I’m not a Conservative voter, currently I plan to vote Labour for

Comment on General Election 2010 Poll Results by David.

I’m not a Conservative voter, currently I plan to vote Labour for reasons I’ve stated a few times in other comments (best of a bad lot), so it’s difficult for me to give a Conservative type answer to your last Conservative question (I bet Vote No To BNP can give it a go :-)).

Although I’m a Labour voter who is not that happy with how things are going (I have similar concerns like yours) I’m not looking at things from the perspective of “Labour have done a poor job, who should I vote for next?”, but “Labours done a poor job, but will any of the others do a better job AND would my vote be wasted?”

By doing this I’m not voting from angry at the Labour party, kick em in the teeth sort of approach, but trying to pick the best people for the job based on those available: that’s like asking do I want the village idiot or the town fool to run things!!!

When I look at who to vote for this way I’m torn between Labour and Lib Dems, but the Lib Dems never get enough MPs to hold real power, if they could win a seat where I live I’d vote for them especially with the possibility of a hung parliament.

When I look at the Conservatives I remember how it was when I was young (I’m 39), as a poor person back then the Conservatives came across as not giving a rats ass how they ran the country affected the average British family, no minimum wage, everything left to market forces, NHS was in real trouble (hell of a lot worse than now, the NHS is improving in my recent experience), services are cut, cut, cut so they could give tax cuts to the rich and though they say they are the party that’s fiscally sound look at how poorly they managed the finances before Labour took power!!! The current recession we are in now is not Labour’s fault, every country has been hit badly, yes you can argue they could manage getting out of recession better, but the Conservative recession was mismanagement by the Conservatives, they can’t blame a world credit crunch for how bad things got!

If the economy is not managed well we are all screwed, so whoever you vote for you have to be sure they are up to the challenge and if you’ve looked at all the parties policies like I have (posted them all on this site for discussion) that rules out the Green Party and the BNP, both their economic policies would be a DISASTER for the country.

Lib Dems I’d give them a try, I see them as a mix between Labour and the Conservatives, being closer to Labour than the Conservatives. They have never been in power, but I used to like how they’d tell the truth in their policies (not so much now) even though they knew they wouldn’t gain power (they could have said anything, didn’t matter that much).

UKIP are more Tory than the Conservatives if you ask me, so not a party I’d vote for, but based on the things you’ve mentioned if you decided the Conservatives are not for you then UKIP sounds closer to what you are looking for. Conservatives are loosing their eurosceptic status IMO (many of the anti EU Tories have moved to UKIP).

Like the Lib Dems, UKIP have never been in power (the parties less than 20 years old) so are a bit of an unknown quantity, but they do have people in the party that have been Conservative MPs so have some experience. I’m not eurosceptic, to be honest I’m not completely sure where I stand on Europe, the media discusses Europe so little from an intelligent perspective it’s hard to know if we’d be better or worse off if we left the EU? I suspect we’d be far worse off and to be honest I like the idea of close partnerships with other countries, it protects us from ever going to war with them and means we (all EU countries) have to abide by the same trading laws leveling the playing field. If we left the EU I think we’d have to loose the minimum wage to compete in the world, that would be terrible for working class families.

And that brings me to the BNP, I’ve spent more time looking at their policies than any of the other parties (because of this site!). If you read them they are very pie in the sky ideas (some are silly, who’d use the word Banksters to describe the bankers that caused the credit crunch in a policy document!) ranging from military National Service for all over 18s or they loose the right to vote to increasing our military spending, but at the same time stopping the Afghanistan war and not going to war unless it directly affects Britain (why do we need more military if we’ll not use them?).

Could you imagine the cost of getting all 45 million eligible voters to server military national service so they are allowed to vote still? though we do get the option to own a rifle, yep that will cut down on crime!!

The BNP plan to completely stop immigration completely, which might sound like a good idea at first, but what happens when businesses don’t have a skilled British workforce? They can’t click their fingers and produce tens of thousands of well trained British workers over night, it would take decades of extensive training programs to meet all our needs, too many of our young people reject education and as long as that is true we need immigration. We don’t need foreign workers to pick fruit and clean toilets though, British workers should be encouraged to do these lower paid jobs.

Then there’s the voluntary repatriation scheme, to get rid of legal immigrants they plan to pay them 10s of thousands of tax payers money to persuade them to leave. If someone offered me £50,000 to leave the country with my family I’d take it and I was born here. This BNP policy could not only cost us billions, but remove well trained immigrant workers that we need.

Then there’s acquiring British land and businesses, yes the BNP plan to take back businesses and land that are not currently owned by British people! This means companies like ASDA (owned by a US company) will be removed from Britain. The only realistic way for the BNP to take back land etc… without it costing the tax payer untold billions would be to steal it back and that would cause no end of legal trouble. Add to this foreign investors would no longer invest in Britain because of fear of loosing their investment when the BNP steal their businesses and we’d no longer be a center of finance, but become a third world economy!

I can not stress enough how bad BNP policies actually are, please have a read of them and feel free to comment on them under https://general-election-2010.co.uk/votes/bnp-policies/

I went a tad all over the place with that comment :-)

David