Although it’s not good for the country to have a Tory government (they are selfish ba#####ds and the less well off will pay through the nose) and based on their recent calls on economic matters they certainly aren’t the party for the British economy in troubled times (mass unemployment is on the horizon!), I can not see them winning the next general election after an age of austerity!
Lets have a weak minority Conservative government for a couple of years, have another general election (I see it in 2012) and put Labour back at the helm with a small, but working majority. I’d like to say the Tories can’t cause too much damage in two years, but… we planned to buy a second house, we are so concerned that there’s no way right now we’ll buy a second home with the Conservatives most likely in charge, we aren’t willing to take the risk on loosing so much money if they mess up the economy again!
Labour, Liberal Democrat, SDLP and SNP Coalition Government
I was hoping for a relatively strong Labour/Lib Dem coalition government (350 seats between them), but that’s not what’s happened: I’m so surprised at the British electorate bottling out on voting Lib Dems at the last minute!
The only alternative to a Conservative led government is a very weak Labour/Lib Dem/SDLP/SNP and maybe others parties coalition government that’s highly unlikely to last very long!
Basically Labour/Lib Dem/SDLP/SNP really all need to work together to scrape by a majority of 1 IF you ignore the 5 Sein Fein MPs who never vote in the London Parliament (I think we can safely assume they won’t take their seats in the London parliament), so to form a majority government a Labour led coalition government would need 323 MPs (not 326 a real majority), a Labour/Lib Dem/SDLP/SNP coalition would have 324 MPs, not exactly a strong coalition and I expect it would cost Labour offering the Lib Dems Proportional Representation : The Single Transferable Vote System (which neither Labour or the Conservatives want)!
I prefer a weak Conservative minority government and see how long it takes for a vote of no confidence, I give them 18 months and then Labour will be back in power assuming during that time the Labour party don’t implode with infighting: Gordon Brown will have to go, it’s a shame as I really like Gordon Brown.
As observers of politics, we have interesting times ahead.
Not labours fault!!!
deregulation at a too big extent, consumerism and credit lead britiain to part of its recession, if they had saved the money left by the major/thatcher prodigy then the country would be in a better place
This site shouldn’t be allowed to call itself something as innocuous as general-election-2010.co.uk, Biased-towards-labour .co.uk would be more accurate. The appalling state of all media in terms of prejudice must be an opportunity for some rational intelligent neutral group of honest information brokers somewhere. This childish brazen pathetically immature political spouting is horribly inefficient and misleading for the British public who want the truth.
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The general election 2010 website is owned by a private individual (that would be me, David :-)).
I’m not a member of the media, I’m not a member of a political party or political group. I’m a British person who just so happens to be very good at getting website ranked high in search engines (it’s my job: SEO consultant) and I have an interest in politics. I pay quite a bit of money keeping this site running, on election day the site got so much traffic I had to buy a new dedicated server ($300 a month) just to keep the site online!
BTW if you check Google for searches like General Election 2010 you’ll notice a lot of newspapers and they are mostly Conservative supporting. Have you also complained at their Tory bias?
The comments are open and as long as a commenter isn’t abusive or breaks any laws they can comment on whatever they want.
There’s also a forum at https://general-election-2010.co.uk/politics/ where anyone can register and post whatever political information they want. If you support the Conservative party feel free to post 100 articles supporting the Tories, I won’t delete them as long as they are unique (if they are copied from other websites I’ll delete them since it can damage a site having lots of copied content).
I also want to open the site up to others creating their own blogs. My youngest son (he’s 13) for example has this blog at : he’s quite left-wing as well, didn’t realise how much until reading his blog!
When the software (WordPress) I use to run this website updates to version 3 (currently version 2.9.2) it will have a new feature to allow people like yourself to create a blog on this domain that you can post anything you want. So in the long term I want to open this domain up to others to create their own blogs just like this one and my youngest sons blog.
David
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The only reason Labour received so many votes was because they have spent 13 years getting people on their payroll (benefits claimants, public sector workers, etc.). Most of these people won’t bite the hand that feeds them.
the actual reason for labour securing more seasts is because they changed the areas to include more labour supporters! look at the swing, a 5% swing in favour of the conservatives and MT came to power with a 5.3% swing so why didnt the tories walk it? answer because labour fiddled the to stay in power. as far as im concerned that is cheating boardering on extreme socialism!
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The new parliamentary boundaries favour the Conservatives more than the 2005 constituency boundaries. So what you said isn’t true.
The problem for the Tories and even more so the Lib Dems is their support is more spread around the country while Labours voters are more concentrated up North and in London.
It means in Labour strongholds a 5% drop in the vote is nothing. There are Conservative strongholds, but nothing like what Labour have.
I don’t even think new boundaries could be arranged that would make it fair under our current first past the post voting system.
I agree it’s not a fair system that benefits Labour when looking at the popular vote share.
Proportional representation single transferable vote would make it fairer, though I doubt we’d ever again see a majority government (Labour or Conservative). We’d always have either Labour/Lib Dem or Conservative/Lib Dem coalition governments or maybe rainbow coalition governments if other parties started to gain support.
David
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actually it was lord mandelson who changed the bounderies and why on earth would he change them to favour the conservatives. that doesnt make sense. and as i said before look at the swing from labour to conservative how can labour have lost so many seats yet still have 258 in parliment??? it doesnt add up if you look at the old boundary lines but when the new ones were established in 2005 labour still won that election even though they lost 5.4% of votes compared to 1997. and if you check the numbers the conservatives would have won under the old boundary lines in 2005
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Do a little research on the boundary changes and you’ll find the consensus is it benefited the Conservatives.
Here’s an overview: https://www.politicshome.com:443/
It’s not like the Labour party went out and drew the new parliamentary constituency boundaries themselves to try to gain as many MPs in 2010 as possible, so I’m glad to say what you believe is wrong.
David
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Dave, Tom
you seem to remember the thatcher government well but seem to exclude the previous labour government who if i remember correclty more or less encouraged national strikes on a weekly basis meaning the whole country would come to a stand still. the reason for the mass unemployment was because the country was in so much debt that if thatcher didnt sell any of our assets we would be a third world country by now. heck our economy was basicly run by other countries as labour couldnt even add up. and because of this debt there was no money to spend in the public sector (schools, NHS, etc). please let me know if you come up with a decent plan to spend money we dont have without borrowing? oh and by the way the economy and public sector were both on the rise and had pretty much settled by the time tony and his lying bunch of labour miscreants came to power. for the past 13 years labour have been riding off the good accounting skills of the previous conservative government and i think we need them now wouldnt you say considering this economic mess we’re in?
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I had first hand experience of the Wilson, Heath, Callaghan years and one fact omitted from Labour propaganda is the destructive power of the unions during those years. They did not fight for the working man they fought for political ideology. It was the Conservatives who saved us from total destruction and debt in the eighties. The electorate never learn they continue to believe the lies of a discredited Labour Government instead of listening to all the facts hence the mess we have today.
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I lived and worked under 18 years of Tory and Thatcher rule and i can assure you i did not feel saved as ancient warrior suggests, it was a me me me society, the NHS was destroyed as were most public services, public utillities were flogged off to the French and money was all that counted. Now that the undead have risen lets hope the LibDems have plenty of garlic and wooden stakes on hand to keep them in check.
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Totally agree Labour should leave them to it.
I feel sad for Gordon Brown because I think he is a good man and I don’t think there are that many good people in politics. Unfortunately it’s not being good that keeps you at the top.
With regards to the ‘Conservative’ responses – It has been identified that Scots who are in the social class that would normally vote Conservative do not because they care about those who are worse off than them and do not feel Conservatives policies benefit ALL.
It would appear that rich Southern Englanders only care about themselves.
Criticising past governments (Labour or Conservative) doesn’t mean a thing – it’s the politicians representing us now that count and personally I wouldn’t want David Cameron or Nick Clegg to be making decisions on our behalf. They both appear as arrogant and too media focused and neither appear to have any depth. It’s all very well looking pretty in front of a camera but how will they respond in a crisis?
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jane
we are already in a crisis and brown and labour have put us there!
So the Conservative voting public are Selfish B#######! Well I think someone who is lamenting that they won’t be able to buy a second home is also selfish and posssibly other adjectives come to mind as some people cannot afford one home even though they are working full time. The whole economy is in a mess – people shouldn’t have to rely on tax credits etc to get a workable income which they can use for the necessities in life. They shouldn’t be paying tax in the first place if they need credits to survive – but I suppose double accounting by the tax collectors keep more of them in employment.
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I would say the majority (not all) of voter, vote for selfish reasons, they vote for what they think will benefit their and their families life most. Maybe we could remove the core Green vote from the selfish bracket since they think they are trying to save the planet etc… which can be seen as altruistic.
I technically don’t vote selfishly, if I did I’d seriously consider voting Tory as they are more likely to not to take my hard earned money, though seeing how the Tories ran the economy last time dragging the country as a whole down (if you can’t get it right in 18 years, there’s something wrong with your approach!!!) NOT voting Tory for me is also a selfish vote since I don’t want complete morons like George Osborne as chancellor ruining an economy I rely on to perform well so I make more money!!! So I do vote selfishly by voting Labour.
I don’t think the Conservatives understand how an economy actually works as a whole. They see an economy like a single business that if they cut costs it saves money, but they forget if they cut costs that costs jobs and whatever saving they made is partially lost to benefits and less money flowing through the economy. Basically they only look at one side of the equation.
The national minimum wage according to the Tories would cost millions of jobs, yet even during a world recession there’s more people in employment today and being paid more money now than in 1997. Having people in employment earning a reasonable amount of money is what drives our economy.
Our economy has shifted from manufacturing industries that rely on manual labor, but that was inevitable as places like China became part of the world economy. We can not compete on low labor costs in an economy like ours, we have to move towards a ‘value added’ economy where you can’t get any idiot of the street to do the job with no training.
I think most people reading this will agree an economy to some degree relies on both business and individuals spending a significant amount of the money they earn and business in particular relies on borrowing money: if everyone lived like Buddhist monks our economy would collapse! When poor people are paid more they don’t save it, they spend it on small luxuries and this helps the economy. Is it better for the economy to give 100 million poor people £1 each that will be spent the week they get it (stimulating the economy) or the same amount to 100 multi-millionaires that will put it in a bank and won’t drive the economy?
Not suggesting government should be giving money away :-), but if people don’t earn enough money to live reasonably well the economy suffers and that’s why the country is worse off under the Conservatives, they don’t get it.
If you are not that well off, think about what you would do with say £1,000 more a year. Would it go in the bank earning a measly few % interest and doing little to help the economy or would you throw it right back into the economy by buying products and services that drives our economy?
Tory governments are penny pinching misers when it comes to helping the less well off thinking very short term about the bottom line and not what extra money flowing through the economy does.
An economy thrives when people spend and stagnates when they mostly save (saving is also important): look at the credit crunch and recession, people had money but they were afraid to spend it and this made the problems worse!
It’s interesting that when comparing the recent Labour and Tory governments, growth in the economy was very similar (so the economy did about the same under both governments overall) but under Labour we’ve had massive investment in public sector services like the NHS, while under the Conservatives everything was underfunded! With how little the Tories spend on the public sector relative to Labour you’d expect the economy to grow significantly faster under a Tory government because they take less money from the wealthy which they argue will create wealth for the less well off. They forget if poor people have no money they can’t buy the products and services that drives an economy!
Anyway, I wasn’t referring to Tory voters, I was referring to Tory MPs. They tend to vote for things for selfish reasons. Conservative MPs tend to be well off and the Conservative governments puts in legislation that benefits well off people at the expense of poor people (like the planned tax break for multi-millionaires!).
David
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Surely someone who earns enough to afford a second home should be voting Conservative anyway?
Poor you, it must be terrible not being certain if another house ill earn you an enormous profit!
Back in the real world, most of us are struggling to pay for one mortgage! Not to mention the costs of child care and the extortionate fuel prices due to Labours wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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On the face of it you would expect relatively well off people would vote Conservative as they want to have us pay less tax in the belief with more money the current better off people will create more small businesses etc… and this will stimulate the economy and the wealth increases will filter down through the economy.
The problem with this belief is to run a successful business you need a country that can afford to pay for your products and services. If the people can’t buy your products or services your business fails. You can’t start a business on the premise that that business will eventually generate wealth that will filter down through the economy to the people that will use your business so they can buy your products and services! The people who use the business need the money first to buy products/services, not the other way around.
Take an extreme example like a country like Ethiopia which is very poor. McDonald’s which has a lot of money decides to open a string of fast food joints throughout the country, what happens, they fail because barely anyone in Ethiopia can afford to buy McDonald’s fast food, it’s a luxury the people can not afford.
Obviously the above example is extreme, but just think about our own not so well off people before 1997 working for measly wages. I had a job at 16-17 that paid £1 an hour, I worked 55 hours a week and took home under £50, after bus fares, rent etc… I was left with about £15 a week and I was living at home. I was a teenager and had no dependants, so I could buy the odd item of clothing and one night out a week! Hard working men and women with families were paid less than £1.50 and hour under the Tories, if they only worked a 40 hour week they would only earn £60 a week before tax! In that scenario people can barely afford to feed and keep themselves warm let alone live a good life, buying small luxury items that drive the economy. If you only take home £50 odd a week and you have a family you have to save for every single item, want a TV, save for it for a year, need a new washing machine save for it for a year.
This results in a large group of people who are not driving the economy through recycling money through British businesses.
Relatively poor people do not save money, give them an extra few quid a week and it’s spent and that money goes through British businesses driving the economy.
People complain that local pubs are closing, imagine if every regular pub user bought one extra pint a week because they have a few extra quid at the end of the week. I realise pubs closing is a bigger issue than the above, cheap alcohol from supermarkets etc… but the principle still holds.
Under Labour and the national minimum wage a family can at least live reasonably well as long as they are careful and can afford the odd luxury item without having to save for a year! It’s still not enough money, it’s not a living wage, but it at least allows relatively poor people to contribute to the economy which makes people like me (I run a business) more money.
And that’s why I’ll never vote Conservative, they do not understand how the economy works! I don’t think Labour really get it either, but they care more about working calls people so in effect put more money in the pocket of the less well off that go out and spend it which drives the economy and makes me more money.
BTW Why are you having a go at me? Up until 10 years ago I was unable to work and was on incapacity benefit, started a business about 10 years ago which has been quite successful and 5 years ago bought our first home (before that was renting social housing). Now we could either pay off the first mortgage over the next year or buy a second house and have two homes one of which will be our ‘savings’ for old age.
We’ve had it really hard in the past, having to survive hand to mouth on benefits buying 4p tins of beans from Tescos that tasted like crap and never buying any luxuries or going out to have a good time. Now we are doing quite well and I’m not apologetic that 10 years of hard work has paid off and we are doing well and can afford to buy 2 or more houses (I’d like to buy a house every few years as investments for the future).
What I don’t want to see is a Conservative government ruin what we’ve got by thinking very short term and only helping the relatively well off in the mistaken belief if you give rich people more money they will share out the wealth themselves by generating more jobs!
We all know it doesn’t work that way under the Tories, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. At least under Labour the rich get richer (even richer than under the Tories) and the poor get a little better off.
Neither system is perfect, but I prefer the Labour one best.
Feel free to try to point out a flaw in my arguments above.
David
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